Anonymous asked: no supernatural on good shows list lottie?
well I’m not gonna fucking lie to people
cinnamonrolltoogayforthisworld:
tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”
it’s also possible he was acting off of the lessons he learned in the abusive dursley household. that’s why he does a lot of his so-called “hero complex” shit. he takes a lot of personal responsibility for other people bc he learned growing up that “no one’s here for you, no one will help you, you will not catch any breaks”. he helps bc if he didn’t, who would? certainly not the dursleys, and that’s what he grew up with.
he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts, bc he’s learned that authority figures are no help and will only make things worse. he takes situations at face value bc he’s never seen other options in his life, he’s never HAD other options in his life. speaking very personally, that was a serious marker of abuse that i saw in myself - i never thought abt escape, or what i could do to improve my situation, bc i didn’t even see that as an option. the options were survive or don’t, deal w it or don’t, acclimate or implode.
maybe he wasn’t thinking abt what DUMBLEDORE would do, what anyone at hogwarts would do. maybe he was acting off what he knew the dursleys (his main authority figures) would do. the dursleys would let the girl drown. and harry was there, and harry could do something, and so harry did. he took personal responsibility for fleur’s sister’s safety bc all his life he’s learned that authority figures cannot be trusted to do so.
people characterize these aspects of harry as a “hero complex” or a “stupid nobility” or a “lack of common sense”, but i don’t agree with that. i can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.
it’s called “complex ptsd” and if you get out of the abusive situation before you’re old enough to understand how fucked up it was, like Harry did, you don’t end up with the classic flashbacks so much, just atypical behavior patterns and a high risk of other shit. That’s why Harry is so fucked up by everything that Umbridge does, it’s because he’s being retraumatized in his safe space.
@ladyknightley - FYI…
That was always how I interpreted Harry’s behavior, because I’m also prone to the same sort of reactions. It’s not about mistrusting a specific person or a specific group of people, it’s about the automatic bone-deep assumption that no one will help. Personal example: I don’t trust authority figures, even the ones I know and like on a personal level–I reported a sexual assault to a teacher a year and a half ago and I had a worse panic attack about that than I did about the assault, ever. The assault was business as usual. Telling an authority figure about it, giving someone that kind of weapon to use against me, was fucking traumatic, my roommate had to come with me and I had to sit down on the ground outside the building before I could walk. Harry Potter example: he doesn’t tell anyone about Umbrige because he assumes that not only will they do nothing, they might use it against him–if I hear literally one more person bring up the fact that he didn’t tell McGonagall, I will have an aneurysm. It’s not that he doesn’t think McGonagall cares about him, nor that, in the Triwizard Tournament, he thinks Dumbledore would let a kid die. It just doesn’t even occur to him that someone else might help. When someone suggests that he go to McGonagall about Umbrige, his response is basically “wait, what?” Once he’s out of the second task in the Triwizard Tournament, and the adrenaline’s clearing, he does sit back and go “why did I do that, Dumbledore would never have let her get hurt.” He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing in the moment, he just sees a threat and resolves it because no one else will help.
It’s not…personal, okay? It’s just the learned knowledge that no one is going to get you or anyone else out of a situation, so you have to do it. Every time.
And as long as we’re on the subject, this is part of the reason I dislike Snape pretty hardcore. I mean, I have a litany of sins for Severus Snape, which ends with ‘you can die like a hero but that doesn’t make you a good man’, but this is one of them. He treats this impulse of Harry’s as an attention-seeking behavior, not just a ‘saving-people-thing’ but something entirely motivated by some perverse desire to be in the spotlight. And he punishes him for it. He repeatedly penalizes Harry for trying to save people. And let me tell you something, from personal experience, the more people punish you for this, the stronger the impulse becomes. It’s a self-feeding cycle. Because, says the little voice in your brain, if they’re punishing me for helping, that means they wouldn’t have helped, so that means that it had to be me. Because better they punish you, right? Better you pay for helping someone because you would have paid for something anyway, right?
