#y'all had me convinced

[princetune]

just found out Goncharov(1973) is not real

[blackhholes]

Teen Wolf as Horror Subgenres

Season five B: Gothic Horror

[gingermintpepper]

Absolutely the funniest thing about my current corner of tumblr is that pretty much everyone I've recently followed for Apollo-Appreciating Purposes are either genuinely Hellenist or just rather very into Rick Riordan's Trials of Apollo series which is wild because I know a net zero about both of those things.

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

my experience with maxing out the twins' friendship is just-

Hawke: So, Carver, my dear baby brother who I love and adore, I only need +10 more points to max out your friendship. I've done the grind; through gritted teeth I've kissed templar ass so that we don't raise suspicion. I've supported and defended you and let you take the lead whenever I could. You're my favorite warrior. I took you to the Deep Roads with me because you desperately wanted to go and then made you a warden and you found a place, a purpose. I've practically written my own guide on how to earn as much friendship with you because I love you and it's totally worth it so can I please please have the last +10...? Carver: Hawke: Carver please I'm begging you Carver: Carver: +5 Friendship Hawke: AAUUGGGHHLKSAJDLKAJSDLK-

Hawke: So, Bethany, my dear sis- Bethany: +50 Friendship Hawke: Bethany: :)

[moralesmilesanhour]

You. Spiderverse fan. Pretend that I have just stopped you on the street and am gripping your shoulders. Forget about romantic Gwiles for a second, walk with me.

Girl what about the 'fridged female love interest' trope as a metaphor for comphet. What about codependent friendships that seem doomed to fall apart. Come to the platonic Gwiles store with me...

[artsy-alice]

i started doing the 2022 Quest Calendar so I thought I'd make art of my character! here's Tansy! 💛 she's a human sorcerer who likes studying spells, crafting stuff and helping people 😗

(p.s. hiiiiiii i'm back 😗)

[chemicalarospec]

Finished Dead Boy Detectives, all in one night!

[azol-otl]

Looking back on my experience reading rhato I'm still disappointed about one big thing.

(Yes, rhato made a ton of mistakes blah blah blah that's been talked to death since 2011)

But the thing I'm most disappointed in is that they never capitalized on that "Cheap Cheesy Saturday Morning Live Action Sequel to a B-Action Film" vibe it started with and force them into stupid shenanigans like chasing an Untitled to an American Idol-esque competition, joining it, only to realize on stage they never chose a group name before Kory goes to the mic and says, "We are.. Jason and the Pussycats".

[cuntwrap--supreme]

Why the fuck did 5 pro-anorexia blogs follow my main overnight? Like? I'm blocking all of you, obviously. Had a friend die from starving herself in middle school. I don't fuck with that shit. One of the blogs literally had a post like, "My mom is concerned about how much weight I've lost recently, but she's just jealous that I'm not the fat kid anymore and she still is. Skinny girls don't think about recovery." Like... Please listen to your mother. Holy shit. This is self harm and she's concerned. Your mother is not jealous that she's fat and you aren't. Stop. People literally die from this shit, and promoting an extremely unhealthy lifestyle isn't cute in the slightest.

[queenlucythevaliant]

In Defense of Wuthering Heights

This is not an “I can make him worse” book. It’s a “we can make each other better in the face of tremendous pressure to do otherwise” book. I promise. 

I’ve already written extensively about my love for Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and while I love lots of other Brontë books with all my heart, what I really want to do tonight is try to make you fall in love with Emily’s Wuthering Heights (generally the most divisive Brontë novel among modern readers) the way that I did.

The thing that a lot of people don’t know which I really think ought to be printed on all the dust jackets is that the Brontë sisters were the daughters of a revered. They were PKs and it totally shows.  

So Wuthering Heights is not a romance; it’s a family tragedy. Specifically, it’s an astonishingly hopeful book about generational trauma. 

Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw’s bastard son. This is never explicitly stated, but it is implied so heavily that it might as well be. To boot, Mr. Earnshaw favors Heathcliff over his legitimate son, Hindley. When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Heathcliff is immediately and violently cast out of the family and forced into servitude. Mr. Earnshaw’s hidden infidelity is Wuthering Heights’s original sin.

Of course, Cathy and Heathcliff love each other, but it’s a violent and destructive like-recognizes-like kind of love between two people who, on the one hand, absolutely should not be together and, on the other, totally deserve each other. They’re capital T Tragic and capital R romantic: co-dependent, sharp-toothed sibling-lovers who don’t understand their own relationship as kids because their father lied to them. That lack of understanding follows them into adulthood; they don’t really know how to make sense of what they feel for one another, but boy do they feel it. 

Cathy tells Nellie “I am Heathcliff” and “He’s more myself than I am” and “whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” and it’s half a reaction to the fact that one of her brothers (Hindley) has cast her other brother (Heathcliff) out of the family with a vengeance and half a statement of the fact that although she doesn’t know what Heathcliff is to her, she doesn’t know how to live without him. And while Cathy’s love for Heathcliff definitely fills romantic roles once they’re adults, it’s doesn’t really read as sexual. To use Lewis’s parlance: it’s not eros/gift-love, but rather need-love in the most emphatic sense. It’s storge. Actually, it’s really posessive storge that thinks it’s eros. Hence the problem. 

