#but also a double edged sword

[padfootastic]

Out of universe: Lily’s letter is in Sirius’s room so that Harry can read it with no thought behind why it was in a room Sirius hadn’t set foot in since he was 16, way before Lily would’ve written the letter

In universe: Sirius kept that letter in Azkaban and brought it with him when he escaped and somehow never lost it, his personal belongings were sent to his family after his arrest and they never got rid of them even though they never thought they’d see Sirius again, his family or an Order member went and gathered up all of Sirius’s stuff from wherever the belongings of dangerous criminals are kept (and if it’s the Order that did it, they got it after he escaped Azkaban, so I guess the Ministry or whoever keeps convicted criminal’s stuff over a decade after they’re arrested), Sirius himself went and got the letter even though he was a wanted felon, and presumably some other reasons as well.

oooh i entirely forgot that harry found it much later 💀 it’s v likely sirius could’ve gotten that letter (and his other belongings) from somewhere and kept it in GP himself. i still like the thought of him carrying it w himself always tho hehe just bc it’s utterly heartbreaking.

[taylortruther]

taylor truly madly deeply hates to be misunderstood

[untouchedsoap]

there is something sooo fucking good about early seasons ian and mickey, about watching this summer fling turn into something more, the fear that elicited from mickey but him being unable to stop, finding those little moments hidden away and taking all this meaning from small gestures and persevering in dugouts and under bleachers and barely pressed confessions in the back of a church that is soo good for my brain

like i am very glad mickey gets to shout his love for ian from the mountain tops and also beat his love for ian into his dad's face but when he was clenching his teeth shut and his love for ian was coming out regardless ohhhhh baby i was eating

[dimonds456]

It is not okay to speculate whether or not someone is suicidal. If they claim to be, you should 100% take that shit seriously and give them the benefit of the doubt.

That said, if someone is using their own suicidality as a weapon to gain sympathy, emotionally manipulate someone, or to push other people down, GENUINELY fuck that person. While it's not okay for us to doubt that statement just because they're weaponizing it, that also doesn't mean we need to ALLOW that manipulation to convince us of something.

If you feel the need to use your terrible mental health as a step-stool in a conversation to make your side more heard than the other, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate yourself. And I am saying this as someone who ALSO has shit mental health and has been in the trenches with it before. I get it. I understand. But also STOP.

It's tempting to want to save your own ass over recognizing where you've gone wrong, but just a word of advise: recognizing where you've gone wrong WILL save your ass and give you better mental health and wisdom down the line.

However, emotionally manipulating people absolutely will not.

[cto10121]

how is jk rowling closer to dickens than donna tartt?

Rowling, like Dickens, is supremely devoted to social realism, which includes comedy, satire, and commentary. So naturally she also uses his techniques (significant character names, child POV with adult sensibility, etc.) and sometimes even tropes (abused orphan boy, mean relatives, relative and abject poverty, snobbery and classism, etc.). This is most glaringly apparent in the Strike series, to the point where they are more like sociological tomes than mysteries, but Harry Potter also fits the Dickensian mode very comfortably.

The difference is that Dickens was not really a mystery writer, whereas Rowling is, at least in plot. Also, Dickens had a much more visceral experience with poverty and institutional injustice than Rowling; there is a lack of that both-sides centrism in Dickens. He was also more influenced by Shakespearean psychology and tropes than Rowling. Rowling, however, was much more aware of white supremacy than Dickens could ever be—her understanding of class struggle includes colorism (Voldemort and some of the Death Eaters especially are aristocratically coded to the extreme - all those Anglo-Norman names! Revealingly, none of them are POC).

As for Donna Tartt, from the two (very popular) books I’ve read by her, she only uses Dickensian tropes for quasi-mythic and romantic journeys; they are largely empty of their political and social commentary, almost serving as mere literary allusions. Above all, she seems mostly concerned with the power of art, literary or otherwise.

[skunkes]

I do wish id known about (? Idk when it started) and participated in artfight before my life became Needing to Do Comms So I Can Save and Not Feel Like a (Completely) Worthless Freeloader, post graduation

[zeb-z]

most islanders think Foolish is entirely pro Federation, either because he wants the power they give him or because he doesn’t truly understand what he’s doing or what’s at stake, and is just having fun. even to Cucurucho, he’s a bit of a fool - an overambitious one sure, but a fool nonetheless - who’s irritating and asks too many questions, not quite in a concerning way, but in the way a kid might bother you asking for more ice cream. a newbie on the job who wants the world and is trying to find his place in all of this - any digging for information surely isn’t malicious, because he’s obvious and ignorant about it!

