9 ♠

Writer-in-progress.  Likes:  snakes, frogs, cuttlefish.  Dislikes:  bedbugs, mosquitos.  Humans are on thin ice.  I'm an adult and will probably assume anyone interacting with me is an adult; if you're not comfortable with that or if you're a kid, let me know.  

[dailymanners]

You don't have to laugh at "girl math" or "girl dinner" or "I'm just a girl" jokes. You don't have to laugh at misogynistic humor that demeans women. You don't have to go along with it. You don't even have to sit there awkwardly pretending you didn't hear anything. You are allowed to speak up and say something.

You don't have to be a jerk about it. The most effective yet civil way of dealing with harmful "humor" is just pretending you don't get the joke and asking them to explain. "I don't get it, what's girl math? What's a girl dinner? What do you mean by you're just a girl? Can you explain the joke to me?"

And if you're feeling bold, you can just say (or follow up with) "I think that's misogynistic". That's allowed. You don't have to quietly endure misogynistic "jokes", you can call a spade a spade.

[9ofspades]

Spoilers for Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca under the cut

I know it’s very good that Rebecca stopped as soon as they saw Manderley burning, but perversely I REALLY want to see Maxim suffer more. Need the fic that picks up as soon as the book ends and makes him have to fend off a bajillion journalists without even a house to protect him from them. All the servants swarming around in confusion asking him what do. Deciding whether to accuse Mrs. Danvers or set the police after her. The constant scrutiny and attention and “Is this connected to the discovery of your wife’s body??” Beatrice’s bluff concern and worry. The whole sequence of events that leads to them finally fleeing the country — because they *could* buy a new house, but the speculation and scandal would keep following them. Realizing that even in France people recognize them, especially in the English-speaking circles they’d move in. Finally making their way further and further away, living in hotels as homeless exiles, hoping to flee Rebecca’s massive sphere of influence. Even decades later, she still haunts her dreams and his waking hours.

Like yeah it’s all there implicitly. But maybe someone needs to write the explicit version >:3c

Tagging @mumblingsage for Rebecca talk.

[xanofmercia]

god give me the patience to ignore people on the internet being so adamantly wrong.

[animemangamenagerie]

His Earnest Advice 🤜 💥

[9ofspades]

Okay I thought Pamela was strictly epistolary but it turns out there’s interludes in the middle that are just narration? That’s cheating, Richardson!!!! At least make it a letter from a neighbor or journalist or something!!!

[berlynn-wohl]

plot 150 words bed-sharing 200 words smut 800 words projecting my fears, insecurities, and anxieties onto a fictional character 9,356 words fluff 150 words someone who is good at fan fiction please help me budget my WIP, my family is dying

[sunken-standard]

150 words of plot seems excessive.

[berlynn-wohl]

thank you for the reasonable advice

[9ofspades]

So I was never part of the BBC Merlin fandom, but having seen the first 1.5 seasons or so of BBC Merlin, I totally get why everyone is obsessed with Merthur. First episode alone introduces them in a ridiculously homoerotic way, Arthur explicitly says “There’s something about you, Merlin…” and decides to keep him around, there’s life-saving and a forced proximity situation with unethical power dynamics… and that’s just the first episode!!!!! Everything after that is “these two slowly make each other better while growing to understand each other” and “Merlin has a secret that accidentally serves as a remarkably accurate allegory for queerness, which Arthur is constantly on the verge of discovering and how he will react will change the entire plot”. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s intentional queerbaiting; I’m only saying that all the things everyone loves are present. (My personal opinion is that the show stumbled into a very good queer story purely by accident)

I do like Gwen-centric stuff, but I feel like the show’s first explicitly Gwen/Arthur episode was HORRIBLY bad. It shoved them into stereotypical roles in ways that did both of them and their relationship a huge disservice.

For context, this is the episode where Arthur is attending some tourney in secret and asks to crash at Gwen’s place, and because he’s a spoiled prince he immediately takes the bed, leaving her to sleep on a pile on the floor. He demands to be served with no consideration for Gwen, who is stuck handling all his chores. Eventually after DAYS of this treatment, she yells at him, and he apologizes and tries to sort of do better, with partial success.

