#tangentially related but w/e

[maybe-arts]

observe the specimen

ok to be serious for one sec, someone on FFSH has uncovered storyboards for ep1 of krbay and uh. Meta was. uncharacteristically long in there. like, had a whole body to him.

[andromeddog]

muck’s rosary, hoobler’s luger, speirs’ lucky strikes, and a false sense of security

[hua-fei-hua]

i will put up with a lot of things for my mutuals, but the second i find out my archnemesis from two fandoms ago says smth is perfectly catered to their tastes, i'm banishing it from my dashboard

[nati-portlandian]

When will the people of tumblr understand that you can care about more than one thing at the same time. Take my hand - let’s log off together <3

[deadpresidents]

In 1919, his work in Europe done, [Herbert] Hoover returned permanently to the United States. He had lived abroad for twenty years and was something of a stranger in his own land, yet he was so revered that he was courted as a potential Presidential candidate by both political parties. It has often been written that Hoover had been away so long that he didn't know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That is not actually true. He had joined the Republican Party in 1909. But it is true that he wasn't terrifically political and had never voted in a Presidential election. In March 1921, he joined Warren G. Harding's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. After Harding died suddenly in 1923, he continued in the same post under Calvin Coolidge.

Hoover was a diligent and industrious presence in both administrations, but he was dazzlingly short on endearing qualities. His manner was cold, vain, prickly, and snappish. He never thanked subordinates or inquired about their health or happiness. He had no visible capacity for friendliness or warmth. He did not even like shaking hands. Although Coolidge's sense of humor was that of a slightly backward schoolboy -- one of his favorite japes was to ring all the White House servant bells at once, then hide behind the drapes to savor the confusion that followed -- he did at least have one. Hoover had none. One of his closest associates remarked that in thirty years he had never heard Hoover laugh out loud.

Coolidge kept an exceedingly light hand on the tiller of state. He presided over an administration that was, in the words of one observer, "dedicated to inactivity."...By 1927, Coolidge worked no more than about four and a half hours a day -- "a far lighter schedule than most other Presidents, indeed most other people, have followed," as the political scientist Robert E. Gilbert once observed -- and napped much of the rest of the time. "No other President in my time," recalled the White House usher, "ever slept so much." When not napping, he often sat with his feet in an open desk drawer (a lifelong habit) and counted cars passing on Pennsylvania Avenue.

All this left Herbert Hoover in an ideal position to exert himself outside his areas of formal responsibility, and nothing pleased Herbert Hoover more than conquering new administrative territories. He took a hand in everything -- labor disputes, the regulation of radio, the fixing of airline routes, the supervision of foreign loans, the relief of traffic congestion, the distribution of water rights along major rivers, the price of rubber, the implementation of child hygiene regulations, and much else that often seemed only tangentially related to matters of domestic commerce. He became known to his colleagues as the Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of Everything Else...

Coolidge didn't like most people, but he seemed especially not to like Hoover. "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad!" Coolidge once barked when the subject of Hoover came up. In April 1927, Coolidge puzzled the world by issuing a statement proclaiming that Hoover would never be appointed Secretary of State...Why Coolidge issued the statement at all, and why with such finality, was a matter that puzzled every political commentator in the country. As Hoover had indicated no desire for the role, and the incumbent, Frank B. Kellogg, no inclination to leave it, they were as bewildered as everyone else.

With withering disdain Coolidge referred to his tireless Commerce Secretary as Wonder Boy, but though he sneered, he was glad to have someone to do so much of his work for him....(W)hen the Mississippi flooded as it never had before, it was to Herbert Hoover that President Coolidge turned. One week after making his enigmatic promise not to promote Hoover to the role of Secretary of State, Coolidge appointed him to head the relief efforts to deal with the emergency. Apart from that one act, Coolidge did nothing. He declined to visit the flooded areas. He declined to make any federal funds available or to call a special session of Congress. He declined to make a national radio broadcast appealing for private donations. He declined to provide the humorist Will Rogers with a message of hope and goodwill that Rogers could read out as part of a national broadcast. He declined to supply twelve signed photographs to be auctioned off for the relief of flood victims.

-- The weird relationship between the equally weird Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, via One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), courtesy Anchor Books (2014).

