Imaginary Dame

[m0rbs]

I’m watching atla and this is my first impression

[autijacen]

Your first impression is the best sum-up of Zuko and Iroh ever.

[alphacrone]

Leverage | Sophie Devereaux & Eliot Spencer

[depsidase]

[quasi-normalcy]

Sometimes I think about how Esme Weatherwax desperately wanted to be the evil twin, but the logic of narrative causality constrained her to be good after Lilly turned evil.

[kshaar]

#and she hates it#she hates it so godsdamned much#she’ll do it but christ alive#and iirc when she finds out that lily didn’t try to have *fun* being evil she absolutely snaps#which kills me because it’s like ‘i had to become your narrative foil and you didn’t even have fun???’#‘i would be ruling the world if i was the evil twin and you didn’t even have fun?????’#‘what the hell were you doing it for if not for fun??? get down here i’ll maul you’ (via @thestuffedalligator)

[quasi-normalcy]

Even worse, Lilly was convinced that she was the good one.

[roach-works]

weatherwax family trait: no fun allowed

[leagueofaveragefolk]

"average witch has fun" factoid actualy just statistical error. average witch has 0 fun per year. Nanny Ogg, who is currently blasted on scumble & is leading a sing-along about the delights of buggery, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[yourplayersaidwhat]

“Paladins are dumb and gay.”

“You’re playing a Paladin.”

“She has 8 intelligence and a wife, my point stands.”

[yourplayersaidwhat]

(Trying to explain the domains of dread to a new player)

“One day, Strahd did a real big fucky-wucky—”

[nunchler]

every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that's beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats

[prismatic-bell]

I forget who told me this, but when I was doing research for James Bond fanfiction I found out the OG book character (born in the 1920s), and therefore also the Connery version, would have been a very good knitter. He was an unmarried orphan who was also a naval commander before he became a secret agent, and when on assignment he would 100% have been mending his own clothing. This is doubly true because he served during WWII—aka Ration City.

There’s a certain kind of fanboy that’s all weird and fetishistic about how Connery!Bond was a “REAL man” and all other Bond actors are inferior because they’re feminized or something, and there is nothing I love more, fandom-wise, than informing these weird proto-redpillers that not only does their hero know how to knit, Sean Connery was ALSO in the navy during WWII, SO HE DID TOO.

[jraker4]

Heh, only vaguely related but in the matter of gender role subversion tied to the British Royal Navy, one of the small recurring themes in the Aubrey-Maturin series was that, when Aubrey was ashore for any length of time and especially when he had money enough to keep his closest subordinates with them, they would be the domestic servants for his family. And keep house and mend garments and such to the standards of a taut Royal Navy Post-Captain of the Napoleonic Wars...which generally meant as mercilessly clean a house and as neatly-mended garments as the very best any female domestic staff could offer. Funny to learn that Connery had a tie-in in a small way to a similar tradition, heh.

[lilithsaintcrow]

“What this means is that the entire 2023 Hugo scandal is something completely different from what we've understood it as during the last month.”

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelat

[neil-gaiman]

Read the link.

[armengoldira]

When a bartender becomes a father

[brightlotusmoon]

[cerullos]

ever think about how beauty and the beast was one big very intentional metaphor for gayness

[dollargenesis]

christine what

[cerullos]

howard ashman was a gay man and he was the composer & lyricist for batb. he finished it right before he died of AIDS, and it was dedicated to him. & alan menken who worked with him on the score said that the film was heavily influenced by his experiences/perspectives. he was already sick when he started work on it (which is why he had to be accommodated in that respect and write in new york, because he couldn’t be moved) and he knew he was going to die and that it would be his last work. honestly! there’s so much self-identification in it, biographers in a lot of the articles i’ve read (this one is good) talk a lot about how he had to conceal his gayness to pursue his career successfully. the entire movie is about like…people who are ostracized and isolated, and it’s all about belle showing the beast that he has humanity and he has worth and he’s not the image the townspeople project onto him. and his lyrics in almost every song! like: “it’s a pity and a sin, she doesn’t quite fit in” / “say a prayer, then we’re there at the drawbridge of a castle and there’s something truly terrible inside” / “grab your sword! grab your bow! praise the lord and here we go! we don’t like what we don’t understand. in fact it scares us” and for context this is all on the tail-end of the AIDS crisis when gay men everywhere are dying because nationally their health isn’t considered a priority, and ashman is about to be one of them…it’s so personal, there’s no way it isn’t imo! 

