You Can Never Be Free But You Can Be Loud

Extracts of my night time writing

[angryracoon92]

New book place !

[angryracoon92]

That’s mad that Darwin was creating the theory of evolution and had no idea what a gene was.

[angryracoon92]

That's the cutest thing I've ever painted

[angryracoon92]

The kind of shit I find under my bed, and then I wonder why I can't sleep

[angryracoon92]

No one at this firework knew that dying is a boring side effect

[angryracoon92]

[angryracoon92]

Baroque depression. Pain, but for poetry. It feels like night in summer. Exhausted by the heath, gasping for air, sweat rolling down your skin. But you choke on the smell of flowers, the moon make water shine and the warmth feels like a sweet embrace.

Like Persephone's garden. Like your eyelids, heavy from sleep, closing to never open again. Feels like desire.

[angryracoon92]

I've been reading ACOTAR again these last days and I can't stop thinking about Elain, as a person, and Elain with Lucien. 

I've been out of the fandom for a while, and I think we're completely missing something big with the ship war going on with Elucien and Elriel. I think SJM has an insane opportunity to give such a message to her readers. I'm mature enough now to take some steps back on the story, but it might not be the case for everybody. At least it wasn't the case for my younger self. 

Elain gets a lot of hate because of misogyny, right? Because she's traditionally feminine, loves her flowers and her baking, is a very social person, and isn't a strong empowered warrior protagonist. I'm not saying those carcters are bad. They are necessary to break gender stereotypes and inspire girls to do what they want in life and  not to be afraid to be themselves if they don't align with the stereotypes. But I've noticed that this type of caracter has become so mainstream now that it has lost its meaning and is no longer a perspective of choice but an expectation. 

This ship war reminded me of Twilight. If I remember right, Bella says at some point that choosing between Edward and Jacob is more about choosing what version of herself is the one she wants to be. So, of course, she chooses an extraordinary life, rebels against the norms, and becomes a vampire. That's good for her. It carried the right message at that time. 

But with Elain, SJM can completely change that message around. If Elain chooses Azriel, she chooses an extraordinary life too. She gets to become an active member of the Night Court, probably will be trained as a warrior or a spy at some point and become a revelant political figure with her seer abilities. That's an attractive life, and would probably allow her character to evolve a lot. But it once again perpetuate that idea that you have to become a very warrior type of character for you to have some value. So we're teaching teens that they have to be extraordinary for people to love them and value them, putting a lot of pressure on them, and encouraging them to, in the end, embody the new stereotype of women that we have created. 

All the beauty of the idea lies there. If Elain chooses Lucien, she won't have to have that dark, alluring life but can choose an ordinary one. She won't be expected to stop her gardening, to act or speak differently. She doesn't have to completely change her personality, and she is still loved and cherished, but for exactly who she is. Even if she can become that super cool person, but not in alignment with herself. It could show that you can be loved even as an ordinary person with an ordinary life. That quiet lives are just as important as epic ones. And that a simple life can still be filled with happiness and beauty. It's a tolkienesque idea, but it's so important to celebrate ordinary lives.

If SJM writes Elucien, she can create a whole spectrum of representation. You can be a queen, a warrior, or a lover, and each of them is just as good as the other if it feels right to you.

And, by writing all of this, I don't even want to take part in this Lucien vs Azriel thing, or even go deeper in the characters. It's not about the characters themselves. There are a lot of amazing people who have done precise analysis of the canon text already. I just felt that it was important for me to share it somewhere, and I've seen no one talking about it already.

Please don't hesitate to interact with this post because I would love to talk about it with someone. Thanks for reading if you made it that far :)

[angryracoon92]

It's so sad to be cold. I just learned in thermochemistry that warmth always warms the cold, so really, when you're cold, it's because nothing gave you its heat. Being cold, really, is a lack of love.

[angryracoon92]

I'm deeply persuaded that we shouldn't know all that we know. All this genetic and informaton knowlege that allow us to degenerate and deform everything from its true form.

But also having this realisation that all of this is man-made and does not exist. Numbers and sounds and everything really, is just human mind organising itself. Everything grows apart and back together and apart again and I'm exhausing myself to understand it all. And I have so many thoughts. So many.

Sometimes I don't know how to keep up with myself. It's not bad thoughts like it used to be. But it's so vast. I had this analogy this morning that I have a lot of thoughts but am slow to process them but it takes so much place. Like a dragon turning in its sleep, waves of gold raining from its scales in a grand trembling. That's how my head feels like all the time. And I feel stupid in basic human knowlege but I always have this machine turning without rest and it doesn't give me so much time to think about anything else.

[angryracoon92]

Is it a writer thing or a student thing to fall asleep with ink pens in your bed ?

[angryracoon92]

I'm not very old, but I've done some thinking about life in general, and I thought I might share it here in hope it would help people who need to hear it.

What I've understood by now is that to live a life that makes you happy, you have to determine what you align with, meaning what are your values and what is something you love to do, and then go on with that. It sets boundaries and goals.

In order to find what is your path, you have to identify what exerts an influence on you and to detach yourself from it. Otherwise, you would not follow your path, but the one external factor makes you think is yours. That's what I did when I was younger, taking what my family and my perception of society for my own path and engaging in studies that did not suit me. You have to listen to your feelings to understand your thoughts. Feelings are guides. They help you identify if you are still following your path or if you're starting to let external factors decide for you.

One thing that is hard to understand is that there is only you in your life. You have to do the living and the thinking by yourself because only you can know what you want and what you need. That's why I'm thankful for everything I went through. Otherwise, I wouldn't have learned all of that.

It is your goal in life to understand who you are and what you must do to be happy. If you're happy, you don't hurt people around you and can guide them to their own understanding. You must also understand that you cannot understand for other people and that everyone is going through the same process as you. In consequence, how other people behave is not about you, but about them and them only. Just like your feelings, other people are guides. You have to listen to them and understand why they made you feel the way you did when you met them.

The ultimate goal for humanity is for to get to that level of understanding. And you have to play the most important part, since you only have power over yourself. All you have to do, really, during your lifetime is understand who you are and what you have to do.

[angryracoon92]

I stopped denying parts of myself as the days got warmer and now I feel whole again