In your opinion, does the Harry Potter series have literary merits?
Absolutely. Setting aside the obvious fact that it got a whole generation of kids reading and made intellectualism cool to them and gave young girls positive female role models while also gently introducing them to the idea that the world isn’t black and white, studies have also shown that kids who grew up reading Harry Potter are more tolerant and compassionate individuals. JKR used things like house elves and werewolves and giants and Death Eaters to show kids why discrimination and bigotry are fucked up. Hell yeah. HP has so much merit. Honestly like how you could argue that it doesn’t, I have no idea.
I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I'mma put him out of his misery.
The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.
the funniest thing to me about the whole “no one talks to each other because of smartphones/technology/etc” argument is that ppl totally still talk to each other?
i can hang out with friends for hours without checking my phone, or i’m using my phone to show the homies pictures and videos and articles that i think they’d like.
like hate to break it to you, but if someone’s on their phone instead of talking to you it’s cause they don’t wanna talk to you. probably cause you’re fucking terrible & likely use the word “millennialls” derisively and there’s someone 2 timezones away they’d rather chat with
“maybe we can talk about how with the internet there are more diagnoses of adhd now, and how the internet is rewiring our brains…”
“medicating childhood: the hoax of adhd”
literally all things ive seen in the past fucking WEEK let me out of this hell
i can debunk this all in a flash
adhd is a neurodevelopmental disorder, and develops around 12 years old. given that, and how many diagnosed adhd adults there are, including elders, this is something that predates the internet
adhd is genetic, so despite an attention given from parent to child, it’s incredibly likely that at least one of the parents or other relatives also has adhd
oh yes, and let’s not forget the myth that adhd symptoms are synonymous with child behavior. but adhd isn’t just hyperactivity - in fact, hyperactivity doesn’t always present itself. in addition to hyperactivity, other symptoms include:
echolalia
poor memory
racing/scattered thoughts
slowed social development (around 30%)
difficulty understanding tasks/organizing them into steps
struggles understanding time management
impulsive acts (impulsive spending is a major issue with many of us)
difficulty managing emotions, especially anger
easily bored (and boredom leads to greater frustration than others)
TROUBLE SLEEPING. many adhd people spend their entire lives not getting good sleep because of the constant “noise” in their heads. see the scattered thoughts. basically, the thoughts are always going. there is no shut off switch. insomnia is largely prevalent with adhd
losing details (like getting poor grades because you missed the fine print on a test even with knowing the material)
struggles with listening comprehension (words sound like nonsense)
struggles with reading comprehension (words look like nonsense)
memorization issues - a child skilled in math will have trouble with multiplication tables, for example
has trouble “waiting their turn” in conversation - frequently interrupts without realizing
hyperfocus - an often overlooked aspect, when one focuses to the exception of all other external stimuli, including needing to eat, sleep, etc. time almost ceases to exist
not a symptom, but adhd - especially adult adhd - is highly comorbid with anxiety disorders and depression later in life. this is because a person with adhd is working their heart out to achieve the same standards, contrary to the believe that they’re “lazy.” as you can see above, almost every aspect of daily life is impacted - social, work, school, family, money… and this can lead to a feeling of being unable to cope.
despite all that, people with adhd are also:
more solution-oriented
more resilient
more expressive
more curious
and better at multitasking - not just because of having to learn how to manage the other symptoms, but these are, in fact, also symptoms. you can imagine how useful hyperfocus can be as well.
i wrote all this because i really want people to understand me and understand how this all works. and i want misunderstandings to stop so people can respect who i am.
College has me so fucked up. Some kid just told me that our final assignments are due in fifteen minutes and my first reaction was acceptance. I don’t even have anything to hand in, it’s worth 30% of my mark and I was just ready to embrace the void. Wasn’t even relieved when he said he was kidding. Nobody can touch this. I’ve surpassed this mortal plane
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
I’ve seen the screen-time/representation argument before, and I’m still not sure I buy it. Yes, @destinationtoast is absolutely correct that more female characters equals more het and more femslash. My other big fandom is Battlestar Gallactica, which features a pretty gender-balanced cast and one canonical lesbian ship, and the result is both more het and more femslash. I’m getting into Mad Max fandom as well, and again, more het, and more femslash. So yes, absolutely, some of the blame falls on the (usually male) canon creators for not creating enough well-round female characters with screen time in the first place.
