The life and times of a legal adult

Multifandom but mainly RWBY, some writing, some essays pretty pictures, lots of love, and the occasional fanfic. She/her, username is the same on dreamwidth and discord. Will tag anything if you ask. Enjoy!

[setulose]

Trace amounts of Monica in my life

[setulose]

A statistically insignificant level of Monica in my life

[setulose]

My life manufactured in a facility that also processes Monica

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Author: I have created a unique heavily gendered society where men and women have different but equal forms of power!

The society: Men have all the political and economic power but women nag them sometimes so who is really in charge here, hm?

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

This isn't limited to fiction by the way, I've seen way too many people argue that a wife has "soft power" in a patriarchal society because she could nag her husband and sometimes he'd even give in to her. There's a reason they call it soft power and it's because it gives the moment hard power comes in.

All power is social. All of it. That's what makes it so slippery. Social power is the reason the order 'i want you to bomb this country' gets followed if it's said by a president and ignored if it's said by an unhoused man on the street corner. But hard social power (legal, economic, religious, political) will always trump soft social power (being persuasive). The reason women's soft social power is magnified is not because it's equal to hard social power, but because it's a patriarchal excuse. That the legal, economic, religious, and political oppression of women must happen to counter their "overwhelming" soft social power of being seductive or clever or naggy or whichever excuse they're using this time.

[jen-iii]

The Estate's Secret

(I saw the movie leaks and I was INSTANTLY thrusted back into ATLA hyperfixation and I wanted to give it a go at drawing one of my all time favorite characters because Toph's story is so wonderfully done and theres so much nuance that I HAD to draw em out. This is a two parter piece AND I still have more ideas so buckle up)

[nondelphic]

unfortunately my story needs a middle. i personally think this is excessive

[ostolero]

[sebright]

Houndoom

[lastoneout]

The most recent Android update making it impossible to actually disable any AI features no matter what you do is surely a sign that this technology is the future and about to take off and make everyone SOOOOO much money that all the nay-sayers will be sobbing about how they were fools who should have listened and invested. Everyone knows you have a winning product if you have to uh *checks notes* trick and/or force people to use it against their will. Great job, everyone!

[kosmogrl]

[vosquitransitis]

the great thing about tumblr is that you can meet people you'll vibe with on a level you have never vibed with anyone before and the tragedy about tumblr is that they almost certainly will live in another country

[hppjmxrgosg]

proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.

[inconspectus]

once my therapist said I used very uncommon and creative phrases and adjectives and i just did not have the heart to tell that Old Lady From A Foreign Small Town that I was translating tumblr speech into our language. so I was like yeah... must be from the books I read...

like girl we have an army of scholars over at tumblr.com crafting our language it's not just little old me I swear

[copperbadge]

I once called a colleague's Borzoi a beautiful Gentle Alien, assuming the term had long since become commonplace outside of Tumblr, and discovered when he burst into delighted laughter at the term that it Had Not. I had to explain to him that I'm not a comedy genius, just repeating a niche meme.

[digitaldiscipline]

Me: "I am getting a good grade in patient, which is normal to want and possible to achive."

My Doctor: "Please stop that."

[gothiccharmschool]

Me: "I want to get a good grade in therapy, which is normal to want and possible to achieve."

My Therapist: "So, how are your peeps on Tumblr doing?"

[thememedaddy]

[planeposting]

I dreamed there was a PSA where a guy is impatiently waiting for the plane to take off and it like "Ugh I wish they'd just hurry up and take off already" and then the plane immediately starts taking off without warning, climbs steeply, pitches down unrecoverably, and crashes into a populated area. Then we see a very badly injured and burned version of that guy being interviewed on a talk show as like "survivor of flight ___" and he turns to the camera and goes "Y'know, it's usually best to just trust the professionals to do their job. Sometimes it's better to be a little bit late."

I don't know what this was a PSA for, other than "shut the fuck up," but I was quite the fan

[nickelodeonhistory]

1998 nickelodeon trade ad

[charbarthe2nd-deactivated202005]

It’s amazing how they could make an ad from 1998 that looks like a shitpost made a week ago.

[trans-trendy-deactivated2022121]

Here’s a template

[trans-trendy-deactivated2022121]

[9differenttypesofcrazy]

Here’s mine

[naamahdarling]

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

[scp-threats-is-back]

It was bound to happen.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Hey. Heyhey. Do me a favor real quick.

