tielan - Tumblr blog

[tielan]

A strange alien doctor stands near the unconscious body of Padme Amidala. “It appears she has lost the will to live.” A older man with a limp hobbles closer with the aid of a cane. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Dr. Gregory House.

[tielan]

Kate and Anthony Bridgerton Bridgerton — Season 3 Trailer

[tielan]

CHRIS PINE laughing at memes of himself

[tielan]

I'm not convinced that it's 'friends to lovers' vs 'enemies to lovers' but more a function of Who Colin Is when compared with Who Anthony Is.

Either way, it's a hella funny comparison.

The difference between friends to lovers and Enemies to Lovers is that:

Colin learned he had feelings and immediately proposed her.

While Anthony learned he had feelings and decided to die with it inside.

[tielan]

has this been done?

[tielan]

Dear Bridgerton critics,

It runs on vibes.

Honestly, give up on the 'historical accuracy'. Give up on the 'book accuracy'. Give up on the 'but that isn't how the ton works'. You can even give up on 'this is not how a romance novel works'.

It runs on vibes.

All the bets are off, and a good day to you!

Bridgerton is a work of art. A masterpiece. *chefs kiss* 🤌

I admit, I am newer to the Bridgerton fandom, but after having watched seasons one and two, and season three part one, I can confidently say that I am HERE. AND I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE. I’ve found my people. I love a good period piece. Is Bridgerton the most historically accurate per se? No. Absofuckinglutely not. No. Not in the slightest. But the accents are accurate. The silhouettes are accurate. And the overall aesthetic is gorgeous. You can NOT WALK UP TO ME AND TELL ME THAT THE COSTUME DESIGN IN BRIDGERTON IS ASS. YOU ARE WRONG AND I WILL FIGHT YOU. Anyway, Colin and Pen are my new comfort ship. I felt good vibes from them while watching tik toks of them long before I actually watched the show or read their book. I LOVE POLIN SO MUCH. I like the other couples too, sure, but there’s something about Polin that is so SCRUMPTIOUS FOR ME. I love them. So yeah, live laugh love Bridgerton and everything that goes with it.

[tielan]

Are you into reading, watching tv shows, movies or even anime? Being part of any fandom can be super fun, especially when fans create amazing stories of our favourite characters!

Well, I have some exciting news~!! Me and my friends are testing out the idea of a platform where fanfiction authors can monetize their work absolutely legally and be protected systematically. One of the main goals is for everyone to have the opportunity to monetize their favorite hobby~!

⭐About LORE: We're creating a fanfiction reading platform, a space where writers can finally monetize their incredible stories legally. Think Wattpad meets A03 with a dash of FanFiction.net vibes.

Link to the promotional site: LOREpresentation

⭐ Why LORE? Fan artists can happily earn through donations, commissions, or selling their art, but unfortunately, fanfic writers often face judgment for seeking the same. Writers deserve to be paid for their passion and creativity. It's time to support your favorite writers, and we're doing it in a way that involves the whole community~!

⭐ How You Can Help: We already have 196 fanfiction creators on standby to help use - we're in the early stages, crafting the first prototype, and we need more opinions; your opinions are crucial!

Could you fill out our questionnaire to share your thoughts on favorite genres, ways to enhance our editing modes, preferred platforms, and how important it is to support your beloved writers. Your input guides our development~!

Link to the form: Readers and Writers questionnaire

If you want to become a test user, please leave your contacts and the end of the form or DM me ♥️

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider supporting us! I'll continue sharing updates on what I'm allowed to disclose about the project. As a massive JOJO and Trigun fan, this endeavor is truly a labor of love for me! 😩🙌🏾💗

FYI I am doing this in my spare time, definitely not interfering with work~!! But great opportunity to put my tech skills to the test~!

[tielan]

I have been in fandom for longer than a lot of current fandom has been alive. (My first fanfic ever was written for a school assignment in the 80s and it was a literal self-insert fic with She-Ra: Princess of Power, a 1980s show call Mask, and time travel.)

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available. 

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community. 

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company? 

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists. 

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom 

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

-

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits. 

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people. 

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it. 

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

[tielan]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Bridgerton (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Violet Bridgerton & Kate Sharma, Hyacinth Bridgerton & Kate Sharma, Eloise Bridgerton & Kate Sharma, Francesca Bridgerton & Kate Sharma, Anthony Bridgerton/Kate Sharma Characters: Kate Sharma, Violet Bridgerton, Hyacinth Bridgerton, Eloise Bridgerton, Francesca Bridgerton, Anthony Bridgerton Additional Tags: Family, Found Family, pre-season 3, Kate's Study, Kate & Anthony Week 2024, Kanthony Week 2024

[tielan]

I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.

Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.

People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.

Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.

People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.

