More vampires who 300 years later can’t remember what was the truth and what was the lie they told to get out of trouble.
More vampires who are like, “I don’t know, man, I spent most of that decade in an opium den.”
More vampires who weren’t paying attention because they didn’t think it would be important.
More vampires who don’t know because there was lot of conflicting gossip and they don’t want to point any fingers.
More vampires who are just bad at dates. “Back in 1620, or was it 1645, wait, what year is it now?”
More vampires who were on a totally different continent when it happened, so get off their back and stop asking them questions already.
YES to all of this but also consider: vampires who only remember the most trivial stuff.
“Oh yeah, the only thing I remember about the American Revolution was this nice candlemaker I met sometime, and she was wearing this really cute red shawl…”
“Uhhh I don’t remember much about the fall of Rome but there was this one fucking cobblestone right outside the coliseum…”
Also consider: vampires who realize three or four hundred years after the fact that they knew someone famous.
Just sits up in bed one night screaming “THAT WAS GEORGE GODDAMN WASHINGTON”
i just realized i have a real actual story that easily sounds like some crazy made up 2012 tumblr post
so about two weekends ago i was hopping on a plane to get back from an out-of-state convention. because i like to keep a tighter budget on con travel, i got a seat almost at the back of the plane where all the people with kids usually get seated because it’s near the toilets and far from the vip class.
anyways i lug my carry-on bags to the 28th row where im supposed to sit my ass the fuck down for about 4 hours and get placed next to a lady and her 2 year old son who is mega energetic. thankfully i actually like kids, so i struck up conversation with her and started playing with her son. the little dude and i got along swimmingly and he even fed me animal crackers while we were up in the air and it was chill.
this totally scored me some points with mom and so when the boy got busy on the tablet, i got to talk to her too. turns out she was roughly my age and working in the marketing department of an all-natural medicine research group. i’m a business student, so i decided to actually try networking for once in my life and ask her about her life and her interests. of all the things she could have listed she says to me:
video games.
and i’m like cool awesome i like video games what kind of games do you play? she lists off a couple, including kingdom hearts, which i was super big on in like high school, when i was a huge fucking axel/roxas (akuroku) and sora/riku (soriku) shipper (like obsessed shipping trash with omg yaoi squee and all holy hot damn). i was trying to establish common ground so i say oh hey i love kingdom hearts
and i swear to god she looks straight at me IN PUBLIC with her TWO YEAR OLD SON SITTING BETWEEN US and said “do you ship akuroku and soriku? they’re so cute together.”
the story ends with me being totally mortified and also admitting that i totally do and us adding each other on facebook and now she and her son are gonna come up and hang out with me this weekend and is also trying to help me get a job at the company she’s currently working at?? i successfully networked?? on a professional level?? because of gay ships and nerd culture?? anime wasn’t a mistake??
can we stop with this “[abuse] builds character” shit? im not a better person because i was abused. im not a more interesting person because i was abused. im fucked up and paranoid because i was abused. stop romanticizing abuse you assholes
Hate vocal fry? Bothered by the use of “like” and “just”? Think uptalk makes people sound less confident? If so, you may find yourself growing increasingly unpopular—there’s a newwave of peoplepointingoutthat criticizing young women’s speech is just old-fashioned sexism.
I agree, but I think we can go even further: young women’s speech isn’t just acceptable—it’s revolutionary. And if we value disruptors and innovation, we shouldn’t just be tolerating young women’s speech—we should be celebrating it. To use a modern metaphor, young women are the Uber of language.
What does it mean to disrupt language? Let’s start with the great English disruptor: William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is celebrated to this day not just because he wrote a mean soliloquy but because of what he added to our language—he’s said to have brought in over 1,700 words. But recent scholars have called that number of words into question. As Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, has pointed out, if Shakespeare was inventing dozens of new words per play, how would his audience have understood him? Rather, it’s likely that Shakespeare had an excellent grasp of the vernacular and was merely writing down words that his audience was already using.
So if Shakespeare wasn’t disrupting the English language, who was? And how did we get from Shakespearean English to the version we speak now? That’s right: young women.
A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681. The pair looked at fourteen language changes that occurred during this period, things like the eradication of ye, the switch from “mine eyes” to “my eyes,” and the change from hath, doth, maketh to has, does, makes.
In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.
This trend hasn’t changed much. While young people have long driven innovation, it’s not just an age thing—it’s also a gender thing. During the decades that sociolinguists have been researching the question, they’ve continually found evidence that women lead linguistic change.
Plus, young women are on the bleeding edge of those linguistic changes that periodically sweep through the media’s trend sections, from uptalk to “selfie” to the quotative like to vocal fry.
