DEAR READER
Claire Keane
Cosmic Funnies

Love Begins

pixel skylines

★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

No title available
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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todays bird
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
trying on a metaphor
noise dept.

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Discoholic 🪩
Keni
we're not kids anymore.

Kaledo Art
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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@robertawickham
What I can't cope with, OK, is L.M. Montgomery's use of bedrooms as a site of both autonomy and belonging. When Emily arrives at New Moon, she has to share the bed with Aunt Elizabeth and feels she is in bed with a griffon but when she moves into Juliet's old bedroom in the "lookout" she is overcome with the sense of nearness to her mother as well as having true space and freedom for the first time at New Moon. Later, she loses a lot of this sense of place and independence moving into Aunt Ruth's spare room where she doesn't have to share a bed, but can't even choose the pictures hanging on the walls - at the same time she loses her freedom to write fiction. Jane hates her bedroom at 60 Gay Street, finding it "hostile and vindictive" - in many ways just like Grandmother Kennedy, but at Lantern Hill, her father lets her choose everything that goes into her bedroom and she is allowed self expression. Her friends give her gifts to furnish it, as emblems of their love for her. Like Jane, Valancy has no control over the furnishings in her room, from the painted floor to the tacky artwork to the dingy and unwelcoming furniture, but she's so constrained that her only rebellion is to throw the jar of potpourri out the window because she's "sick of the fragrance of dead things". To have a sense of self, she imagines a magnificent castle as an escape and is delighted to find Barney's house is just as good a place to be who she wants to be - free from her family, making her own choices. Anne, upon marking the first anniversary of coming to Green Gables, reflects on the garrett room and finds it "as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although unmaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine." Before Green Gables her life was probably a mix of dormitories and makeshift beds in attics that she couldn't change, in versions of her life with no freedom or affection. THEIR BEDROOMS ARE SYMBOLS FOR THEIR LIVES OK. When their rooms are controlled by others, their inner/emotional/creative lives are constrained. When they have their own rooms, they have autonomoy, they choose furniture, they have freedom, they have themselves, they have love, they have me gnawing armchairs about it.
Also funny that both Valancy and Emily are tormented at various times by inescapable portraits of queens - I do wonder if LM had one in her home that no one would let her take down.
Another steal for Fantine/Simplice for @lesmisshippingshowdown !
Inspired by favorite exploding trainwreck of an adaptation, LM 1948! What if Simplice were not just an honest nun but also a SCIENCE NUN with her own lab where she does Medical Research to try and find ways to help the people in her care?
Like So
(and what if her experiments found something that helped Fantine actually recover from her illness and then they went and got Cosette and were fine and happy forever--)
So even thought my Simplice here has a simpler hat, she is definitely Inspired By SCIENCE SIMPLICE of 1948.
Still intent on criming it up for the crime wives, but I was poseessed by the need to do a little steal pic for my rose girls for this round of @lesmisshippingshowdown!
...really hope that clicking to embiggen will offset how much tumblr is destroying the resolution here bc YIKES
..what the heck. ONE more @lesmisshippingshowdown steal for the Crime Wives. Just for fun. For laughs. For the thrill of the road.
Nothing to give each other but stolen-gold dreams And our counterfeit hearts
Another steal for the Crime Wives in @lesmisshippingshowdown! part of a larger project that was alas much too Larger to be done on time. I'm sorry Crime Wives! But they are the winners in my heart (and amazingly the only actually canon household left in the list! We're flying on pure fanon from here on in XD) Just two gals unwinding after the kids are in bed, loving life and plotting Future Crimes <3
Thank you Crime Wives gang! we may have been small but we've nthtupled the amount of fanwork for them and our steals were thematically on point as heck XD
a steal for Fantine/Simplice for the @lesmisshippingshowdown!
Not a lot to say about this one, I had a sudden urge to draw chibis and how much Cute art do these two get? How much ANY art? Let's make them some more! The blue flowers behind Fantine there are supposed to be Cornflowers, which are in the song she sings to an imagined Cosette. Did you know: cornflowers are really fiddly to draw? SCIENCE FACTS :P
...maybe that gives me an idea...
78% voter turnout and a 2/3 majority for the opposition
Americans, the bar is set
i looked it up – that's an 8% increase in domestic voter turnout compared to the 2022 election. And with a 2/3 majority, they can start repairing the constitution (among the many other things)
Every vote counts. Every time.
Am i crying about Artemis II again? Yes. Yes i am.
Thank you @eldriwolf !
hello i've made a sort of short story slash game
all the astronauts are gay now