But when I look at say, Sherlock fandom, the glaring example that always jumps out at me is Mormor. I have nothing against Mormor or people who ship it, but it’s pretty astounding to me the amount of effort that fans have invested in a male fanon character who isn’t even on the show. And, to @observethewalrus’ point, there is no corresponding fandom interest in say, Violet Hunter, or any of the ACD female characters who are mentioned in passing but aren’t on the BBC Sherlock show who could be fleshed out, and I doubt there ever will be, because fans tend to call OFCs “Mary Sue.”
So I do think there is some validity to the internalized misogyny critique, especially when we consider that it’s not just that there isn’t much representation of female characters, but that when we do see female characters in fic, they are often vilified or otherwise reduced to one-dimensional cartoons that don’t encourage reader empathy.
I understand what people are saying about it being easier to blame the fans than the creators. We have closer ties with fellow fans and it’s easier to call out someone we think might actually listen. But for me, this isn’t about assigning blame as much as it is about being the change I want to see in my fandom, to use the old cliche. I write as much het as I do slash, and I’ve started writing femslash as well, though that was harder for me because of the math, as people have pointed out, there are fewer possible femslash pairing and I didn’t really find one that spoke to me until Morkins and obviously both those female characters were introduced in S3.
And I defend people who ship Warstan, Sherlolly, Molliarty, Adlock at every opportunity from people who insist these ships are homophobic. Because I know my friends who ship het pairings are interested in further development of the female characters, and have nothing against IRL gay people (many of us are queer ourselves). Fandom seems to me overwhelmingly about making space in the canon for people and relationships who are not otherwise represented, and women are still underrepresented in mainstream media in major ways.
So, that’s my $.02.
Thanks, @anarfea, for the very thoughtful response. The more time I spend in fandom, the more I think there’s a lot to what you say, and also that it’s really, really complicated.
There was a really good article I reblogged on this within the past couple days called The Femslash Gap that tries to brainstorm & analyze a number of these factors and more – and my response, FWIW. I really like the non-reductionistic approach there.
When I first entered fandom and started seeing arguments about why there’s so much slash and so little femslash, the arguments bothered me because most of the ones I saw were really reductionist and non-mathy. People often assumed there was one reason (usually a bad assumption), and they threw around terms like misogyny on the one side and homophobia on the other (and at the time I hadn’t yet realized how subtle or broad the application of these terms has grown, either), often without paying much attention to the possible combinations afforded by the underlying media. And that seemed absurd to me, as a fan, a Johnlock shipper, and a fandom statistician.
To break that down a bit, because I think many fans – maybe especially noob fans – are in a similar boat on the first couple points:
Oh, and let me make clear– because I think I left it implicit above – I find the “homophobia” accusations hurled by some M/M fans against some het shippers (or non-fans of a given M/M pairing) to be ludicrous and terrible. Who you ship is not who you support rights for IRL. And very many of us in fandom are various stripes of queer, as @anarfea points out and @centrumlumina’s AO3 census data supports:
http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/post/62840006596/sexuality
I find that argument so ridiculous I don’t bother to engage with it, but that may be a mistake on my part (not to mention johnlock/ot3 shipper privilege). And I certainly didn’t want to skip over that excellent discussion by @anarfea and appear to dismiss it.
THIS: “ So I do think there is some validity to the internalized misogyny critique, especially when we consider that it’s not just that there isn’t much representation of female characters, but that when we do see female characters in fic, they are often vilified or otherwise reduced to one-dimensional cartoons that don’t encourage reader empathy.”
I keep wanting to discuss this more– how we write women in slash fic. I’m thinking about how many times a female character– no matter who she is– is portrayed as vapid, shallow, timid, a straight up bitch– a doddering old lady who say’s “dear” every five seconds– or a murderous vixen, etc, etc, …
Okay. In Sherlock, part of the problem is that the women we are given to work with are caricatures to begin with. Ella, the “motherly” Black woman. Mostly invisible. Sally Donovan, the Angry Black woman and a slut, besides. Mrs. Hudson– see doddering, motherly granny stereotype. Janine? Ho’. Mary? Assassin who just wants life in the suburbs. “I’m not really bad, I’m just drawn that way.” Molly, the girl-woman desperately in love. Or, as they used to say– “Fish”. (ugh)
And what do we do? Our women “chirp” and “giggle”, or they are cartoon villains. Or they are window dressing. They have no real purpose. We seem to want them gone. Or– they must stay in their tropeish roles.
I think that’s how much we have been influenced by media.