[vampirezigzagoon]

An academic by the name of Sean Griffin talks about this in his book on Disney and queer theory, Tinkerbelles and Evil Queens. You’ve mentioned most of it here, but Griffin comments on something else worthy of note: the symbolism of the rose, which parallels impending death and oblivion. Wilting day by day, petal by petal, it mirrors the immune systems of those suffering from AIDS during the 1980s/early 90s. The Beast has a limited amount of time to find love and happiness or he will forever be entombed by his condition. Although he is revived by some magical force, he closes his eyes in death right as the last petal falls. 

Griffin mentions the state of the castle’s west wing in conjunction with health decline. The painting of his former self is damaged by his own anger, embarrassment, shame, and loneliness. 

Griffin quotes the academic Cynthia Erb, “The visual contrast made between the deteriorated form of the Beast and the painting of him as a beautiful young man possibly sets up a stereotypical opposition between ugliness and beauty … but in this context the ugliness/beauty dyad also supports a tension, crucial to the film’s AIDS allegory, between the issue of having health or not having it" (Erb qtd. in Griffin 134).

Griffin also mentions how “The Mob Song” serves as “a parallel to AIDS panic that many individuals, as well as religious and political groups, expressed during this press of the disease.”

Source: Tinkerbelles and Evil Queens, Sean Griffin.

If The Little Mermaid echoes the coming out process, familial discord, and first romantic pursuits of the gay man, Beauty and the Beast corresponds to his possible subsequent experiences. During the AIDS crisis, this concerned the fear of sickness and/or impending death.

[reasonandempathy]

Y’all are fucking idiots if you think a thousand year old fairy tale is a pro-gay message.

[noelleian-deactivated20190923]

It’s not a thousand years old. It started with Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1695-1755) though it has some parallels with The Brothers Grimm The Singing Springing Lark. 

Still, obviously it far predates the birth of the gay rights movement and the AIDS epidemic. Y’all reaching like whoa lol.

[cerullos]

im not talking about the original story i’m talking about disney’s adaptation and lyrics and narrative choices that are specific to it. y’all know that but you just had to come on my post and bore us all anyway. 

ur right tho, historically speaking gays weren’t Out There in the big wide world in the 18th century…we actually all came into being simultaneously when ellen aired in 1994, before then we didn’t exist! good catch

[simonalkenmayer]

I hate to tel you this but most fairy tales are absolutely about the issues of the day, and those issues have to do with bigotry of all kinds. So yes, the monster in the forest? Almost always a metaphor for the outsider. That witch in the woods? Almost always humans trying to distance themselves from caring for the elderly or women in general.

[breelandwalker]

Fairy tales and folklore aren’t pro-queer, my ASS.

There is LITERALLY a Romanian fairy tale about a princess who spends an entire quest in disguise as a man called Fet-Fruners and then is turned into a man thanks to a hermit’s spell. The hermit intended it as a curse, but the newly-minted man rejoices, since he now feels he is as he was always meant to be. And I quote:

The hermit followed at their heels, but seeing it was impossible to overtake the thief, he fell on his knees and called his most deadly curse down on her head, praying that if the thief was a man, he might become a woman; and if she was a woman, that she might become a man. In either case he thought that the punishment would be severe.

But punishments are things about which people do not always agree, and when the princess suddenly felt she was really the man she had pretended to be, she was delighted, and if the hermit had only been within reach she would have thanked him from her heart.

Fet-Fruners ends up marrying the emperor’s daughter and by all accounts, they live happily ever after. It’s called The Girl Who Pretended To Be A Boy, originally published in Sept Contes Roumains and later collected by Andrew Lang in The Violet Fairy Book.

“The Little Mermaid” is literally about Hans Christian Anderson pining for a male friend who he was in love with who ended up marrying a woman.

