#thanks for participating in this research

[tejennnn]

My first time drawing RoBul!! 🇷🇴🇧🇬 I've been wanting to draw them with those loooooong bottles 👀

I drew APH Romania with Țuică de Prune, a traditional spirit made of plum. While APH Bulgaria is with muscat grape Rakia or fruit brandy (based on Burgas 63 brand)🍇

((Reference under cut))

Image credit to FabricatinRO (Tuica) and nokovandson (Burgas 63)!

[magnusbae]

So there you have it guys, we’re 2020 simps it seems >:D

[jeffyfitoftheyear]

🌟Jeff Satur outfit of the year 2023🌟

And the winner is Siam Halloween!!

video by beamspy_

Your most voted for Jeff outfit of the year, and most submitted. We had many, many photos of this fit turn up in our inbox. Thank you all for your efforts and dedication to a hot little corset!

picture credits: saturn4am, studio_on_saturn, jeff satur,

[phantomarine]

Because I'm still trying to figure out the numbers before committing to a structured Kickstarter - POLL TIME AGAIN (I'm sorry)

[glennmillerorchestra]

an appropriate poll redesign for the one and only michael nesmith, king of the monkees!

[uefb]

Why do you think there’s a pattern of Theseus being abusive/overly aggressive in Fantastic Beasts fanfic? It’s been driving me up the wall trying to find Newt and Theseus fanfic that doesn’t make them OOC especially Theseus, and idk, in the context of Newt being Autistic I find it disturbing. Like sure, Theseus is hot-headed and loses his temper, he doesn’t always understand Newt, but those traits seem overtly exaggerated in a lot of fandom content.

Obsessed with this ask. I have been thinking about it all day, and am just now getting to write it up! Thinking about it in the background of my statistics class almost singularly got me through its sensory and anxiety hell. /sweat-laugh emoji/ So thank you!

Please remember, all of this is based on my own perspectives, knowledge, and headcanons, as well as canon clues. Nothing here is definitive and is open for respectful conversation! (Not directed specifically at you, salamander, just since this is a public blog I like to cover my bases. ^_^)

Buckle up: major autistic info dump incoming

Alright, so, my initial thoughts are that...

Obviously, there was a decent chunk of Newt fic written between 2016 and 2018 before CoG came out, that first film where we really got to see Theseus as a character, for who he really is (especially since they cut that letter from him to Newt at beginning of FBWTFT, that starts with "little brother," which is just pretty endearing). IMHO, this two-year gap means people had a wide open playing field to build the character themselves. Here's a few thoughts on that:

The framework for the entire Wizarding World, narratively, is the Harry Potter series. Boy wizard, shunned by family, isolated from socialization -- Outcasts have always been the backbone of She-who-must-not-be-named's stories. It's compelling. We love it, we lap it up. With only one FB film out before 2018 and Newt being such a unique protagonist, I think it's likely people fell back on the more typical Harry-Dudley trope to create a compelling backstory for Newt, using that tried-and-true fantasy Cinderella-type trope.

Second, from what I can tell, there was a lot less serious consideration of Newt actually being autistic in the early years of the fandom. (I only "joined" relatively recently myself, despite going to the first 2 movies on opening day, but I'm nothing if not fastidious in consuming every scrap of historical content when I develop a new interest, lol.) I've read pages of threads and plenty of "think pieces" attributing Newt's behavior to trauma-related social anxiety and/or his profession as a magizoologist. I absolutely buy the latter (adjusting body language for one's profession), but not entirely the former. (Personally, Newt doesn't strike me as an inherently anxious person--he strikes me as an inherently autistic one who also sometimes experiences anxiety. Discomfort and anxiety aren't the same thing, but people often conflate them, imho.) Anyway, THAT BEING SAID, I've noticed in quite a few fics that people write Theseus as being part of that implied social trauma, via sibling bullying that rises beyond typical sibling harassment. People perhaps tried to explain Newt's behavior by making him, at the very least, overshadowed by Theseus (and ashamed of it) or, at the very worst, abused and/or neglected by his family.

Also, quite simply: people process their own family trauma via fic. I think it's highly likely Theseus just served a sibling or parental role for some people in stories. (The abundance of abusive!Thranduil fic in the LotR fandom in the early 00s is another example of this.) Nothing wrong with using fic to process feelings and life experiences (god knows I do, it's horrifically obvious and always has been lmao), but this bulletpoint is still one explanation for the pre-CoG "Theseus being a dick in fic" phenomenon.

