#I deeply want to do history

[dollypopup]

"Colin should have grovelled more!" "Penelope folded too easily"

I think statements like this typically come from people who like Penelope. . .but don't really understand her. And don't really understand just why she cares for Colin, and just why him groveling would not in any way bring her peace.

Penelope and Colin are kindred spirits in their loneliness, in season 3 more than any others. Penelope had lost her friendship with Eloise, and Colin didn't really have a close friend circle to begin with. Except with Pen. Pen was the person he could put the mask down for, could open up to, (in particular with their 'dreams' discussion) and that's why he couldn't even entertain the idea of giving up talking to her in Season 2. She is a vital part of his life, and holds so much significance and importance to him.

I imagine that's what made their silence over his travels especially painful for him. They spent such a long time talking after Season 1, and he even informs her that her letters were so encouraging, that it helped him heal something inside of himself. That if she could see him in a gentle way. . .so could he. (And he repays this, because he is honest to god out here acting and looking at her like she hung the moon in the sky). But without her presence in his life, he spiraled. Didn't feel confident in being who he is, and thus put on his persona more firmly. We know this because he wrote in his journal that "I want to be less needy, less insecure, while still maintaining the core of my vulnerability that makes me who I am". That he misses his family, that he misses home.

And we know, from the books, that Home? Home is Penelope. Penelope is his North Star, is his guiding force, and who I argue he feels he needs. In his very first scene, he looks toward her house, tries to find her in the window. When he does not, he returns to his family. In the outdoor gathering, he looks for her and finds her, eager to talk. He states aloud that he misses her, and I imagine he wrote it, too. Not hearing back from her over the course of his travels was surely something that hurt him, but he doesn't hold any ill will toward her for it, only wants to reconnect again. In fact, the one and only time he brings up how he misses her and that she didn't respond, she makes very clear the reason why: she heard what he said and it hurt her. And he's ashamed of it.

Colin hears her call him cruel, and instead of ruffling his feathers about it, instead of getting upset, instead of having a chip on his shoulder as I feel so many men would about it. . .he understands why she does so.

Penelope is a woman who has been largely treated poorly in her society. She feels unheard, she feels undesired, and in her circumstances, and I can't help but ask myself. . .has anyone ever truly apologized to Penelope for hurting her, before? Her mother? Her sisters? Eloise, likely, but. . .anyone else? And the way Colin did? Because of all the characters in the show, Colin? Colin knows how to apologize. He has a lot of practice in it. And very importantly: Colin, a man of privilege in his society, apologizes. . .predominately to women. To Marina, to his mother, and multiple times to Penelope.

Ultimately, Penelope wants to be heard, Penelope wants to be understood, Penelope wants to feel desired.

And Colin checks every single one of those boxes. He informs he is not who he was before, and then he proves it to her. He hears that he hurt her, and he comments on it directly. An entire night apart, and he comes back to her 'Because I embarrass you' with 'I am most certainly not ashamed of you', replies to her 'I am a laughingstock' with 'you are clever, and warm, and I am proud to call you my good friend'. He hears her proclaim her own insecurities, and empathizes so deeply with her. He listens. He understands. He makes clear that he cares for her, and that she *is* desired. 'You lift my spirits' 'I seek you out at every social assembly'. That she helps him see the world in ways he loves, that he sees HER and how much she has cared for HIM, that she makes him feel appreciated, that he appreciates her, in turn.

And then? Then? He shows her. He tells her, and he shows her. His actions all throughout Season 3 reinforce this apology. He continues looking for her in every corner of every ballroom, he continues complimenting her, he laughs at her jokes and respects her boundaries, he is ever so gentle with her, he listens to her with an attentiveness that no one else has ever given her. To Lady Whistledown? Sure. But to Penelope? Who else in the entirety of that ton has listened to Penelope the way Colin has?

Absolutely no one.

Penelope Featherington ghosts Colin Bridgerton for months with no explanation, and Colin comes back wanting to reach out to her, and she finally tells him why.

And he apologizes. Because he listens. Really, truly listens. And really truly cares.

