#The adventures of Huckleberry Finn

[milkandbrownies33]

Hello gang

[libinih28]

you guys ever think about how tom sawyer and pride and prejudice take place during the same time period

[nimos-flakes]

gedagidegedadago

[needlefail]

EVIL THING

[citizenscreen]

On February 18, 1885, Mark Twain publishes his famous—and famously controversial—novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the U.S. #OnThisDay

[idkaguyorsomething]

reading through mark twain’s catalogue of books will be like:

social stratification is so extreme that society will treat functionally identical people in opposite ways for merely believing that they have different origins, forcing them to either be crushed by or perpetuate the unjust system of government that began this whole situation.

even the most brilliant innovator who fights tirelessly to improve the rights of the people will face pushback from bigots resisting any kind of threat to their power that can manipulate the masses into giving up their rights in order to preserve the status quo.

local rascal plays a prank on his neighbors and starts a pirate club :D

discrimination and violence is baked so deeply into the foundations of society that children wanting to do the right thing will believe they are condemning themselves to hell by defying authority in favor of viewing oppressed minorities as humans deserving of rights.

[genericruleroftheflies]

Feel like a largely undiscussed aspect of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (and Tom Sawyer) is that Huck and Tom have likely known Jim almost their whole lives if not their whole lives.

And at the very least, they would have known him for a couple years if you say Miss Watson and Widow Douglas bought him recently to the start of the book…. But I think that’s less likely. I think Jim has been in St. Petersburg a while.

Either way, that’s years in which they were running around outside avoiding almost any other adults. But, they loved hanging out and admittedly messing with Jim.

(I like a common adaptation headcanon where Jim kinda knows or fully knows when they are fooling him and plays into it to make them laugh)

So, when Huck is so comfortable around Jim and so protective of Jim that’s definitely part of it. Like I don’t read Huck as this bias-less super righteous character, he’s a kid who’s father abuses him, but this enslaved man he knows and likes becomes a somewhat surrogate father and friend to him and he comes to see Jim as a person rather than “a slave”

Similarly when questioning like ‘why would Jim go with Tom and Huck’s escape plan?’ I think there’s two factors: 1. He knows they are already taking a big risk helping him escape so he doesn’t want to upset them and they stop helping him (big one) and 2. He likes them, they are friends to him. He wants them to be happy.

Also ‘why does Jim help the doctor save Tom when he could escape?’ Because Jim has known this boy for YEARS he’s not gonna just stand there hiding while he bleeds out.

[lowcountry-gothic]

Cover art for the unreleased comics adaptation of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, by Phil Noto.

[writelikeurruninoutoftime]

say what you want but the first gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss moment was when Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim convinced a slave witches were making him hear things and they didn’t know each other after Jim greeted Tom and Huck by name.

[jessequinones]

Writing Lesson: Remembering the Past

I moved from the United States of America to Australia and since then I’ve tried to rewatch some cartoons from my childhood, mainly ones from either Cartoon Network or Boomerang and I can't find them. They're not on any streaming services and I can’t buy physical copies because they’re extremely expensive. Sure Tubi might have some old cartoons such as Popeye or the original Superman, but I didn’t grow up with them. I wanted to rewatch cartoons from the 60s-early 2000s, shows such as The Jetsons, Flintstones, Yogi Bear, the original Animaniacs, Dexters Laboratory, you get the picture.

So why am I bringing all of this up when it comes to writing? Well it got me thinking that yes, while these shows were racist, and aged like milk being left out in the sun, I would argue that it’s still important to rewatch them. Not just for nostalgia shake but as a writer it’s a good idea to remember the past so we don’t repeat it.

I know, “if you don’t remember the past you’ll be doomed to repeat it” but the thing about that saying is, it’s not actually wrong, but I think it get’s overused so no one understands why we say it.

Stories change and evolve over time. The stories we read and were told as kids, might not be the same ones we tell our children because it doesn’t work for them and that’s ok. Stories are supposed to evolve over the years because they show that we as humans are evolving as well. However, if we start to no longer show the past what lessons can we learn to improve?

