#to be fair i think that's probably most people's experience with reading anne of green gables for the first time lmao

[all-that-jazz-93]

I understood the concept of shipping and OTPs long before I knew the terminology.

I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time when I was eleven years old, and the moment Anne Shirley cracked her slate over Gilbert Blythe's head, I knew they were meant to be together.

[aliveandfullofjoy]

So I was reading about the first Oscars ceremony, and it had a division between Outstanding Picture and Best Unique & Artistic Film, where Unique & Artistic was apparently meant to be an equal to Outstanding Picture but dedicated more for prestige artistic works. The next year, the two categories became one from then on, and Outstanding Picture was the only top prize. (If any of that is wrong, blame wikipedia.)

If the split had remained, and there was a more commercial-y movie top prize and a prestige art top prize, what are some notable movies that suddenly pick up wins?

okay wait........ this is a brilliant question and i am ashamed to say i’ve never really given it much thought until now.

idk if you’ve seen wings and sunrise but they’re both pretty great and they do represent wildly different kinds of filmmaking. while it’s safe to say Wings is the more commercial film, it has great craftsmanship behind it and it very clearly created the template for accessible, capital-i Important, and well-made best picture winners to come. 

and, full transparency, sunrise is one of my, like, top 15 favorite movies, so i’m hella biased, but that movie is a gorgeous and strange and thrilling piece of work. the title “unique and artistic film” is impossibly vague, but watching sunrise makes it very, very clear that it fits that bill for that category. and while we’ll, of course, never know what might have happened if that category had continued, it’s tempting to think that all the winners in unique and artistic film would be of sunrise’s calibre, but knowing the oscars... that’s clearly a fantasy, lol. while sunrise is a wildly inventive and artistic film, it’s important to remember that it was fully on the academy’s radar -- janet gaynor won best actress in part for her performance in the film, and it also won best cinematography. so while it’s tempting to think the academy would always recognize a truly unique and artistic achievement every year, in all likelihood, they probably wouldn’t stray too far from the movies that were already on their radar. 

so for this thought experiment!!

it’s probably safe to assume every best picture winner has to go in one of the two categories. there are only a handful of winners that stick out as maybe missing out on the big win in this new system, but only a handful. 

so uh. this is way more than you asked but i got hooked. here’s what i think might have happened if the two best picture categories had stuck around. as i was working through the years, it became clear to me that, unfortunately, in a lot of years, the unique and artistic film would likely end up going to the more overtly “prestigious” films, such as the song of bernadette or the life of emile zola, while their far better and more commercially viable rivals (casablanca for bernadette, the awful truth for zola) would win outstanding picture. the actual best picture winners have an asterisk next to them. what’s also interesting to consider is the importance of the best director category: most of the time, a split in picture and director will tell you what’s clearly the runner-up. those years, usually, give you a good sense of how the two awards would shake out.

Outstanding Picture / Unique and Artistic Film

1929: The Broadway Melody*; The Divine Lady 

1930: The Big House; All Quiet on the Western Front* 

1931: Cimarron*; Morocco 

1932: Grand Hotel*; Bad Girl

1933: Little Women; Cavalcade*

1934: It Happened One Night*; One Night of Love 

1935: The Informer; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (** this is one of the few years i think the actual BP winner, Mutiny on the Bounty, would miss out; The Informer was clearly the runner-up for BP with wins in director, actor, and screenplay, while Midsummer was seen as THE artistic triumph of the year, and with its historic write-in cinematography win, there was clearly a lot of passion for it)

1936: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; The Great Ziegfeld*

1937: The Awful Truth; The Life of Emile Zola*

1938: You Can’t Take It With You*; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Grand Illusion (** this one’s tough... Grand Illusion made history as the first non-english movie nominated for BP, and it clearly had a lot of support, but Snow White was such a monumental moment in Hollywood, and the academy clearly acknowledged that with its honorary award)

1939: Gone with the Wind*; The Wizard of Oz (** this is one of the first years with a clear runaway favorite for best picture, which makes guessing the way the other award would go very difficult! i’m leaning towards Oz purely because of its technical achievements, but i’m not confident about that choice at all.)

1940: Rebecca*; The Grapes of Wrath 

1941: How Green Was My Valley*; Citizen Kane

1942: Yankee Doodle Dandy; Mrs. Miniver*

1943: Casablanca*; The Song of Bernadette

1944: Going My Way*; Wilson

1945: The Bells of St. Mary’s; The Lost Weekend*

1946: The Best Years of Our Lives*; Henry V

1947: Gentleman’s Agreement*; A Double Life 

1948: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Hamlet*

1949: All the King’s Men*; The Heiress 

1950: All About Eve*; Sunset Boulevard

1951: A Place in the Sun; An American in Paris*

1952: The Greatest Show on Earth*; The Quiet Man 

1953: Roman Holiday; From Here to Eternity*

1954: The Country Girl; On the Waterfront*

1955: Marty*; Picnic

1956: Around the World in 80 Days*; Giant

1957: Peyton Place; The Bridge on the River Kwai

1958: The Defiant Ones; Gigi*

1959: The Diary of Anne Frank; Ben-Hur*

1960: Elmer Gantry; The Apartment*

1961: West Side Story*; Judgment at Nuremberg

1962: To Kill a Mockingbird; Lawrence of Arabia*

1963: Tom Jones*; 8½ 

1964: Mary Poppins; My Fair Lady*

1965: The Sound of Music*; Doctor Zhivago

1966: A Man for All Seasons*; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1967: In the Heat of the Night*; The Graduate

1968: Oliver!*; 2001: A Space Odyssey 

1969: Midnight Cowboy; Z 

1970: Airport; Patton*

1971: The French Connection*; The Last Picture Show

1972: The Godfather; Cabaret

1973: The Sting*; The Exorcist

1974: Chinatown; The Godfather, Part II

1975: Jaws; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*

1976: Rocky*; Network

1977: Star Wars; Annie Hall*

1978: Coming Home; The Deer Hunter*

1979: Kramer vs. Kramer*; All That Jazz

1980: Ordinary People*; Raging Bull

1981: Chariots of Fire*; Reds

1982: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; Gandhi*

1983: Terms of Endearment*; Fanny and Alexander

1984: Amadeus*; The Killing Fields

1985: Out of Africa*; Ran

1986: Platoon*; Blue Velvet

1987: Moonstruck; The Last Emperor*

1988: Rain Man*; Who Framed Roger Rabbit

1989: Driving Miss Daisy*; Born on the Fourth of July

1990: Ghost; Dances with Wolves*

1991: The Silence of the Lambs*; JFK

1992: Unforgiven*; Howards End 

1993: Schindler’s List*; The Piano 

1994: Forrest Gump*; Three Colors: Red 

1995: Braveheart*; Toy Story 

1996: Jerry Maguire; The English Patient*

1997: Titanic*; L.A. Confidential

1998: Shakespeare in Love*; Saving Private Ryan

1999: The Cider House Rules; American Beauty*

2000: Traffic; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (** this is another year where i think the actual BP winner, Gladiator, might have missed out. it was a tight three-way race going into oscar night, and if there were two BP awards, i think this consensus might have settled, leaving Gladiator to go home with just actor and some tech awards.)

2001: A Beautiful Mind*; Mulholland Drive

2002: Chicago*; The Pianist

2003: Mystic River; The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King*

2004: Million Dollar Baby*; The Aviator

2005: Crash*; Brokeback Mountain

2006: The Departed*; Babel

2007: No Country for Old Men*; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008: The Dark Knight; Slumdog Millionaire*

2009: The Hurt Locker*; Avatar

2010: The King’s Speech*; The Social Network

2011: The Artist*; The Tree of Life

2012: Argo*; Life of Pi

2013: 12 Years a Slave*; Gravity 

2014: Birdman*; Boyhood

2015: Spotlight*; The Revenant

2016: La La Land; Moonlight*

2017: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Shape of Water*

2018: Black Panther; Roma (** again, i think Green Book gets bumped out in this scenario, i think Black Panther is precisely the kind of movie that benefits from an award that’s seemingly more ~populist~ while Roma easily snags the unique & artistic prize)

2019: 1917; Parasite*

2020: The Father; Nomadland*

but of course i have no idea at all, and most of these are just my gut reactions lol. what a fun question!

[atruththatyoudeny]

Monthly Reads | October 2020

Happy 28th! I probably sound like a broken record already but I have to say it again: this fandom has an insane amount of talented writers! I am in awe! Every single one of you is my hero! ♥♥♥ Here are all the 23 fics I read and loved this month:

✧ Welcome to The Rivalry | 2tiedships2 | a/b/o - strangers to lovers - enemies to lovers - rivalry - college - 19k “Welcome home!” Niall yelled, clapping his hands in excitement. “Isn’t it great?” Louis looked between Niall and the house, unsure how to respond. “I don’t understand,” Louis finally managed to say. “Aren’t we a little old to be living so close to campus?” Niall scoffed. “You’re only twenty-four for fuck’s sake. There is still plenty of partying left for us to do. What better place than one street over from where a car was set on fire after the Michigan game last year?” “Is there proof of that? Did the car have Michigan plates or something? Is there a photo I can send in a DM to Wolfie?” As if on cue, a Twitter notification popped up on Louis’ Apple watch. He had tweeted again. Or a reverse You’ve Got Mail au inspired by the Ohio State/Michigan rivalry. Featuring duplex neighbors, (kind of) enemies to lovers, and an anonymous Twitter feud between omega Louis and alpha Harry.

✧ Back to Seventeen | crimsontheory | teacher - soccer coach - 26k As a first grade teacher in a small town in Illinois, Harry’s life is pretty simple. He loves his job, is close with his family, and has a best friend he would go to the ends of the earth for. When a new soccer coach starts at the local high school, things start to get a bit more exciting for Harry. Because that coach just happens to be Louis Tomlinson; the guy Harry was unrequitedly in love with in high school. Or the one where Louis moves back to his hometown and Harry realizes he’s still not over his high school crush.

✧ Sigh for Sigh | logogram | historical - a/b/o - regency - miscommunication - pining - marriage of convenience - 11k When his father's sudden illness forces Harry to get married in a hurry, he's delighted that Lord Louis Tomlinson is the one who makes him an offer. Being married to Louis is just as wonderful as he imagined, except for one thing-- they haven't mated yet. Or the one where they're both idiots, Harry's afraid to say what he's thinking, and Louis's just trying to be honorable.

✧ We Can Find a Place to Feel Good | yeah_alright | 1960s - High School - school dances - 8k 14-year-old Harry is ecstatic to finally be old enough to experience the time-honored tradition of school dances. But with each year that passes and each dance he attends, he’s realizing they’re not all he used to hope they’d be. Especially when he can't actually dance with the person he most wants to. Maybe he and Louis can figure out their own ways to keep dancing, anyway.

✧ At Risk, I Fold | clare328 | canon compliant - established relationship - angst - emotional hurt/comfort - miscommunication - anxiety - implied/referenced alcohol abuse - 15k 2015 is a stream of hotel rooms and whisky on the rocks, tired glances and touching hands under tables. It’s the bears and the bees under a rainbow sky, and Harry and Louis have to figure out how to grow up together, instead of apart.

✧ Carry These Feelings | LadyLondonderry | fae Á faires - established relationship - magic - 3k Harry is one of the fae, and has to return to Court once a year to please the Queen. He makes a detour on his way home to Louis. Two weeks and I'll be home.

