i think it would do a lot of people good to remember that Mormons are white supremacists, no nuance, no debate, no arguing how they've gotten "more diverse", their whole belief system is fundamentally rooted in white supremacist ideals
I am glad that in 2026 I find out about twitter from tumblr.
I did not "dance around" the manic pixie dream girl. I sought to write books exposing the dangerous lie that a person is more than a person. The romanticization (mostly by boys) of the Romantic Other is extremely dangerous, and that was a central theme of my first two books. If people read them as MPDG books, then I failed at my first and most fundamental task and I'm sorry.
I did not build the hospital. Nerdfighteria paid for a hospital that Sierra Leoneans built. We paid for the hospital partly through Hank and I donating money, but mostly thanks to the thousands of people who pay for the hospital every month and my brother's stupid but brilliant idea to create Netflix For Socks.
"Consensual, but still weird" is underrated in toxic freaky shipping world. There are many ways you can make it weird while still having everyone agree to it
I don't think people who come from wattpad after the purge and now want ao3 to have its own official app understand that one of the main reasons behind the recent wattpad purge that drove them to ao3 was due to pressure from appstore demanding wattpad to be more strict and follow appstore's policy. wattpad complied in order for its app to be able to remain on appstore. thus the wattpad purge.
ao3 doesn't have an app because for it to have an app, appstore will have to approve it first. and if, hypothetically, ao3 needs appstore to approve it, it will also have to abide by appstore's pro-censorship stance and start banning dark and taboo fics, which is against its own core principle of being completely against censorship.
ao3 doesn't need an app. it works more than fine without an app. the reason ao3 can allow dark and taboo fics, the reason it can allow the most disgusting and shockingly vile fics, and be completely against censorship is because it doesn't need appstore's approval. it stands on its own as a non-profit organization with functioning site and a team of lawyers protecting its platform, its users, and every single fanwork on its platform.
everybody say thank you ao3
here's the list of things you need to know about ao3 if you're new to the platform
It's extremely funny that there have been multiple writers in multiple mediums who've been allowed to write Wolverine from the X-men who clearly had no idea what a wolverine is and assumed it was a fancy word for "wolf", and at no point did any of the literally dozens of other people involved in bringing their writing to life see fit to challenge this assumption.
Sometimes the rest of the team gets handed a once in a lifetime opportunity to do the funniest thing, and all they have to do is keep their mouths shut long enough for it to go to print.
Look, I understand that you're going through some shit, and you know I'll always support you, but I just had to fight your shadow-self in the kitchen. Yeah, I was getting breakfast and the enfleshed eidolon of your existential alienation was shooting, I don't know, some sort of beam.
#also i recognise that the self that walks in darkness is not inherently any more true than the self that walks in the light#but i've gotta ask: is there something going on that i should know about#like#pronoun-wise?
My recipes get more vague the longer I've cooked them.
This soup is based on my infamous Orgasmic Peanut Butter Soup which has spent years fixing people's flu symptoms but apparently has vanished from the internet.
Sautee half an onion or heat a quarter cup of caramelized onions. Throw some diced carrot in there if you want. Celery? Sure, Captain Mirepoix.
Add a tablespoon of sweet curry seasoning. Two if you're nasty. Stir and toast for about a minute on high.
Once the curry powder is toasted, add about a cup of pureed steamed sweet potato. Stir for a minute or two. You can also use a cup of raw potato instead. If you're using sweet potato maybe throw in a few spoonfuls of red wine and cook out the alcohol.
Add about two cups of chicken broth. Vegetarian? Use your favorite veggie broth. Water works in a pinch. Turn down to medium heat.
If you used raw potato, simmer for 20 minutes or until the potato is cooked through. If you used sweet potato puree you don't need to do that, just heat through. Taste it and season/salt as necessary. You like pain? I don't judge. Add some red pepper flakes.
Puree the whole thing if like me you hate chunky soup.
At the very end of the world, add a spoonful of nut butter. Less than you think it needs. No, less than that. A scant spoonful. No, less. Stir to incorporate. You can also use cream or sour cream.
This will make a creamy spicy vegetable soup for two hungry people or four bougie snackers.
if you play short videos at top volume with no headphones in public i hope your phone falls down a sewer grate and you get eaten by a clown while trying to retrieve it
brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed
It's because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.
The most frustrating thing about The Tomb of Dragons is not even the romance bait-and-switch but the feeling that core themes of the trilogy were just completely dropped and even reversed in the final half of the third book.
