For raining-down-hearts, who won my 1K giveaway! She asked for Soul teaching Maka to bake, domestic fluff, and tons of cuteness. I hope you enjoy, RDH!
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Soul came home to what could only be described as Ground Zero.
The kitchen– his kitchen– was an explosion of greasy pots and pans, a snowstorm of flour, egg residue dripping off counters, and an unknown substance clinging to the wall that looked suspiciously like Nickelodeon green gak from his childhood. It was complete and utter chaos and he stood there frozen, mouth hanging open, grocery bags falling to the floor with a soft thump as he surveyed the damage.
His roommate stood by the stove, unperturbed by the mess, face buried in a book as she muttered to herself about grams versus tablespoons. Her shirt– his favorite Nirvana shirt– was covered in flour and her messy pigtails were sporting some very cheery rainbow sprinkles. Soul summoned patience from deep, deep inside to deal with this in a mature manner.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the tiniest of scorch marks on his stainless steel pot, the one that Wes had gotten him for the last birthday, the one that came from a set that cost no less than $700.
Oh, wow, sit tight, all of these are entirely predicated on God my life would be easier if I shipped the most popular ship in the fandom.
Charles Xavier/Erik Lensherr: I got committed to the tragic friendship way too young to change my mind, but I have nothing against the ship.
Any configuration at all of Jim Kirk/Spock/Bones McCoy: I just…struggle? I concur that Spock/Kirk is pretty gay in TOS and I want to ship it, and honestly Kirk/Bones should be my exact shit, but I just–look, Kirk is too in love with the Enterprise for anyone else to have a claim.
Buffy Summers/Spike: nope, nope, nope, nope, can’t do it. Too rapey, too much sexual assault, even if I didn’t like Angel I wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Doc Holliday/Wynonna Earp: the show clearly really wants me to care about that pairing and like…I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, but I raise you Doc Holliday/Wyatt Earp and Wynonna/Dolls because Dolls is wonderful and Doc is so blindingly obviously in love with Wyatt and trying to work his issues out by fucking Wynonna, which, no judgement, because Wynonna is clearly trying to work out her own adequacy issues by fucking Doc.
Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter: I want to ship it just so I could stop feeling this level of seething wrath about it, I feel similarly about almost EVERY ship that the HP fandom likes, including literally anything that includes Severus Snape.
F: What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it?
I mean…I was a late-comer to the concept of internet fandom (the last…four or five years?) because of various reasons, but I’ve been a devoted consumer of any X-Men content I could afford to get my hands on since I was 7 and I’ve been collecting Animorphs books about as long, so there’s those.
Here is my thesis about Doc and Wynonna. You’re right, each of them is–basically–trying to have sex with the concept that the other embodies more so than with the person. Doc is trying to retroactively fix the damage he did to his relationship with Wyatt because he was evidently in love with Wyatt on some level, whether you want to read it as romantic or not (the way he treats acts suggests to me that probably the answer is yes, but that’s me). So then there’s Wynonna, who’s nothing like Wyatt except for all the ways that she’s exactly like Wyatt, and she carries Peacemaker with the same cock to her hip and proud tilt of her jaw, and–well. Wyatt is dead and Doc betrayed him and Doc wasn’t there for him and Wynonna’s kisses feel a lot like Wyatt slamming him into the wall to accuse him of being a traitor.
As for Wynonna…so much of Wynonna’s personality is about her belief that she’s not good enough, that core of certainty that she is not able to carry the weight of the Earp heir and, later, that only being the Heir is what makes her worthwhile as a person. If all that makes Wynonna worthwhile is her last name, she has to prove that she’s enough to be worthy of it.
And Doc is right there. Doc Holliday, who rode with Wyatt himself, as much of a legend as her own ancestor, and if he’s impressed with her…she must be doing it right. Right?