✧ Hung Up High in the Gallery | lovelarry10 | friends to lovers - slow burn - pining - 14k "Louis, lay still!” Louis sighed loudly, and Harry watched his chest puff out as he inhaled deeply, the breath he let out loudly making Harry’s curls shift. “I am, stop being so fussy. Can I see yet?” “Nope,” Harry remarked, smiling to himself. “I’m doing your chest next. Shit, this is going to look so good, Lou. Your tan and these colours… why haven’t we done this before?” “Because we haven’t been this drunk in a while, and it never occurred to me until tonight?” ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ When Harry’s best friend, Louis, comes to support him at his art show, he decides they need to do some celebrating afterwards. How fast do the lines between friends and lovers get blurred ... or better, get painted?

✧ Love you in the dark | Perzikje | historical - wedding night - arranged marriage - dubious consent - 10k The story of a historical wedding night: in which Louis is quite unaware as to just how clueless his brand new husband is about sex. They try their best to figure it out together.

✧ Victorian Boy | audreyhheart | historical - victorian - royalty - enemies to friends to lovers - slow burn - angst - murder mystery - 101k Victorian AU. Harry the virgin Duke of Somerset knows little of love, while Louis the sly Duke of Warwick knows too much. When the two dukes come together for the Bilsdale fox hunt in York, Harry finds himself drawn into Louis' bed. But when secrets from Louis' dark past come to light, Harry fears that the fox isn't the only one being hunted.

✧ the anticipation of knowing you | sweetrevenge | strangers to lovers - neighbors - light angst - 13k Hello Neighbor! Just wanted to let you know that you were having sex so loud and scarily I called our building manager and security officer because I thought you were hurt. P.S. I sent them away when I heard you yell ‘cock’. I’m sorry that I heard that, but I wanted you to know in case they stopped by to check on you or something. Sorry! Your neighbor Louis Tomlinson in apartment #306 After Louis overhears his next door neighbor having sex, he doesn’t really expect anything but awkward hallway encounters to come from it. Instead, he’s surprised to find himself in a whirlwind pen pal relationship with the sweet, albeit loud, baker next door.

✧ We'll Be All Right | dandelionfairies | married couple - accridents - 13k Harry is performing his one night only show in LA but there are four very important people missing.

✧ The Last Song of Your Life | reminiscingintherain | famous/not famous - Rays of Sunhsine - homophobia - 21k As Harry glanced around at all of the faces, he froze as a very familiar pair of blue eyes leapt out at him. A pair of eyes that he hadn’t seen since before the One Direction bomb exploded. A pair of eyes that he never expected to see again. ~~~~ or the famous/not famous AU, with first love, miscommunication, interfering bandmates, and adorable little sisters.

✧ Her | jaerie | a/b/o - trans character - transitioning - dysphoria - anxiety - quarantine - 7k The buttery swipe of a high quality lipstick was almost a sexual experience in and of itself. This time a deep colour with purple undertones which drew out the emphasis of long, dark lashes and perfectly contoured cheekbones. It was a look for loose and styled curls, feeling the classy formal nightclub vibes reflected back from the mirror. The silky plum coloured slip dress would be perfect to debut. The tags still needed to be cut free from the new garment that hung in the closet, but tonight was the night to set it free. When Harry gets home, she can finally be who she wants to be. Letting someone else in always feels like a distant daydream to her... until it suddently isn't.

✧ Loving You's the Antidote | lululawrence | Stylinshaw - a/b/o - touch deprivation - hospitalization - soulmates - polyamory - anxiety - friends to lovers - no smut - 11k Nick and Harry had never been an obvious match. When eighteen-year-old Harry, newly presented as an omega, came home freshly bonded to Nick, a man nine years his elder and a beta no less, Anne had been more than skeptical and Eileen had shared some harsh words of her own. That didn’t deter them, though, and their families soon realised there really was something special about the bondmates that allowed them to work together almost seamlessly. It was only a few months later that Harry started getting sick. Or the one where Harry and Nick have been able to keep Harry's disorder at bay over the course of their relationship, but when they move to London and away from their support system, they find themselves in desperate need of help.

✧ Like A Neon Sign | reminiscingintherain | canon compliant - mentions of death - fluff - 8k Harry had always been perfect to Louis, through every age, through every stage, and in all the important ways, he was proud to have been able to witness the growth that Harry had experienced first-hand.

✧ We Had Everything | lightswoodmagic (sarah_writes) | exes to lovers - getting back together - famous/not famous - 3k “You know Harry’s coming, yeah?” Louis’ fingers twitched, faltering where he was straightening the knot in his tie as he tried to ignore the false nonchalance in Zayn’s voice. He had no idea how he missed the name on the invite list, how he skipped over the initials on the small gifts, didn’t notice the elegant swirl of Harry’s name inked onto an emerald green place card. Or, Louis and Harry fell apart, and Louis' never forgiven himself. He gets a second chance at Zayn and Liam's wedding.

✧ True To Your Heart | reminiscingintherain | Mulan AU - a/b/o - 13k The world was at war with itself. In the small country of Enilenif, in a tiny, often overlooked corner of the world, young Alphas were quickly signing up to fight, desperate to protect their Omegas and their country as Aidem began to attack their borders. A few defiant Omegas tried to enlist as well, but were firmly turned away with disapproving looks by the staff in the office. Harry Styles was one such Omega, sighing heavily as he kicked at a small stone on his walk home.

✧ What the Water Gave Me | larryatendoftheday | fantasy - mermaids - long distance relationship - 29k When a mermaid crawls out of the sea to listen to Harry sing, it changes everything.

✧ it’s hard for me to go home | localopa | angst - breakup - getting back together - 5k don’t call me baby again

✧ The Prince and the Thief | jaerie | Fairy Tale - a/b/o - strangers to lovers - violence - kidnapping - threats of rape/non-con - 19k Harry is an omega prince locked in a tower and Louis is the thief sent to kidnap him. Nothing turns out as planned.

✧ Up On The Shore | wordsnnotes | Eroda AU - magic - epistolary - friends to lovers - childhood friends - emotional/psychological abuse - angst - long-distance relationship - domestic violence - 34k Magic has been outlawed on Eroda ever since President Cowell came into power, and all the magic people had to go live on the island of Stonell. Things are not looking good for Harry when he finds out he's a magician and his abilities seem more and more out of control. Thankfully, his best friend Niall's mother has the idea to put him in touch with Louis, a magician boy living on Stonell. They begin a secret correspondence and drama ensues. Or: Louis hides his feelings under sarcasm, Harry is too sweet for his own sake, everyone is a rebel, the mums are amazing, Harry's dad is a jerk, and I'm struggling to make it understandable without using normal narration.

✧ this town's just an ocean now | louistomlinsons | exes to lovers - friends to lovers - summer romance - miscommunication - childhood friends - light angst - fluff - 31k “I have really great friends. Do you remember Louis? You guys were always hanging out when you were growing up.” Harry remembers Louis. Harry remembers Louis. Suddenly, his throat feels way too dry, despite the ice cream he keeps licking at. He chokes a little on a chocolate chip before saying, “I, uh. I remember Louis.” Her face brightens. “We have dinner every Sunday. He owns the house now. His parents moved further north, and he wanted to stay here, so they just gave it over. Now if you want to worry about someone being lonely, that’s who I worry about.” inspired by watermelon sugar, featuring picnics on the beach and boys being dumb

✧ I Am the Blinking Light | dearmrsawyer | ghosts - shipwreck - 19k There is a legend of a lighthouse far out to sea. It can’t be found on any map, and those who do find it never return. They say a ghost haunts the lighthouse, and you can hear it calling out in loneliness on the ocean waves.

[coochiequeens]

I’m so sorry to any woman that will read the whole article. So much bs to justify not saying Woman or Mother

Last year, a brand-new labor-and-delivery hospital opened on the well-to-do Upper East Side of New York City. Its name, the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns, might strike most people as innocuous or straightforward. But to some people, the suggestion that a hospital where babies are born is for women is offensive, because transgender and nonbinary people who do not identify as women can also get pregnant and deliver babies.

Only niche groups tend to care about how Americans discuss gender and pregnancy—including whether it’s better to use the term pregnant peopleinstead of pregnant women. But those groups care a lot. Representative Cori Bush of Missouri used the term birthing people in a hearing, causing a mini-uproar on social media. “When we talk about ‘birthing people,’ we’re being inclusive. It’s that simple,” the pro-abortion-rights group NARAL tweeted in her defense. Others, however, see this kind of language as exclusionary because it erases women and mothers as worthy categories of identity. Ann Romney, the wife of Senator Mitt Romney, tweeted angrily in June, “The Biden administration diminishing motherhood to ‘birthing person’ is simply insulting to all moms.” It was the first time she had tweeted all year.

And yet, Americans who don’t mainline niche political or linguistic fights probably don’t even know this is a debate. When I texted a friend in a small, liberal-ish city about this topic recently, he had no idea what I was talking about.

To understand the contours of the debate, I called Louise Melling, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who leads projects on women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. Although she does not identify as transgender or nonbinary, she is one of the country’s most influential progressive legal thinkers on gender norms and the law. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Emma Green: Why do you believe it’s important to shift our language around gender and pregnancy?

Louise Melling: First of all, if we’re talking about “pregnant people,” that language says to people—to transgender men and to nonbinary people—“we see you.” It should do a fair amount of work to help address discrimination. If we talk about “pregnant people,” it’s a reminder to all of us to catch ourselves when we’re sitting in the waiting room at the GYN that we’re not going to stare at the man who’s there. We’re not going to be disconcerted.

More importantly, we’re not going to behave in a way that makes that person uncomfortable—that signals discrimination and unwelcomeness to them. And that’s incredibly important when we think about the kinds of discrimination that continue to be pervasive against transgender people and nonbinary people.

It’s nothing short of heartbreaking to read about the experiences of transgender people seeking health care. If somebody is hostile to you, you’re not going to go back. So we have really serious consequences for transgender people—people who already are really in need of health care, who are often of lower income because of all the discrimination they face.

It is the reality that not only women seek abortions. It is not only women who are birthing. It is not only women who are seeking mammography and pap smears and other care. And recognizing that does real work.

Green: This may be hard to summarize, but where do things stand—both in terms of how these terms are used legally, but also how they’re used in the culture?

Melling: It’s interesting to me, for example, that the CDC website nowspeaks of “pregnant people.” With every passing year, it’s more pervasive. My GYN just talked to me about this: “Oh, I just learned this,” and was really working to change her language.

Green: Within the legal worlds you run in—at organizations like the ACLU—is there consensus on the use of gender-neutral terms to refer to pregnancy? Or is there some remaining debate?

Melling: In the spaces in which I find myself most commonly, people are really committed to talking about “pregnant people.” People are really committed to using gender-neutral language. Historically, people have been punished for deviating from gender norms. That includes women, that includes transgender people, that includes nonbinary people. I see commonality, not difference, in this struggle.

I work on reproductive rights. I work on women’s rights. I work on LGBTQ rights. My colleagues are people who are in pain. My colleagues are people who are excluded because of language. They are threatened because of language. When you think about the bills that passed this year, they try not only to attack, but almost obliterate transgender people. A total erasure from the language has huge consequences.

The depth of the discrimination, the pain of the discrimination, the urgency of opening up space for people to be seen—that’s something I’ve really learned from my colleagues.

Green: Your gig covers a lot of different angles of the law—you work on women’s rights, and you work on LGBTQ rights. And I wonder: Is there a cost to gender-neutral language around pregnancy for women? For example: An employer sees a pregnant woman and notices her bump starting to grow and immediately thinks, “Oh, I need to take her off that project because she’s going to become a mom and she’s going to want to step back from work or stay home.” For better or worse, I don’t know if employers would have the same kind of attentiveness to changes in a trans man’s body, at least not around pregnancy.

If, legally speaking, you treat pregnancy like it’s gender-neutral, do you think that could end up hurting women, who face different kinds of discrimination than trans and nonbinary people?

