#anyway we see this phenomenon pretty often

[ghost-bard]

I start to drift off, finally getting some sleep

And then

I have one singular thought:

“Charlie and Quackities characters are always doomed to fall, and when one goes the other is close behind”

My eyes shoot open

I am once again awake, tortured by the knowledge I hold.

[liminaltrickster]

Show Your Work: Nicola Coughlan/Penelope Featherington

For now, I've decided to call this series of astrological investigations "Show Your Work." It's a working title 😉

As promised, let's look for Penelope Bridgerton (née Featherington, aka Lady Whistledown) in Nicola Coughlan's chart.

But first, the same disclaimers as before:

I'm a traditional astrologer. This is the source from which I pull the meanings of the planets, houses and signs. This also means that I use Whole Sign houses. If you're used to Placidus or another house system, things will probably look a bit different here.

Yes, there are natal charts available for the characters of Colin and Penelope. I just haven't had a chance to look at them closely yet. I hope to soon, and we'll see what we can glean!

When we look at a natal chart, individual placements can be read in a multitude of ways depending on what we're wondering about. I'm coming to this chart looking for Bridgerton, so the reading will be very specific.

I don't and won't make delineations for people's personal lives without their consent. That's why we're focusing on a piece of Nicola's public creative output here.

This chart was cast with an estimated birth time, but assuming the rising sign is correct, it's fine for our purposes.

—

Just as we did with Luke's chart, looking at the ruler of the 5th house feels like the most natural thing to do. This means that for Nicola, we're going to be focusing on Mercury (☿) in Capricorn (♑) in the 12th:

The 5th House and its Ruler

Being an Aquarius rising, Nicola's 5th house is Gemini (♊). Gemini isn't the sign of our focus, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the Gemini themes of duality, changeability, deception and invention are quite apt as far as Penelope and Whistledown go.

Anyway, the ruler of Gemini is...

Mercury

This first part is pretty simple: Mercury rules the mind, writing and speech. Penelope is a thinker and a writer. When anyone cares to listen to her, she has a lot to say, and she says it exceedingly well.

But Mercury is also the trickster, so let's discuss the archetype (see: my username). In myths and stories, the trickster is cunning and witty. We'll always find them breaking rules and crossing boundaries, including those associated with the social order, often to chaotic effect. Penelope not only publishes a scandal sheet, but she also blows past the limits of propriety by naming names.

There's also much to be said about gossip's usefulness in holding the powerful to account and the gendered criticism of gossip. Gossip has always been a way for vulnerable groups (in this case, women) to share information outside of the influence or control of the dominant group (in this case, men). The trickster is a disruptor who challenges authority. This is Penelope as Whistledown (and, eventually, as herself).

The trickster is a shapeshifter, and I'm not only talking about Penelope donning a disguise and accent to do business on behalf of Whistledown. Just as the trickster often exhibits gender variability, Penelope plays with the gender roles of Regency society. While she's not completely free to do as she pleases, she has an occupation that she's good at, that she's passionate about, and that brings in a hefty income.

In Nicola's chart, Mercury is very closely conjunct the Sun (☉)—this is called being combust. Combustion is a visual phenomenon whereby a planet is said to be "burnt up" by the Sun and cannot be seen because the Sun's light is too bright.

I don't know if it's possible to count all of the ways that Penelope goes unseen in this show, but let's try:

Not only does the ton spend three seasons not knowing who Whistledown is, but they very rarely take any notice of Penelope either.

At any given ball, Penelope is a wallflower of the first water because none of these dud(e)s think to ask her to dance.

In fact, it's this disregard that allows Penelope to collect information, disappear from events, and even repeatedly spend unchaperoned time with Colin Bridgerton.

Colin himself takes two and a half seasons to see what's directly in front of his face (Penelope... it's Penelope, lol). He doesn't see that she clearly has feelings for him, he doesn't see her as more than a friend, and he doesn't even see that he already has feelings for her. Heck, for a while there, he doesn’t even see her as a woman (“You are Pen. You do not count. You’re my friend.” 💀).

Eloise spends two seasons looking for Whistledown, and it turns out it was her best friend all along. She's also surprised when Penelope and Colin show up engaged because she has somehow never noticed that her closest friend has been in love with her brother the whole time.

Penelope's mother and sisters assume that she's a lost cause who'll remain unmarried. When they find out she's been writing letters to Colin in season 2, they scoff at the idea of them being friends. Portia takes comfort in the idea that Penelope will always be around, but she has no clue that her home is Whistledown HQ.

The 12th House

The 12th house doubles down on these themes of something or someone being unseen. It is a difficult place, but it makes sense for Penelope. Some of its topics include secrets (yes), scandal (uh huh), and hidden enemies (I'd say so).

It's also a place of ostracization. As a woman seen as undesirable for marriage, Penelope is already snubbed by Regency society. Whether it's by her friend (and future husband) Colin Bridgerton or her enemy Cressida Cowper, she's suffered no shortage of slights and cruelty.

She keeps her identity as Whistledown a secret for so long because she risks further alienation if the ton discovers who's been casting aspersions and spilling their secrets.

This house is a place of "self-undoing." Whatever we may think of Whistledown's utility, the whole scheme gets away from Penelope this season. By her own admission, she's made mistakes, hurting others and herself in the process. The only way forward is to own up to it.

Capricorn

Nicola herself has referred to Capricorn as a "famously uncool sign," and I suppose Capricorn has this reputation due to the seriousness of its themes. Resourcefulness, persistence, ambition and goal-setting aren't particularly cool, but they can certainly get you stacks of money under the floorboards.

Capricorn can also be steely and even ruthless. Penelope is a fundamentally good person, but there's an eerie level of discipline, detachment and single-mindedness required to publish gossip about those closest to you, not to mention about yourself.

That being said, I believe that Capricorn (like all signs) is much more complex than folks give it credit for. Let's refer again to Liz Greene in The Astrology of Fate:

I understand [Joseph] Campbell to be saying by this that the father-son polarity, the avenging Lawgiver whose strict and structured rules of life collide with the lusty, libidinous goat-like desires of the son, exists within the one individual. Morality and shame, law and lawlessness, seem to comprise some of the polar opposites of Capricorn. The son must face the father's punishment, only to find that the father is within himself; and the father, the old king, must face the son's rebellion, only to find that it is his own youthful spirit that he thought he had outgrown long ago. The initiation of the son by the father is an inner experience which, it seems as though by fate, Capricorn is often denied in the actual parental relationship, and he must therefore seek it within himself on a deeper level. By this description I am, as usual, not talking about men only, for this father-son constellation belongs as much to woman and her capacity for effectiveness and self-sufficiency in the world as it does to man.

That sums up Pen’s arc pretty tidily, don’t you think?

It's only when she decides to come off the wall and integrate these two disparate parts of herself that she's able to start saying what's really on her mind and articulating her needs. This is when she starts getting what she actually wants: to be with the person she loves, to have better relationships with her mother and sisters, to earn the forgiveness of her best friend, to write openly as herself, and to be recognized by society.

—

That’s all folks!

The next one of these, whenever I get to it, will be looking for Sydney Adamu in Ayo Edibiri's chart.

[pseudowho]

hiya 🙂 i love your nanamin fics and i followed you for them way back when you wrote the pregnant reader one (and I still think about it). thought id ask you cos you seem to answer questions like this pretty wisely 🥲

i started writing fics for a pretty niche character in a fandom (not jjk) a while back and a friend/moot started then too. this character doesnt have lots of readers and thats fine im just here for the writing.

but since then ive noticed my friend has stopped reblogging my fics even tho they did before and even tho they obvs read and reblog everyone elses fics for this character (there really arent many of us).

they also seem upset about notes/likes a lot of the time. but I know they read my fics because I see lots of the same word choices and styles show up in their fics the next time they post.

its upsetting me lot tbh. i still read, like/comment/rb fics i like and its starting to feel like they do it because they think i have more readers than they do and mb theyre jealous.

anyway i dunno if you think i should raise it with them or just leave it?? they dont talk to me much anymore either after I didnt rb one of their fics i didnt really love.

First of all, well done for starting to write, and writing for an 'unpopular' character too, it looks like it's hard having a niche audience in the Tumblr-sphere. I'm always really grateful when someone writes for a niche character I love, every fic is like finding a diamond!

