Just Your Average Bookish Queer Thing

EJ, 27, he/him/his, history and fandom nerd, mod of ao3tagoftheday

[fluentisonus]

you ever think about the fact that two of the first books the creature in frankenstein ever read were plutarch’s lives and paradise lost. no wonder he was Like That

[dorothylarouge]

US Presidents as Dril Tweets

George Washington: another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it

John Adams: "ah boo hoo hoo i want to post Foul comments to content leaders" Fat Chance, Dimwit. I will annihilate you under bulwark of the Law and God.

Thomas Jefferson: Q: If your post was proven by a counsil of wise men to be racist, or bullshit, would you bar it from the record? A: I do not delete my posts

James Madison: (sniffing a crumpled up one dollar bill i found on the floor of a dog kennel) ah.. thats greenbacks baby

James Monroe: for decades i have traversed the unforgiving mountains and rivers of south america, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabled "ass downloader"

John Quincy Adams: "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit

Andrew Jackson: handing Faves over to my enemies is FRAUD !! base, contemptible FRAUD!

Martin Van Buren: Food $200

Data $150

Rent $800

Candles $3,600

Utility $150

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

William Henry Harrison: (spends all of 7 seconds skimming some blog posts) yep. just as i knew all along. having pnuamonia is good

John Tyler: fuck "jokes". everything i tweet is real. raw insight without the horse shit. no, i will NOT follow trolls. twitter dot com. i live for this

James K. Polk: thhere is no such thing as charisma, and art is fake. the only metrics by which we must determine the worth of a man are Strength and Wisdom

Zachary Taylor: the doctor reveals my blood pressure is 420 over 69. i hoot & holler outta the building while a bunch of losers tell me that im dying

Millard Fillmore: trying to heal..... please donate to my go fund me... $10 will make me less racist... $100 will make me extremely less racist...thank you...

Franklin Pierce: blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin

James Buchanan: #NationalGirlfriendDay please cherish your gal's.. in honor of us, the single Boys who must sacrifice all companionship to #CarryTheBrand...

Abraham Lincoln: unloading an entire belt of ammo at me with a minigun or some such device will now get you "Blocked"

Andrew Johnson: who the fuck is scraeming "LOG OFF" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off

Ulysses S. Grant: i regret being tasked the emotional burden of maintaining the final bastion of morality and Nice manners in this endless ocean of human SHIT

Rutherford B. Hayes: using the toilet when i hear Our national anthem start to play. i do what i must. i stand tall in complete agony; as shit runs down my leg,

James A. Garfield: too much truth in such little time. feeling the heat cominh down to silence me... signing off........ for now

Chester A. Arthur: i WILL wise the fuck up. i WILL super charge my content for 2017. i WILL get blue check mark

Grover Cleveland: the way i see it, people who come on here and submit content that is not up to par, could possibly be considered the "Villains" of this site

Benjamin Harrison: i help every body, im not racist, i keep myself nice, and when i ask for a single re-tweet in return i am told to fuck off, fuck myself, etc

William McKinley: boy oh boy do i love purchasing large amounnts of Fool's Gold. wait a minute... fools gold fucking sucks. this stuff is no good..!! Fuck !!!

Theodore Roosevelt: IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL

William H. Taft: ah.. the perfect Souffle! cant wait to dig in to t(*EVERY PIPE IN MY HOUSE EXPLODES AT THE SAME TIME, COVERING ME IN SHIT AND BOILING WATER*

Woodrow Wilson: the conflicted supersoldier stares over the horizon as he smokes a cigarette. "war is the most fucked up thing ever." he takes a sip of beer

Warren G. Harding: somebody please Bribe me

Calvin Coolidge: aggressively joyless oaf hhere. painfully obnoxious respect demander checkign in. extremely dim witted frowning man looking for pals

Herbert Hoover: it is really quite astonishing that I have yet to win The Lottery, given how good I am at selecting six numbers and saying them out loud

Franklin D. Roosevelt: ive never heard of this “europe” but it sounds like a big bunch of shit to me

Harry Truman: everybody wants to be the guy to write the tweet that solves racism once and for all because it would look good as hell on a resume

Dwight D. Eisenhower: my "F*&k It!! Let's Go Golfin" t-shirt maintains a tenacious stranglehold on my life. after 1,125 days of Golf my body is twisted, deformed

