Dreaming of thunderstorms

[ajaxgb]

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

[cipheramnesia]

I still think about one random person I was messaging who got really defensive because I said I didn't think it was hugely likely that David Cronenberg was queer. Not out of the question because he's fairly private, more that he's over 80 and has been making feature films for 50 years, which is kind of like spending 50 years with the biggest concentration of nosy gossipers on the planet. I think there'd have been at least the hint of a whisper of a rumor or something. Like anything is possible but it mostly doesn't seem like his own life concerns his films, a few exceptions to the side. He's a person who makes very strange films who in all other ways expresses himself as otherwise conventional. It's a rare case but I would almost say Cronenberg being trans or queer would be less interesting, because that would almost immediately consume the interpretation of his work. A straight, cis man digging so deep into themes that are easily relatable to the queer and trans in ways that feel unfettered by social niceties, being personally disdainful of social and political proscriptions against sexuality and the body is to me fascinating because if he gets it, and hasn't got anything personal invested as far as sexuality and gender go, that means it's like. Anyone can get it.

Cronenberg is like the metric I hold everyone else to. The guy who seems to have struggled zero amount to accept fundamental human equity and the flexibility to allow for widely ranging lives experiences. He's just some fucking guy, and if someone is blowing a gasket over trans lives, I look at Cronenberg who's position was just quiet positivity and I know. I know the person flipping out is the fucked one, the deviation. Being fine and undisturbed by people who are different from yourself is the baseline. Screaming and rage over differences is a thing people choose, or let happen. I love his films, I hope he never turns out to be anything but bland as fuck.

[garashir]

hey friends where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag?

[lesbiansforboromir]

Couldn’t find it so I made another because you’re right that it’s a crime and it’s definitely my duty to remedy it

[storm-of-feathers]

yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.

[storm-of-feathers]

I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.

[makingqueerhistory]

Womonspace News: Our Voice in the Lesbian Community: Aug 1995

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[monokuromatic]

School assignment was about playing with the formatting of text while writing so I did what I always do and made it about living with anxiety and depression baybeeeeeeee

Anyway now I have something to show people who are blessed enough to not deal with this and maybe they’ll get it!!!!

[josilverdragon]

"The horrors persist but so do libraries, books, iced coffee, sunsets, trees, the word 'fuck', the moon and the sea."

[dragon-in-a-fez]

said this as part of a larger point in a reblog but I'm gonna make it its own post:

humans have the right to do things that are mildly bad for us sometimes.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

you have the right to eat way too many pierogi and make yourself a little sick. you have the right to go skydiving. you have the right to pull an all-nighter building the Imperial City of Tamriel in Minecraft. you have the right to get drunk in your living room watching football.

life is not about making the safest most logically correct choice at all times. you're a blob of salty meat piloting a flesh mech and you get to act like it.

[problemnyatic]

This is called dignity of risk and it's a big topic in disability rights spaces. id elaborate but im fuckin wiped

[fedorahead]

it's always funny how people will advocate for bodily autonomy when it comes to certain things but then shy away from anything they personally wouldn't do to their own body. like yeah, that's why it's your body buddy. i can do what i want with mine.

[str-ngeloop]

refusing to apply first aid to the wound because "it shouldn't have happened in the first place, so what we really should be doing is making sure no one gets stabbed ever again"

[str-ngeloop]

your insistence on bandaging this wound is ultimately just you running interference for all the stabbers of the world and that's honestly really shitty of you

[thestrawberrydreams]

Inclusive language is for everyone!!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Their boyfriend is their partner why is this hard to understand

[korben600]

Also, “partner” is just a good word? It implies an equal relationship where both of your work together in pursuit of something, whether that be life goals or just having fun together.

It’s a good word. People should use it more.

[transgender-rex]

[imsodishy]

One thing about the Hollander men; if you hit them with a social situation they don't know how to react to, they will straight up leave ✌️

call that the Hollander Goodbye

[penandinkprincess]

thoughts and prayers to ilya, who is marrying into a family of flight risks 🙏

[sweetshirebones]

Ilya, some indeterminate time in the future, chasing after their toddler whose instinct is to do a runner the moment everyone starts standing too long, thus perfecting the Hollander Goodbye early: wow…genetic

[iirulancorrino]

Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez

[northstareclipse]

As someone who has overcome substance abuse, I find this decade’s framing of addiction incredibly insulting.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

We deserve better language. We deserve distinctions. We deserve a culture that can tell the difference between compulsion and preference, between harm and habit, between numbing out and nourishing ourselves. Not everything that holds our attention is a disorder. Not everything pleasurable is a vice. And not everything repetitive is an addiction.

[magicmooshka]

someone here needs to be butch!

inspired by alisaall-comic’s medieval-esque take on this redraw trend!

og under cut

[magicmooshka]

oooohh you wan t to draw this in your culture’s attire so bad~

[gladosisalesbian]

something that I feel like is missing from fandom nowadays is the idea that you dont have to have a unified, chronologically/tonally consistent interpretation of your favorite work. your fics dont have to fit within the same version of canon, even if theyre all canon-compliant on their own. your headcanons can contradict each other. be a multishipper. write metas that take two totally different interpretations of the same plot point. write a character as a villain and then write them as the hero next time. write a character as a lesbian and then write them as straight next time! engage in hypotheticals and drop them when you get bored! make up the rules as you go!! have fun with it!!!

[monidoll]

its kinda hard to celebrate trans day of visibility because the visibility we're getting lately is like

[yet-another-heathen]

[yet-another-heathen]

[rikaklassen]

Image description #1: The Eye of Sauron from The Lord the Ring movie trilogy. Image description #2: Same as above but with a silhouette of flipping the bird with the middle finger. Image description #3: Re-edited to accompany five middle fingers.