I’m not saying it’s a healthy mentality, but I’m also not going to condemn it as an unhealthy one, because sooner or later you might actually be the only person who will help. You might be the only person available. And if nothing else, this mentality does teach you to keep a cool head in a crisis.
(via academicfeminist)
Honestly this drive to make tv shows darker each season is so annoying if I wanted to feel sick to my stomach for hours I would watch the news not my favourite tv program
Oh my God I could snarl about this trend for HOURS, okay, like, listen, just LISTEN, if your TV show is 100% non-stop hardcore tragedy, and you just ante up at the end of every season, that loses its appeal, okay (SPN, I am looking AT YOU, you had potential, I have mentally rewritten everything past Season 3 to my satisfaction, I wrote AN ENTIRE GODDAMN NOVEL as a result of how angry I was, that’s how hardcore I am; SPN is gonna be my negative example here and I’m just not even sorry, that’s what fucking HAPPENS).
Because the reason tragedy is TRAGIC is because it’s not the fucking status quo, okay, like, that’s how this works. If every other episode is someone dying or abandoning their morals or fighting with someone they claim to love (GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING WINCHESTERS, OKAY, IF YOUR WHOLE PLOT IS GOING TO BE ABOUT HOW YOU WOULD DIE FOR YOUR BROTHER, I EXPECT YOU TO ACT LIKE IT, JESUS GOD), then that’s not interesting anymore, and furthermore it’s not sustainable. Sooner or later something gives out and here’s the thing, HERE IS THE THING, it’s always, always the character. Not in, like, some emotional ‘poor fragile baby’ way, I mean in the hard and fast writing-a-believable-character way. After a certain point, that shit falls flat. If your character’s ONLY defining trait is how miserable they always are, and how much they want out of their life, and how tired they are of their life, that is a one-note character, that is a caricature, and you have officially lost my interest. Your characters have to carry the show, okay, and that means that they have to be complete, dynamic people at all times, and THAT means that, even if it is Tragedy Train Central, they can’t just fucking mope about it okay.
AND AS LONG AS WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT, anteing up at the end of every season, raising the stakes…um, that’s an expiration-date sort of thing. That’s not sustainable in the long-term. That’s how you get into trouble. Because sooner or later, you will have ante’d up past the point of rationality (*cough* SPN) and you will have really fucked up any perspective on what your character actually cares about (also see “Winchesters comma The”). Like, all right, y’all, look, if you’re going to ante up every season, bring in a bigger threat, then you need to PACE YOURSELF. Do NOT just go straight for “Literally the biggest bad in the universe,” do not just pit your characters against the Apocalypse and avert it outright and then just come back the next season with ANOTHER Apocalypse. (There are times where ‘multiple Apocalypses’ can become a running joke, see: Buffy, but you gotta spotlight that shit and have your characters be blase about it, okay, if you’ve done three possible Apocalypses in a year, your characters have to treat this like just another day at work.) Because you know what, after the fifth time I’m promised A Real Actual Facts Biblical Apocalypse that everyone is so worried about, I am going to be expecting that you shit or get off the pot. Give me your goddamn rain of fire or S T O P. Similarly, if you make something a huge plot point for a season or two, like one of your characters being Not What We Thought (Sam Winchester), or being Possibly Corrupted By Evil (Sam, and then Dean, and then Sam, and then Dean, and then Cas, and then I stopped watching), you need to CARRY THROUGH. The thing I’m specifically thinking of here is the Sam thing in the first couple seasons, the whole “well he’s a hunter but also demon blood” thing that they devoted two seasons to. Like. You can set that up, totally, I set up a novel on that premise so I’m not going to judge, but then you need to stick to your guns. It’s a risky move, plot-wise, because it explicitly aligns a protagonist with the Dark Side, as it were. It’s Plot Russian Roulette. But then you have to pull the trigger. You can’t flinch and drop that plot point once you’ve put a lot of time and effort into it. Because once you drop THAT alignment with the Dark Side, you’re going to feel compelled to ante up (see above) and that will get out of hand and your characters will suddenly need to ante up from SATAN, literal goddamn SATAN, and like I’m sorry but that…that’s just fucking embarrassing.