it’s always so exciting when they talk about him, when they say such things to his face - it means it’s working. he tells Cellbit that he’s genuinely infiltrating and he’s not believed. Bad straight up says Foolish’s plans to a Federation worker, and if anything it does more to legitimize him further in the eyes of the Federation.

because he’s silly, and overeager, he can play dumb and his true intentions fly right over everyone’s heads. they only see him for whatever singular facet of his personality that he chooses to present, and it works so well because he can be all those things, he just overplays it to his benefit. Bad is one of the very few who can see his tricks for what they are, who doesn’t underestimate him - because hes right, Foolish does have this way of slipping past peoples defenses to get the info he wants without them even knowing they needed defenses in the first place.

idk this latest stream was just full of these little moments. acting silly when Etoiles asked him why he’s working for the Feds, and grinning when Etoiles says he’s basically a clapping monkey who doesn’t know what he’s doing, calling him naïve. asking Cucurucho a million questions and overwhelming him, acting suspicious and curious around the black concrete nonsense - allowing him to easily get away with presenting exaggerated, biased, and some even fabricated, evidence for his investigation, controlling the narrative entirely, because that part of the convo was made insignificant. (and through those questions, possibly even getting more bonuses for his office and fellow workers - he’s gotten the break room so far, and coffee machines, and another level for investigations, which has swayed workplace opinion towards him heavily.)

then with the AI, Cucuruchito, engaging in banter, then sharing a secret, which seems like a big deal - but everything he told the AI is just what he himself was told by Cucurucho, it was no secret to the Feds at all. then flirting with it for a long time before leaving - which is a tactic he outright explained to chat. to get what you want, information, loyalty, etc, you have to build a good repoire. if it takes flirting, and charm, if it takes a date or two, he’s more than willing to play the part to get what he wants. he’ll pretend to eat up their bullshit about him being special, and let them think he’s charmed instead of the opposite.

Foolish is good at what he does because he catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, and the flies never realize their caught - he’s patient enough to play the long con. and really, could someone as naïve, as foolish as him, be able to do such a thing?

he isn’t taken seriously. and it won’t be their final mistake, but it will certainly be the one that damns them.

[august-anon]

i’m so glad you’re on a dc kick because so am i

oh dude the dc kick is SO intense, batman and the batfam esp has me in an absolute chokehold lol

I'm devouring fanfic like I need to to breathe, have almost worked my way through the entirety of Batman The Animated Series from the 90s (and am debating which cartoon to dive into next), started reading Batman: Wayne Family Adventures webtoon, and intend to start on comics soon once i can make sense of some of these comic reading guides (i am a Linear and Continuity girlie, comics are REALLY not built for my breed, but by god i will read them even if it kills me dkjfhdfh)

i am so glad to share this dc kick i am in with others lol, i have put SO much dc stuff into my queue and it still takes up over half my untagged/unscheduled drafts, and i am STILL sitting here frothing at the mouth like "i need more batman and/or batfam content immediately" djkfhdkjfh

[fatalism-and-villainy]

While talking to @menciemeer, something came up re: Jack’s motivations for being in Italy in season 3 that I haven’t seen discussed much - and that is that he’s explicitly there not to catch Hannibal, but to save Will. Here’s his dialogue with Pazzi in Secondo:

Jack: If he hasn’t already, Il Mostro will return to Florence. Pazzi: Come back with me. We have a chance to regain our reputations and enjoy the honours of our trade by capturing the monster. Jack: I’m not here for the monster. Not my house, not my fire. I’m here for Will Graham.

This is even more striking in light of the context for his character that the very next episode gives us - his conversation with Chilton in Aperitivo establishes that he’s been forced into retirement with the FBI, but he’s not interested in regaining his standing or reputation. (Very odd in light of the fact that come the Red Dragon plot, he seems to still have his old job in Behavioral Science). Chilton tries to get him to use Will as bait to find Hannibal:

Chilton: Will is going to lead you right to him. Jack: Oh, no, he’s not. Not to me. I’ve let them both go. I’ve let it all go. Chilton: You dangle Will Graham and now you cut bait? You’re letting Hannibal have him hook, line, and sinker. Jack: You’ll excuse me, Dr. Chilton. I like to be home in the evenings when my wife wakes.

What stands out about this exchange is Chilton’s “letting Hannibal have him” phrasing. It foregrounds not subduing Hannibal, but preventing Will from succumbing to his worst impulses, as a central motivation for Jack in 3A. It’s also significant that it’s his need to care for Bella that leads him to defer pursuing anything relating to Hannibal or Will, because her death is framed within the episode as the impetus for his investment in following Will to Europe - as he tells Will in the funeral scene, “you don’t have to die on me, too.”