Second of all: I'm really really sorry this is happening to you. It has happened and still happens to me, too.

Thirdly: While I'll give my thoughts on it straight after this, one truth is that the other person maybe simply doesn't like your writing, and there's nothing mean-spirited about it at all.

Saying this, in your case, there seem to be too many little factors that actually makes me think... 👇

I have Thoughts™️💬 about Toxic Tumblr Reblog Culture...

There is a little phenomenon I've noticed with a lot of fic writers, where they seem to stop reblogging the fics of others who they view as competition. Even if they often read and reblogged another writer's fics before they themselves started writing.

They seem to think that if they reblog the work of you, their "competitor", then your work will get more attention than theirs. It gets even worse the more 'popular' you get, sadly.

I understand, because it's hard to see someone reblog most other peoples' fics about a character, and then pointedly ignore yours. You're not mad for feeling targeted. It can feel this way.

Equally, there can be a cherry-picking of moots' work, and a high school clique attitude to reblogging. Do two or three people band together and constantly reblog each others' work, making a huge fuss whatever it is, but leave you out even though you've historically been part of the circle before? Again, it's not as uncommon as you think.

A real "if we become moots, that means I reblog all your stuff, and you reblog all my stuff" as an unspoken rule. While that might work nicely for some people, it can also foster an air of pressure or entitlement, or of reblogging things even if you didn't really like them, because they're your friend. While fostering growth and circulation in the art community should be celebrated, I'd hate to think someone reblogged my work out of obligation, as opposed to passion.

I've had followers who loved my stuff, always commented and reblogged etc, but when they started writing for the same characters themselves, just stopped. I've also noticed a lot of the things you mention (them using similar word choices, stylistic choices etc to mine, in their new fics).

So, you know they're there reading in the background, and it doesn't make sense that they liked your writing one day, then just stopped liking it overnight, right?

I don't often muse aloud about "controversial" subjects on Tumblr, but this one really gets me. It turns writing, an already isolating art, into an even more isolating "competition".

It's sad, really.

Saying that, I still read, comment, reblog all the work of theirs that I read and love! It feels petty and ridiculous, but try to be the person that you want to see in the community. They'd probably notice they still get just as many readers as before, and actually, will be forced to address that their writing may be less popular for another reason.

I have wonderful friends here who read and reblog any of my stuff they like, just as I do theirs. I made a post a little while back, r.e. always reblogging stuff just because you're moots, and I'm glad to say I don't have this strange entitled relationship with these friends. It's low pressure and really fun.

Reblog in the best spirit; reblog stuff you love, that you think is great, etc etc. Don't fall into bad intentions! It's meant to be fun. It's not high-stakes. What are people competing about? I feel really bad for you, OP, and I know what it feels like.

Jealousy in the Tumblr fic writer community is strong!

Hang in there baby. You're doing great.

-- Haitch xxx

[eri-pl]

Hard magic, soft magic, hard metaphysics…

So, we all know the soft magic vs hard magic distinction, and soft vs hard worldbuilding in gereral, right? (If not, it's probably easily googleable. I'm bad at explaining concepts.)

Tolkien is more or less soft-magic, yes, in the sense that magic has no (strict and known to the reader) rules. He has some hard worldbuilding (and strived to make it harder and harder), but that's not very relevant for this post (except that I appreciate the amount of effort).

What matters is hard metaphysics.

As in: good and evil are well defined (the reader may disagree with the definitions, but they are concrete and rather clear), and have well defined consequences. But it's not a physical phenomenon, so the consequences are often indirect and appear after some time.

(long and somewhat chaotic post below cut)

To clear this out: to be honest, I wouldn't say those definitions 100% align with how Catholicism sees it, There's some fairytale to it. Mentally stable and securely attached characters are …I don't want to call it "more good", because it's jarring to me. Let's say they're brighter than characters who carry a lot of baggage. And that is not how morality works, sorry, Professor.

Anyway, no matter my opinion on it, it is a pretty coherent system.

Plus: estel is a thing. "Happy chance" (divine providence) is a thing. When you are a bright-hearted character, acting in a good way at the moment, and you take a leap of faith, it works. It just works.

(Contrary to how usually "magic systems" work, I'd say: you can't do it fully on purpose, of course you can't. Even if you know it works, you must be at least so emotionally deregulated in the moment to not see that it works. And tbh this is a very legit assumption to me., makes sense)

Anyway: This is probably why I don't see Luthien as Mary Sue. It's not the narrative bending for her. It's the world itself bending, because this is how it works. (yes, it doesn't work for Feanorians, we'll get there)

If anything, I would call Luthien privileged. (It is not a negative thing in itself, it's just like being white or something ok? the important part is what you do with it and I'm not going to analyze Luthien on that because that's not relevant to this post).

She is born to a very healthy, kind and (before Beren asked for her hand…) good family. This makes a lot of things easier. This makes being a "bright" character easier.

BTW: do we even know anyone with bad background who is a bright character? Tuor maybe? Finarfin if we assume Finwë neglected him emotionally?

On the opposite end, there are some characters with a wholesome background who turn evil anyway (yes, Melkor, you. And your secretary. And… probably some incarnates too? Gollum? Maybe Eol, but he's more a "missing backstory" than "good backstory").

Anyway, back to Luthien. Her crazy actions work not because she's Edith, but because she has a bright heart, a lot of hope, and does good (tries to save her beloved). She has all of that because she's Edith. Yes. :) But still not a Mary Sue, just a very powerful character in terms of "mechanics" of this world.

And why doesn't estel work this way for Feanorians, why the Battle of Unnumbered Tears is… well, Unnumbered Tears. They had hope, after all.

Well, because they started with darkness, because blasphemy and murder and Doom of Mandos. And even if they're sorry (maybe they are), this means a lot, but doesn't change the more surface results, in particular it doesn't change the "you're doomed to fail, guys" part.

How does Earendil fit into this? How does Turin (who didn't do so much wrong initially) and even moreso, Hurin, fit into this? I have no idea. It's not a 100% strict set of rules. But I don't think it's much fuzzier than a typical magic system either.

I hope this explains something anyway.

Those are my opinions, but I'm pretty certain that at least the general idea is something Tolkien would agree with. Maybe he would say that it works sometimes, but not always, because mysterious. OK, I guess. Still, it mostly works.

So what about Finrod? Oh, my boy Finrod. He had Doom of the Noldor on his head too. He had blood on his hands. No matter how awesome of a fanboy he is, Morgoth would pop his optimism just as Sauron did, and eat him and his army.

But the problem wasn't "army to small", the problem was "king too problematic". So C&C's critique wasn't very… they got the right conclusion, but not the main problem. Bigger army wouldn't fix it.

(I try to not complain, but if Tolkien wrote King David, he would have him dead in an ugly way before Solomon even happenned. But ok, it is not Bible, it is its own thing close to fairytales and sagas, Guy did one seriously evil thing, guy can't have a happy ending. OK, to be honest to Tolkien: Finrod got kind of a happy ending eventually.)

(@dfwbwfbbwfbwf this is that post I mentioned)

[altheneum-library]

Could we get a Lamb x Outsider!f!reader x Toww soulmate au?

Maybe some soft smut/yandere elements?

Like, take the red string of fate, (Lamb and Nari were aware that they were already soulmates, with the string on Lamb right pinkie finger connecting to Nari's left) but one day two different strains appear on their opposite fingers, leading outside of the cult following it until they find and rescue reader who was kidnapped from outside of the lands of the old faith to be sacrificed and taken back to the cult.

AND IF I LIE ABOUT LOVE, LET DEATH'S ROSE WRAP IT'S THORNS AROUND MY NECK

❤️ ☁️

================================================

When Narinder and Lambert had finally accepted their differences and got together, both were confused when both their ring fingers had a string slowly appear.

It was Narinder who felt it's presence first, it was a calming night with his spouse, he had been sitting beside them and enjoying the peaceful silence alongside the lamb but then he felt it, he felt the sense of small warmth on his finger slowly appear.

confused he was, he looked upon his paw and becomes shocked, a silent gasp and a gleam in his eyes. not one but two soulmates attached to him, when he was snapped out of his thoughts it was Lambert that smiled so excitedly yet warmly.

they also have the string, they both have the same soulmate.

now it isn't often you get two soulmates, it's a very rare phenomenon that happens once every blue moon for great one's sake! it was such a low percentage of getting this but it happened.

