Woodville Women Don't Talk to Rivers

Aca-fan. Medievalist. Early Modernist. Lots of Shakespeare and Game of Thrones to be found here.

[melrosing]

there’s a certain section of fandom who reallyyy remind me of johnlock conspiracists not even bc what they propose is as outlandish as that but bc the fervour w which they seek out dissenters and try to shut them down just reeks of insecurity

[melusineloriginale]

For those of you with a JSTOR subscription, there is an excellent article about Johnlock conspiracists and how they work.

You can also read part of it on GoogleBooks (starting on p. 82).

I've talked about it a little in relation to the ASOIAF fandom, but EJ Nielsen is the one who deserves credit for articulating it first.

[puppybong]

let’s listen to mama

[sourcreammachine]

[whentherewerebicycles]

ok my other thought—after reading those first paragraphs of bleak house—is that I think a lot of popular contemporary fiction (Colleen Hoover and Emily Henry and the popular romantasy series etc) do not use difficult figurative language at all. the style makes no demands on the reader and often does not even really try to evoke a sense of atmosphere in the way the bleak house opening does. descriptions communicate the basic facts of setting and action. I reblogged a post about this a while back but I think even more “literary” contemporary fiction tends to skew increasingly towards a movie-like style with a lot of rapidfire dialogue, pared back descriptions, and not much interiority. this feels VERY marked when I go back to my fave British and Irish novels of the 1920s-50s and I’m like wow even popular middlebrow fiction of the time (which would’ve been regarded as not very literary) cultivates a rich sense of its characters’ interiority and uses figurative language that expects the reader to be able to fluidly navigate unexpected associative leaps. AND ALSO I feel like older fiction isn’t afraid of a slower pace where the writer really takes their time building up that sense of place and atmosphere, whereas contemporary fiction is much more likely to plunge you directly into action. the students reading the bleak house opening might not even recognize that this kind of slow establishing of place, context, and mood is something that literature can do or does.

[melusineloriginale]

Okay, going to make actual suggestions here. Try The Count of Monte-Cristo. Seriously. It is a banger that just happens to have been written 1844-46. If you read French, try the original.

It's more fast-paced than Bleak House but has loads of characters and is in translation, which adds an extra layer of complexity. Also it is the template for easily half the superhero origin stories out there. Is it Orientalist? Yes. More than a little. But it's no worse than its contemporaries.

I am also a huge fan of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but that might just be my weirdo brain. If you want shorter, check out A Christmas Carol. Yes, that one. I'm serious. It is legitimately creepy and a good ghost story!

Sick of white men? Well, Alexandre Dumas was a biracial Black man.

Sick of men? Try Dorothy Dunnett, who clearly read a lot of Dumas at a formative period. Most people seem to prefer The Lymond Chronicles but House of Niccolò has my heart. If medieval England is your thing, check out Sharon Kay Penman; for medieval France, I know of Maurice Druon, but please chime in if you know of something more modern (e.g. nicer to women).

Want fantasy elements? Check out Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint or Jacqueline Carey's Kushielverse (the OG romantasy as far as I'm concerned). Both feature prominent queer plotlines as well. Look up Tanith Lee or Nghi Vo or Chloe Gong.

The point is that there is so much excellent fiction out there. Don't limit yourself through artificial categories. Also, in case anyone wants to check me, I have a PhD in literature.

[apolladay]

Have you ever shot a gun?

Yes, at a target

Yes, at an animal

Yes, at a person

Yes, at something else

No, but I have held a gun

No, I have never touched a gun

Voting ended onMay 21, 2025

[sandersstudies]

When I was growing up and complained something sucked and was difficult (school, paperwork, etiquette rules, etc.) a lot of the time adults told me “noooo no it’s not difficult! It’s easy if you put your mind to it.” Or maybe a kinder “nooooo don’t say that, you can do it!”

And setting aside the fact that I had executive function issues I wasn’t aware of at the time, I think what I usually needed to hear was “yeah. yeah it does suck and it is difficult. but it’s important that you do it anyway.”

Like yeah in the moment it WAS difficult to learn my multiplication tables or to get college scholarships or to apply for jobs. It DID suck a lot but I did learn to do math, and go to college, and get a job. And I just wish somebody had told me that’s how it would feel to look back — not like “that was actually easy and fun once I tried it,” but to say “wow, that sucked. but I did it and I’m glad I did.”