I need you to understand how rare that is, even nowadays, but especially back then. That Colin is the kind of man who can put his hurt to the side and realize he made a mistake, that he said something callous, and he adores her, and he can't lose her, and he has to see her and make it right.

Because that's why Penelope fell for Colin. Not because he's beautiful, not for his charm, not for his family. But for his heart. Because he shows her kindness in a world that so often disregards her. Because he seeks her out and tries to understand her, truly hears what she has to say and compliments her, says he's sorry and looks at things from her perspective.

Because he saw her when she was invisible.

Penelope Featherington, who grew up in a house that made cruel jabs at her, has Colin Bridgerton come to her and say he regrets what he said, and that he was wrong, and that he understands why she's mad at him. Penelope Featherington who has so rarely had much of anyone tell her that they're sorry for what they said about her, sits before Colin Bridgerton as he professes how much she means to him. That he cannot even spend a full day away from her knowing they're on bad terms with each other without making it right. That he sees how she is hurting and he has to in any way he can amend it. She is lonely, with no one really in her corner at the start of season 3, and she feels like she lost it all, and Colin comes to her and says 'no, I'm here and I appreciate you and you are special to me, please let me in and let me prove it'. Is it any wonder why after she shakes his hand, she stands in the sun, and she feels the warmth of it, she can smile? That she can breathe, again? That she can be truly content for the first time in the season?

Because Penelope Featherington does not want Colin to beg. She knows him. She knows the tender, full heart he hides behind the new cavalier persona. She knows the soft underbelly of Colin Bridgerton.

He never had to grovel. All he had to do was love her. Assuredly. Fervently. Loudly. Unapologetically.

And he does.

[gingermintpepper]

"So Ginger, what're you doing today?"

The beauty of linguistics is that I still do not know a lick of modern, living Greek. (I am, in fact, a fraud)

[ccbatman]

woe. bruce and dinah friendship be upon ye:

"Someone has to have our backs. Keep us honest. That's why I'm here." / "Batman needs a conscience? Okay, I'll bite."

{ The Brave and the Bold (1980) #166 • JLI (1987) #13 • Batgirl Year One (2003) #7 • JLI (1987) #6 • JLI (1987) #7 • JLA: Incarnations (2001) #4 • Green Arrow/Black Canary (2007) #1 • Injustice 2 (2017) #4 • JLI (1987) #13 • JLI (1987) #11 • Justice League of America (1960) #84 • Justice League of America: Rebirth (2017) }

[willowser]

hi willow 👉🏾👈🏾, i have a writing question if you don’t mind me asking. how do you personally write with such detail??? i find it so challenging to make my writing consice and to the point but also interesting without dragging unnecessary descriptions out, and you can only use so many adverbs without them becoming annoying. i know writing is inherently telling, but how can you still show the readers without being too boring or over-descriptive?

hi kennie, friend !! i don't mind you asking at all, though i don't know if i'm the best person to ask alkfhagha also i didn't know how to get all my thoughts together enough to type out (read: eepy....) so have these two voice notes instead LOL

[sixty-silver-wishes]

[rotzaprachim]

*breathes in and out through mouth* everyone is scared and grieving and still waiting for news of their families everyone is scared and grieving everyone is scared and grieving*

[mueritos]

(different anon) u don’t see how it’s inappropriate be drawing western usa “cowboys and indians” genre romance art?? and with the fake polynesian tattoo on the white guy,,,,,

i understand being detribalized as so am i, but we still have to be careful about how we’re interacting w current native communities especially those to whom we are outsiders

thank you for clarifying you're a different anon and this one i'll respond to with care, and thank you for sending this because it is a genuine critique. I drew that header after finding a western/cowboy artist that I liked, and I wanted to draw something t4t centered. After finding the artist again (linked above), yes he is not indigenous, but in the article he describes his work with the Wampanoag community in MA. But you're right; there is a fine line between depicting western/cowboy culture that doesn't negate the colonization/manifest destiny of its time. I believed I made the image more "contemporary" (both have punk/lgbtq patches in the full image), but if that's not clear because the man on the left's patches are cut off from the header, then that's on me.

