I_dlovetobeknowunknown

[thinkingisadangerouspastime]

my students are really harshing on the romance in jane eyre and yeah whatever age gap but something is just not clicking for them that jane eyre is a sexual power fantasy FOR THE YOUNG WOMAN in the relationship. jane eyre shows us this young woman who has an older man so wrapped around her finger that he SOBS for hours when she rejects his love, that raises up a panicked storm when she chooses to leave him. and while you shouldn't get me and my crip studies self started on the ableism of the ending, i.e. that jane's mastering of rochester is complete only when he becomes disabled, the fact remains that jane eyre is about a young woman mastering an older man in every sense of the word. it is a sexual power fantasy in which a young woman is so desirable and so loved by an older man that he drives himself into (emotional) ruin when (for a while) he cannot have her—that the young woman has the upper hand to choose when and how and on what terms their relationship happens. so whatever, age gap blah blah blah (it's literally a victorian novel, come on), but they're truly just missing that the novel is not endorsing an older man preying on a young woman—jane always has some degree of agency (and eventually total control) over rochester. the sexual power fantasy is about and for (and told by) the young woman!!!

[ak-nm]

[rylandsgrace]

THE GOOD PLACE (2016 - 2020) I 3.07 - A Fractured Inheritance

[kedreeva]

This is one of my favorite moments in The Good Place. This moment hit hard the first time through, because I think a lot of people (myself included) do have this kind of fear/anger. And the first time through, that was kind of where my thought process stopped: at "Yeah she's right."

And the show kind of stops there too, because Michael doesn't have a reassurance for her. He knows he's supposed to say something comforting, and he tells her that, and he's an extradimensional being that knows a LOT more than her and he's stumped.

But. I'm not.

The thing is, Eleanor isn't right.

Donna Shellstrop was not always capable of making this change, for the same reason that's the point of the whole entire show: her environment and past experiences at the time didn't allow for it. The whole point at the end of this show, with the way they remake the afterlife to be a repeating cycle, where people learn (and grow) from each reset, is that people have to learn and grow before they can truly change, and they must be in an environment that allows for that change (they make a point of saying outright that, earth is so messed up that even when people TRY to be a better/good person, there are often so many limiting factors that it's not possible). Eleanor wasn't given her chance to change until after her actual death, but Donna was given it when Donna Shellstrop "died" and Diana Tremaine came into being.

[memewhore]

[knitmeapony]

This is no joke one of the most profoundly terrifying things I've ever watched

[nudityandnerdery]

I physically flinched, goddamn.

[chaoticsgood]

he sees you when you're sleeping

HE KNOWS WHEN YOU'RE AWAKE

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

[vaugemessenger]

Something about him crawling down made me jump

[tired-fandom-ndn]

I've seen a lot of fics disappear from my bookmarks, some 10+ years old, because they were added to an unrevealed collection. It makes me wonder if people realize what your fic being added to a collection actually means and if the authors approved it automatically without realizing what would happen.

If someone adds your fic to their collection, they can hide it! They can mark the collection as unrevealed and your fic will be unreadable to anyone other than them! If you're writing works for a surprise event, like a Secret Santa, this is really nice.

But if you're just writing and someone adds your fic to a collection for their own personal use and marks it as unrevealed, that. . . really sucks.

I bookmarked this fic in 2017, almost 5 years ago. Knowing me, the fic itself was probably at least a couple years old at the time I bookmarked it.

This is a 5+ year old fic that is completely inaccessible now because it was added to a collection that, as far as I can tell, is literally just for the collection owner's own reference. There's almost 30 fics in the collection, all of them unrevealed.

Please don't blindly accept collection requests and if your works ARE in a collection, make sure that they aren't being hidden without your knowledge or consent.

[hex-fauna]

Are you able to remove a work from collection after you allow it or is it just a story that's just fucked?

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Yes, you can remove your works! From the faq:

If you're the creator of the work:

1) Select the "Edit" button from the work's page and scroll down to the "Associations" section.

2) Select the red (×) beside the collection name you want to remove next to "Post to Collections / Challenges".

3) Select "Post" to apply the change. The work will be immediately removed from the collection.

I'm not sure if you get an alert if your fic is marked as unrevealed though, so keep an eye on the collections that your works are part of.

There's also an option in your preferences to accept collection invitations automatically. I would highly recommend making sure that that option is not selected.

[butterflyinthewell]

I realize this might be a dirty trick pro-censorship fandom harassers might try to pull on some people, so yeah.

Boosting for visibility.

[brightwanderer]

Reblogging to add my periodic reminder that I don’t accept collection requests for my fics, for this and other reasons. Collections are like anthologies. If I write a story specifically for a challenge or collection, then it goes in that collection. Otherwise it’s an automatic no.

