I'm a fandomatic demi-gray everything obsessed with magic, animals, and cartoons. I don't follow back without reason, but I don't bite unless you give me reason, either. I recommend reading this first. Blog Guidelines!.
http://beyondthetemples-ooc.tumblr.com/byf
Hello! My name is Zira, nonbinary pronouns please. (My favorite set is xe/xir, but I also like ey/em and xe/xem.)
This is my multipurpose personal blog, but it's actually a sideblog. Asks and likes will come from the main blog, @beyondthetemples. Here, you're likely to see a lot of Teen Titans (multiple versions but not all of them if you catch my drift), animals (especially birds), and sundry topics on both fandom and philosophies. I talk a LOT about my OCs, too.
The most important tags to know around here are probably:
~ my personal tag (rhs personal posts)
~ my Teen Titans tags (rhs makes yet another post about teen titans and rhs personal teen titans)
~ ...and of course my OC tags: rhs has ocs and this is the tag about them, oc rebloggables, iala yona (for Dove), iala srentha, iala kary, iala sathera (for Leyla), and for my original 'verse OCs, team transition.)
Other blogs I run include:
~ @rwt-mystic-corner <- my blog for magic, witchcraft, paganism, spirituality, and other such related topics.
~ @works-of-magic <- a pokemon IRL / RP / tribute blog.
~ @beyondthetemples of course, an RP blog for my dearest Teen Titans OC.
~ I have other blogs I don't like advertising, such as for recordings of my singing, writings I'm shy about sharing with a wider audience, and my AltH/θ∆/heptagram blog. Ask off anon or DM for details.
-> I don't use a DNI, but I do block liberally. <-
More personal information and a wider selection of commonly-used tags below the cut.
Born in: 1993 (I'm not going to remember to update my age.)
Location: Ohio, USA (usually; I travel now and then)
On tumblr since: 2011 (I had another account before this one.)
Other identifying things: Writer, hyperfixated fan, collector of sundry things. Neurodivergent, chronically ill, queer (mostly aroace but it's Complicated^tm). Practicing witch (eclectic) and Neopagan + pop culture pagan.
Local activist, but this blog is meant to be a separate space from that. (I won't be sharing Depressing/Infuriating News posts without an action to take in response, for both the morale of my followers and my own personal mental health.)
See also:
* IRL canon camera (my tag for selfies/etc.)
* blog (my tag for posts relevant to how I run this place)
Tags for my creations:
rhs writings
rhs art
rhs personal writings
Other fandoms include:
(but are not limited to) Yu-Gi-Oh, The Magnus Archives, Steven Universe, The Owl House, The Locked Tomb, music (especially Evanescence and Starset), books (especially from Neal Shusterman), and I generally have a lot of love for OCs.
My original posts in fandoms are tagged with "rhs" in front of them (rhs steven universe, rhs toh, rhs tma, etc.)
Other frequently used tags:
(Don't include the parenthesis if you search them.)
music
linguistics
writing (tips, analysis, etc.)
amazing animals (any and everything animals)
IRL canon (about me)
laugh rule (those rare things that amuse me)
current events (happenings in the world)
empowering (for encouraging and uplifting posts)
good news (doses of hope we desperately need)
notes from the experimental vegetarian kitchen (food)
Extensive tag index coming soon! If there's something specific you're looking for, feel free to ask! Odds are, if I like it, I have a tag for it.
I will always try to trigger-warn in the tags!
I use the format "#trigger tw". If you need something specific tagged, please feel free to ask and I will do my best to remember. Reminders are welcome. I can also use "[x] don't look" tags if needed!
I also tag for spoilers and tag fandoms extensively. You're welcome to block ANY of my tags for ANY reason if you don't want to see it!
External accounts:
fanfiction.net (fanfics and bios): Raven's secret-keeper
Archive of Our Own (only has newer writings): Stellar secret-keeper
Spotify: Zira
deviantArt (no longer used but contains a LOT of my writings and art): RavensHiddenSoul
DMs for my Discord and AltH Dreamwidth account are welcome.