.

.

.

.

.

And- that's how they're here- with you sitting on the medbay bed after almost being sacrificed to a god in an outside cult, you were currently conversing with Lambert slowly, thanking them for saving you. Lambert had found you from one of their crusades, they decided to travel to the outside lands from the old faith and saw you immediately right after.

Narinder sees the string attached to you, his heart skipping a beat. despite you looking like a mess right now, you were so so pretty in his eyes...

your fur, your body, your eyes, your outfit, it fit you so well, everything about you let his heart skipped a beat even more.

Now, I'll say the same goes with Lambert. everytime they glanced at you they almost lose their ability to speak, much less breathe! you were so majestic, your voice was so soft, warm and kind, how dare that cult decide to sacrifice you!? well, it was a good thing they dealt with the cult anyways...so there's no say in the matter now.

this was their soulmate, YOU were their soulmate, theirs and only theirs.

by the time you fell asleep to try and recover, Narinder and Lambert just watched over you protectively as they both had one thing in their minds:

You're Ours, We're Yours

[familyabolisher]

🔥 fanfiction

the distinction between what does and does not constitute ‘fanfiction’ is almost entirely dependent on site of publishing/identification as such on the part of the author. whilst ‘dante’s inferno is fanfiction’ is an incorrect statement because it misunderstands the relation between the commedia and its plethora of source materials & misattributes this relation to what is in fact a contemporary phenomenon that exists relative to the rise of IP, this is v rarely the terrain that people are fighting on because the ‘is/is not fanfiction’ property is applied as a metric of quality rather than a value-neutral statement about the political economy of a prose text. (ie. inferno/the commedia is ‘not fanfiction’ because it’s Good—under a particular metric which defers to hegemony—your 400k destiel coffee shop omegaverse au etc etc could Never be dante because it lacks an intellectual quality with which dante has been imbued—do you see what i mean about quality being the qualifying metric here, rather than the actual nature of the text? plausibly, under this framework, someone could write fanfiction of a quality sufficient to transcend the category of ‘fanfiction’ and become, in fact, ‘canonical.’ by this logic, there exists a scale of objective ‘quality’ running from ‘fanfiction’ to ‘canonical’ such that that is what those categories describe. like, you see why this is incoherent.) anyway, these are silly terms to fight on & i think key to an actual politics of literature (far beyond this v parochial argument) is interrogating all the assumptions about meritocracy + artistic value + particular forms of ‘publishing’ as legitimising or delegitimising a work that seem to be making up the base of this discourse whilst managing to go totally uninterrogated.

also, it’s very weird that people treat fanfiction as a wholly discrete category completely shut off from the critical practices we bring to our understanding of what gets called ‘real’ literature (which is in itself a very poorly thought-out umbrella). fanfiction does have significant reactionary currents running through its attached culture and it’s dishonest and lazy to try and dismiss that fact, but there exists a particular cognitive dissonance which jumps from here to the idea that the way we ought to think about ‘difficult’ subject matter in our ‘real’ literature (as deployed to a particular end that could look like any number of things far beyond the boundary of tacit or explicit endorsement; as potentially unethical in its depiction, but also as potentially thoughtful and discursive and ethically viable) has no crossover into how we can think about fanfiction. the idea that fanfiction alone is a discrete category in which everything depicted makes for a 1:1 articulation of the real-life ethics of the author with no possible room for ambiguity of the kind that we allow other forms of prose fiction is as silly as saying that lolita is sufficient evidence for vladimir nabokov having been a pedophile, and leaves us with a stupidly limited and pretty easily refutable scope for what fanfiction actually is and does.

that being said, hot take #3 is that people interested in fanfiction & how it can be situated within a discourse of literary criticism & production need to be prepared to actually address the fact that the culture around it can be vv reactionary, most often racist, and decrying all criticism as coming from quote-unquote “antis” (silly term) or as people trying to project “moralism”/“puritanism” onto a fandom space is itself also racist.

[stiffyck]

Hi stiff!! I was writing this as a comment but I think it’s a better ask. It’s very long and I will not be upset if you don’t answer! :3

I think part of peoples aversion to it is that it doesn’t conform to the style people are used to seeing online by popular artists. There’s this sorta phenomenon I’ve noticed where people tend to move their style towards a very cartoon/anime ish style with little variation because it’s pretty and that’s what people/algorithms like. People gravitate moreso if they intend on selling their art though.

So, when someone has a stylistic choice that doesn’t really fit that mould people find it “weird”. Exaggerated features (or in this case and many others like, a feature people just have???) are often seen as ugly or strange. An example of this is the person on TikTok who drew characters with big foreheads and lower eyes and got bullied off the platform for it! Another example could be “the tumblr art style” where commentary channels bullied artists who drew any minority ever or “ugly” features. It really exemplifies to me how online culture (especially on western apps) views western standards of beauty as the only way people can be beautiful. And why, in their mind, would someone create art that isn’t beautiful in that way unless they’re trying to be weird or make a statement? When, in reality, the beauty is in that they’re drawing what they see, what they want to see, and what they think is beautiful. Without diversity in what we consider beauty there is no beauty.

In this case it also feels a bit. Weird. To have the big nose be such a big issue. I don’t see people getting mad at hooked nose scar? How is this any different? There is nothing different about the way you draw scar now and the way you drew him before aside from that. You’ve always drawn him with body hair and fat and with these details that really just. Humanize him. And I think the point I’m trying to make here is that drawing people with big noses or crooked eyes or acne scars isn’t bad or weird and only adds to your art. It only makes you a better artist and I’ve genuinely watched you improve really really fast as you’ve drawn these characters with so much body diversity. Anyway. Big nose scar sweeeeep

honestly yea. sometimes when i see people draw certain characters it almost feels like theyre afraid of making them "unattractive" if you know what i mean? like i dont know how else to describe it but its really weird.

making their nose smaller, giving female characters bigger eyes and fuller lips, drawing only skinny characters, drawing older people with less wrinkles then they actually have or should have etc. and like people can draw whatever they want of course but tbh i see those "unattractive" parts as beautiful.

like i genuinely think wrinkles are pretty. i think big noses, hooked noses, small noses, crooked noses or just any kind of noses are beautiful. i think someones lips dont have to be full to look pretty. i think fat people and skinny people and just all kinds of people are beautiful. acne scars and and skin markings of any kind are beautiful.

idk just all those things and imperfections even make people beautiful to me.

like i find diversity beautiful and its kinda sad that some people dont see it that way? not everyone is skinny and buff, not all women will have the perfect hourglass figure or full lips etc.

those body types are beautiful too of course but sometimes i feel like people should see beauty in other body types and features as well.

anyway thank you for the ask it was very sweet and i do agree with you <3

[quohotos]

My fan theories about how the Underland works

In today's @returntoregalia episode had some interesting tangents about how the creatures probably couldn't survive in the Underland. There wouldn't be enough air, the air wouldn't circulate, and larger creatures die sooner than smaller creatures because their hearts have to work harder. The correct answer is obviously "It's fantasy", but I still think there are some clues that can give a plausible psuedoscientific explanation of how this can work.

Where does the air come from? The overland, specifically the currents. That massive amount of air being pulled in and out of the Underland is what is recirculating the air and keeping it breathable. This is sort of passing the buck, since the currents are never explained and are one of the few purely magical parts of the worldbuilding, but I believe that is the purpose they serve. There is something in the Underland, could be magical or some strange natrual phenomenon that's not explained yet, that flushes out the dead air pulls in fresh air. Sometimes Overlanders like Gregor get caught up in it and it allows for safe passage between the two lands. Sandwitch specifically sought out the Underland because he saw visions of the surface being uninhabited (headcannon: nuclear war), so it's possible that the underland wouldn't actually save them in the event of that happening because it relies on air from the surface, but you can't really blame him for not understanding that.