If you don't already know you have issues doing so, squat down real quick. Bend your knees all the way and touch the floor. Just make sure you can do it. Okay? For me? And then stand up all the way and make sure you can balance on one foot.

Like. You don't need to blow it into some huge thing. Just. Make sure all your bits and peices still work the way you think they do.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Can you turn your head to look behind you without twisting your shoulders? What about standing on your toes? If you sit down on the floor can you get back up without using your hands?

If there was ever a tumblr post worth sending to your mom, it's this one.

Just saying, bodies are a use it or lose it kinda thing.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

okay so every time I see this post crop back up in queues and notifications I end up thinking about it. Because I made the post and even I'm still doing the thing where I read the post about maintaining range of motion in my delicate meatsuit and I nod and hmm and think yeah that's a good idea and then dont move from where I'm curled up shrimp style staring at the nightmare rectangle.

So like. Thinking real hard about moving doesn't count as moving. Major bummer. Anyways. Joints.

[bethanydelleman]

It's hard discussing women/wives in older literature because frequently someone will absolve a woman of all responsibility or say she had no power at all in the relationship because "she had no rights." And it's like, well yes, she had less rights than some women today, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have any responsibility or power ever. And you also need to look at the circumstances.

Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice for example, she is clearly not a beaten-down, controlled wife. Other than keeping her from spending them into debt, Mr. Bennet doesn't seem to restrain her in any way. She hosts parties frequently, gives quite a bit of money to her favourite child, serves fancy food; she clearly has a lot of freedom over the household budget. And yet, people will say that she couldn't have saved money. She clearly could have. Mr. Bennet wouldn't have stopped her and he wouldn't have squandered it himself. She's not some poor little oppressed housewife who lived in abject misery.

Catherine Earnshaw is described in Wuthering Heights as a thorn embraced by roses who bend themselves (her husband and his sister) to her will and comfort. Her husband is mostly a spineless coward. Yet, people argue to me that she had no power in this relationship because she was a woman. Yes she did! What book did you read? Edgar probably would have given in to her immediately if Nelly hadn't encouraged him otherwise.

The wives in Austen's novels who have very little power are Lady Bertram (Mansfield Park), who acts like a child, wants her husband to make decisions for her, and is coaxed like a child the only time they disagree; and probably Mrs. Tilney (Northanger Abbey), if we judge by how controlling General Tilney is of the household under Eleanor's tacit management. And yes, in the past a husband could totally run roughshod over his wife with very few consequences. He could limit her money, control her spending, and bully her out of her legally required pin money (allowance). But that doesn't mean every single one of them did! Most didn't. Colonel Brandon is disgusted by his brother's financial abuse of his wife in Sense & Sensibility. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë is describing a very financially abusive marriage, not a typical one. John Dashwood either defers to his wife or treats her as an equal. Lady Elliot in Persuasion kept her husband out of debt for years, meaning he listened to her about finances or she used soft power very capably. Like Mr. Bennet, lots of men were probably happy to have household management off their plate and a good dinner in front of them.

The amount of power a wife had on paper could vary massively in practice.

Addendum: this doesn't mean the system that granted husbands/men this much power was good or we should go back to it, because it sucked and could result in a ton of abuse and oppression and we are going back over my dead body.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Honestly sometimes we forget that as much as Jane Austen resented the misogyny of her day and pushed the envelope on female characters in novels, she was still subject to it. The idea that women are frivolous spenders who can't handle money, that they're the real power in the relationship because they're naggy or manipulative (even when the men have all the societal and legal power), or that financial abuse is the exception and not the norm were all stereotypes magnified by the patriarchy of the day to justify women's low status.

Stereotypes do not have to be always wrong to be stereotypes. There are women who are frivolous or domineering or manipulative, and there are marriages that were far more equal in practice than on paper. I've no doubt that the authors met several examples in real life and modeled that onto paper. But confirmation bias is a thing, and if you are told all your life that certain women should not have money and meet a woman who isn't spending her money well, your brain isn't going to stop and think "well yes, but what about men who don't handle money well? What about all the women who do handle money well?". You're going to think "well, this just proves that certain women shouldn't have money."

It's tempting to take a modern perspective, because a modern perspective is all we have (until one of us invents time travel, I guess). But just because we see these women as disempowered does not mean the authors were depicting them as such.

[hotvampireadjacent]

[futchlings]

"incurious" still GOAT insult. You could be better but you're not. You could learn but you won't, and for no good reason, just a base dispositional apathy. Get fucked