Doc believes he’s in love with her, but he’s more in love with her last name. Wynonna isn’t foolish enough think she’s in love with him, but some part of her craves that tacit approval. So they sleep together and work together and it’s not really good for anyone, and in the meantime Dolls stands back and quietly works on his own quest for redemption and tells Wynonna she’s good enough for anything, just the way she is, as herself, not the Heir, and I’m really frustrated with the fandom for not agreeing with me.
It’s almost like demonizing the far left and taking on a moderate position during times of far right violence helps Republicans more than Democrats…
“I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame object on both sides,” Trump said during his remarks today.
“You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he added.
Some very fine Nazis showed up at Charlottseville
I’m sorry. question.
”times of far-right violence”
whose been starting fires, destroying property, macing folks in the face, smacking photographers over the head with bike chains, throwing glass bottles filled with m80s at crowds, tagged walls with “liberals get the bullet too”, and assaulted people in gangs on the streets for like the last 6 months, all while wearing black clothes?
A crazy asshole rightwinger claimed the first life of this bullshit, but do not for one fucking second make the assertion that the far-left are innocent victims, that they have not done their fair share of violence, and have no blood on their hands.
also, how about the people that came who don’t want history destroyed because it was ugly, and the people on both sides that came to protest but not engage in violence? could those people be very fine, on both sides?
Hey there. Answer!
You’re young, and male, and in your 20s, all according to your profile. I was young and male and in my 20s once, so let me explain something to you.
There’s a cultural narrative that’s been sold hard to young intellectual men, to you and to me at one point, and that narrative is roughly: “you’re smarter and more enlightened if you’re neutral in politics”. The extremes are too passionate to see clearly, they’re biased.
I believed this, once.
But back to your point. Is there leftist violence? Sure. But read this.
That’s by the Cato Institute, a conservative (libertarian, but chaired by a Koch brother) think tank. Here’s the analysis:
“the annual chance of being murdered by a Left Wing terrorist was about 1
in 400 million per year. Regardless of the recent upswing in deaths
from Left Wing terrorism since 2016, Nationalist and Right Wing
terrorists have killed about 12 times as many people since 1992.“
Let me repeat for you that this was a conservative point of view, published by a conservative organization. Even a very, very casual look into terrorism data reveals that right-wing extremist groups are many times more violent than left-wing groups. I’m a leftist and think this analysis is horseshit, by the way, it’s way too soft on what counts as right-wing violence. But it’s from the opposite side of the isle, from an organization that cares about the truth enough to be credibly debatable.
So, this is where the trick is. When you don’t have truth on your side, when you know you’re wrong, a great tactic is to try and paint the other side as badly as you can. Make it about relativism, subjectivity. This is where the “both sides” rhetoric you’re repeating comes from: a desperate need by white supremacists, nazis, and other right-wing hate groups to muddy the water enough to make the uninformed complacent. By the way, take a look at a logical fallacy called False Equivalence.
For men like you, normal rhetorical tactics can’t cut it. But! They can appeal to your desire to be more knowledgeable, to find a higher ground and to defend it.
But neutrality is not “higher” or more “noble”. It is not the “smart” position. It is not “balanced”. It is complacency. It is propaganda designed to take bright people like you and turn them into a buffer for extremists.
It’s designed to make you a nazi ally.
So go ahead with your “both sides” rhetoric if you want, but know what it is.
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
no but (among the 1424356 other things on my list) i so need to write a book about medieval history for a popular audience, just because the reality would blow people’s minds
there are so many things you can learn from it, so many misconceptions to destroy, and such an interesting social and cultural study of people learning to do things in different ways after rome fell. they had a period of almost 1000 years where classical culture was NOT the automatic standard. that is why we have gothic architecture and script. why they invented new literary and artistic genres, why they developed new laws. where, unlike in the ancient world, women and slaves were not relegated to a position of utter inferiority – in fact, slavery was abolished throughout most of the middle ages, and only began returning in the 16th-17th century when people were determined to replicate the criteria and legal systems of antiquity. same with women. you can find records of women doctors, bookbinders, copyists, shopkeepers, traders etc throughout the high middle ages. women religious were HUGELY influential; the abbey of fontevrault in france was required to have an abbess, not an abbot, in charge. queens regularly ruled whenever the king wasn’t around. it was only in 1593 that france, for example, decided to outlaw them from public/professional life. the salic law, made by philip iv in the early 14th century, barred them from inheriting the throne and later spread throughout europe, but that was not the case beforehand.