John F. Kennedy: when you do sutuff like... shoot my jaw clean off of my face with a sniper rifle, it mostly reflects poorly on your self

Lyndon B. Johnson: incredibly handsome , charismatic famous boy credited with ending income inequality after saying that slumlords should be called "dumblords"

Richard Nixon: i attribute the complete failure of my brand to the actions of detractors, oor my “trolls”, as it were, as well as my own constant fuckups

Gerald Ford: shutting computer down until the shitty moods & attitudes can fuck off., if you need me ill be on my other computer, sititng 60° to my right

Jimmy Carter: i warnned you all that bad things would happen if you kept letting your wives wear jeans. AND NOW LOOK! the damn gas prices are up again

Ronald Reagan: spend a lot of time thinking about how sometimes even war criminals can be heroes sometimes... Dont like it? Click the unfollow buttobn

George H.W. Bush: just thought off an idea i believe to be bad ass. lets find the address of the leader of isis, and mail him/ her pieces of our SHIT

Bill Clinton: were at the point now, that when i offer to impregnate my girl followers, people assume my motives are sexual. disgusting, grow the fuck up,

George W. Bush: friday night gathering up together a big pile of things i like to respect (flags, crucifixes ,etc) and just roll around in it ,give kisses,

Barack Obama: my IQ has increased 10 points ever since i stopped tollerating people mucking about, on the time line

Donald Trump: THERAPIST: your problem is, that youre perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good posts, and that makes you rightfully upset.

ME: I agree

Joe Biden: I will shut the fuck up , IF , it will restore the Harmony. I will get on my knees like a dog and make that sacrifice, for the sake of Calm

[prokopetz]

Given that a lot of folks in kink spaces are bent for the forbidden precisely because it is forbidden, I sometimes wonder how many people there are out there who unironically get horny for workplace and laboratory safety violations. Like, I know for a fact that number isn't zero, but how far above zero is it?

[prokopetz]

Show me the person who gets hard when they knowingly commit copyright infringement. Logically this person must exist. Let me see them.

[dwellordream]

“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”

[swords-n-spindles]

If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.

[swords-n-spindles]

I would like to amend the above: spinning all day every day in order to keep your family afloat must absolutely have been terrifying back-breaking labour eventually. Or wrist-breaking.

In unrelated news, last year I got a repetitive strain injury from too much spinning, and had never been so grateful in my life that I can simply stop spinning and suffer no financial hardship from it.

[marzipanandminutiae]

It's also interesting how much spinning remained a symbol of idealized femininity and even in societies where it was highly professionalized, later on in history

In the lead up to the American Revolution, you see newspapers talking about women – many if not most of whom had never spun a day in their lives, either because they were wealthy and didn't have to or because they were poor but didn't have time to among all of the other things they had to do for their families or their jobs, and professional spinster's existed, so why would they? -Getting together "spinning bees" to try and make homespun thread for homespun fabric so they could boycott textiles coming from England. These women were hailed as paragons of patriotic womanhood (never mind the fact that we have no evidence they ever produced scalable amounts of textiles, or even like… High-quality anything. Most of these bees seem to have been one-off events that were almost more about performing femininity and patriotism than actually producing threads/fabric)

And moving into the 19th century, the image of the spinning wheel became ubiquitous here in the US when talking about women in earlier American history. Longfellow's poem about his Mayflower ancestors features the female protagonist at her spinning wheel, even though textile production wasn't really a thing in the new colony at the time when the events he wrote about took place. Popular illustrations showed colonial women spinning at home. In the early 20th century, an art photographer named Wallace Nutting and his wife Mariet Griswold staged images of imaginary colonial interiors that almost always involved some type of antique spinning wheel as set dressing (to the great annoyance of later museum workers, who are forever having to debunk his photos in various ways)

And within those societies, there's been an idea that "women these days" are so lazy for not spinning and/or weaving their own cloth and instead of having it done by professionals. Making textiles from scratch remained a marker of idealized femininity long after it was the norm for most households in many places

[facts-i-just-made-up]

What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is the opiate of the very, very few.