TL;DR: I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore, tragedy is only interesting if it’s unusual, characters are only interesting if they’re not one-note, and go ahead and play Plot Roulette, but don’t flinch when you pull the trigger. And SPN flunked all of these criteria, thus the chip.
(Source: starsarewishesindisguise)
Who wants to hear my latest story of being a fucking disaster?
All right, so, here’s the deal: I’m pre-med, just finished my junior year of college, and, like a fucking moron I thought that I could maybe trust that, y’know, literally anyone in the department at my school would have realized that I do not actually know everything. In fact, I often don’t even know what I don’t know, and therefore am often in a position of, A, flying completely blind, B, bordering on a panic attack, and, C, totally unable to even start doing research in order to resolve my ignorance.
Why does this currently matter?
So, the deadline for the medical school app (yeah, there’s just the one, apparently, and they send it to the schools you want them to send it to) turns out to be October 13th.
That means that I need to take the MCATs at such a time that I’ll have the grades by October 13th, meaning that I need to take it in early September (because then the grades will be out on October 12th), which means that instead of having a significant part of next semester to study, I have this summer.
Now. I also have an internship this summer. A very intensive internship eight hours from my home. An entirely research-based internship that I only signed up for after my…everyone spent months talking me into it. After my organic chemistry teacher spent an entire semester talking me into it. I do not have time to intensively study for the MCATs during this internship, but I guess I’m going to have to fucking make do because I will not retain information through a gap year. If someone had thought for one second to talk to me about the MCAT thing, this all would have been very different. Given that it actually never came up, I did not even begin to realize the size of this critical gap in my knowledge.
You know, I have trust issues and I know it, and I have trust issues with teachers and authority figures specifically, but somehow every once in a while I get comfortable enough or stupid enough (fuck if I can tell the difference anymore) to think they’re actually going to take care of me. And then I am suddenly and viciously reminded of the fact that this always happens and I shouldn’t be surprised anymore and yet somehow I always am. I expect teachers to punish me for things that aren’t my fault or leave me to handle a physical threat without help–hell, I even expect teachers to punish me for handling a threat to my safety. But for some goddamn reason I always fool myself into thinking that somehow they’re going to help me with shit like this.
i’m fucking cackling people are boycotting the sims 4 because they removed the gender barriers and 99% of randomly generated sims will now no longer fit in the gender binary like i cannot believe pixel trans people are ruining a game about a bunch of mixed race bisexual people screaming and setting plates of pasta on fire
it is a good day on the planet earth
All right but for just one second let’s consider the math here (note: I haven’t played the new Sims, and am just working from what I’ve gathered on the internet). There are four options, yeah? Each of them have two possible answers. That gives 2^4, or 16, possible configurations, with no regard for what the configurations are. Assume that one of those gives you ‘all masculine (your basic cis dudebro)’ and another one gives you 'all feminine (your basic cis sorority chick),’ and that every single one of them is equally probable. That gives you 2 in 16, or 1 in 8 (12.5%), Sims fitting the gender binary.
That’s way more representation than transgender people get in TV (less than 1%).
Now let’s take into consideration that one of those categories (clothing preference) has no impact on the actual gender of your Sim. That adds two more categories of cis characters: the cis man rockin’ a skirt and eyeliner, and the cis woman crushing it in a three-piece suit and a cropped haircut. Okay, now there are 4 possible arrangements of a cis Sim, making it 4 in 16, 2 in 8, or 1 in 4 (25%).
That percentage is almost half of the percentage of trans people who have attempted or committed suicide (between 40% and 50%).