The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists. The founder of modern sociolinguistics, William Labov, observed that women lead 90% of linguistic change—in a paper he wrote 25 years ago. Researchers continue to confirm his findings.
It takes about a generation for the language patterns started among young women to jump over to men. Uptalk, for example, which is associated with Valley Girls in the 1970s, is found among young men today. In other words, women learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.
While the pattern is well-established, we still don’t know for sure yet why young women reliably lead linguistic innovation. Maybe it’s nature, maybe it’s nurture; but we do know that young women tend to be more socially aware, more empathetic, and more concerned about how their peers perceive them. This may translate into a greater facility for linguistic disruption. Women also tend to have larger social networks, which means they’re more likely to be exposed to a greater diversity of language innovations.
And of course, women are still likely to spend more time caring for children than men—even if a particular woman works outside the home, daycare workers and elementary school teachers are disproportionately female. This means that even if young men were disrupting language as much as women, they would be hard-pressed to pass it along.
All of this leads us to the biggest question: if women are such natural linguistic innovators, why do they get criticized for the same thing that we praise Shakespeare for? Plain old-fashioned sexism.
Our society takes middle-aged men more seriously than young women for a whole host of reasons, so it’s only logical that we have also been conditioned to automatically respect the tone and cadence of the typical male voice, as well as their word choices.
Sure, let’s encourage young women to speak with confidence, but not by avoiding vocal fry or “like” or whatever the next linguistic disruption is. Let’s tell them to speak with confidence because they’re participating in a millennia-old cycle of linguistic innovation—and one that generations of powerful men still haven’t figured out how to crack.
“The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists” *weeps with joy*
THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL
also @loveandfolly I feel like this thing with sensitivity to/ disruption of language describes our high school circles
Current annoyance: I keep clicking kudos button on AO3 and then that fucker announces:
I don’t care. Some things just deserve more kudos.
Comments are also effective…
I just thought of something.
A lot of people say they don’t leave comments because they can’t think of anything to say other than “I liked this” and they think it’s dumb or something.
So how about… You leave a comment that says “This is an extra kudos” because you can leave as many comments as you like, but you can only leave a max of two kudos (one logged in, one logged out). You can do this on every chapter if you want! “Extra kudos in comment form!” You get to express your extra love in an introvert-friendly way! :D
This is an amazing idea, and this post needs ten thousand notes.
You don’t have to be grateful that it isn’t worse.
read that.
read it again, and again, and again.
somebody, somewhere, always has it worse than you. there is one person on this planet that has it the worst of all, and that person is NOT the only person allowed to be unhappy with their lot.
if things are bad for you, they are bad for you. period.
This goes for trauma as well. A lot of times survivors get trapped in a cycle of minimizing/diminishing their trauma because “other people have it worse” - but there is no hierarchy of trauma. There is no ranking system for which traumas are “better” or “worse.” Your trauma is valid. Period.
Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.
Thank you.
I will always re-blog this
I think it was high school when i overheard some white girl put on her best semi-disgusted and confused voice and go “why do so many Mexicans dress up like cowboys?” and I had to be the person to tell her.
Why do you think the whites say buckero? Cause they couldn’t say vaquero.
I dunno if I reblogged this before but fuck it, y'all gon learn today.
Guys, this is not a drill. Antarctic scientists need you to study photos of penguins to help them figure out how climate change is affecting these stumpy little flightless birds.
Scientists from the UK have installed a series of 75 cameras near penguin territories in Antarctica and its surrounding islands to figure out what’s happening with local populations. But with each of those cameras taking hourly photos, they simply can’t get through all the adorable images without your help.
“We can’t do this work on our own,” lead researcher Tom Hart from the University of Oxford told the BBC, “and every penguin that people click on and count on the website - that’s all information that tells us what’s happening at each nest, and what’s happening over time.”
The citizen science project is pretty simple - known as PenguinWatch 2.0,all you need to do is log on, look at photos, and identify adult penguins, chicks, and eggs in each image. Each photo requires just a few clicks to identify, and you can chat about your results in the website’s ‘Discuss’ page with other volunteers.
Oh my god I have never wanted to write a Marvel/Project Runway fusion before but can you imagine
Right though? RIGHT? She’d be so perfect, and it would be AMAZING.
I feel like she’d be super charming and sweet and nice–but also super critical and not shy about it, either.
“Darling, I know you’ve seen Batman and Robin, like, a thousand times, but the nipples really aren’t a selling point.”
“Okay, so the red and gold metal bikini is very sexy, but I think you missed the entire point of armor.”