So much of Jack’s character arc in the first two seasons is juggling his repeated sacrifice of others for the greater good. His guilt over what befalls both Will and Miriam features prominently in season 2, and during Will’s trial, he’s already prepared to put his career and reputation on the line to stand up for Will and atone for what he feels is his role in Will’s downfall. Both the traumatic events of Mizumono and Bella’s death bring about more of a full turnaround in that direction - Jack becomes less invested in apprehending killers in service of public safety, and more invested in saving the specific person who’s been harmed by that project.

I think this motivation doesn’t always stick in people’s minds because these exchanges get eclipsed by Jack beating Hannibal to a bloody pulp a couple episodes later, as well as his inexplicable return to working for the FBI in 3B. But even in the former altercation, his fight with Hannibal feels personal, more about venting anger and grief than actually apprehending Hannibal. In Dolce, when Will asks why Jack didn’t kill Hannibal, Jack responds “maybe I need you to” (in the same exchange, of course, as “you need to cut that part out”). That scene also establishes clearly that Will and Jack are, like Pazzi, “outside the law and alone.” As in Mizumono, they’re effectively vigilantes - and Jack’s mission is not serving justice for the FBI, but in saving Will from Hannibal’s influence.

This is why, despite the fact that Jack is once again embroiled in FBI business in season 3B, I always envision his role post-canon as being a continuation of what haunts him in the first half of the season - less about catching or killing Hannibal than about rescuing Will. It’s a lot more compelling to me, at least, than him simply continuing to be the face of law enforcement.

[gothamsfinestdummy]

Here’s a random awkward Romy I drew up in my evil science lab

[necratmancy]

What I’ve learned from being intersex is that no matter what I do, I cannot fit in anywhere good enough for the liking of peers.

I was never feminine enough. I am now not masculine enough. Couldn’t be taken seriously when I presented femininely, and now I’m not taken seriously when I realized how much I wanted to present masculinely.

LGBTQA+ spaces have also not been safe, trans spaces weren’t either. And I wasn’t even truly safe with partners, referring to me as a woman when I never was one.

[doubletrucks]

it is so cool and definitely not insanity inducing at all how no matter how i personally feel about my own gender or how hard i try to present myself a certain way everyone including other queer people are going to make assumptions abt me and my identity that are pretty much completely untrue based on the way my body looks 👍👍👍 something i did not ask for at all 👍👍👍

[cave-monkey]

Six Ears, and being left.

[good-to-drive]

I know Yoko tends to siphon off most of the active hate but tbh it kind of pisses me off how people talk about Cyn too, like there's this weird phenomena where in order to be sufficiently horrible to Yoko people have to be pretty misogynistic to Cynthia as well. By which I mean that if Yoko is a conniving whore spinning webs around John it pushes Cynthia into the virgin/mother role where she is so sexually vacant and incapable of guile that she's essentially a child or a paper doll. Really it's like she's a background character to the drama/tragedy we like to project onto John and Yoko and like most female characters in the Beatles story that portrayal has been straight up dehumanizing.

[emotinalsupportturtle]

David Tennant, Good Omens, Michael Sheen and Doctor Who trending on rotation these days is not helping my mental health

[featherbreak]

Camilla Hect's sworddaggerknives: an exhaustingly comprehensive weapons inventory

(alternate title: "In Which Tamsyn Muir Tries to Kill Cosplayers with Imaginary Weapons", or "How to Consult a Swordfighter for the Fight Scenes but Not Give Nearly As Much of a Fuck About the Implements Used")

Written in hopes that this will either spare other Cam cosplayers some misery, or bring them to the commiseration station --

Gideon The Ninth - Canaan House Cam: In Which We Meet the Weapons Nerd of the Sixth

When we first encounter Camilla Hect, she's using a somewhat traditional sword + offhand combo against Gideon:

Gideon The Ninth, chapter 12, bold emphasis mine, italics canon -

She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced. Gideon, neurons blaring, drew her own. She slid her hand into her ebon gauntlet—the grey-cloaked girl let the flashlight fall, drew a knife with a liquid whisper from a holder across one shoulder—and their blades met high above their heads as the cavalier leapt, metal on metal ringing all around the chamber. ... Blow after lightning blow rattled her defences, each one coming down like an industrial crush press, the short offhand knife targeting the guard of Gideon’s blade. ... her opponent dropped as though shot, crouched, kicked her dagger up into her hand, and did a handspring backward down the stairs.