Plus, fanfic doesn't occur in a vacuum. Even when new canon info comes out, existing fic and whatever the going/contemporary fanon is often impact how new writers write their characters, even post-CoG. (And how those characterizations are received by the larger fandom--that reception may subsequently impact how writers maintain or change their characters in the future, imho.)

As for the current reasons Theseus is often OOC in post-CoG fic...

Well, I have my theories, but I am also not entirely sure. However, I feel pretty confident it has to do, primarily, with points 1 and 4.

Leta Lestrange and the Scamander Brothers - Honestly, I think people likely are pretty offended on Newt's behalf for the Leta/Theseus marriage. In mainstream media, we're kind of trained to think that dating your friend's ex is ultimate betrayal--it's difficult for people to imagine a world in which a person who marries their brother's ex is a good person. (...I was once in a friend group where we had all dated the same girl at some point, but we were all either ridiculously honest or autistic so we just--wait for it--talked about it and moved on.) That being said, I never read Leta & Newt as overtly romantic (then again, I also didn't know Bunty liked Newt until the 4th time I watched CoG), so I don't entirely get this one to the degree that I think some people viscerally feel this. But I expect some people see that and assume it says something much larger about Theseus' character than it does. (I do think it says a lot about Theseus that he loves Leta, but I don't think it says the same things about him that some other people do -- I think it speaks more to his similarities to Newt [compassion and positive outlook] than it does to stealing Newt's Hogwarts sweetheart. But I digress.)

Something Did Happen at Some Point - Now, there is undeniably a distance between the brothers that we, as viewers, don't necessarily know the origin of. (So I think I may have mentioned in my letters that [my brother & I] have quite a complicated relationship. // Does he want to kill you? // Frequently.) Have they always been like that? Is it new? Is it because of the age difference? Because they have different personalities? (Though I will argue until I'm blue in the face that they're actually extraordinarily similar people, at their cores.) Is it because Newt got expelled, or because Theseus scooped up Leta, or because Theseus expresses emotion through touch & Newt jerks away from touch he doesn't initiate himself, or because because because because because? I don't know. But there is something there and, based on the "complicated relationship" comment, it sounds like it is something that likely developed over time. So imho - I think some people see that and just lean in way too hard. Like, pedal to the medal, 0 to 60 too hard.

Theseus is Snarky to Newt on Multiple Occasions - Mostly based around how Newt directs his life, carries himself, etc etc. For example, it would be easy to take that whole scene before and after Newt's travel hearing in CoG and assume Theseus is an overprotective, condescending, and ableist prick. But if we look below the surface (and the stage directions in the screenplay help, too. When he says "maybe a little less... / like me. / well, it can't hurt" the instructions say 'not without fondness', or something like that), it's pretty glaringly obvious he doesn't mean to be that way. Even condescending behaviors usually have causal correlates, even if we can't see them on the surface. (Believe me -- and this is something we both touched on in DMs, salamander, I'm just repeating for the sake of the ask -- well-meaning pep talks and encouragement can still drip with condescension when loved ones think you need guidance because they "love you and know better " and you're just too autistic or too idealistic or too naive or whatever.) Ultimately, whether due to a failure to approach these snarky exchanges with grace and nuance, or because it can make a good fic to put brothers at odds, IDK -- but I expect this particular point plays into some people's decisions to interpret Theseus in a way I view as OOC.

Ease of Narrative ~ Nuance is hard - I mean, this one explains itself. Writing characters in a nuanced manner that allows digging into the messy horrible confusion of relationships--embedded as they are within families and societies and personal & general history--is not easy. It takes not only patience and significant effort as a writer, but it also takes a degree of self-awareness and maturity that we all reach at different points. I'm not there yet myself (there's no real arrival -- life's not a perfect graph), but still: My fic writing is very different now at 32 (with 14 years of 'adulthood' and 12 years of therapy under my belt) than it was when I was writing about adults when I was 15. (And, yes, I still have my first posted HP fic up on MuggleNet and FFnet, so you don't just have to take my word for it lmao.) To be very clear, this isn't me being ageist or whatever: I'm just saying that I often get the sense while reading fic where Theseus is reallllly overly aggressive that the writer is sometimes either very new to creative writing (and good for them! we love new writers! keep writing, lovelies!), or else quite young, and thus still acquiring life experience that is going to improve their work as they age, every single day.**

