honestly? abandoned/on indefinite hiatus/very slow to update fics, even and especially AUs and longfics, are often some of my absolute favorites. and people who refuse to read them are missing out!
for one, stories don’t have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesn’t always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i don’t know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, they’ve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.
so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. you’re just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, i’ll be delighted to jump back in! but if you don’t, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise i’m taking good care of it :)
i don’t normally ask this, but if this resonates with you please reblog it, so it can reach the authors who need to hear it <3
honestly? abandoned/on indefinite hiatus/very slow to update fics, even and especially AUs and longfics, are often some of my absolute favorites. and people who refuse to read them are missing out!
for one, stories don’t have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesn’t always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i don’t know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, they’ve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.
so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. you’re just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, i’ll be delighted to jump back in! but if you don’t, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise i’m taking good care of it :)
i don’t normally ask this, but if this resonates with you please reblog it, so it can reach the authors who need to hear it <3
Here's remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)
Anthony and Cleopatra:
~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017
As You Like It:
~ At Wolfe Park - 2013
~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006
Coriolanus:
~ NYET Alumni - 2016
~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014
~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011
Cymbelline:
~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014
Hamlet:
~ David Tennant - 2009
~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000
~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989
~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990
~ Broadway - 1964
~ Christopher Plummer - 1964
~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948
Henry IV:
~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989
~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017
Henry V:
~ The BBC's - 1990
~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944
Julius Caesar:
~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019
~ The BBC's - 1979
~ John Gielgud - 1970
King Lear:
~ The RSC's - 2008
~ Laurence Olivier - 1983
~ The BBC's - 1975
~ James Earl Jones - 1974
~ Orson Wells - 1953
Love's Labour's Lost:
~ Calvin University - 2016
Macbeth:
~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017
~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969
~ Sean Connery - 1961
Measure for Measure:
~ Hugo Weaving - 2019
~ The BBC's - 1990
The Merchant of Venice:
~ Al Pacino - 2004
~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001
~ The BBC's - 1980
~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982
A Midsummer Night's Dream:
~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019
~ City of Columbus's - 2018
~ The Globe's - 2013
~ The BBC's - 1988
~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986
Much Ado About Nothing:
~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019
~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993
~ The BBC's - 1984
Othello:
~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990
Richard II:
~ David Tennant - 2013
~ Deborah Warner's - 1997
~ The BBC's - 1978
Richard III:
~ Ian McKellen - 1995
~ Laurence Olivier - 1955
Romeo and Juliet:
~ Simon Godwin's - 2021
~ The BBC's - 1988
~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954
The Taming of the Shrew:
~ Ontario production?
~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976
~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967
~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929
The Tempest:
~ Gregory Doran's - 2017
~ The BBC's - 1988
Timon of Athens:
~ Barry Avrich's - 2024
Troilus and Cressida:
~ Audio Production
~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016
Titus Andronicus:
~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999
Twelfth night:
~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015
~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970
Two Gentlemen of Verona:
~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018
~ The BBC's
The Winter's Tale:
~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)
Bonuses:
Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)
Rock Opera Hamlet???
Shakespeare animated tales
The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy
From the original post:
A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.
Russian Hamlet here
Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Hamlet retelling.
Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.
This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.
The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!
Here's the 1948 one,
the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there
I’m going to pop in with a quick note here that in this year of 2025, whether a zoo is AZA or not is really not a singular indicator of if a zoological facility is ethical or acceptable to visit. San Francisco, for instance, is in the middle of a shitload of scandal based on animal health and safety issues going back years, and afaik AZA hasn’t said a peep or done any visible oversight prior to the blow-up.
I’m not mad at either person in this thread, to be clear, but I need to thump this topic a little because I’m very, very tired that this perspective on the zoological industry hasn’t evolved yet.
Just because a facility isn’t AZA does not guarantee it is bad. I can’t speak directly to Tanganyika’s animal care - I haven’t been there since before the pandemic - but a lot of colleagues in the field I respect think well of them. I’m not personally comfortable with all of their encounters (hands on primate stuff) but they’re legal and it doesn’t mean the animals are inherently abused in the process. Also, do you like clouded leopards? I counted the studbook once and I think Tanganyika is responsible for the existence of over half the US studbook over the last few decades because they’re a really finicky cat to breed. One of their upper management has been spearheading collecting data and advocating for equitable pay for zoo staff all over the country for years. This sort of complex mix of good and iffy and not great occurs at every zoo and aquarium - but members of the public only have a view into part of the equation.