[yotd2009]

i hate liking vocaloid/adjacent bc the tag for it on Any site ever is literally just [project sekai post] [unnuanced take on senbonzakura] [cute lil miku art] [teto post from some1 who clearly only knows her from triple baka] [person WILDLY overestimating the relevance of gumi] [unnuanced take on senbonzakura but in the opposite direction] [person getting rlly mad that ppl aren't abiding by the traits they projected onto some voicebank] [person who genuinely seems to think other voicebanks will ever be able to compare to cypton's] [people mistakenly calling synthv vocaloid] [miku redesign that slays] [triple baka #animecore #y2k #aesthetic gif] [miku from someone who would've bullied me in middle school for being a weeb is just using her as a blue-twintailed barbie doll bc she's trendy or w/e] [audio post] ["meme squad" post from someone terminally stuck in 2017] [unnuanced take on senbonzakura from a secret third perspective] [project sekai post] [art of one specific module that slays] [kaito slander] [gakupo slander] [rolling girl #aesthetic] [random ass crossover w miku] [dimly lit pencil doodle w a three paragraph caption] [just a shitton of miku from ppl whose heads would implode if they actually listened to anything more experimental than taylor swift] [cosplay] [tangentially related post in the maintag bc fuck it] [person WILDLY overestimating the importance of vflower] [kaito x reader] [redraw of iconic vocaloid art w unrelated characters i don't care abt] [neru post from some1 whose entire experience w vocaloid beyond 'this fits my #animecore aesthetic' was a tiktok meme audio] [anime figure] [memelord fukase in 2023] [project sekai post]

[stellerssong]

Hi again. I'm on some level here to ask for a complete explanation of every aspect of Hawaiian culture that is even tangentially related to your latest fic because I know absolutely nothing and there is the ever present concern that the terms run through cursory Google Translate and internet searching will lose nuance and implications. There were definitely some references to divinities and myths and such that went over my unenlightened head. The story you wove was rich and intricate enough to be held in the mind of someone who knows less than nothing and still have great meaning and truth, but I know that it will mean yet more if I can see the threads you used to make it. (On another level, I'm asking for the explanation because I am abruptly deeply interested in a topic I had previously not thought about very much, and you seem to be significantly more of an expert than the average internet search.)

first off! well first off i am blowing you so many kisses for this very kind ask, thank you so much for giving me an excuse to ramble at (great, great, great) length.

so second off! i would just like to stress that i am very much not an expert in hawaiian language, folklore, history, culture, etc. i am neither kānaka maoli (native hawaiian) nor kamaʻāina (born in hawaiʻi although not necessarily of hawaiian ancestry), and i have not studied these topics formally/in a setting that applies academic rigor. i am an enthusiastic amateur with a personal connection to hawaiian culture, the kind of brain that likes to fixate on areas of interest, and a willingness to scrounge around for reading material. i have, i think, a decent sense of what some of the baseline texts in the field are, and a fairly good bullshit detector (and the understanding/ability to dig into things when i can't rely on the bullshit detector), but ultimately i am a layman and an outsider with corresponding perspectives and biases. i also, i will admit frankly, have a pretty sharp knowledge cutoff corresponding to the time of first european contact, just because of my own personal interests and reading preferences.

read that whole disclaimer? let your eyes glaze over while you skimmed it? good! here's my real quick (lmao) rundown of Sum Things U Should Know If You Wanna Close-Read Kīpuka:

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi 101

Good grief when I put it like that I do NOT feel qualified to tell you any of this. Anyway. We can keep it basic just so you can get a sense of the mouthfeel of the words. And just fyi ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is the proper name of the language; i'll be using "Hawaiian" as the adjective form, sans ʻokina, assuming an English-speaking readership.

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi as it is commonly rendered today has 13 letters: 5 vowels (A, E, I, O, and U) and 7 consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), plus the ʻokina or glottal stop (that little apostrophe-lookin' dude at the beginning of the word ʻokina, also the source of most of my typesetting woes). Pronunciation-wise, there are no silent letters and no though/through/enough-type surprises: every letter is pronounced, and all of the vowel renderings are approximately equivalent to how you'd pronounce them in Spanish or Italian. Hence, the word kuahine = koo-ah-HEE-nay rather than, like, kyoo-ah-highn, which made me feel gross even just typing it out.

The ʻokina is pronounced, and bear with me here, like the dash in the english nuh-uh. or, if you're a try-hard vocalist—reattack the vowel after the ʻokina instead of eliding it to the vowel prior. So the place-name Kaʻū is pronounced ka-OO, as distinct from the word kau which is pronounced more like kow (which is a bit of an oversimplification of the latter word, but I'm trying to be efficient here).

