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

Anonymous asked: I've always been madly in love with the story of Tam Lin and your description of it as Beauty & the Beast's older cooler cousin is 100% my favorite thing, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk about your feelings on the matter a little bit.

notbecauseofvictories:

don’t get me wrong, I love beauty and the beast, I could happily read/watch/etc. nothing else but beauty and the beast adaptations for the rest of my media-consuming days

but.

if beauty found herself in a tough situation and went “well, I guess I would bang a monster born of magic and bad decisions, that’s something I did not know about myself!!!” janet went ahead and put on sensible boots and marched into the enchanted castle pulling every rose she sees up by the roots and going “WHERE’S A GIRL SUPPOSED TO FUCK A BEAST AROUND HERE”

…also, when Tam Lin tries to tell her she’s trespassed on his magic castle, her response is That’s Not How Property Rights Work You Mystical Maidenhead-Taking Squatter, which I think we can all agree is amazing.

(for extra lols, you can imagine Tam Lin as Coming Out Of The Well To Bang and/or Steal From Womankind)

Anyway, my actual favorite part of the entire story is that presumably Janet just wanted to get rid of her pesky virginity in the most epic way possible and had no intention of sticking around past the initial banging-of-an-elf, because she goes home directly afterwards. This is the part I always like to imagine Tam Lin Languishing For Love Of Janet (The Best I Ever Had), and like. Sighing a lot, and looking forlornly into his well, and being a generally useless Romantic poet about everything.

He probably writes sad poetry about it. The rhymes are terrible.

Anyway, the only reason anyone brings it up again is because a few months later, Janet’s hugely pregnant and her dad finally, tentatively asks, “so uh….this baby. who….?”

 “NONE OF YOUR STUPID KNIGHTS THAT’S WHO,” Janet says, because Janet has no chill at all, no chill at all has she, and so she hies to Carterhaugh—

Anyway, she shows up on Halloween, because Janet has an appropriate sense of gothic timing, and Tam Lin is ecstatic to see her. He mentions super casually that actually he might die that night, presumably because he thinks this will convince her to bang one last one out. 

(“About to be sacrificed to Hell by the faeries” is a pretty good fuck-or-die scenario, incidentally.)

Except Janet’s response is “UM EXCUSE ME WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS ELDRITCH MAGIC BABY IF YOU ARE DEAD, ASSHOLE,” and because Janet has no chill, no chill at all, she demands to know how she’s going to break the stupid curse and get him back from the faeries.

At which point Tam Lin finally comes through with the iconic line, “hold me fast and fear me not” which everyone should quote over-liberally. Plus, you get the mental image of a very pregnant Janet holding onto Tam Lin as he turns into a wild wolf and a lion bold and a snake—

Afterwards, the Fairy Queen appears and admits defeat and lets them go back to Janet’s father, who presumably was cowed into accepting this weird ex-changeling knight as his son-in-law.

Which just goes to show what any woman can accomplish if she has a sensible pair of boots, a proper sense of gothic timing, and goes around fucking whoever or whatever shows up when she weeds the garden.

miraculoussparrow asked: I'm reading a biography about a badass screenwriter Dalton Trambo, blacklisted during HUAC and sent to prison. He was cool. Anyway, my point is that one of the movies he worked on is titled Lonely are the Brave and the first thing I thought of was "That so describes the animorphs". Then I thought hey, that sounds familiar and remembered you screaming in the tags about "Too few in number and too proud to hide" so I figured I should tell you.

words-writ-in-starlight:

First of all, I’ve never been so pleased in my life as I am by this fact.  If every single person on this blog knows me as “that one person screaming about the Animorphs” I’m fine with that.

Second of all, I’m with you???? I’m so with you??  There are so many good terrible tragic Animorphs quotes in the world.  This one (the one you mentioned) is still my favorite though and I’m constantly screeching about how good it is.  Behold the brave battalion…  Hell yes.  That’s the stuff.  I should write a whole entire fic about how a rich Controller who saw the six of them go into battle at the end of the war commissioned a statue with the money their Yeerk made, and so there’s a statue in their rebuilt hometown of four kids standing back to back, one of the girls with a hawk on her arm and a young Andalite at their side ready to strike, with that quote on the base and the years of the War and not a damn thing else.

Fuck.

@drifteratheart wanted to be able to reblog my tags, so: 

#animorphs #BEHOLD THE BRAVE BATTALION THAT STANDS SIDE BY SIDE #TOO FEW IN NUMBER AND TOO PROUD TO HIDE #EXCUSE ME I NEED TO GO COLLECT MYSELF #but honestly that statue though #like i know there’s probably a handful of courageous statues of their battle morphs #and children hoist themselves up onto the wolf and imitate the roaring bear and take pictures with the gorilla #but i think that’s the one that their hometown should have #just…four kids and a bird and an alien child #scared and young and desperate #but yet standing #too proud to hide

I’m Very Serious about that statue.

archangelruind:

my friend is studying for the mcat and was just trying to explain to me about heat transfer and she said ‘you know, like the reason you get cold when you go outside on a freezing day is that your tiny human body is trying to warm up the entire universe’ and i think that’s the best thing i have ever heard

fun fact, i’m studying for the mcat right now and physics is my worst subject (like…i speak a dead language and taught an anatomy class and aced biochem, but I barely scraped by in physics) and this is how i remember how radiant heat works

(via slyrider)

bring me the moon

earth-shines:

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!