It’s worth noting that this stuff doesn’t have to be malicious action from the person who owns the collection. A LOT of people don’t realise that collections aren’t intended to be used as rec lists or personal bookmarks, and therefore don’t realise that making changes to a collection can have this effect on the fic itself. As stated above, the author can fix this IF they notice that it’s happened. If a fic has been orphaned since being added to the collection, or if the author isn’t really active on AO3 anymore, that’s not going to happen.

[itsscottiesstark]

Wow I didn't know that.

[ohcorny]

speculative biology/fantasy/fictionalized large predators that kill indiscriminately and don't eat what they kill drive me up the fucking wall. it is so, so dangerous and exhausting to be a large predator. you don't want to get into a fight, you don't want to exert too much energy, because if you fuck up you can die. and once you manage to kill something, you eat it. you don't go and kill the rest of the herd, you scare off the rest of the herd and eat the thing you killed until something scares you off.

did you know tigers only have a 10% success rate as hunters? TIGERS.

[crystaltoa]

There are exceptions if a predator has a bunch of easy prey in a confined space (fox in a chicken coop for example) and some mammalian predators will kill extra and store or bury them for later if the pickings are easy.

So for fantasy/sci-fi creatures, this behaviour might be understandable if the predator gets into a small underground base or space station or what have you and the humans are unarmed and not much of a threat to it. But yeah, it should at least be shown to stop and eat one or two of its first victims before it begins stocking up the larder.

[crystaltoa]

Concept: A creature gets into the underground base, eats a couple of people. But it doesn't stop there because the rest of you are sitting ducks and it plans to save you for later. Walls and other obstacles can't stop it, its claws tear through anything in its way. You reason that it's a fossorial predator, and it's clearly not built for a pursuit over open ground, so you and the other survivors make for the exit up to the surface...

And run straight into the ambush of a different kind of predator. It's far taller and has longer limbs than the other one, this one *is* built for the chase, but a whole group of you popping up out of the ground one by one means it barely has to put in effort at all. It will eat well for weeks.

You realise, too late, that this is no unfortunate coincidence. The surface predator was working with the burrower to drive you out here. These creatures may not be sapient, but they appear to have a strategy. Some kind of symbiotic relationship, perhaps?

You never stood a chance.

Anyway, you just met the sci-fi horror version of these guys:

[draconicslime]

[ID: A photo of a coyote and an american badger walking together on a prairie. End ID]

[s-ofthearted]

Saw these luvers at the New Orleans Botanical Garden

[phantomrose96]

So it’s clear that when Mob transferred his powers to Reigen in the Claw 7th Division arc, he did not do it intentionally. It was just the redirection of his massive energy out-pour toward Reigen out of gratitude.

Then in the World Domination arc he does, intentionally, transfer some of his power to Shou to help Shou get back up. And this is a very big deal because Touichiro is like “what the hell power transfer is MY thing.”

Where I’m going with this is the realization that Mob DOES know how to do the power transfer thing intentionally and I am picturing a post-series-finale case where Reigen calls up Mob frantic like “Sorry I know you’re not working today but this is a real case and Serizawa is at school and this thing is going to eat me please come help.”

And Mob shows up like “Okay here you go” and raises his hand but the spirit does not disappear. And Reigen is like “Mob please I don’t think that did anything.” And Mob is like “I didn’t exorcise the spirit Shishou. I’m off work today. I gave you some of my powers though. Please use them responsibly.”

And Reigen is just standing there staring at his fingers in crisis going wait holy shit, my whole body is buzzing, I can move shit with my mind, oh shit I have powers (temporarily) (Mob’s powers), wait I’M still supposed to exorcise the spirit?

And Mob is like “have fun Shishou bye” and Reigen is like “Mob wait I want an instruction manual” and Mob is like “that would look bad to the client” who is currently cowering in the corner.

Anyway I think Mob continues to do this and now Reigen has to deal with the consequences of becoming actually sometimes psychic after so long pretending to be psychic.

[phantomrose96]

Teru "can copy any ability he's seen one time" Hanazawa is hanging around the S&S office one day and ends up bearing witness to this. ("Mob I told you to stop giving me your powers when I didn't ask. You're still an employee of Spirits and Such so when I ask you to do a task you should do it." "But Hanazawa is in the middle of explaining this math problem to me." -Reigen telekinetically confiscates math book from them- "I'm not paying you to do math.")

And Teru who's been trying for 8+ months to rationalize why he's never seen Mob's great Shishou use his powers even once since taking down the Claw 7th Division (despite clearly needing them many times) (despite running a psychic agency) (Teru kept rationalizing this as some kind of enlightened psychic ascetism from Reigen) finally has every single neuron click into place as he realizes the Claw 7th Division display was just Reigen using Mob's powers.

