#for the first class yo

[non-un-topo]

Time to shift into academic mode and close all my fun tabs ;_; (ao3, google docs, research I was trying to cram in so I could write a short fic before the semester.... rip)

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

K but the fact that Kristen is just a regular human being. Just a standard, average person in a land filled with mystical beings and magic spilling from every crack, nook and cranny.

And here's Kristen Applebees, the first born child of typical suburban parents, born into a religious neighborhood where everyone goes to church every Sunday and prays every night and everyone has a white picket fence with a perfect manicured lawn and not-so-subtly shuns those who are in anyway different from them.

Was Kristen not chosen by her God, by Helio himself, because of her perfect average parents with their perfect average house in their perfect average neighborhood?

Kristen wasn't rich, she didn't have a powerful bloodline, her parents weren't important, there was no prophecy foretelling her birth. No, Kristen was an attainable goal. Kristen was a good example for the youth, an example of what could be achieved if you just played along and played your part.

Kristen was destined to be the perfect picture of a devoted follower of Helio. She was the poster child, born smack dab in the center of Helio's flock, surrounded on all sides by followers and moulded into the perfect unquestioning chosen one since birth.

But by choosing Kristen, by marking her as property of a God, Helio gave Kristen power. Power over him, power over good and evil, the divine and infernal. Because Kristen is promised to Helio, because she was chosen by him and prophesied to be his, Kristen wields the power to start the end of days and crumble nations with a snap of her fingers. Should she want to, Kristen could destroy the world by simply not doing that, by not ending up in Helio's afterlife to live for eternity by his side, by proving a God wrong.

And it's with this power, this leverage that Kristen holds over Helio's neck like the sword of Damocles, that Kristen is able to free herself from his grasp. It's slow, at first. Joining a 'risky' school, meeting people outside of the religion, questioning elders, researching history and religions. And she doesn't understand how much power she has, not at first, because the power she possesses isn't magic, but a divine promise and unspoken rules that govern a world that she was never supposed to know.

But despite not having magic, despite being chosen for her averageness, despite being trained to be naive and blinded to the realities of the world, Kristen is overpowered as, if you'll excuse the pun, hell.

Helio creates divine religious scholars to protect her when she doubts and strays from him. Helio creates an entire new deity and religion for Kristen, allowing her to think that YES! (and, later, YES?) is it's own separate power from his and he does all of this, not out of generosity or love, but because he needs to keep Kristen alive. Kristen cannot die before she rejoins Helio's flock or the divine promise will break and Helio would be fucked.

So Helio gave her power under the pretense of it being from elsewhere, solely so that he could keep Kristen alive until he changed her mind.

And then! And then Kristen dies! And is revived. And she's Saint Kristen Applebees now (but the Saint of who?) and Helio has fully given up on her and turned his back on her (but his prophecy cannot be unspoken and he cannot be proven wrong so does he really? Can he really?) and Kristen finds a new God, a broken God and Kristen chooses her.

Kristen names her, creates her, Cassandra the Goddess of Doubt and Night, and Kristen finally has her religion, a source of power that doesn't stem from Helio, she's finally escaped his grasp.

And yet.

And yet, Helio still spoke his prophecy, still chose Kristen and she will always have that power over him.

And yet, in his own foolish shortsighted attempt to keep Kristen within his grasp, Helio still created a deity for her, a separate divine entity that chose her as well.

And yet, Kristen is still the undying, the follower of Night and Doubt, Saint Applebees, Creator of Cassandra.

With no real magic to speak of, with nothing special in her bloodline, with no real talents or money to her name, the perfect picture of normalcy in every way, Kristen has managed to twist the divine sphere around her little pinky finger. She has so much power and she has so little awareness of it.

And also she's going to be President, bitch.

[atopvisenyashill]

i think it’s deeply silly to call second born children “middle class” or people who know ~struggle~ and idk where that impulse is coming from bc i’ve seen this take a LOT lately (i think s2 of hotd is rotting everyone’s brains tbh). like “otto had to earn everything he’s gotten” are we somehow also making the argument that kevan lannister or bran stark are middle class and have to ~work for everything they got~ or can we acknowledge that just like every other noble in this series they were all handed immense privilege by their older brothers? like, bran is not ever going to worry about being homeless lol and neither would otto; hell, tywin fucking hates tyrion and is looking for an excuse to disinherit him and says as much to his face but tyrion never suffers for anything materially (until the trial) because regardless of his status as a disabled man, a younger brother, or the scapegoat for all his family’s problems, they’re not going to let him wallow in squalor!! otto, kevan, quentyn, bran, like 70% of the freys, oberyn, ned and benjen, daemon - these are all second born sons and they are not at all equivalent to someone in the modern day who is one medical crisis away from poverty! they are noble born and castles are fucking huge, even if they never married an heiress or their daughters never married heirs, they would NAWT have been homeless!

[hballegro]

alan alda storytime

the full story from one of the screenshots of my previous post.

story begins with my archaeology professor showing a slide of alan alda in the early 2000s holding some mammoth bones and asks the class if anyone recognizes him. i had watched some MASH with my mother when i was little and had also seen the movie The Object of My Affection, so i raised my hand and said it was alan alda. he lit up and said yes, it was, and told the rest of the class he used to be on this old show, and that when we got more into the bioanthro side of things, remind him to 'tell his alan alda story'.

about 2 months later, we are in bioanthro, and i remind him. he gets excited and says he included slides to talk about it.