—

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.

Fuck patience.

“Back away from the stove, Albarn. Slowly.”

Keep reading

justsomuchhacking:

bleedingshoulder:

zanmor:

taxloopholes:

taxloopholes:

Wonder how all the liberals who used the term “alt left” are feeling right now

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.

https://www.cato.org/blog/terrorism-deaths-ideology-charlottesville-anomaly

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.

(via aethersea)

Anonymous asked: ANDALITE. AND-A-LIGHT WOULD BE GREAT!!!!!!!! HILARIOUS. TOP QUALITY. I LOVE IT.

AND A LIGHT.  LISTEN I WENT ALMOST TEN YEARS WITHOUG READING THESE BOOKS (long story) AND WHEN I REREAD BOOK 12 I LOOKED AT THE COVER AND THE FIRST THING THAT POPPED INTO MY HEAD WAS “CASSIE I’M SO PROUD OF YOU YOU’RE SO GOOD” LIKE LISTEN THAT LINE STUCK WITH ME COMPLETELY INTACT AND WORD PERFECT FOR A D E C A D E.

Also, if anyone wants to hear my headcanons about ADHD Rachel hit me U P.

Moran Rereads the Animorphs, Part 10

Book 10: The Android

AKA “Dogs are literally too good for this world, the first main character dies for a bit, and we learn about the motherfucking Chee”

Keep reading

fozmeadows:

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

mikalhvi:

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

amakthel:

thesocialjusticecourier:

thej-key:

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

corpus-vak:

vessel-haver:

thefutureoneandall:

argumate:

marcusseldon:

(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

oh my god… that’s why they send dick pics

“witness me!”

There are occasional reddit threads about things like this: “guys who send unsolicited dick pics, why do you do it?”

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily - or at all.

Obviously that’s not universal, any more than all women are catcalled, but it seems like a really serious communication failure to appeal to a sense of objectification that much of your audience has literally never felt, and desperately wants.

Reblogged because thefutureoneandall describes exactly why I have trouble empathizing with feminism columnists.

Can confirm, I’d take literally any compliment on anything at this point, and would cherish it.

one day we gotta get all the men and all the women to sit down together and hash this stuff out between them, how hard can it be.

This discussion kind of reminds me of a story that made the rounds about a year ago, where a woman, after having gotten a bit tired with dick pics, decided to try to get her “revenge” of sorts, by sending unsolicited vagina pics to 40 random men:

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?” And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy, his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention - with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop -

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap - with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

This alienness is … mutual.

For men, it feels like no men are sexy to women.

For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.

It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.

“It’s like one person dying of dehydration watching another one drown.”

the conversation has gotten longer, so i’m reblogging

… This is so cool. It actually makes sense.

but of course women are wary of just giving men compliments, because attention-starved men are likely to take it as a come-on. what a dilemma.

So what I’m getting from this…
Is that my idea of taking popular types of fiction and essentially ‘flipping the script’ so that there are sexy male characters as ‘damsel in distress’ types would actually be very good and help a lot of people become comfortable with their sexuality?

it could well! i’m not the guy to answer this really, i’m queer and also i’ve always been pretty comfortable with being the one giving the compliments (and just asking for validation when i need it). but i do think there’s a place in the world for fiction where The Sexy One is male.

consider chris hemsworth in ghostbusters. that one’s a bit mean-spirited, with him being hilariously clueless, but you’ve got that dynamic where what he contributes is, he’s hot. that’s it. and i found it kind of a breath of fresh air, not because it was a fuck-you to sexist tropes, but because it’s never, ever enough for a guy to be attractive, but here it was, and that was fun to see.

i once thoughtlessly complimented a guy on his jacket, because he and his friend rounded the corner and suddenly i was confronted with an extremely handsome young man in a very fashionable black leather jacket, and i blurted out ‘whoah, nice jacket, you’re looking good!’ and the look on his face was just this explosion of surprise and delight– he actually kind of missed a step. the next minute i was like shit shit SHIT what if things get weird JEEZ but he and his friend were already walking past, and his friend just started laughing. kind of this ‘whoah, cool, what the hell’ laugh, and when i glanced back they’d both kind of lit up and were elbowing each other as they walked away. i was extremely relieved to have like dodged a bullet of ‘if you let a man know you are attracted to them at close range GOD KNOWS WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN BUT IT’S GONNA BE OBNOXIOUS PROBABLY’ and then also pleased that i’d made that guy’s day. but also like. i guess now i’m realizing i probably made that guy’s decade… 

i wish it was more common to compliment people– especially guys– in a casual way. but when you live as a woman you can spend a lot more time dodging men’s attention rather than soliciting it… 

maybe male poledancing is like, the next big fad to cash in on? guys can enjoy getting hit on and girls can enjoy there being a specific space for that, that they, the girls, can leave afterwards. 

