#defy me aesthetic

[thegirlivealwaysbeen]

DEFY ME by Tahereh Mafi

[starrynightsxo]

my side blog: @bookgirlfanatic <3

cr: The Brother's Hawthorne

Books I've read this year 2024 (so far, in order):

Powerless by Lauren Roberts

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

Letters to the Lost by Brigid Kemmerer

Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes (reread)

Truth or Dare by Sophie McKenzie

Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J Maas

A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J Maas

How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories by Holly Black (reread)

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Destroy Me by Tahereh Mafi

Unravel Me by Tahereh Mafi

Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi

Fracture Me by Tahereh Mafi

Restore Me by Tahereh Mafi

Shadow Me by Tahereh Mafi

Defy Me by Tahereh Mafi

Reveal Me by Tahereh Mafi

Imagine Me by Tahereh Mafi

Believe Me by Tahereh Mafi

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Hawthorne Legacy by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Final Gambit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

My goal is at least 30 books this year and I'm pretty happy with where I am right now so please wish me luck. Happy Reading everyone!

Icebreaker by Hannah Grace

Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross

A picrew of me <3

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[autumnmobile12]

Defying the Volstead Act: Illicit Affairs

“We came to America for a better life and what did we find?  Enforced sobriety.” ~ Trevor Belmont

Castlevania Prohibition AU

I’m having way too much fun with this one.  Alucard is too powerful, Sypha is adorable, and Trevor’s just done.  Definitely gonna be drawing more characters in this au, stay tuned!

[yourfavscarynight]

Step on me, Warner.

[moondustpugh]

who's afraid of little old me? well, you should be.

[rileylou99]

For some reason my hair decided it wanted to act like princess bangs

[ma-aera]

<self hate>

It's like I'm drowning and gasping for air, even when I know how to swim.

[abandonedthoughtss]

Defy the night by brigid kemmerer

Ignite me by tahereh mafi

_________

Someone said best bookboyfriend and these two answered 😩

[gcdwinged]

tag dump

#* ic    /    all things must die.

#* aesthetic    /    defy the force that drags them all to heel.

#* musings    /    whispers from mother.

#* character study    /    beneath the legend is a longing.

#* visage    /    alone as a god.

#* dyn. sephiroth & aerith    /    we cast darker shadows with stronger light.

#* dyn. sephiroth & cloud    /    what you are without me? what am i without you?

#* verse: final fantasy vii    /    ruination to all.

#* verse: crisis core    /    the one who remains shall become a hero.

.#* verse: kingdom hearts    /    in the heart of darkness.

#* verse: remake    /    the sun rising on a rebirth.

#* verse: advent children / i send the pestilence and plague.

[thereviewverdict]

Some scenes from Defy Me by Tahereh Mafi (if you haven't read the book then skip to avoid spoilers)

[waffled0g]

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback...

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

Specifically, the look is Memphis Milano, self-named by the Italian design house Memphis Group. Starting in the early to mid 80s, they made all sorts of furniture, fabrics and sculptures that were like a Piet Mondrian grid painting under heavy radiation. Their whole deal was defying the standards of existing industrial design up to that point on purpose. Chairs had weird arches, bookcases would be in strange alien colors, unusual materials like plastic or elastic were used in place of metal or wood, that sorta thing.

Memphis quickly became the signature look for the decade. You can tell something’s influenced by Memphis design from it’s telltale trademarks:

Clashing, neon colors.

Use of diametric shapes.

Contrasting patterns like zebra print stripes, confetti squiggles and checkerboards.

It wasn’t long before Memphis Milano-inspired design was everywhere in 80s pop culture:

It was a special time, yes.

I was a kindergartener at the tail end of the 80s, so I knew Memphis mostly through the lens of kids media. Toys, clothes, games, tv shows used it like candy colored catnip. Cable channel Nickelodeon more or less adopted the Memphis aesthetic as their signature in-house style and practically built a monument to it at a Florida theme park:

I think this is why folks mistake what decade Memphis is representative of - 90s staples like Nick, Saved By The Bell, Fresh Prince - they all stayed around much longer than the design trend’s expiration date. 

Couple that notion with the fact that companies are slow followers to design trends. Something gets popular and they want to get on the bandwagon? Gotta wait for the ink to dry, gotta wait for the production molds to be made. It would take a few years for them to completely work Memphis outta their system.

Now, this is not to say Memphis is bad! Personally I’m a fan of the aesthetic, if my neon-drenched artwork wasn’t a tip-off already. But it is a trend, and trends never last forever.

So what took the Memphis Milano look down for good? This part’s up for debate, but I personally think it had something to do with this dude:

It’s that grunge music from Seattle that’s so popular with the kids these days dontchaknow.

Once Smells Like Teen Spirit hit in 1991, the Nirvana tone drove the rest of the decade. Clean geometry became weathered, grainy and organic. Bright neon pastels became more bold. Bubblegum pop music sounded fake and manufactured. Attitude and apathy was authentic. Whatever.