[rest under cut]

he tells us how he had just moved to a new city, and he had taken a university job in order to get insurance for his new family [which he didnt get but thats neither here or there]. he gets news that his job is going to be working with Scientific American Frontiers, hosted by the one and only Alan Alda. my prof was thrilled, he loves MASH, and while he specifically wouldnt be involved in the process [being a presenter, working with alan, etc] he was allowed to be around incase they needed help.

i dont know the specific episode, or if it can be found anywhere, but the topic was early man and tools, and how there were mammoth bones that specifically had cuts that could only be made with tools, not by teeth from an animal. they had finished filming for the day and just needed B-roll of some lions at the local zoo chewing some bones [part of the experiment], and alan got a call. he asked if he could head out now, because he needed to get back to his hotel now, and the call had been important. the producers said sure, go ahead, and alan asked if someone could give him a ride.

my professor, having the chance to actually spend time with someone he idolized, and being a stupid late 20s-something, volunteered immediately. stupid why? well, i said he'd just moved there. he didnt know where the hell anything was, and he didnt have GPS available to him, he was just really excited. so they get in the car and start driving.

as i said in my previous post, alan alda had about 20 minutes with this random guy, and found out pretty quickly that he was an archaeologist, and the amazing topic of conversation that he picked was the [then new] theory that we developed agriculture specifically to make booze, and that the rest of the stuff was more or less a biproduct. which is pretty on-brand honestly.

after a while, alan catches on to the fact that this guy clearly has no idea where the hell hes going, and that they've been driving in circles around the city for a while now. he [reportedly very politely] said that actually, this here was his stop, and thanked him for the ride. he then most likely called a taxi that actually knew where it was going, and got to his hotel.

turns out the call was about The Aviator! the call was important because he learned it was confirmed he in it and they needed him to get over there.

its not a glamourous story, but its the only story i got. my prof reported he was a funny guy, and despite slightly kidnapping the poor man for a while, he was the picture of kindness and personability. and clearly he likes telling the story and it left an impression, because he took time out of our already-short lecture to tell a class of 20-somethings that had no idea who Alan Alda was about it.

sorry this is so verbose i dont know how to be short lmao

[nashvillethotchicken]

People will ask "why did lestat buy the Fairplay for louis? Does show!Louis not have his own money" as if 1: either Tom Anderson or the other one would sell it to him outright (they literally gave him horrific terms for a business deal in ep 1 because they wanted to take him down a peg) or 2: Lestat doesnt explicitly love spending money on Louis and what he wants

[bardicious]

I'm literally SCREAMING, CHARLES WAS EXPERIMENTED ON BY MISTER SINISTER IN THE COMICS???? You know I'm putting that in my personal canon for the movies.

[venomgender]

kang jinhyuk is such an admirable protagonist hes like the perfect mixture of Knows hes strong and overpower so hes full of himself and also Cares about the people around him despite that

[aesculapiansnake]

the amount of times people have asked if my tattoos are harry potter themed in the past few weeks is crazy. an owl and snake on my left and right upper arms respectively. i get where they’re coming from to an extent………but my brothers and sisters in christ they’re from??? the animals??? from the outside???? from nature???

[oh-meow-swirls]

this is amusing to me.

[saturnisfallingdown]

not rlly related! but the morning that queen elizabeth died this girl in my third period told everyone "my uncle works at buckingham palace and he said the queen died, they're announcing it in a few hours". and then they did!

HELLO... im insanely taken by the my uncle works at nintendo of this all.... like id have to imagine if you work in the palace you'd have to sign some deadly stack of ndas. but the niece comes first.... thats family right there

[abstract-hellbender]

itsy bitsy iper post 🤪🤪 happy pride month folks

[poughkeepsies]

looked at some med school stuff for the first time despite the fact that I've planned on going to med school for at least 5 years and like. lowkey. that doesn't look too bad 👀 maybe I should be careful, icarus, but I really feel like I expected it to look way worse

[roosterbox]

I’m almost positive I’ve said these exact words before, but I’m feeling them again

Man, writing Cherik feels like coming home.

One of my Inception Bingo fics is an XMCU Crossover, and working on it has me a bit mushy. It’s First Class-era Cherik too - even better. Right in my feels.

[blackberryjambaby]

i'd like to say i'm not oblivious to things around me but in high school a guy had 11 fingers & i didn't notice until i'd known him for TWO YEARS

[sainz]

the serotonin boost that gives me to see my old (and first ever) class playing together in the playground for the primary students and even more when they come running to give me hugs and kisses 🥹😭🥹😭

[samsspambox]

HIHI! Small thing to note, I’ve noticed you using the word segway in your recent fic and recent analysis, sorry for being picky and I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s a common mistake and I wanna spread the knowledge that it’s actually written as segue, despite how it’s said out loud

lmaoooo nonnie i misspell so many things 💀😂

it's not rude honestly, i just genuinely have shit spelling and if it weren't for autocorrect or gramarly i wouldn't be able to spell half of the words i write

*shoved face in hands* english is hard bro. and i speak it. why's that word gotta look like a french word lmaooo

thanks for the info, nonnie!