We need to let go for this “AZA good, everyone else shitty” idea. It’s literally just a marketing slogan you’ve been taught to accept as truth. I can cite that directly back to the Director of AZA. There is so much nuance to how zoos and aquariums operate that a reductive assessment of quality and ethics based on which political games a facility plays is going to lead you wrong more often than not.
Also, while I’m on the soapbox, “roadside zoo” is a dogwhistle for a moral stance that communicates nothing concrete about a facility. It has never had a real definition, intentionally, because it lets activist groups call out facilities and say they’ve got bad vibes without having to cite any sources. Criticize a place you’re uncomfortable with all you want, but please use real words with real information value to do so.
sometimes life is just about a hardened warrior with a troubled past, complex morality, and regenerative abilities,,, and a personification of undiagnosed ADHD who won't leave them alone
“That is just as well, Potter,” said Snape coldly, “because you are neither special nor important, and it is not up to you to find out what the Dark Lord is saying to his Death Eaters.”
“No — that’s your job, isn’t it?” Harry shot at him.
He had not meant to say it; it had burst out of him in temper. For a long moment they stared at each other, Harry convinced he had gone too far.
But there was a curious, almost satisfied expression on Snape’s face when he answered.
“Yes, Potter,” he said, his eyes glinting. “That is my job.”
And the fact that he goes to put his lute down gently, then what he's seeing really hits him. The lute just drops from his fingers in his sudden horror/distraction. My heart.
This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!
at some point you have to realize that you actually have to read to understand the nuance of anything. we as a society are obsessed with summarization, likely as a result of the speed demanded by capital. from headlines to social media (twitter being especially egregious with the character limit), people take in fragments of knowledge and run with them, twisting their meaning into a kaleidoscope that dilutes the message into nothing. yes, brevity is good, but sometimes the message, even when communicated with utmost brevity, requires a 300 page book. sorry.
Do you ever think you'll stop drawing fanart? No offense it just seems like the kind of thing you're supposed to grow out of. I'm just curious what your plans/goals are since it isn't exactly an art form that people take seriously.
Ah, fanart. Also known as the art that girls make.
Sad, immature girls no one takes seriously. Girls who are taught that it’s shameful to be excited or passionate about anything, that it’s pathetic to gush about what attracts them, that it’s wrong to be a geek, that they should feel embarrassed about having a crush, that they’re not allowed to gaze or stare or wish or desire. Girls who need to grow out of it.
That’s the art you mean, right?
Because in my experience, when grown men make it, nobody calls it fanart. They just call it art. And everyone takes it very seriously.
It’s interesting though — the culture of shame surrounding adult women and fandom. Even within fandom it’s heavily internalized: unsurprisingly, mind, given that fandom is largely comprised by young girls and, unfortunately, our culture runs on ensuring young girls internalize *all* messages no matter how toxic. But here’s another way of thinking about it.
Sports is a fandom. It requires zealous attention to “seasons,” knowledge of details considered obscure to those not involved in that fandom, unbelievable amounts of merchandise, and even “fanfic” in the form of fantasy teams. But this is a masculine-coded fandom. And as such, it’s encouraged - built into our economy! Have you *seen* Dish network’s “ultimate fan” advertisements, which literally base selling of a product around the normalization of all consuming (male) obsession? Or the very existence of sports bars, built around the link between fans and community enjoyment and analysis. Sport fandom is so ingrained in our culture that major events are treated like holidays (my gym closes for the Super Bowl) — and can you imagine being laughed at for admitting you didn’t know the difference between Supernatural and The X Files the way you might if you admit you don’t know the rules of football vs baseball, or basketball?
“Fandom” is not childish but we live in a culture that commodified women’s time in such away that their hobbies have to be “frivolous,” because “mature” women’s interests are supposed to be marriage, family, and overall care taking: things that allow others to continue their own special interests, while leaving women without a space of their own.
