Mostly Fandom Reposts @iamveryantisocial - Tumblr Blog

Posts

#our flag means death

#ofmd

#izzy hands

executiveespressodepresso-deact

Will: Your pronouns are about to be “was/were” if you don’t shut the fuck up

fromstarstuff

Quotes from The Starless Sea that I like just because

“Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.”

“For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.”

“Be brave. Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel.”

“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the page become so precious that they feel like a part of your own history because they are.”

“He had always wanted to be in the place but he didn’t understand until he was finally there that the place was merely a way to get to the person and now he has lost them both.”

“He has a sword and he is in a cavern beneath a lost city somewhere in the vicinity of the Starless Sea and he has lost track of Fate and he cannot see but he still believes, dammit.”

“We are all stardust and stories.”

“They are gods with lost myths, writing themselves new ones.”

“Why would you fear that which guides you?”

“This is where we leave them, in a long-awaited kiss upon the Starless Sea, tangled in salvation and desire and obsolete cartography.”

“Once, long ago, Time fell in love with Fate.”

And of course, my personal favorite, “You will pry this Adventure Time notebook from my cold dead hands, ya ding-dong.”

cassandraclare

Hi Cassie, ever since I started reading your Shadowhunters books I've loved the world you created and I'm amazed at how you manage to build it out more and more with every book you write. Do you have any tips or tricks regarding worldbuilding? How did you go about creating this amazing world?

I could write a whole book about world-building — in fact, there are lots of books about it! Every book, even contemporary fiction, requires world-building: you are always creating a sense of place, time, and character in a story, which is essentially what world-building is.

Obviously fantasy has specific elements of world-building that other genres don’t have, so that’s what I’ll talk about — briefly — here. These are a few steps you need to consider when you’re building a fantasy world, be it an open world or a closed one.

1) What’s your normal?

You’re always going to establish what the norm is in your world before you do anything else. You don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty, but set your basic ground rules. Is there magic? If so, what’s the cost of magic? (Power is never free — it always costs in effort, knowledge, body parts, etc.) Does everyone know about magic (in which case yours is an open fantasy world)? Is it a secret (closed fantasy world)? What’s your time period? Tech level?* What are the major antagonists of your world? What are the biggest dangers? And finally, what’s the main thing your character wants? That may seem like character work, but it’s intrinsic to world-building. If your character wants above all other things to be King, for instance, then you know you have a monarchy.

*Remember Clarke’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In other words, you can usually have magic or super-advanced technology, but not both, because they do the exact same thing in a story. Location spells are pointless if you have GPS tracking devices implanted in everyone. If you are going to have both, you have to figure out how what they do is different. Otherwise you are giving Spiderman the power of flight, thus rendering his web-slinging useless. So give it thought!

2) Make your rules.

Otherwise known as internal consistency. Our world is governed by natural laws that determine what people can and cannot do. A world you make up must be the same. What if only some people can do magic? Then you have to figure out who they are, why they can do magic, what rules govern the practice of that magic, how the rest of the population feels about them, and what that magic is based on. While you don’t need to — and shouldn’t — explain every detail of these rules on-page, your characters have to abide by them. We need to believe these are real people who are governed by an internally consistent set of strictures that shape and define their behavior. If your main characters live in a walled city that closes at night, show us that by having them worry about getting back before the gates shut.

3) Break your rules.

Half the reason you established your normal is so you can fuck with it. Stories are about conflict. They’re about the moment things go wrong, not about things going right. They’re about things suddenly not conforming to expectations. If you have a land ruled by a benevolent King everyone adores, assassinate him. (Even better if your main character does it.) If you have a world where women can’t do magic, you need a badass sorceress to rise. If parabatai can’t fall in love, make sure two of them do. If Shadowhunters are the descendants of angels, what happens when one is a descendent of demons? Once you build your world, your first question should be, What is this story going to do to change it?

4) Everything hews to a theme.