So, uh…speaking as a cis person, I think everyone can just shut up and enjoy the spacious new vistas of Sim life, yeah?
(via inkandash)
So my time is running down to bitch about this writing class (I CAN SEE THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL, THE END OF THE YEAR IS SO CLOSE, GOD, I CAN PRACTICALLY TASTE FREEDOM) and I need to get some stuff off my chest here. An open letter to my class under the cut for ranting and cursing and general miscellaneous bullshit.
I’m taking that creative writing class and I just. Okay. Guys. Explain me a thing. WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape? I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ. Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this. I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing. This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“ I just. Do not understand why rape is the thing. Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape. They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.
Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’ Like, no. It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing. The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.
FUCKING UPDATE.
So I got out of responding to the rape story, but I still had to go to class so that I could respond to the OTHER story we read (see above re: fucking abstractist writing that I still hardcore do not like). And I was like “All right, I can live with this, I got my iPod, I got my Fall Out Boy, I got my writing, I can do this.” But I forgot that the classroom is really small and my seat is very close to the teacher, so I couldn’t, like, crank my music to the point where I couldn’t hear anyone talking and so I ended up listening to the talking. And fuck me I’m angry.
Pro tip: as a teacher at a college that specializes in taking people out of like sophomore year of high school (I dropped out and started college at 16), it is your goddamn job to express clear ethical and legal boundaries. Admitting that rape is wrong is awesome, but it is ALSO WRONG to abandon a rape victim when you have every opportunity to help them. You should not ever be talking about how well a student puts the reader into the mind of a witness and makes their decision to not help understandable.
Also, there was a lot of talking about “Well, I feel like there was some confusion about consent between the boyfriend and the girlfriend.” Let’s be clear here, folks, if I wave a knife at you and you say “Oh no, don’t stab me,” and then I stab you thirty-five times in the chest, the cops are not going to be like “Well, I feel like there was some confusion between the stabber and the stabee.” That’s not how it works. If the girlfriend says no, pushes the boyfriend away physically, and reaches out to a bystander for help, that is not ‘confusion,’ that is pretty fucking clearly not consent. Like, you know what, if you’re going to make me fucking sit through this story, you’d better at least have the stones to admit that your student turned in a story about rape and you forced the rest of the class to read it.
I’ve reached this point of universally being furious with everyone in my writing class. Even the people I like. Literally just existing in the class is enough to make me angry with you, by, like, transitive properties of loathing. And my teacher can fuck the entire way off and not make snide remarks about my writing anymore just because I don’t fucking turn in weird abstract rape stories.
FUCKING EDIT: Did I forget to mention that it’s actually literally illegal to do nothing to aid the victim of a rape? LOOK AT THIS. You can be charged as an accessory to literally whatever the perpetrator is charged with.
I’m taking that creative writing class and I just. Okay. Guys. Explain me a thing. WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape? I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ. Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this. I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing. This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“ I just. Do not understand why rape is the thing. Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape. They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.
Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’ Like, no. It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing. The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.
People with good parents get so offended when abused children speak negatively of their parents. Like…REALLY offended lol.
They say things like “Your mom would do anything for you” and “Your parents sacrificed a lot for you!” and “I don’t respect anyone who talks down on their parents.”
But just because YOUR parents would do anything for you and sacrificed a lot for you doesn’t mean it applies to all parents. We don’t have the same experience boo. You can’t tell me shit about what my mama would do for me. All moms and dads are not created equal.
