PurpleSunflower

30s she/her I tried to put fandom back in my life and ended up in a lot of Twilight. I secretly follow many chronic illness blogs too.

[eldestshowgirl]

I’ve been seeing so many posts about burnout relating to working/studying hard......but burnout from fighting mental illnesses, disabilities, and chronic conditions needs to be talked about more. When you struggle with these things, you fight so many invisible battles a day that you don’t even realize you’re burnt out. You don’t have to be studying or working or “oN tHe gRiNd” to be burnt out. Being strong every day is the most grueling and exhausting kind of work. Please know that you are valid, even if you can’t get up and work/study. You are having to learn a curriculum that school doesn’t teach, and I’m so proud of you <33

[the-ace-up-y0ur-sleeve]

[purplesunflower]

We would all have so many cats and the occasional dragon or griffin

[the-ace-up-y0ur-sleeve]

[purplesunflower]

Rereading Tortall as I Age

I’m rereading the Tortall books. When I first started in 2000 or 2001 in the middle of Kel then back to the beginning with Alanna, mixed in with Emelan, then caught up and have read by publication date ever since.

Well I never really paid attention to their ages.

At this reread, I decided I really wanted to pay attention to their ages.

Alanna was easy to follow enough with her four books. I could tell she was early twenties ish when we leave her.

Then Daine begins. We leave a mid twenty something and return to the world of a 13 year old.

This is where it gets interesting.

I’ve known these characters for at least 15 years now. Daine has been my favorite because I’ve claimed Numair as my literary husband.

So I start Daines book with a handwritten timeline I coppies from Tammy’s website with everyone’s updated ages.

In the first Daine book, things are going along swimmingly.

Then we get to the scene where Jon is grilling Daine on her father and her magic and Numair is arguing with him about going with Daine to Pirates Swoop.

So I decide to check my timeline because just how old are these people now anyway. When I was 13 and reading about Daine, the big 5; Alanna, George, Jon, Thayet and now Numair were all “adults” meaning aged “40-50”.

Oh no.

They are not.

They are 30, 36, 32, 30 and AND 24.

Numair is 24 and telling off the King who is 32.

WHAT.

This country is being run by a bunch of CHILDREN in the 7th year of their reign because Jon took the throne 7 years ago at like 25.

And he’s being told off by my now 24 year old husband who is really just a trussed up post-doc who thinks he’s an academic.

He even says so to Daine that he forgets not everyone is an academic. Numair, you are 24. I was finishing grad school at 24. Oh no.

But look again. When you read the descriptions of this country, it has mandated schools for everyone, open job opportunities for anyone who can complete the training, and a king who comes down to help everyone out when some enemies attack where he lives, women can get fighting jobs and the queen regularly helps out the program of fighters that she partially oversees. Then they ask a 13 year old for help.

Is this what would happen if you left a kingdom to some mid twenty somethings? Jobs for everyone, education, talking to teenagers for help and advice. Especially teenage girls.

And also.

When I was 13 and I read about their trouble with the emperor in Carthak...

I imagined this guy

But no.

The Emperor of Carthak is 26.

Not an old man.

My brain is hurting. Where I work, I’m one of the youngest out of 100 people, and yet I’m of this age group that is governing Tortall.

I don’t know what to make of this information yet.

Share when you also were no longer 13 and started figuring out relative ages of everyone and as you got older and had different opinions about your life long literary friends.

Reading these books at 31 still holds that special magic. I grieved when I had to close Alanna and leave her, only to feel the tearful joy when she comes back in the first Daine book. It’s like Tammy knew we wouldn’t be able to let go.

(Be kind if you fact check me and I’m wrong. I did quick math from Tammy’s timeline on her website).

[bluedevilgirl11]

I knew they were younger adults, but I had never put together that I’m (roughly) the same age now that Alanna was in the Daine books! 

[purplesunflower]

I’m getting closer to alannas age in the Kel books now (I think) and I don’t know how I feel about it! I don’t like getting older than them.

[namchyoon]

blood sweat & tears - choreo focus

[always-ascending]

Doctor Who | The Pandorica Opens | S05E12

[prokopetz]

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

[veteratorianvillainy]

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

[persephoneshadow-deactivated202]

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

[prokopetz]

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

[observethewalrus]

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

[ainedubh]

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

[slitthelizardking]

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

[lierdumoa]

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

[destinationtoast]

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

[olderthannetfic]

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

[kyraneko]

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

[whetstonefires]

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

[headspace-hotel]

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

[everylittlethingtheydoispainful]

chronic illness is saying “eughughuhuhggg I’m somehow faking all my symptoms I’m such a bad person” as you’re literally alone in a room in the fetal position trying to cope with all of your pain

[witchesversuspatriarchy]

Repost: thought this belonged here.

[purplesunflower]

I know her. She’s amazing.

[thetrippytrip]

My girl spoke nothing but fucking TRUTH. Now that’s this kind of Women we need our girls to look up too.

[ladygreytea76]

Who is she?

[enigmazing-blog]

Sarah Kendzior.

She’s an expert in authoritarianism and has accurately predicted almost everything that is happening - her unflinching insight and analysis is terrifying but invaluable right now. Well worth following on twitter.

[anosci]

fucking

why did i never see this until now

[arboreyes]

I love that she barely even opened her eyes to look at those men. She said allat with a veil of “stfu I’m so done” over her face, it was incredible.

[averyterrible]

Imagine not recognizing the interdependence of all phenomena and believing that people’s choices emerge fully formed from their own untouchable independent rational self lol

[styna]

I’d like to say, as a chronically ill person… I’m not brave. I’m not strong. I’m not an inspiration.

I’m just stubborn as fuck.

[igor-shesterkin]

love is many things...

[stream]

[catchymemes]

[desertfangs]

It’s the How I Met Your Mother Effect. If an ending betrays the viewers and the story badly enough, it actively cancels out the cultural influence of the show. It decreases the rewatch value and diminishes the fondness and relatability of earlier seasons. 

[purplesunflower]

Y’all have already forgotten LOST. That’s how bad it was.

[goose-the-kitten]

You never realize how much energy something mundane takes until you don't have any energy left

[reasonandempathy]