[dionysiaproductions]

[madgirlautumn]

This is so obviously correct I can’t even think what the other answer would be.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

anyway the thing about Ratthi and Gurathin is that I could get behind them as a Thing but literally the only version that works for me is Gurathin being So Fucking Mad that he could bite through METAL because it's sooooo stupid that he did the Most Basic Thing imaginable and got a stupid lil crush on the Hot Nice Guy from work that everybody wants to fuck. oooooh wow Gurathin that guy is hot and nice and now you want to touch his junk about it??? groundbreaking. inspiring. idiot. obviously he'll be taking this to his grave. and meanwhile Ratthi's acting like the girl from a horse girl movie. going pspsps with lil sugar cubes. trying to lure Gurathin to his polycule board game night.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Ratthi isn't even doing it with Intent he just thinks Gurathin needs more enrichment but every time he's like oh hey wanna get a smoothie after work :) no pressure :) only if you're up for that haha :) Gurathin's going oh fuuuuuck he's trying to seduce me 🤬

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

and he knows the rules!!! he knows all of the weird rules and how to set up the board and what the weird little tokens are for and he's keeping track of points because he has to have a Task to alleviate the inherent mortification of being invited to your hot nice coworker's polycule board game night so now he's just. Gamemaster Gurathin. everyone loves him, invite him back!!! Ratthi thinks he's just discovered a previously untapped passion for game night that no one has ever figured out but Gurathin is in HELL. fighting for his life trying to keep track of the points in Sci-Fi!Wingspan and update his spreadsheet where he's trying to figure out how all of these people are involved with each other. Murderbot keeps hacking in to make annotations because its desire to watch Gurathin suffer slightly outweighs its distaste for romantic and sexual relations.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Murderbot isn't adding anything incorrect for the record it's just stressing Gurathin out with extra info. sliding in with shit like "you forgot to note that Variables Three and Seven have recently become romantic partners" and Gurathin's like "bullshit, they're both dating Variable Four but they're not involved with each other" and Murderbot goes "incorrect. they went on their first date this weekend. Ratthi is very excited for them and told me about it this morning. it was agony." and then Gurathin throws up

[markovchaingang]

my lord. the two statues you commissioned are finally complete. yeah, the double-order with the vast and trunkless legs of stone and the shattered visage. i like to think we captured the sneer of cold command pretty well. it's a really thought-provoking piece my lord. very deconstructionist. i'm sure that even a traveller a thousand years from now could take one look at it and instantly recognise it must have come from an artistically enlightened culture

[libertineangel]

It is implied through gameplay mechanics that the two kingdoms at war in chess both formally permit regnal polygamy, allowing the King to take at least nine wives of equal status, and that marriage can be bestowed as a military honour, but curiously that honour - in stark contrast to the conventional attitudes of the aristocracy - can only be bestowed upon soldiers of the unlanded class, leaving great questions to be asked of the material interests and stability of these kingdoms' aristocracies

[libertineangel]

Unless, of course, it is gameplay abstraction that we see soldiers as individuals and we are in fact commanding representations of whole units, in which case the King already has up to nine wives but only one is in command of her own company at the onset of battle, and unlanded regiments are largely self-directed (which would explain their limited effective range, lacking proper leadership coordinated with the objectives of the ruling class) with further members of the aristocracy taking charge of those which excel in the field, presumably in large part so they can take credit for the soldiers' successes and advance their own social and political standing as is often the way of things

[libertineangel]

Several people in the notes by now have brought up the mobility of the castles, and there is simply no explanation for that I can think of beyond the drift between original and translated forms of the game. The original pieces occupying that role were heavy war chariots, with some later replacing them with war elephants carrying an archers' tower, and when it spread to Europe (a continent notably lacking in elephants) the elephant part began to be omitted and the tower reshaped into a European-style fortification. There is no gameplay justification for its retaining the war elephant's moveset, it is merely a cumulative translation issue.

[libertineangel]

STOP CALLING IT A SIEGE TOWER!!!!!

It is very obviously not a fucking siege tower, like 1) in the majority of cases their designs are round and crenellated in the style of western European post-Norman fortifications, which is not remotely what a siege tower looks like, 2) why the fuck would a siege tower be in a pitched battle such as that depicted by the game, what the fuck do you think they're besieging, and 3) do you think a fucking siege tower can cross a battlefield at speed???