You see history is a funny thing, if we know our history and the lessons it brings we can do stuff to avoid making the same mistakes as the previous generations. However, if the previous generation's mistakes are lost in time, how can we avoid them if we don’t know what those mistakes are to begin with?

That’s what the saying means. Remember the mistakes our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on so we don’t make those same mistakes. This is one of the reasons why every couple of generations society seems to go backwards since the mistakes of the past are being forgotten or ignored and we do them again.

Now I’m not one of those people who think we should stay in the past, life was better back in the old days because let’s be honest, it wasn’t. We were just kids and didn’t understand how the world works. I think we should be able to tell new stories while also not wiping the old ones from existence just because the old ones no longer make money. Of course, they aren’t going to make money the people who like old things are old and there'll always be fewer old people compared to younger ones.

All I'm saying is that if we could keep the old stuff available for as long as possible, we should try and do so. Is the past embarrassing and racist? Yes, but so are we. As a society, many stories are being told that I already know aren’t going to age well in the next couple of decades but we shouldn’t forget about them. Keep learning, keep improving, keep being better.

If you want to reread some old books as a bit of a history project I got some for you. "The Giving Tree", "Gone with the Wind", "Lolita" (my god is that a bad story, why was that ever popular?) "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Stranger in a Strange Land". I could go on but those are some classic stories that it would be best not to forget about them. It’s important to understand why they were popular and what newer lessons we can get from them.

I also understand history for most people is kind of a boring subject, and while I don’t have advice on how to make learning fun. Perhaps if you’re a writer, and don’t want to read some old books in the genre you writing in, there might be a Youtube video you could put on or something? I’m not asking anyone to do a ten-page history report, just to try and remember some of the mistakes that were being taught in the old days so we could create new and more progressive ones instead of just repeating the same mistakes and never moving forward.

[james-vane-stan]

what? no, i'm really normal about this line from adventures of huck finn.

[milkandbrownies33]

Mornings w huck

skskjs I'm not really a background person, I felt artistic and did this out of nowhere

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

(Mark Twain, left, with John T. Lewis, a lifelong friend and inspiration for the character Jim in 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn')

* * * * *

February 18, 1885: "Mark Twain publishes his famous–and famously controversial–novel 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens) first introduced Huck Finn as the best friend of Tom Sawyer, hero of his tremendously successful novel 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876). Though Twain saw Huck’s story as a kind of sequel to his earlier book, the new novel was far more serious, focusing on the institution of slavery and other aspects of life in the antebellum South. At the book’s heart is the journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on a raft. Jim runs away because he is about to be sold and separated from his wife and children, and Huck goes with him to help him get to Ohio and freedom. Huck narrates the story in his distinctive voice, offering colorful descriptions of the people and places they encounter along the way. The most striking part of the book is its satirical look at racism, religion and other social attitudes of the time. While Jim is strong, brave, generous and wise, many of the white characters are portrayed as violent, stupid or simply selfish, and the naive Huck ends up questioning the hypocritical, unjust nature of society in general. Even in 1885, two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' landed with a splash. A month after its publication, a Concord, Massachusetts, library banned the book, calling its subject matter “tawdry” and its narrative voice “coarse” and “ignorant.” Other libraries followed suit, beginning a controversy that continued long after Twain’s death in 1910. In the 1950s, the book came under fire from African-American groups for being racist in its portrayal of black characters, despite the fact that it was seen by many as a strong criticism of racism and slavery. As recently as 1998, an Arizona parent sued her school district, claiming that making Twain’s novel required high school reading made already existing racial tensions even worse. Aside from its controversial nature and its continuing popularity with young readers, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' has been hailed by many serious literary critics as a masterpiece. No less a judge than Ernest Hemingway famously declared that the book marked the beginning of American literature: “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”" 

- history.com 'A heroic deed, a rewarding friendship' - via The Washington Times: https://bit.ly/2V4sHN3 [Random History of the Day]

[nimos-flakes]

im cooked for exams but uhhh kitty :3

[needlefail]

Give it up for Tom-Cat Sawyer and Hucklepurry Finn

[citizenscreen]

On February 18, 1885, Mark Twain published “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” #OnThisDay