Melling: I don’t see it as an either/or. For example, I think it’s critical that we talk about “pregnant people,” that we use language that tries to address discrimination, that lets transgender people and nonbinary people feel seen.

At the same time, I also talk about the ways in which restrictions on abortion constitute gender discrimination and, in particular, target women. When legislators are passing these measures, they have women in mind, and they’re passing these measures as part of a historic trend of trying to press women into one particular role. Abortion restrictions perpetuate gender stereotypes and thwart prospects towards equality.

You can acknowledge that, while women may be the dominant group hurt by this particular restriction, abortion is not a service sought only by women.

Green: On the one hand, you can think about terms like pregnant people as being more inclusive: They provide legal cover to the broadest universe of people who might experience pregnancy, and they also invite us to reimagine who might have this kind of experience.

But aspects of these terms are also exclusionary. Talking about “birthing people” means you are not talking about “women giving birth” or “birth moms.” That’s an affirmative identity that people really care about.

Do you agree with that at all—that gender-neutral language around pregnancy may be exclusionary in some way?

Melling: Not if we’re doing it right. You can talk about birthing as an experience that is common to so many women, as well as an experience for transgender men and nonbinary people. You can have more expansive language. This is how people sometimes talk about BIPOC: That’s a broad category, but then you can be more specific about how certain restrictions affect Indigenous people or Black people. You can put emphasis in different places while still recognizing broader harm. You just have to be more intentional. You have to do more work.

One analogy that I think might help is breast cancer. I don’t even remember when I first heard about men who get breast cancer. I will admit: I hadn’t thought about it. The man who has breast cancer has his own fear of the diagnosis. Then he’s going to struggle going into a whole host of places that are gendered. We addressed a gap in care to try and encourage women to come forward and have a community. But we also need to make space so that men with breast cancer can be recognized both by the medical profession and by the rest of us.

Green: It seems like there’s also a flip side to that example: Without specific, gendered targeting around particular health needs, women might also miss out on care. Pregnancy is really hard! And it’s often a super gendered experience. You’re chained to your body, and gender really shapes how people view you and what you’re going through.

I think at least some women navigate that by affirming their new identity: I am a mother. This is part of being a woman. I see myself in that. I find solace in it. So I guess this comes back to the same question: Do you think there’s something lost in trying to create a more inclusive vision of pregnancy?

Melling: I don’t think the increasing reliance on language like pregnant peoplemeans you can’t define yourself as a mother, or say this is an experience many women go through, or recognize that I’m experiencing this in really gendered ways. One of the things that Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized was the way in which gender stereotypes, gender roles, and gender norms hurt all of us by locking us into some kind of vision. Women can speak about our experience, but that doesn’t preclude men from speaking about how gender has affected them, too.

Talking about birthing and gender discrimination is still something that women can do. We just also simultaneously want to talk about the ways in which we’re not recognizing trans men as parents. If we’re doing this right, we’re creating more, not less, conversation, because we’re talking about the many different ways in which gender expectations are playing out on who we are.

Green: Is there any part of your feminist self that has worried about the potential consequences of this as a cultural and legal move?

Melling: No, because I see the commonality. That’s one of the beauties of being at the ACLU. You live intersectionality in terms of conversations about the law and conversations you have in the kitchen—in your collegiality as well as your legal theory.

Green: This may be an unwelcome imaginative exercise. But I wonder if you have spent time thinking about why this makes some people on the right so mad. Why do you think people care about this?

Melling: Look, why do people get mad that people marry the person they love? If you want to have a child on your own, why do people get mad? If you fall in love with somebody of another race? I think there may be some people who are confused at first—changes in language have to come with education. But for those prominent politicians, whether it’s on abortion rights or transgender rights or voting rights, there’s clearly an effort to have society be more narrow in imagination and inclusivity.

Green: Do you think it’s possible to make a good-faith argument against the use of birthing people?

Melling: I definitely think there’s a good-faith person who wants to ask a question. Change is hard. People want to hold on to their particular world. Or maybe it is not intuitive to people. But maybe it was hard for people to all of a sudden have a woman be the person at the law firm who managed their case, too.

Green: This may be another unwelcome imaginative exercise. But I’m sure you’ve heard the argument from some people on the right that the left has a culturally authoritarian streak. They embrace certain buzzwords and ways of thinking that are often reflective of academic thought, and it can seem like overnight, everyone is expected to use those words. If you don’t use the right language, you’re considered a bigot, or you get canceled.

Do you worry about that? That trying to shift something as fundamental as people’s perception of motherhood might further fuel this kind of cultural backlash?

Melling: I think this characterization is exaggerated and not true in really profound ways. Nobody is stopped from speaking about her motherhood or the importance of that. I go out of my way to talk about parenting so that men can be seen as parents. Not ‘You’re not a mother,’ but [opening] up space so that we no longer have the cultural expectation that women are the caregivers.

We need to do a good job of explaining why we care—explaining what the goals are here and talking about the ways in which gender stereotypes really do lock everybody into different kinds of roles.

Emma Green is a staff writer at ​The Atlantic, where she covers politics, policy, and religion.

[wildeoaths]

LGBTQ Book & Film Recommendations

Hello! As someone who tries to read widely, it can sometimes be frustrating to find good (well-written, well-made) LGBTQ+ works of literature and film, and mainstream recommendations only go so far. This is my shortlist. 

Some caveats: 1) I have only watched/seen some of these, though they have all been well-received.

2) The literature list is primarily focused on adult literary and genre fiction, since that is what I mostly read, and I feel like it’s easier to find queer YA fiction. Cece over at ProblemsOfABookNerd (YT) covers a lot of newer releases and has a YA focus, so you can check her out for more recommendations.

3) There are a ton of good films and good books that either reference or discuss queer theory, LGBTQ history and literary theory. These tend to be more esoteric and academic, and I’m not too familiar with queer theory, so they’ve largely been left off the list. I do agree that they’re important, and reading into LGBTQ-coding is a major practice, but they’re less accessible and I don’t want to make the list too intimidating.

4) I linked to Goodreads and Letterboxd because that’s what I use and I happen to really enjoy the reviews.

Any works that are bolded are popular, or they’re acclaimed and I think they deserve some attention. I’ve done my best to flag potential objections and triggers, but you should definitely do a search of the reviews. DoesTheDogDie is also a good resource. Not all of these will be suitable for younger teenagers; please use your common sense and judgement.

Please feel free to chime in in the replies (not the reblogs) with your recommendations, and I’ll eventually do a reblog with the additions!

BOOKS

> YOUNG ADULT

Don’t @ me asking why your favourite YA novel isn’t on this list. These just happen to be the picks I felt might also appeal to older teens/twentysomethings.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo - poetry.

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender - trans male teen protagonist. 

Red, White & Royal Blue

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda

The Gentleman’s Guide To Vice And Virtue

The Raven Boys (and Raven Cycle)

> LITERATURE: GENERAL

This list does skew M/M; more NB, trans and WLW recommendations are welcomed!

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. One of the most acclaimed contemporary LGBTQ novels and you’ve probably heard of it. Will probably make you cry.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. Portrait of a middle-aged gay man.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. M/M affair, British student high society; definitely nostalgic for the aristocracy so be aware of the context.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. It’s somewhat controversial, it’s gay, everyone knows the film at least.

Cronus’ Children / Le Jardin d'Acclimation by Yves Navarre. Winner of the Goncourt prize.

Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran. A young man in the 1970s NYC gay scene. Warning for drugs and sexual references.

Dorian, An Imitation by Will Self. Adaptation of Orscar Wilde’s novel. Warning for sexual content.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. Two wlw in the 1980s. Also made into a film; see below.

Gemini by Michel Tournier. The link will tell you more; seems like a very complex read. TW for troubling twin dynamics.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Another iconic M/M work.

Lost Boi by Sassafras Lowrey. A queer punk reimagining of Peter Pan. Probably one of the more accessible works on this list!

Lie With Me by Philippe Besson. Two teenage boys in 1980s France.

Maurice by E. M. Forster. Landmark work written in 1914. Also made into a film; see below.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. An expansive (and long) novel about the story of Cal, a hermaphrodite, by the author of The Virgin Suicides.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Plays with gender, time and space. Virginia Woolf’s ode to her lover Vita Sackville-West. What more do you want? (also a great film; see below).

Oscar Wilde’s works - The Picture of Dorian Gray would be the place to start. Another member of the classical literary canon.

Saga, vol.1 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. Graphic novel; warning for sexual content.

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinburg. An acclaimed work looking at working-class lesbian life and gender identity in pre-Stonewall America.

The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair. The basis for Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). I am hesitant to recommend this because I have not read this, though I have watched the film; the M/M dynamic and LGBTQ themes do not seem to be the primary focus. Warning for sexual content and incestuous dynamics between the twins.

The Animals At Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey. Plays with gothic elements, set during WW2, F/F elements.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham. References Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Probably a good idea to read Virginia Woolf first.

The Immoralist by André Gide. Translated from French.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline MIller. Drawing from the Iliad, focusing on Achilles and Patroclus. Contemporary fantasy that would be a good pick for younger readers.

The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. Gay life pre-AIDS crisis. Apparently contains a fair amount of sexual content.

What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell. A gay man’s coming of age in the American South.

> LITERATURE: WORLD LITERATURE

American and Western experiences are more prominent in LGBTQ works, just due to the way history and the community have developed, and the difficulties of translation. These are English and translated works that specifically foreground the experiences of non-White people living in (often) non-Western societies. I’m not white or American myself and recommendations in this area are especially welcomed.

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson. The memoirs and essays of a queer black activist, exploring themes of black LGBTQ experiences and masculinity.

A People’s History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian. Female communities and queer female characters in a Bangalore slum. A very new release but already very well received.

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. Coming-of-age in post-WW1 Japan. This one’s interesting, because it’s definitely at least somewhat autobiographical. Mishima can be a tough writer, and you should definitely look into his personality and his life when reading his work.

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi. A family saga told against the backdrop of Iranian history by a queer Iranian woman. Would recommend going into this knowing at least some of the political and historical context.

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones. A coming-of-age story and memoir from a gay, black man in the American South.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Another acclaimed contemporary work about the dynamics of abuse in LGBTQ relationships. Memoir.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Contemporary black British experience, told from the perspectives of 12 diverse narrators.

> POETRY

Crush by Richard Siken. Tumblr loves Richard Siken, worth a read.

Diving Into The Wreck by Adrienne Rich.

He’s So Masc by Chris Tse.

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson. The best presentation of Sappho we’re likely to get.

Lord Byron’s works - Selected Poems may be a good starting point. One of the Romantics and part of the classical literary canon.

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. The explicitly lesbian poems are apparently in the les fleurs du mal section.

> MEMOIR & NONFICTION

And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. An expansive, comprehensive history and exposure of the failures of media and the Reagan administration, written by an investigative journalist. Will probably make you rightfully angry.

How to Survive A Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France. A reminder of the power of community and everyday activism, written by a gay reporter living in NYC during the epidemic.

Indecent Advances: The Hidden History of Murder and Masculinity Before Stonewall by James Polchin. True crime fans, this one’s for you. Sociocultural history constructed from readings of the news and media.

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker. It’s illustrated, it’s written by an academic, it’s an easier introduction to queer theory. I still need to pick up a copy, but it seems like a great jumping-off point with an overview of the academic context.

Real Queer America by Samantha Allen. The stories of LGBTQ people and LGBTQ narratives in the conservative parts of America. A very well received contemporary read.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Gender, pregnancy and queer partnership. I’m not familiar with this but it is quite popular.

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan. LGBTQ history of Brooklyn from the nineteenth century to pre-Stonewall.