Like please think about what you're saying, the role and construction of a siege tower, for one fucking second, instead of leaping to the first piece of medieval military engineering you can think of that's related to the concept of towers. A siege tower unit is not going to be in the middle of a battlefield actively hunting down mounted cavalry and providing a rearguard screen to the frontline infantry, is it, like come on that is ridiculous and if you think that's a remotely reasonable thing to say you clearly have no fucking clue what a siege tower is actually for; furthermore, if you're in a pitched battle where the king himself is on the field like why are you even gonna bother besieging anywhere nearby, you have an opportunity to end this war here and now (as demonstrated by the rules of the game!!) so why on earth would you bring your expensive, cumbersome siege equipment along instead of leaving it back at camp, if the king retreats (and you can't take him in the rout) then sure then you go and grab your siege equipment but y'know it would just exhaust your troops and put it in harm's way for no reason to drag it into a battle where no siege is taking place.

[clingyduoapologist]

The lesson of avatar was never “killing bad people makes you just as bad as them” it was “you cannot be letting fascists dictate what counts as a win or loss” guys like come on it’s been 20 years

[clingyduoapologist]

Katara doesn’t forgive Yon Rha and hug him and dry him off and walk him home she leaves him scared and sniveling and crying in the mud but she leaves him alive because she realized in that moment that she was only doing this because she felt like she had to. She hates this man, therefore she should want to kill him, right? The narrative isn’t saying wow Katara killing a mass murdering fascist dickwad is just as bad as said dickwad killing an innocent wife and mother during a raid on her home, it’s saying wow isn’t it fucked up that this little girl has been forced to carry this deep seated anger in her for most of her life to the point where the only outlet she believes she has for it is killing a man in cold blood? And like… yeah! That is pretty fucked!

[icannotweave]

#katara realizing that the man who killed her mother #who has been the face of evil and the war for most of her life (prior to aang's bullshit) #is just a pathetic loser #and by extension that most soldiers who commit hideous crimes of imperialist violence are just Some Guy #god that's really something #like he's Not a monster he's Not uniquely evil he has NO particular grudge against her or kya #the most traumatic event of katara's life was just a day at work for him #and less than a decade later he's nothing. he's retired and miserable and PATHETIC and he's not worth her time #she's better than him in every way #brave and powerful and generous and about all PRINCIPLED in a way he could never be. she's exceptional #she doesn't need to kill him she's already beaten him in every way that matters #and killing him will not create any positive change in the world #katara doesn't show mercy for his sake she does it for hers #god I love you katara ( @batmanisagatewaydrug )

[illycanary]

Yes, yes, yes!

“She already beat him in every way that mattered.” She just didn’t know it until she saw him again. She didn’t know he was no longer a threat to other young children and their mothers until she saw for herself that he’d been neutralized. She didn’t know how much she had grown until she stood next to him and realized she was the one looking down instead of up. She never could have known any of it without seeing him with her own eyes, and that’s why seeking him out was her only path to peace.

This episode and Katara’s choices are so misunderstood because people hear Aang’s arguments about forgiveness and peacemaking and forget that’s not what this story is about. This has always been a story about a boy who runs away from hard things.

The context that frames this episode is the final lead-up to a confrontation Aang doesn’t want to have. He’s giving Katara the advice (and permission) he wishes someone would give him. He doesn’t want to face the Fire Lord; he wants to do what he’s always done: dance around the problem then bail. But he can’t. Zuko had to stand up to his abuser and speak his truth, and he will yet have to face and beg forgiveness from the father figure he rejected. Katara has to face the demons from her past. Toph had to reconnect with her parents (via letter while maintaining her boundaries, but she’s not hiding or pretending the Gaang kidnapped her anymore). Sokka had to face his inadequacies. Aang doesn’t get to change the subject and run away anymore.

Forgiveness vs. revenge is a false dichotomy here. Neither was the solution. Neither was the point. The whole argument was Aang’s last-ditch effort to give himself an out. A red herring. A non sequitor. And Katara calls bullshit. Just like Zuko does with the final line of the episode: “What are you going to do when you face my father?” Because unlike Yon Rha, Ozai is a known, very active threat; and Zuko understands from sad experience that Ozai will only view an olive branch as a sign of weakness and an excuse to escalate his violence. “I forgive you on the world’s behalf,” was never a valid option. And couching it as “Air Bending pacifist philosophy” was never going to make Aang “the bigger, better person.” (If you are the only other armed person in the building during a mass shooting, you don’t get to forgive the shooter on behalf of his current and future victims then pat yourself on the back for being virtuous. That’s not enlightenment; it’s just cowardice wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of self-delusion.)