as for the white dude, I wasn't clear on either of their races, but both of the men in the photo are drawn from the indigenous people in my life. When i think of dark haired dark skins indigenous folks, I think of my long time best friend who is Nahuatl and detribalized, and for the "white man", I based him off myself and other detribalized/mixed folks who are paler and look "less native". Obviously none of this is clear because the image is just there, but these were the thoughts that went into that drawing. It was all based on the Mexican culture around me in terms of vaquero, because I associate the masculinity that I am comforted by with vaquero culture.

as for the tattoo, I made it up on the spot. but you're right, it does look similar to indigenous communities' like the maori or polynesian/samoa. I'll be more careful about that and I have not drawn any tribal like tattoos on anyone else since that drawing (the drawing is from 2019).

and you're right about your last point. I have been thinking of changing the header, but it has also been there for several years so I don't know what to change it to and I have had many folks in my inbox say they were comforted/affirmed by the header. at the same time, I don't want to drive off any folks who don't know im detribalized and may think i'm just randomly drawing indigenous people because I am like, fascinated with them.

i'll be more careful from now on, but thank you for sending this and feel free to lmk anything else, or if any indigenous folks want to add any other points feel free to do that in the notes!

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello.

You and gay-jesus-probably have successfully made me question everything with your view that Tears of the Kingdom is imperialist propaganda, so that's been fun.

Anyway, I decided to share this discussion with the Zelda fans on reddit, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them disagreed. Here is what they said (I'm Alarming_Afternoon44):

So what do you think? Have I and all these other people just been duped by the game's manipulative framing? Or do they actually have a point?

And if you'd rather not answer this, or would prefer if I censored the usernames, just tell me and I'll delete this.

Hey! Thanks a lot for reaching out, and I'm glad it made you think stuff through!!

Honestly, as I mentioned in this post, I am not super interested about in-world conversations about who oppresses who, because what can be assessed from the game is super vague and more vibes-based than evidence-based. Within the text, of course that the Good Zonais are good and the Bad Ganondorf is bad! But that's my whole point! The narrative has been deliberately crafted so that the zonais and Rauru (and Hyrule) are as blameless as possible (and it's not doing a great job at it overall to be frank; we would not be having these conversations about how offputting it all feels for a non-zero number of people if it did do a great job). More importantly, I want to focus on what sort of real-life narrative it all parallels. Because people make stories, and people live in the real world.

Not going after everyone's throat here, gamedev is hard and the hydras that are AAA game production do end up doing super weird stuff, especially since the thematic ramifications are absolutely never prioritized (and it's also always the same kind of people who make the final calls and push out what can and can't be talked about also). And as fans, we tend to have trouble stepping outside the lens of lore and take a look at the bigger picture sometimes; not as an attack on any individual part of that decision-making process but to just pause, stop, and question our standards, our priorities and the kind of reality (or skewing of reality) the stories we tell each other reflect.

Again: do we want to take videogames seriously or not? If we do, then we need to accept they are a vehicle for ideology, just like any other artform. And sometimes, you push out questionable ideology, sometimes without meaning to, because you didn't unpack your own biases as you did. And it's even fine to do it, nobody is perfect, a 300+ people team spread over 6 years certainly will not be that. But that it wasn't prioritized is, in my opinion, a problem. As a narrative designer, I want games (at least the narrative side) to be held to a higher standard than this. It's literally my job to work with the industry so it can hold itself to higher standards of quality --so the whole TotK situation is quite frustrating to witness from a very pragmatic, work perspective where I already spend my days trying to convince people that things mean things. I have a vested interest here in not having the companies I work for being given a free pass by gamers to do literally whatever as long as it's fun, especially when we're talking about a billion-dollars company suing its own fans left and right for any perceived slight. Nintendo are not underdogs here. It's fine to point out they cut corners and maybe promoted messy ideologies, voluntarily or not.