But because we are independent of popular media– in other words, we are in it, but not of it– and we can pick and choose what we want to do, how we want to show these characters– we have the power to change how women– who are reflections of ourselves– appear in our own wing of underground media.
It’s a shame that oftentimes, we can be more chauvinistic in our writing where women are concerned than the men writing the original series…
Sorry for blathering, but y’all made me think! :-D
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
Seven year olds can properly name the genitilia that they have, as well as the genitles others have.
Eleven year olds know that girls can like girls and boys can like boys and that its even okay to like neither, or both, or multiple.
Thirteen year olds know what a condom is and how to say no when someone wants to kiss but you don’t.
This is AMAZING. I want THIS! I would LOVE to have this education and openess in my life.
Telling a group of teenagers to wait until they’re married is:
a) not going to do /shit/, did you really think they were going to listen to you
and
b) none of your FUCKING business, I’m gonna have a post coming up about this so stay tuned.
This is what sexual education is about. This is what it needs to consist of. This is what I wish I had learned.
Take note, America, because you’re doing a really shitty job.
(W)
Not to mention that this method has been proven to reduce the amount of childhood sexual abuse that occurs. By teaching children what consent means, that no one has the right to touch you without permission, children are more likely to report sexual abuse and to recognize it.
i’ve seen a lot of pushback against “kid hating” lately, so let me just say a few things:
i don’t particularly like kids
they make me uncomfortable
the idea of being responsible for the physical and emotional well being of a child freaks me out
being pregnant is incredibly unappealing to me
i wouldn’t want to screw up my kids or scar them in any way with my shitty parenting
i don’t want to have to organize my personal/professional lifestyle and finances around my children for 21+ years
i just don’t want kids
but
i would never be mean to children
i love other people’s kids
i completely understand why other people want children
i’m fully aware that many others struggle to conceive and i would never disrespect or belittle that pain
i don’t think less of anyone for wanting kids
the idea that people who don’t want kids are inherently selfish, uncaring assholes is a lazy, misogynistic attempt to shame people (primarily women) for prioritizing personal goals and self care above parenthood. Choosing to have children doesn’t automatically make you more kind or selfless or fulfilled than people who don’t. Wanting to remain childfree is not the same as “hating kids,”nor does it mean you’re a horrible person. It’s a personal choice like everything else, so can we please stop being shitty about it?
Could I request Max saying something stupidly sweet to Furiosa in Latin? A friend and I think he knows it, considering her speaks it randomly a couple times in the movie, and him having the excuse of Furiosa not understanding him is adorable to me
I’d love to! Are there any suggestions for what he says? I know no latin…
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
Everybody wins. Nobody dies.
This has probably been said on this post before but it makes a reasonable amount of literary sense as well.
A lot of Shakespeare’s works, comedy in particular but also relatively serious plays like The Merchant Of Venice, were based in the tropes of Italian commedia, which is eventually where we get French sex farces from as well.
Add in a servant who facilitates the nightly transfer and wants to get laid with one of the housemaids, some jokes between characters about people thinking Romeo and Benvolio are fucking all night long, Romeo in drag once or twice, and either a lecherous elderly neighbor or Juliet’s father always hanging around, and you’ve basically got the plot of a commedia performance. Especially funny at the time would have been dressing Romeo in drag (say, to pretend to be her lady in waiting when her dad almost catches him in some other man’s marital bed in the middle of the day) while Juliet was already being played by a boy actor in drag, and having Romeo pull it off so well that he gets mistaken for her.
But yeah, R&J as a door-slammin’ sex comedy, I’d watch it.
here’s a reminder, too, for some of my younger followers
BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN THE WORLD. it’s important that you learn about what’s going on. but it’s not a requirement that you post about them on your tumblr. it’s ok to blacklist things that upset you if you use tumblr as a safe haven.
you’re not bad, uninformed, or uncaring because you don’t blog about tragedy, politics, human rights, etc. it doesn’t mean that you aren’t moved by these things. it simply speaks to whatever your personal purpose is when you use tumblr.
generally you won’t see me talking about current events on tumblr. that’s because this is a visual and personal journal – not a current events blog. sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of pressure to include current events and your stance on them on your blog. that’s not necessary if you don’t want to include those things.
A few people have reblogged this with tags like “i thought this went without saying” – but for some people (especially young people) i have found that it is NOT so obvious. There is such enormous pressure in the tumblr callout culture to have specific content on your blog. I have been trying to look at the things I take for granted (like this concept) and making sure to talk about them.
