be the happiness you so desperately need

I will face God and walk backwards into hell

[lhazaar]

i, personally, love to straddle that fine line between “fandom blog” and “record of complete psychological breakdown”

[luna-azzurra]

Things to consider when writing a character!! --1

⊹ What do they want vs what do they need. these should not be the same thing. what they want is the surface goal ( the job, the person, the revenge, the answer.) What they need is the thing underneath that they can't name yet. The story is what happens in the gap between those two things. if they're identical your character has nowhere to go.

⊹ What are they wrong about. Not morally wrong necessarily. just. what belief do they hold that the story is going to test. What assumption do they make about themselves or the world that turns out to be incomplete? A character without a wrong belief is already finished. They have no arc, give them something to learn even if learning it hurts them.

⊹ How do they talk when they're nervous. Do they go quiet or do they talk too much? do they deflect with jokes? do they get weirdly formal? do they ask questions instead of answering them? the way a person behaves under pressure is who they actually are. And it should be different from how they behave when they're comfortable.

⊹ What do they find funny. this one sounds small and it is not small at all. Humour is worldview. What makes someone laugh tells you what they value, what they're afraid of, how they handle pain. A character with no sense of humour is just flat. even the gravest person finds something absurd. find the thing.

⊹ What are they ashamed of? not their tragic backstory. their actual shame. The small ugly thing they would never say out loud. The time they were a coward. The feeling they pretend not to have. The desire they think disqualifies them from being a good person. Shame is where the most interesting character work lives and most writers skip straight over it :(

⊹ What do they do when no one is watching? how do they move through a space alone. What do they reach for when they're sad. What do they do with their hands??? Public behaviour IS performance. Private behaviour is truth. you don't have to show all of it but you have to know it or the character will feel hollow in a way the reader notices without being able to name.

[catchymemes]

[josilverdragon]

"The horrors persist but so do libraries, books, iced coffee, sunsets, trees, the word 'fuck', the moon and the sea."

[sovereignxofxsherwood-blog]

We are not just six outlaws in the forest, we are the spirit of England, and that is Robin Hood! And that, Lads, that! Is this country’s only hope.

[corporalicent]

matthias helvar trying his best in season two of shadow and bone

[elizabethanism]

“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver

[savvysergeant]

[beatrice-otter]

[image description: two pictures, one above the other. The first image shows a statue originally from the Acropolis in Athens, now in the British Museum. The statue is a column shaped like a woman. It is labelled London. The bottom image is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, showing the other five matching column/statues, with a space for the missing statue pointedly left open. This picture is shot from above and is labelled Athens.

image in savvysergeant’s reblog: screencap of tags from two people. Feeblekazoo’s tags read: the degree to which the Acropolis museum is designed to shame the British Museum is spectactular. butherlipsarenotmoving’s tags read: the acropolis museum is the most passive aggressive museum i’ve ever been to and i love it

/end id]

For those of you who don’t know museum drama, one of the largest and most famous parts of the British Museum’s collection is the so-called Elgin Marbles, which were looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the 18th Century. (The Acropolis is the hill in Athens, Greece which has some of the most amazing Greek ruins anywhere, the most famous of which is the Parthenon.) Elgin had (or at least claims to have had) permission from the Ottoman Empire to take stuff home with him, but a) this is one empire asking another empire if they can loot stuff from the other empire’s subjugated people, so, not exactly any moral high ground there Elgin, and b) he took a lot more stuff than the Ottomans said he could have.

Greece has been asking for those statues and sculptures to be returned since they won independence in 1832. That’s right, 1832, 190 years ago. The British Museum has had a number of excuses over the years, one of the biggies of the late 20th Century being “we couldn’t possibly give them back because Athens doesn’t have a nice enough museum to display them” and ignoring Greece’s response of “we will BUILD a museum just for them if you will just give us our damn stuff back!“

Finally, Greece said “fuck you” and built a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Acropolis museum. It is huge, it is gorgeous, the collection of objects is amazing and the educational bits (“this is what it is and why it matters”) are really well done. It’s probably one of the best archaeological museums in the world; it definitely is the best collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, both for the size of the collection and the way it’s displayed.

Oh. And it is amazingly passive-aggressive. Every single piece of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has an empty spot on display waiting for the piece to be returned to Greece. For example, there are a lot of pieces where Elgin took, say, the nicest (or easiest to remove) one of a set. The column/statue in the OP’s image is one of these. Friezes from the roof of the Parthenon are another example. The Acropolis Museum displays each one of these sets with space for the stolen pieces, along with a picture of what the stolen piece looks like and where it is. It is a giant middle finger at the British Museum, disguised as helpful information.

There’s no chance that the British Museum will return any of this in the next generation. It’s not up to the curators at the British Museum; they don’t get any say in this. The board of governors of the British Museum is made up of old posh English people who genuinely believe that the Empire was awesome and England has a perfect right to everything in the British Museum. They have set policies about what can and can’t be removed from the collection, and according to those policies nothing of any historical or monetary value can be given away or sold. And they actively promote the idea that their predecessors had a perfect right to loot the cultural heritage of the world, and that the museum has a perfect right to keep it forever. The only way to get anything out of the British Museum and back to its rightful place would be to completely replace the entire board of the museum with new people who think completely differently. And that’s not happening any time soon, alas.