FILMS

With films it’s difficult because characters are often queercoded and we’re only now seeing films with better rep. This is a shortlist of better-rated films with fairly explicit LGBTQ coding, LGBTQ characters, or made by LGBTQ persons. Bolded films are ones that I think are likely to be more accessible or with wider appeal.

A Single Man (2009) - Colin Firth plays a middle-aged widower.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013) - A controversial one. Sexual content.

Booksmart (2019) - A pretty well made film about female friendship and being an LGBTQ teen.

Boy Erased (2018) - Warning for conversion therapy.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017) - Young AIDS activists in France.

Brokeback Mountain (2005) - Cowboy gays. This film is pretty famous, do you need more summary? Might make a good triple bill with Idaho and God’s Own Country.

Cabaret (1972) - Liza Minelli. Obvious plug to also look into Vincent Minelli.

Calamity Jane (1953) - There’s a lot that could be said about queer coding in Hollywood golden era studio films, but this is apparently a fun wlw-cowboy westerns-vibes watch. Read the reviews on this one!

Call Me By Your Name (2017) - Please don't debate this film in the notes.

Caravaggio (1986) - Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton are in it. Rather explicit.

Carol (2015) - Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are lesbians in 1950s America.

Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) - Hard to summarise, but one review calls it “lesbian birdman” and it has both Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in it, so consider watching it.

Colette (2018) - About the bi/queer female writer Colette during the belle epoque era. This had Keira Knightley so by all rights Tumblr should love it.

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) - Lesbian love in 1920s/80s? America.

God’s Own Country (2017) - Gay and British.

Happy Together (1997) - By Wong Kar Wai. No further explanation needed.

Heartbeats (2010) - Bi comedy.

Heartstone (2016) - It’s a story about rural Icelandic teenagers.

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015) -  Queer teens and religious themes.

Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974) - Early Chantal Akerman. Warning for sexual scenes.

Kill Your Darlings (2013) - Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat poets.

Love, Simon (2018)

Lovesong (2016) - Lesbian and very soft. Korean-American characters.

Love Songs (2007) - French trio relationship. Louis Garrel continues to give off non-straight vibes.

Mädchen In Uniform (1931) - One of the earliest narrative films to explicitly portray homosexuality. A piece of LGBTQ cinematic history.

Maurice (1987) - Adaptation of the novel.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) - Heavy gay coding.

Milk (2008) - Biopic of Harvey Milk, openly gay politician. By the same director who made My Own Private Idaho.

Moonlight (2016) - It won the awards for a reason.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) - Another iconic LGBTQ film. River Phoenix.

Mysterious Skin (2004) - Go into this film aware, please. Young actors, themes of prostitution, child ab*se, r***, and a lot of trauma.

Orlando (1992) - An excellent adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, and in my opinion far more accessible. Watch it for the queer sensibilities and fantastic period pieces.

Pariah (2011) - Excellent coming-of-age film about a black lesbian girl in Brooklyn.

Paris is Burning (1990) - LANDMARK DOCUMENTARY piece of LGBTQ history, documenting the African-American and Latine drag and ballroom roots of the NYC queer community.

Persona (1966) - It’s an Ingmar Bergman film so I would recommend knowing what you’re about to get into, but also I can’t describe it because it’s an Ingmar Bergman film.

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) - Cult classic queercoded boarding school girls.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) - By Celine Sciamma, who’s rapidly establishing herself in the mainstream as a LGBTQ film director. This is a wlw relationship and the queer themes are reflected in the cinematic techniques used. A crowd pleaser.

Pride (2014) - Pride parades with a British sensibility.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955) - Crowd-pleaser with bi coding and James Dean. The OG version of “you’re tearing me apart!”.

Rocketman (2019) - It’s Elton John.

Rent (2005) - Adaptation of the stage musical. Not the best film from a technical standpoint. I recommend the professionally recorded 2008 closing night performance instead.

Rope (1948) - Hitchcock film.

Sorry Angel (2018) - Loving portraits of gay French men.

Talk To Her (2002) - By Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar.

Tangerine (2015) - About trans sex workers. The actors apparently had a lot of input in the film, which was somehow shot on an iPhone by the same guy who went on to do The Florida Project. 

The Duke of Burgundy (2014) - Lesbians in an S&M relationship that’s going stale, sexual content obviously.

The Gay Deceivers (1969) - The reviews are better than me explaining.

The Handmaiden (2016) - Park Chan-wook makes a film about Korean lesbians and is criminally snubbed at the Oscars. Warning for sexual themes and kink.

The Favourite (2018) - Period movie, and lesbian.

Thelma And Louise (1991) - An iconic part of LGBTQ cinematic history. That is all.

The Celluloid Closet (1995) - A look into LGBTQ cinematic history, and the historical contexts we operated in when we’ve snuck our narratives into film.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) - Adaptation of the YA novel.

The Neon Demon (2016) - Apparently based on Elizabeth Bathory, the blood-drinking countess. Very polarising film and rated R.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) - Book adaptation. It has Ezra Miller in it I guess.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - No explanation needed, queer and transgressive vibes all the way.

They (2017) - Gender identity, teenagers.

Those People (2015) - They’re gay and they’re artists in New York.

Tomboy (2011) - One of the few films I’ve seen dealing with gender identity in children (10 y/o). Celine Sciamma developing her directorial voice.

Tropical Malady (2004) - By Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His is a very particular style so don’t sweat it if you don’t enjoy it.

Vita and Virginia (2018) - Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West biopic

Water Lilies (2007) - Celine Sciamma again! Teenage lesbian coming-of-age. 

When Marnie Was There (2014) - A Studio Ghibli film exploring youth, gender and sexuality.

Weekend (2011) - An indie film about young gay love.

Wilde (1997) - It’s a film about Oscar Wilde.

XXY (2007) - About an intersex teenager. Reviews on this are mixed.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) - Wonder what Diego Luna was doing before Rogue One? This is one of the things. Warning for sexual content.

[cecilspeaks]

155 - The Heist, part 3

Leave no stone unturned. Leave no rock unpivoted. Leave no pebble untwirled. Welcome to Night Vale.

My brother-in-law, Steve Carlsberg, is still in jail, wrongly accused of the recent bank heist. But I am happy to have my husband Carlos back home. The Sheriff’s Secret Police had only taken him in for some questions regarding the robbery of the Last Bank of Night Vale. Sheriff Sam had deemed Carlos a person of interest, which I’ve been saying for years, but Sheriff Sam meant it differently.

Carlos said while he was being questioned at the police station, he saw the other bank employees who were there the day of the robbery. Genevieve Daly, the new bank teller, was being asked if she saw anyone other than Steve Carlsberg near the vault that day. Carlos said she was stone faced, unhappy with the interrogation. Susan Willman was there, crying, as the police asked her who else, other than Steve Carlsberg, could have a key. And security guard Jesse McNeil was there looking quite ill, almost seasick, according to Carlos, as the police tried to badger him into implicating Steve Carlsberg.

Carlos has been home for a couple of weeks and in a terrible funk. He said Steve has a nearly impossible case. The police are convinced of Steve’s guilt and all their evidence points directly to him. Carlos hardly has any energy or emotion to work, or even leave the house. I feel awful for Steve too, and we are doing our best to support him and our family.

I tried cheering Carlos up by telling him my favorite science jokes, like two chemists walk into a bar and one tells the bartender, “I’ll have an H2O” and the other says “I’ll have an H20 too,” and the bartender says and sighs.. [fed up] “It’s been a long day guys,” and then the two chemists nod and say, [embarrassed] “Yeah oh god yeah sorry, just a couple of waters thanks.” And then later they make sure to tip very well. But Carlos didn’t even crack as mile, let alone laugh, and I asked him how his doorless fridge experiment was going and he’s welcome to work on it here, in his home laboratory. I don’t even mind if he keeps staining everything green with that weird gel he’s been using. “I ran out of gel, Cecil,” he said, prone on the couch not opening his eyes. “I couldn’t work on that, even if I wanted to. which I don’t.” Hm. I wanna curl up on the couch too, stay home from work. But I know that would be terrible for Carlos. There are many times I’ve felt flat or depressed, and Carlos has been there for me, keeping me company, taking in my sadness and reflecting back not a false smile but attentive eyes, a listening posture that makes me feel heard and understood, and that’s what I want to be for him. Besides, I think Steve can beat these charges. Steve may have been the only one with a key to the vault, but they cannot prove he opened the vault, as he was locked inside his own office during the robbery. And besides, Steve keeps very detailed accounting so they wouldn’t be able to find the stolen money, not even if he had taken it. Steve Carlsberg is… [moved] the nicest man in Night Vale. He’s a good boss, breaking his foot to get free to try to protect his employees. He’s a fine father. A loving husband. And a perfect brother-in-law. It’s just not... it’s not possible. You know, if someone on the inside did this, it was probably Susan. Susan Willman is the least trustworthy person in that bank, if not in this whole town. So if you’re going to…

[loud scary noises] Station Management just slit a memo under my door gently, reminding me about libel laws. The memo is written in fire on a sleep tablet, and there’s a snake curled around it so, uhh.. I’m going to leave my Susan WIllman theory alone. But. Let’s just say that there was an untrustworthy person in that bank, and that her name was Su..anne Wilt..son. Yes, Sue-Anne Wilson, yes and this hypothetical jerk was always complaining at PTA meetings about her own personal problems, rather than focusing on the agenda, let’s just say. And this Sue-Anne Wilson once accused Steve Carlsberg of censoring her, when Steve was just trying to finish the meeting in a timely manner so that the basketball team could se the gym for evening practice. This person might well hold a grudge against Steve Carlsberg and want to not only steal from him, but frame him for the crime. 

Or, what if the Sheriff’s Secret Police… [loud scary noises] was doing a really great job, so great that they didn’t have a lot of arrests to make because the town was so safe. And of course, [chuckling nervously] they would never need to frame someone for robbery! So they would look like they were solving one of the major crimes in recent memory. Or maybe it was space slugs. Some distant aliens from across the galaxy somehow found our solar system and spotted our Earth, and then randomly chose Night Vale, and for whatever reason, they really wanted our money, so they went down inside the bank vault while the building was on fire, and without the safe key they entered the locked room because these space slugs can crawl through walls, and then they stole all the money. I don’t know! I feel helpless.[loud scary noises fade out]

Reading the news and getting angrier and angrier, but you know there’s little I can do about terrible things that keep happening. I’m sure you can’t relate. Maybe a community calendar will cheer me up.

This Saturday, the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex opens its annual Haunted Halloween Hayride. There was complications this year, because Ghost Union Local 31 went on strike for an increase in pensions and maternity leave. Teddy Williams, owner of the Desert Flower, argued that ghosts cannot retire nor get pregnant, but the union countered with vaguely human faces muttering in the shadows while Teddy screamed, and eventually, a deal was truck.

Sunday morning is the pie eating contest at the Night Vale fair. Contestants will be competing for a top prize of a 1991 Buick Le Sabre, autographed by former US presidential hopeful and Illinois governor, Adelai Stevenson.

Tuesday afternoon is a tedious song. Wednesday night is the high school dance team’s statewide semifinals at the rec center. Our own Night Vale High School is competing that night. Their top rival is Red Mesa High School, who will be performing a jazz routine called Tommy Tunes Broadway: an upbeat medley of classic show tunes. Night Vale’s dance team will present (--) [0:09:21] postmodern masterpiece (-): contemplative blend of sculpture opera and dance defined by its explosive physical bursts, chanting, and (contra-) movements born of a 22-member ensemble, who express the human body as a multidimensional art installation. Good luck to all dancers!

And finally, Thursday is sick, so Friday will be covering Thursday’s shift. Eh, except for the part about the haunted hay ride. That did not cheer me up.