“I like how it flows, but it’s far too flimsy. Forget Doombots - a stray corner is going to snag this cape and your whole costume just tears apart. Wardrobe malfunctions are embarrassing when you’re a celebrity, they’re fatal when you’re a superhero.”
“Yes, yes, the catsuit is very classic but it needs a zipper. I don’t care how hot you think she is, if you tell Black Widow she has to fight ninjas wearing a costume held together with double-sided tape she’ll break all ten of your fingers.”
“It’s certainly unique, but I’m not sure that glowing in the dark is a real selling point when you’re fighting crime.”
“Okay, this is just a Daredevil suit with the crotch cut out.” *takes a picture with her cell phone* “Nelson and Murdock will be contacting you shortly, I suspect.”
O-omg. PERFECT.
She totally pushes for style AND practicality in the judging. Yesss.
my fave greek history story to tell is that of agnodice. like she noticed that women were dying a lot during childbirth so she went to egypt to study medicine in alexandria and was really fucking good but b/c it was illegal for women to be doctors in athens she had to pretend to be a man. and then the other doctors noticed that she was 10x better than them and accused her of seducing and sleeping with the women patients. like they brought her to court for this. and she just looked at them and these charges and stripped in front of everyone like “yeah. im not fucking your wives” and then they got so mad that a woman was better at their jobs then them that they tried to execute her but all her patients came to court and were like “are you fucking serious? she is the reason you have living children and a wife.” so they were shamed into changing the law and that is how women were given the right to practice medicine in athens
So I am out Christmas shopping and I’m seeing all these little girls picking out star wars toys and seeing storm trooper gear at Claire’s and overhearing parents picking out lightsabers for their daughters and I keep thinking about being a little kid when Phantom Menace first came out and there was NONE of this and my mom would sigh heavily every time I asked for a BOY toy and just what a great time this is right now for kids and sci fi
You have three islands. Divide them into groups of one. The straight island, the gay island, and the lesbian island. The straight island is going to reproduce and keep going strong for millions of generations to come. The gay and lesbian islands will both wipe out in not even one century. This isn’t just about religion or morals, it’s just simple common sense. Being gay is unnatural, and not just because God said so, but because you yourself wouldn’t even be born without a REAL natural man and woman. And no, there is no such thing as a lesbian bone marrow “thing” to have children. That’s a biased fact that came from a lesbian scientist who has false opinions. If it’s not a real penis or vagina, then it’s fucking false and you’re just opinionated by dumb facts. I’m done here. Read over what I said and if you still think that being gay is normal and natural, then I hope you achieve some common sense one day. Bye
Where is this gay island located.. asking for a friend
I just have SO MANY questions. Why were we all separated onto different islands? Did the government sanction this? If so, why? Why didn’t we revolt against this tyrannical government? Where are these islands? How were they chosen? Are the continents of the world abandoned? What kind of resources are on each island? Are they the same or different? Does each island have a right to form its own government or does the government that segregated us still rule? If so, what island do they rule from and how do they communicate with the other two islands? If they can communicate with the other two islands, can all three islands communicate with each other? If the straight people keep reproducing, won’t their island become overpopulated and their resources depleted? Islands only have so much space right? Do straight people stop having gay kids? Isn’t it a fact that, to date, straight people are the largest manufacturers of gay kids? If a gay kid is born on straight island, do they get sent to their appropriate island? Wouldn’t that aid in the re-population of gay and lesbian island? What about people who are attracted to more than one gender? Are they just lost at sea, floating aimlessly? Is the ocean full of listless pansexuals, floating nowhere? Or are they trapped in some sort of purgatory because they don’t fit on any one island? Are there trees on lesbian island? Is it conceivable that if there were, a large group of lesbians could build a boat? Have you ever seen lesbians around timber? If they built a boat, could they travel to gay island? How far apart are the islands? If they could travel to gay island, would they be able to collect semen, return to lesbian island, and repopulate the island? Would they be able to send some of those children to gay island? Do trans people exist in this world? If so, wouldn’t they be able to aid in repopulation? If the lesbians decided to declare war on the heterosexuals, would they be able to reach their island? On the way to heterosexual island, could the lesbians pick up the gays and scoop the floating bisexuals from the sea? If so, would they all be able to go and attack heterosexual island together, wiping out its people’s, stealing its children and taking all its resources? Does this fantasy world get you off at night? Please write back soon!