Thanks to everyone who has reblogged this for sharing this idea with your followers!
listen ok. so there’s that typical horror trope about the family and the haunted house and yadda yadda.
but like, have a movie where this family has gone through many haunted houses before, to the point where they move into this new one and are like ‘okay. fresh start number seven.’ and then basically throughout the movie avoid and deflect any typical horror event from the house like it’s no big deal.
something’s under the teen girl’s bed? she takes a can of bug spray and some chloroform and uses that shit on the demon creature without turning an eye from whoever she was texting. mom’s cooking and the family’s nowhere to be found? weird creaking noises? she sighs and continues cooking. family comes through the back door later with some blood on them and carrying a few hockey masks. mom doesn’t question it. family looks exhausted and irritated. younger brother walks into his room to find the dog trapped in the wardrobe, wardrobe unable to open? seeping dark smoke and gross liquids? move it and throw some salt around that thang and kick in the back of the wardrobe. dog hops out with a scoff and trots to the door of the room and down the stairs. a shadow follows. lots of growling and snarling and scuffling. a shadow runs fuckin outie back down the hall in fear. dad is in the garage working in the car. car shuts it’s doors and locks them. he is unable to get out. he sighs and starts the car. might as well go get groceries.
family don’t give a fuck.
hello, yes, how much do movies cost and how would I fund this
There’s this fic on AO3 that, according to my history page, I have visited 176 times. Which means I alone am responsible for 176 hits on that fic. I commented on some of the chapters, but only a few, because I feel like a stalker when I comment every week. I gave it kudos, but I can only give it one, even though it’s one of my favorites.
So just remember, when you’re looking at that hit count and wondering why you don’t have that same number of kudos (divided by the number of chapters, because each one of those also counts as a hit), it might be because some people out there love your fic. They read it when they’re feeling down. They open it in the waiting room at the doctors office, or in the lonesome dark of night. They turn to it in celebration when they did something right. They open it over and over so they can send the link to their friends, or just to revisit the characters that they love. They checked it ten times in one day, hoping that you had updated.
A disparity between hits and kudos does not mean that your readers didn’t like your fic, or that they were too lazy to hit the kudos button. It means that some of them came back, and there’s nothing that makes me happier about my writing than that.
i actually don’t think it’s stated anywhere the text what degree he is working on at university, only that his is attending. however, there is no mention of him graduating and when he first goes to university, it is the first time he is attending, so it’s likely that he is only earning his bachelor’s
THIS MOTHERFUCKER WAS AN UNDERGRAD
IMAGINE HEARING ABOUT THE DUDEBRO LIVING NEXT TO U IN THE DORMS “yah dave dropped out cuz he built a fucking person”
can you imagine how much the Jaeger Program meant to the poor and weak of the world?
like it is explicitly stated that the rich and powerful lived way inland, safer from the kaiju than those along the Pacific coastlines of the world. Can you imagine the interiors of various countries gentrifying, forcing lower-income families further and further from safety? Can you imagine having to tell your kids that you can’t afford your suddenly hyper-expensive home in, say, Idaho, and your best chance of being able to get an affordable house is on the coast of Oregon, where any day an enormous monster could pop up to say ‘hi fuck all of you’?
can you imagine how beloved the jaeger pilots are by the people on the coast? how happy they are that the battles are taking place out in the ocean rather than on top of their houses?
just
I just want to know precisely everything about the world of Pacific Rim not even just about the pilots I want to know about the average people living on the front lines of this horrible alien war and what sort of things they think about every day and how they live their lives and what kind of dumb blog posts they make and I want to see the riots that started over the Wall because no fuck you, you can’t take away their giant metal protectors and leave them with a wall that’s practically nothing, how dare you
Hey let’s destroy the pernicious myth that preteens were regularly marrying in medieval and early modern Europe and were having children as young teenagers. It’s just not true. Church records show the typical age people got married was around 18-23. Sure, around a third of brides were pregnant at the time of their marriage, but premarital sex was actually completely fine in medieval and early modern Europe if the couple intended to marry. (Oh look! Another historical fact the Victorian period completely mangled!)
Very young girls were not having babies in medieval times, people. The only people who ever bring this non-fact up are paedophiles looking to defend their dangerous paraphilia. So cut it out. Stop spreading this myth. It’s not historical, it’s not factual, it’s not true.
