#Dangerous Alliance

[guyincognitojr]

[meeghanreads]

Top 5 books I will definitely* read in 2024

Hello friends!! Welcome to Top 5 Tuesday!! This week’s topic is top 5 books I will definitely* read in 2024!! Because this is a post I definitely* keep every year… *cough* In case you’re new around here, this is a post I seem to do most years (2023, 2022, and 2021), and there are still books from each year that I swore I would read, that are… still unread. To make things interesting, the last two…

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Dangerous Alliance | Author: Jennieke Cohen | Publisher: HarperTeen (2019)

[branwendaughterofllyr]

as if we don't semi-regularly bring up the horror that is Lysa and Jon's marriage. It's one of the main reasons why Lysa Is The Way She Is. it's the foil to Cat and Ned's happy marriage, as it really is sheer luck if a woman ends with a "good" marriage. The whole situation that leads up to the marriage literally haunts Hoster on his death bed. Girl.

[autismmydearwatson]

What I think: Thrawn alliances is a comedy but it's also a tragedy because thrawn KNOWS its anakin, he can see it in every move vader makes, and everyone around him pretends anakin died, including anakin, and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know the full story of anakins fall, but a long time ago he met a jedi who was probably the first jedi who wasn't trying to kill him, and did a whole lot of other batshit things instead. But even though anakin was impulsive and vengeful and singlehandedly destroyed a planets environment, he was a good man and an honorable warrior and that's all that mattered to thrawn, and obviously thrawn admired anakin enough that he thought the mention of anakins name could get him clemency from the Empire. Instead anakins walking around in an oubliette and he's seven inches taller and hates thrawns guts but obviously he's STILL anakin skywalker and it's obvious, why does no one else see it? So he continues to bring up anakins name so that vader will stop being a rage-filled bloodthirsty idiot and stop pretending his old self is gone, thrawn keeps trying to unearth anakins chutzpah and his valor and his anakin-ness, and it's not until the epilogue that thrawn has accepted that, one way or another, anakin has gone and there's just a tired, vindictive cyborg in his place

What I say:

[alphamecha-mkii]

[miliamin1]

Everytime I read Nevermore I keep thinking of how to Annabel Lee absolutely everyone but her and Lenore are corpses. She's interacting with people she considers fully dead already whilst Lenore deeply cares about everyone's lives. And neither of them is truly correct! They're neither dead nor alive, and the stated rules are that only one person will live again. They operate under different beliefs about circumventing the game but so far neither of them has proof that it's possible.

[creamiceandsugar]

the kid, law and luffy interactions bring me such joy because it'll just be

captain: no i have to do this stupid thing because otherwise They'll win

crew members: win WHAT

captain:

[pushing500]

A raid from Hot Minute's niece and a social fight between Kaz and Wendy occurred at the same time, which was stressful but ultimately solved with Albina's overpowered 'summon pack' psycast. I love that psycast.

Wendy broke Kaz's nose and won the social fight, if you were curious.

Pig, the guy from The Menra Covenant who tried to marry Hazrov a while back, is trying to get with Candlelight now (we said no).

I was amused reading through Zonovo's social interactions and seeing that he's apparently in a gambling mood today. Cards, dice, roulette... He's happy chatting about them all.

Kawoo is the only colonist I've ever seen using the pool I spent so many resources to build, so I wanted to draw her enjoying herself.

I imagine it takes a lot of shaking to get all that fur dry, but she's probably super fuzzy and soft afterwards!

Finally, Hot Minute's nephew and some of his friends crash-landed right into Baz and Zonovo's bedroom, which was very rude of them. They busted down a wall and got ambushed by a turret and two of our nightlings, who distracted them until some of my colonists could run over and take them down.

Then we ripscanned Hot Minute's nephew, haha. Serves him right.

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[skyhawkstragedy]

[kingtuna]

Cody: I'm sorry, you were stabbed??

Rex: Lightly stabbed, I didn't want to frighten you.

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[teddy-bear-d]

Currently rotating angsty Martyn from killing Scott in my head

[in-tua-deep]

Drew representations of the three unchained sun gods from my dream about the golden peacock trickster! Erythristic animals are so excellent

It was nice to draw again after such a long break ♥️

[augustheart]

geoff johns needed to have courtney and mike try to kill each other on a daily basis because if they worked together they would be unstoppable. their dad would be DEAD

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

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