[tielan]

Wonder Woman gifs from SS:KTJL; vault scene. Hopefully these come out better than the last gifs. Still trying to figure out how to make these things look good on mobile.

[tielan]

You start by broadcasting a net: anything and everything you think you'd like to read. You'll find a few things that you like, tags that work for you, themes and tropes and characters and pairings.

Start clicking on those; work out which fandoms attract you, or which writers.

Start checking out those authors, their bookmarks, their rec lists, their accounts, their backlog. If you like the way they've written one pairing, see if they have a theme of pairings and the tropes that go with them. Chances are if you like the way they wrote pairing A/B, you'll probably like the way they write pairing C/D.

Comment and kudos. Let the author know you like their stuff. Bookmark and subscribe. Rec on tumblr and anywhere else you care to be fannishly active.

Keep an eye on the authors you're following and check out their recs, what they get gifted, what they gift to others. Those sorts of things are often interlinked: someone likes pairing A/B and writes pairing A/B for someone else, who also likes pairing A/B and likes other things that maybe you like, too.

There is no FYP on AO3 - it's an archive, not social media.

TBH, it's a slow, winnowing, thoughtful process. But it's not dictated by some faceless, brainless algorithm, you have total control over it.

Another AO3 thing I’m curious about, how do yall decide if something is good enough to read? Usually I follow a rule of 1 kudos for every 10 hits. One because it’s easy math and two it’s yet to fail me. Thoughts? Do you just go for it and pray it’s good?

[tielan]

Kent State University

[tielan]

I’m glad the folks at NASA are having fun with XKCD too.

[tielan]

I recently had surgery, and at the time I came home, I had both my cat and one of my grandma's cats staying with me.

- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.

- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.

- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.

That's love. 🐈‍⬛🐈❤️

[tielan]

I'm rereading Thud, and I've just got to the point where Chrysoprase and Vimes are having a meeting. When Vimes tells Chrysoprase Carrot is investigating the Grag Hamcrusher murder case, which Chrysoprase just assured Vimes definitely wasn’t a troll, and asked him to investigate personally, Chrysoprase first asks him to reconsider. Vimes refuses. Then Chrysoprase asks if Vimes trusts Carrot, and Vimes says yes. Then Chrysoprase says:

"Okay. He shiny. He a thinker."

And for the first time that word jumped out at me. Shiny. Diamond King of Trolls is going by the pseudonym Mister Shine at the moment, and the slogan "Mister Shine - him diamond", is popping up in Ankh-Morpork graffiti, literally the writing on the wall. The connection is so striking Vimes jumps straight to it. He doesn’t ask Chrysoprase what he means, he asks who Mister Shine is, because at this point he doesn’t know.

But. Troll kings are diamond, and we know from Thunderbolt the lawyer, who also has some diamond to him, (I wonder if he was ever in line for the throne?) that having any diamond in you means you can't lie. It makes you truthful and it makes you royal. It also makes you highly conspicuous. Diamond King of Trolls goes about wrapped in a cloak, and he is called by the use-name Mister Shine.

And what does Chrysoprase - a well-informed and intelligent gang boss - call Carrot, a hidden royal heir who hasn’t taken up his crown, and who uses the truth as a shield and a sword? Shiny. Chrysoprase calls him shiny. It's a compliment I can't remember anyone else in Discworld getting or giving.

I just think that's incredibly clever.

[tielan]

answer to a question elsewhere

I don't feel sorry for Edwina. She's a dumb kid, sure, but she behaved even dumber than simply being young and naive. She deluded herself that she was going to have a "love match" after repeatedly being told by Anthony that he wasn't going to love her (or him evading the question). She *begs* Kate to make sure Anthony doesn't cry off after the dinner with the Sheffields, then *blames* Kate for Edwina getting all the way to altar before deciding in her own pretty little head that she's not going through with the wedding - as though Edwina wasn't the one who decided that only the viscount would do and she'd otherwise be forever shamed as not good enough!

Oh, and that "half-sister" slam at Kate? No, honey. Everything else can go under "young and stupid" but that one goes under "mean and deliberately cruel".

So, yeah, nah. Not sorry for Edwina. She might have been a nicer character in the book, but I have no time for idiots who weep victim status because things don't go their way after they manipulate and maneuvre things but it doesn't work out.

Edwina's sole saving grace is that she gave Kate and Anthony her blessing in front of the ton. That's the biggest gesture she does in all of eight episodes (because it actually might cost her a skerrick of pride, vs comforting the King which is just what your standard decent person with a bit of compassion would do) and what keeps me from binning her as a bratty wonder.

I can see why some people like her - there are always the kind of people who want to be delicate dainty victims in life, like they're not manipulating and pushing everyone around them cause they're just the SWEETEST DARLING in the room, don'tcha know? And they want a 'get out of bad opinions scot-free' card, because they don't know how to take responsibility for their bad decisions. *shrug*