don’t talk to me about how “feudal anarchy” was a thing. feudalism was the last thing from anarchy, and it wasn’t about a lord mistreating or killing his peasants however he pleased. it was a highly structured and regulated system of mutual obligations – not a desirable condition for the serf, but still the bedrock on which society functioned. serfs were not slaves. they had personhood, social mobility, could own property, marry, form families, and often obtain freedom once they were no longer in an economic condition to make serfhood a necessity. abbot suger of france (late 11th-early 12th century) was most likely a son of serfs. he was educated at the same monastery school as the later king louis vi, ran the kingdom while louis vii was on crusade, and became the foremost historian of the period and partially responsible for establishing the tradition of ecclesiastical chronicles.
don’t talk to me about how everyone was a fervent and uncritical religious fanatic. church attendance on the parish level was so low that in 1215, pope innocent III had to issue a bull ordering people to take communion at least once a year. the content of clerical grievances tells us that people behaved and thought exactly as we do today – they wanted to sleep in on sunday, they wanted to have sex when they pleased, they didn’t believe the guy mumbling bad latin at them, they openly questioned the institutional church’s legitimacy (especially in the 13th century – it was taking assaults on every side as splinter and spinoff sects of every nature grew, along with literacy and the ability of common people to access books and learning for themselves). in the 14th century, john wycliffe and the lollards blasted the rigidly hierarchical nature of medieval society (“when adam delved and eve span, who then was the gentleman?”) partly as a result, wat tyler, a fellow englishman, led the peasants’ revolt in 1381. yes, the catholic church had a social and institutional power which we can’t imagine, but it was fought and questioned and spoken back to every step of the way.
don’t talk to me about how they were scientifically ignorant. isidore of seville, in the frickin 7th century, wrote books and books on science and reason from his home at the center of the andalusian “golden age” in muslim spain. toledo in the 9th century was a hotbed of theology, mathematics, and writing; admiring western european observers called multicultural, educated iberia “the ornament of the world.” in the 8th century in the monastery of jarrow in northumbria (aka in the middle of FRICKING NOWHERE) the venerable bede was able to open his “ecclesiastical history of the english people” with a discussion on cultural, linguistic, demographic, historical, geographical, and astronomical details, and refers to britain’s location near the north pole as a reason for its days being long in summer and short in winter (“for the sun has then departed to the region of Africa”). while bede’s information is obviously imperfect by virtue of his social and chronological location, he is a trained scholar with a strong critical sensibility and the ability to turn a memorable phrase; discussing an attempted imperial coup by an illiterate roman soldier, he sniffs, “As soon as he had seized power he crossed over to Gaul. There he was often deluded by the barbarians into making doubtful treaties, and so inflicted great harm on the body politic.”
don’t talk to me about how they were uneducated and illiterate. they were well versed in antiquity and classical authors through the high middle ages. they didn’t just suddenly discover them again when the 15th century started. the renaissance wasn’t about finding the texts, it was about deciding to apply them in a systematic way. beforehand, the 13th century saw the rediscovery of aristotle and the development of a new philosophical system to compete with the long-entrenched and studied works of plato. thomas aquinas and the dominicans were writing in this century. dante wrote the inferno in this century. i could go on.
don’t talk to me about the stereotype of the silent and oppressed woman – we already discussed that a bit above. i should also add, women usually had voting rights on the level of their community and this wasn’t regarded as odd. i already wrote a ranty post earlier on the myth that “it was just medieval times” and thus a rapey free-for-all.