From the other side, Heathcliff is an outsider from the moment he enters the story. He’s an intruder and a presumed bastard. He’s coded as non-white, maybe Romani or similar. (Probably not actually African-black, but kudos to that one movie for at least making the attempt.) He’s… probably kind of a psychopath in that he displays cruelty to animals and then later on becomes a charismatic, manipulative monster. You can make a nature vs. nurture argument—Heathcliff is definitely on the receiving end of a lot of cruelty—but there’s also something Off about him and that too is othering. And after Mr. Earnshaw dies, Cathy is the one person who still loves him.

But of course, they can’t actually marry. On and off the page, that simply cannot be. Heathcliff runs away, Cathy marries Edgar Linton. They hurt each other badly in the process. Neither Heathcliff nor Cathy can escape the harm that Mr. Earnshaw began and Hindley perpetuated. Cathy dies, Heathcliff marries Isabella, and then things get really interesting.

Because the beating heart of Wuthering Heights, the place where you can profoundly see the fingerprints of the reverend’s daughter, is in the third generation. Cathy and Heathcliff devour each other in life and in death, but the children survive. They forgive. The patriarch died without knowing what he had wrought on his children, the second generation died in anguish, but the third makes it out. Or at least Hareton and Cathy II do.

Cathy’s daughter is named for her mother. Heathcliff’s son by Isabella Linton is named Linton Heathcliff. Heathcliff forces Hareton, Hindley’s son and the only one among the third generation not named for his parents, to live in the same debasement that Hindley once forced on him: he denies Hareton any education and forces him into servitude while simultaneously courting his admiration. In essence, Cathy and Heathcliff implore the next generation to go on living their parents’ tragedy and it. Doesn’t. Work.

Heathcliff tries to force them both into awful situations in which they must act out his trauma, his revenge, to go on perpetuating the pain and bitterness. And at first, it looks like they’re going to play their parts. For a time, they’re as awful to each other as everyone else is.

But then they change. Hareton tries to stand up for Cathy II while she’s essentially being held captive as part of Heathcliff’s 12-Step Revenge Plot. Cathy teaches Hareton to read. She laughs at him, but when she realizes that she’s hurting his pride she apologizes and learns to be patient.  

“I didn’t know you took my part,” she answered, drying her eyes; “and I was miserable and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?”

And after this, they both stand up to Heathcliff. They say, “This ends here. This far and no farther.” Heathcliff is their dragon and they face him together. And when everyone else is dead in grand, tragic fashion, Cathy II and Hareton are left living.

But it’s not just that Hareton and Cathy II survive. They specifically un-do the failings of the previous generations. There’s a kind of atonement to it. They’re honest with each other, unlike Mr. Earnshaw. Cathy recognizes Hareton’s humanity, something Hindley never did for Heathcliff. Hareton lets go of his bitterness and resentment, while Heathcliff let his fester into cruelty and Elaborate Revenge. Cathy II is willful, like her mother, but she is also kind. Hareton is proud, like his father, but he is also compassionate. They forgive each other, while Cathy and Heathcliff only ever held grudges.

At the beginning of the book, Cathy is dead and has explicitly not gone to heaven; with the Brontës, you’ve gotta take these things seriously. Cathy is not in heaven and Heathcliff is a monster and they both seem to be damned, but they do not succeed in damning their children. And in that (I would say because of that), even Cathy and Heathcliff find peace after death.

I also do think that the fact that the story is narrated by Lockwood (weirded out by all of this) and Nellie (unreliable, cares deeply about everyone involved) can make it difficult to see the redemptive arc in the story as clearly as we might if it had an omniscient narrator, or if, say Cathy II was narrating. We're presented the Cathy and Heathcliff love story as this great, horrible, compelling saga (and it absolutely is), but then the following generation can almost seem like a footnote. They're adapted out of most of the film adaptations. But they're the whole point!

I do get why Wuthering Heights just isn’t to some people’s taste. Really. Some people just don’t go for Big Romantic Family Tragedy and that’s fine. But too many people come to the Brontës looking for Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell and that’s just. Wrong. You’ve gotta at least read Wuthering Heights on its own terms before deciding that you hate it (not directed at anyone specific on here, but I do know people irl...). And you really ought to read it with an eye towards Emily’s faith. It makes a world of difference.

TL;DR- There’s a beautiful, very Christian center to Wuthering Heights and it’s one of forgiveness instead of revenge and kindness instead of cruelty. It’s a book about people who are destroyed by the sins of their fathers and those that manage not to be. In a way, it’s almost a fairytale.

[sarah-yyy]

at that time of the year where i have No Motivation to work

[sergeantnarwhalwrites]

Me dodging being called in on my day off with the strength of a bitch tired of being used and abused by fucking food service jobs.

[vampireromantic]

dropping my cringe pjo selfship with octavian and running off like a teenage girl who just asked a boy out

this was a scene redraw from a movie :3

ermmm anyways my oc is called lewis iudicium. he's non-binary, 17 and the child of nemesis. he/they pronouns.

he's apart of some shared lore with my friends. so. I can't really say much yet...

I promise there is so so so much more I just. give me some time xoxo

[chidoroki]

January 15th - Ray’s Birthday

(with one Ray from almost every chapter)

[red-hot-moon]

Sonny seeking out an ex-con he's arrested three times before whose life is in danger and soulfully reciting his own theatre play back to him was not what I had on my bingo card for this season but uh