[sandersstudies]

Has a teen in my audition workshop yesterday burst into tears and say “I’m just so scared” and I almost said “no, it’s not scary!” But I caught myself because that’s literally a lie and I said “Yeah auditioning can be scary - I’ve been doing it over twenty years and I still get really nervous. It is normal to be scared but I want you to do it anyway —you are safe from judgement here and our goal is for you to feel less scared by the end, even if it’s not possible for you to feel unscared.” And it worked! She composed herself with us for a few minutes and tried again and she did it!

[lama-gaza0]

Hello, my name is Lama, and I am from Gaza City, specifically in the northern Gaza Strip. I grew up in a loving family of resilience and hope, with my parents working tirelessly to provide us with a life of dignity and opportunity. My father was our steadfast provider, and my mother was the heart of our home. I have two brothers and three sisters, the youngest of whom is just six months old. She is frail and often sick due to the lack of proper food and medicine. My siblings and I have shared dreams of education, careers and a bright future. But life in Gaza is marked by hardship, and when the war began, everything we had built was shattered. My older brother, a kind and a courageous soul, was martyred while trying to secure basic necessities for our survival, my younger sister was gravely injured, and the cost of her treatment weighs more than the universe to us, now the responsibility for my family has fallen on my shoulders.

Help Lama in the North

Hello, my name is Lama, and I am from Gaza City, specifically in the northern Gaza Strip. I grew up in a loving family of resilience and hop

Our home, once filled with warmth, laughter and memories, has been reduced to rubble. We have been displaced more than thirty times from place to a place with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Each time we returned, we found more destruction, we always clung to the hope of rebuilding, but in the last attack, our home was completely destroyed, we are now homeless, living in unsafe conditions with no shelter to protect us from the cold nights. The loss of our home is not just the loss of a building, it’s the loss of safety, stability, and the place where our dreams were nurtured.

With my father unemployed since the beginning of the war, we have no income to provide even the most basic necessities. Water, food, medicine, warm clothes and blankets-things that many take for granted-are beyond our reach. Every day is a battle for survival, and every night is a reminder of the dangers and struggles we face. I am determined to care for family and give my younger brothers and sisters a chance to grow up with hope. But I cannot do it alone.

I am reaching out to you with a plea for compassion and action. Your support can help us rebuild our lives, restore hope, and secure a future where my family can live in peace and safety. Every donation, no matter how small brings us closer to survival and dignity. Please for the sake of god and humanity, help us in this time of desperate need.

[lama-gaza3]

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #510 )✅️

[bonivers]

this this this

[gholateg]

It's rage inducing, because we've HAD short run series with huge fandoms before, because they took the time to let the shows marinate in the fandom space, giving us time to question and theorize and fucking do art, and fics and get in slap fights over where the plot was going.

Arcane would be fucking CANDY to this Hellsite on par with Doctor Who, If they had spaced out the episodes and let it run for three months.

The 9th doctor had 13 fucking episodes. THIRTEEN.

Bingeing is supposed to be for people who want to wait. the show itself can't GROW an audience if the audience is watching it all at once.

[re-jet-irony]

The episode ends, on a cliffhanger, or even if not, it leaves you wanting more. But there won't be more until next week. So you rush to your computer to get your fill online, discussing ideas, squeeing over the good, talking fanfic an and what ifs and searching art...talking to people, making friends maybe, even more excited for next week's episode and what it may bring...

With binging, there's a bit of a high at the end, some squeeing and art, but there's no theories because it's over, or discussion will only last so long between seasons because the show didn't really marinate in the brain the right way, and the gap will make you lose enthusiasm as you are encouraged to binge something else in the meantime.

It's created this...flighty feeling in fandom, and why some people don't even seem to care about characters beyond shipping or surface level representation: they're only in fandom for so long, because the new method is to watch it all and move on.

[tgirl-thucydides]

[petermorwood]

Mail shorts (proper name, "mail brayette") go round the front as well, so the crossbowman probably got them himself on the grounds that he had something he wanted to protect.

I hope they worked better there than at the rear, where he's got an arrow in one cheek and another in the thigh. Um... Ouch?

[shakespeaker]

Who are the Anti-Stratfordians?

People who think Shakespeare wasn’t actually Shakespeare, but that ‘Shakespeare’ was a secret pseudonym for someone more important and better educated, like the Earl of Oxford. 

See also: imbeciles.

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

This

[thebookishgurl]

Not to piss anyone off, but why does this matter? The author is literally (and possibly metaphorically) dead.