I love that thing when people get a little bit tongue-tied and garble what they’re trying to say so they make a little “blegh” 👅 noise and start over. verbal reset button. hitting the top of the tv to unscramble the signal
idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms
the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.
actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:
abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.
i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.
a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.
I honestly still feel a little Weird about still calling TCS my favorite fanfiction.
Like, shipping a 25-year-old with a 15-year-old was Weird^tm, don't get me wrong. But we already know why that's weird.
No, the thing that makes me Add an Asterisk every time I think of that story as "my favorite fanfiction" is actually the ending.
I've never been so baffled by an author's choice of resolution. Though religion seemed pretty important to the author, so I suppose I should've seen it coming.
But "Jesus forgave Raven and she cried" was. Very much NOT how I expected that fanfiction to end, and it absolutely did NOT speak to me personally like So Many Other Moments Did.
I'm not going to say it was a BAD ending because that's so incredibly subjective. I understand how it has significance to people who believe Jesus forgiving them is their only salvation. Forgiveness can be powerful...
...but oh sweet stars and skies, was it anticlimactic to me as someone who believes I can be my own redemption and I don't need a deity's good graces to be worth living, and worth loving, even as an imperfect being who makes mistakes. o_o
Raven ALREADY HAS people who love her and forgive her, despite the evil in her heritage! Despite the things she's done!
I'm just.
What a letdown, for me personally.
I found that story posted on a Teen Titans forum we were both on (RIP TitansGo.Net), and while I wasn't reading it from its very beginning, I think there were only 5 or so chapters written when I discovered it. And it was one of those stories you discover at 10pm, and the chapters were LONG, so I think I stayed up until 4am reading it. Something very late like that.
And I went to its fanfic.net page and subscribed immediately. I left long, luxurious, elated reviews on every single chapter that came out after that. I had a lot of conversations with the author, even going to him when I needed feedback on the climax battle of DDD (and his advice to make it "three times as long and nine times the punch" stayed with me), and I adored so many things about his style. To this day, there are echoes of words I learned from that story and immediately wanted to wield myself now fossilized in DDD. ('Lurid' and 'routed' come immediately to mind.)
I absolutely ADORED this story, okay. The technical writing was very good, for one thing, which I've come to dearly appreciate in a fanfiction because otherwise I'm breaking immersion by correcting errors in my head.
But what really hooked me was the fascinating OC, and the writing style, and the lore drops, and the world this author built. The magic system, the way it had a cost and had resistance, lines like "Reality takes affront to being pushed around." The style was simultaneously so lush and so succinct, and I look up to that accomplishment to this day!
Another cue might've been the author choosing to label Raven a Nephil, even though Trigon was never, ever an angel, let alone a FALLEN one, but at the time I saw that, I researched like hell, and despite being Neopagan, I discovered so many fascinating myths about angels, and began working with them (particularly Raphael and Ariel), and Enochian magic, and John Dee's work, and the Book of Enoch. Just set off a cascade of research I ended up incorporating into my spiritual practices.
The third- and second-to-last chapters were scenes of battle between Raven and the OC's demon, both unleashing their full power. It was breathtaking! It was POWERFUL! It was of apocalyptic proportions! It! Was! EPIC!!!
I think it was multiple YEARS I waited for that final chapter, the ending of this story I'd been reading since age 17, this story that inspired so many short-essay-length reviews on each chapter and even personal entries in my own journal.
I was absolutely, entirely, completely OVER THE MOON when I got the email that it had, finally, updated!
And then....... in a quite literal Deus Ex Machina, a mechanism from god, Jesus showed up.
That scene was given a lot of emotional weight, don't get me wrong. But I was still reading it like... "What is he doing here? Where did the epic battle go? How did this resolve that? Isn't Raven Azarathean, like religiously? Why is religious conversion the answer here?"
