Fandom Things And Where To Find Them

Kyanne. 29. US. Music teacher and Pharmacy Technician. Constant reader, currently obsessed with SJM and Sherrilyn Kenyon. Anime fan. Super awkward and quiet

[stuckinapril]

sometimes life is overwhelming and sometimes a girl needs to wade through her books and swim deeper into her books and submerge herself in her books because they're breadcrumbs guiding the way back to land

[paulthebukkit]

missing babe so much right now

you’ve saved me so much weapon durability in botw and i want to u to know u were appreciated

u cut my trees

u kaboom’d my bokos

i love u

[mayasaura]

I don't wanna further hijack that poor poll, but the thing about Harrow's schizophrenia is that it's canon. The author has confirmed it, and shared that it's based on her own experience.

It's a pretty obscure bit of canon, so of course there's no shame in not already knowing, but that's why I'm so obnoxiously persistent about letting people know.

Whatever else is up with Harrow, autism or cptsd or any number of likely headcanons, she is also schizophrenic. I feel like that's too important to be handwaved away as a difference of opinion.

[sockdrawerdemon]

It's also in the afterword/author's note of Harrow, iirc. So not explicitly in the story, but in the book at least. Harrow has schizophrenia, but at least on the Ninth, almost no healthcare and absolutely no mental healthcare to provide any kind of language or understanding of her condition.

The 201 ghosts are certainly complicating factors.

[mayasaura]

It sure is heavily implied in the acknowledgements of Harrow the Ninth!

[sarsaparillaswords]

If anyone is looking for the author’s confirmation that Harrow has schizophrenia, specifically, it apparently happened at a panel at Boskone and someone tweeted about it:

https://twitter.com/saltyseaghost/status/1495099655637684224

[mayasaura]

I know of one written interview where she talks about it, too:

Ciara: Something that stands out about your books is how bizarre yet honest and authentic they feel on a very deep level. It doesn’t feel like you write for anyone but yourself while trusting that those who will love it will find it. In a time where it feels like marginalised authors are more tokenised than ever, and often boxed in by expectations of ‘minority stories’ (whether they be about women, lesbians, mental illness or anything else), how do you stay true to yourself and your vision? Tamsyn: It’s very difficult. There are people who talk about Harrow in terms that are fundamentally thoughtless and unsympathetic to mental illness, and the tragic thing is that I know a lot of people who discuss it would probably rather eat their feet than say something hurtful, but because Harrow doesn’t flag itself up as a story about the mentally ill they have no idea what they’re doing. They almost need those flags to remind themselves to be kind. There are other people who have dealt with that particular brand of mental illness and one or two of them have reached out to me and gone ‘This is the first time I’ve seen this, I understood it immediately,’ and it’s wonderful, it will carry me through to the rest of my life. I didn’t intend Harrow to be a compliance test or a gotcha, it’s just interesting to me how some people talk about the book in terms that make me feel tired. But I knew that going in! When I wrote about this topic I had to write a very long letter to my editor coming out of that particular closet, and he and my publisher were wonderful about it but I knew it would happen. I just wishing anticipating it would take away the sting.

[ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her]

Also also, you don't even need to look to Word of God or authorial intent or any of that, it is in the text! When Crux thinks Nona is Harrow, he asks her about her mental state, about her delusions and hallucinations, confirming that Harrow's account of her history of schizophrenic symptoms to Ortus in the River bubble aren't a product of her being haunted - it is an actual genuine account of her life up to that point, one that Crux corroborates. Her schizophrenia is textual!

[theotherwesley]

(forgive me for adding a long personal anecdote, but this post comes to me two days after finishing HIXth and it is so intensely relevant to my recent experiences that I feel like I gotta, if only for myself. All I can say is: that person quoted saying "I recognized it immediately"? INDEED. That.)

As a diversely mentally ill person who has been, of late, extremely, excruciatingly, unprecedentedly, more in the shit than usual-- experiencing hallucinations, fractured personality, inability to sleep, being trapped in looping mental rehearsals and arguments that I have no ability to shut off, having dead and/or illusory people keeping me company, feeling perpetually on the precipice of a cataclysm that will tear me apart, having night terrors and hallucinations of being violently dismembered or ground up, only to be put back together seamlessly so it can happen all over again, completely unsure at times whether I am real or if only I am real or if nothing is real, and otherwise being stuck in a non-linear horror show of fractally repeating grief and heartbreak,-- DECIDING TO FINALLY READ HARROW THE NINTH FELT SOMETHING LIKE THIS:

I kept reading lines that felt not just autobiographical but *prescient*; stuff I was not only going through while I was reading, but also stuff that I then experienced afterwards almost exactly as written. It was like it was narrating the exact landscape of my brain back at me. Which might as well happen, I guess.

