#the second is for understanding

[hedalexa]

Oh you just finished reading The Locked Tomb? Congrats! Read it again. I’m so serious right now. Read. It. Again.

[arynneva]

wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

[redisnotonfire]

shout out to suzanne collins for, in the middle of Everything Else she was doing in sotr, dropping a paragraph that’s just “btw fuck ai”

[forgettable-au]

But that's dessert!

I FINALLY FINISHED THIS THING LET'S GOOO

I hope u all like it

[technically-human]

YAAAAY U REPLIED TO MY ASK! 1!!! 1! 1! 1!! (also can we have some more shadow hating Robotnik for existing and loving stone for... Also existing)

They're all adapting

[iloveluxu]

im going to go to hell for this probably

[prlssprfctn]

I still can't stress enough over how underrated Ghostmaker in this fandom is.

You want to say that my man, Minhkhoa Khan, dragged Slade's ass and called him out ("But what should be expected from a guy who usually goes after the kids?") as if Super Bowl depended on him, almost kissed the shit out of Bruce in Moscow, fucks pretty men and women in his penthouse, is immune to fear toxin, and despite all break-ups and reinconcilation, total different morals, got Bruce Wayne asking him to join him in Gotham after years of divorce, AND YOU STILL SLEEP ON HIS CHARACTER?

[luckthebard]

Every day we inch closer to finding out what the hell the German dub of the Mighty Nein cartoon is going to do about Caleb.

[lilybug-02]

That's a lot of water...

Bug Fact: The nocturnal African Dung Beetle can see 1,000 times better than a honeybee and uses the Milky Way stars as navigation!

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Volume 2 Masterpost

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[madbard]

Watching Gravity Falls for the first time in 2024 is certainly an experience.

Because there is a lot of fandom overlap, so of course I’ve seen fanart before, but I didn’t have the context for it.

So I entered Gravity Falls with two key pieces of knowledge:

1. There is apparently toxic triangle yaoi.

2. Everybody is a CHICKEN.

[ms-demeanor]

I don't care about data scraping from ao3 (or tbh from anywhere) because it's fair use to take preexisting works and transform them (including by using them to train an LLM), which is the entire legal basis of how the OTW functions.

[out-of-lucky]

Batgirl 2000!!! To the person who recommended it, it's sooo good.

It's got to be the craziest experience to have your whole thought process fundamentally changed. I'd crash out on that telepath dude.

[jinglebunns]

happy 3 yr anniversary to Kirby and the Forgor Land!! this game rewired my brain and cracked my life like a glowstick and i love it dearly

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

MDZS x Firefly AU: A ragtag crew.

[luneartt]

the whole "geese mating for life" thing is funny to me (not funny, deeply tragic, but you get it) because yes, we know that this is false and suzanne collins decided to put it anyway. which is a VERY good parallel to the way we tend to hierarchize relationships and think that there is only one love for life. it's not true, we are capable of loving in equal amounts and in different ways (even in romantic relationships) several people. but this idea of a hierarchy of relationships is so intrinsic in our heads that we tend to think it's true, even if it's not (just like geese mating for life). and this is a broken man, who was ripped away from the first girl he loved before he could even experience all that love with her and never really began to heal (probably not until the end of mockinjay). it's OBVIOUS - and consistent - that he thinks this way.

and by the way, giving my contributions to the discussion as a hayffie shipper for years now, because i can't help it: even before sotr, the love that haymitch felt for lenore dove, along with the social complexity and political debates that can be raised by a relationship between haymitch and effie, is precisely what adds layers and development capacity and attracts me to them. so no, nothing about my ship was destroyed by this book and yes, i'm quite the opposite of frustrated by his love for lenore. both of my two favorite characters (individually) and their relationship (as coworkers, friends or, non-canonically, lovers) were profoundly deepened by it.

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."