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

I feel like I have to address this. I tried not to, but I actually think it’s really important. Most of the people who make the argument that ‘Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare’ are doing so on the basis that the real William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon simply didn’t have the literary wherewithal to have written what are now the most famous plays in the English (or possibly any) language. They like to argue that because Shakespeare’s family wasn’t particularly wealthy or influential, and that he never got more than the Elizabethan equivalent of a grade school education, he couldn’t possibly be as well-read or as eloquent as the person who wrote Hamlet, or Macbeth, or what have you. 

The reason Stratfordians are so vehemently defensive of Shakespeare as himself is because (a) there’s literally no proof that he wasn’t exactly who we think he was and (b) we believe that it’s entirely possible that a man who was nominally ordinary became the world’s most famous playwright. If you take that away from him, you are doing the world a huge disservice, by reinforcing the idea that in order to have a significant impact on the course of history, you have to be wealthy or politically powerful or socially superior. I for one want to be able to tell any struggling middle school kid with average grades not to give up, because passion is more important than money or power, and he or she could be the next Shakespeare. 

So, that’s why it matters. 

[engrprof]

^^^This^^^

[melusineloriginale]

Yes. All of this. The Oxfordian authorship theory is rooted in classist, elitist attitudes that insist that a glovemaker’s son from Stratford-on-Avon who never left England couldn’t possibly have written 37 plays based simply on extensive reading and a great deal of imagination.

Also they have no conception of what “grammar school” actually means. A grammar school education in the sixteenth century usually included extensive study of rhetoric, philosophy, and history. Ben Jonson claimed that Shakespeare’s Latin was mediocre and his Greek nonexistent, but there were a wide variety of classical texts available in English translation during his lifetime and we can clearly see echoes of those translations in Shakespeare’s works.

Lastly, the Oxfordian theory is rooted in an 18th century forgery popularized by a man named Looney (pronounced Loh-ney, but WHATEVER). The best book I’ve seen on the subject is Contested Will by James Shapiro, which is marvellous and snarky and everyone should read it.

[melusineloriginale]

So, ten years out, just wanted to add to this post that I've written an open-access article about the early history of Shakespeare fans that has an entire section dunking on anti-Stratfordians.

[nymphoutofwater]

Here's remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)

Anthony and Cleopatra: ~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017

As You Like It: ~ At Wolfe Park - 2013 ~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006

Coriolanus: ~ NYET Alumni - 2016 ~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014 ~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011

Cymbelline: ~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014

Hamlet: ~ David Tennant - 2009 ~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000 ~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989 ~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990 ~ Broadway - 1964 ~ Christopher Plummer - 1964 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948

Henry IV: ~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989 ~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017

Henry V: ~ The BBC's - 1990 ~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944

Julius Caesar: ~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1979 ~ John Gielgud - 1970

King Lear: ~ The RSC's - 2008 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1983 ~ The BBC's - 1975 ~ James Earl Jones - 1974 ~ Orson Wells - 1953

Love's Labour's Lost: ~ Calvin University - 2016

Macbeth: ~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017 ~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969 ~ Sean Connery - 1961

Measure for Measure: ~ Hugo Weaving - 2019 ~ The BBC's - 1990

The Merchant of Venice: ~ Al Pacino - 2004 ~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001 ~ The BBC's - 1980 ~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973

The Merry Wives of Windsor: ~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982

A Midsummer Night's Dream: ~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019 ~ City of Columbus's - 2018 ~ The Globe's - 2013 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986

Much Ado About Nothing: ~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019 ~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993 ~ The BBC's - 1984

Othello: ~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990

Richard II: ~ David Tennant - 2013 ~ Deborah Warner's - 1997 ~ The BBC's - 1978

Richard III: ~ Ian McKellen - 1995 ~ Laurence Olivier - 1955

Romeo and Juliet: ~ Simon Godwin's - 2021 ~ The BBC's - 1988 ~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954

The Taming of the Shrew: ~ Ontario production? ~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976 ~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967 ~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929

The Tempest: ~ Gregory Doran's - 2017 ~ The BBC's - 1988

Timon of Athens: ~ Barry Avrich's - 2024

Troilus and Cressida: ~ Audio Production ~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016

Titus Andronicus: ~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999

Twelfth night: ~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015 ~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970

Two Gentlemen of Verona: ~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018 ~ The BBC's

The Winter's Tale: ~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)

Bonuses:

Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)

Rock Opera Hamlet???

Shakespeare animated tales

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy

From the original post:

A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.