Think about the thematic implications of your world. If you’re building a low-tech, high-nature faerie world, think about the way not having tech, and having nature magic fill a lot of those uses, will influence the way the characters talk, the expressions they use, what they wear (nothing with zippers, nothing mass-produced) the way they live their day-to-day lives (alas, no flush toilets). For instance, the thematic character of the Shadowhunters books is defined by the overarching mythology of angels and demons. Seraph blades, which have to be activated by speaking an angel’s name, hew to that theme. Everything the Shadowhunter characters do is defined by their belief that they have angel blood (or fear they have demon blood.) Whenever I build new mythology into the Shadowhunter world, I have to think “Does this fit with who the Shadowhunters think they are, their priorities, beliefs and history? Is this something that could or would happen in this complex, small, militaristic society?”

It can help to think of it as an aesthetic, as if you were putting together a house. Does this piece go, or does it clash with everything?

5) Small details.

Little pieces that feel unique and true help build out a world. Rather than spending your time detailing the entire history of the Royal Family for a thousand years, create a room in the palace where the faces of royal enemies are dried, stretched and mounted in glass. Now we know the Royal Family is creepy, which is more interesting than knowing everyone’s grandparents’ names. Stuff that isn’t momentous is fine if it’s interesting. Random stuff I know about Castellane, the city in Sword Catcher: interior light comes from carcel-lamps, dentures are made from the teeth of dead soldiers, the Queen loves kalamansi fruit, and if you fall in the bay, a crocodile will eat you. Think of the big world-building details — names of countries, the type of religion, the way magic works — as the walls, beams, and floors of your house. The small details are your paint, wallpaper and furniture. One is a structure; the other is the sense and character of that structure.

There’s a lot more to say about world-building, and I’m always happy to answer writing questions. It offers me an amazing opportunity to procrastinate. :) Good luck!

ghostresidues

did i ever tell u all that when i was 15 i went on a school trip to see romeo and juliet at the globe but my teacher didn’t realise until after he’d booked it that it was a ~sexy~ version with bdsm in it

ghostresidues

ok people wanted the whole story here are the most Memorable Moments™️

•the production made a lot of people very very angry and the reviews were calling it ‘a desecration of shakespeare’ , other people said it was akin to vandalism

•a warning letter had to be sent home to parents because it was too late to cancel the booking

•all the teachers there looked like they wanted to die cause we were 13-15 years old lmaoo

•the play opened with really aggressive confetti cannons and in the centre of the stage there was this really muscled guy wearing almost nothing and there were four women in essentially lingerie just.. gyrating over him

•this had nothing to do with the plot by the way it was just there

•we’re only five minutes in and i think the teachers were considering evacuating us

•romeo’s dad is in an inflatable dinosaur costume for an entire scene.. no context was given

•i’ve blocked the actual sex scene out of my memory

•i might have imagined this but in the masked ball scene i swear someone was in full bdsm gear i SWEAR

•mercutio was played by a woman and just started stripping during a monologue which was an Experience

•lots and lots of twerking from background actors

•romeo was just dressed like an emo the whole time

rollingstoneboycomplex

when Lemony Snicket wrote “I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you everyday” that hurt me

heavensickness

Full paragraph hurts even more.

“ (…) I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close… I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else and I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all. That is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

foxmagpie

That’s not even the full quote.

“Always. Continuously. With increasing apprehension, and decreasing hope.

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in blurry, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table.

I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as a starfish loves a coral reef and as a kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fettuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza.

I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. i will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey.

I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and as an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of people who talk too much. I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself and as a pair of white gloves loves to slip delicately into the punchbowl. I will love you as the taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock.

I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house.

I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear daggerproof tunics, and as a daggerproof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home.

I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguished and until every home is rebuilt form the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen.

I will love you until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V.

I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try.

I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.

I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively.

I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog.

I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this.