Things got grungy. Things got grimy. Olestra was invented.

I think the best way to visualize this transition is how Cherry Coke entered the decade and how it left it:

1992 Memphis on the left, 1998 grunge junkie on the right. Fitting that the 90s would end with a design that looked like Darth Maul’s lungs.

Okay, so what should 90s retro design look like?

Continue on to PART TWO! Spoilers: No VHS filters or vaporwave needed, but maybe bring an antacid.

[kismetconstellations]

Troy Bolton & Fawn Lynn

[thecw-unicorn]

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

“𝙇𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙙𝙖𝙧𝙠, 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙧 𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙖 𝙗𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙩𝙬𝙤.”

𝙿𝚛𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚝: 𝙲𝚑𝚘𝚒𝚌𝚎

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

✮♱✮ art by @isis_villalobos_art

✮♱✮ commissioned by me

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

I have returned to bestow more beauty on this wondrous celebration of @elriel-month . This lovely piece of art was absolutely perfected by the amazing, sweet, and talented @isis_villalobos_art! The choice prompt is so romantic and perfect for Elriel, I couldn’t resist contributing! For this one, I wanted to show the longing both Elain and Azriel have for each other and the length their willing to go for the other—whether it’s defying fate or the cauldron, we’ve seen how they will stop at nothing to be with each other—their true loves. I also couldn’t help but add more of their glorious light and dark aesthetic! I hope yall enjoy and have been having a wonderful Elriel Month!

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

✮♱✮ quote is from A Court of Wings & Ruin by @sarahjmaas

✮♱✮ characters are Elain Archeron & Azriel.

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

✮♱✮ likes, saves, and shares are always appreciated!

✮♱✮ no reposts allowed.

༉‧₊˚🕯️🖤❀༉‧₊˚.

[autumnmobile12]

Defying the Volstead Act: We Play What We Play

The forge master duo and Lenore playing for the speakeasy.

Castlevania Prohibition AU

The trombone is a left-handed trombone.  I definitely did not draw it backwards.  Not at all.  Don't worry about it.

[vexingwoman]

genuine question regarding the "women are female people" post. trying to understand the radfem mindset because I don't agree with y'all on most things, but I understand your need to find safety and acceptance within the patriarchy's oppression/danger. I am female but not a woman. I was never socialized as one either. I feel like biological socialization piece goes out the window in my case. Biologically yes, I am female, but socially no one, including myself, would ever view me as a woman or place me through the same social oppression that women face, nor will I experience or have experienced any of the good parts of womanhood. I feel no desire to, because despite sharing the same biology, we are not socially the same. I feel like, in this experience, theres a stark divide between the social category of "women" and biological category of "female." What is your take on this, I'm curious?

The crucial issue here is that you’re conflating women and femininity. You say there’s a difference between women and females, when you instead mean there’s a difference between feminine women and non-feminine women. You believe women are socially constructed, when you instead mean femininity is socially constructed.

The only way you could think that your non-conformance to femininity indicated that you were not a woman, is if you believed femininity was innate and inseparable from women. This is not only an unabashed display of bioessentialism, but a reinforcement of the same sex-based roles and sexist stereotypes that gender ideologues purport to be defying. 

In case you don’t know, the concepts of femininity and masculinity were created solely to enforce female subjugation and male domination (elaboration here). Therefore, nothing is more misogynistic or in direct contradiction to the radical feminist goal of gender abolition than claiming women are defined by the very social construct created to subjugate them, rather than by their biological sex.  

I’ll be honest, I feel increasingly irritated and hopeless every time I receive these messages of “I’m not a woman because I don’t conform to society’s sexist, outdated idea of what women are.” How can you not see how backwards it is to believe your conformity to a demographic’s harmful stereotypes is what determines whether you belong to that demographic? In what other circumstances is this ever the case?

This is a genuine question: why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that you’re a gender-non-conforming woman? Why must you go through all these mental cartwheels and act as though being a woman is contingent on how others view you, or how you socially conduct yourself, or what degree of oppression you face? What benefit do you see in defining women by the social construct of femininity (hierarchical, prescriptive, arbitrary) rather than defining them as female (non-hierarchical, descriptive, concrete)? 

Much of my frustration stems from the knowledge that radical feminists and gender ideologues actually hold similar views on the concepts of women and men, until they diverge at one crucial, irreconcilable point: 

Both radical feminists and gender ideologues acknowledge the existence of regressive stereotypes attributed to the sexes. But where radical feminists seek to remove the stereotypes from the sex, gender ideologues instead, quite stupidly, seek to remove the sex from the stereotypes.

In short, I still consider you a woman completely deserving of access to women’s spaces, because being a woman does not, and should not, have any other prerequisites other than being an adult, a human, and a female. There are not, and should not be, any behaviors, aesthetics, feelings, or non-biological characteristics that determine whether you’re a woman. There are no gendered brains; there are no gendered souls. Being a woman is an innate, neutral, and non-prescriptive reality, no different than having freckles or brown eyes or hooked noses.