That leads us neatly into the other diacritical marking used in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the kahakō or macron which helpfully appears in its own name. No worries here; the kahakō just serves as a stress marker, so you'd say kahakō = ka-ha-KO instead of ka-HA-ko, or from the example above ka-OO rather than KA-oo.

There are a couple of other little pronunciation tricks here and there. The letter W is sometimes pronounced as a V, and unfortunately I can't really describe the rules for that shift; that is one I must admit I know mostly from vibes. For example, the correct pronunciation of Hawaiʻi itself is ha-VAI-ee, but I've never heard the place-name Waimea pronounced as anything but why-MEY-ah.

Occasionally you will encounter the letter K pronounced as a T, which I believe is an artifact of the morphological shift from older related languages such as Tahitian and Samoan which do preserve the letter T as a unique phoneme. To my knowledge, the Kauaʻi dialect (spoken today on Niʻihau) also preserves the T, but most spoken ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi heard elsewhere is based on the Big Island dialect, which lacks the T. One notable exception is the word tūtū (an affectionate/respectful term for a grandparent or elder), which you really don't hear pronounced as kūkū.

Really, though, listening to Hawaiian music is how I got the language in my ear and imo it's the best way to get it in yours. Can't go wrong with Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" fame), but I have a personal soft spot for Kealiʻi Reichel, Weldon Kekauoha, Amy Hanaialiʻi, and the Cazimero Brothers.

The Place-y-ness of Hawaiian Literature

This is more of a sidenote than its own heading, but I'm the one driving the essay, and I think it's an interesting thing to point out, just because it helps establish a particular perspective I wanted to keep in mind while writing this fic.

Something you might notice as you start to look at Hawaiian oli, mele, and myth is the high level of specificity of place. Hawaiʻi is, let's be honest, not that enormous of a place when you consider it on a global scale—but the specificity of localities within Hawaiian literature is kind of astounding. Not only are there loads of place-names referenced in any given work, there are unique Hawaiian names for landmarks, cliffs, peaks, hills, streams, waterfalls—even rains and winds of specific locations merit their own names.

"kīpuka" is very specifically set on the windward side of Hawaiʻi island, so I made an effort to focus my references to place-names on that region—Hilo, ʻŌlaʻa, and Waiākea are all locations on the eastern side of the island, and the one reference to Kona on the leeward side reflects the coming of someone bearing grievances (in addition to eia aʻe ka makani Kona being an existing idiom warning the listener to watch out for an angry person, the windward and leeward sides of Hawaiʻi island have a long history of territorial warfare and jockeying for control of the island). I'd also considered having the bird discussed in the fic be a different species, the kākāwahie—but that species is/was endemic to Molokaʻi, and quite honestly my knowledge of the history and culture of Molokaʻi as a separate polity is not that great.

(This is partly due to sample bias—my introduction to Hawaiʻi was within a Big Island-based context. At the same time, another thing you may notice about the better-known source texts is that many of them center around Hawaiʻi island and, to a lesser extent, Maui, thanks to the political supremacy during the unification/post-contact era of Hawaiʻi island and Maui aliʻi. Ross Cordy wrote a whole ass book about the Oʻahu chiefdoms that is simply not to be had for love or money no matter how I search for it. I am THIS CLOSE to straight up cold emailing the man and being like I WILL VENMO YOU $75 USD DIRECTLY IF YOU WILL SIMPLY JUST SEND ME A COPY OF YOUR BOOK. PLEASE. SAVE ME ROSS CORDY.)

Girl (Gender Neutral), I Cannot Explain Hawaiian Mythology, Poetics, and Mythopoetics As a Subheading in One Post

Honestly. I can't do it. But some tidbits to assist your further research:

A great deal of Hawaiian literature and oral tradition hinges on kaona, roughly "allusion" or "metaphor." In a description that is useful to precisely no one but myself, it's not unlike the complex plays on words, puns, and deep well of references used in Heian Japanese epistolary poetry. Some of it is easy to grok for newbies: for example, the concept of one's lover as a lei adorning the body, or being splashed or sprinkled with water as a euphemism for sex. Some of it goes a lot deeper, relying on historical or folkloric place-name associations, puns, and ancient practices and superstitions.