I’m getting word that the Secret Police have made a breakthrough in their bank heist investigation. Or maybe they found the real thief and can let Steve Carlsberg go? [clears throat] Sheriff Sam said the lab reports came back, the fingerprints were inconclusive as their top suspect Steve Carlsberg worked at the bank, so his fingerprints were everywhere. But the lab reports did detail a strange goo police found on the vault walls. This goo, a light green gel, was also found on the walls of the cells that the other robbers had escaped from two weeks ago. So maybe my theory about space slugs is correct. No wait. The lab reports showed that this unusual chemical can render certain metals intangible, allowing people to reach through walls without breaking them. [stutters] Police believe whoever used this greenish goo used it to rob the bank’s vault and to free the prisoners inside the abandoned mineshaft outside of town. The Sheriff then said they discovered this exact same chemical on Steve Carlsberg’s property. They discovered it inside the shed behind the house, and that this is the final piece of evidence that links Steve Carlsberg to the robbery of the Last Bank of Night Vale. They believe that, oh no… Um, that Steve did not act alone, that he had an accomplice, a scientific mastermind who created this chemical for him. Who generated a complex concoction that enabled them to walk through walls stealing whatever they wanted. They have a warrant out now for Carlos’ arrest. I’ve gotta call Carlos. I- Oh, it looks like he left a voicemail.  

[beep] Carlos: Hey sweetie, it’s um me. So listen, I have um, I so-so I’ve just been arrested. No biggie, no biggie, I’m fine. This is actually good news, because I wanted to talk to the Sheriff anyway about all this, so that-that’s great. And um, I do have some new thoughts about what happened at the bank, and they’re really interesting, so they’re driving me downtown to meet with uh ooh, ouch, those cuffs are a bit tight there, officer… officer (Q. Fortier). Ah, that is a beautiful name. I-i-is that Franchian? If you don’t mind, Officer Fortier, I’m going to just finish my voicemail to my husband. So Cecil. When I get downtown, I’ll explain everything to them, Steve and I clearly did not do this and that’s what I’ll tell them, they’re police! [chuckles] You know, they just wanna know the truth, and uh ooh uh, oh Officer Fortier, I am not done with my call yet. Uh sir, what-what are you doing with my pho- [beep]

Cecil: I… I… Let’s go to the weather.

[Good Luck with That” by Fathom All the Animals https://fathomalltheanimals.com]

Cecil: Listeners, we now go live to Steve Carlsberg’s press conference at City Hall.

Steve: This has been a difficult month for me, and for my family. I thank you all for hearing me out today. I’m glad to know that these criminal charges are behind me, and I think Sheriff Sam and their secret police, as well as their Overt Police, for listening to reason and overturning the charges against me. [sadly] But of course, I’m sad to learn about their most recent arrest. Breaks my heart to know that such a dear friend of so many years, someone who’s been in home many, many times, someone I consider family, could betray me, my bank, my town in this way. I don’t even know how to talk about such a breach of trust by someone so close. [crying] Carlos! Oh Carlos. Thank you Carlos, for your brilliant and thorough evidence that put Jesse McNeil in jail today. Our security guard of nearly 50 years committed a heinous crime, and he nearly sent the two of us to prison for it.

When Carlos arrived in my cell this morning, he was all smile saying he had figured it out. He called the Sheriff over and said, “Check Jesse’s skin for the same chemical they found on the doors.” Carlos had been experimenting on the gel that allowed him to reach his hands into refrigerators without opening the door, and thus lowering the temperature of the food inside. He’d developed this chemical. He’d developed this chemical in his temporary lab in a shed behind our house. The problem with the chemical wasn’t its effectiveness and intangibility. He had been able to make that work. No, the problem with the chemical is that it stained everything it touched a dull green, including skin. Carlos showed me his own hands, which were green from the fingertips to about halfway up his forearms. He said the last few times he had seen Jesse, Jesse looked ill. Not like a flu or cold, more like seasick: queasy, green in the face. Carlos didn’t put it together right away, because we all felt sick about not only the robbery, but the false charges against me.

The police report also showed that none of the cash tills on the teller wall were affected by the fire that broke out during the robbery last month. Which means the fire had to have started on the opposite wall, which is by the front door, Jesse’s usual station. The smoke from the fire and the three robbers waving guns provided a distraction for Jesse to cover himself with Carlos’ intangibility gel, sneak downstairs past my office, where he had locked me in earlier than day, and then unload the cash from the safe and carry it into the alleyway behind the bank where his car was parked. When the fire trucks arrived, Jesse ran deliberately in front of their hoses so that the gel would all be removed from his body before the police began questioning those of us who had been inside during the robbery. But, as Carlos pointed out, the gel stains the skin for a long time, water alone won’t remove it.

Sheriff Sam brought Jesse back in for questioning based on Carlos’ statements, and found Jesse’s skin was the same dull green as Carlos’ hands. But unlike Carlos, the green stain covered Jesse’s whole body, not only his hands, indicating he had used it to walk through walls, rather than merely reach to a door.

Carlos explained that he had Jesse in his lab many times, Jesse and all my employees come to my house regularly for dinners. Like I said, they’re family to me. Jesse had taken an interest in Carlos’ science projects, so Carlos showed Jesse his doorless fridge experiment. Not long after that, Carlos noticed that the rest of his intangibility gel was gone. He thought he had just run out, even though he had made plenty of it. Never occurred to Carlos, until he saw Jesse’s green face a few days ago, that Jesse had stolen it to remove the money from the vault and his criminal colleagues from their jail cell. While I was the only person with the key to the vault, Jesse as a security guard was the only person with master keys for the rest of the building. My office door is never locked, so I don’t carry a key for it. Jesse knew this and locked me into my own office. Then his three collaborators Richard, William, and Emma created a fake robbery of the cash tills to distract from his heist of the vault. Sheriff Sam was impressed with Carlos’ explanation and arrested Jesse McNeil on the spot. Jesse turned to Carlos and Sam and said: [very deep voice] “I guess I’m going to jail now.” Sam said: [Sheriff Sam voice] “Don’t flatter yourself!”

Anyway, I finally get to return home, thanks to my brother-in-law Carlos. Thank you Susan Willman for managing the bank in my absence. Abby, Janice, I’ll be home in a few. Can’t wait to see you both again. Oh, oh, maybe I’ll bake some scones tonight! Carlos showed me a way to do it without letting the butter too warm. Oh-oh yeah!

Cecil: I’m so relieved and so glad they put the right person behind bars. And I have never been so excited to try one of Steve’s scones. That really is neat.

Stay tuned next for someone playing on a saw. No, ahem, (-) that, with a saw. It’s just someone playing around with a saw. Enjoy.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Wisdom ages like fine wine. Knowledge ages like Boston lettuce.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

One thing that really bothers me about the new Star Wars canon timeline: there are women of color working for the Empire. Rae Sloane, Ciena Ree, and Iden Versio. Although the latter managed to open her eyes and see how truly oppressive the Empire was, why there are WOC willingly loyal to an oppressive regime George Lucas intentionally modeled after the Nazis makes no sense at all.

I agree with you (although, to be fair, Ciena and Iden both flip and become Rebel Alliance – only Rae Sloane, as far as we KNOW, remains Imperial, and I still hope that we find out that she flipped at some point in her later life?). It bothers me a lot, because I think that it makes it much easier for people to argue in bad faith on behalf of really overt and unsubtle metaphors in the rest of the narrative of the Empire and First Order.

I also think that it’s a really good example of why “colorblind storytelling” doesn’t work. You can’t create a fantastical world – whether scifi or fantasy – and populate it with peoples whose races or ethnicities closely mirror our world’s, and whose politics closely mirror ours, but then claim that they aren’t actually meant to align or matter. They ALWAYS matter, because the audience of your media exist in the real world and are going to bring their experience to their audienceship… whether you want that or not.

It’s really important to remember, whether you’re writing a $50billion franchise like Star Wars or just, for your own fun, yk, that once something becomes public, your authorial intentions don’t matter, your authorial execution and the public interpretation matters. THAT is what “death of the author” means. So it’s true that sometimes people read way more into things than the writers or directors intended – or read totally different themes into them – but the author doesn’t get to say “you guys are the ones who are wrong.” (JK ROWLING, PLEASE TAKE NOTE, DEAR GOD.)

A classic example of that would be how Ray Bradbury thought that he wrote a book about the problem with television when he wrote Fahrenheit 451. THAT BOOK IS CLEARLY FUCKING ABOUT CENSORSHIP, RIGHT? It was his execution of the themes that determined what everyone read into the book, and although he thinks that literally every English class since it was published is wrong, ::shrug::

More akin to your original message, and people bringing the real world to a text – John (fucking) Green thought it was cool and sexy and romantic to have Hazel and Augustus make out for the first time in Anne Frank’s house in TFIOS.

That’s not cool and sexy and romantic. It’s insanely disrespectful and antisemitic.

John Green brought his own bias, that Anne Frank’s life and death didn’t matter, to writing the book. And I bring my bias, that her life and death mattered more than his ever could, to reading it and was disgusted and offended. (And so were the curators and caretakers of the Anne Frank house, who have asked people not to fucking make out there.)

Whatever his INTENTION with the symbolism there – which… I do not understand; cancer is not equivocal to the Holocaust, and I feel like that’s probably offensive to people with cancer as well???? – the execution failed in the real world.

Having women of color serve the Empire is, on the side of the Lucasfilm Storygroup going, “We need to have more female CoC in leading roles,” a good idea, because most of the novels and comics have been about the Empire and FO [since thank goodness, the movies have been about the good guys still]. But, they didn’t think through to the second step, which is, “We’re calling these women of color Nazis/neo-Nazis.” Yikes.

I do think that in some areas, Star Wars has gotten better with that and does okay; certainly, JJ Abrams’ attentiveness and willingness to change aspects of Finn’s relationship with Rey to be more positive and less competitive or combative than “Sam’s” relationship with Rey, when John Boyega expressed concern about how it would come across with him playing opposite Daisy, was a really great thing. So was JJ listening to Oscar’s concerns about playing yet another “Latino man dies to set up white heroes’ adventure.”

But Rilo Jon wrote Rose as overbearing yet timid, and Finn as “comic relief” to the point of mistrelsy. He wrote Paige, played by a FUCKING HUGE STAR, as *silent* (and fridged). He decided against all existing canon that Poe, whose canonical heroes are Leia and his mother and whose best friends are all women, has too much Latino machismo and needed to learn a lesson from some random white lady to earn his place in the franchise.

When given the latitude to create an alien race from scratch – the Lanai – he also gave them 1950s fucking Cleaver Family gender roles, where the males go out and sail and adventure and the females stay on Ahch-To and wear dresses and keep house and cook because they live on an island so remote and basically uninhabited for thousands of years so WHY WOULDN’T their gender roles work like Rilo Jon’s masturbatory WASP society???? BARFO! ARUGHGJGHH TLJ IS SO GROSS.

Anyway, tl;dr, I agree with you, and I think that it’s a byproduct of the LF storygroup recognizing that they wanted to have leading women of color, but not fully thinking through the repercussions of “colorblind storytelling” and making those leading women of color lead stories about people who, if looking at the stories as mirrors and windows, would want to kill them. And that’s a big bowl of yikes. Also TLJ was bad.

[a-pirate-my-hearties]

1, 4, 6, 11,13, 15, 19, 20, 25, 27, 29, 30 :)

1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to? Look towards Charles Baudelaire, Tadeusz Miciński, Samuel Coleridge, William Blake, Bolesław Leśmian… these are my beloved poets. Listen to Moonspell, Jill Tracy, Nightwish, Type O Negative, Loreena McKennit.

6. are you religious/spiritual? I’m more spiritual than religious. I don’t think I believe in a Christian god (I was baptized and my parents are Christians), I don’t identify with Christianity at all. I feel like I might be a witch or something. I believe in energies and aura, as well as spiritual healing and passing your energy on people.

