I have no pity to spare for thee...

>30, Canadian. This blog trends towards Dragon Age & The Untamed, & Dead Boy Detectives, as well as a sprinkling of current events, artwork, other fandoms, and nature photography. Feel free to message me if you want something tagged fairandfatalasfair on DW fairandfatalasfair on pillowfort muirgen_lys on AO3

[hobbitsdoitbetter]

Currently WIP, based on “The Meeting on the Tower Stair,” by Irish water colour artist Frederick William Burton, which is one of my favourite paintings.

It shows the story of Hildebrand and Hellelil, which is as sad a story as Orpheus and Eurydice, but with less cannibal Maenads. Alas.

[madnessiseverything]

—three quick tips on how to be adored

[a-foggy-maggy]

I did it! I finally made some dead boy detectives fanart!

[shaylogic]

Cryland Week Day 1: Protective / Knight

"Uh, maybe I should do that. Seeing as you could be super-extra-killed by this thing."

Crystal offering to protect Charles, and Charles accepting her protection without complaint.

Protective for @crylandweek I wrote more on my thoughts on this scene here.

[winepresswrath]

How Jiang Fengmian could criticize Jiang Cheng for not understanding what it means to attempt the impossible when he's holding out hope for his parents' trash fire of a marriage despite a lifetime of experience with them is beyond me. Even Wei Wuxian is like aw, buddy. Signs point to no.

[heavymetalchemist]

I actually think that Jiang Fengmian’s whole “oh yeah wwx understands our sect motto way better” is A C T U A L L Y “I want to live vicariously through this small trash fire gremlin” because quite frankly as much as wwx is a prodigy who invents a whole new cultivation method, I don’t feel like a good sect leader is in fact someone who ignores other clans’ rules to the point they get kicked out, deliberately taunts people, can’t remember people’s names and faces (including people he’s personally insulted TO their faces), flirts shamelessly with all sorts of people (UNLESS YOU’RE JGS I GUESS).

Like I get that JC is way more uptight but like, okay, so I’ve got a low-key boner for alpinism, and there are some WILD stories about people doing stupid shit in the mountains. Like there’s a guy who decided to just basically try backpacking up Mt. Everest with almost no acclimatization because he thought that he was That Special (I don’t have the book in front of me but as I recall he thought he could just like mediate through altitude sickness).  And honestly that’s WWX, the guy who’s like yeah I’ll figure it out!  Meanwhile JC is the one who meticulously acclimatizes, plans each aspect of the route, watches the weather closely, trains every day, and manages to actually summit AND make it home. The way JC attempts the impossible is just not in the same frivolous gremlin way as WWX, and WWX gets away with it because he IS LEGITIMATELY that talented!

But JFM is absolutely sitting there like “ah yes if only I too could be a rude asshole and ignore rules and do whatever I want but also still somehow be good at things, I wish that were my life instead of this horrible strained marriage where I’m constantly walking on eggshells” I mean it’s especially telling since WWX and JC are both literal teenagers here, I really feel like JFM is just wishing HE’D been more like WWX in his youth and achieved the impossible of getting WWX’s mom to marry him instead.  Like I really don’t want to underplay that WWX is the top disciple and legitimately talented but he’s also demonstrably a rule-breaking screw-off who gets away with shit because his adoptive dad is constantly indulgent because JFM wishes that he could be running around like a little terror.

[winepresswrath]

Oh, yeah, I think all that and also that Jiang Cheng is basically a symbol of his failed marriage and looking at him reminds him of all the ways he’s constantly fucking up with his wife and also all of the things that he doesn’t like about her. He can’t change her but he can change their son! Except he can’t, because he’s such a shitty dad that his kid can’t hear criticism as anything but further confirmation that he dad just doesn’t like him. Genuinely the saddest part of their whole relationship is that Jiang Cheng isn’t even really mad or angsty about his dad not loving him. He’s holding out some hope of winning him over, but his baseline feelings about his relationship with his father are resignation and sadness for his mom, because if he was better maybe his dad would like her better and then she’d chill out and stop being so awful about his brother and they could have a not-terrible family meal for once. His aspirations are kind of heartbreaking both in how small they are and in that he persists in maintaining them.

[afurioushawk]

[batboyblog]

not enough of the children know that Hillary Clinton literally risked her life to expose a criminal conspiracy to extend school segregation.