So long story short: no I don't believe anyone here has a point in regards to what I think is actually important, which is why these choices were made in the first place. If you look at an imperialist text expecting the text to tell you that it's imperialist instead of recognizing a framing used for propaganda by yourself, you're never gonna find any imperialist text ever, obviously not!! I'm sorry if I sound a little gngngn here, but I don't know why audiences have, at large, this feeling that lore and story beat decisions materialize themselves already formed and without any human bias, meddling, intervention, internal politics or approximations (it seems that people can only conceptualize this part if they have actual names to attach to the story, but without clear authors it's like there are no authors and so no bias, which is... a very strange bias in itself). I can promise you that it does not work that way in practice: every narrative department on every big game is a battlefield --some nicer than others, but all of them very emotionally draining either way.

So yeah, I guess that on these grounds, I disagree with every point raised here. Sorry Reddit :/

But thank you for the ask and sorry if I didn't go more into details as to why. The big Why I Dislike Rauru Post and the Gerudo Post might have some more specific rebuttals, but I am not super interested in debating small detail stuff tbh. I feel like it's no use if the frame of reference isn't being understood in the first place.

[popsicle-stick]

wanna make a folk costumes of britain zine sooo fuckign bad.........

[haarute]

just now, someone broke into my very next door (our buildings are connected) neighbor's place as they were away on a trip. they noticed over security cam livestream footage and contacted everyone. a bunch of cops with rifles and shotguns then showed up right in front of my bedroom window, broke into their house, and took away this singular unarmed woman who had snuck in and was hiding inside of their trailer in the garage.

the sergeant told my mom not to worry because they took several items (like a fire extinguisher) from my neighbor's place and were going to straight up lie about why she was being brought up to the precinct by saying that she was stealing/using said items so they can detain her for longer.

i'm feeling a lot of things right now

[kideternity]

Read DC pride. My review of it of the stories I read was that it was predominantly mediocre though I did like the Ray writing and I liked the circuit breaker story as a whole but the only story that genuinely pissed me off was Al Ewing's Mikaal Tomas' story. People have already talked about the whole sexuality thing online but honestly what personally pisses me off more was A) no mention whatsoever of Mikaal's canon long term boyfriend Tony whose a black man in favour of comments of Mikaal fucking the white side character Al made up for the story and then everything to do with Komak and B) no mention either of Komak having had an STD at all and that being really necessary context for how Komak met Mikaal in the first place. Omitting both of these things is imo really fucking disrespectful / shitty to do and as someone who Really Loves Mikaal I'm disappointed that for the first major story he's had in Years this is what he was given. He deserved better

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

There’s a real paranormal attraction near me open at night!!! :D

…but everything is done in such a tourist-attracting way that the whole business appears to hinge upon sensationalized exploitation of the mentally ill >:(

[oopsallmabari]

me: oh i should write a flashback scene in ostwick circle that'd be a good thing to explore

me, 5 minutes later: i need to diagram the entirety of ostwick circle in my mind with floorplans

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[termagax]

👂ianthe opinions ? 👀

i find her deeply compelling and fucked up and a very cool counterforce to harrow in HTN and i think about the "you are twenty two" "it's a universe away from eighteen" interaction on the fucking daily and the ianthe-harrow relationship lives in my heart and soul and i also think people on the internet are extremely callous about her and respond violently to even the SUGGESTION that her relationship w harrow may be predatory in any way. which is absurd coming from the "we love dark fiction we just want to explore DARK TOPICS you guys cant handle HORROR" crowd.

[llycaons]

omg so this happened last night and I was drafting a furious post abt it before my phone died and then I came home to find my door damaged etc. but I hate bible thumpers so so much when they literally stand in public places and SHOUT AT PEOPLE like the guy yesterday in my neighborhood yelling and preaching that ppl who worship anyone besides jesus are choosing to walk in sin like shut the FUCK up oh my god I cannot fucking stand the smug self-righteousness and proprietary attitude of western xtians. LITERALLY with a microphone. this happened in campus in college too and when I covered my ears because this fucker was bellowing about that bullshit right near me he LEANED IN CLOSER and SHOUTED INTO MY EAR like fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