#irony is so beautiful

[thekidsfromyestergay]

Do non-uk people know that there's currently a new arena trying to open (meant to be the biggest in the country) who's manager talked shit on small venues and called them poorly run and refused to help with grassroots funding (after which he quit) and have now had to delay their opening by around a month, cut thousands of tickets for their preview night with only a few hours warning, stated that it may not be open for another year, and cancelled concerts minutes before they were meant to start when people were already inside because pieces of the ventilation system literally fell from the ceiling. Oh and of course they're not offering any kind of compensation to people who might have booked travel or hotels

[lgbtlunaverse]

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

[glassiskies]

I think this is the most angelic shot of aziraphale ever. and I mean ever. and it’s him lying to gabriel to thwart the will of god. isn’t that beautiful

[azaisya]

a maedhros for @irrealisms !!! I've drawn maedhros once before so I don't have super solid headcanons for him but I hope you like it!

[overtake]

Drive To Survive Season 5: Final Trailer

[chaos0pikachu]

lol yuan was really like "yes I AM in love with qian but this ain't about him"

[hoffmanstits-enjoyer]

when mark's voice echoes through the room in that mocking, even tone as he says right now you're feeling helpless and he immediately jumps into action??? cHRIST, brutality looks so fucking sexy on him it's surreal

[stitchlingbelle]

So I recently saw this post and decided to be completely self-indulgent and write about the two specific characters who turned me into the person I am: Belle and Honor Harrington.

Belle* is a fairly easy one to explain. I'm a brunette who grew up on Disney movies and was just old enough to be hit with a lot of "you can't be the princess, you have brown hair". I'm also a voracious reader. And then, I switched schools and became The Weird New Girl overnight.

So when a brown-haired book-reading princess who everyone thought was weird appeared on the screen, I imprinted on her like a baby duckling. Here was all the validation I craved, that I could look like me and be me and read books and still have a happy ending. I clung to that all the way through middle school, high school and into college before I finally made it out the other side (ie, found my people and some self-esteem of my own.)

Honor Harrington is a bit more complicated. I have a deep and abiding love for that book series, and have for going on fifteen years now, but Honor herself is actually not my favorite character.** I didn't see myself in her, or aspire to be her.

What I eventually realized was that I wanted to live UP to her. Every time there was a passage about Rafe or Scotty or some other junior officer doing their best for her, I wondered if that would be me. If I would be good enough, try hard enough, be clever and brave and compassionate enough, to be one of 'hers'.

There's a scene where she has a bunch of cadets over for dinner and one asks a question that reveals they've had a look at some files that are officially off-limits, but unofficially are juuuust barely accessible if you're very, very dedicated. And it's said that caring enough to find them is a mark of being 'the right stuff' in senior officers' minds. I found myself caught up in wondering, would I have found them?

And that was all fantasy to me for the first bit of the series, which is heavy on the military action, a career I have never been cut out for. In-this-alternate-universe-would-I-be-a-Jedi levels of engagement. But it nagged at me.

And then the rest of the series happens, which is increasingly political and increasingly fraught and increasingly personal, as Honor actually becomes one of the people doing the politics. And while Weber leans a lot more monarchist than democratic in the books, the necessity of participating in your politics-- and thus your government and your society-- is one of Honor's major areas of growth and a key ideal set out by her and the people around her.

And I thought, I can't be a war hero. But I can do that.

I'd always been a voter, but I became a write-to-your-senator person, and then a donate-money person, and then a protest-march person, and then a volunteer-who-specializes-in-legislation person. Slowly I became more and more the sort of person I think Honor would be proud of.

So thank you to both my girls, and the people who made them, for making me.

*The Beast, being a miserable outcast, also spoke to me pretty strongly in middle school, but it took a lot more maturity to see that later on.

**That would be Thomas Theisman. Definitely also a character to live up to, but his impact on his junior officers gets a lot less page-time. And most of his storyline revolves more around direct action than civic engagement. (God, I'd love to see a committed lefty tackle that theme in restored-Republic Haven...)

[mariemariemaria]

sally rooney is a marxist and has criticised, through her fiction, the treatment of books as aesthetic objects that are just seen as a commercial enterprise, to be bought, sold, and to look good on shelves and social media. it's just both quite funny and sad that you can pre-order special editions of her new book, and that when beautiful world where are you came out you could get limited edition bucket hats with the book's design on them. she is out here criticising capitalism in her work and her interviews and then her publishing company comes in, supposedly not having read anything she's written, just to provide a slice of delightful irony, or perhaps to prove her point.

[du-hjarta-skulblaka]

Park art art in a park~

[lgbtiwtv]

there's really something to be said about book louis (amc louis doesn't have this problem as much since he is much more complex and well-rounded and dealing with his experiences with racism and trauma) being able to lament the difficulties of the vampiric lifestyle in the way that only someone who chose it can. he can long for escape, feel crushing guilt, even long for death because, in the end, there was part of him that chose this because he wanted to die but feared the finality of "true" death, because he wanted to "damn himself" as an act of self-punishment for the grief he felt over paul. he can linger for hundreds of years in that sorrow and grief and depression and philosophize about mortality and morality and monstrous natures because he is both the victim and the monster. he's the punished and the hand of justice. so you can see how this would give him complexes on complexes lol. but this is where the fundamental differences in experience between louis and lestat really come through, because as much as i'm a fan of louis, in a way, it's a luxury that he is in the position to ponder all this. in giving consent and retaining his autonomy, he allows himself the mental space for exploring his tether to humanity, the grief of losing it, the depression at a (partially self-imposed) eternity of damnation. obviously in some ways he grows out of this mindset over the years. but for lestat, someone who had his humanity forcibly ripped out of him, who was kidnapped and turned in a scene very intentionally meant to represent assault, who said no over and over and was still changed, how could he look at louis punishing himself and not feel resentment and pain in some way? lestat was robbed of his choice (death) and the only way through that trauma was to allow himself to enjoy the freedom and control and "evil" that vampirism offered. a way to be extravagant, be powerful, be violent in response to all the ways he'd been taken advantage of over the years (on top of symptoms of ptsd and other mental illnesses) and it's just so easy to see how in their ignorance of each other's experiences they grew to resent each other so much