Why are the animals so big? Yes, larger animals die sooner, but they also are much more efficient because of the Square-Cube Law. "This principle states that, as a shape grows in size, its volume grows faster than its surface area." Energy lost as heat is a function of surface area, which means that larger animals have to eat less often than smaller animals. Mice can starve to death within days whereas a human can stay alive for weeks without food. In places where food is scarce and temperatures are low, like the open ocean and deep sea, we see lots of animals evolve gigantism. If you go deep in the ocean you'll find lots of animals that look like the ones at the surface just scaled up (and yes there's more than one factor that contributes to that, but the caloric efficiency of gigantism is one of those). In a cave environment where calories are scarce it would make sense for everything to get bigger to conserve energy. As for them dying sooner, who's to say that they don't all die pretty early. The oldest creature we see is a cockroach on the code team, but basically everything else besides humans aren't given an age. Maybe Gnawers only live to be like thirty, maybe Ripred is an old geezer who's about to keel over. Most people die in wars anyways, so longevity isn't really a concern. The fact that Rats can grow up from pups to adults in about a year leads me to believe that they die off early and their whole society has made peace with and is designed around that fact.

When it comes to why the animals are all intelegent... that where there's no explanation beyond fantasy book, and that's fine. You could make an argument that with the added stresses and challenges of finding food in the underland intelegence would be important, but also complex brains are a huge caloric sink so it's more efficient to be dumb and specialized. The truth is that no one should ever have to justify having big talking bat friends in their story. Every story should have those without needing to explain their reasoning.

[a-dragons-journal]

Sorry if you've been asked about this before, but do you have any insight into the more recent trend (I think recent anyway) of systems claiming that otherkin/singlets "steal terminology" from the DID community? More recently I keep seeing introjects essentially saying kinfolk are just 'larping' and only systems are really xyz. But I've never really seen explained what exactly we are "stealing" from systems, it really just confusing me. If you don't want to answer or don't have any input no worries, have a nice day either way 🖤

I honestly have no goddamn idea where that’s coming from, it confuses me too. Literally all of the terms I’ve seen people claim that with are either nonspecific or originated with the otherkin and therian communities - usually it’s “shifting,” which, people seem to think that that came from switching, which it didn’t, or “switching” itself, which we… don’t use? Once I saw someone say it about “species dysphoria,” which I’m pretty sure originated with us but either way is in no way system-specific. As far as I’m aware, there’s fairly little overlap in terminology between our communities (outside of, like. basic words like “nonhuman” that aren’t specific to either of us, I mean) to be accused of “stealing” in the first place, and so far I’ve yet to see a claim that wasn’t easily debunked with like five minutes of research.

Overall, as far as I can tell it just seems to be people insisting that only system members, typically only DID introjects specifically, can “really” be nonhuman/fictional, which is bluntly kind of just tiresome and ridiculous. I understand the instinct to defend yourself when the world often tries to decry you as either crazy or roleplayers, but turning around and turning the “that’s not real” on other people is not helping anything. It also often seems to be tied to this idea that if your experiences are similar to a medically recognized phenomenon, they either must be that phenomenon or they’re not real at all (and if you claim they are, you’re either faking or wrong). Which is the same idea that fuels a lot of anti-endo sentiment (which, a lot of the admittedly small group of people I’ve seen yelling about this seem to be both anti-endo and mixing up endogenic systems and otherkin).

But, that being said, I haven’t seen much of this firsthand and I’m not exactly deep in the syscourse - if any plural folks have insight, please feel free to chime in in the notes?

[uefb]

Why do you think there’s a pattern of Theseus being abusive/overly aggressive in Fantastic Beasts fanfic? It’s been driving me up the wall trying to find Newt and Theseus fanfic that doesn’t make them OOC especially Theseus, and idk, in the context of Newt being Autistic I find it disturbing. Like sure, Theseus is hot-headed and loses his temper, he doesn’t always understand Newt, but those traits seem overtly exaggerated in a lot of fandom content.

Obsessed with this ask. I have been thinking about it all day, and am just now getting to write it up! Thinking about it in the background of my statistics class almost singularly got me through its sensory and anxiety hell. /sweat-laugh emoji/ So thank you!

Please remember, all of this is based on my own perspectives, knowledge, and headcanons, as well as canon clues. Nothing here is definitive and is open for respectful conversation! (Not directed specifically at you, salamander, just since this is a public blog I like to cover my bases. ^_^)

Buckle up: major autistic info dump incoming

Alright, so, my initial thoughts are that...

Obviously, there was a decent chunk of Newt fic written between 2016 and 2018 before CoG came out, that first film where we really got to see Theseus as a character, for who he really is (especially since they cut that letter from him to Newt at beginning of FBWTFT, that starts with "little brother," which is just pretty endearing). IMHO, this two-year gap means people had a wide open playing field to build the character themselves. Here's a few thoughts on that:

The framework for the entire Wizarding World, narratively, is the Harry Potter series. Boy wizard, shunned by family, isolated from socialization -- Outcasts have always been the backbone of She-who-must-not-be-named's stories. It's compelling. We love it, we lap it up. With only one FB film out before 2018 and Newt being such a unique protagonist, I think it's likely people fell back on the more typical Harry-Dudley trope to create a compelling backstory for Newt, using that tried-and-true fantasy Cinderella-type trope.

Second, from what I can tell, there was a lot less serious consideration of Newt actually being autistic in the early years of the fandom. (I only "joined" relatively recently myself, despite going to the first 2 movies on opening day, but I'm nothing if not fastidious in consuming every scrap of historical content when I develop a new interest, lol.) I've read pages of threads and plenty of "think pieces" attributing Newt's behavior to trauma-related social anxiety and/or his profession as a magizoologist. I absolutely buy the latter (adjusting body language for one's profession), but not entirely the former. (Personally, Newt doesn't strike me as an inherently anxious person--he strikes me as an inherently autistic one who also sometimes experiences anxiety. Discomfort and anxiety aren't the same thing, but people often conflate them, imho.) Anyway, THAT BEING SAID, I've noticed in quite a few fics that people write Theseus as being part of that implied social trauma, via sibling bullying that rises beyond typical sibling harassment. People perhaps tried to explain Newt's behavior by making him, at the very least, overshadowed by Theseus (and ashamed of it) or, at the very worst, abused and/or neglected by his family.

Also, quite simply: people process their own family trauma via fic. I think it's highly likely Theseus just served a sibling or parental role for some people in stories. (The abundance of abusive!Thranduil fic in the LotR fandom in the early 00s is another example of this.) Nothing wrong with using fic to process feelings and life experiences (god knows I do, it's horrifically obvious and always has been lmao), but this bulletpoint is still one explanation for the pre-CoG "Theseus being a dick in fic" phenomenon.

Plus, fanfic doesn't occur in a vacuum. Even when new canon info comes out, existing fic and whatever the going/contemporary fanon is often impact how new writers write their characters, even post-CoG. (And how those characterizations are received by the larger fandom--that reception may subsequently impact how writers maintain or change their characters in the future, imho.)

As for the current reasons Theseus is often OOC in post-CoG fic...

Well, I have my theories, but I am also not entirely sure. However, I feel pretty confident it has to do, primarily, with points 1 and 4.

Leta Lestrange and the Scamander Brothers - Honestly, I think people likely are pretty offended on Newt's behalf for the Leta/Theseus marriage. In mainstream media, we're kind of trained to think that dating your friend's ex is ultimate betrayal--it's difficult for people to imagine a world in which a person who marries their brother's ex is a good person. (...I was once in a friend group where we had all dated the same girl at some point, but we were all either ridiculously honest or autistic so we just--wait for it--talked about it and moved on.) That being said, I never read Leta & Newt as overtly romantic (then again, I also didn't know Bunty liked Newt until the 4th time I watched CoG), so I don't entirely get this one to the degree that I think some people viscerally feel this. But I expect some people see that and assume it says something much larger about Theseus' character than it does. (I do think it says a lot about Theseus that he loves Leta, but I don't think it says the same things about him that some other people do -- I think it speaks more to his similarities to Newt [compassion and positive outlook] than it does to stealing Newt's Hogwarts sweetheart. But I digress.)

