searching, but not very hard

“i am the sea and nobody owns me." seren, 20s, terfs dni. asks are always open. ao3

[munchy-k]

ive always rly liked the idea of a member of a group of adventurers having what everyone assumes is very well trained hawk and then at the end of their journey its casually revealed that thats actually just his buddy whos a shapeshifter and just rly likes being a hawk

[munchy-k]

the guy also like thinks everyone knows bc he never tries to hide the fact that the hawk is a person but everyone assumes hes always just joking. like the others being like "damn its crazy how he knows exactly what you want him to do its like he knows english or something." and the guy is just like "well yeah thats his first language so ofc he's fluent??" and they all go "haha good one" and move on, leaving him confused

[munchy-k]

they just think hes a quirky guy that really loves his pet and says things like "the 9 of us" even tho there are clearly only 8 people! he just cares about the bird so much he counts it as a group member haha !

[searchingforserendipity25]

andhera and BINX are SO sweet. but i need the follow-up episode where binx comes back from faery and introduces him to her family (inanimate court members , her warlock, gwendolyn, etc) as her very dear friend, the prince of the unseelie. that's so funny. like they're gone for a month to uncover the deliberate mass-murder of her kin, and come back, victorious, and also in a queerplatonic life commitment (they're all living forever btw). and with with the guy (gn) who has an ambiguous dominion over shadows and storms and abysses and caves. and he's very earnest and awkward and very eager to please, not at all intimidating or domineering. but listen. he IS the abyss. it HAS been only a month. somehow he's sworn an oath of fealty to her even though logistically that makes no sense. sweet! but girl (gn). that's the prince of air and darkness right there.

[microsff]

Every morning, the queen asked her magic mirror to show her the most beautiful person in the world.

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The mirror would show her, and she'd be amazed.

[nullen-void]

The first time, she says "To me," and the mirror dutifully shows her her reflection. And she is pleased.

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.

It is a different person each time, and they are all beautiful.

[the-tardis-is-blue]

the fact that the ip court case scene makes its way into the book (which is entirely narrated in first person by grace) means that grace was there. which means stratt ordered him to be there. which means that one or multiple of these things are true:

stratt wanted moral support

stratt wanted grace to know how much information was on the hail mary in case he ended up there

stratt for some reason thought they might start asking her science questions and wanted somebody to point to

or worse:

stratt wanted to show grace how much power she has. just in case he was thinking of running away.

[specialagentartemis]

these are all intriguing options, but I think it’s much simpler than that.

I think Stratt said “Dr. Grace, you were an academic. You went to grad school. Do you want to personally say fuck you to the CEO of Elsevier?” and he went YES?? OBVIOUSLY?? SIGN ME UP

[searchingforserendipity25]

the thing about contemporary portuguese musicians trying to invent traditional sound revivalism is that. okay. you've got different flavour. there's your alentejanos gen z guys (only guys, no women) who have become a huge trend. they pretend to be doing cante alentejano but they aren't really doing cante alentejano because they like a single spotlight and also they are not 60 years old exploited service workers and assorted family members putting on a show for the tourist tips at an overpriced inn. it's bad. the lyrics are bad. there's always a girl who must be won over from the appeal of her boyfriend/her big city/her unspoken but present aspirations of not living in a tiny rural city and have 3.5 kids with the singer, which she should give up to go see the sunset over the pastures or whatever the fuck. BAD. pisses me the hell off. their sharp rise in popularity has coincided perfectly with the rise in popularitty with far-right voting and influence in alentejo over young people, which is not a coincidence. they don't even do anything fun with synthed up portuguese guitars, and they're either too racist or cowardly to acknowledge the connection between alentejano singing and roma musicality (or, god forbid, arabic musicality). they're just sell outs. then there's milhanas and rossana and a bunch of other 20-somethings women (only women) who go around with huge braids and tambourines/adufes and third wave feminist lyrics and a lot of rage. they do this mix of women's traditional lullabies/work songs/choir singing with electronic music that can be fun. a lot of percussion and keyboards, much fewer guitars. they're not doing fado and they're being a bit punk about it. twee-ish about it sometimes but we forgive them. i do love the sounds because you can tell they actually know what a mixing board is, and even, perhaps, experimental techno. you can always tell when young portuguese artists have a terminal case of catholic school because of the basic acoustic of it all (sorry MARO. i know because i lived it) so it's good to see something new blossoming. last but certainly not least you've got the queer sounds. bandua are doing exclusively renaissance for beira baixa songs with a gender performance spiritual mix and artistic aspect which is kind of amazing ngl. went to their concert recently and i did get chills. and there's fado bicha (literally queer fado. call that a coming out) and though i'm talking about trad sounds, not fado, they're trying to do a bit of everything. not always well! but often!! but they're huge they're gigantic they are everything in queer pt music so we stan and they deserve a mention.