Anime physics aside, we have also immediately established Tamsyn Muir's love of using "dagger" and "knife" interchangeably. The sword is described as a rapier a paragraph later, at least:

Gideon was stronger; the girl’s arm was buckling—she brought up her rapier to harass Gideon’s blocking arm ...

We get a closer look at it in the duel against the Second:

Gideon The Ninth, chapter 23, emphasis mine -

The rapier looked, like Gideon’s, maybe a million years old. It was the first time she had seen it in a good light, and here it looked as though it had never been designed to take an edge blow; the blade was light and delicate as a cobweb. The offhand looked like Camilla’s whole House had gone searching down the back of the sofa for weapons. They had come up with what looked more like a long hunting or hacking knife than a duelling dagger: thick, meaty, cross-guarded, with a single sharpened edge. The whole effect was sadly amateurish.

We quickly learn that she can still deliver a drubbing with this combo. However, it is not clear whether her offhand in this duel is the same knife as the one she fought Gideon with - which is described as a "short offhand knife" compared to the "long" knife against Marta - and we can call that into question more confidently once we learn that Cam is PACKING LOTS OF STEEL:

Gideon The Ninth, chapter 27, emphasis mine -

There was no question about whether or not Camilla inhabited the horrible cot attached to the end, cavalier-style. It sagged beneath assorted weapons and tins of metal polish.

Gideon, being a weapons nerd herself, calls Cam on her setup bluff partly by elaborating on Cam's pile o' pointies:

“So, hey. What do you really use when you’re not pretending the rapier’s your main wield? Two short blades of equal length, or one blade and one baton?” Her keen eyes narrowed into black-lined slits. “How did I mess up?” she asked, eventually. “You drew your rapier and your dagger at the same time. And you’re ambidextrous. You keep cutting like both your blades are curved. Also, there’s six swords and a nightstick on your bed.” “Should’ve tidied my mess,” admitted Camilla. “Two blades. Double-edged.”

Gideon refers to Cam's offhand in the duel with the Second as a dagger here, too, despite having previously observed that it looked more like a knife. She also refers to all the blades on Cam's bed as "swords", but it's clearly a mix of blade types. Gideon is only as consistent or reliable a narrator as Tamsyn is; her terminology is equally laissez-faire.

Cam, meanwhile, is not more specific when she describes her main wields: they're just "blades." We finally meet them when shit hits the fan later on, but they are confounding:

Gideon The Ninth, chapter 32, emphasis mine -

With only the faintest liquid whisper of metal on sheath, Camilla drew her swords. Gideon had never had the opportunity to study Camilla’s two short swords before: they were more like very long daggers, slightly curved at each end, wholly utilitarian.

So Gideon's observation that Cam cuts as if the blades are curved seems to hold water, but Cam specifically only identifies her blades as double-edged - which is much less common on curved blades longer than a few inches. In the same breath, they're implied to be shorter than short swords, but remarkable enough to call "very long" for daggers, which also means they're longer than the "knife" length in which having double edges is relatively common without making tradeoffs in durability/blade structure.

(This is where my brain broke.)

To add insult to injury, for the rest of the chapter, Tamsyn calls them knives:

Gideon The Ninth, chapter 36, emphasis mine -

She crashed into her from the side, her two knives flashing like signal lamps in the sunlit hall. ... Camilla Hect off the leash was like light moving across water. She punched her knives into the Lyctor’s guard over and over and over.

Well, mostly. That would be too easy. Here's the lone exception:

Camilla slumped next to her, swords crossed over her knees.

SWORDS AGAIN?

We also see Cam with a single knife. It's unclear if it's one of her main dual wields or another one she had stashed:

Camilla, as she’d seen from above, had caught up with Cytherea the First. She had one hand in the Lyctor’s singed curls, dragging her head back. The other hand pressed a knife against the smaller woman’s throat.

Whatever it is also is well-balanced enough to throw -

Her good arm was up behind her head, holding the blade of her knife. Gideon ducked. The knife whistled over the top of Gideon’s head in a flashing blur and buried itself in Cytherea’s upper back.

- which usually implies something shorter and less medieval dagger-y. Different knife? or more Anime Physics? We don't know.

In conclusion: Canaan House establishes Cam as Very Hot and Good At Pointy Objects. Who the fuck knows what they are, though.

---

Harrow the Ninth - Random Planet Encounter Cam: Still Kickin'

At this point, Cam has been chugging along under the tender mercies of BoE, hauling her pulverised necro around, and comes face to face with a delightfully lobotomized Harrow. She's still dual wielding, although whether they're her Canaan House blades is doubtful, and they're described as knives all the way through:

Harrow The Ninth, chapter 32, emphasis mine -

... you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash. ... Camilla Hect sheathed her knives with as much speed and fury as she had unsheathed them, and she said: “No sudden moves.”

