Never's Remedy

[tumblr]

💞 Ships Week Fanart: #1 – #20 💞

It’s the final day of ships week and we’re celebrating the top 20 ships on Tumblr with some homegrown fanart. Please enjoy these artful depictions of the art of shipping!

@furbetii:

@officialspec:

@cinnabarfangs:

@bobbibitybob:

@the-everlasting-ash:

@polartss:

@sylairaa-commsopen:

@marz-rm:

@pbeeanjay:

@skipppppy:

@simplytomh:

@l00106:

@rainbowcryptid:

@yvainart:

@maersiel:

@shinkomiii:

@dyleeart:

@chimneyz:

@leon-donovan:

Thanks for joining us for Ships Week! If you don't want it to be over yet, come hang out and chat about yr faves on the tag: #ships week 2026 <3

[l00106]

holy shit thats my superbat art on a billboard 😭 i just noticed that now NOW

[l00106]

superbat x secretary 2002

[lenbryant]

Women in Shakespeare

[orangebitters]

Also like to point out that when her mother says “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid,” (translation: I had you when I was your age) you have to remember her father’s words: “earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” (translation: all the other children died.)  The whole plot point of Juliet being an only child is explained by her mother being a Margaret Beaufort type who had her first child too young and it damaged her past the point of being able to bear more children.

[beatrice-otter]

Margaret Beaufort died in 1509. She was a major player in the Wars of the Roses, the swirling on-again-off-again civil wars that consumed England from 1455-1487. Romeo and Juliet was written and first performed in the early 1590s. Your average English person of Shakespeare’s day would probably have had at least a vague understanding of who she was and what happened to her, because she was a key figure in recent history and was still getting passed around as a cautionary tale.

There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.

The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.

You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.

Shakespeare is telling us “yeah, this is fucked up. but even if you’re the kind of awful person who doesn’t think girls marrying too young is morally wrong, it’s also a problem for practical and dynastic reasons, don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

[stalker-among-the-stars]

Interesting

[i-fear-neither-death-nor-pain]

It bears repeating:

don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

[sarahthecoat]

yes, excellent discussion!

another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)

i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?

art history matters.

[rowanhorserider]

I've been thinking about this play a lot lately. I really wanna highlight that Lord Capulet asks Paris to wait and get to know her, and to woo her, while Tybalt lives. While Tybalt is alive, Juliet has something of a reprieve, and her wellbeing as his only child matters more to Capulet. But once Tybalt has died, the gloves come off. Lord Capulet was worried about his daughter's wellbeing when he felt he had the space to care, but as soon as his dynasty is at stake, as soon as this becomes larger than Juliet's happiness, his consideration for her health and mental wellbeing get thrown away. Which also is due in part to the fact that Capulet's family is implicated in a brawl that has left several dead after the Prince's family EXPLICITLY told the Capulets and Montagues to stop fighting or face dire consequences, AND Capulet is trying to align himself with the Prince's family by marrying Juliet off to County Paris, a relative of the Prince. So to Lord Capulet, it is now less important that Juliet is happy, and more important than he reminds the Prince of his loyalty via this marriage and aligns his family with the Prince's before it's too late. And he believes this must be done, at any cost...until Juliet kills herself. And that's when he realises the devastating cost of treating his family as chess pieces. He realises his wrongdoing far too late.

Seriously Romeo and Juliet is HEAVY on the dynastic politics, and I think you can't fully understand the play without understanding how that all works, especially because the impact of dynastic marriages on women and girls is like. THE POINT of the play

[need-him-pregnant-poll]

NEED👏THAT👏MAN👏PREGNANT *SEASON TWO* ROUND 1 POLL 98

TUMBLR! Who's getting pregnant?

Zhongli (Genshin Impact)

Benjamin Sisko (Star Trek)

Voting ended onFeb 16

PROPAGANDA:

[Zhongli]

"To fill out that thin slutty slutty waist."

[Benjamin]

"This man is a FATHER! He is a great dad to his own son and also to literally any child he comes across (including his own crew). Every time this man holds a baby an angel gets its wings. If Sisko could get pregnant, I honestly think he would. The fact that this man was not submitted for the first tournament was honestly criminal."