btw. the only real fado going around is the one with some acquaintance with afro rhytms in it and i said what i said.

[searchingforserendipity25]

sara correia claiming the hip hop of chelas and all the scope of personal and structural violence she has known. ana moura and mornas and the way migration is always the unspoken third thing in her songs. gisela joão knows what pop and rock are and she knows where they're from. you know what i'm saying? they know what the language is about and who it belongs to and where it's going. fado has such constrained melodies. the original musicians were prostitutes and robbers and pimps and dockworkers. they only knew a few chords and there's still purists going around saying you can't add shit. but it can only be fado and fateful and grieving and victorious and funny as fado should be if it grows. otherwise you might as well enter a civil union with a bust of amália and call it quits.

carminho is very very good. i would never say carminho is not the top of whatever it is she is doing, which is turning a street style and a boring dictatorship style into something virtuoso and classic and elevated. she can reach for a sweetness and a wealth of feeling that brings back the best of the genre. but she's singing her way around a round enclosure and i don't know how she's getting out. maybe she doesn't want to get out! maybe there's enough there. but then who is it for. when fado means something so specific about national identity and nationalism, with its history of fascism-backing and revolutionary resistance. it's always fraught and it's always political. who listens. who does it belong to, who can it belong to!!! trad revival groups keep branching out - alentejo or beira baixa or tras-os-montes or something. but fado? what can you even do with it now. is seeking out new sounds ('new' lmao) and broader global influences not running away from its history, or it is an owning, and reclaiming? i don't know. i like carminho's new album, is the thing. i like that she's always in brazil and she knows what the words mean across the sea. but she's not a 60 year old exploited service worker putting on a show for the tourist tips. and maybe i'm being too twee about it myself, but that's where all the truest folk music i've found is, still, despite everything. and the tips aren't even that good.

[searchingforserendipity25]

the thing about contemporary portuguese musicians trying to invent traditional sound revivalism is that. okay. you've got different flavour. there's your alentejanos gen z guys (only guys, no women) who have become a huge trend. they pretend to be doing cante alentejano but they aren't really doing cante alentejano because they like a single spotlight and also they are not 60 years old exploited service workers and assorted family members putting on a show for the tourist tips at an overpriced inn. it's bad. the lyrics are bad. there's always a girl who must be won over from the appeal of her boyfriend/her big city/her unspoken but present aspirations of not living in a tiny rural city and have 3.5 kids with the singer, which she should give up to go see the sunset over the pastures or whatever the fuck. BAD. pisses me the hell off. their sharp rise in popularity has coincided perfectly with the rise in popularitty with far-right voting and influence in alentejo over young people, which is not a coincidence. they don't even do anything fun with synthed up portuguese guitars, and they're either too racist or cowardly to acknowledge the connection between alentejano singing and roma musicality (or, god forbid, arabic musicality). they're just sell outs. then there's milhanas and rossana and a bunch of other 20-somethings women (only women) who go around with huge braids and tambourines/adufes and third wave feminist lyrics and a lot of rage. they do this mix of women's traditional lullabies/work songs/choir singing with electronic music that can be fun. a lot of percussion and keyboards, much fewer guitars. they're not doing fado and they're being a bit punk about it. twee-ish about it sometimes but we forgive them. i do love the sounds because you can tell they actually know what a mixing board is, and even, perhaps, experimental techno. you can always tell when young portuguese artists have a terminal case of catholic school because of the basic acoustic of it all (sorry MARO. i know because i lived it) so it's good to see something new blossoming. last but certainly not least you've got the queer sounds. bandua are doing exclusively renaissance for beira baixa songs with a gender performance spiritual mix and artistic aspect which is kind of amazing ngl. went to their concert recently and i did get chills. and there's fado bicha (literally queer fado. call that a coming out) and though i'm talking about trad sounds, not fado, they're trying to do a bit of everything. not always well! but often!! but they're huge they're gigantic they are everything in queer pt music so we stan and they deserve a mention.