We start book one with Thara still grieving the death of his lover Evru and only recently returned to his calling after that tragedy, starting his life anew in the city of Amalo. Throughout the trilogy, he is aloof, reserved, and unwilling to rely on others or accept companionship or camaraderie from anyone. Despite this, his earnest nature and devotion to using his role as a prelate to help others wins him the affection of many in his new home.
Yet he is, as Anora says in the third book, a hard man to be friends with. Although many around Thara genuinely like him and wish him well, he continues to hold himself at arms' length, in part by nature, in part due to past tragedy, and in part due to complex feelings around being gay in a homophobic society (and perhaps a feeling that he must hold himself apart, to be able to keep that part of himself private). He is repeatedly shocked when others express affection or well-wishes to him beyond simply politesse. Anora has to tell him that Azanharad feels warmly to him, as it simply never occurred to Thara.
In his relationship with Iana, he starts to come around to the idea of romance again, but in his relationships with many more, he starts to come around to the idea of community. In his dinners with Anora, in his training and partnership with Tomasaran, in his working relationship with Prince Orchenis, Thara begins to develop this community, a home in Amalo.
We know that he has no love for his previous city of office, Aveio, where Evru was executed, and that he never felt at home in the imperial court with his cousin Csoru, but in Amalo, he begins to feel comfortable. He feeds the local strays on his porch, he regularly attends the theater, he regularly dines with Anora and later with Tomasaran.
After great loss, both personal and directional, forced to start his life over essentially from scratch, Thara is beginning to resettle.
And The Tomb of Dragons just tosses all that and decides that actually what Thara wants is a life on the road with some guy he met a few months ago and barely knows. All of those relationships he spent nearly three full books painstakingly building are relegated to pen pals and that's meant to be an optimistic ending. Those friendships that were sold as so important turn out to mean less than this rando love interest introduced in the final third of the last book.
Thara is not a character who ever gave off the air of being an adventurer. He is not someone who has been looking for thrills or a life living out of a suitcase; he's always seemed far more domestic and practical. Few characters in the Chronicles of Osreth seem less suited to a life of constant travel and peril. All of the dangers Thara takes on in Amalo are only in pursuit of his calling, and he does not take any pleasure in it beyond being able to assist those who rely on him.
For two and a half books it felt like Thara was building a new home in Amalo, a place where he felt safe, and cared for, and known, and for that to all be chucked at the last minute for the life of a traveling prelate feels like a second tragedy in his life. It doesn't come off like a hopeful new start, it comes off like Thara having another home snatched away from him, like his once more being forced out of a place he had, with great difficulty, made connections.
An aromantic bisexual’s review of “The Tomb of Dragons,” by Katherine Addison. Because of my identities, I have some thoughts on a specific controversial element of this book.
Spoilers below the cut.
Two caveats:
None of this criticism is about Katherine Addison as a person. I’m not going to speculate on her identity or her “right” to tell this story, and I would encourage you not to, either. Surely in 2025 we’re capable of better literary criticism than that.
No group of people are a monolith. This includes aromantic people. I would love to hear dissenting opinions from other aromantic fans.
“Cemeteries of Amalo” is my favorite book series. These are, without question, the books I’ve read the most number of times as an adult, probably the most fannish I’ve felt about a book series since high school.
Like others, I enjoyed what I perceived as the understated, slow-burn romance between Thara and Iäna. Like others, I saw their romantic arc as an extension of Thara’s character arc, as he slowly learns to trust again, to let others in, to believe he is deserving of love.
I continued thinking their arc was romantic for most of “The Tomb of Dragons.” Actually, I thought this book was significantly more romantic than previous ones, honestly a bit much for my taste. Previously, Iäna was in relatively small portions of each book, only when Thara absolutely needed to talk to him to advance the mystery or was experiencing a moment of personal weakness. We got little sips of Iäna, like Thara rationed his company, another symptom of how fundamentally Thara believes he does not deserve good things. It was, I thought, an extraordinarily effective part of the series, an unusually restrained feat of storytelling in a time when the shortness of audience attention incentives authors to never let things burn too slowly.