[wyvernquill]

Narrative Determinism, or: Why Dream Stays In The Fishbowl

Okay, so, this is hugely inspired by a conversation with my dear friend @darkonesdagger7437 who gets preview snippets from my fics now and then - and every time I write Fishbowl Angst(tm), she calls Dream some very choice words, and implies he’s an idiot who could be out of there at literally any point, IF HE REALLY WANTED.

And, well, that got me thinking.

It’s true, isn’t it? From the moment Roderick died, a single sentence, hell, a single word to Alex could’ve set Dream free; and even before that, he probably could’ve found a way to contact his siblings, ask them for help. Hypothetically, he could’ve even bargained with either of the Burgesses for his freedom.

And, for the record, you can easily find a thousand reasons for why he doesn’t do that! I’ve seen a lot of quality discussions touching on Dream’s characterisation, his actions, the relationships he has with his siblings, with Jessamy, and so on and so forth. There’s reasons aplenty in the “text” of the show - not all of them necessarily good reasons, admittedly, and the end effect might still contain a frustrating note of “why couldn’t he just swallow his pride and call for help though?”, but, well, that’s Dream for you. He’s a stubborn fool sometimes.

BUT, setting all those reasons woven into the narrative aside, the simplest explanation is just this, as silly as it sounds:

If Dream had been freed, there would have been no story - or, at least, not THIS story!

I know I’m in part just pitting Watsonians and Doylists against each other all over again, but my point remains: in some way, Dream remains trapped because the narrative NEEDS him to be trapped, to kick off the story of The Sandman. To tell this particular story, Dream needs to stay in that damned bowl for 100+ years, so he cannot take any of the ways out that are offered/open to him.

(If you want to tell another story, however... well, that’s a completely different matter, I say, winking affectionately in the direction of the 1001 Dreamling Hob-rescues-Dream-from-the-fishbowl fics.)

Now, technically this is true for every story, but to me, it gains a different weight in The Sandman, which is, on many levels, a story about stories and storytelling itself. It seems only fitting to especially remind ourselves that Dream, beyond being trapped by in-text circumstances, beyond being trapped by his own stubborn and prideful character, is, above all, trapped by the narrative he is in, and what it demands from him. He is the Lord of Stories... but this one is Lord over him, actually.

...

...OR IS IT, I exclaim dramatically, once more turning to the previously-winked-at fanfics!

Because, you see, canon is only one version of this story. A very influential version that arguably has a certain dominance over others - but, well, the show is already a reimagining of the comics. Which is more The Sandman, then? Is it the one that came first, chronologically - the original? Or is it this newer adaptation, updated, made “better” (in huge quotation marks) by the decades that went by since the original was conceived? Sandman 2.0, New and Improved, The Definitive Edition?

I personally believe that The One True Version Of The Story doesn’t exist. Sure, there is such a thing as (show/comics/book/whatever) canon, referring to what is or isn’t in the text of a specific (more widely spread, more dominant) version, but retellings and adaptations and fanfics and headcanons and what-have-you aren’t automatically lesser or irrelevant just because they’re not The One True Story. (Which, I believe, just from the occasional post of his floating onto my dash, is not so far from Neil Gaiman’s general thoughts on the matter.)

So, bringing the post back to Dream and the narrative he is trapped in: we can break him out of it.

We can imagine a version of the story in which the narrative not only ceases to demand his imprisonment, but in fact now requires an escape! We can send Hob, Jessamy, Lucienne, Death, The Corinthian, or even some lovely OC, to get him out of that fishbowl. We can give him the power to do it himself, one way or another, earlier than in canon. As readers, as writers, WE are Lords over stories, too.

Dream is only doomed by the narrative if we let him be... and, honestly, that’s a strangely reassuring thought. Isn’t it?

[hershelwidget]

jester yaoi: the prequel

I like to imagine that the Powerhouse NPCs meet up regularly and it’s super casual despite their histories and roles in the story. and every like second meeting or so Theatre does something particularly strange that everyone’s normally tolerant of until one day he straight up brings Dimentio and THATS the last straw

[apk02]

So I was reading a fanfic and it was tagged Unhealthy Relationships and I don't usually read it because I invariably always get annoyed by self destructive behaviors in relationships and reading it is just not for me but the premise was pretty great and I gave in and lo and behold, I was annoyed by it.

But then, I realised that one of my favorite shows is based on a twink and a himbo co-dependently dying for each other and doing morally questionable things for each other and almost having self-destructive behavior to save the other (I'm looking at you, twink)

Which then led me to the realization that it's not unhealthy because they obviously brought out the best in each other and made the other a better person. But some things are definitely in the grey area and it's just spread over 65 episodes that I didn't realise it as much.

[starlightcataclysm]

girl who only just watched adventure time in 2024 voice: hey just watched adventure time pretty good stuff

[numetaljackdog]

is there anything worse than trying to talk about art with people with closed minds. "i don't like this" "oh? why's that?" "it's just weird. i don't like it." fine then never look at or listen to anything again. since you are so insistent on not appreciating it