This episode was SO BAD!!!!! First of all, we’ve ALREADY SEEN Arthur be more considerate and active while staying at peasants’ homes. In the episode where they help Hunith, Gwen actually gets a REALLY good scene where she calls out Arthur’s snobbishness around the gruel, because the village folks can’t afford better food but are still sparing some of their limited supply for Arthur. It’s also a good example of Arthur being ignorant of his privilege in a non-hateful way — of course he has this reaction; he thinks this tastes bad and he’s never experienced “this is the only thing there is to eat” before. And he’s not even complaining or anything; he’s just refusing to finish the gruel and being weirded out when his host follows after him trying to make him finish it. As soon as he gets told, he has a really good reaction where he learns from it and thanks Gwen for calling him out. It’s a SUPER good example of him learning more of how poorer folks live, and listening to Gwen and respecting her opinion. And! It’s a really good Gwenthur scene!

Unfortunately the later episode decided to throw all that out the window. Arthur forgot everything he learned and went back to being a spoiled prig, displaying all the bad selfish traits he’d been unlearning throughout the first season. There was no more subtlety or romance to their relationship; Gwen was simply the long-suffering girlfriend who couldn’t handle the abuse anymore, which we’ve seen in a million other romcoms with bad love interests and women protagonists who are too used to keeping quiet. It’s generic, it’s uninteresting, and it’s a bad couple dynamic. I don’t blame anyone for seeing that and thinking “Gwen deserves better”. ANYONE deserves better. Even Merlin would deserve better if that was their relationship.

Thankfully, it wasn’t, because despite the fact that Merlin is Arthur’s personal servant, Arthur doesn’t actually expect Merlin to give up his bed for him or host him or care for him outside of his regular servant duties. Merlin does improve Arthur throughout, usually by getting him to see or understand the ways peasants are also human, but it’s never done in as hamfisted a way as That One Awful Episode. If it had been, I wouldn’t blame anyone for hating on the Merthur pairing, but their relationship, platonic or otherwise, actually gets the deft touch.

And!!! Gwenthur did originally!!! So it’s VERY frustrating that when the writers decided they wanted to advance that romantic subplot, they did it by mashing the characters together like Barbie dolls, fully erasing all of Arthur’s progress and making him undergo a cartoonishly extreme arc from asshole to slightly-less-oblivious asshole, while also forcing Gwen into a long-suffering victim role who finally forces Arthur to confront things in an on-the-nose explicit way. That was never their dynamic in the show! That shouldn’t have been their dynamic in that episode!!! Wrong and bad!!!

I’m sure the show did better after that, and it’s possible they made a really good love story for them eventually. And also I don’t blame fans for being so put off Gwenthur by that episode that they never wanted to touch it again.

Personally I just wish there was more Morgana/Gwen content — there’s a nice amount, and what I’ve seen is REALLY good, and they’re clearly a phenomenal ship and VERY sapphic even in canon, but there’s not nearly as much as there could be!

[calli0pea]

unfortunately, Sky High was only (1) 1hr 30 min Disney film and not the 6 season so-bad-it’s-good CW series it could’ve been

[shaftking]

“Media can be factually made with a child/family audience in mind” and “media for children/family audiences can be well made and engaging pieces of art” and “if you are an adult you should have a more diverse media diet than what exists to target an audience of primary middle and grade schoolers” and “it’s okay to watch a cartoon as an adult and enjoy it” can coexist.

[9ofspades]

I’m going to be completely insufferable here under the cut

This is a good post and I agree with it all except for the “you should” bit. I think it’s not at all helpful to frame things as though all adults have some kind of obligation or moral imperative to do certain things for themselves, and explicitly using the words “you should” in a post WILL make readers defensive.

I liked a mutual’s framing of it as “If you only [consume stories] with a target audience of children, you are depriving yourself of joy, but it’s not my job to force joy upon you.” People who never read, listen to, watch, or experience any kind of fiction other than that with a target audience of grade schoolers may also be depriving themselves of learning or wisdom or self-reflection opportunities, but this is a purely personal choice.

No one has any obligation toward self-improvement or joy-seeking or growth, so long as they aren’t hurting anyone else in the process.

However, it would benefit people to seek additional joy and improve themselves.

It would probably benefit those around them as well, but those around them are not entitled to those benefits.