[gemsofgreece]

By the way, the British argument that Greeks wouldn’t know how to care for the antiquities……. Greece has 206 archaeological museums. It’s not only incredibly demeaning as an argument, it’s also straight out false and misleading.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

One thing (and with the massive caveat of I don’t disagree with the above in the slightest): the Board of Trustees isn’t like that. They’re not all white, they’re not all rich, and they’re not all English. By and large they’re academics. I was speaking to them the other week with regards to repatriation when I visited and they’re actually very much all for it (bar one or two exceptions…looking at you George) and are working on things. A group of 5 of them I can confirm actively loathe Elgin and the marbles room. The problem lies with the British Museum Act of 1968 (hereafter referred to as BMA68) which was a law created by the government to prevent anything within the BM, which the government owns but wants very little do to with unless you’re trying to repatriate fyi, being removed in the “national interest”. Repatriation is, annoyingly, illegal in the case of the contents of the BM. So the Board have been trying to change this by putting pressure in various areas to get the laws changed, and the government screws them by enforcing term limits for serving on the board and then trying to stack the board in their favour to prevent further action. It’s a game of politics and the government do not want to give up BMA68 at all.

I know we like to categorise everyone we’re up against in the fight for repatriation as “old, white, rich guys” but it’s not helpful when it is decidedly not the case. We need to be mad at the right people and focusing on efforts to change this ridiculous law. At this time, supporting projects like the International Training Partnership, which is the BM’s way of building a network of curators and training them so organisations like the British Government can’t say “hurr durr they can’t look after their artefacts” because actually they can, we trained them ourselves. The network of curators also allows them to build mounting international pressure. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the pressure is building now, I promise you.

[jessie-and-the-dead]

“We need to be mad at the right people” is the crux of SO MANY THINGS

Thank you Lottie, as always.

[the-real-seebs]

So the problem isn’t even the people who run the museum, who are after all museum people and want museum things to be done well and respectfully, but the government, who want the museum to remind everyone of the time before they made their entire country a laughingstock.

[beardedmrbean]

[onyxstorms]

I surrender.

↳requested by @afirewiel

[percabethownsmybutt]

chiron: honestly, you’re doing a lot better than i expected

percy: it feels like all i managed to do is… not die

chiron: and believe me, that is a remarkably rare skill

[sincerethoughtsblog]

the monster's gone. he’s on the run and your daddy's here. beautiful , beautiful, beautiful. beautiful boy

[moonminho]

[safereturn]

Something I love love love is that Percy keeps referring to the gods as their familial titles.

“Your son.” “Your dad.”

This boy knows love. Knows the warmth of his mother’s gaze. Knows how to wrap his arms around friends, tells them they matter, they’re important, they’ll be okay. Knows how to see the best in people, see the good. He’ll hold fast and brave the storm.

He knows how messed up all the games are. All of the god’s stupid rules, and squabbles, and schemes, and pride. That none of it matters

Percy really said y’all don’t know the meaning of family and that’s so sad.

[maxanor]

PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS Season 1, Episode 8, "The Prophecy Comes True"

[filmtvtoday]

#he really said we cope through humor

[fairycosmos]

always vaguely feeling like im in trouble for something but idk what

[stromuprisahat]

Forcing myself to read the next chapter of Siege and Storm (It's been almost half a year...) made me realize why I cannot take Malyen's change of heart seriously. Why won't I ever believe him not to become abusive shitstain again.

A cold wind was blowing. ... Mal tried to rub some warmth into my arms.

Siege and Storm- Chapter 7

He was all nice and attentive throughout the trilogy. He's not simply horrible all the time. There are moments even I'd call sweet and thoughtful.

... but it never stoped him from shaming Alina as soon as she wants more, it didn't really make him stop her from taking on the blame for his actions, her health is far from his priorities, I doubt his anger disappeared with Alina's powers- there will be things in ordinary life to get pissed off about-, his trust in her's not the strongest- especially with other men present... all those nasty traits already co-exist with the nice moments ON THE PAGE.

That is the real horror of the relationship. That is why I can see him even hitting her one day, when he grows tired of the mousy puppet she became for him. He'll surely apologize later, because he wouldn't really want to do it, would he?!

So yes, he can place as many shawls around Alina’s shoulders, as he wants. That won't persuade me she won't be a freaky whore as soon as they arrive back in Keramzin. The Darkling re-gained his powers thanks to her after all, didn't he? Saints know, if she wasn't keeping them for him this whole time...

[alrightsnaps]

Jily Fanfiction Recommendations

So, I’ve received more than one ask about giving some Jily fic recommendations… but tumblr is determined to drive me mad and if it didn’t crush after I’d spent hours compiling a list, making me lose everything, it refused to process my post as an answer to an inbox message *sigh*. But I’ve been meaning to make a list of my recommendations for a while so I’m posting it separately here! 

Buckle up cause this is going to be a LONG post.

The first half consists of sort of canonverse stories (in that they take place in the magical world of the hp books) but not necessarily canon compliant. The second half consists of varying non magical AUs.

There are some stories that I’ve revisited time and time again over the years as well as others that I haven’t read since I was a teenager but remember liking at the time. 

At the end of the post I’ve also included some fics and new authors that are on my TBR- I’ve hit a big slump over the pandemic, but I’m still keeping an eye out and there are some new jily writers that have began writing over the past 2-3 years whose work looks amazing and I can’t wait to check out!

Enjoy!

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