is about the reboot of a famous sci-fi space travel show from the 1960s with a longstanding fandom, including a vibrant culture of shipping the captain and first officer. it is about fandom and what happens when marginalised things become mainstream, and also gay astronauts.
it's designed to be readable as an open-ended, interactive short story, or playable as a GMless storytelling game. it's a format i've been experimenting with, and i'd really love to hear your thoughts if you take a look in either capacity!
This is your reminder today that Irene Adler in the original Conan Doyle story is literally not a criminal. She never commits a crime.
Nor is she a seductress in any kind of negative or manipulative sense - she has a mutual relationship with a powerful man who then breaks up with her, and afterwards she keeps protection against him in the form of evidence that the relationship existed. She HAS blackmail material, she even waves it at him threateningly because he treated her like shit, but she never even uses it.
Irene Adler is not a thief, femme fatale, or blackmailer. She's just a cool lady that wants to be left alone.
@delphi-star You do recall correctly!! She does not give a shit about that man! She's happily married! She tipped him for being a witness at her wedding!
If your Sherlock Holmes adaptation has a character whose identifying qualities are that she is a seductive criminal in love with Holmes, you have created a character that is basically the literal opposite of Irene Adler and you should name her something else.
Moftiss could not comprehend that a woman could be The Woman for any other reason than that she was naked and Sherlock wanted her. Instead they wrote one of Moffat's typical Strong Female Characters, ie, a paper cut-out labeled "woman" with no depth and no real agency.
They really read ACD Holmes wrong; the stories are politically progressive in almost every way (Doyle was way ahead of the game on seeing through both the Mormons and the Klan as sleazy gangsters from whom no good could possibly come), most especially when it comes to women characters, who are fully fleshed people with--if not as much social clout or political power as men--self-possession, intelligence, and who command respect.
Sorry. It's been years since I went on a Moftiss rant! It's a lightly-sleeping impulse in me.
I recently watched The Cat Returns and have become obsessed with Natoru. She* is so cute and happy and silly and such a CAT and I love her.
*I know she's voiced by a male actor in the English dub but in both the Japanese original and the French dub, the latter of which I watched, she's a she.
Thoughts on rewatching S2E16, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (2/4): Why is this episode so bad?
Ok so here’s the rant. The central plotline of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” is bad for five independent reasons. In a previous post I summarise them as follows:
Xander’s initial problem is way less sympathetic than the writers think
His response to it is way less sympathetic than the writers think
Love spells are way more horrifying than the writers think
The way the spell backfires is way less enjoyable to watch than the writers think
The final resolution is way less fair-minded than the writers think.
In this post I want to try to explain each of these, while also trying to figure what the writerly intentions behind these choices was, and why they go so wrong.
“Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, ‘Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.’”
— NYT (via gq)
I feel like I'm being stupid but I would like to ask for a clarification; in your tags on the selkie song post about do you love me, are you saying that Golde is dodging the question and/or giving an ambiguous answer?
well she does dodge the question for the first part of the song. and then:
this is not ambiguous: this her Golde saying that she doesn't have the freedom to know what "love" is or feels like beyond what she has with Tevye.
I know a lot of people find this song sweet or romantic and like that's... fine. It's not NOT sweet. But also: It's Tevye expressing The Selkie Anxiety about whether it's possible for his wife to actually love him given the social dynamic between them, and it's basically Golde saying: I don't have any other experience to compare it to.
Like ... it's. in my mind a strong indictment of the arranged heterosexual marriage in societies where that is the only access to material stability women have: it prevents a true and totally voluntary and uncoerced union between two people. Which is a tragedy, I think? Like it's a kind of horror! and I think that's why a lot of stuff like selkies/crane wife/etc exists because this leads to a sort of cultural anxiety about this disconnect: this woman is supposed to be your most intimate human connection, she sleeps in your bed and makes you meals and bears your children and breaks her back doing chores, and can you ever TRULY know that she's doing any of it out of love? Can you truly know that she wouldn't leave, if she had a better alternative? You kind of can't know! like the point is that it's an unanswerable question. And none of this makes Tevye A Bad Guy or their marriage Evil. it's like... baked into how their society works. I think it is understandable for some men to be really wigged out by this even if they're not able to quite out words to it or articulate what about the intimacy between husband and wife feels incomplete. But like, for men in this type of situation: there's a part of your wife you can't access because it is not safe for her for you to be able to access it. no matter what kind of man you are. because the consequences of your reacting poorly are too high stakes and she hasn't got any other options. and I think that lack of access is a stressful thing to navigate for men who can perceive it.