Something Did Happen at Some Point - Now, there is undeniably a distance between the brothers that we, as viewers, don't necessarily know the origin of. (So I think I may have mentioned in my letters that [my brother & I] have quite a complicated relationship. // Does he want to kill you? // Frequently.) Have they always been like that? Is it new? Is it because of the age difference? Because they have different personalities? (Though I will argue until I'm blue in the face that they're actually extraordinarily similar people, at their cores.) Is it because Newt got expelled, or because Theseus scooped up Leta, or because Theseus expresses emotion through touch & Newt jerks away from touch he doesn't initiate himself, or because because because because because? I don't know. But there is something there and, based on the "complicated relationship" comment, it sounds like it is something that likely developed over time. So imho - I think some people see that and just lean in way too hard. Like, pedal to the medal, 0 to 60 too hard.

Theseus is Snarky to Newt on Multiple Occasions - Mostly based around how Newt directs his life, carries himself, etc etc. For example, it would be easy to take that whole scene before and after Newt's travel hearing in CoG and assume Theseus is an overprotective, condescending, and ableist prick. But if we look below the surface (and the stage directions in the screenplay help, too. When he says "maybe a little less... / like me. / well, it can't hurt" the instructions say 'not without fondness', or something like that), it's pretty glaringly obvious he doesn't mean to be that way. Even condescending behaviors usually have causal correlates, even if we can't see them on the surface. (Believe me -- and this is something we both touched on in DMs, salamander, I'm just repeating for the sake of the ask -- well-meaning pep talks and encouragement can still drip with condescension when loved ones think you need guidance because they "love you and know better " and you're just too autistic or too idealistic or too naive or whatever.) Ultimately, whether due to a failure to approach these snarky exchanges with grace and nuance, or because it can make a good fic to put brothers at odds, IDK -- but I expect this particular point plays into some people's decisions to interpret Theseus in a way I view as OOC.

Ease of Narrative ~ Nuance is hard - I mean, this one explains itself. Writing characters in a nuanced manner that allows digging into the messy horrible confusion of relationships--embedded as they are within families and societies and personal & general history--is not easy. It takes not only patience and significant effort as a writer, but it also takes a degree of self-awareness and maturity that we all reach at different points. I'm not there yet myself (there's no real arrival -- life's not a perfect graph), but still: My fic writing is very different now at 32 (with 14 years of 'adulthood' and 12 years of therapy under my belt) than it was when I was writing about adults when I was 15. (And, yes, I still have my first posted HP fic up on MuggleNet and FFnet, so you don't just have to take my word for it lmao.) To be very clear, this isn't me being ageist or whatever: I'm just saying that I often get the sense while reading fic where Theseus is reallllly overly aggressive that the writer is sometimes either very new to creative writing (and good for them! we love new writers! keep writing, lovelies!), or else quite young, and thus still acquiring life experience that is going to improve their work as they age, every single day.**

Sibling Experience - Not having personal or narrative experience with an age gap like Newt and Theseus have. I'm an older sibling by 7.5 years, which is close to Theseus & Newt's age difference. I basically half-raised my younger brother, so I have a real soft spot for that kind of sibling relationship, which comes across in most of my fics (LotR & FB). It's hard to imagine the sort of borderline sibling-parental love, responsibility, and anxiety that can permeate those kind of relationships if you haven't experienced or seen it represented in media yourself. This is just a theory, of course---I have no actual data on this being actually related to his OOCness.

What else? What do you or others think?

Final very random thought

I also think a lot of people forget that autism runs in families. So yes, Theseus doesn't always "get" Newt (god, no, lol) and he doesn't have guidance on what to do when he doesn't, but it is highly unlikely he hasn't seen behavior similar to Newt's before, whether in a parent or cousins, an aunt/uncle or something else. People *also* tend to forget, IMHO, that subclinical traits are often present in direct family members of an autistic person--Theseus' rigid thinking, for example, isn't necessarily "autistic", but he may get Newt better than people think for certain reasons we never have an opportunity to see in the script. (Not that the movies are paying *that* much attention to the actual research or autism presentations lmao, but I'm just saying it is a possibility). Being able to relate to a smaller version of someone's struggles can simultaneously make one both a better support and a worse one in a lot of ways. (And certain autistic traits can even rub up against each other poorly in different people--I have a few acquaintances that rub me the wrong way because our "symptoms" manifest in very different ways and their natural behavior triggers some of my own sensory issues or overdeveloped sense of justice or whatever. Conversely, my ADHD tendency to be 20 minutes late to every hang gives one of my autistic friends a panic attack every time -- I feel terrible, but all we can both do is try to adjust the behavior around our symptoms. And sometimes the same traits--firmly held beliefs, for example--bump into each other explosively, which I have experienced in fandom myself: two autistic people w diametrically opposing views interacting, but because we process information in similar ways even with very different perspectives, no progress can be made before someone shuts down.) BUT I BRING THIS UP BECAUSE, I do think it's possible to headcanon that some of Newt and Theseus' conflict (which does exist) could even be rooted in differing forms of neurodivergence or presentation of subclinical symptoms.

The world is a big place and there's so many possibilities. These are just some of my thoughts on why Theseus is often portrayed in a way I find to be OOC!

Asterisked footnote under cut -

**I'm trying to convey what Sandra Cisneros does much better in her short story "Eleven." That we, all of us, carry our entire lives and what we have seen inside of us at all times, and I think that's what we bring to our writing.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three. Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

[hood-ex]

#EMILY#one of these days we have to stop enabling each other in just writing our untagged snippets and scenes on here#and then never posting them anywhere else and constantly being surprised when a) we#cant find them later. b) other ppl cant find them. c) we forget we ever wrote them and d) nobody ever finds them or knows they#exist because we wrote them at some weird ass hour and reblogged it maybe once and then also forgot we ever wrote them#and thus never actually thought to tell other ppl that hey we wrote a thing that they might maybe like and go check it out#BUT I DIGRESS#the point is I love this and also Ive never seen this before but like. considering all of the above like.....that tracks. i should maybe no#be surprised by this phenomenon which directly mirrors or replicates a phenomenon that we have mutually experienced pretty often#with each others random ass scenes that were written and posted and forgotten about at random ass times and never thought about again#lol#anyway#the point of this is yay i like it. im glad to have read it. wish I had read it when you first wrote it#and fed you validation when this was fresh off the vine and potentially had momentum that couldve been nurtured and fed#into getting you to write more of it there and then but like. I didnt. so. oh well#unless I did and just forgot. which as we've established. also a strong possibility#whatever. anyway here have a convo that probably couldve been a DM convo but lol since when do we waste perfectly good DM convos on actual#DMs when we can just yell back and forth at each other in tags that nobody else actually needs or wants to read anyway - @bigskydreaming

See this is why we technically should have secondary blogs dedicated to this so that nothing gets lost amongst everything else. And if we were really smart, we'd use complex tagging systems, but at the same time, I think Tumblr would just eat the tags and not bring them forth when we called upon them. As it tends to do. But also I think we'll never find everything we've written to transfer them over to said secondary blogs, so I think we're just going to continue enabling each other to write things that get lost in the tundra of digital life.

That's literally how I feel whenever I see one of your posts show up on my dash that I've never seen before. Like hello yes it was posted at like 3 in the morning so that's why I never saw it, and it probably didn't have a Dick Grayson tag on it, which is basically the only tag I ever check, and I also don't scroll down all that far on my dash when I visit it every day, so things just get lost foreverrr. Until they don't because one random person someway, somehow found the post and got it circulating again at some random point in time. Or you magically remember said post exists, and you post it yourself, to which I am like ?! thou'st dare hideth the writing from thee!

So yes we could potentially mitigate this problem, but also, I think we both post something and then completely forget it exists either minutes or hours later, so we'll just continue this cycle of prioritizing other things over fic visibility and accessibility.

[lycanlovingvampyre]

MAG 155 Relisten

Activity on my first listen: sitting in my hammock chair on the balcony

So after MAG 154 has been such a banger I couldn't stop and wanted to listen to yet another episode! So I grabbed my phone and went upstairs and outside on the balcony to listen to this one. It's one of my favorite statements, it’s so good on a very complicated level! (Plus that conversation with Basira at the beginning!) ... (It’s gonna be a long post...)

