#my point still stands lol

[semiotomatics]

i meant to make some big well-written post abt it but unfortunately my brain was otherwise occupied experiencing The Horrors so instead, have some wordvomit

this past monday marked twenty years since i went on a field trip to the library and ran my hand along a bookshelf in the children's fiction section and found a book called So You Want To Be A Wizard* and brought it home and read it cover to cover in like. a day. and i couldn't even begin to explain how that day has shaped my life but i do just wanna acknowledge it and say that i'm so glad my friend let me borrow her library card (cause i didn't have my own yet) so i could bring the book home and i'm so glad my mum special ordered the rest of the series from the local independent bookstore almost immediately after i finished it and i'm so glad i discovered the forums and i'm so glad i found so many cousins on tumblr—including my best friend and platonic soulmate @astraldepths—and i'm so glad i got to help plan and execute crossingscon (twice!!) and that i got to meet so many of you in person—INCLUDING DD HERSELF—and i'm just. so glad i discovered this series

i have like twelve copies of SYW but i think my favourite is the twentieth anniversary edition (which is now, itself, twenty years old—wild), because it contains both the short story Uptown Local, which i adore, and an afterword by DD, which i have read entirely too many times. anyway, i wanna share a quote from that afterword, bc it seems fitting:

Wizardry, too, changes with the times, because its practitioners do...and indeed it must change, to keep up with the Lone Power, Itself never averse to using new means to Its old end. Even the Wizard's Oath will seem to change from time to time, altering its appearance according to species, age, cast of mind, and (sometimes) simply according to where you're standing, in time and space, when you examine it. But beyond that, as the series continues, I can promise that some things will always stay the same—the knowledge of a partner's dependable friendship; a shared go-for-broke determination to get it right when the Universe is watching; and the glad adrenaline rush caused by the sudden incursion of the unexpected...as when you run your hand down a row of books on a library shelf and one of them catches your finger.

so yeah. in lieu of a more coherent post abt it, i just wanna say. thank you @dduane. for everything 💚

[rosiethedragongeek]

Chicken is so iconic name 1 (one) other chicken on a tv show who has an affair/secret double life and EIGHT secret children with her paramour

[lilacthebooklover]

i've got to point this out...

even the OFFICIAL ARTISTS can't be asked with drawing pv's absurdly large hat. live your truth, fanartists. ditch that oversized ice cream cone. show a little crown xx

[lucienarcheron]

The idea that some people still think Nesta’s main traits are supposed to be bitchy, mean, and a hater…idk what to tell you but the whole point of her healing journey is to not be those things because all it did was hurt everyone around her and herself.

[homosexuhauls]

Why are 87% of women exclusively attracted to men, but 60% of male-bodied, male-raised, female-identifying "trans women" are attracted to women?

Also if 0.25% of the human population are lesbians*, and roughly 0.15% of society are sapphic trans goddesses**, then the lesbian community has no hope of shutting out straight males who want to steal our spaces.

Because the way I understand it, in a room of 100 lesbians, if using any definition of lesbian which includes the straight/bi men who call themselves lesbians, we have a breakdown of:

62-63 female lesbians (62.5%)

37-38 male lesbians (37.5%)

I.e. if a lesbian is defined without using biological sex, over a third of all lesbians are trans women. But clearly lesbians are overreacting to this tiny minority of people.

*if lesbians are 0.5% of all women, and women are roughly 50% of all people.

**if trans people are 0.5% of all society, and roughly 50% of all trans people are AMAB, ignoring non-binary people because we're grown-ups.

[sea-buns]

Forgive me if I'm a bit nervous about Gorgug this season. It's just that the last Zac Oyama pc was Colin Provolone, who was arguably one of his greatest D20 performances, if not the greatest.

Zac always does great with every pc he plays, but Colin was something else. He came out swinging with actions and words that were teeming with unspoken emotional baggage. The way Colin's presence affected the other pcs; there was this level of depth that I don't think I've seen in any of his other characters. It was understated and quiet in that signature "just a guy" way that he tends to be, while still captivating everyone instantly with just how raw it was.