Russian Hamlet here

Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Hamlet retelling.

Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.

This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.

The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!

Here's the 1948 one,

the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there

A Lego adaptation of Othello here.

Here's commentary on David Tennant's Richard II

[weirwoodking]

i’m gonna scream and bite something

[greyhairedgeekgirl]

On Fandoms, Age, and Gender: The Politics of “ Putting Away Childish Things”

Weighing in on yet another round of “fan spaces are youth spaces” (aka “go home and knit, old lady” or “You’re old enough to be my/someone’s mom! gross!” )

Consider these thoughts:

There’s a whole set of interests and behaviors that you might become interested in as you grow from child to adolescent to young adult and take greater interest in the wider world.

You might like horses, or dolls.  Or building models.  You might play soccer, or follow baseball every summer and learn about  box scores.   You might follow the college football draft, or love a pop band.  You might deeply admire a rock band and learn to play the guitar.  You might love superheroes and see all their movies.  You might love space opera and collect paperback books.  Maybe you collect trading cards of your favorite team players – or movie moments.  You probably get t-shirts and posters of teams, or media outlets.  You might get deeply into a social or political cause.

Those are all expressions of interest in the world, all with associated social aspects, many with associated creative actions. 

And then you get older.  And here’s the thing about that list.  The things on that list that are “for boys?”   Are also “for men.”   But the things on that list that are “for girls” or “for nerds?” Are only “for children.”  

Adult men wear brightly colored team clothing and paint their faces without shame.   They join fantasy football leagues and hang out online.   They follow Phish (or continuously talk about how they did when that was a thing).  They spend vast sums on tickets to bowl games.   They get excited all over the internet about Geddy Lee’s greatest hits.  They spend long afternoons on the golf course, playing very bad golf.

No one tells them to grow up 

An adult woman who turns a childhood dollhouse into a beautiful scale model of a real Victorian home is “eccentric.”  An adult man who builds a vast HO train layout in his basement is a “train enthusiast.”   An adult woman who displays her favorite Bryer horses is “odd,” an adult man with a shelf of signed baseballs is “a collector” or even “an investor.” 

Adult women making fanart of attractive movie stars is “creepy,’ while adult men decorating their garages with calendar art of scantily-clad very-young women is “just what guys do.”

Interests and hobbies that were feminine and are taken up by men become acceptable.   When The Beatles were greeted with mobs of fainting teen girls, they were a “boy band.”  When young men discovered them, they became Serious Musicians.  

Over and over, across fields of interest, things that girls like are “toys and games and childish” and should be left behind by adults, while things that boys like are “hobbies and sports” that are lifetime pastimes.  And acceptable “hobbies” for adult women?   Most are things that could be coded as household chores, but generations of women have worked to turn into enjoyable pastimes:  knitting, sewing, quilting.  Home decor.  Baking.   Many adult women (myself included) enjoy doing those things in their free time and have elevated them to art forms.  But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re rooted in utility, while “men’s hobbies” are, by and large, rooted in leisure.

Look around you and follow the pattern.  And then, before you ask “Why are adult women in fan spaces,” maybe ask “why do I feel like adult women don’t get to have fun?” 

[aliciavikander]

THE GREEN KNIGHT dir. by David Lowery

[cundtcake]

[melusineloriginale]

Why is it so hard to find your stuff in the actual tumblr app? It’s awfully designed. You should have your own site separated from tumblr. Your writing is so much funnier and historically accurate. Although Gregory did make me interested to research the real history and she writes in an entertaining manner. I’m not part of that academic community so I don’t know if she claims accuracy vs entertainmentI don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in a long while....I know not really am ask..but suggestion.

That’s kind of you to say! Those posts are pretty old, so I can guess why they’re a bit difficult to find.

I do have a somewhat more professional blog at Wordpress and I have been meaning to repost them there, but that requires finding all the gifs again, and that’s proven to be a bit of a challenge. Maybe soon.

Sadly, PGregs does have a habit of claiming her novels are in some way accurate. I wrote a book chapter about fan responses to TWQ, and there’s a tweet of hers on p. 145 that made me headdesk hard.