BASIRA: "Hmm. London’s what, 600 square miles?" JON: "607." I don't even think this is the Beholding, I think Jon just knows that xD Just like I know the exact meters of sea level of my hometown XD

JON: "I mean… I don’t know how much she can predict or manipulate the future, but I think she’s proven she can at least avoid us finding her." BASIRA: "Yeah, well, it makes me feel better." Oh yeah, one of the most horrible things... Knowing that there is a spider, but not knowing where...

BASIRA: "Why did you call her and not me?" JON: "Honestly, I panicked. Her name came up first on my phone." We needed it to be Daisy for the narrative, but also I like to think that Jon trusts Daisy more than Basira. And having Daisy come up first on his phone also just shows, that he's talking more often to Daisy on his phone than to Basira.

BASIRA: "I’m trying to convince her to go after them. To, uh… Hunt them." JON: "Why?" BASIRA: "Because I’m not going to lose her." JON: "She goes hunting again, you might anyway." BASIRA: "And if she doesn’t, she might die." JON: "Something you’re fine with in certain other cases, and something she’s made peace with." Ah yes, now the real hypocrisy starts... Jon sounds so angry here when he's calling her out on it. I mean, yeah, I get the emotional side of it, Basira has been with Daisy for a long time and you tend to have a lot more patience for people you love than for people you do not care that much about. But it must still feel horrible on Jon's side.

BASIRA: "Because of the guilt she feels over the stuff the Hunt made her do. It’s not her fault." Oh, just because you feel guilty everything's okay? That's not how it works. It might be an important step to stop doing it, self recognition, but it's still a long way from there. Jon says he wanted to get those live statements, that they felt good. It doesn't mean that he can't feel guilty about it. Isn't that a theme with addiction? (I don't know, I don't think I've ever been addicted to something, at least not in the conventional sense. But I damn sure know what it feels like doing something because you wanted it so badly in that moment and afterwards you see it different -> mundane example of eating that damn piece of pie and regretting it afterwards xDD) Also interesting topic there, "the stuff the Hunt made her do". It might not be a shock to hear that police here in Austria is also pretty right-winged. What is it, that makes police like this. I know only one police officer, she's leftist and of course has a really, reaaally hard time with her colleagues. Gotta ask her someday if it's just that kind of people who chose to become police (it would make sense, that promise of power does attract these kind of people. A phenomenon you can also see in management positions), or if there's in fact a considerable amount of people on the fence, who then get brain-washed into that bullshit.  

JON: "Earlier, when she was still out of it, I… I saw some of the things she was talking about, some of the things she did while she was police. I’m not convinced I disagree with her assessment. Do you want me to tell you?" BASIRA: "No. No I don’t." JON: "You knew, didn’t you? You knew the sort of things she did, and you let her." BASIRA: "No. Not exactly. I thought… It’s not that simple." JON: "It never is. But that doesn’t make it okay." Denial might be natural, but not one of the steps to make things better...

JON: "No. I suppose not. In many ways it’s simpler now isn’t it? At least now our demons have names." OMG yes... Even though none of my "problems" have resolved themselves, being able to put names to them makes it so much easier. And some of those things actually stopped being a problem as soon as I understood them. Now they're just a part of who I am and I won't beat myself up about them anymore.

Conversations like these are so important. Not just in-story for character growth, but also for us to understand them better, maybe even to understand ourselves better.

"I know most people have plenty to live for, but what I mean is that my life does good. I put a lot into the world. Did you read about that homelessness initiative that got 8,000 people into shelters? That was me. I’ve financed drug projects, organized inner city violence initiatives. I’ve always been so aware of the position I’m in, and keen to use that power to actually help people." Ahhh, I love/hate the fact that THIS is the person who tries to justify their behavior....

"My existence does a lot of good, and that’s only gotten more true since all this started. I’ve given more, spent more time on charitable stuff, and helped more people." Yeah, figures, trying to compensate the guilt.

"Sorry, I’m just… aware of how this story makes me look and I don’t want you to think I’m some selfish monster grinding people up just to extend my own ghoulish life. I’m trying to do good." Ahhh, this statement is so extremely difficult and I love it!!!

"So when I had an epileptic seizure, the first one of my entire life, the month before my wedding… that wasn’t fair. I mean, even if I had to have epilepsy – which I could live with – having my first attack at the top of a staircase, five weeks before the happiest day of my life, that’s just not fair!" That’s life. Life doesn't have a manual with an warranty. Vis major doesn't have any fairness. It just is.

"But more likely I thought it would be nothing. No heaven or hell, no thought or sensation, just… Nothing. You wouldn’t even notice you were gone." Oh yeah, I think of this sometimes and it makes my head feel fuzzy. It's not possible to comprehend, this nothingness.

"But it wasn’t like that at all. I don’t know if I have words for it. How can you describe being aware of the absence of everything? Life. Light. Warmth." At least there is a mind to describe it. The nothingness doesn't even have this... Oh course, if it ends in nothingness, I won’t care about this...

"It was very dark, and very cold. It dawned on me that this might be my existence forever. There, beyond time, and I tried so desperately to scream, but I had no lungs or throat in that dreadful place." Literally “And I Must Scream” xD The trope of a fate worse than death and the statement giver tries to scream^^

"And then I felt something. I felt myself reach into his chest, held the strong steady beat of his heart. Calm. Calm while I was lying dead on the table. There was a sudden moment of rage and hate that flowed out of me down at his torso" Yeah yeah, we needed that for the story to progress. But I think this is also why the Jigsaw Killer in Saw imprisoned that doctor? At least I remember that I first began to think about this when watching Saw - the first one I mean, from 2004. This is something that always makes me a bit mad. What do you think makes you so special that the doctor should beat themself up over your fate? Do people not realize that doctors and nurses see this every week? Do people think medicals would be able to continue their jobs if every tragic case gets to them? This is something you have to understand, when you work in medical. You can't let these things get to you. It'll eat you alive and then you'll be less than ever able to help people. Yes, getting a devastating diagnosis is an exceptional state and I know this leads to all kinds of emotional outbursts. But it won't change a thing if the medical staff feels sorry for you or not (provided they're not complete assholes about it of course!). And I say this having been on both sides.

"I had to live, I couldn’t die, not then. We were on the verge of closing a deal that would provide fresh water to impoverished communities in a dozen developing countries. Without me, it would fall through." Ahhh, this statement! This is already something like the dilemma of MAG 199. Hypothetical impact on other people. Morally/logically (?) you would have to say every life is equal. So when you have to kill again and again and again then several lives would pay for your single life. But then we get the hypothetical component of the survival of this single person might save hundreds, thousands more! Suddenly that scale dips the other way. But you won't know if without that one person the project would actually fail or work just fine.

"If only I could have explained it to her, I’m sure she would have understood. She might even have agreed." OMG, holy hell, wtf, no! Why would that person want to live any less than you do?

"Perhaps it was life itself that I was taking, and the old woman that had hardly any left in her, and it had run out too fast." It does sound plausible at least?... Isn't that vaguely how Death Note works for the Shinigami? I can't remember, it's been so long since I read the manga and I never watched the anime...

"This time I sought out a homeless man. Young and strong, though his life was clearly over as he tried to destroy himself through drinking." Aaaah, so now we had an old person and a homeless alcoholic... It seems those are the people less valued in our society... Thanks, I hate it!

I love how the music picks up when the statement giver has a car accident only 3 months after the homeless guy. Cause it's the moment when this turns into absolute madness, seemingly having to take more and more lives!

"I took a newborn. It’s strange, the maths you do of it all. A full life ahead of it, but aside from the devastated parents, no real harm to the world as a whole. No good works left unfinished." I... know that this is where a lot of people get absolutely mad at the statement giver, but I think that's missing the point of the statement. The cost of living... or more the cost of a life. Its value. By what criteria is the value calculated? There is a tendency of society putting an awful lot of value on children's lives. Rather save the kid than the adult... But adults want to live too... This discussion has become even more complicated with the pandemic. Cause then we tried to protect people with pre-existing illnesses and old folks the most. At the cost of mental health of so many. I remember very clearly when young folks suddenly began to become angry when elders immediately went outside after lockdowns to sit in cafes. Like they said, we stayed home for you to protect you and now you immediately throw that away by putting yourself so much at risk? Then again, I remember a.. politician (I think?) also saying something absolutely mad like "Old folks should die for the freedom of the youths"... Holy fuck... Well, long story short, I find this topic just highly interesting...