I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

ihaventpaidtaxessince2011-deact

top 10 preminger moments

kazjazzhandsbrekker-deactivated

Give me Sixth year Slytherins helping Draco in subtle ways

Give me Pansy Parkinson starting rumors about other students to take attention from Draco, so people are too busy talking about other things to notice how sick he looks

Give me Blaise Zabini always doing his prefect rounds near Myrtle’s bathroom, to keep other Prefects away in case Draco’s in there

Give me Theodore Nott finishing Draco’s homework for him when Draco is too stressed/busy to do it himself

Give me Vincent Crabbe casting silencing charms on Draco’s bed at night, in case he forgets and wakes up screaming

Give me Gregory Goyle taking food from the Great Hall and giving it to Draco in the Room of Requirement when Draco is too busy to eat

Give me Slytherins who know not to ask what Draco’s task is, because they know he can’t tell. Give me Slytherins who don’t comment on Draco’s long silences.

Give me Slytherins subtly helping Draco in Sixth year

sadlonelyhufflepuff

Do you ever think about how brave James and Lily must have been? They were both only 19 when Harry was born, who was most likely not planned. They were fresh out of Hogwarts, fighting for their lives in a war that had already claimed the lives of so many of their classmates. On top of general parenting worries they had to deal with the fact that Harry was most likely going to grow up in a war-torn country in constant danger. And then the prophecy comes and they are forced into hiding and they still become the warm hearted and loving parents we know them as. They gave their lives to protect Harry, not just Lily, but both of them. James and Lily Potter were some of the best parents in the series, and their parenting was a leading cause in the end of both of the wizarding wars.

sadlonelyhufflepuff

Draco Malfoy Headcanons

Draco, being the upper class pureblood he is, grew up being tutored on a variety of subjects

Often he is heard sneering crude comments at Harry in german because even though nobody can understand him, it makes him sound more cultured

He’s a decent piano player, but due to the lack of a respectable music program at Hogwarts he was never given the chance to flaunt his skills

It wasn’t until his forth year that his tutelage became useful

A great deal of time is spent flirting with the ladies and gentlemen of Beauxbatons in french, resulting in many smitten students

And of course the Yule ball gave him the chance to show off his vast repertoire of dances, he spends most of the night dancing everything from the Argentine Tango to the Bolero

Sometimes he can be heard singing beautifully in the shower, but the other slytherins learn quickly to never mention it

straightgirls

susiethemoderator

OH MY GOD.

earthnicity

“I was 14, I didn’t know what I was doing.”

whaT THE FUCK

yourrealityruinedmylife

iamveryantisocial

This is the greatest video I have ever watched.

incorrecttdaquotes

Like, don’t get me wrong it’s frustrating as hell but there’s just something so hilarious about the fact that Cassandra Clare refuses to make Will and Jem’s bisexuality canon. CC really said “I want to leave this aspect of the characters ~ambiguous~. If you chose to interpret this five page monologue Will does about the color of Jem’s eyes as gay then that’s your perogative 🤷‍♀️” like girl WHAT

thebitchforjemcarstairs

I think it’s because she doesn’t want to pull a JKRowling on us. CC is clear about it, she did not state that they were bi in TID, so she won’t say it now when the series is over. At least she is not queerbaiting us.

incorrecttdaquotes

I think some of y’all confused on what queerbaiting is aljsljzlajs

tikkunolamorgtfo

The thing that really irritates me about all of this bullshit with J.K. Rowling is that I see broke, stressed out college students writing fics for $0 who are painstakingly seeking out sensitivity readers to beta stories that only a small subset of a fandom will ever read, whereas Rowling, who has all the goddamn money in the world, is basically just looking up world mythology stubs on wikipedia and calling it a fucking day.

She could literally afford have a university’s entire critical diversity studies faculty on retainer just for kicks if she wanted, but won’t make even the slightest effort to do better.

iamveryantisocial

AMEN