I’d honestly never considered this before; it makes a lot of sense. *internally recalculates a bunch of stuff*

(via windbladess)

princehal9000:

ok but what if

the tolkien dwarves invented the printing press

give me that fic

I never thought about it, but, I mean…of course it’s the dwarves.  

The elves would never think of it, fading out of Middle Earth with their perfect memories entirely intact, bearing the lore of ages in their own lifetimes.  Elrond would never think to write down the story of his life, for all that it stretches back to the Silmarils’ crafting.  When they do write things down, they believe in taking the time to inscribe the words with their own hand–no one knows the hard truths of permanence and impermanence like the Firstborn, and if you are going to take the time to make something ephemeral into something lasting, you do it right.  And besides, Quenya and Sindarin and forgotten Noldorin, all are made with elaborate curling letters, intended more to be written with a brush tip or a calligrapher’s pen than printed for clarity.  A printing press would never capture the fluidity quite right.

The race of men…well, they’re still trying to recover.  The great kingdoms of the human race–hard Gondor and broken Arnor, wild Rohan and poor shattered Harad to the South–took the brunt of the Ring War hardest of all.  Even the strongest of them is left in fragments.  New rulers, damaged walls, burned cities.  Not many have time, in those first years–and it does take years–to worry about the lore that might have been lost or muddled by water and fire and falling stone, not when there are still leaderless orcs roving and people starving as they try to stretch the harvests.  By the time they do, they’re trying to piece together what they used to have.  No one thinks twice about trying to piece it together the way it was, and the way it was, was handwritten.  Someday the race of men will be great innovators, reaching toward the stars with sure hands and bright eyes.  Now, though, the race of men is enduring, is rebuilding and making alliances, trying to prevent the losses of the war from reappearing ten, twenty, a hundred years down the line.  They are doing well, at enduring–pragmatists, grim and tough and determined–but they hardly have the time for mechanical marvels that don’t aid building, speed farmwork, or otherwise smooth the path.

The hobbits persist in being stubbornly hobbitish.  Oral history is what they do, and their memories for family ties and dramatic gossip could give the oldest Eldest a run for their money.  Who’s going to bother to write down the story of the time Athella Proudfoot–no, not that one, the other one, Odo’s great-great-great aunt–drank half the tavern under the table, got up on the bar, did a jig in nothing but her bloomers, and then settled in to drink the place dry?  (And still looked fresh as a daisy, if quite a bit less sober, the next morning.)  No one, because anyone you ask knows the story of everyone who ever did anything worth knowing the story of.  What do the hobbits care for legends and lore?  They know who they are and where they come from, songs and stories and all, and there’s a certain level of strength in that.  Strength enough to walk into Mordor, strength enough to reclaim the Shire.  

The dwarves…the dwarves are a people who once had libraries, sweeping and beautifully full of knowledge.  The libraries in Khazad-dum have rotted, by now, ransacked by orcs and goblins or burned entire by Durin’s Bane.  Books and scrolls, illuminated with precious metals and expensive inks by the finest scholars, are worth nothing to a dragon, nothing but fuel for amusement, things to send sparking.  The library where Dis learned to read, where Thorin and Thrain before him learned statecraft, are nothing but ash.  The Iron Hills, Ered Luin, those places were filled by a people seeking refuge.  Few dwarrows snatched tomes as they fled Erebor.  Fewer still kept them at the ruin of Azanulbizar.  The dwarves escaped their ancestral homes with the clothes on their backs and scraps of bread baked on stones, with the pyres of the burned dwarves still smoldering behind them.

It’s a survivor of that flight who scratches down the first idle plans.  She remembers seeing Dain Ironfoot, barely more than a child–but then he seemed such a grown-up to her, at the time, when she was still a beardless babe only just walking–bloodied and limping on a crutch as he stood up to claim the leadership his father had left in his wake.  Dain and Thorin, young dwarrows still, but already old with the weight of the world.  She remembers that better than the dragon, better than the battle.  Her mother died in Ered Luin, but not before writing a poem for the burned ones, a poem for the two dwarves who had surrendered their own youth for the sake of their people.  She can’t stand the idea of her mother’s poem being lost, the way so many things were lost in flight after flight.

That dwarrowdam dies, an old dwarf in her bed with her loved ones around her, and it’s her best friend’s daughter who comes across the plans, many years later.  Yes, she thinks, looking at the levers, at the vague notes about possible lettering methods, yes, that could work.  

It doesn’t work, at first.  It doesn’t work a lot, really, but the dwarves are a stoneheaded bunch and not in a rush to be put off by a few petty failings.  Or by a total collapse of the base mechanics, the first time she tries to pull the lever.  The dwarrowdam unearths herself from a pile of metal and gears and wood, with the help of a few other folks who heard the complicated crash and weary cursing, and starts again. 

It takes most of two years and a lot of brainstorming–first with her friends, then with her guild, then with any poor fool careless enough to wander into her workshop–but the scribe-machine works.  She shrieks and bursts into tears when the first page comes out crisp and clean and beautiful, and sprints into the great hall waving it triumphantly over her head.

The paper says, in kuzdh runes, plain and clear, We are Mahal’s children, and we are yet unbroken.