Keep the fires burning

Orion | 27 | he/him | bi | ♡ @alwaystheview ✨ Writeblr & more info in pinned ✨

[bisexual-kelsier]

Howdy! My name’s Orion Arthur and this here is my personal blog! You may be interested in following me if you like the idea of a 20-something queer posting whatever bullshit catches his eye. Disclaimer: I am easily amused.

I guarantee you I will be absolutely delighted if you interact with me—please don’t take it personally if I don’t respond to you, I just forgor or missed it entirely.

My (main) fandoms: Mistborn, The Underland Chronicles, Six of Crows, Shades of Magic, The Adventure Zone: Balance, Camlann, Dungeon Meshi, Baldur’s Gate 3, His Dark Materials, Ingress Adventuring Company

Writeblr: @thegreatbeargod-writes

AO3: thegreatbeargod

StoryGraph: thegreatbeargod

Toyhouse: thegreatbeargod (please look at my OCs… also feel free to ask me for an invite code! I literally have hundreds)

Currently reading: Something!

[crimson-chains]

New standee I'm making ^^ Looking back on their time together as boys <3

[mintaii]

another wha wip agotta be kidding me

[konoko]

[satanfemme]

otherwise interesting post ruined by the bold insistence that you can never accidentally abuse someone & that all abusive people are self-aware evil masterminds

[satanfemme]

I don't think my parents are aware that what they did was abuse. in fact I think one of the reasons they abused me was because they lacked the self-awareness, introspection, and education needed to realize what they were doing counted as abuse. if they did have more self awareness &etc, they would have likely stopped. it is not productive to insist they woke up in the mornings with the intent to psychologically torture a kid for no reason, when that is self-evidently not the case or within their motivations.

I'm speaking annecdotally here but I think many cases of abuse are like this. I think when reckoning with the reality of how abuse functions in our society, you must come to terms with the mundanity of it including the fact that abusive people are primed to overlook the harm of their own actions through the shield of mundanity and (lack of) intent.

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

[antihumanism]

is the primarily female user base of FANFICTION WEBSITE enforcing the brutal maleocentric maleocracy by being full of bl? is the primarily male dev team and user base of WAIFU GAME leading the charge of feminist rebellion against FANFICTION WEBSITE by only having anime girl waifu bait in their cast? the answer would only surprise you if you're stupid as all fucking hell, and, IF YOU ARE, tune in next time, to continue watching the internet's two most annoying clusters of Always Complainers, Never Contributors continue clashing over shit that has literally never fucking mattered

[april]

women are like diamonds: synthetically-produced women are not meaningfully different from naturally-formed women, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise is probably trying to justify keeping their women mines open

[gayluigi]

[anomalocaris-in-da-clurb]

Women are like diamonds since they are composed primarily of carbon.

[fictionadventurer]

One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!

[starfieldcanvas]

the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

[chocolatepot]

People like to tie the shift from courting to dating to the 1920s, but it's actually a bit older than that. (Caveat that everything I'm about to write is about the United States; the same thing may have happened elsewhere, but my sources are about American social history.)

Courtship was something that happened semi-publicly, in large part because women tended to live with family until they married. A man would come to pay a call and sit in the parlor with the woman he was courting ... and usually members of her family, like her parents or siblings (or uncles/aunts and cousins, if she was living with more extended relations). It was about pleasing all of them, and proving to all of them that he intended to marry her.

In the late 19th century, young working-class women started to move out of the family home for work, and not just to the other side of town — to cities across the state where they didn't know anybody. They usually stayed in boarding houses, where the landlady wasn't interested in hosting chaperoned evenings of courtship in front of the fire. As a result, they spent time with men in dance halls and bars, something akin to modern dating. On the positive side, this gave women the independence to make romantic and sexual choices away from their parents' influence. On the negative side, the women taken on dates (disparagingly called "charity girls") were frequently pressured to have sex in exchange for the money spent on them, money they were unable to spend on themselves due to their low wages.

Dating practices then spread to college students around the turn of the century. Among these upper- and middle-class young people with , the idea that the male party was owed sex in exchange for the date was not as much of a thing: dates were public courtship, held without the direct involvement of family members but still under the eyes of the community. This eventually spread out to become an ordinary part of teenagerhood in all classes. And yes, there was no assumption of exclusivity: teenagers were expected and encouraged to date widely, because going steady was a precursor to engagement, which they were too young for. (It was also the norm prior to WWII for couples attending dances to dance with other people at them. It was in fact the male partner's duty to find other people for his date to dance with! And he couldn't leave whoever he was dancing with unless she had a new dance partner.)

[marzipanandminutiae]

Similar to the non-exclusive 19th century courting, 19th century balls were also considered social events and it was thought rude (and sometimes even scandalous, for young unmarried women) to only dance with one person. Even married couples would not be together the whole night, that would spread themselves around to make sure everyone enjoyed the amusement equally

[rosenkranz-does-things]

So I read this fic (I'll link it in the notes) in which there was this very emotional parallel between Taako realizing he has a sister for the first time, and post-Stolen Century Taako remembering that he has a sister. Just had to illustrate it :')

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[burins]

thinking fondly of this meme I made for a coworker years and years ago

[burins]

this is going around again and the tags are full of people talking about printing it out to put in their breakroom or cubicle or sending it to their coworkers, which fills me with great joy. vast diversity of professions represented also. zoos. labs. summer camps. restaurants. garden centers. libraries. schools. many reports from the brave warriors of assorted retail. a truth universally acknowledged: if there is a sign a customer will not read it <3 and they don't read emails either <3

[zillychu]

these human creatures have strange customs. some are nice tho

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

[godlessondheimite]

In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.

[nobodys-odyssey]

Taylor Swift does this

[godlessondheimite]

no she doesn’t

[nobodys-odyssey]

You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.

[dancinbutterfly]

#I'm fucking crying#this is an instant classic#this is the next meme#i can't believe I'm here to see a baby copypasta nary two hours old#I can't#lol#i laughed way too hard#iconic

[escuerzoresucitado]

[churlsgonewild]

[digitalmyyth]

Hanging out with people will make you remember you're the crazy woke friend for like. not wanting to shop at shien