11. describe your ideal day - Actually doing anything with my SO or simply having fun at a poetry reading or spending time with friends by the sea.

13. inside or outdoors? It depends on my mood, I like both, but lately I’ve been staying inside more often.

15. five most influential books over your lifetime. “Anne of Green Gables”, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, “Picture of Dorian Gray”, “Flowers of Evil”, “Dracula”.

19. which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle? Probably a Gryffindor. :)

20. would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else? Huh, I’m not really sure, but probably Hogwarts. I’d love to experience the magic and joy of studying and living there.

25. could you live as a hermit? HELL NO. I may need a lot of me time, but I am not reclusive, I would die without possibility of meeting other people.

27. do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”? More less, if I were rich, then it would be 100% me. :D

29. three songs that you connect with right now. - Moonspell - DevilRed, 2WEI - Toxic (Cover), The Cure - Prayers for Rain.

30. pick one of your favorite quotes - “There’s nothing wrong in being a little sad and thoughtful. In feeling pain, in complaining about it, in being lunar instead of solar. No harm can be done in saying: I don’t know.”– Fernando Ribeiro, “Life: How to spell it”

[eldritchsurveys]

o52.

Do you look up spiritual meanings to things? >> Sometimes. If all else fails, I’ll make up one. Do you wonder what you should be doing currently? >> I don’t wonder -- I should eat something, but I’m like... glued to the bed right now. Is there someone you want to be friends with who is mean to you? >> No, I don’t want to be friends with someone who’s mean to me. That’s the literal opposite of what I want from a friendship. Are your parents abusive? >> Not by my reckoning. Do you plan on sending out Christmas cards this year? >> Sure, hopefully.

When was the last time you had surgery? >> I’ve never had surgery.  Do you take a lot of risks in life? >> Hell, just being alive and doing the things one needs to survive is a fair amount of risk in itself (for example, eating is risky -- just look at all the food recalls we’ve had lately), so yeah, probably. Do you believe that taking risks is what makes life worth living? >> No, I think that taking risks is part of living, and learning which risks are acceptable and how to deal with the consequences of risk is pretty important to a good life. Which Anne of Green Gables character are you most like? >> I don’t know if I’ve even read that. Are you currently healing from surgery? >> No. Do you wish you had a mother you could talk to? >> Sometimes. But it’s hard for me to even imagine what that would be like. Do you feel panicked frequently? >> No. Are you ashamed of who you are? >> No. Do you feel free to be yourself? >> Sure. Do you feel safe and loved and cherished? >> Like, in general? I feel loved and appreciated, I’m not really sure what safety feels like (I only know it by its lack) but like, probably. Have you ever spent Christmas alone? If yes, did you enjoy it? >> I don’t think so. Like, lonely, yes, but not literally alone. What do you plan to do for Christmas this year? >> I assume I’ll be doing what I’ve done for the past two years. Do you currently have a crush on someone? >> Sure. What are you currently longing for? >> My energy back, lmao. I’m really not used to going out like I did last night anymore. What emotions do you experience most frequently? >> Happiness and sadness, I guess, to give a simplified answer. Who was the last person to hurt your feelings? >> Hallie, but it’s over and we’re good. Have you ever had a revelation from God? >> Sure. Are you lonely? >> Sometimes. Not at this moment, I don’t even have the energy to be lonely lmao. Are you or have you ever been shy? >> I’ve been shy. What color are your favorite pair of slippers or slipper socks? >> --- Do you like to soak in hot baths? >> Noooooo. What’s your favorite flavor Tootsie Fruit Chew? >> I don’t have one. Do you ever experience acid reflux or heartburn? >> Yeah. Do you take birth control pills? >> No. Do you generally feel your best in the morning or the evening? >> I’m not entirely sure. I think I’m at my cognitive best in the evening, though. Who was your first celebrity crush? >> Matt Damon. Do you like boys or girls better? >> Meh. Would you want your first child to be a boy or a girl? >> I don’t care. Do you pray a lot? >> No. Do you have blood circulation issues (that you know about)? >> I might, considering I don’t get a whole lot of cardio exercise. Has a family member ever died of cancer? >> Not that I’m aware of. Do you not understand something right now? >> No. Do you type fast? >> Yeah. Do little yippy dogs annoy you? >> The sound can be annoying, but in general I’m all right with them as long as I don’t have to spend long periods of time listening to them yip. Is there a website that shut down that you miss? If so, what? >> Xanga. Do you ever read about the olden days and wish u could have lived back then? >> I mean, yeah, in a superficial sense, but I don’t really want that. How old is your mom? >> I don’t know. Do you enjoy readings Scripture? >> Sure. Are you happy with your life right now? >> Sure. Have you ever overdosed on a medication? >> Yeah. Have you ever sat on a whoopee cushion? >> No. What talk show do you want to go on? >> No thanks. What would make you happy? >> Right now? A nap, probably, but my brain’s too awake so I can’t go back to sleep. Bodies are dumb. What prize would you like to win? >> I don’t care. What current fashion trends do you like and which ones do you dislike? >> I’m not savvy to the fashion trends right now. Would you want your kids to look like you? >> I really don’t care about this sort of thing. Do you want to have a big family? >> Yeah, but not necessarily like... the way you’re probably thinking. Do you ever wonder why people want to have a ton of kids? >> I’ve wondered that, yeah. Do you like uncommon names? >> Yeah. Have you ever been camping? >> Yeah. Do you wish they made a summer camp for adults? >> I’ve been to summer camp as an adult, but those were pretty unique circumstances. They’re not at all common and I do wish they were. Do you know anyone who is colorblind? >> Yeah. Do you do what you should do? >> Not always. Do you feel oppressed? >> I mean, in general, I am, because I belong to several marginalised demographics. But usually I don’t feel it, even if I recognise its effects on my quality of life. Are you happy right now? >> I’m neutral. Have you ever sent a package? >> Yeah. Do you enjoy knitting? >> I don’t know how. Would you get your hair done if it was free? >> Not right now. Did you have highlights when you were in high school? >> No. Do you have a cat? >> I don’t, but Sparrow does. If not, do you want a cat? >> No. Are you a cat person or a dog person? >> Dog person. Do you like peacocks? >> Hell yeah. What’s your favorite zoo animal? >> I don’t know. Do you feel like you are able to make the most of summer without a pool? >> Yeah, I can’t even swim, so... Do you get hyper in the winter? >> Not at all, lol. Good old Vit D deprivation.  

[aadmelioraa]

Tagged by @grumpybell thank you, Erin!

1. what is your most popular fic by kudos? comments? bookmarks? are they all the same?

I Know I’ll Get It From a Good Friend for all 3!

2. do you have a favorite of your fics? if not, do you have one you’re most proud of? why?

From a Good Friend is probably the fic I’m most proud of as well. I tried to balance the tension and angst with upbeat dialogue and lighter moments, and I think I succeeded for the most part. 

3. what fandom/ship (if you write for more than one) is your favorite to write for?

I write for t100/Bellarke exclusively as of right now. 

4. do you have any fics that got more popularity/attention than you expected? if so what were they?

I wrote a prompt fill for @bellamynochillblake that multiple people asked me to add onto, which was unexpected but nice! You can find both parts here. 

5. where do you get your ideas/inspiration from? do you have a fic that you feel is particularly unique in that area?

I draw inspiration pretty equally from life around me and from other media--anything’s fair game. I have a oneshot, Blake’s Books, that was inspired by an episode of Brooklyn 99, and a prompt fill (”Clarke with an E”) that was inspired by Anne of Green Gables. 

6. do you have a favorite character to write POV for?

I really enjoy writing from both Bellamy’s and Clarke’s point of view. I find Clarke a little more challenging to write, honestly. She’s got such a complex character and I want to make sure I do her justice! Bellamy’s point of view comes a little more easily to me sometimes, but it depends. I identify pretty strongly with both characters and it’s fun to change it up from fic to fic. 

7. what’s your favorite sidepairing to include?

Definitely Raven x Roan and Monty x Miller. I also love writing Raven & Clarke and Raven & Bellamy...Bravenlarke is my Brot3 for life!

8. do you have a fic you feel is underrated in comparison to your other fics? or you just wish more people would read?

I don’t know if this is underrated but the first tumblr prompt fill I ever wrote, Rebel Rescue, was for @sly2o and it’s honestly still one of my favorite things. It’s a ridiculous Bravenlarke Star Wars AU and I laughed the entire way through writing it. If you like Star Wars and Bellarke, check it out :)

9. what’s something you would go back and change in one of your fics?

I’d go back to my first fic, I See You, and strengthen Clarke’s characterization a bit. But honestly I’d rather keep moving forward and just focus on my WIP and new projects. I haven't been writing fic very long but I do think I’ve been able to improve a lot in a short time, and I hope I can continue to do so. Writing is so cathartic for me and it’s been a real joy to get back into it after almost a decade of not writing.

10. what is your favorite sort of comment to receive on a fic?

Any time someone catches a reference to canon or a dumb little joke I drop in there it seriously makes my day :)

11. what are your favorite genres of fic to write? (e.g. modern au, hurt/comfort, fluff, angst, etc.)

Definitely modern au, though I do enjoy canonverse depending on my mood. I’m a big fan of fluff and angst in pretty equal measure when I write, with a dash of hurt/comfort and some light smut from time to time.

12. what are your favorite tropes to write?

I really like exploring friends-to-lovers relationship dynamics, and established relationships. And who doesn't like bed sharing, am I right? 

13. do you write fics similar to what you enjoy reading or completely different? both?

I enjoy writing canonverse more than I enjoy reading it, for some reason. I want really specific things from canonverse fics, like this oneshot I did set right after the events of 109. I read a lot more modern au for sure. There are so many great ones!

14. what’s your writing process like?

For multi chaps, I start with a conceit and an outline of some kind, broken down into chapters with corresponding summaries. I’ve always ended up adding at least a chapter to that initial framework to fit in everything I want to, but that way I have a plan and its easier to build things to the climax I want. For shorter pieces, I kinda just start typing and go with it? I get like 75% of the way through then edit and finish those in one go. 

15. multi-chapter, oneshot, or drabble?

I’ve really enjoyed writing prompt fills lately (it’s such an adrenaline rush to self impose a deadline, and I can be competitive with myself). I have lots of ideas for multi chaps but they obviously take a lot more work and planning. I do enjoy writing them though, and the two I’ve finished have been very rewarding and a great learning experience for me.

16. if someone was only going to read one of your fics, which would you want them to read?

I’d recommend From a Good Friend for sure. If you don't want to commit to a multi chap, check out my prompt fills to start.

tagging @bellamynochillblake @stardust-blake @carrieeve @katchyalater and @sometimesrosy if ya want!

1. what is your most popular fic by kudos? comments? bookmarks? are they all the same?

2. do you have a favorite of your fics? if not, do you have one you’re most proud of? why?

3. what fandom/ship (if you write for more than one) is your favorite to write for?

4. do you have any fics that got more popularity/attention than you expected? if so what were they?

5. where do you get your ideas/inspiration from? do you have a fic that you feel is particularly unique in that area?

6. do you have a favorite character to write POV for?

7. what’s your favorite sidepairing to include?

8. do you have a fic you feel is underrated in comparison to your other fics? or you just wish more people would read?

9. what’s something you would go back and change in one of your fics?

10. what is your favorite sort of comment to receive on a fic?

11. what are your favorite genres of fic to write? (e.g. modern au, hurt/comfort, fluff, angst, etc.)

12. what are your favorite tropes to write?

13. do you write fics similar to what you enjoy reading or completely different? both?

14. what’s your writing process like?

15. multi-chapter, oneshot, or drabble?