The Hawaiian "pantheon" I place in scare quotes because ancient Hawaiian religious practices and superstition were highly syncretic, often extremely localized, and more contradictory the more you read into it. In a very, very, very, VERY rough and off-the-cuff sense, though, there were thought to be four major gods: Kāne (associated with dawn, the sun, the sky, running freshwater, and irrigation-based agriculture, among other things), Kanaloa (associated with the ocean, sea creatures, and sometimes death, as an opposing or complimentary force to Kāne), Lono (god of fertility, agriculture with something of an emphasis on dryland agriculture, rainfall, and peace as embodied in the Makahiki festival), and Kū (god of war, the deified kingship, fishermen, sorcery, and quite honestly a ton of other things in various manifestations).

There were also quite a large number of "lesser" gods, the word "lesser" used just in the sense that they weren't honored to the same extent as the four previously named in state-sanctioned religious practice. Probably the most well-known of these is Pele, the volcano goddess. (I reference another in the fic, Niolopua, god of sleep—but the jury's out on whether or not that refers to an actual god or is just metaphorical in the same way that most people think of "the Sandman" as a euphemism for sleep and not a literal guy who comes into your house and puts crusties in your eyes.)

The gods were thought to manifest in a variety of forms, called kino lau (literally "four hundred bodies"). You can think of this in the sense of "Lono takes on the shape of an albatross or a tropicbird to interact with mortals, while Kanaloa prefers to manifest as an octopus," and in stories kino lau are sometimes represented that way, but in practice it's less of a Greek myth-style practice of shapeshifting and more of an animistic religious belief. The kino lau in nature embody the god and in a metaphorical sense illustrate the interconnection between divine and earthly and the presence of the divine on earth.

(HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. PLEASE DO MORE RESEARCH AND DO NOT TAKE ONE TUMBLR POST AT ITS WORD ON THIS.)

The Endless, in the fic, are very easy to loop into the concept of kino lau, because of their canonical universality. Danny appears as a shark (a symbol of chiefhood), a pueo, or Hawaiian owl (an 'aumakua, or ancestral guardian), a manu-o-Kū, or fairy tern (a bird associated with the god Kū, likely in his aspect as a god of fishermen, navigators, and wayfinders), a kalo plant (a staple crop of ancient Hawaiʻi, a kino lau of Kāne, and a symbol of duality and rebirth), and a snowcapped mountain (a sacred site considered kapu, or forbidden, to all but the highest chiefly individuals). Despair, meanwhile, appears as an ʻalae ʻula, or Hawaiian moorhen (another ʻaumakua, but also an animal whose cry was thought to foretell misfortune), a stingray (for her barbed tail), a hāpuʻu fern (in contrast to Dream's kalo, the hāpuʻu was considered a famine food), a lava flow and its first growths (acknowledging Pele as both a destroyer and a creator of land, just as Despair also embodies hope), and a number of other things meant to embody the devastation of Hawaiʻi (rats, feral pigs, and mosquitoes have decimated endemic birds and insects; the kiawe is an invasive plant species that forms dense, thorny, and difficult-to-destroy groves; light pollution affects behavior and migratory patterns of both avian and aquatic species).

All pretty simple, obviously!

Further Resources and Recs

Okay, so, obviously I'm not going to be able to explain every single reference in this fic in a single post, though I obviously tried my damnedest. In lieu of that, I'll offer some useful resources for further reading:

Stephen Trussel's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary is a fantastic resource for vocab that incorporates several major Hawaiian dictionaries in a straightforward (well, as straightforward as this gets) text-based web page. Ulukau also has a searchable interface, which is a little easier to interact with, but I like having the Trussel for reference.

Huapala is everyone's go-to for translations of Hawaiian lyrics. I've linked to it in the endnotes of the fic for readers interested in more on "Ka Ipo Lei Manu," but it's got nearly any ʻauana-style Hawaiian song you please, and if I recall correctly even a few traditional oli. Again, another slightly old-fashioned text-based site—but we all know how to use CMD + F in a page, do we not?