Anyway it was very surreal, and strangely comforting; during this time where I've been feeling trapped and alone and invisible it looked me right in the eyes and shook my hand, and that's a hell of a profound thing for a book to do for someone.

[janerogan]

sometimes i get this deep, overwhelming yearning to reread all the locked tomb books but its a lie. i dont want to reread them. i want to eat them, i want to pour them down my throat, i want to blast them into my brain in a mesmorising 3 second speed run where i go through every single emotion and then instantly experience a small death (yes) and then continue on with my day. you know? anyway,

[milliebobbyflay]

paired with their often intimate and violent subject matter, i find the incidental way tamsyn muir frames women and their bodies throughout the locked tomb series to be refreshing bordering on radical

consider harrowhark; in the first book we see her as gideon sees her. she's a hideous ghoul with a flat ass and no tits, she's a delicate sopping wet beauty with a sharp face and angel bow lips, she's a triumphant and awe inspiring master necromancer screaming and fighting drenched in her own blood. the shape and condition of her body is allowed to take on meaning contextually based entirely on the situation and how gideon feels about their relationship in any given moment

she then spends the second book hobbling around with a sword twice her size, ripping apart her body to use as a weapon and passing out in her own vomit, struggling to eat and sleep – she and puts herself through absolute hell and never once thinks anything of it, and we're made to mourn this not as the desecration of a beautiful woman but as a manifestation of a human being's despair and self loathing, and we see this specifically contrasted against the care gideon tries to take when inhabiting her body during the last act

it's jarring, in nona, when we're suddenly made aware that her body could be perceived or valued as a commodity, when pyrrha is assumed to be nona's pimp. it feels strange and horrifying when we learn alecto's form was modeled for a doll, learn that she was given a woman's body as a display of ownership, an alternative to being consumed, and as we're processing this we watch gideon, paul, and ianthe, immediately setting aside their conflict in a desperate scramble to preserve harrow's body for no reason other than because it is harrow's and they love her

feminist fiction often focuses on women's relationship to a body which is valued more than the person within it – and that is a worthy experience to explore – but as a transsexual butch(ish) dyke, i have never really had the privilege of seeing my body as a precious commodity, never felt like it couldn't or shouldn't be a sight of violence and disgust, and as a result the locked tomb books have made me feel seen in a way that few other works of fiction have?

we as an audience are not made aware of how attractive any character would be outside of the context of our lesbian POV characters' perspectives, their relationship to patriarchal beauty standards is an utterly irrelevant detail we're never told and only occasionally glimpse through implication. the women in the locked tomb books are simply free to exist, to have experiences and feelings, to love and hate and grieve and suffer and die like anybody else, and to have those experiences reflected in their physical vessels

it's a perspective that's so fundamental and obvious that to praise muir for it for it feels almost patronizing, but i also think it's a huge part of what's made the series so resonant for so many queer women and i feel that that's worthy of highlighting and celebrating

[boneapptheteef]

[thecollectibles]

Art by James Zapata

[2impostors]

genesis 🌏

[bevsi]

corona & ianthe 

[babinforaelin]

“A vision of bold, striding through the trees, the queen and the wolf.” - SJM, Kingdom of Ash

I finally got round to (kind of) finishing this work from ages ago. Hope you enjoy xx

[somarysueme]

Reblog to put John Gaius in a microwave on low so you can watch him rotate until he explodes and then when he reconstitutes watch him sigh deeply like “was that REALLY necessary” but you both know it absolutely was.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

the most unrealistic thing about traditional fantasy as a genre is that if a bitchy little wizard came up to me with a "you are the Chosen One (chosen to perform free heroic labor)" spiel i'd send that cunt packing and return to my personal mundane-but-containing-wifi-and-lacking-deadly-peril timeline, thank-ye-very-much.

and yet, if the selfsame message was delivered by a talking cat? absolute and automatic acquiescence, no questions asked

[princealigorna]

Want to make a contract?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I HAVE NEVER SO INSTANTLY REGRETTED A POST

[thatsthat24]

I’d rather skip that step 💬

[phantomrose96]

Wait I’m reading today’s Dracula while drying my hair and this is EXTREMELY funny.