we should also talk about how a form of gay marriage was legal for hundreds of years – two men could take wedding vows in a church and live together like any other married couple (though they called them “spiritual brotherhoods”). we should also talk about the cult of male bonds between knights in the 12th/13th century, and how it was idealized as the highest form of love. i also wrote a post a while ago about richard the lionheart and how sexuality worked. so.
we should talk about how all of this was happening in the time period that routinely gets written off as basically a wash between the fall of rome and the renaissance. we should remember that the renaissance was what led to modern structures of oppression for women, slaves, etc – everyone who had been worth nothing in antiquity. we should tear into the myth of historical progress and how it was invented to justify massive, wholesale colonization, genocide, and “civilization” in the supposedly enlightened 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries – because nothing we do now, apparently, can be as bad as what those bad ol’ bloodthirsty ignoramuses did back then.
we shouldn’t idealize the medieval era as a golden age either. that is never the right way to approach history. but we should take a long, long look at why we are so insistent on our simplistic, erroneous concepts of this time period, and how exactly they serve to justify our behaviors, mindsets, and practices today.
further reading to support any of these topics available on request.
When I was growing up any time my brother upset/hurt/was rude to or downright nasty to me I was told “he’s just doing it to get a rise out of you” “he’s just doing it to annoy you”
Like??? I know?? I know he’s being mean to upset me. I know he’s saying horrible stuff to annoy me. And guess what?? I’m annoyed!!!!
I was literally told not to be upset, because his intentions were to upset me????
How is that not upsetting? Especially to a young girl??
THE GASLIGHTING STARTS EARLY.
“Sweetheart, its easier for you to just bear it than it is for us to teach him to stop. Mkay?”
Everyone still does this to me about everyone.
Also, like, listen: why is “oh don’t worry, they’re just doing it out of a malicious intent to hurt you” supposed to be…better?
Anonymous asked: Where you a Tamora Pierce reader growing up?
Actually, yes! I preferred her Immortals and Circle Magic series, and having reread one of them just a couple years ago (the Immortals series, with Daine) I can confirm that they age remarkably well and I still really ship Daine/Numair. Feel free to come talk to me about my feelings.
Anonymous asked: C and F for the fandom meme? (I hope you're having a good day!)
Oh, wow, sit tight, all of these are entirely predicated on God my life would be easier if I shipped the most popular ship in the fandom.
Charles Xavier/Erik Lensherr: I got committed to the tragic friendship way too young to change my mind, but I have nothing against the ship.
Any configuration at all of Jim Kirk/Spock/Bones McCoy: I just…struggle? I concur that Spock/Kirk is pretty gay in TOS and I want to ship it, and honestly Kirk/Bones should be my exact shit, but I just–look, Kirk is too in love with the Enterprise for anyone else to have a claim.
Buffy Summers/Spike: nope, nope, nope, nope, can’t do it. Too rapey, too much sexual assault, even if I didn’t like Angel I wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Doc Holliday/Wynonna Earp: the show clearly really wants me to care about that pairing and like…I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, but I raise you Doc Holliday/Wyatt Earp and Wynonna/Dolls because Dolls is wonderful and Doc is so blindingly obviously in love with Wyatt and trying to work his issues out by fucking Wynonna, which, no judgement, because Wynonna is clearly trying to work out her own adequacy issues by fucking Doc.
Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter: I want to ship it just so I could stop feeling this level of seething wrath about it, I feel similarly about almost EVERY ship that the HP fandom likes, including literally anything that includes Severus Snape.
F: What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it?
I mean…I was a late-comer to the concept of internet fandom (the last…four or five years?) because of various reasons, but I’ve been a devoted consumer of any X-Men content I could afford to get my hands on since I was 7 and I’ve been collecting Animorphs books about as long, so there’s those.