[itssjanedoe]

[s-h-a-s-e]

[goodfriendo]

i wonder what they're gossiping about

[jmawork]

had to draw them

[jadeseadragon]

[lectorel]

Let's not cooperate with mama

[moonsheen]

Always lovely to see how universal the experience of getting a very unwilling and strong minded toddler into the car seat can be.

[neversremedy]

Trying to get my youngest up for school and out to the bus on time.

[homunculus-argument]

Vanilla is the third most expensive spice in the world, right after saffron and mahlab, and people use it as a term to describe things that are okay, but mild, default, and boring.

Also, Saffron Sex sounds like the artist name of a nepo baby artist who has a spectacularly outrageous fashion sense but whose music is tragically dogshit.

[homunculus-argument]

The whole "merry christmas vs happy holidays" discourse feels so weird to me because it frames all mid-winter holidays as the same. Not in a "christian holidays are supposed to be superior" kind of way, but in implying that whatever other religious or cultural holidays happen at the same time are, or should be, as big of a deal to those who celebrate them as christmas is to christians.

Having never lived in a country that wasn't christian majority, I can't say I have any idea how it actually feels to live in a place where your cultural religious background is a fraction minority, but I assume it'd somewhat feel the same like living somewhere where everyone celebrates Diwali and it's A Big Fucking Deal, and them feeling like you're not being included when you mention that you don't really do anything for the major holiday, and quickly googling what christians are up to for the same time, and going "oh and also happy dead saints day for the christians" as a trying-to-be-considerate afterthought.

And it would feel far too petty and ungrateful to mention that I was raised protestant and we don't really do saints, so this has never been a major holiday to me ever, but it would feel kind of patronising despite of that. But the fuck do I know, as I said I've never been there.

[riddle-master]

I always took 'happy holidays' just to mean 'happy time off work' because even though not everyone celebrates christmas or another religious/cultural day, most people here at least celebrate new years, but most definitely almost all people do get time off work or school.

So more holiday in the meaning of vacation, rather than religious day.

[homunculus-argument]

There needs to be a better way of saying "enjoy having a breather while the christians are distracted."

[chekhovs-raygun]

unfortunately the christians are never distracted

[homunculus-argument]

There needs to be a better way of saying "enjoy having a breather while the christians are too busy with bothering each other to focus on bothering you."

[voidsentprinces]

[crystalis]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[teaboot]

I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”

[homunculus-argument]

When it comes to people you saw once and still sometimes think about, I sometimes recall this one young Romani woman I saw in Helsinki. She was dressed in the traditional finnish Romani costume, with long half-tied hair curled in the way Romani women do, the big gold earrings that nobody else could pull off, a lacy puff-shouldered frilly blouse (very traditional), and a big, bulky, floor-length velvet skirt (very traditional). I would like to stress that so far, nothing I have described is unusual or even remarkable for finnish Roma, this is just how they dress. She just caught my eye because she was remarkably pretty, tall with an absolutely regal posture, and having a playfully dramatic argument with her friend and a Roma man of about her own age (the ladies vs. him, he was losing).

However, the thing I noticed which still lives in my head rent free is the fact that as she moved around, I noticed that under her long, heavy, thick extremely traditional black velvet skirt, she was wearing clear plastic sparkling goddamn glitter stripper heels.

I hope she's still living her best life, wherever she is.

[playwrongs]

In King Ludwig II’s defense, if I had basically infinite discretionary funds, was accountable to absolutely no one, and was king of a country full of picturesque landscapes, you couldn’t stop me from building myself a big gay fairytale castle on a mountaintop either.

[playwrongs]

This post is spreading and I feel bad about it because it contains misinformation, so for the record: Ludwig II did not in fact have infinite discretionary funds. He only acted as if he did. He never dipped into the public coffers for his building projects, but he spent his own fortune extravagantly and borrowed heavily from everyone he could think of. By 1885, the year before his death, he was 14 million marks in debt.

[insomniac-arrest]

~ ✨✨ 14 million marks in debt ✨✨~

[centrally-unplanned]

I always find this inspiring because try to name another prince of a German state. What did the rulers of Hamberg do? The Grand Duchy of Hesse? Gone with the wind, no one knows them anymore. But Mad Lad Ludwig built a top 5 most famous castle in the entire world. Money is fake, castles are real. Go broke and die like a winner.