Native Books is awesome if you, like me, prefer reading things in print but would prefer not to feed your dollars into the maw of the Amazon beast. A lot of the lit on Hawaiʻi was printed either a long time ago or in very small releases and is now out-of-print and difficult to find even in libraries, so it rocks that there's an independent bookseller that specializes in getting those works to an audience in hard copy. @ NATIVE BOOKS PLEASE CONSIDER GETTING ROSS CORDY TO RE-PRINT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OʻAHU KINGDOM THANK YOU SO MUCH. University of Hawaiʻi Press is also a good source for academic texts, although their website is...mm...difficult to navigate, and do be warned that they charge academic press prices.

In terms of who to read, you really can't go wrong with Mary Kawena Pukui, a Native Hawaiian scholar, author, composer, and educator whose work is the backbone of just, a fuckton of writing about Hawaiʻi, both academic and popular. Her book ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings is worth at least a skim just to get the feel of the Hawaiian mindset; it also contains a healthy dose of myth, folklore, and history in the explanations of the sayings. Absolutely adorably, I've found two books she edited that I read the absolute FUCK out of as a child available as PDFs through Ulukau: The Water of Kāne and Other Legends of the Hawaiian Islands and Hawaiʻi Island Legends: Pīkoi, Pele, and Others. Definitely worth a quick read if you want more on the myth side of things.

As a non-specialist, I've really enjoyed Patrick Vinton Kirch's writing on precontact Hawaiʻi. For a field archaeologist, his writing is both highly engaging and very respectful of the peoples he studies, and trust me, I do get my back up easily when it comes to white people writing about Other Cultures TM, so I'd posit it means something that he passes my sniff test. A Shark Going Inland is My Chief is a great overview of the history of the Hawaiian chiefdoms from the first settlement of the islands to immediately precontact, and Kuaʻāina Kahiko offers a bit of a closer look at everyday life in a specific locality in the islands (in this case, Kahikinui, Maui).

Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekūhaupiʻo by Stephen Desha (trans. Frances N. Frazier) began its life as a serialized Hawaiian-language history of the rise of Kamehameha I. It's a dense read, and it WILL test your ability to remember who the hell all these people are to its limit—it mostly discusses the lives and times of the major players of the aliʻi class in the late precontact–early postcontact era, and when you remember that a) a hell of a lot of personal names in this tale begin with the letter K and b) the aliʻi class of Hawaiʻi practiced a mindboggling amount of political marriage, consanguineous marriage, and sanctioned adoption between blood relatives, the family trees get real complicated REAL fast. If you can hang on through all that, though, it's an intensely detailed and very vivid portrait of a culture at a tumultuous moment, it gives a great sense of how the Hawaiians viewed themselves and the world, and it's an interesting exercise in the mythologizing of the Kamehameha dynasty.

Okay, So...?

So...if you hung on through all that, god DAMN are you dedicated. Have what is quite possibly my favorite Hawaiian song for your trouble. It is, funnily enough, about a bird.

EDIT: I am retroactively making this post unrebloggable. I'm really, really glad folks have found it interesting and are looking into the resources I shared, but I absolutely do not want this getting passed around as Hawaiian Culture 101. If you want to learn more about Hawaiʻi, I must stress that you should look to a reputable source and not some schmuck on Tumblr rambling about her effortposting fanned fiction.

[blueiight]

y/k when parents lose a child and often blame each other for it even if it wasn't actually anyone's fault? that sounds like what louis was doing in the first interview, except actually it was kind of lestat's fault or so he thinks. maybe in dubai he's at the point of realizing something doesn't add up about her death. he must've thought about that night so many times, like why did armand only show up in time to save him not her, why did madeleine have to die she didn't even have anything to do w/ lestat's murder like something's off.

well claudia is actually both of their faults lolol. but ya if lestat snitches on claudia & omits louis’s role in the murder attempt for w/e reason whether its armand coercing lestat to hide louis’s role in the attempted murder and/or w/ lestat running under the belief he can get louis back right away that could certainly explain why louis in the 70s sounds like such a shameless playa hater based off the tapes.. i think amc louis is more cognizant than his novel counterpart tho so if lewis was suspicious of armand & asked armand if he was their leader why couldnt he stop them almost right after he burned the theater down, then louis w/o a doubt would be suspicious of armand moreso well before dubai

[1] & [2] maybe tangentially related but linking them. <3

[venusmages]

This is only tangentially related to the last post but it came to mind, does anyone else think the tone indicator thing or w/e is weird and probably doesn’t help the people it’s supposedly meant for, or worse is kind of condescending

[secretmellowblog]

