vasilissadragomir - Tumblr blog

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hey are you busy for the next 50 years? I’d like to sit on the porch with you and watch the sunsets

[vasilissadragomir]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

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Christian and Lissa's break up is harder on me than my parents divorce.

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And I think really my favourite thing about vampire academy is that Rose is constantly having a horrible time because horrible things keep happening and she responds to them instead of the narrative acting like it's just set-dressing. People die and it haunts her, she has to kill her enemies and it's never seen as a victory, it's always a terrible thing she was made to do too young. She never stops being scared of how dangerous everything is, she's trained to be a good fighter but she's terrified anyway and she fails a lot, and there's this atmosphere throughout of powerlessness and of loss and grief and fear, and of the world being much bigger than she really understands and the confusion and anger of being left in the dark. It's a surprisingly dark mood of worldbuilding and I really appreciate it.

[vasilissadragomir]

penelope: you do not have to kiss me ever again i expect nothing from you

colin: ok

penelope:

colin:

colin: but can i though

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Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

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At the lesbian meetup, met a kind of transphobic woman. Started gearing up to get fighty and then realised... she wasn't an actual terf. She was just older, genuinely didn't know stuff, had heard some terf talking points in passing and had been made kind of anxious by them, but hadn't made it her entire personality. She was open to learning that trans women weren't actually roaming around coercing unwilling cis lesbians into sex, thanked me earnestly for giving her a basic explanation of what "non-binary" meant and truly seemed to be relaxing bit by bit the more she heard. Obviously I'm aware that I can't be sure I've given her a sufficient dose of anti-transphobe vaccine to immunise her permanently against the shit that's out there, but overall it made me hopeful. Most people just aren't dyed-in-the-wool bigots. People can be curious and relieved to hear the fearmongering they've been exposed to is untrue. Telling people this stuff isn't a lost cause.

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For the Top Five thing, Top Five Episodes of Buffy that don't have Faith in them but do make you think about Faith?

Not in any order except chronological.

When She Was Bad

Obviously I don't think the writers had the slightest inkling about Faith when this episode was written -- I very much doubt they'd even started to think about Kendra, honestly -- but in some ways this still feels like a Faith origin episode to me. 

So much of how Buffy behaves in this episode would go on to be echoed by Faith the following season.  The insistence on doing things alone and not relying on others (Buffy's refusal to let any of her friends try to help her mirroring Faith's "I'm on my side, and that's enough"); to refusal to tell the people she cares about them that she cares (Buffy's too-late admission that she missed Angel over the summer mirroring Faith's "Uh, Buffy? ... Nothing"); the conflation of sex and violence (the way Buffy demands Angel tell her if he thinks he could “take” her mirroring Faith asking the same thing of Buffy herself).  Even the sudden feigned interest in Xander (as a way of trying to make the actual object of her affections jealous) fits.

Ted

Not just because it’s the first time the show asks what would happen if a Slayer accidentally killed a person, not just because the detective who investigates the death is the same man who will later investigate Finch’s death in Consequences, not just because Ted himself – with his cultivated wholesome image and the lurking unspoken threat of violence and his love of mini-golf – feels like a foreshadowing of the Mayor, but because this is perhaps the one time we see Buffy feel unsafe in her own home because of something ordinary rather than supernatural.  Which I think is something that Faith could relate to.

(By the way, you should read @explosionshark’s Common Ground if you haven’t already).

Anne

This is the first episode in which I think the Buffy/Faith parallels are probably intentional.  It's very hard for me not to watch Buffy alone in her apartment in LA and not be reminded of Faith in her motel room.  So much of Season 3 is about stressing the importance of Buffy’s family and friends in her life (as shown by their absence in The Wish, or by the Class Protector scene in The Prom, or the end of Graduation Day), with Faith as a version of Buffy who didn’t get those things (hence Faith’s “you get the Watcher, you get the Mom, you get the little Scooby Gang.  What do I get?”; and  Buffy’s earlier “Different circumstances, that could be me.”)  And in Anne we see a Buffy who doesn’t have those things, and who is – until she’s talked out of it, by one of the people she already helped save in Sunnydale – an awful lot like Faith.  (Not the same side of Faith that we saw foreshadowed in When She Was Bad, but still I think an aspect of Faith nonetheless.)

Restless

There are a lot of episodes I wish Faith appeared in, but if I could pick just one it would have to be Restless.  And -- given that Faith is actually talked about quite a lot in Season 4 (in a way she isn't in Season 5 or 6 or even the first half of Season 7) -- I’m inclined to think that she might have if Dushku had been available.  We know that Willow and Xander and Buffy are all still thinking about her, after all, and that they were even before she woke up from her coma. If nothing else, she'd have made a lot more sense as the voice of the First Slayer ("No friends! [...] We are alone") than Tara did.