So “you should have a media diet that…” is the one outlier here. There is no “should” about what you’re watching or reading in your own free time.

It would be better for you if you have a more diverse media diet, though.

[whitsantos-twinism-truther]

[9ofspades]

@thelionthewitchandtheholocryptid

[frog43]

wha t if oregon trail was called wagon age: oregons

[naamahdarling]

This made me so angry the first time I saw it I’m reblogging it again.

[luxiethefool]

happy 10 years to wagon age oregons

[vulvalini]

[9ofspades]

It occurs to me that if it hadn’t been for silly folks on TikTok, “unalive” could be a very useful word in speculative fiction.

Undead folks are those who are biologically dead (vampires, zombies, other corpse-y things) who still exhibit alive behaviors, so unalive folks could be folks who are biologically alive but don’t respond to stimuli and exhibit all the behaviors of dead folks. This could be princ(ess)es under a sleeping spell, living beings under a petrifying curse, those who are currently outside the flow of time, and probably a number of others.

These terms would probably make for useful distinctions for Witchers, monsterhunters, and curse-breakers of various stripes. An unalive entity requires curse breaking or maybe containment depending on the spell. An undead entity may require a trained fighter.

In more.. crunchy? speculative fiction, there could also be discourse on what rights unalive people have, especially if they’re going to stay unalive for over a hundred years. Do their descendants still have responsibility of care? And if they’re a royal, what is their place in the line of succession when they become alive again?

Unfortunately, we don’t have that. We just have censorship and “self-unalive”.

[northirish]

I'm following blogs that haven't posted in like eight years but I don't care I shall never unfollow them because I am a true and loyal knight #loyalknight

[mumblingsage]

I'm not unfond of litotes and similar negations, but the thing with "It isn't X - it's Y" construction, even aside from the fact that AI gorged itself on so much of it that it now vomits it forth at a keystroke, is - what's your reason for not just saying "It's Y"?

You might have reasons! As I said, I don't hate litotes myself! But you are taking twice as long to communicate the information, and sometimes the immediate response to "It's not X" is "Did you really think I would think it would be X? Why are we talking about X when X isn't the case?"

Also, if I said "I'm not unfond of litotes. I like it quite a bit" you'd be justified in feeling that I wasn't giving your common sense enough credit. Sometimes it's just the "It isn't" part you need, and let the reader infer what it is on their own.

[9ofspades]

Ooh!!!!

I hope you don’t mind the piggybacking, but now I’m wondering about things like…

So in science/statistics, you can disprove something you set up to be disproven, but you can never prove something. Reductively, you can say “there is not enough evidence to conclude that x is wrong” but you can’t correctly say “x is right”. I’m wondering how that reads in casual dialogue 🤔

I know the “Well, you’re not wrong…” can read as “I don’t want to agree with you but I can’t honestly disagree” or “technically correct but not at all what I meant!” Kind of curious about how things like “I don’t disagree.” Or “This isn’t bad… I might even say that it’s good.” make a character come across, though.

I can see the second one in a series of escalations 🤔 “This isn’t bad. I might even say it’s objectively good. But it makes me want to set you on fire. Never do it again.”

I don’t think that’s a litote, though, because the point isn’t whether it’s good, it’s just acknowledging “this criticism isn’t about whether it’s bad or not”. Or maybe that still counts?

Also curious now what some actually good litote + statement would look like.

I can see the format “it’s not x — it’s y” working for a situation where x and y aren’t opposites, and the point is “I’m pedantically hairsplitting but in this context the hairsplitting is VERY important.” Like “it’s not pain — it’s agony” or “it wasn’t gray, it was grey, and that made the clouds all the gloomier.” But those aren’t opposites, so would they even count as litotes?

[scribeherself]

people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.

[scribeherself]

Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼

[assiraphales]

ok so apparently in celebration of the 250th anniversary of paul revere’s ride this was projected onto a church in boston??

[xiaq]

“A church”?? That’s Old North Church! That’s THE church where the lanterns were lit.

[massachusetts-official]

Official Post of Massachusetts

[girlpurplelily]

ive noticed u made the common mistake of stoppijg petting me so i will whine and paw ur paw until u realize this mistake its ok its a common mistake here let me lay on u to makr it easier