REALLY THIS. And I’ve discovered that…like, it extends past parents. Like, don’t get me wrong, my parents are absolutely as good as it gets, they’re great people and they would support me if I said I wanted to make seashell necklaces for the rest of my life (actually no, I’ve always been ridiculously Type A so they would take me to a hospital if I said that, but the point stands). My extended family? Genuine, bona-fide, abusive train wreck. They spectacularly fucked up my parents, who I can never thank enough for the trouble they’ve taken to protect me as best they can. It’s just…a fact of life in my experience that my grandparents treat me like I’m either worthless because I’m terrible at everything or worthless because I’m a girl. My aunts and uncles and cousins (with VERY few exceptions) have taken the party line my entire life. And that’s behavior that I generally consider benign from them. I get panic attacks when they contact me, and the few people who really push the point about “Oh, but they’re your family, you must love them!” and “But they’re your family, of course they love you” piss me the fuck off. Because it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes something breaks along the line.
I don’t usually say this, but: you don’t know my life. Similarly, I don’t know yours. You tell me you have issues with your parents? Shit, you tell me that you’re waiting on someone to die so that you can get the fuck out? Cool, bro. I’m still here for you, whatever you need. Treat me well and I’ll back you in anything, because fuck, you know what? I’m waiting on my grandmother to die so that I don’t have to fucking watch my mother worry anymore. I’m waiting on her to die so that I can cry and scream for the kid I should have been. I’m waiting for her to die so that I can go to a funeral in a red dress she would have hated, over combat boots that would have made her furious, wearing red lipstick that would have made me call her a whore. Yeah. Sometimes family is shitty. It doesn’t always pan out nicely and you never get to tell someone what they’re allowed to feel about it.
(Source: tanae-briana, via bonehandledknife)
Anonymous asked: 12 girls on tumblr complain about a problem they all had and make it out to be some grand injustice that happens to anyone when really they can't think beyond themselves. Are you going to ignore all the good done just because it didn't happen to you?
Hi, anon, I’m gonna be honest and say I’m…genuinely not sure what you’re talking about here? I’m guessing it has something to do with either the one post or another one of the recent posts that I’ve reblogged about medical equality lately, though, based on the tone, so I’m going to answer this assuming that.
First of all, no, I’m not, as you seem to believe, acting out due to personal insult. I’ve been reasonably fortunate in medicine, actually, from a certain perspective: when there’s something wrong with me, it’s spectacularly wrong and generally speaking impossible to write off (too concussed to speak, intolerant of a medication to the point of seizures, etc.). My experience is actually coming from my training as an EMT and in reaching out to doctors to learn what it’s like working in the medical field. Thanks for the assumption, though.
Second of all, this isn’t an issue of a few girls on Tumblr, it’s increasingly an issue that has the potential to affect a lot of people. Women, yeah, are a part of that group. So are trans individuals, people with existing disabilities, or people of color. Is it going to affect all of those people? No, of course not, that would be an absurdly generalized statement. But it affects some, and when you look at the sheer number of people who fall into the group, ‘some’ of them becomes a not-insignificant number. However, this does not change the fact that the medical field at large has helped innumerable people, nor would I ever want to devalue that. It is completely possible to acknowledge both the flaws in the medical system and the vast good that the same system can do and has done. Since the goal of medicine as a discipline is always to help the most number of people possible, I would say that acknowledging the flaws in the system and acting to change things is actually quite in spirit with the same attitude that leads to all that good being done in the first place.
Third of all. Okay. Look. I’m eighteen. I am first-aid certified. I am a trained EMT looking for somewhere to take my certification exam. I am a junior in college (on SUCH a scholarship, I might add, because my family’s broke) currently on the pre-medical studies track. I am looking into which medical schools I should apply to. I am talking to doctors and nurses to see what field I might like to specialize in. I keep a medical kit and provide first-aid care to my friends and classmates when they need it. So you just damn call me when you decide what else I need to be doing to be qualified to make a note of the fact that some people do not consistently receive the attentive listening and respect they are entitled to. Not to sound like too much of an idealist or whatever, but in my personal opinion, if only twelve women had ever experienced this sort of thing, it would still be unacceptable.
If you weren’t talking about the medicine thing, feel free to consider this a free lesson in specificity. Tip: it pays to be particular about the post you’re griping about, because otherwise you get a long rant about medical equality you weren’t looking for.
