dragons talk

*sits in gay* • they/them • this blog is a mess • find me on ao3 papermachedragons • header and sidebar pics by szczurherbacany

[vvitchella]

not to be disabled on main but have you ever fucking noticed how every god damn thing requires both time and energy

[punchdrunkdolly]

i exist and i love you

[this-is-a-podcast-fanblog]

the benoit blanc movies show really beautifully how to write a queer character whose story is not centered around their queerness. it's shown that benoit blanc is gay married (to hugh grant!) it's shown that he participates in queer mediums like musical theater and fashion, but none of those things are ever explicitly remarked on. he doesn't have a big coming out scene because he doesn't need one; and the subtle details about him not speaking to his mother, the way he associates a church with homophobia, allows us to draw conclusions about how his family felt about his queerness without making that the sole conflict in his story. the conflict in benoit blanc's story is not that he exists in the world as a gay person, it's that he's always trying to wrangle a bunch of 30 somethings into not confessing to crimes they didn't commit

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’ve been thinking a bit about Harry Potter again and specifically why it feels so different to me from other bad things I’ve enjoyed.

I’m trained in literary criticism, I personally study a lot of stuff from people with stupid opinions in my freetime, including opinions about people like me, I enjoy reading in general. What is it about Harry Potter that makes me just not want to come back to it?

I think it’s kind of how it became a part of culture for a while. And at the time it wasn’t criticized as heavily as other things I witnessed, at least from my child’s perspective. Poking holes in media has been a favorite pastime of mine for long time, including with Harry Potter, but the fundamental emotional core of the thing never quite felt flawed.

Yes Rowling put some stupid things in there but that’s to be expected from a white woman in Britain who has had most of her life being taken care of for her. At the end of the day, the intentions always felt solid even if the execution was less than perfect.

Then came the slow eroding of her reputation. I picked up on it before most people did. The moment she went “mask off” in 2020 I and many others were surprised that people saw it that way. She’d been consorting with transphobes for years at that point. In online trans spaces she’d been a known radfem apologist for a long time.

But then she got worse. Like she started materially hurting people with her money. And that’s about when to me I really started to get sick when thinking about Harry Potter.

It’s like. She’s not just a privately bigoted person who accidentally made a story about misfits finding a place that they belonged. She’s taking the power that the marketing machine behind that series granted her to cause active harm right now.

It’s at about that point I no longer found myself with the ability to turn on my critical brain trained in the ways of lit analysis or my casual consumer brain just liking fun things even if they’re bad. I just felt a pit in my stomach. I moved the family copies of the Harry Potter books from my room into the communal family bookshelf and then into my dad’s room because I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.

It’s not just that Rowling is an author with bad opinions. I’ve read plenty of those. It’s not just that the series isn’t what I thought it was. That’s par for the course of most things you read as a child and revisit as an adult. It’s the combined power of her and her brand being everywhere and inescapable and her currently using the power that gives her for evil. Not only was the core of the series disingenuous but the series itself is currently actively causing people harm and normies just casually walk by it at Barnes and noble vaguely wondering if they should buy a mug for their cousin not knowing or not caring what that actually represents.

I can read dumb shit. I can handle my beloved childhood media being worse than I remember it. I can even handle my favorite authors turning out to be absolute garbage but the level of how all this happened with Harry Potter almost has no equivalent that I can think of because it is so big and so destructive and so intertwined with its author in the way that very few other things are.

The author cannot be dead with Harry Potter because she keeps coming back in to twist the knife. She has implanted herself into the series itself so firmly that trying to remove her from it make the entire thing implode on itself into something else entirely. And she uses that firm rooting that she’s established to materially harm people. People like me just one continent over. I’m sure she’d also interfere in other countries politics if she legally could.

It’s like. You can’t think critically through the full scope and ramifications of something when she hasn’t even stopped twisting that knife of hers. I can playfully stick my tongue out at shakespeares bad opinions because he isn’t alive right now spending his money on bad things. And even most authors alive now don’t have financial knives big enough to make much of a difference.

Rowling though? She can just throw a million dollars at something. It’s no wonder I can’t look at those books. My siblings are being threatened with them. It’s a lot easier to study a knife in a museum than one that’s currently being held to someone’s throat.

I don’t think I can be trusted to ever study this particular knife objectively ever again. Because I’ve seen what it can do. I’ve seen where it’s pointed. I can’t really have rational academic thoughts while I’m watching that.