[blacklinguist]

yes i am an academic & hate academia

yes we exist 

[dreamingofbabylon]

no one likes academia, people just want to study moss or teach the youth about the history of illuminated manuscripts but the only way to get paid for it is to deal with a bunch of red tape and administrative paperwork bullshit. why do you think every professor is a lunatic

[shredsandpatches]

Some years back, a person I was lj friends with posted some meta in response to that year’s histories ficathon entries about her disapproval of the fandom’s general portrayal of John of Gaunt – she preferred a more Anya Seton-like portrayal, although I don’t think she’d actually read Anya Seton – and how it was a sign of lazy (American) writing to focus on daddy issues so much. I wasn’t really bothered about it, even though it was definitely about my own writing, among a few others. Then I sort of did the math mentally and realized that the fics she was critiquing were mostly the work of a small handful of people, like, maybe five at the most, and it upset me a lot more after that.*

And I guess that is the same thing that bothers me about this. Richard II is a microfandom. There are a lot of fics on AO3 for a Shakespeare play (264, posted over about a decade), and some of that is because of small-fandom exchanges like Yuletide or one-off fics inspired by productions with beloved celebrities in the title role, but a lot of the existing fic has been produced by a small handful of people; if you look over the AO3 tag you’ll see a lot of names recur over and over. And the article isn’t really about fan works as it is about fan culture: about what she thinks we see in Richard II and how we supposedly conflate celebrity and text because of our particular identifications. She cites at least one conversational (non-fic) tumblr post, for instance. And it feels personal in a way that an article about a big fandom probably wouldn’t (although I wouldn’t know, I’ve never done anything in a big fandom that would draw the attention of fan studies). Like “these five or ten or a dozen people fetishize skinny posh white British men, they stan a tyrannical king, they write fic about Ben Whishaw’s and Eddie Redmayne’s Richards but not Adjoa Andoh’s” (even though the latter production wasn’t available on film until this spring, when the book would have been in press already).** Maybe I’m just taking shit personally again, but it feels like the article is passing judgment on a small group of people as representative of Fandom as a Whole.

I dunno. I know there has been at least some writing on the ethics of doing fandom studies? Like, I don’t feel that microfandoms should be off-limits for analysis, necessarily, and maybe I’m just put out for being called out on being soft on imperialism when cute boys do it or whatever, but I also feel like a few of us are being singled out in a high-profile publication (the collection this is in is an Arden volume) and it just makes me want to crawl into a hole.

*The same person made a yuletide request that year for fic about Gaunt and Katherine Swynford and felt the need to specify in her letter not to use the prompt as an excuse to write about Richard II, which also stung, although I was probably taking it unduly personally, and it was definitely a reminder of how I probably come off to other people, but, like, I wouldn’t do that, if I were assigned to write for her! Which I wouldn’t be because I wouldn’t offer to write Gaunt/Katherine Swynford fic in the first place, but never mind. **The article discusses Redmayne’s Richard II as if it inspired a lot of fic; I have only ever seen one fic that cited it directly as inspiration. While photos of the production are seen fairly regularly on tumblr, it has not had an appreciable impact on fic, because it was a stage production that was not filmed, and most of the regular writers in this fandom do not have regular access to stage productions in London unless they are filmed. And, like, I know racism in fandom is A Thing and maybe we should write more fic about Adjoa Andoh’s Richard, but that’s only been a meaningful possibility for a short time

[melusineloriginale]

I have already ranted about this nonsense to @shredsandpatches elsewhere but I’ll do the capsule version here.

Yes, there ARE discussions happening about ethics of fan studies research. I recommend this piece (alas, it is paywalled and I’m away from my computer that has a PDF copy) as well as the special issue of Transformative Works & Cultures that is open-access. Unfortunately, I know from personal experience that this particular scholar does not read a lot of fan studies scholarship. I know this because she has used my work without attribution and claimed the ideas as her own. She is tenured, and therefore she gets away with it.

I absolutely agree that she is misrepresenting a very small niche fandom and that actual interaction with the fan authors in question would have fixed many of the issues in her article. This is why, when I research fan communities, I always ask permission before citing a particular fanwork. I ask authors if they will give me permission to use their work, I ask how they wish to be cited (pronouns, pseudonym or legal name), and I ask if there is anything they want me to know about the story that isn’t evident from the author’s notes or the story itself. This, to me, seems like basic courtesy, and I advocate for it (with my co-author) in Chapter 2 of this book, published last year.

[levourdalak]

How DARE

The Green Knight sweetie I'm so sorry

[melusineloriginale]

NOOOOO.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses

The Sword in the Stone

Sword of the Valiant (which is TERRIBLE, don’t get me wrong, but hilariously so)

And if you want a Macbeth, I recommend this one instead. Stellar cast, and introduction by yours truly.