[the-barefoot-hatter]

EXCUSE ME, this is still wrong. He built 3.

Neuschwanstein, literally the inspo for the castles in Disney's Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella

Hohenschwangau, the practical castle

Linderhof, the final, the smallest, and the MOST fab.

Every room is incredible and the park is beautiful, but shoutout to The Bedroom, the biggest room

The Hall of Mirrors, which he probably wandered by candle light because he was a serious night owl

The Dining Room, with a wishing table that lowers to the kitchen, and rises with a crank, returning magically full of food

The Venus Grotto, constructed for the sole use of Ludwig to larp to his heart's content

A full artificial cave, it features a waterfall, fake stalactites, and a custom-designed swan boat floating on an artificial lake. The first electricity in Bavaria was generated here, to change the colors of the stage lights and to power Ludwig's fountain and wave machine.

Now THAT'S ~ ✨✨ 14 million marks in debt ✨✨~

[marzipanandminutiae]

I love that- and I cannot emphasize this enough -none of this was tax money

the public paid for zero of his fairytale castle hobby

rare European monarch W as far as spending money lavishly goes

[sleepless-cavia]

[mamoswole]

When I tell that I LOVE solarpunk

[powersandplanetaries]

[hunter-rodrigez]

Oh, I remember this, the edit was done by youtuber Waffle to the left.

They didn't just cut out the parts with the oat milk, they skillfully edited over all the god-damn branding and replaced the audio.

But what I still find most hilarious about this whole commercial is the fact that everything they show in this solar punk world seems to be made with sustainable, zero waste and reusable materials.

Everything EXCEPT THE FUCKING CHOBANI BRANDED STUFF! The only plastic you see in this whole commercial is all the straight to the landfill packaging made by the very corporation that tries to sell how sustainable and "green" they are. Unintentional self satire at its finest.

They couldn't even show their yogurt and milk in (basically infinitely reusable) glass containers because they pretty much only sell their shit in plastic

It is such a perfect example of the true face of "green" capitalism, it's hilarious.

[undeadentropy]

The punk in this solarpunk comes from cutting the corporation out of the picture

[eco-socialism]

ALSO

Another really interesting thing about this edit is that they changed the label on the side of the apple-picking machine.

From "donations" to "commons". It's a subtle change, but it makes a huge difference in the world-building of the video. The former implies that this big orchard belongs to an owner and that they're donating the fruits to "the less fortunate" (and, by extension, that poverty is still a thing); the latter implies that the orchard belongs to everyone and that the fruits are free to take in the spirit of solidarity.

Waffle To The Left brought out the potential in this gorgeous video and made it an actual solarpunk utopia — without brands and without corporate pandering, complete with true common ownership over land and resources.

[beggars-opera]

Just lost a few braincells reading an nyt article about gen z "treat culture" and I can't even fathom that this is a thing. We're living in a dystopian hellscape where someone spending $5 a week on a cookie is considered a wasteful brat because they should have just gone for a nice free walk instead and saved the $250 a year that roughly equals four days' rent. That's why these ungrateful kids can't buy a house, naturally.

I am ALL for free treats, like hiking or reading in the park. But at some point you can't budget your way out of poverty, and you will literally go mad if you deny yourself basic pleasures that are literally all around you. They even lamented that little treats could snowball into doing something absolutely unforgivable like learning how to play the guitar or buying concert tickets.

At what point do we just start saying out loud that living an enjoyable and fulfilling life is now only acceptable at a 100k+ salary, and if you're one of the millions of people unlucky enough not to be in that category you should just eat dirt and be grateful?

[sermna]

me, a normal person: I'm going to make a design based on my cat

Her name is Girlfriend <3 <3 <3

[nongunktional]

when i first heard about the male loneliness epidemic i was like oh yeah close camaraderie and bonding between men is often discouraged in favor of competition or, if not discouraged, at least filtered through a lens of individualism that precludes deep connections. and then i learned what people meant by it (men arent getting laid) to which i say skill issue

[johnnyanger]

(id in alt)

prompt 591 (brutalia w/hijabi talia) for spinninggaround via @dcforgaza ! requests close on the 21st!