Not to say we haven't seen emotional depth in Gorgug. It's just that, compared to the other Bad Kids, Gorgug's journey and progression as a character has been very... impersonal? Like, yes, he found his birth parents, and he found friends who appreciate him, and he faced his insecurities about his intelligence, and he navigated relationship troubles, and his trial through the claustrophobic bug-tunnels was a horrifically-uncanny parallel to how he's spent his entire life trying to make himself as small as possible.

But how much of that has actually changed him from the Gorgug we started with? I would agree that he's definitely happier with his life, given all the loving and supportive people that have been added to it when it used to be just him and his parents. And he's certainly grown into himself and become more self-assured in his abilities, even if he's still, and always will be, our anxious little guy. And there's nothing wrong with that. I've always liked how Gorgug was a representation of all the little things. The subtle acts and kindnesses that don't seem like much to most, but to some are everything.

We don't need another Bad Kid living in fear that their mouth could be shit-in at any moment. We've already got one-too-many.

All that being said, I just feel like Gorgug's personal story beats are much easier to sweep under the rug than everyone else's. He has the same soft and understated quality that Colin held, but they lack that extra oomph that pushed Colin over the edge from being just another guy in a series of dudes, to a character that the vast majority of us could not get out of our heads. He took someone who was anxious and softspoken, who ultimately never wanted to be violent— someone who is remarkably similar to Gorgug in many ways— and maintained that demeanor and core in Colin's character while still hitting us in the feels with character development at max velocity at every turn.

I think Zac gets better and better at this with every season that goes by. With each new character, there is always something that leaves me stunned in awe. And it's been, what, three? Four years since we last saw Gorgug?

I'm just,,, I'm cautiously optimistic but also going into a bit of a worry about what violence this man may inflict upon us

[thats-a-lot-of-cortisol]

Shadowheart, in the style of "The Sorrowing Soul Between Doubt and Faith" by Elihu Vedder (aka one of my absolute favorite paintings)

Other Classical Tadfools: Lae'zel, Wyll

[the-somwthing]

Welcome to my little meta analysis essay called

Why do we misremember Flower Husbands as being “nicer” than it was?

Disclaimer: I’m not here to talk about whether or not FH is “toxic” or anything like that. It’s just a fact that many old fans rewatching FH POV and new fans who are watching it for the first time after seeing fan content tend to be surprised at how they actually behaved in the series compared to how everyone remembered them being back in the day. This will NOT go over whether or not I think FH is unhealthy or whatever and instead just discuss why I believe this phenomenon has happened.

So, if I try to make this a fancy well written essay, I’ll be here all day, so I’ll just get to the point. 3rd Life came out during the DSMP era of mcyt. MCRP has been around for ages, but the DSMP style of RP (which I’ll be calling “smp rp”) was pretty much popularized by DSMP, mostly towards the end of 2020. For reference, 3rd Life started early 2021, so there’s about a half a year between these two events, and DSMP kept going for years so 3rd Life was absolutely happening during the golden era of DSMP.

But what does DSMP have to do with this? Well, it sort of created this idea of “lore” and only specific things being “canon”. You can make fun of me for the way I worded that, but you know what I mean, DSMP was weird about that stuff. I don’t really blame them as it was kind of a new style of RP they accidentally spawned, but still, it was a confusing time for SMPs.

3rd Life was actually less like DSMP and more like the modern SMP RPs, where there’s no (known, lol) scripted events and the fandom itself deciphers what is or isn’t “canon” rather than it being told to them, with mostly everything being considered canon. HOWEVER, I do believe that DSMP’s style did still affect the fandom, specifically with the topic of this essay, Flower Husbands.