Sibling Experience - Not having personal or narrative experience with an age gap like Newt and Theseus have. I'm an older sibling by 7.5 years, which is close to Theseus & Newt's age difference. I basically half-raised my younger brother, so I have a real soft spot for that kind of sibling relationship, which comes across in most of my fics (LotR & FB). It's hard to imagine the sort of borderline sibling-parental love, responsibility, and anxiety that can permeate those kind of relationships if you haven't experienced or seen it represented in media yourself. This is just a theory, of course---I have no actual data on this being actually related to his OOCness.

What else? What do you or others think?

Final very random thought

I also think a lot of people forget that autism runs in families. So yes, Theseus doesn't always "get" Newt (god, no, lol) and he doesn't have guidance on what to do when he doesn't, but it is highly unlikely he hasn't seen behavior similar to Newt's before, whether in a parent or cousins, an aunt/uncle or something else. People *also* tend to forget, IMHO, that subclinical traits are often present in direct family members of an autistic person--Theseus' rigid thinking, for example, isn't necessarily "autistic", but he may get Newt better than people think for certain reasons we never have an opportunity to see in the script. (Not that the movies are paying *that* much attention to the actual research or autism presentations lmao, but I'm just saying it is a possibility). Being able to relate to a smaller version of someone's struggles can simultaneously make one both a better support and a worse one in a lot of ways. (And certain autistic traits can even rub up against each other poorly in different people--I have a few acquaintances that rub me the wrong way because our "symptoms" manifest in very different ways and their natural behavior triggers some of my own sensory issues or overdeveloped sense of justice or whatever. Conversely, my ADHD tendency to be 20 minutes late to every hang gives one of my autistic friends a panic attack every time -- I feel terrible, but all we can both do is try to adjust the behavior around our symptoms. And sometimes the same traits--firmly held beliefs, for example--bump into each other explosively, which I have experienced in fandom myself: two autistic people w diametrically opposing views interacting, but because we process information in similar ways even with very different perspectives, no progress can be made before someone shuts down.) BUT I BRING THIS UP BECAUSE, I do think it's possible to headcanon that some of Newt and Theseus' conflict (which does exist) could even be rooted in differing forms of neurodivergence or presentation of subclinical symptoms.

The world is a big place and there's so many possibilities. These are just some of my thoughts on why Theseus is often portrayed in a way I find to be OOC!

Asterisked footnote under cut -

**I'm trying to convey what Sandra Cisneros does much better in her short story "Eleven." That we, all of us, carry our entire lives and what we have seen inside of us at all times, and I think that's what we bring to our writing.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three. Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

[bestfrogbracket]

nice

[Image description: a picture of text that says "69 responses." End ID.]

This is more submissions than I ever thought we'd get, so I'm going to call it now so that not too many frogs will end up eliminated from the final bracket. The form will close at 2 pm CST/8 pm GMT on Friday, March 10. Be sure to get final submissions in by then!

[sxthee]

Why did you block meeee!!!!!!! 😭

[izloveshorses]

not to be lame and post a real serious question poll but. just out of curiosity,,, does anyone still purchase/want to read fandom zines? i'm working on a little (big) project that would be multiple pages and it seems like it might be more fun to have available all together, if anyone is interested.

if you do purchase zines or are interested, where do u go to buy them? 🧐 i don't have much experience on this particular front but i'd like to see what y'all are interested in. do u prefer a digital or physical zine??

all feedback is appreciated!

[dustoftheancients]

Hey guys, two questions:

What colors do you guys associate with The Garden of Moonlit Grief?

Also, what songs (if any) do you associate with the fic?

[purenguyening]

Re: one small step - isn't that just because we're so used to the phrase now that it no longer registers as wrong? We're kinda biased to think of it as correct, as it's been repeated over and over again

Possible.

I always find it hard to use myself as a frame of reference whenever I have to focus on anything English-only because I'm considered bilingual. For what it's worth, casual Vietnamese does have tendency to drop information and the listener has to extrapolate based on what's not being said out loud, so I always presumed I was just used to it.