So think about what you’re actually saying when you call someone “too old” for fandom. Because you’re suggesting they are “too old” for a consuming hobby, and I challenge you to answer — what do you think they should be doing instead?
This whole modern approach is also seriously undermining just how important fanfiction is - from a historical standpoint.
The concept of fanfiction formed and forged the earliest stages of literature in Europe. Because the majority of authors in France, Germany and Great Britain looked at that funky little Celtic dude Arthur and thought “hey, he’s neat. I wanna write about him”.
The entire concept of a book outside of religious purposes was born out of fanfiction in my country.
There is no “first canon” for Arthur where he came as the prince of Camelot, with his sidekicks Lancelot and Merlin and his endgame love interest Gwen.
Arthur was some random hunter when he started out.
Someone’s fanfiction made him a prince.
Someone else’s fanfiction gave him a round table.
Someone else’s fanfiction gave him Merlin at his side.
Someone else’s fanfiction gave him Morgana, gave him Gwen, gave him his swords.
And, to this day, we still write Arthurian fanfiction. Literally last year there was a movie adaptation that is, by all intends and purposes, fanfiction, because it wasn’t even close to a literal adaptation of the source material (The Kid Who Would Be King). Heck, BBC’s Merlin, itself an Arthurian fanfiction, remains one of the biggest fandoms that people today write for on AO3.
You were a joke in the middle ages if you tried to write your own stuff. Who’s interested in your stuff? You were only a respected author if you wrote fanfiction. The most famous medieval German authors are famous because they wrote fanfiction about some knightly OCs they created who served on Arthur’s court. That is the literary legacy of the middle ages. Arthurian fanfiction.
Yet somewhere along the way, this concept of “I find x story/element cool and want to elaborate on it more, shift the focus onto an aspect of this original source material” has gotten this “eh, it’s fanfiction” connotation and lost respect.
Even though this very concept is still being used - even outside of the actual medium of fanfiction - and it is still being used for the very same purpose it was used for in medieval times. Original movies often don’t get as much recognition as adaptations of existing source material that the audience is familiar with. People see a movie about a character they’re familiar with and seem more inclined to buy a ticket to see the 10th new interpretation of Batman or Superman or Snow White. How are these new interpretations of familiar source material that usually add to the lore, reinterpret characterizations and dynamics, any different from fanfiction?
But heaven forbid we call The Dark Knight Nolan’s Batman fanfiction. No, fanfiction is that silly thing that we can’t take seriously, but that new Joker movie, that however is high-end art.
This. Fanfiction is variations on an existing theme, simultaneously making use of and satisfying people’s existing love for a story that they’re happy to consume more of, and cultivating the synergy between an existing story/mythos and a new author who, in interacting with characters they’d never have created themselves, creates something that neither they nor any of the story’s previous tellers could have made all by themselves.
Fanfiction is the new whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and fanfiction is the story being made limitless, retelling by retelling, and it is wonderful.
It’s also worth noting that Batman himself only came into being because of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a series of books about an extravagantly rich foppish playboy by day, daring hero in disguise by night (I mean, loosely. He also fopped by night and heroed by day, but you get my drift). Written by a woman no less.
Batman is a transformative work with a modernised crime-fighting SP but also borrowing strongly from earlier comic books, and yet it is seen as definitive.
Coming back here to say that I think the derision for fanart also has some of its roots in our capitalist hellscape.
It’s the age old “If thing not make you money, why you care about thing?” that’s so prevalent in the system. Of course some people do make money with their fanart, but I think that is still part of the scorn.
It’s supposed to be something you do not just for fun, but for practice, people like this think. Once you’re good at it, you can drop it and make money by focusing on your OCs and original work!
I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.
Most classroom practice is astrology.
Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.
We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.
Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.
Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.
What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.
Some definitions:
Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.
Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.
Things we (scholars) DO know:
-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.
-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).
-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.
Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.
Maintaining the status quo? Nope.
Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.
If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.
They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.
And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.
For what?
It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.
WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.
We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.
The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?
Education is all about capitalism.
"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.
THAT is why modern education is a failure.
Its basic premise is monstrous.
"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"
Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.
