Graaaace

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[mikkeneko]

You know I was thinking as I watched this that it seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to for decorating the top of a pastry

[writers-solace]

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world

[rarmaster]

I saw advice once ((I'm sure it's somewhere in my writing advice or writing tips tags, but this was years ago)) that instead of emulating Tolkien and pouring linguistics into your writing (unless, of course, you're also a linguist) you should pour the thing YOU love into your writing

are you a fashion nerd? write about their dress, the fabric, the style, let that be the part you flesh out and out and out - what fabric do the elves wear? how many layers? (are they even elves?)

are you a bug nerd? make a fantasy species that's bugs. that's based on bugs. same goes for any kind of animal. elves are OUT, my species based on bearded dragons (lizards) is IN.

tangentially this is probably an aspect of why Homestuck was so popular. WOW, did Andrew Hussie care about their funny bug-like Troll species. WOW, was the worldbuilding for troll castes and stages of life like. Tolkien level of detail. Also!! Homestuck is full of Hussie's love for WEIRD VIDEO GAME MENUS and COMPLICATED MECHANICS.

so pick whatever you're a nerd about and fill your work with that. you don't need a fantasy language. but maybe you want to talk about the anatomy of dragons. maybe you're a nerd about Cambrian period organisms and life. maybe you're a nerd about book binding. or about music and how music can be magic!

hell, Witch Hat Atelier - whose anime just started airing - exists because people pointed out to Shirahama that art & draftmanship are basically real-life magic*. and WHA is a series about magic through drawings and ink! And how the best magic is precise and careful applications of the magic ink!!!

(*source - but be sure to read the whole thread!)

so... you don't have to be Tolkien. Be your own freak. And put your own nerdery into your work.

[asmeesh]

1$ flea market score. Tiny glass 1960s perfume bottles. I love them.

[shit-show-no-go]

Can you swap their heads ?

[asmeesh]

omg you can

[asmeesh]

Their meeting was foretold in the ancient texts

[theinvisiblespoon]

[gilliflowersmaybe]

Frank Churchill’s Murder Plan (aka my completely insane but mostly possible emma theory)

Go to Highbury, where Jane <3 currently is. Introduce yourself as the son of a respected gentleman with no connection to Jane <3 other than a passing previous meeting. Be quickly established as charming and fun, but (and this is crucial) let more critical people think you’re a little bit dumb.

Get a rapport going with Patty, the Bates’s cook. Make sure she likes you enough to let you into the kitchen whenever, and make sure you can trust her not to tell her employers when she’s seen you. Do this by convincing her to keep the delivery of a whole ass piano a secret from Jane <3.

Go back and forth between Enscombe and Randalls more frequently than you need to. Make everyone (especially dad) think you’d love to spend more time in Highbury, but you’re just at Aunt Churchill’s total beck and call. Try your best to hide the letters from Dad and your cool new stepmom, so they won’t notice when you go to Enscombe without a letter.

After a bit of back and forth, go to Enscombe one final time and kill Aunt Churchill. She’s already pretty sick, so just buy some rat poison in Highbury, befriend their cook like you did Patty, sneak it into her dinner and say she has a newer, more serious symptom. No one will suspect a thing, least of all your loving parents or your weak-willed uncle.

At some point, Jane <3 might follow through on her threat to break off the engagement and start applying for governess postings. If this happens, sneak back to Highbury for a bit and use Patty’s trust of you to get into the kitchen. When you’re there, give Jane <3 a small dose of the poison you gave Aunt Churchill to buy yourself time. She can’t go to Maple Grove, she’s too sick.

Ask Uncle Churchill for his consent to marry Jane <3, break the news to the people of Highbury and live a happy life as a free man without consequences. Keep Patty in your good graces, and hope to god that George Knightley never decides to become a detective

[phantomqueen]

my storytelling final! or, that week i almost went blind cross-hatching!

it’s a couple weeks old at this point, but i’m still proud of it (all that cross-hatching…) even though looking back at it now i can see a ton of flaws or things i just could’ve done better. maybe i’ll redo it one day.

the page colors are kind of wonky because they’re photographs; i didn’t have a scanner big enough for the pages.

hell yeah monster/human friendships

[immabethehero]

Awwww, cute comic!!!

[recurring-polynya]

never lose hope. somewhere, a middle-aged, gender ambiguous person with an advanced degree in an esoteric field and a fiber arts hobby could be crashing out and pinning all their remaining mental health on getting obsessed with your otp. any day now, the most elegantly written 100k fanfic you have ever read is going to hit ao3. it could happen. it has happened.