"It was about connection. About joy. The more friends, family, loved ones the person has, the further out the terror of sudden death spreads from me. The longer it keeps me alive." Ahhh, that it such an interesting concept! The more impact on the surrounding world, the more "saturating" is that life. And Fear Entity-wise that makes sense. It feeds off of that negative emotions. And this actually ties in with the Desolation and not just the End. Causing pain through loss.

"I’m 40 now, and I have taken the life of beloved mothers, respected professionals, pillars of the community. But I have done so much good with my life, I’ve reached further helped more people than they ever could have." Hahaha, have you? Cause in the end, you'll never know...

"I’m not saying how I live is right, or good, but it is the position I have been put in, and a decision I have to make. I never wanted to weigh up the value of a life, to set it on the scales against my own, but that’s a choice that I am forced into. And it is one I will continue to make." Just boil it down to this: The desire to survive is stronger than the guilt of taking lives' of others. Period. No excuses of doing good.

JON: "I’ve saved the world, the whole world. Does that give me the right to take what I need to survive?" Aaaah, such a good question!

MELANIE: "It’s – it’s the rest of you I’m worried about." Seriously, Melanie really made me angry at times. But I think that was all during her Slaughter bullet time. She not an easy person, but seems to care a lot. And when she's not hurting she can be really sweet.

Also again the parallel of the statement and the conversations being held in that same episode. All of them are about a certain price. Losing yourself and hurting others to survive, losing your eyesight to be free... Melanie says it, she okay to pay the price.

JON: "How are you planning on doing it?" MELANIE: "Got, uh, got one of those awls from the book repair suppliers, up in the library? (shakily) If it can punch through books it can punch through, uh… Well it – it should do the trick. No reason to try and make it too complicated." Of course Jon had to ask, urgh... But TMA is horror genre, wouldn't make sense to miss out on that sweet body horror...

MELANIE: "But if you, um… If you could…In five minutes, I would appreciate it if you could call me an ambulance." Ah fuck...

@a-mag-a-day

[liskantope]

I always find your thoughts on dating apps to be super interesting, and I'm sorry to hear about the demoralizing nature of it (which has been precisely my experience, too, for the past couple of years).

It got me randomly thinking, do you feel that one reason the dating sites don't generally work is because, counterintuitively, there's too much to choose from? In other words, the very fact that we know there are so many profiles makes us more likely to pass on people who we might have been willing to give a chance in real life.

I'll admit outright that I'm guilty of that, and it might not be the case with most other people, but I do wonder if the overabundance of profiles on the dating apps has some unhelpful effect.

I hope you have better luck real soon, by the way!

Thanks for the kindness and commiseration! In fact, just in the last couple of years, everyone I hear discussing modern online dating seems to express a disgust with it and seems to feel some degree/variety of hopelessness around it. I was at a meetup event organized by a woman for single men some months ago, the purpose being to discuss what the dating world looks like from men's point of view, and the one thing that we seemed to unanimously agree on was "Online dating sucks!" Part of it clearly has to do with dating apps just visibly getting worse. Just twice in the past couple of weeks there have been snarky offhand mentions (one of them on ACX) of "OKCupid, back when it was still good". And I have the same feeling: it's hard for me to put a finger on precisely which changes in the interface of the dating apps I've been on have made the overall experience much worse than it was even a few years ago*, but it's there.

Anyway, to more closely address your question, I've heard the "paralysis and decreased happiness from having more choices" hypothesis from time to time in conversations (mostly from podcasts) about the modern world of dating. It's a much more generally-applied hypothesis as to why there seems to be more unhappiness (among certain populations) in modern times than half a century ago; I even recall there being a famous TED talk on it. I think this phenomenon must have an effect for some people in some areas of the online dating realm, but my suspicion is that this is mostly a factor for women seeking men through online dating. My impression of most women on dating apps who are reasonably attractive and have some ability to post decent photos is that they have a plethora of men to choose from, a very large percentage of whom will right-swipe them back, so they might as well aim for the top. But then, the men they perceive via very limited digital profiles to be the cream of the crop often turn out to be disappointing in person.

This could be an issue for some non-women not seeking men online as well, I suppose (although from what I hear, my experience of putting tons of energy in desperate hopes of getting a single match every now and then is pretty normal for men seeking women, even men I would consider more attractive than me, and plenty of men who are not me follow the strategy of just right-swiping everyone so your suggestion certainly doesn't seem to apply to them). But I don't really think it's an issue for me: as I said in my last post, the vast majority of dating profiles I see show women don't enthuse me on one or more fairly basic parameters (this is particularly the case on OKCupid, where a lot more information tends to be exposed). This sounds like I'm being very demanding -- and whether I am is a question I ask myself all the time -- but these criteria just don't seem like they should be too much to ask for, although I'm beginning to see why as our history progresses and as I get older it was bound to get harder and harder to find them.

These basic parameters aren't as visible with someone you've just met in real life, and maybe if I met some of them in real life I'd find them more dateable than they appear in a profile, and maybe chemistry would take over powerfully enough for me to be more flexible on certain things than I currently think myself capable of. But admitting this possibility is subtly but significantly different from saying that the multitude of choices presented to me on dating sites raises my standards: I just don't think it has, or that for me the larger number of choices has anything to do with it.

Anyway, I wish you better luck too!

*The closest I can come to explaining coherently is that they are more visibly trying to find ways to get my money. Which I find not only annoying but somehow infantalizing in a way I can't quite explain, even to myself. My attitude doesn't seem entirely defensible when I zoom out and consider that there's no reason dating sites should have to be free: they are businesses that have to stay in business and have every right to try to get me to pay money. There's just some holdout within the last bit of my internalized stigma around using dating sites that makes me strangely proud of how I've never spent a single penny on dating sites in 11-12 years of on-and-off using them. (At the single men's event I mentioned above, one bit of advice some other guys gave to me is "if you're a guy, you have to spend money on dating apps, otherwise they're not going to be effective.")

[djuvlipen]

The whole slavic anon talk got me thinking, but I don't do original posts so I thought maybe you'd like this little thinkpiece/explanation. Don't feel the need to respond.

Slavic radbrl's extreme defensiveness over being accused of racism/"mixed up with the rest of white people" points me to extreme disconnection from their own community with a pinch of being terminally online. Navigating the power dynamic where you're white but not white enough to be considered part of the "civilized world" is hard and can be painful at times, which is why you'd see slavic people trying so hard to stick with poc with the whole "we're not like other white people" rhetoric. Because xenophobia is never talked or taken about seriously they can't explain why we're treated like that by western europeans, so searching for community with poc just makes sense to them. You see the word racism used by slavic ppl instead of what it actually is (xenophobia) for the exact same reason.

(also, there's legitimate movements to recognise slavic people as people of color, most of them seem to be spearheaded as Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian ancestry, which is not a coincidence imo)

Getting a reality check that yeah, you're still an opressor class, actually, sets off a defensive response in many people because they've personally never gotten the privileges of being a part of the opressor class (or, yknow. Never realised they did), which makes sense, but honestly I'd expect a better attitude from the community that seems to understand how intersectionality works.

But there's also this disconnect where slavic people tend to be very distant from our (admittedly pretty ugly) history and culture, only nit-picking the bits they like, because the rest of it reminds them that we ultimately live in a culture that is incredibly misogynist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic, which doesn't fit with the idea of being that perfect victim a lot of slavic ppl on the internet strive to be.

There's this idea that the only way to gain sympathy from the west (which we subconsciously aim for despite all out sneers at them because sometimes it feels like it's the only way for our countries to survive, and sometimes it actually is) is to make them realise we never actually "deserved" the way we treated. Facing all the pain we've caused to Roma and Jewish people and countless other nations makes you doubt and think that maybe you *did* deserve that - which is a very wrong way to go to begin with, but it's just easier to distance yourself from your history - your responsibility - and live in that comfy little bubble where your people never done any wrong because understanding that we still don't deserve the shit we get from the west despite all this, but at the same time should finally take some action against racism and discrimination we take part in today and at least apologise for what we did in the past takes some damn reflexion and mental resource and thought not all people are capable of. Especially not those who came to radbrl to escape the already painful reality with having to deal with Eastern European men, lol.