I’ve been thinking about the Javert/Eponine parallels lately and like!!! I completely forgot that the line where Enjolras tells Javert “your friends have just shot you” is immediately followed by the chapter where Eponine dies of her gunshot wound

I know other people have written posts (and i probably will too) about the parallels between Javert and Eponine— how they’re both described as “guard dogs whose parents are wolves,” how they turn against their criminal parents to defend “society,” how Eponine is described using police metaphors, how Eponine often talks about drowning herself and Javert is supposed to die at the barricades but then they “trade deaths” so that Eponine dies at the barricades and Javert drowns himself, Javert seeing Eponine’s corpse right before he’s about to be executed and remarking that he feels like he knows her, and so on

But I’m really emotional about the parallel between....... how Javert and Eponine are the “guard dogs” of a person or institution that Doesn’t Care About Them, and barely even knows they exist.

Eponine gives her life for Marius, but he doesn’t even notice! She has to crawl over to him to make him talk to her because otherwise, he wouldnt even know she saved his life. She did so much for him and gave up so much for him, and he barely remembers she exists. She’s at his feet after taking a bullet for him and he doesn’t even recognize her.

Javert gives his life for the society he serves, and is calm/resolute while facing his execution. Then the National Guard has an easy opportunity to save Javert’s life — they just have to pull a hostage exchange, giving Jehan in exchange for Javert. They could easily save the life of the police officer who has done everything “right” for them, who has been completely submissive and obedient his entire life, who has dedicated his entire soul to his work, who has turned himself into a cruel empty friendless husk for his work, who has sacrificed everything for them— but they don’t. Because they don’t care!

Because Javert is to the National Guard what Eponine is to Marius— if he’s not literally crawling up to them and begging them to notice him, he might as well not exist.

Les Amis instantly notice and care when Jehan Prouvaire is missing. but Javert goes missing and is instantly easily forgotten/discarded, because he’s not important and no one cares and the police/military don’t value human life.

There’s a line later on where Javert’s behavior as he awaits execution is described like this:

“A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought he was to die; who had played the spy even in his agony; and who, with his elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulcher, had taken notes.”

And I’ve seen people try to argue that line shows how Heroic /noble Javert is, and I’m here like no! :((That line isn’t heroic, it’s just….deeply pathetic and pitiable.

To me that line has the same Feeling as Eponine slowly dying and, “with her elbows leaning on the sepulcher,” using the last of her strength to crawl over to Marius and try to make him notice her.

One major difference is that Marius is ignorant but he does ultimately Feel Something about Eponine and tries to take care of her as she dies, while the police/national guard do not care about Javert at alllllll........when he returns to the police station and gives a brief report of what happened to him, they indifferently just put him back on duty again without even telling him to take a break first. :|

Javert’s executioners (Valjean and even Enjolras) ultimately show far more concern for him than the people who are supposedly “on his side,” because unlike cops they actually value human life, lol

But I don’t know. Even beyond this specific metaphor, there’s just something so sad about the way both Javert and Eponine are so “unimportant” to the other characters, so quickly forgotten by them. Almost immediately after Eponine dies Marius moves on to reading Cosette’s letter; Valjean reads about Javert’s suicide in the newspaper and says “he must’ve been crazy” and then forgets about him. Eponine and Javert have these deep complicated thorny emotional relationships with the other characters that they literally destroy/kill themselves over, but those deep emotions aren’t returned/requited at all, in a really bitter horrible awful way.

[fxa]

did anyone else grow up with christian metalhead parents so you freely listened to system of a down from a young age but simultaneously were afraid to sing the "when angels deserve to die" part of chop suey out loud in their presence.

[sonicenvy]

one of the top things that i don’t miss about working in adult services at the library (which i did for ONE summer as an intern in high school) is dealing with the creepy old guys that hit on young female staff and who you regularly have to remove for watching pornography on library public computers.

literally ask any library worker in public library and they will tell you that they have at least (1) regular male patron (usually older and white) who they regularly have to remove for watching pornography on public computers. they may also attempt to “discretely” wank whilst doing so, or drop trou in public spaces.

the best thing about working in children’s exclusively is that you have to deal with so many less creepy old dudes. downside, you have to clean up urine, feces and vomit more regularly. so 🤷🏻‍♀️

[samarecharm]

please,, please join us in ryugoro,, they're very cute

I already am! And they ARE cute 🥺 ive yet to go through the tags on both tumblr and ao3 and so far ive been content to just think about it in my own time. Theres a lot of good potential! Two equally (rightfully) angry kids dealing w it in their own ways.