And he snaps his head to Mob like "Kageyama does Reigen-Shishou not have powers?!" and Mob's like "Well right now he does."

And Reigen goes "Hey" and Teru falls into a really deep contemplative silence for several seconds before he raises his hand and copies Mob's technique and also gives Reigen his powers. To which Reigen says "Hey."

[phantomrose96]

Mob Psycho takes place during peak Poke Your Friends On Facebook era which does open the possibility of Teru and Mob doing this regularly to Reigen for the same inane and pointless reason. Which is to say absolutely no reason. And Reigen can’t “poke” them back because he is not a real psychic and has no idea what he’s doing.

Ritsu alone doesn’t do it which Reigen is grateful for. Ritsu alone doesn’t do it because he is not like Teru and cannot copy powers effortlessly and can’t figure out how to do it.

Which puts him in the absolutely torturous situation of Reigen thinking Ritsu is being nice to him and Ritsu’s only two options are “admit he can’t actually do it” or “let Reigen believe Ritsu likes him.”

[phantomrose96]

[3liza]

quora is one of the most terrifying social networks on earth which i think is why all the most powerful posters can be found there

[3liza]

bless this woman Bonnie Wingate. this little piece of short nonfiction brings tears to my eyes every time i stop to read it through

[buried-in-stardust]

Demonstrating the rope dart (繩標; sheng2biao1)

[eng by me]

[star-anise]

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

[beatrice-otter]

Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)

[star-anise]

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”

[whatevercomestomymind]

Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.

[eric-coldfire]

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

[star-anise]

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

Modern India

[wowsyri]

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.

[thevampiremarie]

Before the Spanish showed up and WRECKED OUR SHIT, precolonial Filipinos all wore skirts, dresses, and/or loincloths. It is much easier to weave a single piece of fabric, or a single tube of fabric, than it is to weave the fabric, pattern the fabric, cut the fabric, and sew the fabric into breeches. Why would you do that unless you had a practical reason to?

There were occasional examples of what looks like breeches in the Boxer Codex, a late 16th century Spanish manuscript that contains illustrated examples of the attire of the various ethnic groups in and around the Philippines, (along with ethnic groups from other Asian countries), but irl most likely those were just malong/patadyong (a garment that is a tube of fabric) tucked and tied to create breeches.

Please enjoy the below illustrations.

(There is a critical lack of mention of hanfu, yukata, or hanbok on this post. I only have the expertise to cover hanfu, but I don’t have the strength, spoons, or enough expertise to feel comfortable handling that so I’m hoping a hanfu expert can weigh in!)

[theribthatgrewback]

opposite of "came back wrong." they came back exactly the same, but it's been so long and you've changed so much that you are now the one that's wrong. you want so badly to resume what you had, but your newly jagged edges no longer fit with their smooth lines. they can't even recognize you anymore.

[phantomrose96]

"The conman who's lying to and underpaying his 14-year-old employee is the moral compass of the whole series" makes it sound like Mob Psycho 100 is so universally filled with amoral characters that a conman ranks as the most ethical.

This is not true. Mob Psycho 100 is full of many moral characters. It's just that the conman who's lying to his 14-year-old employee is such a unique and brand-new type of fictional guy that he achieves being a liar and a conman and a moral compass all at the same time with absolute consistency and zero contradiction.

[soaringsparrows]

#he will happily lie through his teeth to tell you exactly what you need to hear to fix your life and he will do it again #he will own up to his mistakes and apologize to you live on television while being grilled about psychic powers he's pretending to have #he will go along with being mistaken as the boss of your world-domination organization and also call u a fucking loser for kidnapping kids #he will lie every step of the way to his customers but he won't take payment unless he believes he actually provided value #he is underpaying a 14-year-old #Reigen the man that you are

[raisinchallah]

ok enough regular fujoshi media we need to investigate how writing about men fucking is actually proxy sex between women we need a story about two womens increasingly codependent and toxic online friendship built on writing slash fiction together escalating to doing sex roleplay on instant messengers pretending to be their favorite ship to get better at writing so they can really embody the mind of the characters obviously and talking one of the women thru her divorce and their weird emotionally blurred and toxic friendship as the more talented friend keeps leveraging her popularity and control over a major fanfic site in the fandom to keep control over the rapidly deteriorating friendship and they have weird phone sex and one of them realizes they are gay for real and gets a girlfriend whos jealous of how much time shes spending online and the friendship eventually explodes and one of them goes on to get published and the other woman shows up at her book signing and its the first time they have ever seen each other face to face but only one of them knows who the other is

[meiniilh]

Xie Lian: I can't believe that my former Guoshi is actually an ancient immortal from a fallen kingdom, who hid his true name, background and basically everything the entire time, has been a heavenly official before, didn't die like I thought he had, and has now returned in the most unexpected manner, first making me believe that he's my enemy, only for there to be a crazy twist and suprise villain! *sigh* I guess I never really knew him after all...