In theory, I'd imagine "one small step for man" while it doesn't make sense semantically (I believe the full quote is meant that Armstrong is literally taking the first step and then the latter quote saying it is symbolically a huge accomplishment for man kind as a whole), it does flow better from a phonetic perspective. Take this with a grain of salt since I never finished my linguistics degree and so I might not be applying the theory correctly, but the reason "one small step for a man" is awkward to say is due to the Stress Clash Avoidance Principle.

The general gist being that in English has an alternating pattern of stress and unstressed syllables where "content words" (like nouns and verbs) will have a little more emphasis when said and less important words like articles can sometimes sound distorted or unclear. This is why when you say 'a' in context of a sentence it gets shortened and will sound like 'uh'.

So going back to the phrase, if we try to say the original phrase intuition will put emphasis on 'step', no emphasis on 'for' but then, we run into a problem of needing to put emphasis on both 'a' and 'man' which is why there's that awkward feeling. In theory you could try to omit the emphasis on both 'for' and 'a' but I don't think that'd be possible either since English does require an alternating stressed/unstressed syllable pattern and there's not really a way to insert more syllables in something like' for' or 'a'...

Ultimately, while it doesn't make much sense, I do have a feeling this is the reason why "one small step for man" is a lot more natural to say than "one small step for a man".

[gay-jewish-bucky]

having a rare and under-researched multisystem genetic disorder with such large variation in both presentation and in complications is googling what the prognosis/progression of a certain aspect is and finding that no one has ever even done a literature review on that let alone a full study

[natandacat]

Hi, sorry if this is unsolicited/unhelpful but it might help so I just wanted to tell you anyway. My mum got diagnosed with M.E after a bout of flu when I was 7. I was too young too fully understand exactly what had happened to her at the time, but i still remember how scary and sudden it was was for the family. The first few months were awful and she could barely get out of bed, but she did get a LOT better! Within a few years she was able to walk up hills and even drive short distances again. She will never be 100% recovered, but it's not over, and she's certainly still able to live a good life, 21 years later :)

I do appreciate it, thank you. The problem is that I'm getting worst in the second year, not better. I was doing so much better in the first 6 months somehow. Also, since we have stopped giving a shit about the pandemic, it's likely that I will end up contracting covid again. Even though I now have a treatment protocol in place for this eventuality (instead of a general instruction to go to the ER and wish for the best lol), it's likely that this will at least cause a momentary relapse of symptoms (if not permanent). I just have a very atypical case and even the not bs doctors I've seen are genuinely confused. The thing that breaks my heart the most is not being able to play the cello, because it's too physical. It's not just art to me, it's a part of my body. It's like losing my ability to cry or laugh. But thank you for this. There is a treatment that we're trying, it will just take months to show effects if it has any. And who knows, maybe there are issues with my brain which can be fixed, so eh.

[noraqrosa]

♤the internet learning what logical fallacies are was a mistake

[kazoologist]

you know i really have always been more of the opinion that if someone is studying the history/folklore/culture of a group that isn't their own but if they proceed with a great deal of care and caution and view themselves as scholarly collaborators as opposed to authorities that it like. is probably fine. but man wrapping up my reference services homework for cherokee folklore here is showing me that not NEARLY enough scholars agree with me

[damiduck]

Damian, handing Bruce a piece of paper with a very neat calendar on it: father, I will be taking a step back from my participation in our nightly patrols. I have carefully considered factors such as, but not limited to, school tests, most likely days for breakouts and when other people will be available. Here is my schedule.

Bruce: any particular reason you are stepping back from Robin?

Damian: I have reached an acceptable age and am by far mature enough, so I will be participating in Ramadan this year, father. Afterwards I will pick my duties up as normal, but with changed sleeping and eating patterns, this is the most logical step for now.

Bruce, who grew up with a jewish mother and christian father who were intent to raise him on some weird mix of the two, then a second father who was atheist, proceeded to lose his entire way in any form of religion due to losing himself in his teen years, took in Jewish boy, then a catholic one with religious trauma, then an atheist one who had no idea how to even approach the idea of religion, followed up by a pagan girl and already making seven different mental lists of things he will need to research, how to add aspects of Islam into their weird family holidays and trying desperately to show his support for his son: ....hnn

Damian: thank you father