The south reacted to Brown V Board and later rulings forcing school desegregation by opening private schools, having all the white kids go, not allow any black kids and then the town votes to defund the now 90% black public school, but officially its desegregated.

Hillary Clinton and others posed as young mothers trying to get their children into these private academies, gathering the proof of their racial discrimination. I want to repeat only a few years before civil rights workers, white and black had been murdered in the south, lots of them. Clinton and all of them were literally risking their lives to get the proof.

work like Clinton's in 1972 would build to the Supreme Court ruling in 1976 that private schools could not racially discriminate

I would also add that Hillary in 1973 went on to gathering information and interviews with disabled children, who at the time did not have the right to go to school. I remember Hillary talking about meeting a little girl in a wheelchair whose biggest dream was to go to school. That work and those testimonials gathered by Clinton and all those advocates came together into the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 which established the right of EVERY child in America to an education. If you or anyone you love has ever gotten a public school education with an IEP, it was Hillary Clinton and young idealistic people like her in the 1970 who fought to make that a reality.

[hedgehog-moss]

Have you heard about Gracie the giraffe? She escaped from a Texas ranch (she's since been found, fat and happy), and I was reminded of Pampe when I heard about her method of escape.

[fairandfatalasfair]

#llama drama #thank you for the message! I liked learning about this giraffe 😊 #technically her escape was more impressive - she was at large for 2 weeks which is considerably beyond Pampe's personal record! #which is 3 days and 7 kilometres away #but Pampe is a French camelid and therefore considers freedom a philosophical condition not subject to vulgar quantification (tags via OP)

[steveyockey]

survival mechanism they don’t emphasize enough is memorizing a poem. you memorize a poem you have a little lift raft for a variety of situations

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 琅琊榜/Nirvana in Fire.

Nirvana in Fire is a 2015 historical series best described as either a complicated succession drama set in the premodern Chinese imperial palace, or the story of a man who didn't die a decade ago and has decided to make it everyone else's problem.

And really, I almost feel silly giving my glib little summary, because Nirvana in Fire is so well-known of a property. It's a classic for a reason, and that reason is that it's legitimately very good. This show is what happens when you adapt a solid story, get a bunch of very talented actors, and throw a huge amount of money at it. It's incredibly popular and highly acclaimed, and it earned all of the hype.

Still, while I bet there are few people adjacent to c-drama stuff who've never heard of Nirvana in Fire, I'm sure there are plenty who haven't watched it. After all, it looks like one of those slow, serious shows with a lot of ponderous talking and no joy. If that's the impression you've been given, I could imagine looking at the 54-episode commitment and saying, I don't need that in my life.

I am here to tell you you're wrong. It is a banger of a show. It's tense. It's funny. It's heartbreaking. It’s exceptionally clever. It’s jaw-droppingly stupid. It’s romantic. It’s tragic. It has smart plots and bizarre subplots. And that's not even touching the thing with the yeti.

So in case you're one of those people who's heard of Nirvana in Fire, but has put off watching it for one reason or another, I'm here with five reasons I think you should try it.

1. Epic Shit

Did you like the Lord of the Rings? More specifically, did you really like the second Peter Jackson film? Great, then you're all set for this.

I guess I could have called this Game of Thrones without the dragons, but that's not actually the vibe at all. Game of Thrones is much more sensational and salacious, with all the blood and butts and what-not. The Tolkien comparison is more apt, I think, because Nirvana in Fire is equally about as wholesome as you can get in a property where dudes are still getting stabbed all the time.

This is a show about vengeance. And yeah, justice for the fallen, sure, that's fine too. But mostly it's about a bunch of good people joining forces to make sure the bastards who did wrong pay, with their lives as necesary.

The problem, though, is that these bastards are incredibly powerful, which means that a pure brute-force approach isn't going to work. Accordingly, this quickly becomes a story about the power of smart teamwork to exact retribution on some people who can (and did!) legally get away with murder -- and our heroes are some of the people with their necks most on the line if anything goes wrong.

Don't let the Middle Earth comparison fool you into thinking this is all epic swordfights. It's not. (I mean, for one thing, as well-funded as this project is, it doesn't have Peter Jackson Money.) The vast majority of the tension in the show comes from dialogue and slow, terrible realizations. The fight scenes are almost a relief from the nail-biting intensity of intimate conversations about getting a letter from somebody's ex-wife or returning a book.