Lang Qianqiu: Huh I wonder how that feels

[olgasaysso]

The apothecary diaries made me realize something very interesting about how women perceive power...

I can't be the only one who noticed that in stories written by women power is often compared to a prison or a cage meanwhile in the ones written by men it's mostly fun and freedom.

It is that women tend to see power as more of an responsibility and men think of it as the ability to do whatever they want?

The apothecary diaries made me think of it first. I discovered with surprise that I actually like the emperor, which I almost never do. Any guy that has relationship with more than one woman at once tends to disgust me, especially if he's in a position of power but for some reason not him.

Because the emperor is as much a prisoner as the 2000 women in the rear palace. Maybe even more because as long as he doesn't touch them, they're allowed to leave.

Like on one hand, he's the most powerful man in the empire. He calls the shots, right?

But on the other hand, he can't even properly protect Lishu from being sold to some pedofile by her father. The only way he could protect her was to make her his concubine and how f*cked up is that? She's like a daughter to him and the only way he could protect her was by marrying her? And then he couldn't even spend time with her anymore because that would be read wrong.

It's the fact that 3 of his children died because there was no proper medic to save them due to the fact that they don't allow non eunuchs to treat them and forbid women practicing medicine... when he doesn't even care about that. He hasn't blinked once at Maomao running around the inner palace and being a doctor.

At first when I was watching the story I thought of how horrible it was that he didn't even visit Lady Lihua after their son died. But then it made me think of how he's literally not allowed to get attached because of his position and how hard it is for him? The fact that he couldn't even provide enough support for Lady Ah-Duo so she doesn't lose her uterus? The fact that she switched their baby with his brother and he had to watch his son grow up "away" from him?

There's so much more to this, especially with Jinshis approach to power and I could go on an on but I think I made my point.

And when I started comparing the stories written by women to those by men... Women tend to write power as more of a burden than a gift.

After watching TAD I watched solo leveling.

And for those of you who don't know, it's basically a story about a guy who suddenly "discovers" that he's like a character in a game (not exactly but it's be too long to explain) and basically finds out that he has endless potential and over the course of the story he becomes the most powerful being in the entire universe.

And there's a moment where he's talking to his little sisters friend that gets very misread as something inappropriate by another character.

This other character points out, kindly, to Sung Jinwoo that the girl is a minor.

Sun Jinwoo doesn't understand so he just looks at him and asks "so?".

And so the guy immediately gets scared and never mentions it again despite the two of them being friends.

This moment is kind of played for laughs. Nothing actually happened, Sung Jinwoo is a good guy so he wouldn't.

But he could. Nobody could do anything to stop him.

And when I watched that I laughed too. But then I thought of how terrifying that is. To have someone be so above the law, this untouchable. Who can do anything he pleases because no one will ever stop him.

But that's never actually adressed in the show other than to show us how cool this is.

It this was written by Natsu Hyūga there'd probably be a million different situations to show us how fucked up this is and how it weighs on the main character.

In the apothecary diaries Jinshi doesn't even want to ask anything directly of Maomao because he doesn't want her to interpret it as an order.

[tanoraqui]

basically I think that if your protagonist doesn’t want to fuck someone so bad it makes them look stupid, then there probably isn’t enough energy in your story. “Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw—they can want to uncover the secrets of their parent’s death, they can want to prove their worth, they can want a donut from one particular bakery—it can be anything so long as they want it so bad that they’ll make decisions that make any sane person go “are you a moron??”, with little to no forethought, or even tons of forethought and this is still the option they chose. Because they want to fuck that thing so bad.

[bigfan1811]

wait isn’t that just giving your characters a motivation???

[tanoraqui]

You’d be surprised at how many people fail to give their characters motivation, and so write a story that’s less good than it could be.

It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?

They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.

Also keep in mind! When it comes to character development, “WANT” is NOT the same as “NEED”! Sometimes a character knows what’s good for them, what will truly often make them happy, but more often they don’t. They want the acclaim and adoration of the crowds, but really they need the recognition, acceptance or love of one particular person—and maybe that person is their own self. They want to avenge the loss of their loved one, but really they need to accept the loss and move on. A refusal to accept what they need is usually going to get in the way of what they want—and sometimes they figure it out just in time to go forward and climactically achieve their goal, or maybe they double down on their character flaws in a classic display of Greek tragedy!