But back to Katara, who has spent her entire life living in the shadow of her mother’s murderer. Until Katara saw Yon Rha as he truly was, she could not see herself clearly. Katara weighing herself against the monster that haunts her nightmares and finding him outmatched and outclassed, understanding that she is no longer the little girl who needed rescue, knowing that she is bigger, stronger, more powerful, and scarier than any demon she could face… That’s what she needed.

She was never going to get that by listening to Aang and avoiding the confrontation. If she had taken Aang’s bad advice (and it was bad advice, no matter how moral and peaceful it sounded), she would have continued being that scared little girl forever. No matter how skilled or powerful she became, that shadow would always loom larger.

There’s a lesson here for everyone about facing the conflicts we fear. Maybe it’s not a lifelong grudge. Maybe it’s just an awkward conversation that needs to be had. Or an overwhelming task we’re putting off. Or an apology we need to give. Maybe the solution isn’t getting back at the other person or getting yours or serving justice. Sometimes you may have to be the one who rights a wrong, but sometimes it’s enough to face the discomfort, shine light on the boogeymen, and walk away with a clearer perception of yourself and your own strength.

[padmestrilogy]

a little funny that the common star wars practice of taking aesthetic elements from foreign cultures as to appear "alien" to american audiences so throughly wrecked jedi discourse on here and made it so u can't critique the jedi without being told they're buddhists/jewish/muslim/sikh/asexual, when the jedi in the actual text have far more in common with george lucas' methodism and his later struggle to commit to both a marriage and a demanding career.

[padmestrilogy]

the fascist allegory in star wars has always drawn from american imperialism, as do all the politics in the prequels, and the jedi's later status as persecuted and hunted down do not override their willing service as army of the republic, but a few blunt aesthetic choices have made it so many are genuinely convinced that doing apologetics for a fictional institution is both progressive and a duty that includes disavowing the actual protagonist of the whole saga, mr star wars, as #problematic. the prequels politics were muddy enough b4 u all somehow brought rampant traditionalism in . and i cannot stress this enough: the jedi aren't real

[boytranscending]

[sexhaver]

You wake up, it's 2015 again, Tumblr heyday, your friends are unbanned, the posts, the bits... the block is hot but the dash is hotter, one wrong move will get you deactivated...

who you tappin and who you cappin?

>look north

You see several people arguing passionately about something. You can't make out any words, but one of them is wearing a Steven Universe shirt.

>look east

You see untagged porn.

>look south

You see a featureless gray wall immediately in front of you.

>look west

You see a featureless gray corridor extending off an unknown distance into the darkness.

>move west

You venture forth into the hallway. As you take your first step, your foot bumps into something solid.

>look down

You see a knife on the ground. Though its blade is pitted and dulled by time, it still gleams in what little light remains here.

>take knife

You pick the knife up and put it in your pocket. Its heft feels good in your hands.

Gained 1x KNIFE.

Your stomach begins to rumble...

>check inventory

You are holding: 1x KNIFE, 1x STICK, 1x TINDER.

>use knife on stick

You sit down and whittle the stick to a point.

Lost 1x STICK, gained 1x SPEAR.

>make angsty post

You cup your hands to your mouth and yell out into the darkness. "Man, I'm such a waste of space, even getting drunk doesn't make me feel better any more, I should just die!"

>listen west

Through the overwhelming silence present in this place, your ears faintly begin to pick up the scrabbling of talons on stone.

>look west

Although its gray skin has evolved to blend in perfectly with the gray walls and oppressive darkness of these halls, you can just barely make out the form of a wild Anonymous approaching, drawn by your cries. Its sunglasses-covered eyes glint in the darkness. Although it has no mouth to move, it speaks constantly in a stream of consciousness as it patrols. As it draws closer, you can make out some of what it's saying: "you just want attention, if you actually cared you'd [chewing noises], drug addicts like you are worthless..."

>throw spear at anonymous

Your aim is true: the sharpened stick flies down the hallway and pierces directly through one of the Anon's reflective eye coverings. It shudders, twitches, and gurgles as its pitch-black blood pours out in gouts, never breaking eye contact with you or stopping its rambling until it just abruptly... ends.

>skin anonymous

Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "skin".

>use knife on anonymous

You bleed, skin, and field-dress the Anonymous corpse.