Speaking up from the pansexual archipelago: I too have these questions
Checking in from bisexual bay: The boats are nearly complete and are equipped with a special invisibility function. We attack at dawn
Fuck the questions, lemme on that boat, I’m coming with you
*random ace just floating away into the sky like a balloon*
I am so here for an asexual sky nation. We live in floating cities and master the wind currents. Newly minted ace youths are sent up to us in baskets suspended under hot air balloons. We breed giant birds to bear us through the skies, or else build ourselves wings and gliders to fly in their midst. The only land we know are the tallest mountain peaks and the world is a bright blue gem spreading out beneath us.
(And we will of course be providing air support for the impending attack on Straight Island)
OP’s nasty-ass post got turned into a goddamn sci-fi dystopian adventure and I’m so here for it.
oh my god Bisexual Buccaneers from Both-Ways Bay is both a porn tile and my new life goals
i’m an asexual homoromantic does this make me our young heroine torn between worlds
You spend part of your time on lesbian island, learning the stories, and traditions, and part of your time in the vast floating asexual cities, training with your eagle so that you can one day become one of the chosen few: the messengers, who carry letters and passengers between islands, jumping the heterosexual blockades. When you enter this select group, you’re assigned the job of collecting reports from spies pretending to heterosexual on straight island, flying in at the dead of night, risking discovery to collect vital intelligence. You fall in love with a pansexual girl who’s chosen to hide her orientation so she can aid the Resistance. At the climax of the novel, you swoop down from above on your giant eagle to rescue your lady love from a frenzied mob. As straight island burns in the background, you share a chaste kiss and cuddle while discussing the possibility of a mountain-top pansexual outpost.
IT CAME BACK AROUND AND IT GOT BETTER!
THE EAGLES ARE COMING THE EAGLES ARE COMING
AND THEY’RE ACE
All right so who’s writing the best selling novel?
A white Bulgarian nationalist literally recorded a video of himself humiliating and beating up a Romani boy. Where is the outrage? Where is the massively trending hashtag? Where are the gofundme pages or the countless donations or Facebook profile picture filter?
Oh, right. Gypsies don’t get those things because most of the world views us exactly as this Bulgarian neo-nazi shithead: subhuman and not worthy of basic human dignity let alone help or respect.
I’m so tired of all of this. Please spread awareness and solidarity using Mitko’s hashtag #RomaAreEqual
Reblogging again for my trans* and genderfluid buddies and also all female cosplay friends.
yO IM !!!!!!!!
WOAH THIS POPPED UP ON MY DASH AGAIN! Everyone, this is the binder I use. Its rather comfortable, and it doesn’t feel too constricting to me. In fact, half the time i’m running around in cosplay and i forget im wearing a binder! i do remember to limit my time in the binder to at most 8 hours if not 6, take deep breaths after its off, and to do deep coughs, etc. but honestly using a sports bra was more noticable and uncomfortable than this binder. and they last, too! I recomend it to anyone who can afford it and bind safely!
I always love that Eliot is like, “Listen Nate, this is a shit idea. It’s going to go horribly wrong. We’re all going to end up in jail or dead. But if you’re really set on doing this then I’ve got your back because that’s my job.”
it just gives me warm fuzzy feelings whenever Eliot is protective of his crew, even when they’re making potentially shit decisions (which is usually just Nate tbh)
Your dog sounds amazing, you need to tell us about that door licking story Dumb dogs are the best!
We trained the dog so that when he wants out, he goes to the front door and waits.
Somehow in his little golden retriever brain, he interpreted this to mean “go to the front door, and lick it.”
If he’s at the door, but isn’t licking it, he doesn’t need out, he’s just chilling.
So, this was our routine - when he wants out, he goes to the front door, and licks it. And then we moved house, and he got very, very confused.
He knew he had to go to the front door when he wants out, but this was a new house with obviously a door that was completely new to him.
Despite our condo having only one door that leads outside, and him going out this very same door literally at least five times a day, every day, for about a year…he still has no idea where the front door is in this house. Absolutely no idea at all.
Now whenever he needs out, he will go to any random door and start licking it. And I mean any door - the bathroom door, my bedroom door, my closet, the goddamn door of a kitchen cabinet, even.
I don’t know if he’s really smart or really dumb. Because clearly, he understands conceptually what a door is. I don’t know if he thinks my closet or the kitchen cabinets lead to outside, or if he’s just hoping to find doggy Narnia, or if he’s just hopelessly given up on ever being able to find the door by himself and is just doing the best he can, but every goddamn time he wants out, he’s right there licking the glass door to the shower or something.
He doesn’t alert us he needs out any other way. So if you haven’t seen him in a while, you have to search room by room until you find him with his tongue pressed up against the linen closet because he thinks outside might be that way.
He’s the biggest, dumbest dog I have ever met in my life and I could not love him any more. He’s perfect.
