Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: Yes to your Jake headcanon. 'Big Jake' to me always meant that he was broad shouldered and tall and just solid (which means Tom was probably even taller if he called him midget but that could have also been a big brother teasing thing). No offense to anyone if they want to headcanon Jake as being chubby, but that's not how I interepreted his nickname at all.

I have read some EXCELLENT chubby Jake headcanons and I’m here for it, tbqh, but yeah, IDK I knew a lot of just…really big dudes when I was younger, the gentle giant types who seem kind of bemused by being the size of a fridge.  And Jake always struck me as the type of guy who seems kind of bemused about being so tall.  Also, who else is with me that Tom used to call Jake midget because Jake was shorter than him as a kid and then Tom got infested with a Yeerk and the Yeerk never changed the nickname even though by the end of the war Jake is three inches taller than his big brother.  Obviously in an AU where Everything Is Okay this means that Tom calls Jake midget as like an ongoing family inside joke that makes people very confused because Jake is Tall.

Anonymous asked: I am really glad about your tags on that mom post you did. Everyone is always ragging on me because I do t talk to my mother, but they don't understand how shitty she is. And things like you said just help me not feel super shitty as well. Thank you.

Listen, honey, let me tell you a story about my family.  First of all, my mom and dad are the kindest, most generous, best people I have ever had the privilege to know, and I am grateful every day for their presence in my life.  

That being said.

My Yaya, my mom’s mom, used to leave bruises on me and convince me that I was insane, and that’s nothing compared to what she did to my mother.  She has caused directly four (five?) nervous breakdowns in my cousins, and drove one to the point where he called his sister to come keep an eye on him in case he tried to kill himself.  My Nana, my dad’s mom, is a decent person, or could be if she didn’t stand idly by while her husband turns violent and aggressive.  He’s a bitter, cruel, misogynist old man, and the shit they are literally right now putting my father through makes me see red.  I could gladly punch any of them in the face.  My response to hearing that Yaya has kicked the bucket will be literal tears of relief, followed by copious amounts of alcohol.  The best I can hope for is to be ignored, and I have resigned myself to that, but my god am I ready to be done with their shit.

So here’s the point to this unnecessarily personal rant: you’re doing right by yourself, and that’s what matters.  You looked at your situation and chose life over limb, and I’m really, really proud of you for it.  That is a brave thing to do and the only people who understand that are the people who are in the same situation.  

Family isn’t supposed to hurt like this.  You are doing the right thing.

Moran Rereads Animorphs

Book 3: The Encounter

AKA “The first named character attempts suicide and suffers the first breakdown regarding humanity”

Keep reading

destinationtoast:

lierdumoa:

slitthelizardking:

ainedubh:

observethewalrus:

prokopetz:

ibelieveinthelittletreetopper:

veteratorianvillainy:

prokopetz:

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?

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

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.

(via johanirae)

Anonymous asked: Okay so you mentioned kind of missing Tolkien and I've been on a bit of a Tolkien kick lately ('lately' she says as she scuttles deeper into the horde of Tolkien marginalia beginning to resemble a small mountain) and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on dwarves. I know the Men of Gondor are more your thing, but I was struck by sudden curiosity.

notbecauseofvictories:

I LOVE DWARVES

look, the beauty of Tolkien is that, as far as I know, he is the only creator who firmly maintained, all his life, that filling in the blanks of the world he had generated was actually an act mirroring divine creation. (He called this “subcreation”—as human beings, we are made in the image of the divine creator, and therefore, we are driven to replicate creation on a minor scale. Tolkien wholeheartedly loved fanfiction, in a way I’ve never seen in any subsequent content-creator.)

but

I love dwarves!!!!

I love dwarves particularly, because tolkien dismisses them in the context of a numnber of stereotypes, and actually this opens the door for the way fandom has taken then and run with what if dwarves are super jewish. maybe that’s because I follow @goodshipophelia and @swanjolras and @silentstep but the reclamation of very jewish dwarves is beautiful

(thorin harp-player as david springs to mind)

and honeslty to this day, my favorite idea about dwarves is @silentstep’s conception that “mountain” refers not just to the idea of a physical mountain, but everything that lives inside it, all the songs and stories and philosophies, that “mountain” is shorthand  for community the way “Judah” or “people of the tribe” does in more modern Judaism 

it leads to so much articulation and fictionalization of Judaism and I love that, everyone one should have a fictional articulation of their religion, it allows for so much more freedom than would otherwise be.

Also, I love the idea of thorin fictionally composing the lord of the rings alternative to song-of-songs, so. that’s something, right???

scribefindegil:

one of my Favorite Things is when you have a line in a song that’s obviously a metaphor but when you put it in the right fandom context it’s actually completely literal

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)