They arent two sides of the same coin by a longshot but they are similar enough that a beginning of a possible relationship could bud from them acknowledging each others history. Ryuji is just SO forgiving when it comes to people who make an effort to change and better themselves; it honestly wouldnt seem outrageous to see him getting buddy buddy w goro like he does akira. ogh...both of them are so insanely competitive too... insufferable to everyone but themselves....🥺

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

wow the depths of my loathing for the word “duffel” are unreal. we’re talking maraiana trench flavors of hadal, over here.

[fagderolo]

smth unique abt bein in a discord w someone who youre 95% sure was part of the reason fic/tionkinfessions banned a source for like a week or smth

[dasakuryo]

Would you be able to share ways Mando gets fetishized/written OOC by fanfic writers? Or maybe know of a resource where I can find more information myself? I’ve tried Google but haven’t found much relating to this specific issue in the SW fandom.

So, I am going to answer this under the premise that this an actual honest question and not a bait to then nitpick my answer. And I apologize if my answer has a harsh or rude edge, but honestly we Latine fans have answered this same question COUNTLESS times before. Anyway, here it goes.

Would you be able to share ways Mando gets fetishized/written OOC by fanfic writers?

I mean, I have pointed this out time and time again on my posts about Latine characters, The Mandalorian and/or Pedro Pascal. The answer is actually in the question you have asked yourself, anon. The ways in which Mando gets fetishized and written OOC by fanfic writers is… precisely being fetishized and written OOC by fanfic writers. It’s not rocket science, the fetishization is directly connected to applying stereotypes and biases about Latines to Latine characters, especially when said stereotypes go in direct opposition to their canon characterizations.

The main stereotypes applied to Latine characters by fandoms (and yeah, note I am not limiting this issue to The Mandalorian, because it happens to every Latine character in every fandom under the sun) are:

The Latino Lover stereotype

The angry/fiery Latina

The sexualization of the Spanish language

The exotification of Latin American Spanish varieties and NNE Latin American accents

The portrayal of Latines, especially Latinos, as cold, irrationally angry and violent, detached from emotion. As far as Latinas are concerned we get extremely sexualized or villainized (quite often portrayals are hyper sexualization with a dash of angry jealous Latina ready to steal a given LI)

I’ve talked about these and Latine mistreatment in Mando (tangentially) here and here.

softie actually made a pretty good summary on the different ways The Mandalorian fandom sexualizes and fetishizes Din/Pedro and his Latine identity. You can read it here 

And now, this is not directed at you personally anon, but let me address something very important. Even though softie went through the trouble of listing the most common ways in which Mando gets fetishized/written OOC by fanfic writers, we Latine fans should not have to be here pulling out excerpts of every single fic this has happened in for people who aren’t Latine to a) believe us when we say there’s a problem, b) realise this is a problem because it’s a cemented fandom trend (across fandoms) at this point.

And another thing, because this mindset of “show me proof this has actually happened!” truly me tiene los ovarios inflados. Why should we Latine fans have to delve into disgusting content that will upset us just to give you all a research-like presentation on how X fandom exotifies and sexualises a Latine character? Especially when then many people love to pull “well X popular fic didn't do Y exactly you are a big meanie”, as if a given content not following every aspect of a stereotype to a T suddenly means the plethora of issues in said content isn’t harmful, stereotyping, biased, racist, etc.

(Not to mention that actually “showing proof” of fics/content in which these things are present actually prompts some people to argue we are targeting people on purpose, just to twist the debate and paint anyone raising concerns of fetishizing as a big meanie trying to stir fandom drama.).

Latine fans, particularly in the Star Wars fandom, have been speaking about the various ways in which fandom fetishizes Latine characters for years (and we have also talked at length about how to avoid fetishizing Latine characters and treat them respectfully), but it seems some people find out there’s a problem with Latine fetishization in fandom every two weeks. It’s exhausting.

If some of you all insist you aren’t biased/racist/w/e, then you truly don’t need people from X marginalized group or community telling you how to treat a character from said background with respect, without applying stereotypes to said characters, because you’ll be already looking at ways in which to write and engage with these characters respecting the human dignity of the group they represent (and you wouldn’t victimize yourself when someone points out something you are doing is harmful).