But in “The Tomb of Dragons,” it abruptly felt like all restraint was gone. Iäna has significantly more screen time than the previous books. He is constantly appearing, even at moments when it felt strange that he would know to be there (like when they meet at the city gate). He shows up so often it feels like a plot hole, given his canonically intense rehearsal schedule with the opera. They have the most significant affectionate touch between any characters in the whole series. The intimacy that was the most shocking of all to me was when Thara baldly tells Iäna the whole story of Evru, the secret that has hovered between them like Banquo’s ghost for the previous 500 pages, on page 25 out of 339 of this book.
I thought that “The Tomb of Dragons” was drawing their romantic relationship with a significantly (and to my mind, disappointingly) heavier hand than the previous books. But I still took it for granted that their relationship was romantic, until I got to the scene (starting page 213 of 339, to give you context for how far into the book this is) where Iäna tells Thara that, actually, he only sleeps with women, and he’s aromantic.
I am a bisexual aromantic person. I do not, for the most part, see representation for identities like mine. On paper, for there to be a complex, vivid, aromantic character in what is, again, my favorite book series of all time, should be an absolute triumph for me.
But it wasn’t. Instead, it felt more like a queer-baiting genre TV show from the 2000s slapping down any homoerotic reading at the eleventh hour, complete with a shoehorned, underdeveloped alternative love interest. It was like the book turned to me and said, “You thought this was romantic? Nice try!”
I have been struggling to articulate to myself why I feel this way. Some of it is because their relationship felt so explicitly romantic to me, like Iäna taking honey in his tea, Thara worrying they’re courting, or Iäna’s mother teasing him about Thara.
But mostly, I think it’s that “The Tomb of Dragons” made me find Thara and Iäna’s friendship disappointing, too.
I’m aromantic. I believe, passionately, in the sacredness and importance of friendships. I believe that they can (and maybe should?) be the most important relationships in our lives. There is a version of this book I would love, where Thara and Iäna continue to participate in each other’s lives, where they end up as platonic soulmates. I would actually like that better than them having a straightforward romantic conclusion, because then I would feel represented, too.
Except they don’t, do they? The scene where Iäna clarifies that their relationship is not and never will be either romantic or sexual is the last major relationship beat between them. The novel, and by extension the series, ends with Thara leaving Amalo and tepidly promising to write. Thara and Iäna don’t break up. As “The Tomb of Dragons” seems eager to remind us, they were never together to begin with. But they do part, and part seamlessly, tearlessly, like their friendship never actually mattered. Like I was stupid for becoming so invested that I read 800 pages about it.
I keep going back and forth on whether I think “The Tomb of Dragons” was unsuccessful, or whether I think it was just a complete mismatch for what I wanted from it. It is, in many ways, a massive departure from the first two books. It is quite fast-paced, while the first two were more deliberate. Large chunks of it take place outside Amalo, whereas the specificity of the city was my favorite part of the first two books. The series until now was mostly conversations, introspection, and puzzle-solving, in a way that made the brief episodes of violence feel as shattering as it does in real life. But in “The Tomb of Dragons,” Thara is kidnapped, thrown down a mine shaft, lead through a mine in the dark, garotted, and is in such constant danger he must live under guard. By the end, I felt completely desensitized to the newfound action.
But mostly, I feel like the first two books, and especially the role Iäna plays in them, encouraged my belief that Thara was having some sort of arc. We slowly see his relationship with grief change, as he opens himself to more and more emotional intimacy. We slowly see him admit truths to himself about how he deserves better, about how he must face his grief, which he would not have been capable of at the beginning of the series. The reason the corn maze scenes are such brilliant bookends in the first and second book is because the parallel experiences let you see how much Thara has changed.
But by the end of “The Tomb of Dragons,” Thara ends the way he begins the series: in exile. Far from home, in every sense of the word. Away from his friends. Away from the city that every granule of description underscored that Thara loved, a city that we saw slowly come to love him. I admit I was upset when I was reading the ending, so maybe I missed some traces that his outlook has fundamentally shifted, and this is meant to be another parallel underscoring those changes, like the corn maze scenes were. But on my first read, it felt like the ending of “The Tomb of Dragons” made the 800+ pages I had just read fairly meaningless.
I am still not entirely sure what to make of this book, or my reaction to it. I can’t tell if it’s poorly constructed compared to the first two, or if the problem was just the critical mismatch between what I wanted and what I got. If the latter, I don’t even know if that’s the book’s fault or mine. I’m going to reread it once I’ve had time to reflect more. But I admit that my initial read left me feeling more bitter than sweet.
romaincrisis
areudirty
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