All told, the show has that incredible almost-RPG vibe of going through all the little subquests and cutscenes you find along the way to defeat the final boss. The plot carefully unravels a multi-tendriled mystery told to you by people in incredible costumes. It doesn't get much more epic than that.

(Nirvana in Fire is also a cautionary tale about how you should be very careful with who gets invited to your birthday party.)

2. A chronically ill protagonist

Okay, right in the first episode, it is established that the main character has three whole completely different names and an old nickname. I'm going to call him Mei Changsu for the duration of this rec post, but let the record show that I could just have easily gone with one of the other three.

What you learn in that same first episode is that Mei Changsu used to be a palace insider, the cocky son of a noble family, only now nearly everyone he used to know thinks he's dead. Also, he's not far off from being actually dead -- he has an unspecified terminal condition that's mostly managed, provided he stays in his little mountain hideaway with his handsome doctor bestie and doesn't return to his old stomping ground and start kicking over hornets' nests.

So guess what he's about to do.

I have to make a note of how brilliant the casting is here: Hu Ge is an action actor! He is a kickpuncher of a man! And I think it's great that you can sort of see his frustration, as well as Mei Changsu's, at having to spend the whole series wrapped in countless layers of fabric and/or lying in bed while everyone around him gets to be the badass action heroes.

Mei Changsu's not faking it, either -- he's actually dying. He expends his energy where he thinks it's necessary, and sometimes that means he has to spend the following week in bed. He's constantly frustrated with himself for what he can't do anymore. He's racing a clock, and that clock is his own failing body. If he dies, the only hope anyone here has for justice dies with him.

He gets two love interests that the show treats pretty much equally. One's a lady general who wasn't even a love interest in the book. The other's the handsome prince who was initially going to be his textual romantic partner in same book, until the author hopped genres from danmei to general historical drama. I can't even call this a love triangle, because there's no competition. He just gets a wife and a husband -- in that he gets neither, because circumstances and his own illness keep him distant from them. He lies to both of then about his condition (among other things). He wants to be with them both and knows he can't be with either. And they in turn have to learn to accept what of him they can and can't have.

(Also, Nihuang (her) and Jingyan (him) are both incredibly gorgeous, which is exactly what bisexual genius Mei Changsu deserves.)

Obviously this isn't a perfect representation of life with chronic illness, largely because Mei Changsu is an incredily wealthy man who lives in a universe with what's basically magic medicine. However, I've seen the story's treatment of him and his condition resonate with a lot of chronically ill viewers, so even with the fantasy layer on it, there's definitely something there.

3. Dave

I have already told the story of how Meng Zhi became "Dave," but long story short, he's such a Dave that I legitimately forget his character's real name. He embodies Daveness. He's The Ultimate Dave.

Dave is an excellent fighter, a loyal friend -- and a terrible liar. He's possbly the only straightforward character in the entire show. When he's asked to be duplicitous, he's comically bad at it. Dave will never do a heel turn. I was misled at first by his semi-evil facial hair, but I have seen the error of my ways. Dave is pure lawful good.

And the reason I list Dave as such a selling point is that having a Dave means you always know what's going on. This is because Dave never knows what's going on, and he has no ego about that, so he asks questions, and other characters have to explain to him what just happened, and that is how you figure out what's going on.

It's an incredibly smart move on the drama's part, because some of the (very fun) schemes are so complicated that there's no way for you, the viewer, to understand them just by watching. Without the internal monologues and omniscent narration of a book, the machinations are opaque. You need things explained -- but why would the schemers explain their schemes? Well, Dave needs some exposition, so here you go.

So if you're worried that you might be left feeling stupid by a show where so many sneaky people are hatching so many complex plans, worry not! Like the good man he is, Dave has your back.

4. A Million Amazing Antagonists

If you like bad guys, this is a show for you. This show has brilliant bad guys all the way down. It has bad guys at every turn. It has bad guys for every taste. Welcome to Big Liang's Big Bad Guy Emporium, where we guarantee you'll walk out of here with a bad guy you like, or your money back!

(And yes, this set of pictures is also to say that their costume budget was entirely well-spent.)

Without getting too far into spoilers, I will say that the basic situation underlying the whole series is this: The emperor has done a lot of bad things, and he has enlisted a bunch of people's help in hiding those bad things, so much so that many of those other people have done even more bad things the emperor didn't even know about -- and then everyone has gone to great lengths to cover those up as well. Our protagonists spend the whole series unraveling this colossal shitshow and bringing people to task for their crimes.