You gained 1x RAW ANONYMOUS MEAT and 1x RAW ANONYMOUS HIDE.

>cook raw anon meat

You can't do that without a fire.

>use tinder on spear

You can't use those items like that.

Your stomach rumbles again, louder this time...

>examine tinder

An app you used a lot in 2015. You were quite the manwhore back then.

>fuck

Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "fuck".

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Good job with the sheep description, really upsetting

I'm just saying that if you met your first ever nonhuman mammal at six years old, it might be a bit confusing.

[sleepymccoy]

Yeah I immediately texted that excerpt to my dad, just to let that filter into his work day. Very upsetting.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I was thinking about that Tumblr post about the toddler who was just finding out that parrots can talk

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#wait no sorry#I just can't get over the fact that you'd be able to meet your first mammal at 6#like 6 years and you don't at least interact with a DOG?#or a cat

They're on a spaceship

[beamorgan]

During WWII, children in London were evacuated to the countryside. For many of them, this meant their first encounter with livestock:

How London Boy Learned Where Milk Comes From

LONDON.—Ernest Brown, minister of health, read the following essay he received from a 10-year-old London East End boy who had been evacuated to the country: “The cow is a mammal. It has six sides, right and left and upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this he sends flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so his mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, milk comes and there never is an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell and one can smell it far away. This is the reason for fresh air in the country.

“A man cow is called an ox. The cow does not eat much but what it eats it eats twice so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos and when it says nothing at all it is because its insides are full up with grass.”

This is one of my favourite bits of writing ever

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Fuck yeah he is learning so much

[afloweroutofstone]

Every single American is on welfare, they just find ways to pretend that it isn’t welfare. Do you think that your home mortgage interest deduction fell from the sky? Do you think God granted you a child tax credit

[olderthannetfic]

Speaking as a curious outsider, do M/M fans really write more than F/F fans or are M/M fans just more common than F/F fans so there's just more M/M fic by default since more people like M/M? I feel like with fanart it's fairly equal but there's a big gap with fanfiction and I wonder why that is.

--

Oh boy...

So, a lot of the discourse is about AO3 stats. That old AO3 census was pretty flawed, but the broad demographic patterns it showed match every other (also flawed) survey and anecdotal evidence about slash fandom spaces, BL fandom spaces, etc.

AO3 is mostly cis women with a hefty chunk of nonbinary people and some trans men. There's a scattering of other demographics, and when a site is as popular as AO3, that means that the total number of demographic X can still be pretty high even if the group makes up a tiny fraction of the whole. (So I don't want to hear any "My friend group is all cis men/trans women/whatever and..." style moaning.)

Lots of AO3 users are bisexual, but lots are asexual or straight. Other demographics share a smaller slice of the pie together.

Much of the discourse boils down to:

"AO3 is full of wlw. Why don't these wlw produce more f/f?"

The answer is that the question involves masses of assumptions that aren't actually valid.

If one looks at internet spaces broadly, one sees a mountain of het. In spaces with more cis men, the het reflects that. In spaces with more cis women, the het reflects that.

Looking broadly again, one also sees a lot of allegorical work. Think the literary equivalent of drag queens. Spaces with lots of cis men have plenty of art that focuses on female characters. It's partly because they're hot, but it's clearly also because some emotions are easier to express while playing with female barbie dolls than while playing with male ones. The distance is helpful. Some of this art is f/f, whether that's because two girls equals twice the hotness or because there's twice the distance or because guys are intrigued by the all-female social spaces they aren't privy to in real life.

AO3 is a space full of allegorical work for AFABs. There are some trans men doing very #ownvoices art, but a lot of AO3 is drag king stuff. It's people using cis male barbie dolls to express their insides rather than their outsides and the social role other people demand that they inhabit and relate to.

--

This doesn't sound like a direct answer, does it?

What I'm trying to say here is that:

There are not more m/m fans.

If we compare #ownvoices m/m with #ownvoices f/f, the amount might well be similar. It's always going to be relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

If we compare "Ooh, girls are neat and exotic" f/f with the kind of m/m that tends to be on AO3, both are popular and common. They are not both common on AO3 because AO3 was founded by a bunch of fujoshi and it has thus continued to attract fujoshi and adjacent fans more quickly than it attracts other demographics.