[computer-voiced-by-majel-barrett]

Shoutout to my favorite genre of TOS episode:

[dduane]

…I can’t think how it took me so long to run across this. I feel privileged to have been found by it. 😄

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

if they're gonna remake The Princess Bride, it should open with a kid sick in bed scrolling on his phone. his grandpa arrives with a gift--it's a DVD player with a disc already inside. grandpa hooks it up to the TV and presses play. and we all just watch the original 1987 film again.

[raccoonmilf]

Actually I’m incredibly upset about how tween fashion has essentially vanished from the market. I think that the tween period is wildly important for childhood development and developing personal sense of style. Like??? I was slathering myself in green body glitter every day and wearing purple eye liner. That shit is highkey important

[6qubed]

that was your joker arc

[raccoonmilf]

No

[dramatic-dolphin]

and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.

[hiveswap]

^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.

[dduane]

The final trailer.

I want to see this get an Oscar nomination and make A GAZILLION BUCKS.

[cerusee]

“Based on the New Yorker article by Ian Frazier” Ian Frazier is a humorist JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING.

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[queerofthedagger]

okay let's actually do this properly

Where do you write your fics/stories

Word

Google Docs

Scrivener

LibreOffice

Obsidian/Notion

ProtonDocs

Notes App

Directly into AO3

Ellipsus

Handwriting

Other (explain in tags?)

Remaining time: 3 days 19 hours

[voidcenturyscholar-deactivated2]

Post canon Toph who doesn’t want to go back to her shitty parents so she just decides to stay in the Fire Nation and bum off Zuko’s hospitality.

Zuko’s like no, yeah, I totally get it, and just makes her one of his advisors. At first it’s just so she has a good excuse to stay but after the first meeting Toph storms out shouting about how EVERYONE was lying why would you even need to lie about what kind of tea you want??

Zuko: I mean they’re politicians…..but also who, and when, and in what way

They make a subtle Morse code system so Toph can warn him when someone is lying to him without tipping anyone off that she can sense lies.

Zuko gets a reputation for somehow being both extremely socially inept and yet somehow disgustingly perceptive?? You can’t get ANYTHING by him???

[romancedawning-deactivated20210]

#my lord what EXACTLY is ms Beifongs role in these meetings #a nervous nobleman asks after the third time she interrupts them with stupid commentary #zuko with perfect deadpan: she’s my scribe

You CAN’T leave that in the tags

[atlaheritageposts]

atla heritage post

[cryoverkiltmilk]

“Wait, you know the Fire Lord?”

“I’ve never seen that man in my life.”

[yyyyddmmsupremacy-deactivated20]

one person's "ugghh this trope is so overdone" is another person's "oooooohohohohohohohoho"

[thhouseofblack]

[Felson, N. (2025) Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics. 2nd ed. Hellenic Studies Series 101. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.]

The scene of their marriage bed with Odysseus' reaction is so important for Odysseus and Penelope's relationship, and functions as the perfect climax of their reunion. The plot of their relationship is incomplete without this moment.

[david-box]

I think my main problem with trying to figure out what time period a given fantasy film is set in, especially Disney ones, and then analyzing the film based on that is that a lot of movie makers will put images and references to what the average person *thinks* about a certain time period to establish a cohesive setting everyone can agree with, instead of just fashion history majors.

The caveat to this is that you can totally have everything be 99% historically accurate in a fantasy film and everyone can understand it fine AND it can contribute towards the understanding of the plot (see the costuming of the Muppets Christmas Carol -changes in dress indicate the passage of time). But for Disney specifically, it's usually specific versions of fairy tales that's been around for centuries. There's not something to be accurate *towards,* just a setting to establish and we can all tell Beauty and the Beast takes place in pre industrial France because they say it's France and there's no machines and that's all we need to know about the setting. Princes exist, and so do Victorian era dresses, and its all very romantic so let's focus on the plot.

I personally prefer things that assume the viewer can think about things but if we're talking analysis I thinking looking at what the film makers are trying to say is frequently more useful than what they accidently did.

[firawren]

I completely agree. To continue using your Beauty and the Beast 1991 example, there is no way to fully reconcile it to any real point in French history. There is no consistency in historical details. Thus, I must conclude that it does not take place in Real 18th Century France, but in Fantasy Old-timey France. It is a fairy tale. The setting is not real. It's not meant to be. Same with most of these Disney movies. Most of the live action ones get too bent out of shape trying to make them historically accurate when that was never the point of the stories they were trying to tell, and it just bogs them down.