I love the phrase “what the entire fuck” because it implies that there exists some scenario that warrants only a “what the partial fuck”.
Similarly “what the actual fuck,” implying “what the figurative fuck” or “what the imaginary fuck”.
“What the actual fuck” is an interesting one because “actual” has so many distinct shades of meaning.
“Entire” generally means “whole” or “complete”, but depending on the particular context, “actual” can denote any or all of “real”, “literal”, “concrete”, “truthful”, “grounded” or “factual”.
Thus, when deriving the contrastive phrase, in addition to “what the imaginary fuck” and “what the figurative fuck”, we could also reasonably arrive at “what the hypothetical fuck”, “what the fraudulent fuck”, “what the fanciful fuck” or “what the counterfactual fuck”.
Language is fun!
@blackmelange Feeling the need for a little variety.
Ooh, what about “what the everloving fuck”? “Everloving” could mean “faithful” or “devoted”, so that implies “what the faithless fuck” or “what the indifferent fuck”.
also ngl, I kind of love the idea of a ship where the guy is dark, and the girl initially wants to “save” him, but he doesn’t need or want saving from it because it’s part of him
and in fact she’s the one who needs to embrace her dark side because she represses it, and so in order for the relationship to work she needs to be honest and accept that part of herself
and the development is that they help each other accept and embrace who they are, darkness included, and they become this slightly evil power couple
inspired by @suzukiblu‘s lovely head canon about the trio getting babies
It starts with Finn. They’re on a mission, finn and poe going to an abandoned first order barracks to hunt down some information and the retreating first order left behind this baby, this tiny soft little girl, and she’s crying out of hunger and cold and fear and finn acts on instinct and bundles her under his shirt
finn has never actually seen a baby because troopers are kept isolated from baby troopers, kept in age appropriate barracks, and he is absolutely hypnotised by how tiny and fragile it is. it is so soft. look at its little soft softness.
can we keep it? can we keep it poe, please, look how beautiful and tiny she is she’s never going to be a trooper, never ever ever.
they keep it. what do you call it? you name babies after things you love right–
Rey takes one look at the little thing and says. “We’re going to call her Luke.”
That’s the first. After that, Finn comes back from a mission holding the hands of two little boys, twins. Both are wearing mini versions of Stormtrooper armour. “Say hello to Millennium and Falcon.”
After that Rey comes back with no fewer than five Force-sensitive kids who had almost become troopers. “They’re not going to the Academy,” she says, “because we’re not going to start when they’re little, not anymore. Kids get to be kids.”
They make the mistake of letting these kids name themselves (after things you love, Finn suggests, after people you admire) . Thus, the Resistance ends up with: Finn I, Finn II, Finn III, Dameron’s X Wing, and ReytheJedi.
tell me about troopers and food! I have All The Feelings: regimented meal times, told what and when and where to eat, have to finish in a certain amount of time or they don’t eat; not eating is grounds for reconditioning; you eat what is in front of you, everything controlled and bland and perfectly nutritionally balanced
Ok yeah, tell me about troopers absolutely forgetting to eat because no-one is directing them to, tell me about troopers who are weird and cranky when they don’t have EXACTLY the recommended level of calories or nutritional intake, who don’t know why they’re mad and irritable.
Or troopers who like, just eat whatever out of a can and assume it’s all fine. Can of preserved fruit, can of bean paste, can of condensed milk. Just the assumption that rations are interchangeable
TROOPERS WHO ARE SO SURPRISED WHEN THEY EAT SOMETHING OUT OF DATE AND THEIR BODy IS JUST LIKE…naaa fuck right off
troopers dealing with the aftermath of coming off all those strange pills the order had them on: you know that they were so full of medication they rattled; uppers, downers, things to delay puberty, things to sort out muscle growth
God, the concept of food poisoning and allergies must be totally foreign
Even things like the common cold get blasted right the hell out of you with every antiviral they can get their hands on because otherwise massive communal barracks would be a nightmare
So really the only experience with illness they have is ‘you get better right away or you DIE’. The ‘get lots of rest and fluids’ approach to the common cold must scare the crap outta them
Oh God the baby troopers would think they were going to be decommissioned. The older ones might understand the new way of things but imagine little ones hiding the fact they were ill. Scared because they can’t stop sneezing.
Hiding their friends from resistance medical because sickly children in the order are culled
There’s like, a bad batch of rations, and half the resistance spends a night puking, and all the troopers thinking is ‘oh god, this must be one of the plagues I’d heard about’
And reviving care from non-medical professionals must also be so ????? This isn’t your job why are you doing it?