Jonathan’s like “I was shaving with my shaving mirror when the Count came up behind me and startled me. I was startled because he had no reflection in the mirror, which I double- triple-checked and was definitely very weird for a grown man to not show up in a mirror, I think we can all agree. His surprise caused me to cut myself, and when the Count noticed he was overcome with demonic bloodlust and tried to seize my throat, but the crucifix that crazy peasant woman gave me held him back. Also very weird.

“Dracula then said ‘hey FUCK mirrors’ and grabbed my little shaving mirror and hurled it out the window where it shattered into a thousand pieces. This was very annoying. Now how am I going to shave?”

[soc-ck]

The Queen of Nothing

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

i KNOW most of y’all are lying about being in the gifted program as children because none of you could pass the basic reading comprehension assessment they give third graders today

[themself]

this post is mean and I never read divergent or whatever the fuck but 1984 sucks and is rape apologism so if somebody wanted to write about divergent or whatever good for them

[westenra]

this reply is like literally exactly what op is talking about lol. like firstly ops point isn’t “1984 is good”, ops point is that analysing complex stories teaches you how to form opinions and think for yourself. and like secondly in 1984 you’re supposed to think damn it’s fucked up that he’s thinking that way about her, i wonder if this ties in with the central theme of “a society like this will fuck you in the head”? (this is the thinking for yourself part). like do you think orwell just put that in for fun? do you think that just because winston is the protagonist you’re supposed to agree with everything he does?

[lunaescribe]

You know I feel like this post just gave me an epiphany for what is wrong with how Tumblr Fandom/Internet Fandom responds to media-or not *wrong* but makes it very hard to respond to anything but a morally correct, and heroic protagonist. 

When an English teacher, or reader, taught or picked up 1984, it wasn’t with the intention they were going to love the protagonist. They picked it up with the intention of reading a whole story and trying to grasp the theme or catharsis from the story. If the protagonist was a *shitty* person it played into the the themes or the story, because it wasn’t about morally judging the book or *liking* or feeling attachment to the protagonist. Sometimes and often times, books were just about gaining another perspective. 

No one read Lolita expecting to endear, or like, or be inspired by Humbert. You are supposed to be upset by his behavior, you don’t read Lolita with the intention of being inspired. You read it to learn more about what the fuck is going on inside someone’s head when they behave like that. How children get sucked into abusive situations. Or read “The Great Gatsby” not because they want to fall in love with Gatsby or Nick, but to better understand and analyze the experience of the 1920s or destitution of the American Dream. 

A lot of internet and fandom culture has changed that though. When we say something like “I love the Great Gatsby” it comes with the idea or association that means you must *love* or relate to one of the characters. And maybe you do, but the first assumption is not longer about the quality of the work or themes, or cathartic impact-it’s about character admiration. And with that character admiration, in tumblr stan culture, or kin culture, or exalting characters with fanart/romance/so on you don’t just ‘admire’ or find that character ‘compelling’ it now translates to ‘you LOVE that character’ or you ‘DIRECTLY relate to that character.’ 

You can’t say “I love how Humbert is written, it’s so fascinating and dark”, without it directly translating you somehow relate to a child abuser or condone his actions. Taking in media has become an act of worship and connection. We no longer watch meant to just see the story as a whole, we watch expecting to connect to a character and if we offer them our “worship” as it’s become, as opposed to just attention or interest study as it traditionally was, it means we are condoning the character or saying we directly empathize with all their actions. 

I think that’s why there is often now so much fuss over *toxic* characters or not. Or whether that classical novel is showing good or bad things anymore. We’re treating the characters as people we should love or want to draw or write about. Sometimes a story is just about getting the the theme or catharsis or learning another perspective. We don’t NEED to like the character. Or we don’t HAVE to like a character to be impressed by how they’re written or intrigued by their behavior. 

I think if internet culture could learn to view stories as small insights into other lives or single takes of one perspective instead of purposeful moral inspirations we’d be a lot less worried about how toxic or not toxic they are. 

[gwynrielism]

the pretty priestess ♡︎ ( art by @mftfernandez )

The priestess had been pretty in the library, but with that joy, that confidence as she aimed for the three priestesses, she had emerged into a beauty to rival Merrill or Mor.