"If that's not love, what is?" <- "if love is a different thing than living with someone, fighting with someone, starving with someone, sharing your bed with someone, cooking all their meals & bearing their children, I wouldn't know, because I have not had the opportunity to find out"
Tevye and Golde's marriage is arguably the best outcome of the arranged marriage scenarios available to poor Jews in the shtetl, and it's still... this. right? which is not irrelevant to the themes of the overall story: all three of Tevye's daughters rejecting this same tradition, one by one, for various reasons.
the original tags are on this post & read:
Huh.
My reading of it is: “for twenty-five years we’ve been a team against everything life throws at us, even when we argue. Love isn’t an emotion, it’s a committment – if these twenty-five years aren’t a commitment, what is?” Or, put a little differently: “love isn’t something you feel, it’s something you do. We’ve been doing it for a quarter-century.”
The “it’s nice to know” duet to end it does indicate this is supposed to be a positive answer on the whole.
Yeah, I think the last reblog is the closest to reflecting the intended reading that fits with the tone of the musical.
I also, as a matter of philosophy, consider the OP and immediate reblog to be correct. "Love is a commitment" in practice here means "endure your marriage that you had no choice about, and then call whatever positive feelings you've developed for your cellmate 'love', and if you haven't developed any, call your endurance 'love'." Tevye already knows Golde's been doing all the things she lists for 25 years. He's asking about how she feels about it and him, whether they really did come to love each other in a way that's not just "we've been married for 25 years," because that's *already* known. And her answer is...mixed, I'd say. The music says "yes," and the words say "I guess I had to since I've been doing all these things." It's rather unintentionally sad for me because Golde doesn't say a word about ever being happy to see Tevye, or caring about him, or enjoying his company, or deriving comfort from his presence, when she sums up their 25 years. You might perhaps derive that from the tone of the song or the actress's expressions (e.g., what does she look and sound like when she says "fought with him," "starved with him," "my bed is his"?), but the lyrics are "I did all these things with him [that a wife doesn't have much choice but to do] and therefore I love him." And I do think that, while the musical pays tribute to Tevye and Golde's marriage in this song, it says something powerful that the ultimate result of this conversation is for the two to give their blessing to a love match between Hodel and Perchik *because* they are getting married for love, in a way that is very different from what Tevye and Golde did. And it says something that speaking to Hodel and Perchik about their engagement inspired Tevye to ask this question of Golde.
Further, the refusal to engage with empirical reality leaves exploitable gaps in progressive politics. Loudly refusing to acknowledge the flaws of non-Western cultures makes forming alliances across national borders much harder, and incurs the risk of alienating, if not outright radicalizing third world women, who see the misogyny they chafe against being summarily dismissed by the same people who champion queer liberation or anti-imperialism or trans rights. This incoherence in Western leftism stems largely from unexamined antifeminist sentiments as well as a mangled understanding of anti-racism that paradoxically ends up abandoning the most vulnerable non-Western populations.
Personally, I find I am tired of cowardice. Of apprehension. And I am, more than anything, tired of “feminists” who lack the conviction to stand by their own beliefs when it gets the slightest bit inconvenient to do so. I am tired of asking my friends to lend me their skirts anytime I wish to assert a basic feminist principle, and I am first and foremost tired of cultural and moral relativism and rank cowardice masquerading as ‘progressive’, ‘decolonial’ thought.
We can be a society of polite ladies, if you like. We can be meek and spineless and too terrified to think for ourselves, too terrified to speak with our own two lips on the off-chance that a racist or imperialist or conservative non-Westerner twists our words and appropriates our statements for their own goals. We can continue to watch the slow death of feminism in front of our very eyes, as any centering of women’s rights or women’s plights or women’s pain is dismissed out of hand via any of a dozen academic, leftist-sounding rationales. Is that what you want?
No Country For Non-Men
But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back"—almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour—the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrise. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the blue castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings-torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder.
Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Blue Castle