[stuckybearbarnes]

Thank you. This phrased it better than I’ve been able to

[thereschocolateonmykeyboard]

That's exactly what it feels like seeing new HP editions in the window of a bookshop. It's the reason my HP books (recently along with the Neil Gaimann books) live in the part of my bookshelf that has doors, because I can't look at them without feeling devastated. It's honestly surreal how all of that has happened and is still actively happening and the general public just... doesn't know or care.

[socialistexan]

Babe wake up, new all time great image just dropped

[stevishabitat]

photo by filipestonoga.art on Bluesky in Vancouver, Canada on March 23, 2026

[gingerhaze]

Some character designs with some…atypical color choices? I guess. I don’t know what’s going on in that area.

This is Nimona and her supervillain friend (He doesn’t have a name yet, I’m working on that). Nimona is his sidekick/squire, they’re like the Batman and Robin of slightly Medieval villains, but she’s actually way more evil than him. He does what he does to make a point, and he doesn’t really want anyone get hurt - Nimona just gets a kick out of destroying stuff.

I’m going to attempt to make a two page comic with them? We’ll see how this goes.

[trans-ballister-blackheart]

This was tagged #homework and posted in December 2011.

[sadieb798]

[vetchtibbles]

adhd or as I’ve come to understand it, extremely stoppable force vs immovable object

[nyctoheart]

movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….

girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.

[nyctoheart]

if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:

[cyberphuck]

I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–” “Ten,” I said. “What?” “J. J is ten,” I said again. He stared at me. “I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him. Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.” He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room. I looked at the wall for a while. He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time. So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is. “It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were” “Sit down,” he said. I sat. Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted

[underthehedge]

ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.

This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.

It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.

[firebirdeternal]

I can remember specific details about games I played over two decades ago that I have not played since.

I once forgot it was my birthday. On my birthday. And when my sister (Who lived several hours away) jumped out of hiding and yelled happy birthday, I looked around to see who she was talking to.

[clotpolesonly]

[musicofthe-ainur]

Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny

[eleemosynecdoche]

A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language. 

[modernclaire]

another hilarious example:

[lotrmusical]

my absolute favorite example of tolkien switching registers in this way is

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

[mofsblog]

"This is some gay shit" Good. Silly. Fair enough. Doesn't inherently invalidate other interpretations of the relationship. Honestly yeah, it is kind of gay regardless of their canonical relationship status

"There's literally no platonic explanation for th-" WRONG!! KILLING YOU WITH AMATANORMATIVITY KILLING LOBSTERS 🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞🦞

[unfuckablebogtroll]

Fandom needs to go back to it’s roots of shipping without any expectation of canon agreement, shipping characters that have never even met, shipping characters from entirely different properties that came out decades apart, shipping just for fun, and generally speaking mostly not bothering the creators about it. Put fandom back in the shadows, being profitable has only made everything worse as grifters saw easy marks and forcing creators to play pattycake with fandom has led to so much open resentment.

[wolfythewitch]

Constantly obsessed with the concept of a man forced to be a myth. What do you do when every step you take is embedded into the text. Every word you say prose to read. You're part of something bigger than yourself. The narrative tugs you along like water currents. There is no time to rest, to be human. You must be great, you must be legend

[observaureium]

there is not enough cheeky and forward lancelot in fics. he would tease the absolute hell out of merlin alongside doting on him you can't convince me otherwise

[makielkowo]

patron saint of being doomed (and sacrificing everything for a blond guy)

[so-many-ocs]

no dude it's so cool how attached you are to that character who is singled out and ostracized due to the external monstrousness that clashes with their internal spark of humanity. and i love how drawn you are to themes of horror and love, nature versus nurture, otherness, isolation, and the abject. i bet you have normal feelings about your own personhood

[probuccalfat]

one time i told a group of lesbian and bi women that i have never watched wicked and they were shocked, gagged, gooped, “but you’re queer. you like pussy. how have you not seen wicked?” yeah. well. i like pussy, not musicals?

[probuccalfat]

i’m this exact post. all this just to fuck women.

[probuccalfat]

“are you going to the lucy dacus concert?” no. i listen to gucci mane.

[veil-of-exordia]

[alanaisalive]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[iguanamouth]

oh shit

[throughshadow-to-the-edgeofnight]

[alanaisalive]

As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.