16. if someone was only going to read one of your fics, which would you want them to read?

[howlingmoonrise]

At worst, take this as a bit of fandom history?

Alright I’m pretty tired but it finally hit me that some antis legitimately believe that people are shipping a 25yo with teenagers and I’m still a bit dumbstruck. Then I mused a bit and realized it’s probably a fandom background/generational kind of thing, and this post was born. I’d appreciate if you read through it, and if you want I'm always open for discussion as long as it’s civil. 

There’s two main points I want to make on this post:

1) Creators’ words outside of the source content being automatically “canon” is a fairly recent thing. As in, last 2-to-5 years recent, and in new fandoms only. It’s not global.

If you go back to older and not-so-older fandoms, you'll see that most of them disregard stuff the creators have said outside of the source material or even source material content if it’s OOC, illogical, contradicts previous canon, etc. If a showrunner or a writer said something in a convention or in an interview, this wasn’t taken as canon and people didn’t assume that other people would know and adopt this information as official content, for a multitude of reasons.

We’re talking about creators queerbaiting/colourbaiting and saying or teasing outside of the books/shows/etc that a character was LGBT+ or Latin@ or something of the sort and getting kudos for being inclusive without any of the backlash. 

We’re talking about creators saying all sorts of canon-contradicting bullshit outside of the source material just because, or because they couldn’t even be bothered to keep up with the material they were supposed to be writing for. 

We’re talking about something having multiple creators and each having different views on the content and contradicting each other and even the very source material. 

We’re talking about creators taking a look at the headcanons and ships the fandom was creating and not liking them and doing everything to squash them to the ground.

I could cite a few examples, starting from queerbaiting on shows like Supernatural and Sherlock, the whole thing with Moffat and Doctor Who, Butch Hartman downright banning people and shutting down all LGBT+ headcanons and ships he sees of his shows for over a decade now, writers and producers Bryke for A:TLA stiffling the other writers and the pre-planned progression of the show in favour of their ship, even stuff like (NSFW) JK Rowling going ahead and tweeting that group masturbatory sessions in the Hogwarts dorms were a thing. 

None of this is particularly new. Creators putting stuff out there outside of the published material has been going on for as long as anything resembling fandom has existed. I’ve gone a bit more into this and the Death of the Author trope here.

Something that has also been going on as long as this is fandom creators taking all this, ignoring it, and doing their own thing. Creators say a character is definitely, for-sure, no take-backsies cis and straight? Nope. Trans and gay. Non-binary and ace. I’ve seen y’all doing this with Pidge even though she’s the one character to have canonly (in the source material) come out as any gender at all. Hermione has mentioned to be pale and to tan in the books? Let’s make her black. Alya’s family is from Martinique? Cool, it aligns with my headcanons but I’m not gonna push it into anyone else. Trans!Danny Fenton has been shut down by the creator in social media so hard you got whiplash? Keep putting him in binders, my dudes. This spreads to stuff like what the characters like to do for fun or their favourite colour or their birthdays. (you will pry hunk being cancer from my cold, dead hands.) Or, you know, ages.

People used to be legitimately sued and doxxed for writing fanfiction at all because it deviated from the creator’s original vision, the likes of Anne Rice making people afraid to post fanfiction for years, so that we’ve come this far and that we’re able to headcanon and take creative liberties with other people’s characters or worlds speaks a lot. This isn’t just about social justice and inclusivity. Extra skills for a characters? AU fics? Couldn’t. Coffeeshop slowburns included, considering it ruins the “integrity” of their work.

You see where I’m going with this, and this leads us to my second point.

2) Your opinions and feelings aren’t invalid, but I’ve met nearly no shaladin/pidge shippers who took the general ages lineup as canon. Though, to be fair, i don’t deal with all of them so I’m generalizing things a bit. You’ll notice I won’t mention She!th and that’s because I haven’t interacted with them.

I can assure you right now that, for example, Shidge shippers in general are grossed out at even thinking of a 14/25yo relationship. A good portion of them are even CSA survivors or minors, so you can see how much they’d like the mere idea of it. Shunk and Shance shippers, from what I’ve seen, don’t tend to roll with the “canon” ages either. If you’d like to argue that Shiro is coded as a clear adult or that Pidge is coded as a kid as opposed to the other paladins being late teens, I’ve argued against that in my comments here so feel free to take a look. If you’d still like to contest another point, I am more than willing to discuss your point and make my own.

I can sum up one half of this point like this: show a shaladin/pidge shipper a 14/25yo relationship, and they think it’s gross. A good portion think the same of 16/17/25. That they’re shipping shaladin/pidge ships regardless just comes to show that they really don’t see the age lineup as an actual thing. 

You have all the right to still feel uncomfortable with these ships or dislike them, though! It’s not for me to tell people what to like or not, nor to decide what affects them and their personal experiences or not. You also have the right to keep thinking that the age lineup is official and canon!

Picture the “creator’s word is canon” debacle like this: for me, the sea is blue. For you, the sea is green. Why? It depends on the depth of the waters, the weather, the environment beneath the waves, pollution degrees, etc. Neither of us is wrong here, but it depends on our own experiences and perceptions. In this case, those factors would be these: fandom background, personal opinions, previous headcanons, your own cultural background, and degrees to which you relate to a character. With a bonus of whether you think the creator is the worst thing since standardized testing or not, for some fandoms.

I’ve explained the fandom background on my previous point, but here’s a tl;dr: on recent fandoms and for people new to fandom, what the creators say goes; with less recent fandoms and fans, people do their own thing and only adopt what is said in the source content as canon, with the rest being taken as strong headcanons but not official canon. There are fans who even ignore sequels or certain episodes of their source materials due to it not fitting their standards.

This, coupled with the rest, obviously brings clashes of opinions, and sadly enough harrassment from both parts. Yes, I’m not discounting that there are shippers that are downright nasty, it’s a terrible reality we don’t have control over. We’re not a hive mind, and neither are you.

I’m not writing this to get any of you to ship or not ship a thing. I just want people to know where others are coming from, and you should respect other people’s history, culture, and experiences regardless of your opinion on the ships or on whether what creator’s say outside of the source material is canon or not. 

Throwing around suicide-baiting and harmful terms such as ‘pedophilia’ is unarguably not a good thing, especially when you’re attacking minors and csa survivors along the way. You need to respect that not everyone has the same background as you, and as such the age lineup isn’t canon for a good portion of the fandom and this does not make them pedophiles or supporters or anything resembling that. 

Respect. Other. People’s. Backgrounds.

[dulwichdiverter]

Read all about it

Alastair Kenward tells us about the colourful career path that led him to open his buzzing bookshop Rye Books on Upland Road

By Katie Allen; Photos by Lima Charlie

A charming photobook of cheerful women perching on branches would make an unlikely Amazon bestseller – which might be why Women in Trees, edited by German photography collector Jochen Raiss, has been one of Rye Books’ recent, heartwarming hits.

“It is a great thing to be able to introduce people to books they might not think of. You’re not getting fed an algorithm, it’s a random choice,” says owner Alastair Kenward, who cites Alistair Gibbs’ photos of esoteric Peckham signage as another popular buy.

Bitten by Witch Fever, about  the Victorians’ toxic love of arsenic-dyed wallpaper – as well as the spoof Ladybird books which you probably received in your Christmas stocking – have also been sought-after by customers.

“Rye Books doesn’t have a top 50,” says Alastair. “We’re probably very different to the rest of the country. We stock a little bit of everything. It’s the more unique books that we tend to gravitate towards. We try to be very diverse.”

Based on Upland Road and perfectly placed for wanderers from Peckham Rye Park to East Dulwich – as well as bibliophiles venturing up from North Cross Road market – Rye Books recently celebrated its fifth birthday as one of the area’s best-loved bookshops. They marked the occasion with a party that included mulled cider and performances from local folkies The Relatives and the Nunhead Folk Circle.

Alastair opened the shop in 2011 just in time for Christmas. He and his wife Hatty had moved to Nunhead in 2009 and immediately began looking for a good site for the shop. He remembers: “Of all the empty shops, this one had the most soul. Even the mice had soul.”

The site was formerly a run-down old junk shop, where previous star stock included a rather covetable-sounding mint-green 1960s Pakistani washing machine. But it was situated on a street that had once been lively with shops including a haberdashery, a toy shop and a baker.

“We were like, ‘Let’s save this one,’” Alastair says. He admits that the route between Nunhead and East Dulwich was “a risk in terms of footfall, but we thought, ‘Let’s take that risk,’ and luckily it worked out.”

Alastair has worked in bookselling for 12 years, which has included stints as a partner at Clapham Books and Herne Hill Books. But running a bookshop is the culmination of a colourful career path that has seen him work – in no particular order – as a teacher, in a pub, in a tropical fish warehouse and briefly at Sainsbury’s.

He also worked for the RSPCA, where he remembers helping a cormorant escape from the toilets of a primary school and rescuing a family from a monitor lizard which had grown too big and was dominating their bedroom. “They were opening the door and throwing food in – they were terrified of it!”

He also spent three years as a gravedigger at Morden Cemetery. “All those jobs – they help to push you towards a passion,” he says. “You tend to gravitate towards what thrills you.”

Alastair’s love of books comes across strongly the moment you step through the door of Rye Books, which is cosy yet packed with shelves and tables displaying the sort of intriguingly chosen titles that ask to be picked up for a gander.

The tempting selection of stock almost guarantees that anyone dashing in for a birthday card or a gift will probably leave with something for themselves too.

Their most recent catalogue handpicked a variety of titles, including Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard, Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke’s poetry collection The Map and the Clock and the rather less highbrow Pornburger, for lovers of the ultimate fast food.

A recent unusual favourite has been London in Fragments: A Mudlark’s Treasures by Ted Sandling. London and locally themed titles always do well, Alastair reveals, but this book particularly excited him because of its sideways look at the city.

Sandling recently came in to host a popular event at the shop, revealing secrets about the items he had found while digging around in the mud of the Thames. They included an original RAF button, which contained a compass in case a marooned pilot needed to find his way back home.

Why did Alastair want to open a bookshop? “We wanted to raise books up, to make them something special again,” he says. “The internet has devalued many things, like vinyl, journalism and books. It has changed them for everyone, it devalues things for everyone.

“The internet can be a hollow experience: you order something online and you get it. There is a general trend towards wanting experience – a chance to meet authors, a nice place to buy a book. We want to inspire thinking and creativity and books are a perfect way to do that.”

The shop is known for working with community groups and schools as well as running a packed series of events. In the past year they’ve had Bridget Hargreave discussing her book about postnatal depression Fine (Not Fine) with Dr Helena Belgrave.

They’ve also welcomed Hester Vaizey, author of Born in the GDR, and Jon Magidsohn discussing his memoir Immortal Highway, about going on the road with his baby son after the death of his wife.

There’s also a programme of one-off events and regular classes for children, such as author readings, story time and baby bop. Local parents will know the diverse spread of children’s books too, from classics to contemporary favourites like Jon Klassen to more unusual picture and pop-up books. “There’s so much out there that lies undiscovered and that should be celebrated. We want to showcase books that don’t normally get seen,” says Alastair.

He cites bookshop favourite Coralie Bickford-Smith, whose award-winning illustrated book The Fox and the Star took over the bookshop window as a beautiful paper forest.

Of course few modern bookshops exist without selling an array of other products. Rye Books stocks wrapping paper and cards, some illustrated by local talent, book-related knick-knacks and tea, coffee from local social enterprise Old Spike Roastery, and cakes.

“Another passion of mine is eating,” admits Alastair, who for the past two years has also been selling colourful little Prakti stoves from the shop. Designed to help women in the developing world – because they funnel smoke out of a dwelling – and to run economically, they are ideal for campers and those who like to feast outdoors. “I love being outside and cooking – it��s a marriage of that.”