btw. the only real fado going around is the one with some acquaintance with afro rhytms in it and i said what i said.

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[fortunate-hal]

i find robert's rebellion aus (ie. ned marrying ashara, cersei marrying rhaegar, jaime marrying lyanna) tedious because they tend to smooth out the domestic tensions that make that generation interesting without acknowledging the alternatives could be just as tragic

however, i do think catelyn and jaime could have had an unhappy arranged marriage that produced offspring with kill counts like hotd's daemon in adulthood. an au for the type who looks at the 12 names on the characters killed by jaime lannister wiki page and thinks "i could do better"

[ilynpilled]

echoes of my old meme in this…

[deoxoid]

his wife has filled THEIR house with ANTIQUES. to AVOID DAMAGING HER VALUABLES i fuck him on the floor

[kirgiakos]

Zdzislaw Beksinski - Untitled, ca.1973

[searchingforserendipity25]

BINX choppley, hoarder of mismatched treasures and finder of lost objects and leader of the court of craft, keeps crossing paths with wuvvy after canon. surely this has no implications for how wuvvy sees herself as a tool or anything like that.

[searchingforserendipity25]

“for the rest of our existence, any time you are scared I will reassure you” is crazy because they are. well. immortal. it's forever and ever and ever. they're cooking love stories in dimension 20 the likes of which are rarely seen

[itssquidbian]

feminist retelling shoulsnt be the woman does some girlboss shit femist retelling is she does the same stuff except u actually give a shit abt her perspective and thoughts and feelings as a human being this time

[dionysiaproductions]

[searchingforserendipity25]

thinking about brennan's idea for hob as three goblins in a military and honestly i kind of want to take it seriously. there are so fun fics about it already, and i know it's not canon. but it could be.

let's say he IS three goblins in a trench coat and that there goblins make up a single identity the vast majority of the time. his booming voice is a chorus; his military skill demands a lot of synchronicity backstage. how does this work in terms of friendship and romance?

so much of hob's personal status is, despite being dependent on his court, defined by how ungoblin-like he is - how civilized, how polite, how competent. all things goblins, to other fey, are not. if he is, however, three goblins in a military coat, that creates a cognitive dissonance zone around him.

he is civilized and polite and competent, because his various parts are goblins; whether he is a conscience that took over them or something they brainstormed together, he is still himself. is this so different from BINX's deception? is it different to rue's situation?

'would you still love me if i was a worm?' is old and dated and problematically bugphobic in fae society. 'would you still love me if i was three goblins in a military coat?' is avantgarde. it asks real questions about identity and multiplicity and subtle prejudice against goblin kind. would you still be loved and befriended and respected if you were a worm pretending to be something else? can several goblins be the same as a single goblin, and can they be in love?

in a story about freeing one's self from different coercive control systems (political, emotional, structural) would a happy ending include the three goblins dissolving hob forever, or something else entirely?

[searchingforserendipity25]

i have to imagine that whenever grace and rocky watch a movie with mountains or boulders grace taps the ball obnoxiously and goes 'look rock it's you!'. and that every time rocky bumps him over until he falls down.

[lesbiansforboromir]

You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)

[lesbiansforboromir]

everyone stop reblogging this I hate to be reminded of my own good advice