Not an excuse, of course, this phenomenon just seems very interesting to me personally since I observe it often in real life too.

(also the whole "slavic countries, aside from Russia" thing just feels so pretentious to me as a Ukrainian. I'd bet some serious money these people only mean Russia's attitude towards Ukraine that came to light recently and maybe other Eastern European countries, but not the North Asian native people that Russian colonised and killed because they wouldn't have even added that little "except Russia" to the list of they knew their own country's history with racism, which I'm sure there is some. Also, all that aside, is Russia not overwhelmingly slavic with slavic mindset and culture anyway? What's your reason for putting it aside like that, anon? Uncomfortable with the fact they're part of our ethnicity? Yeah, me too.)

Hi! Thank you for your input. You made a lot of good points, especially regarding the lack of education about xenophobia, and I don't think I can add much besides saying 'yeah that's true', especially since I'm a Westerner it wouldn't be fair of me to speak over you.

However as a Romani woman there are some parts where I disagree with you. I don't think Slavic people are trying to stick with people of colour by saying they are not like other white people. To me the very statement that Slavic people aren't like other white people is baffling. We can agree that Slavic people face xenophobia and persecution in the West based on the idea that they are not white *enough*, but the emphasis here is on "enough". They are still white and they have historically oppressed Romani people and they continue to do so. I don't see Slavic people distancing themselves from whiteness as an attempt at solidarity with poc. Roma have faced and still face institutionalized segregation, police brutality, forced sterilization, being put in ghettos, being denied access to school and healthcare, they never got compensation for slavery or for the pogroms and massacres they survived. Because the majority of us (esp. in Eastern Europe) are visibly brown and have a dark skin. Slavic people can't relate to that and the fact that they still continue to be so racist against Roma (like, the situation of Roma in Eastern Europe is so appalling, human rights violations are being committed against Roma everyday and we all know it) yet think of themselves as different from other white people is laughable at best. I am not only talking about myself here, all the other Romani women I've talked to on the matter echoed that sentiment and some were way, way less polite than I am when talking about this, because they live(d) in Eastern European countries and they have experienced racism first hand.

The idea that Slavic people are somehow different from other white people lies on the idea that racism against Roma is less reprehensible that racism against other people of colour. Slavic people who argue they are different from white westerners say they never colonized third world countries and say they never enslaved black Africans. So they recognize that racism against third world people and black people is bad. But they can't apply the same thinking when it comes to racism against Roma.

For the same reason, I wouldn't say Slavic people who say this are nit-picking bits of their history to leave aside the parts they don't like. I think it's actively rewriting history to try and pretend Slavic people were never racist against Roma to the same extent white westerners were to other poc. And this erasure has deep consequences on the lives of Roma today: they still haven't gotten reparation for slavery and we barely got any reparation for the Holocaust. The reason white people erase anti-Roma racism from history is because they don't want to compensate us and they don't want to acknowledge anti-Roma racism is bad, because they hate us. And the idea that Slavic people were not like other white people or were even people of colour (ridiculous considering that they have a white skin) has been used to silence acknowledging the severity of anti-Roma racism. Years ago when I was talking about Czech policemen kneeling on a Romani man's neck and smothering him to death, Czech users replied by insulting me, saying I was racist against Czech people, put me on blocklists, and then sent me anon hate telling me my whole family should be shot and Europe should be cleaned of gypsies.

So I think the main characteristic of that "not like other whites" phenomenon is how it erases the history of anti-Roma racism and acts like it isn't as bad as what other poc go through when Romani rights are constantly violated every other day in Slavic countries. But I do agree with a lot of what you are saying, I don't think Slavic people's anti-Roma racism or antisemitism should be used to justify persecuting them, and I agree that more people should be aware of how xenophobia is and works. I agree that there must be a lot of psychological reasons behind this phenomenon, you highlighted them very well and it was very interesting!

[watchmakermori]

so I’m finally reading twilight in 2023. I was never interested in it as a teenager, and if i’m honest i’m even less interested in it now, but it was a massive pop culture phenomenon that caused huge shifts in teen fiction, so I wanted to meet it on its own terms and see if i can understand why it had such a huge following.

i’m about 17% of the way in and my thoughts so far are:

the writing is not great, which I pretty much expected. there are so many transitional scenes (bella cooks steaks, bella starts up the truck, bella parks at school, bella walks from one class to another) which could very easily be cut out to keep the pace a bit tighter. meyer also has that annoying habit of explaining the tone of dialogue when it was already obvious from the dialogue itself. standard show/tell balance issues, nothing major

so edward is actually kind of gingery-haired in the books? can’t believe the blueprint for the brooding dark hair YA love interest was actually ginger

I assumed everyone was exaggerating about how often bella goes on about edward’s ‘perfect face’ but no, she really will not shut up about it. we don’t really get any interesting description about how it is perfect - his features outside of his hair, eyes, and skin don’t really get any airtime.

did you know that it rains a lot in Forks? well, get ready for bella to remind you of that every two pages 

bella and edward seem to have...slighty more personality in the books compared to the films? but the emphasis is on slight. bella’s clearest character trait is that she hates attention and gets really stupidly wound up over people noticing her, which definitely isn’t the most riveting of traits, but hey, it’s better than nothing.

edward seems to have marginally more snark than in the films but he’s still dangerously dull. if he and bella had any actual charisma and chemistry it would make the story so much better

I can sort of see why bella works as a protagonist though, because she straddles that happy line between ‘relatable to teenage girls’ and ‘unattainable fantasy for teenage girls’. like a lot of romance protagonists, she has the standard laundry list of flaws that aren’t really flaws, including:

clumsy

not athletic (but she’s still thin, don’t worry)

too pale (apparently this makes her stand out in this white-ass town??????)

not very social (but the entire school is obsessed with her anyway)

I feel like the premise of ‘girl moves to small boring town and falls for a mysterious boy who may or may not be a supernatural creature’ is actually excellent basis for a story. the problem comes from the fact that bella and edward are both incredibly dull characters and it’s hard to care about their romance.

nontheless. I will keep reading and keep adding to this post with my thoughts

[breakerwhiskey]

095 - NINETY-FIVE

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Transcript under the cut. For more episodes, click here.

[click, static]

Hey Birdie.

I got to the Grand Canyon.

I can’t believe I called it a hole in the ground. It is…so much more than that.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

I drove right up to the edge—who was gonna stop me, right? And now I’m sitting on the hood of my car, watching the sun rise.

The colors are extraordinary. The light and the shadows, the different shades of the earth. The bits of reflected light from the river down below.

This isn’t—I don’t know what you meant yesterday in saying I was wrong about the impression I’ve left on the world, but I don’t think you really appreciate the comparison I’m making. I’m not denying that I’ve made choices that have had…devastating consequence. Even if you take some of the lesser choices—the ones that I don’t feel regret over—they obviously still had an effect on people. Every piece of art I helped steal had some kind of ripple effect.

But the real mark—the one, the last one I left, I guess…I know—I mean, I can only imagine the, not even ripple, the wave that that left. I know that there are some decisions that will leave permanent marks. On you just as much as others.

But I’ve—I guess I’ve comforted myself with the fact that it didn’t matter after all. Even if we hadn’t—even if I hadn’t done what I did, everything was about to change anyway. The “incident” or whatever it was happened and changed the world overnight—or maybe really gradually, I don’t know. Everyone either died or was…raptured? Moved into underground cities? Abducted by aliens?

I was a meteor, maybe. But the crater is impossible to see because a much bigger meteor came along and blew away the earth around my crater. I’m one wave inside of a tsunami.

I—I think maybe I know what you were trying to say though. I’ve been thinking about it—and about you and what I know about you—and you seem to walk around your life with this immense burden of responsibility on your shoulders. You told me that what you did—whatever happened with your job—still matters. And I'm sorry, I’m sorry it’s still haunting you.

But if you’re trying to tell me that what I do matters, that it matters just as much as whatever happened with you? Trust me, I get it. I heard that particular lecture pretty often, for six straight years, I don’t need it from you. Don’t project your guilt onto me.

So I’m just going to sit here, watching the sun rise over this beautiful, natural phenomenon, and marvel at the fact that as much as I matter, nothing I could ever do would erase this view from the world. [click, static] [beeps]