Speaking of keeping cosy, one of Alastair’s plans for 2017 is to install a wood burner in the shop. His second plan will please dog lovers, especially those who were fond of Kenward family dog Bert, who has sadly passed away.

The family recently acquired George, a six-week-old Lab-cross puppy. “If he’s anything like Bert, he’ll enjoy chewing all the stock,” Alastair laughs. “I’ve missed having a bookshop dog.”

He’s planning to continue hosting events for his customers, although nothing is in the diary as yet. “At the beginning of the year I have no idea what we are going to have,” he says. “The thrill of it is that people organically come along. It always amazes me – we get to the end of the year and somehow we’ve done it.”

He is positive about the future of the bookselling industry, which has been rocked by the closures of bookshops large and small due to the threat of Amazon and online shopping as well as rising rents and the lure of e-books.

“More bookshops have opened than in previous years, that’s an encouraging sign,” he says. “People have seen a balance in favour of printed books and sales are coming back. People don’t want to look at screens all the time, and books are a comfort.”

He points to the popularity of titles such as Elena Ferrante’s blockbuster Neapolitan series, which is essentially about the friendship between two women over the years. “There is a trend towards escapist books because of the horrible place we’re in [politically].

“A book is a place for people to lose themselves – they will serve an even greater role in helping people get though the times we are living in. That’s what I have always loved about books – they can transport you and enrich your life.

“There’s nothing wrong with books that give you a hug – you don’t always have to read literary books. Whatever you are feeling, there will be a book to fit it. In the shop, we’ve listened as hard as we can to the people coming in here. They have shaped how it looks and what we sell.”

He discusses Rye Books’ mixed clientele, which includes parents and children in particular during the week and “everyone else” at the weekend. Then there are the customers who buy from the bookshop’s striped van, which turns up everywhere from North Cross Road market on Saturdays to book fairs across London.  

With almost stage-managed timing, while we are chatting a woman passing knocks on the door and pokes her head in to thank Alastair for a recent event she enjoyed. Other passersby wave and smile.

“The best thing about running the shop is the friends we have made,” Alastair says. “The community, the sense of trust. I’m pleased we’ve managed to do five years – we couldn’t have done it without all the people who live around here and for that we’re grateful.

“No day is ever the same, and that’s down to the people really. That’s why we keep on doing it – every day is different because of the customers. We’ve had a good year and we hope to have another one.”

[writingguide003-blog]

44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

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44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

Writing looks fun, but doing it professionally is hard. Like really hard. Why on earth am I doing this?-hard.

Which is probably why so many people want to write, yet so few actually do. But there are ways to make it easier, as many writers can tell you. Tricks that have been discovered over the centuries to help with this difficult craft.

In another industry, these tricks would be considered trade secrets. But writers are generous and they love to share (often in books about writing). They explain their own strategies for how to deal with writers block to how to make sure your computer never eats your manuscript. They give away this hard-won knowledge so that other aspiring writers wont have to struggle in the same way. Over my career, Ive tried to collect these little bits of wisdom in my commonplace book (also a writers trick which I picked up from Montaigne) and am grateful for the guidance theyve provided.

Below, Ive shared a collection of writing hacks from some amazing writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott, and Raymond Chandler. I hope its not too presumptuous but I snuck in a few of my own too (not that I think Im anywhere near as good as them).

Anyway, heres to making this tough job a tiny bit easier!

[*] When you have an idea for an article or a bookwrite it down. Dont let it float around in your head. Thats a recipe for losing it. As Beethoven is reported to have said, If I don’t write it down immediately I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and I never have to look it up again.

[*] The important thing is to start. At the end of John Fantes book Dreams from Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

[*] In fact, a lot of writers use that last technique. In Tobias Wolffs autobiographical novel Old School, the character types the passages from his favorite books just to know what it feels like to have those words flow through his fingertips. Hunter S. Thompson often did the same thing. This is another reason why technologies like ebooks and Evernote are inferior to physical interaction. Just highlighting something and saving it to a computer? Theres no tactile memory there.

[*] The greatest part of a writers time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson

[*] Tim Ferriss has said that the goal for a productive writing life is two crappy pages a day. Just enough to make progress, not too ambitious to be intimidating.

[*] They say breakfast (protein) in the morning helps brain function. But in my experience, thats a trade-off with waking up and getting started right away. Apparently Kurt Vonnegut only ate after he worked for 2 hours. Maybe he felt like after that hed earned food.

[*] Michael Malice has advised dont edit while you write. I think this is good advice.

[*] In addition to making a distinction between editing and writing, Robert Greene advises to make an equally important distinction between research and writing. Trying to find where youre going while youre doing it is begging to get horribly lost. Writing is easier when the research is done and the framework has been laid out.

[*] Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim he opened with. THAT is why you want to get your thesis down and perfect. It makes the whole book/essay easier.

[*] Break big projects down into small, discrete chunks. As I am writing a book, I create a separate document for each chapter, as I am writing them. Its only later when I have gotten to the end that these chapters are combined into a single file. Why? The same reason it feels easier to swim seven sets of ten laps, than to swim a mile. Breaking it up into pieces makes it seem more achievable. The other benefit in writing? It creates a sense that each piece must stand on its own.

[*] Embrace what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the draw-down period. Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to doubt.

[*] On being a writer: All the days of his life he should be reading as faithfully as his partaking of food; reading, watching, listening. John Fante

[*] Dont get caught up with pesky details. When I am writing a draft, I try not to be concerned with exact dates, facts or figures. If I remember that a study conducted by INSERT UNIVERSITY found that XX% of businesses fail in the first FIVE/SIX? months, thats what I write (exactly like that). If I am writing that on June XX, 19XX Ronald Reagan gave his famous Tear Down This Wall speech in Berlin in front of XX,XXX people, thats how its going to look. Momentum is the most important thing in writing, so Ill fill the details in later. I just need to get the sentences down first. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” is how Joshua Wolf Shenk put it.

[*] Raymond Chandler had a trick of using small pieces of paper so he would never be afraid to start over. Also with only 12-15 lines per page, it forced economy of thought and actionwhich is why his stuff is so readable.

[*] In The Artists Way, Julia Cameron reminds us that our morning pages and our journaling dont count as writing. Just as walking doesnt count as exercise, this is just priming the pumpits a meditative experience. Make sure you treat it as such.

[*] Steven Pressfield said that he used to save each one of his manuscripts on a disk that hed keep in the glovebox of his car. Robert Greene told me he sometimes puts a copy of his manuscript in the trunk of his car just in case. I bought a fireproof gun safe and keep my stuff in therejust in case.

[*] My editor Niki Papadopoulos at Penguin: Its not what a book is. Its what a book does.

[*] While you are writing, read things totally unrelated to what youre writing. Youll be amazed at the totally unexpected connections youll make or strange things youll discover. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: I cant begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

[*] Writing requires what Cal Newport calls deep workperiods of long, uninterrupted focus and creativity. If you dont give yourself enough of this time, your work suffers. He recommends recording your deep work time each dayso you actually know if youre budgeting properly.

[*] Software does not make you a better writer. Fuck Evernote. Fuck Scrivner. You dont need to get fancy. If classics were created with quill and ink, youll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Dont let technology distract you. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in an interview, Every writer has written by hand until relatively recent times. Writing is a consequence of thinking, planning, dreaming this is the process that results in writing, rather than the way in which the writing is recorded.

[*] Talk about the ideas in the work everywhere. Talk about the work itself nowhere. Dont be the person who tweets Im working on my novel. Be too busy writing for that. Helen Simpson has Faire et se taire from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as Shut up and get on with it.

[*] Why cant you talk about the work? Its not because someone might steal it. Its because the validation you get on social media has a perverse effect. Youll less likely to put in the hard work to complete something that youve already been patted (or patted yourself) on the back for.

[*] When you find yourself stuck with writers block, pick up the phone and call someone smart and talk to them about whatever the specific area youre stuck with is. Not that youre stuck, but about the topic. By the time you put your phone down, youll have plenty to write. (As Seth Godin put it, nobody gets talkers block.)

[*] Keep a commonplace book with anecdotes, stories and quotes you can always usefrom inspiration to directly using in your writing. And these can be anything. H.L. Mencken for example, would methodically fill a notebook with incidents, recording scraps of dialogue and slang, columns from the New York Sun.

[*] As you write down quotes and observations in your commonplace book, make sure to do it by hand. As Raymond Chandler wrote, when you have to use your energy to put words down, you are more apt to make them count.

[*] Elizabeth Gilbert has a good trick for cutting: As you go along, Ask yourself if this sentence, paragraph, or chapter truly furthers the narrative. If not, chuck it. And as Stephen King famously put it, kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.

[*] Strenuous exercise everyday. For me, and for a lot of other writers, its running. Novelist Don DeLillo told The Paris Review how after writing for four hours, he goes running to shake off one world and enter another. Joyce Carol Oates, in her ode to running, said that the twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.

[*] Ask yourself these four questions from George Orwell: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Then finish with these final two questions: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

[*] As a writer you need to make use of everything that happens around you and use it as material. Make use of Seinfelds question: Im never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, Can I do something with that?

[*] Airplanes with no wifi are a great place to write and even better for editing. Because there is nowhere to go and nothing else to do.

[*] Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). Heres a quote from a scholar describing why Ciceros speeches were so effective which I put on my wall while I was writing my first book. At his best [Cicero] offered a sustained interest, a constant variety, a consummate blend of humour and pathos, of narrative and argument, of description and declamation; while every part is subordinated to the purpose of the whole, and combines, despite its intricacy of detail, to form a dramatic and coherent unit. (emphasis mine)

[*] Focus on what youre saying, worry less about how. As William March wrote in The Bad Seed, A great novelist with something to say has no concern with style or oddity of presentation.

[*] A little trick I came up with. After every day of work, I save my manuscript as a new file (for example: EgoIsTheEnemy2-26.docx) which is saved on my computer and in Dropbox (before Dropbox, I just emailed it to myself). This way I keep a running record of the evolution of book. It comforts me that I can always go back if I mess something up or if I have to turn back around.

[*] Famous ad-man David Ogilvy put it bluntly: Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

[*] Envision who you are writing this for. Like really picture them. Dont go off in a cave and do this solely for yourself. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his interview with The Paris Review: …every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. Thats the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

[*] Do not chase exotic locations to do some writing. Budd Schulbergs novel The Disenchanted about his time with F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses the dangers well: It was a time everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. I have a perfectly marvelous house for you to write in, theyd say. Of course no one needs marvelous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.”

[*] True enough, though John Fante said that when you get stuck writing, hit the road.

[*] Commitments (at the micro-level) are important too. An article a week? An article a month? A book a year? A script every six weeks? Pick something, but commit to itpublicly or contractually. Quantity produces quality, as Ray Bradbury put it.

[*] Dont ever write anything you dont like yourself and if you do like it, dont take anyones advice about changing it. They just dont know. Raymond Chandler

[*] Neil Strauss and Tucker Max gave me another helpful iteration of that idea (which I later learned is from Neil Gaiman): When someone tells you something is wrong with your writing, theyre usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, theyre almost always wrong.

[*] Ogilvy had another good rule: Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

[*] Print out the work and edit it by hand as often as possible. It gives you the readers point of view.

[*] Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe to break off work when you ‘are going good.’Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume. Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Billions) has referred to this as stopping on wet edge. It staves off the despair the next day.

[*] Keep the momentum: Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. Jeanette Winterson

That taps me out for now. But every time I read I compile a few more notecards. Ill update you when Ive got another round to share.

In the meantime, stop reading stuff on the internet and get back to writing!

But if you have a second…share your own tips below.

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