Still a badass, obviously. And "big" knives seems to imply they're still of a long-dagger/short-short-sword length as Gideon described. "Butt" instead of "hilt" or similar terminology seems to imply they're more pedestrian than daggers. What the hell does Harrow mean by calling them "balanced", though?

Who the fuck knows. That's all we get. Onward to:

---

Nona the Ninth - New Rho Cam: More Badass & More Bonkers Than Ever

Cam is living her best worst best-given-the-circumstances guerrilla fighter rebel operative life. This means she's just...armed to the teeth all the goddamn time, and it's knives all the way down:

Nona The Ninth, chapter 2 -

... Camilla looked the person deep in their eyes and casually touched the hilt of the knife she kept down the waistband of her trousers, and then the person moved to the back of the queue.

Nona The Ninth, chapter 9 -

Camilla had been crouched down, wiping her knives on one of their jackets. ... Then she had equally normally set to putting her knives away – sticking them in the bands down her thighs, inside her trousers –

Nona The Ninth, chapter 12 -

Almost all of the knives Camilla had strapped to her got taken away, but not the very hidden knife, or at least the one hidden knife Nona knew about. There were probably more.

This could be because they're actually knives, or because Nona's vocabulary only goes so far, and her narration - backed by Tamsyn's established lackadaisical approach to pointy objects - is too simple for disambiguation.

To hint at this: when upon prepping for the final mission(s) of the book, Cam empties out the hidden armory, and Nona goes so far as to compare two of her blades to kitchen or filleting knives:

Nona The Ninth, chapter 22, emphasis mine -

Pash said, “Your people... that obsession with swords.” “We are our swords,” said Camilla. She shrugged on a criss-cross halter of black plastic straps and clipped it tight across the front of her chest, and then she opened a box and took out two long, plain knives, the type of thing they used to chop up fish at the market. All of Cam’s secret knife stash, Nona thought, numb with anticipation.

Cam seems to only say "swords" to mirror Pash philosophically, not to describe her weapons, but it's worth noting.

A detail that is mentioned once and then never brought up again, though, is that she's carrying at least four blades into the fight. Earlier in that chapter:

Camilla flipped open boxes and took out a belt, which she tied around her waist, and she secured a hook to the side of the belt. To this hook she reverently attached a long plain black scabbard, then a shorter plain black scabbard, and she tested the hilts in her hands.

So: two unseen blades of possibly different lengths - described only by the hilts, but stored in scabbards of two different lengths - in addition to "two long, plain knives" that are presumably stashed in the shoulder? back? chest? "criss-cross halter" holster situation. Or something.

Say it with me: WHO THE ACTUAL FUCK KNOWS.

Nona The Ninth, chapter 23, emphasis mine -

Just for shits and giggles, Tamsyn throws in the only use of "daggers" to describe Cam's weapons in the whole goddamn book right before the final duel with Ianthe:

The two uniformed soldier zombies knelt Camilla, roughly. They squeezed her wrists until, with an agonised hiss of breath, she dropped her daggers. They clattered softly on the carpet.

Her main dual wields of choice, this time, seem to be single-edged, likely the "fish knife" pair:

She mopped a little at her chest... she was bleeding freely and messily... and she picked up, from where they had fallen, her two long, plain, one-sided knives.

Even Ianthe agrees that they're knives:

“I didn’t mean to take anything to this planet I couldn’t replace,” said the Prince. “I shouldn’t have bothered. Why two knives?” “Shock and awe,” said Camilla.

And then Paul happens and my heart broke forever that brings us to the end of Camilla Hect As We Knew Her x Bladed Weapons OTP For Life is too short and love is too long.

So what's our takeaway on accurately portraying Camilla Hect, you might ask?

tl;dr: use whatever the fuck you want. go loud, Cams.

do not be like me and spend a cumulative 15-20 hours spread out over three weeks debating how to accurately portray her weapon shape because fanart seems to mostly depict her with daggers.

---

as for me? I've finally gone with utilitarian but elegant hunting daggers (long, cross-guarded, single-edged, curved at the end) for Canaan House Cam and a scrappy pair of Bowie knives for New Rho Cam, after polling a bunch of Cam fans; votes were overwhelmingly in favor of curved blades being more important than double edges. THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.

with the utmost thanks and apologies to the patient & best beloved folks in the Library for responding to my Cam poll, and for emphasizing & reassuring me that cosplaying On Vibes is kosher and encouraged in this fandom