Because everyone in a unit has very set jobs, and it doesn’t mean that everyone else doesn’t care, but you wouldn’t trust a sharpshooter to do an engineers job because they 'were concerned about the wall’ so why would you trust Not A Medical Professional to bring you tea and soup?
But yes! Bad rations, mass food poisoning and
the troopers are like WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON and the Resistance fighters are like…dudes, its okay, just some bad food and the troopers are convinced they’ve been poisoned because that is what the first order does with rebellious squads, sometimes; they wipe them out with tainted food, make it look like an accident
the first order thinks they are being subtle but they aren’t and the troopers know and they are so VERY SCARED when people start vomiting because is this a trap IS THIS ALL A TRAP.
Especially because there’s the 'we thought that you were different and you BETRAYED US’ panic,
but they get better. they get better: that’s the magical thing the troopers find about freedom; they are allowed to get sick and heal. (the resistance fighters are just….struck dumb. you poor poor babies and they are guilty for weeks and poe personally does lessons on What To Do When You Get the Sniffle to reassure these scared scared killing machines.
stormtrooper headcanons (part 1 of ???) courtesy of conversations with @dimir-charmer
Ok, so talk to me about stormtroopers who think that seeing other people’s faces is super intimate and don’t want anyone to see their faces because it feels to special and risky
talk to me about troopers who are deeply ashamed of their inability to read facial expressions or make ‘normal’ ones
so here’s the thing: stormtroopers with their helmets on since they were babies aren’t going to have the faintest sodding clue how to read facial expressions. they know, instinctively, that one is happy and one is sad but nuances are often lost on them. thus: body language. every trooper is spot-on brilliant at assessing the smallest flicker in body language because they have to be, because it is the primary means of unspoken communication
and the faces! the faces finn makes! they are open and exuberant and here is a boy who never had to hide his expressions and does not know how to
everything a trooper thinks is on their face (yes, even phasma.)
Also lets talk about poker(or the space equivalent thereof) games b/ween former troopers and resistance members, because they’d both be able to read each other?? So easily??
Like, the troopers would pull literal faces at their hands, and the outsider would be like ‘oh easy money’ and bluff and the trooper would laugh bc ??? She fluttered her fingers?? Who does she take them for??
Anyway it’s terrible and complicated and lots of money changes hands back and forth and back and forth while they learn to control tells they never had to worry about before
hahahaha but OH WAIT it gets even more complicated because troopers have all sorts of Very Strict Rules about what belongs to them and what doesn’t – think about it, most things in the Order are communal and having personal property is a major thing and also absolutely sacred (you do not ever, ever steal from other troopers, you just DO NOT) so they take gambling Very Seriously. There are basically two layers: the sort that occurs within units, wherein random things like sanitation hours are bet (you know – time, favours, things that aren’t physical things) and the other sort, the sort that occurs /between/ units, where troopers gamble for Actual Things (cigarettes, sweet rations, etc, etc). Gambling for Actual Things within a unit is grounds for absolute disaster because troopers are very protective of their Things. Gambling for Actual Things is something you do not do with someone you want to stay friends with…….this causes issues for the Resistance pilots who do not have the same complicated idea of A) These Things are mine and Do Not Touch Them, b) unit is everything, unit is FAMILY, c) trading favours in lieu of actual currency (e.g. ‘I bet you three hours of gun cleaning’ – fineeee, I bet ten credits – THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS)
HARRIET TUBMAN ESCAPED FROM SLAVERY AND THEN WENT BACK TO GET OTHERS. LIKE, I KNOW YOU KNOW WHO HARRIET TUBMAN IS AND THAT SHE DID THAT, BUT I JUST WANT YOU TO TAKE THAT IN FOR A SECOND.
HARRIET TUBMAN WAS HELD CAPTIVE AND BOUND TO UNPAID, BACK-BREAKING LABOR SINCE BIRTH UNDER PENALTY OF TORTURE OR DEATH. SHE MANAGED TO ESCAPE THAT LIFE, AND SHE TURNED THE FUCK AROUND AND WENT THE FUCK BACK TO GET EVERYONE ELSE WHO WAS STILL TRAPPED IN IT. AND THEN SHE DID IT AGAIN EIGHTEEN MORE TIMES.
WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS UNSURE WHETHER OR NOT HE WAS PREPARED TO MAKE A STAND AGAINST SLAVERY, HARRIET TUBMAN BASICALLY SAID HE SHOULD STOP BEING SUCH A DIAPER BABY AND THAT GUYS WHO ARE TOO SCARED TO END SLAVERY DON’T DESERVE TO WIN WARS.
