botanical books 🌷🌸

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if i look back, i am lost
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
d e v o n

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Show & Tell

shark vs the universe
No title available
DEAR READER

pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
No title available
Stranger Things

Kaledo Art
Mike Driver
trying on a metaphor
Today's Document

oozey mess

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@lizanthium
botanical books 🌷🌸
A Likeness
by W.S. Merwin
Almost to your birthday and as I am getting dressed alone in the house a button comes off and once I find a needle with an eye big enough for me to thread it and at last have sewed the button on I open an old picture of you who always did such things by magic one photograph found after you died of you at twenty beautiful in a way I would never see for that was nine years before I was born but the picture has faded suddenly spots have marred maybe it is past repair I have only what I remember
Could you personally navigate a cross-country road trip, door to door, without your electronics (phone/computer/tablet/etc)?
Yes
No
every other note on this post is someone going "am i allowed to use paper maps?" yes. obviously. i did not say "without a map", i said without your electronics. And to the like, 20% of people saying "of course, i would simply take the train" that is definitionally not a road trip. i love trains too, but that is a rail trip. a road trip requires taking a trip on the road.
#a train can go on the road if you believe hard enough
casey jones off the shits
less artificial intelligence and more ancestral knowledge please.
Not now kitten, mommy needs to overanalyze a 20 year old Nickelodeon cartoon where the characters wear color-coded clothing.
Thinking about these two scenes in the same thoughts:
Maybe add in the scene where he faces Ozai and actually redirects the lightning after confronting his father for the time he didn't hold back before. Something, something, Zuko meta.
Thesis statement: The popularity of "found family" is a great thing, especially as it celebrates the importance of non-biological, non-romantic relationships. However, an overemphasis on this relationship model can lead us to undervaluing philia in favor of storge, in much the same way that an overemphasis on shipping can lead to undervaluing philia in favor of eros. It can also lead to an erasure of the differences between philia and storge, treating these two types of love as interchangeable instead of celebrating the distinctive aspects of each.
...Yeah, this could definitely be an Entire Literal Essay, actually. This is...not the short version, but it is the shortest I can manage.
So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.
In practice, I think that....even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.
...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??
But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.
(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)
The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.
The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”
Personally, I kinda miss alternative labels like TVTropes’ “True Companions” or “Platonic Life Partners.” Characters don’t need to be spouses or siblings to be important to each other. They can be solely and purely—though not “just!”—friends.
and one last thing about zutara! i’ve recently made a post where i jokingly commend zuko for supporting katara’s murderous intentions in the southern raiders. but i want to push back on something many antis say, which is that zutara functions as some kind of “dark romance” ship where the two “make each other worse” and the usual spiel. the claim that zuko is a traditional “bad boy” in opposition to “good girl” katara has already been disproven a million times, but to dig deeper:
the charm of most straight dark romances is the lack of morality displayed by the male half of the couple. this appeals to people because a protagonist with no moral limit is willing to commit any type of crimes to protect or avenge his love interest. “i’ll burn the world down for you” is the most common dark romance trope. in that type of stories, the woman often functions as a moral compass and she ends up either fixing the man or being corrupted herself. while she’s inherently good, she does not have strong convictions. when the man changes, it is because he loves her, not because she’s successfully redeemed him and changed his views.
zuko and katara can never fit that archetype because zuko and katara have strong, unmovable, righteous morals. even as a villain, there are lines zuko refuses to cross. times and times again, he’s moved to act out of compassion and empathy. not for a woman, not for the Uncle he’s devoted to, but for people and creatures he barely knows. kindness is inherent to him. he’s more than willing to leave mai, the girl he canonically loves, to become a part of the anti-imperialist resistance because his conscience allows him no other path. even in a world where zutara happens, zuko’s redemption would not be kickstarted by his romantic love for katara.
zuko would not “burn the world down” for katara because zuko would not love a woman that asks that of him, and katara would not love a man that would. their sense of justice, their kindness and their willingness to do what is right even when it’s impossibly hard is what would ultimately draw them together.
"At last came the golden month of the wild folk-- honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the dawning year."
Samuel Scoville Jr. "Wild Folk"
Happy 100th birthday David Attenborough, you absolute bloody legend 💖💖💖💖💖
Yeah, remember when Aang and Zuko were stuck in goop in The Firebending Masters?
No one says this didn't happen 🙃
(speech bubbles written out under the cut)
aang being tophs first friend is so important to me. someone who wants to be her true unapologetic self but has been misunderstood and underestimated her whole life by those around her meets a genuine and kind hearted individual who sees her for who she is and wants to be her friends because he likes the real her so she decides to drop the life she’s always known to help him on a journey all across the world
Do you have an Assigned Animal™ (including extinct or mythical ones) that dominates the gifts people give you/your decor/etc.?
Yes, I have an Assigned Animal™ (owls, koalas, unicorns, dinosaurs, etc.)
No, but I've been assigned something else (fandom, color, plant, etc.).
I have more than one Thing (ex: koalas AND purple AND cacti)
BB what the fuck are you talking about
To Know the Dark
by Wendell Berry
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Zutara Reverse Bang 2026 SIGN - UPS
Okay, zutara friends, sign-ups for this year's Reverse Bang are HERE and they are LIVE until MAY 2ND. Invites will be send MAY 3RD.
Sign-up Form Rules and Guidelines Event Calendar
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Schuyler Peck, Worth the Wait