Dead Things

Season 6 is the only season after her first appearance in which Faith’s never mentioned at all, and also the season where Buffy herself is the most like Faith (crawling out a grave in Bargaining the way Faith did in her dream in This Year’s Girl, struggling with money for the first time in a way that Faith had to have been doing for the first half of Season 3 even though we rarely see it; not able to find meaning or purpose in her life except through supernatural violence).

And arguably that most Faith-like Buffy becomes is in Dead Things, which itself is full of very deliberate nods to both Bad Girls/Consequences and This Year’s Girl/Who Are You?  Both because Buffy (believes that she) kills a person, but also because the way Buffy seems almost relieved to be able to give up and turn herself in to the police echoes the way Faith herself eventually did just that (at Buffy’s prompting) in Sanctuary.

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Bloodlines Book 5 Silver Shadows by Richelle Meade

Illustration of the wedding <3 I moved the location. I mean, Sydney loves roman architecture? And they're in Las Vegas? Honestly Caesars Palace just seemed like the obvious choice (I considered the Venetian but the locations outdoors at Caesars were just more picturesque)

Excerpt from Chapter 20 of Silver Shadows

"Oh, hang on. You need this first."

I caught hold of her hand and slipped on the newly made engagement ring. Sydney's breath caught at the glittering array, and then she looked up at me in alarm, finally realizing where the funding for this adventure had come from. "Adrian, those are your aunt's."

I led her forward. "And now they're yours."

The officiant knew about our time constraints and kept the service pretty basic, mostly sticking to what was legally required in the state of Nevada. He did add one part that was his own design, words that burned into me and repeated in my brain later when I slipped the little glittering circle of rubies onto Sydney's finger: "Until now, you have always lived your life alone. Every decision you've made has been for you and you alone. Now, and for the rest of your days, your life will be tied to another's. Every decision you make will be for both of you. What one does affects the other. You are a family, a team... inseparable and unbreakable."

They were powerful words for someone like me to hear, someone who'd indeed lived a pretty selfish existence. But as I met Sydney's shining eyes and saw the hope and joy radiating from her, I felt up to them. I was ready to take that selfless step with her, to know that everything we did now was about the two of us and, eventually, our family. This was the biggest decision I'd made in my life... and the one I did most happily.

When the vows were said and the rings were on, the officiant pronounced us husband and wife. I drew Sydney to me and kissed her, full of love and life and the happiness of what we had in store for us. When we finally pulled apart, the minister added, "I'm very pleased to introduce the world to Adrian and Sydney Ivashkov."

[vasilissadragomir]

I maintain that the time-jump epilogue at the end of the hunger games is one of the only times anyone has ever done it right. So so so often when a story does a timeskip - ESPECIALLY a "they have kids of their own now and they lived happily ever after" type timeskip -- all it serves to do is sever the reader from the story and take characters that you've grown to known and love, and it Frisbee them into being strangers that we don't know.

But the hunger games epilogue, with katniss and peeta having kids, it perfectly mirrors and flips the katniss that we first met - the one who said so staunchly that she would never have kids, because of the life they would be born into. Not the poverty, exactly, but the perpetual terror of the games and the Capitol's control.

So having that katniss be a mother of two by the epilogue is a perfectly inverted match to the katniss we first met. Early katniss announced she'd never have kids, because they would life a life of terror, of waiting to see whose name will be called, of watching their friends and classmates be sent to die in an arena, of being sent themselves to die in an arena, and toiling endlessly for the Capitol's gain in the meantime.

The epilogue is not just a "And Then They Lived Happily Ecer After" ending with no substance to it - it's a "the world has come so far from where it was, and she has healed so much from her traumas that she has reversed her stance on having kids, and has had two of them now, and there is nothing in the future for those children except for peaceful, happy lives."

And the fact that the meadow they're in is the grassed-over mass grave of district 12 civilians mirrors that too.

"There was so much death here once, but despite the bones that lay beneath the soil, the land has healed enough that flowers grow here now." It's a mirror to Katniss and Peeta's "despite all the horrors we endured, and despite the nightmares that still wake us up at night, we have healed enough that flowers can grow here now."

I know some people tar the epilogue of the hunger games with the same brush as other, shitty epilogues from other stories, but I stand by it. I think it bookends Katniss' story really perfectly.

[vasilissadragomir]

sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really. 

[vasilissadragomir]

Plague Doctor masks based off of different birds