NOT ONLY DID SHE SECRET OVER 300 SLAVES TO FREEDOM ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, BUT SHE ACTED AS A SPY FOR THE UNION ARMY DURING THE CIVIL WAR, AND BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD AN ARMED ASSAULT IN THE CIVIL WAR. THAT RAID BROUGHT FREEDOM TO OVER 700 SLAVES IN ONE GO.
SO I JUST WANT YOU TO STEW ON THAT FOR LIKE A MINUTE. ACTING IN THE SHADOWS, SHE WALKED INTO HELL ON EARTH 19 TIMES TO SAVE HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS FROM THE TORMENT SHE ENDURED, AND THE SECOND SHE WAS GIVEN EVEN A MODICUM OF POWER, SHE MANAGED TO FREE SEVEN HUNDRED SLAVES IN ONE DAY.
I GUARANTEE, HOWEVER IMPRESSED YOU ALREADY ARE WITH HARRIET TUBMAN, YOU ARE FALLING LIKE AT LEAST 40% SHORT OF HOW IMPRESSED YOU SHOULD BE WITH HARRIET TUBMAN. SHE IS ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLES OF BADASSERY IN THE ENTIRETY OF AMERICAN HISTORY.
OKAY LISTEN IN ADDITION TO MAKING BOTH CAPTAIN AMERICA AND MOSES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF GODDAMN UNDERACHIEVERS SHE DID ALL THISWITH CHRONIC PAIN FROM A TRAUMATIC HEAD INJURY.
WHEN SHE WAS FUCKING TWELVE YEARS OLD SHE TRIED TO INTERVENE IN THE BEATING OF ANOTHER SLAVE AND GOT HER HEAD CRACKED OPEN FROM IT. A CHILD. A CHILD BORN INTO SLAVERY. AND SHE WENT UP AGAINST A PISSED OFF WHITE MAN WHO LITERALLY OWNED HER TO TRY AND HELP, LIKE, SHIT, I DON’T WANT TO GO TOE-TO-TOE WITH PISSED OFF WHITE MEN AND I’M WHITE AND IT’S THE 21st CENTURY. SO OKAY THEN HERE’S THIS WOMAN, FIVE FOOT NOTHING, DISABLED, HAD NARCOLEPSY AND HEADACHES AND VISIONS, DECIDED THOSE VISIONS WERE FROM GOD, AND PERSONALLY DELIVERED A THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS FROM ONE OF THE CRUELEST FORMS OF ENSLAVEMENT IN HISTORY. OH, AND AFTER ALL THAT SHE LIVED UNTIL SHE WAS FUCKING NINETY.
When Rey is ten, another scavenger tries to steal her haul. It isn’t much: a twist of some old engine, a carbonator; but it’s enough to feed her for the rest of the day, maybe the next, and pickings have been slim lately. The clutch of metal bits (barely enough to swell the lining of her bag) represents the first meal she’ll have had in two days (she is so hungry). And this man – this boy, she’ll think when she looks back; he can’t have been more than fifteen – grabs it from her. There’s no civilisation on Jakku, no sense of protect the small and weak – there’s no mercy for a girl alone. And the boy just takes it, snatches it from her grasping hands, holds it aloft, grinning wide and wild and mocking. “Finders keep –” he starts to say, quoting the oldest (and only) law of the desert. The rest of the words snag on his loose teeth and split-open lips: Rey smacks him in the jaw with her staff and every bit of strength she has. He stumbles, makes for the blaster at his side, and she panics: she hits him in the legs to bring him down, hits him in the skull until his hand falls slack and he is very, very still. Rey snatches her haul up and runs and does not look back. (She’ll think of him sprawled in the sand, skull open and red and wet, when she prowls through the frozen forest towards Kylo Ren. She’s older. She knows better. She’ll hesitate. She will not deliver that final blow.)
Jessika Pava snatches a chip from her plate in the canteen. It’s all in good humour; Rey is hanging out with the pilots in one of the rare moments she isn’t training with Luke, enjoying the noise and hubbub – oh there are so many people. It gives her a headache, light and sharp behind her eyes, but it is a good pain, a clean pain; a growing pain. Anyway. Pava snatches the chip – a misguided attempt at flirting, maybe? – and Rey reacts without thinking and stabs her in the back of the hand with a fork. There’s silence for a moment, an aching and desperate silence, and Rey can only hear the roar of blood in her ears. She stares down. Pava’s hand has slackened; the chip is on the table. The tines of the fork haven’t sunk in that far, but there is red pooling on Pava’s skin and Rey feels a great rush of nausea. Her stomach cramps, hard, and she leaps to her feet, gabbling apologies. Pava holds up her hands, says, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, it really is,” and Poe scrapes a good chunk of his dinner onto Rey’s plate and says, “We won’t ever let you go hungry,” and it’s all too much: Rey bursts into tears. (No one tries to steal her food again. Later, she leaves a basket full of apples and potatoes on Pava’s bed. It is an apology. It is a very well guided attempt at flirting.)