But why would it only really affect Flower Husbands? Now we get into a rough topic: shipping discourse. Back in those days, shipping in the mcyt fandom was heavily frowned upon. Moreso than it is today (I know it’s still around, but it was a lot worse the earlier we go lol). I’ve even seen old relics of ppl saying flower husbands should only be portrayed as platonic cuz it’s wrong to ship them, despite their team name literally being husbands. But more importantly, for A LOT of people, flower husbands was the One Ship people felt “allowed” to ship, BECAUSE it was canon. So they would allow FH and shun every other ship.

My point isn’t actually that, with it being the only “acceptable” ship everyone tried to make it more wholesome, though I suppose that could be a contributor. But my ACTUAL point is where all the things I laid out finally close in on each other:

Ships were a Dangerous territory in mcyt fandom, and ships being “canon” was something a lot of people weren’t prepared to deal with. People don’t want to get too close to RPF territory, but back in the day their ideas of c! vs cc! wasn’t as great, so they default to the DSMP Rule of “if it’s stated to be roleplay, then it’s canon to the characters, if not, it’s noncanon and just the CCs hanging out”.

You see where I’m going with this? When trying to follow this rule for a character relationship where they don’t explicitly state what is or isn’t RP, they hear “we’re married” and instantly mark that as canon to the characters since it clearly isn’t true to the CCs, and tend to block out anything else, otherwise you’re risking it not actually being true to the characters. Especially when it’s things like Scott saying something mean about Jimmy; that directly contradicts the “these characters are in love” thing, so it must not be canon, right?

But wouldn’t people still remember that these things happened, or did they actually straight up not process any of it? My answer to that is: of course everyone was paying attention, but with the context that it’s the CCs playing a video game, all of the teasing and other behavior seems WAY less serious. It just looks like average friends playing a hunger games smp together. And as I explained earlier, the fandom was ONLY processing this as a CC thing, so Scott’s treatment of Jimmy never stood out because that’s just how it is playing games.

Back to DSMP, I’m not active in that fandom anymore but I’ll see snippets sometimes, and I’ve seen the claim that beeduo was actually boring in canon and the fandom was the one that made it interesting. I feel like this is exactly what happened with FH. Nobody was actually expecting anyone to go hard into romantic roleplay, so the fans just take whichever pair says they’re getting married and fill in the blanks themselves. And that was normal back then, it wasn’t fans making stuff up for no reason, it was kind of expected of us.

So yeah, I personally believe that this whole confusion about FH is a result of its time. Whether you want to finally look at the actual substance of the relationship rather than following weird rules about what is or isn’t “canon”, or you believe that since FH was from a time where romantic RP was confusing and weird it would make the most sense to take into account the time period it came from and ignore the less appealing bits in favor of the fanon, I don’t really care honestly. But man isn’t this an interesting situation.

[bees-nest]

If creativity is inherently linked to suffering then why do the best ideas come during a nice warm shower, hmmmmmmmmm?

[worm-in-a-trenchcoat]

Oop- I realized today that I’ve been calling Venus’ hairstyle micro-braids when they’re actually micro-twists. Which are two very different things lol

[teeth-go-clink]

At this point, canon is just another fanfic to me. And by god, I’ve seen ones that were better written.

[sysig]

Finally made a Parapluesch OC, introducing Mama Oz ♥ (Patreon)

[stonedstargazer666]

Listening to my Teeth of God playlist, and i'm dosing off. just just barely there to hear the very ending of Missing Limbs, so seamlessly blend in with Chokehold. uuggghhh so freaking goooddddd

[booksandpaperss]

there is something that's so juicy about mike angst bc as of season 3 least 85% of it can be traced back to self sabotage due to self hatred that spiraled out of control and to me that is one of the most interesting reasons a character can be in deep shit

[autism-swagger]

@el-fandom-birb @krikeymate ask and ye shall receive

Itty bitties

[piratespencil]

Ashton very specifically knocking out the centaurs instead of killing them vs the witches just fully evaporating a guy… This team is so wildly divided on whether or not casual murder is okay and I’m fascinated by it.