And don’t even get me started on Greek mythology.

Queer people, trans people, and gender non-conforming people have always existed, and folklore clearly reflects that. If the modern queer community is finding themes in these stories they can identify with, it’s hardly a reach.

[francescointoppa]

Croco napoletano (Crocus neapolitanus (Ker Gawl.) Loisel., Iridaceae)

[yourplayersaidwhat]

In a mindflayer lair, coming across a sphincter door that the DM is struggling to describe

Player: Is it yonic?

DM: I don't know what that means

Player: Pussy-like

DM: Oh, no, but you're on the right track

[sentimentalslut]

your honor my client should be at the club

[sentimentalslut]

i know what you’re thinking. ‘thank god this tumblr user isn’t an actual licensed attorney’. well bad news kids

[sentimentalslut]

[maxknightley]

personally, even ignoring any other implications of the "cozy" / "wholesome" Marketing Label, I'm averse to them because they suggest you couldn't think of any better reason to play your video game.

[maxknightley]

you know when people talk about how the villagers in Animal Crossing used to be more rude and demanding, and it was frustrating at times, but it gave the whole thing a lot of character? and now they're all just sort of Generically Pleasant, even the ones that are nominally supposed to be kind of standoffish? that's where I'm at on "wholesome" games. you don't have to be edgy but for the love of god don't be edgeless. don't be twee.

[maxknightley]

thinking about the Moomin books and how they're stories about cute, silly cartoon animals that are also very aware of loneliness and longing. thinking about the way "Ghibli films" are often reduced to Well Rendered Anime Food and Pretty Meadows when people post about them, because the actual stories and characterizations aren't as GIF-able or easy to generalize. thinking about Recettear, a fun and cute little shop simulator where the core concept is "if you fall behind on your bills you are ruined. you are a child and you will be completely ruined."

there have to be ideas. you know? there have to be ideas.

[animalyears]

My brother and I have this thing where sometimes we forget that we live with our parents and we’ll say “my lawyer has advised me not to finish this joke/anecdote” to stop from saying something untoward in front of them and the other day we were talking about sandwiches and fluffernutters came up and I started to say “fluffernutter? I don’t even know her!” But my dad leaned over and goes your lawyer is advising you not to finish this joke at the dinner table” and it was really funny

[t00thpasteface]

got told at lunch "you feel like Tumblr Incarnate" and i had to tell them i've been here for 13 years and counting. i was here three years before dashcon happened. i saw the mishapocalypse. i survived the gigapause. i've been here longer than the shoelaces post. i've been here since it was hipsters versus fandom and i played both sides extensively by overdoing the sepia filters on everything and making my own flashing galaxy gif edits for my fandom posts. i'm every tumblr. it's all in me

[dovelylittlebird]

Oh ancient one what wisdom do you hold?

[t00thpasteface]

99% of callout posts are bullshit and just petty personal drama someone is escalating to get even on a grudge. do not engage with these, do not freelance as a cop

DNIs do not work. accept this. internalize that people you don't like will see your posts and engage with them. this is unavoidable and the sooner you make peace with it the freer your mind will be. block the freaks and don't sweat the small stuff

building a tight knit circle of fellow weirdos who vibe with your particular quirks and taste is infinitely more rewarding and sustainable than chasing the biggest numbers

don't respond to bad-faith arguments or bad takes; just block people, blacklist tags, filter post content, and move on. don't feed the trolls (or the bigots)

don't hate-follow

don't tag your hate (ex. if you're posting about how much you hate a ship, don't tag it as that ship, etc.)

don't feel obligated to keep following someone who posts stuff that upsets/depresses/angers/bores you just because you know them really well, or because you're mutuals, or because you used to like what they post. following is nothing personal and neither is unfollowing

op doesn't know you; avoid parasocial relationships

don't pick fights or reblog posts just to disagree/argue

spread joy and positivity in your circles

disable anonymous asks

[charliejaneanders]

This is some of the best social media advice (and advice for being a human among humans generally) I've ever seen.

[neil-gaiman]

All of this. For people asking how I've survived here for over 12 years...

[everythingfox]

To be an otter swimming in a river