The best fics are the ones that recognize that although Luke Skywalker may APPEAR on the outside to be a normal friendly twink who happens to have cool powers, especially when contrasted with such ship partners as Boba or Din or even Han, he is arguably the scariest person alive in the galaxy around the prequel era. AND, crucially, he is also a fundamentally weird guy. This man was homeschooled on a rural farm his entire life and then apprenticed to a swamp gremlin who showed him how to tap into the cosmic power of the universe. He blew up the death star age 19, killing approx 2 million-ish Imperials. He is a vortex of Force power that can communicate with the ghosts of dead Jedi. He’s staring into the distance and mumbling to himself and doing Yoda aphorisms and casually pulling out the “yeah I could crush that guy into a paste with my mind (:” and nobody around him knows what to do with that. I think he is a character who has very little frame of reference for how a Jedi or a person in general is supposed to act and there is some thing about him that is by necessity really fucking weird and a little scary but he’s so nice that it can throw you off the scent a little bit. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
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His Dark Materials is a franchise that tackles so many branches of physics and even creates a universe where the main course of study is experimental theology which is all about identifying and explaining dark matter while also adding dimensions to string theory, the multiverse theory, and the very concept of the human soul. At the same time, it aggressively calls out the problem with the state being controlled by the church, how people are condemned for being different and religious fearmongering stops the chance at growth both on an individual and a societal scale. It’s a franchise where the heroes of the story are two children who aren’t allowed to know the prophecy they’re a part of, who save the world unwittingly simply by doing what they believe to be right. Meanwhile, the person who thought he was the hero all along, the person who rallied an army from multiple universes to FIGHT. GOD. HIMSELF. is ultimately consumed by his own ego and forced to take a back seat when he realises he’s just one tiny piece of a much larger story that’s true heart is his own daugher. The child he abandoned, the child he didn’t know or care to know how to look after. It’s a franchise about finding love even when your biological family abandon you, it’s about looking evil in the eye and seeing your own mother, it’s about good and evil not being black and white but instead a complex and cruel mixture of both. It’s about the two worst people you know banding together at the last second to save their daughter with their final breaths. It’s about exploration and learning how to grow through experience, it’s about kindness being shared across the multiverse, exchanging stories with strangers and saving the whole world by doing something perfectly ordinary and receiving no reward.
Oh, and it’s also a franchise rich with fantasy, with giant talking polar bears, witches and ghosts, angels and daemons, and a mammal-like species from another world that travels exclusively on roller skates.
And it fucking. rocks.
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I'm thinking abt that pretty fall leaves embroidery pattern post and about how like... it is categorically a repost, it's a reupload. right? a thing that is generally disliked. but because it's credited, it's genuinely boosting the artist in question.
and it could ALWAYS be like this. reposting content could ALWAYS be a symbiotic relationship, but because sourcing back to the original creator of something is so uncommon, it's just easier to ask people not to repost it at all. and people still don't understand the difference. or they'll go to the effort of cropping out usernames/signatures to repost something, which is More Effort than literally crediting the creator of something you liked enough to want to repost.
Like. I literally don't actually care if my own shit gets reposted, you have to understand. I just don't want it STOLEN. But "do not repost" is easier to write on my art than "you can repost this, but don't alter the image/remove my signature, don't you dare write 'credit goes to the artist' because that is not credit, please link back to my original post or someplace that you can actually find me. please use an actual link/url instead of writing a non-clickable link of my username, because making it text instead of a clickable link cuts the number of people who will go to the effort of visiting my own page in Half."
All those aggregate themed accounts, those fuckin annoying as hell instagrams and facebook groups that are like "body positive art we love wamen 💕 hashtag feminism" and then MASS-STEAL plus sized art created by women, if pages like these that always go and steal my older self-portraits and other works... If they just put a link to my prints of those pieces in the text of those posts, or, fuck, my commission info page? I would literally be living on the moon right now. I would have a house on the moon
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I'm a big fan of having the Fentons opening up a portal to hell in their basement having some consequences that aren't just the ghosts coming through to mess with Amity Park.
Amity Park has to be drenched in ectoplasm by now. And mysterious ghostly substances can and should cause some side effects for both the town and its inhabitants.
Meaning: Danny is split half and half, both and neither, but he's not the only one toeing the line between ghost and human. he's just the most concentrated version of it.
Valarie and Jazz are first. The former has a full suit of ghost technology embedded into her body and the latter grew up in a house where safety protocols were enough of a joke that pure ectoplasm was stored in the fridge right next to dinner and it contaminated everything. Tucker and Sam are next: they were there when the Portal Incident happened and even though they weren't in the portal, they must have absorbed some of the backlash from it ripping a hole in space to the Infinite Realms, and they were further exposed from helping Danny fight ghosts.
everyone in the town is a little contaminated at the least. everyone is also a little more focused and obsessive than the average person. everyone's got a hobby or a craft or a couple causes that call to them. this goes unnoticed. Amity Park is just a passionate place, you know? Amity Park has some quirks– and the ghosts are 83 of them– but this is their town and they're not leaving for anything. It's the way of things, it's placing a live frog in cold water and slowly cranking the heat up to boiling. No one sees what they're becoming because the changes are so slow and they're affecting all of them. There's no outsider looking in alert people to how different their bodies, their priorities, their community are in comparison. It's a small town far enough away from anything important to be beneath notice. It's isolated enough that when change comes, no one recognizes it at their doorstep. It's small and unimportant enough that their neighboring towns, their state, and the rest of the nation call the ghosts attacking their town a hoax: a way to draw tourists in. (the claim to ghosts do not draw tourists in. the only "tourists" that go to Amity are the ones that have a wild spark in their eye and not much to lose. they end up staying more often than not.)
time + isolation = a new culture, or at least room for cultural shifts. The word "wish" is treated as taboo as the most vulgar curses. The parks bear an unusual amount of fruit (and who even planted those fruit trees? what even is this fruit?) are wild enough to count as small forests. Crows talk and old ladies think it charming. There's always live music going on somewhere, played by band kids and musicians that are... particularly strange. Some pets die and come back for dinner. The library has never before been hosting so many events, for groups of knitters, artists, hobby biologists, and college students showing off the powerpoints they made for fun. Every month a guy who really likes birds shows off his rescued parrots to starry-eyed kids. Seasonal decorations get... intense.
It's the way Amity Park is. The way it's always been, right?
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