Wankers like to compare AO3 m/m to their desired and hypothetical #ownvoices f/f spaces, often with a heavy undertone of gold star cis lesbian #ownvoices f/f.

This is apples to oranges.

There is no reason these two numbers should ever resemble each other.

--

The reason fan art looks more even is that AO3 cannot directly host images and thus only a few fan artists bother with it. Fan art spaces are big social media or older art sites that have a wider and/or different user base.

With different demographics in the user base, there will naturally be different posting patterns.

--

The fanfic gap is partly because AO3 makes it easy to get shipping stats, while other fanfic spaces make it quite difficult.

The gap is also because fanfic, as a hobby, attracts fewer cis men than cis women. Everybody likes making shit based on preexisting shit they enjoyed. Not everybody calls it fanfic and puts it on a fanfic archive.

The reasons are complex, but the best explanation I've seen—and made—boils down to gendered socialization around unpaid labor. Cis dudes will code open source projects because that gets specific kinds of clout they are taught to value. They don't usually write free fiction for the purpose of deepening social bonds with their community.

As writing becomes more commercial or produces other kinds of rewards, it attracts more cis men. Cis dudes write spec scripts all the time. I've seen men talking shit about fanfic while writing a blog post speculating about what a sequel would look like in such detail that it's essentially one of those not!fic tumblr posts. Cis dudes write epic quantities of webnovel content, plenty of it focusing on female characters and plenty of it including f/f.

Fan art has always been socially different from fanfic. In some spaces, fan art is respected and seen as a stepping stone to pro work or at least to accolades of a type fic doesn't get. It aligns more with what cis men are socialized to value.

There totally are fanfic spaces full of cis men. I'm told that Worm fandom on those forum sites I never go on has plenty of dudes writing f/f, exactly as one would expect.

--

Both the wanking and the self-aggrandizing navel gazing about m/m stats tend to come from people who spend too much time around AO3 circles and only around AO3 circles.

The lack of a broader view of fan activities and spaces and original-ish art spaces leads to the huge disparity between m/m and f/f and to many stupid conclusions about why it's there.

If you want more f/f, invite the cis men.

If you want more #ownvoices, no matter which kind of own voices, curate your space but expect it to be smaller.

If AO3 doesn't satisfy, explore the many, many other places out there. If it does, stay put.

There are so many options one can pursue to look for fun and pleasure. I wish people were a little savvier about them instead of feeling stuck in place and feeling sad about what they can see from right here.

--

Not that you sound sad. You don't.

But to talk about the "gap", you have to look at the faulty assumptions that lead to AO3 shipping stats being taken as a valid stand-in for all of fandom.

Here is what fan art on AO3 looks like:

Sure, the fanart tag isn't exactly the same as the overall stats on AO3. Maybe we could say something about the larger share of gen. But one thing I think we can say for sure is that AO3 fan art reflects AO3 and not patterns of fan art everywhere.

This type of context is vital if we want to have a realistic conversation about this kind of topic.

[sigmaleph]

Im taking a class in ethics at evil university. Today the professor is asking us if it would be ok to divert a trolley to kill 5 people even if doing so would mean you saved 1 and justify our choice.

i'm not gonna do your homework for you, anon. if you can't write your own essays, how are you gonna be ready for when you need to make a speech to the hero about your evil schemes? are you going to ask fucking chatgpt to monologue for you?

if you want a hint, though, consider that nothing in the premise forbids you from finding the person whose life you 'saved' later

[greatwyrmgold]

That's a cop-out. You can respond to any evil hypothetical with "and then I kill more people" to justify your choice. You can kill someone after not pulling the lever, too.

[sigmaleph]

and, to be clear, you are of the opinion that 'you can justify whichever choice you want' is an undesirable property in a theory of evil ethics?

[cockatude]

"Oh, its ok for me to help people If I might kill more in the future." Oh what, so I guess it'd be ok to give a bunch of people clean water just because you later develop chemical weapons? You're line of thinking is morally solvent.

[sigmaleph]

and thus you see the problem with the absolutist, black-and-white thinking of villains these days. "waaa waaa you can't do nice things for people that makes you as good as the heroes"

have you even considered how much easier it is to get people to trust your chemicals are safe if your reputation is "that nice lady who gave us clean water"? no, of course not, you just get into pissing contests on social media about who is more corrupt, entirely divorced from any real-world practice of evil. y'all think it's more important to do nothing right than something wrong.