So really, if you're going to spend 54 episodes taking down the baddies, they've got to be baddies you love to see taken down. And these are -- in part because all of them have crystal-clear, rock-solid motivations for their actions. Nobody here is a moustache-twirling comic-book-villain baddie. They're all bad for reasons that are very understandable in their individual contexts. And not a single one of them is going to go down without a fight.

5. World's Best Mom

(Sidebar: The fact that four out of five of my reasons to watch the show are individual or groups of characters should be your strongest indicator that this is an intensely character-driven story.)

This is not a Dead Mom Show. Okay, some moms are dead, but mostly this is a Moms Are Alive And Often Cause Problems Show, which is a lot of what makes the palace drama so delicious. But there is one Good Mom who stands out above all the rest: Consort Jing.

Played with perfect grace and devastating politeness by the stunning Liu Mintao, Consort Jing is a skilled doctor and excellent baker who starts the show with a low-level status among the women of the palace. She swallows down all kinds of mistreatment because she's not in a place to oppose it -- and when she can retaliate, it must only be through soft power. She loves her jock son with all her heart, but because of both their relatively poor positions in the hierarchy, she doesn't get to see him all that much. She wants to be an asset to him, while all the time she has to fear becoming a liability.

She is also the smartest person in any room that she's in, unless she's in a room with Mei Changsu, and even then it may be a tie.

There are lots of great characters in the show that I could have highlighted here, and plenty of them are women, but Consort Jing in particular never ceases to impress me. She is trapped in a gilded cage, married to a man who [lengthy list of spoilers that are traumatic to her in particular], and held hostage by how every time she even looks like she's out of line, it puts both her and her boy in danger. She's the most vulnerable of any of our good guys. Kind of like Wang Zhi, she's got to be clever or she's dead.

Consort Jing is not part of Mei Changsu's original plan. She figures out his plan and makes herself part of it -- and entirely remotely, as she and he aren't even in the same room until episode 40 or so. She puts herself in great danger to make sure he succeeds, not because it will necessarily do her any good, but because Jingyan needs him. This woman has been captain of the Mei Changsu/Jingyan ship for like twenty years already.

Oh, and did I mention her outfits?

I love you, Consort Mom.

Are you ready to watch it yet?

Get it on Viki! Get it on YouTube! Get it on YouTube but in a different playlist! (And also maybe get it on Amazon? Not in my region, but maybe in yours.)

I will warn you that it does take off running -- I think I saw someone say it introduces nineteen characters in the first episode? I was worried that I'd be too innundated by situations and flashbacks and names to be able to follow. By the second or third episode, though, I was rolling with it. So if you feel like you're struggling at the beginning, stick with it a bit. See if you don't feel it start to click.

...Man, reading over this post has left me going, oh, but I missed that! and that! and that guy! And yeah, the truth is that there are just so many great things about the show that limiting myself to only five (and being limited to only thirty images) was tough. I'm sure that people reblogging will add their own must-see elements.

Truly, this is a show that deserves its reputation. It may not be for everyone, but if this is the kind of thing that you like, it is a shining example of that thing.

Besides, you have to love a production where everyone was clearly having just a whole lot of fun being big ol' costumed dorks.

[thehaberdasheress]

Arabesque Hearts

This classic design makes the perfect border for any historical costume - this particular pattern comes from Renaissance Italy, but there are similar examples in all kinds of forms around the world, dating back a thousand years. This stick-and-stitch pattern dissolves effortlessly in water when you're done, leaving only your beautiful embroidery behind.

Check it out on Etsy!

[sodamnbored]

I know Tumblr is full of posts about the virtues of commenting on AO3 fics and such. But like. It works.

I just knocked out 8.5k words in one single day for a chapter update because of one reader leaving one of the most absurdly endearing comments I’ve ever gotten. That is unheard of levels of productivity for me.

The power of the fandom. The power of the comment.

[zipzaptoastainthebath]

Something about Charles and Edwin each thinking that theres something intrinsically wrong with them while believing that the other is the best person that they know.

[emryses]

underrated dead boy detectives moment...2 me....is when crystal tells the boys her full name and edwin looks like he's having the deepest internal struggle between wanting to be supportive of her getting her memories back and making fun of her So Fucking Bad.

[maureen2musings]

Jacob's Ladder, Peak District, England

peaklass

[hyperpixating]

[daily-crystal-palace]

day 13

[hazyconstellationss]