Eleanor Fraser is a fanfic writer who entertains some hope of one day becoming the kind of writer who gets paid. She loves Austen, procrastinates endlessly, and is pretentious enough to write her bio in the third person. That should tell you all you need to know. Active on A03 and fanfiction.net as 'EleanorFraser'.
So I haven’t really been seeing folks talk much here at all about what’s been going on with Hurricane Helene recovery- but I thought I might share something I thought was cool and important.
Because of how roads have been washed out making homes and towns inaccessible to vehicles, the Cajun Navy (organizations that performs search, rescue, and assistance during disasters) has partnered with Mountain Mule Packer Ranch to use the mules to get medications, food, and water to people in need.
I just think it’s incredible. Despite all the technology you’d think is accessible to help people out, mules are still the most reliable form of transport to save people’s lives
#this IS the technology humans developed for this problem!#carries more than a donkey! calmer than a horse!#surefooted enough to handle rough terrain#and smart enough to find a path for itself#doesn't need the landing space of a helicopter#“I need to move people and supplies where there is no road or even ground” is a problem we have tried to prevent (with roads)#but when it shows up the solution hasn't changed - via @cygnahime
so many articles about Fast Fashion, not enough articles about what the hell is happening to the quality of clothes
Like okay. People own more pieces of clothing nowadays and they wear them a lesser number of times before throwing them out. BUT.
Why do we pretend like this is pure vanity or careless wastefulness, rather than forced by the qualities of the clothes themselves?
The other day, I was going through boxes of old clothes in the basement in search of fabric to practice sewing on. The difference in quality of the fabrics themselves is shocking! The worn-out old jeans from twenty years ago are MUCH thicker and tougher than anything more recent. My old baby clothes are made as sturdy as my work clothes from today.
In the past couple years, I have had entire seams rip out of clothes on the first wash. That's not normal!
Polyester blend shirts that feel cozy and soft when they are new, become scratchy and rough after 20 washes or so. I am trying to avoid polyester, but it gets harder and harder; the other day i couldn't find a single pack of crew socks that was 100% cotton. SOCKS!
Also, pilling is out of control. The newest pants I bought developed pills within a single day of walking around campus with a backpack.
These companies are trying to frog-boil us but touching clothes from twenty years ago, the useless crap of today would stick out like a sore thumb...
I think my favorite genre of fanfiction is when the author says something like "this was meant to be 3 chapters but it's actually going to be 5" in the notes at the end of a chapter and you can look up at the chapter count and it's like 15 or something
"shipping and blorbofication are not inherently at odds with understanding a story's deep themes" and "some people can't grasp the themes of a story because they never learned how to engage with stories outside of the lens of shipping and blorbofication" are two statements that can coexist
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.
Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.
There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"
I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.
There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.
fanfics are one of the best things that humanity has come up with. i fucking love reading stories about my favorite characters from people who have the same brainrot as me
It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.
Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.
In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).
The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.
This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.
I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.
Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.
It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.
------------
*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.
**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.
The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."
i really dont want to come off as an asshole and act like im not sympathetic but i think the idea that it is an appropriate thing to do to respond to posts about about positive experiences made by strangers with long and graphic vents about how your own life is nothing like that really has to end. i’m very sorry you’re going through that. but it’s just. really not appropriate.
To add to this. I run a blog that gets often a dozen of these in a day, depending on post popularity.
Recently a post I made when I was 14 talking about seeing the reason life it worth living has been getting tons of attention including constant tags and replies (and even messages) about how life is empty, pointless, and commiserating about how this is just another thing wrong with the person forever. This is super upsetting for me, to be frank. The post I made was about the fact that recovering is possible and needed, so it being shared under this completely different context sucks, and my tags are full of these kinds of comments.
I really desperately try to explain to people that these replies are just inappropriate for me and others, and that they are welcome to create separate venting spaces but that replies to a post go to… the poster! But I get tons of backlash saying if I didn’t want these replies I shouldn’t post about that topic.
While the internet is primarily an open forum, social rules and responsibilities are still very real. If you wouldn’t say that to someone in person, why should you say it online?
It’s not a healthy way to share or healthy for me to receive. All I ask is that before leaving a negative (sad, hopeless, angry, sarcastic, pessimistic, etc.) comment on a post just consider:
Why am I sharing this reply?
What am I hoping to get out of saying this?
How will this make the OP feel? Do they need to see this?
Would I say this to someone IRL?
How else can I get what I’m looking for without commenting on this strangers post? Perhaps I can talk to a friend, journal, vent in my own blog, etc.
origamiaround
stormborns
snowghoul
kianamaiart
discoholicmusic
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
gummygunk