That last question especially kept me up that night, because by the time it was published, I had been Neopagan for 7 or 8 years, and a big part of my leaving xtianity was because I don't believe in proselytizing. Forced conversion is a tragedy, and has led to the erasure of cultures around the world, and wars in its name disgust me. One of the biggest tenets of xtianity is removing peoples' right to choose their own religion, by force and coercion and cultural extinction, and I absolutely despise everything that stands for.
I think, to this day, it's the only chapter I never reviewed. Because I just didn't know what to say that doesn't boil down to, "What the fuck was THAT?!"
Unfortunately I still love everything that came before that too much to have had anything usurp it as my favorite fanfiction...
But it's enough to make me append "TCS is my favorite fanfiction!" with a little "unfortunately."
black ppl make aave or aave related joke > use aave with the community > we r all having fun > white and nonblack ppl find it > they start using it wrong and throwing it into random sentences > it gets bastardized and used as if it’s just a random Funnysound in a sentence > within a month people are mocking and attacking black people for “still” using aave that is now deemed corny meme speech > the cycle repeats
Body Horror: Things that cannot happen in real life.
EX: The Thing, stomach mouths, eyes on hands, etc
Gore: Fresh injuries, often severe.
EX: Severed leg, gutspill, deep gashes, etc
NEITHER: Healed injuries and burns, congenital differences, missing appendages, etc. If I could theoretically go to the store and see that character browsing the isles- It isn't body horror or gore. That's just a person.
*AND the amount of people that tag, not just fictional characters, but real human beings as body horror is staggering. Its not solely a fandom issue, ableism and bigotry against anyone that looks sufficiently "different" is prevalent in real life and has devastating consequences.
this is about the death penalty and its also about call out posts about people who have already apologized for things they did a long time ago and it’s also about using ‘toxic’ or ‘abuser’ as if its an immutable class of person, and its also about any other circumstance with permanent consequences or wherein you assume someone is still the same person they were.
ok so it's not quite a dialect, since that would necessitate a fundamental shift in grammatical structure while still being sorta recognizable as the same language to speakers of other dialects
i mean, how fundamental you want to argue they are is somewhat YMMV, but the way people use language on this website has absolutely had grammatical and linguistic structure shifts from most "offline" dialects
it's hard to make a coherent argument for phonological changes because text-based website. lets ignore that one lol
from a morphological and vocabulary-based standpoint, there's a few. consider "glup shitto" and "blorbo", as well as generalized affix fuckery like -"ito" as a diminutive, as examples of morphemes originally from tumblr. we also have the concept of the Sexyman (derogatory)
most of the really interesting tumblrspeak comes from syntax though. there is of course the oft-mocked, parodied, and misunderstood Tumblr Prose, where someone just sticks words together in an order that sort of conveys an aesthetic-based meaning as long as you don't think about it too hard and realize it doesn't make a whole lot of sense together
it's obvious what is being conveyed here even though the words barely function together. beyond Tumblr Prose, we also have Emphasis And Nounification Through Capital Letters, and its inverse where everything is lowercase unless it's being emphasized, as well as using sentences that while easily parseable by a reader do lack a lot of punctuation that would be desired by stricter english speakers often commas and periods. this last trait is particularly despicable considering the high amount of neurodivergence among tumblr users makes us very prone to run-on sentences anyway
there is also using "lol" and "lmao" similar to STOP on a telegraph, though it's hard to say how exclusive to tumblr this is
the in-joke about how being on tumblr is a cheat code to being funny as fuck around people who aren't is reliant on the fact that tumblr netizens are often playing with an entirely different set of learned syntax rules than non-tumblr residents
I don’t know anything about dialects vs accents so I don’t have a dog in this run but as a Mexican American I grew up with -ito as a diminutive suffix long before I was ever on tumblr. I’m not saying the way tumblr has used or spread it is not exemplary of a tumblr dialect/accent, but that’s just Spanish, it’s not “originally from tumblr”
But I do definitely agree that tumblrspeak is some kind of affectation that linguistically works different than how a lot of non-tumblr users communicate!