“What’s wrong with this water?” she gasps, holding her cupped hands out to Luke. “It’s awful!”
Luke bursts out laughing. “It’s full of salt, Rey. You can’t drink it.”
“All that water,” she says, scornful, “and not a drop to drink – are you sure that the Force is benevolent?”
“Hey, when I first saw an ocean I did the exact same thing. Only difference was that Han pretended that that was what water was meant to taste like. Pretended to drink it and then got offended when I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem like the odd one out so I drank a whole mug of it and vomited everywhere – he wasn’t laughing so hard when he was trying to air the smell of vomit out of the Falcon.”
Rey bursts out laughing, wading back towards shore. “Tell me more about him,” she says.
Okay, so we all know that Poe went around the Resistance base telling everyone about the Handsome Stormtrooper that saved his life – but what about BB-8? Imagine BB-8 coming back to base and promptly telling everyone about the good brave human who saved his Poe. This is Finn he is so lovely, he is the best of all humans, look at him, be nice to him – he’s a little bit slow – doesn’t understand droid at all but he’s a quick learner.
And imagine ALL THE DROIDS falling into line, looking after Finn, and Finn is just so nice to them because he remembers what it’s like to be treated like you’re nothing, like you don’t have a personality. And they just adopt him: Finn the best human, they designate him, and R2-D2 – battle-hardened war vet that he is – teaches him binary but teaches him the bastardised sweary binary that all the older droids speak and BB-8 is innocent and oblivious and C3-PO is scandalised because Finn is going round saying things like fuck me this is hot in this little whistle-beep.
And whenever Finn sits down he’s surrounded by happy young droids who absolutely adore him, and he is just so nice and all the droids go out of their way to do things for him.
And yes. Give me sweet lovely Finn with his droid ducklings.
so if BB-8′s “a BB unit”, does that mean there’s a BB-1 through 7?
Does this mean there were scary stories on the flight deck pre- or post-mission with Poe and Black Squadron? Imagine Poe with a light-stick beneath his chin and a glint in his eye, kneeling to speak in a spooky voice to BB-8.
“Hey, BB-8. Why is BB-6 afraid of BB-7?”
An inquisitive whirr.
“’Cause BB-7 ate 9!”
“!!!!” BB-8 rolls back and forth in panic while Poe falls over laughing.
“It’s okay, buddy. I didn’t mean it literally! It’s just a joke!” (A joke??) “Yeah, a joke!” BB-8 gently zaps Poe in retribution and rolls away, the droid-equivalent of a walking off in a huff.
“Ow, hey! Come on, BB-8, it was supposed to be funny!”
BB-8 doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, so Poe goes on a mission around base asking any and everyone if they’ve seen any droids, and joins the squadron table at dinner looking exhausted but triumphant. BB-8 is with them.
“Hey, BB-8, look!” He holds up a round, shrieking droid with a grin. “It’s BB-7!”
BB-8 beeps in alarm and hides behind the table leg while Poe gently explains that BB-7 is not really scary at all, see?
BB cautiously rolls out to investigate for itself. Cue gentle droid booping.
They become bosom buddies and roll everywhere together, collect the whole gang and then BB rolls up to Poe pre-flight sometime a week later, like ten minutes before take off. “BB-8, buddy where were you? we gotta go!” “!!” “what is it?” BB-8 is insistent.“!” “You wanna show me something? ok buddy but make it quick, it’s almost time to leave.”
BB-8 whistles and BB-6 rolls over in a panic, whirring. BB-8 whirrs at it and it whirrs back and all three of them turn towards BB-7 rolling determinedly along. BB-6 Ducks behind BB-8 as BB-7 rolls to a stop a few feet before reaching them. A smaller beep draws Poe’s attention to his feet where BB-9 sits, rocking back and forth in contentment.
All three droids beep back the joke in binary.
Poe cries laughing and doesn’t stop until the General herself contacts him on comms to ask what him the hold up is.
Okay but consider: the droids.
The fact that they clearly, CLEARLY rehearsed this little show before showing off to Poe on the tarmac just before the flight
BB-8 is a very strict producer ok
lots of beeeeeeep!!! and whirrrr bleeep!!!s when the others got it wrong
“no it has to be THIS WAY” “this is how Poe told it!” “do it OVER.”
