pov your character’s best friend just accidentally let it slip to another character who knows nothing about your character’s backstory that your character killed his entire family
William Etty, Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched, 1828 and 1830 @yorkartgallery
In his lifetime, his concentration on painting the nude gave rise to much-heated debate about the moral value of his painting. After his death, many collections have struggled to make Etty’s work seem relevant in the twenty-first century and many of his works are in storage rather than on the gallery walls. To give a sense of the prominence of the nude within Etty’s output, all but one of the 15 paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1820 and 1829 included nude figures. This preponderance did not go unnoticed in the contemporary press and Etty’s ‘fleshiness’ was much commented on. It was his depictions of the female nude, especially when displayed in prominent venues such as London’s Royal Academy of Arts, that caused the most excitement and consternation. Texte source : artuk.org
What if you loved yourself the way you loved your favorite fictional character? Be your own blorbo.
Better yet treat yourself the way you treat your precious little mewo mewo. All those mistakes and regrets that keep you up at night- what if you defended yourself with the vigor and determination and unyielding love you show your meow meow? What if you made yourself look at the bigger picture and the greater scope and mitigating circumstances? What if you let yourself view your past in the most charitable and forgiving light? What if you showed yourself the kind of kindness that you freely give away to characters whose sins are by any metric so much worse then your own?
I love the idea of Jin Ling being independently wealthy because of the sheer number of times he has been paid for his silence. A-Yao loses Jin Ling in the market for 5 minutes, and after he finds him, is just like “don’t tell your Jiujiu” and gives him money. When Jin Ling hears Jiang Cheng cursing one day and starts repeating him, Jiang Cheng has to write out 2 checks, one so that Jin Ling doesn’t say those words again, at least until he’s older, and another so that if his xiao shushu asks, he didn’t learn those words from Jiang Cheng.
Real talk ok, this just makes me so unreservedly happy because it’s just something that I didn’t think anyone cared enough to create. A big-budget dinosaur project that pays so much attention to detail, anatomy, and engages in interesting, reasonable and thought-provoking speculation seemed like some unachievable holy grail, seeing it finally become real is wild.
I have such high hopes for this show and you bet I will be raving about every episode, because with even the tiny pieces we have so far this is shaping up to be potentially the dinosaur show of an entire generation, the same way Walking With Dinosaurs was more than 20 years ago.
The funniest thing on my dash right now is folks who are familiar with The Untamed (i.e., the 2019 TV series) only via GIFsets reblogged by their mutuals honestly being under the impression that it’s, like, a period romantic comedy or something and going “wait, that guy is an evil wizard?”
Now, now, I’m well aware that this is a period romantic comedy between the evil necromancer wizard and the farm boy hero!
I regret to inform you the farm boy hero is the evil necromancer wizard
I really wish “unlearning internalized misogyny” hadn’t become synonymous with “learn to like being feminine.” That’s true for some people but it’s not true for everyone and it shouldn’t be true for everyone. Some people don’t like femininity because of internalized misogyny, but some people don’t like it because they’re just not feminine. It’s not for everyone. Not liking pink because it’s just not one of your favorite colors isn’t interalized misogyny, and not liking it because it reminds you of the pain of having femininity forced on you growing up isn’t internalized misogyny either. You don’t have to “unlearn” those things.
Internalized misogyny isthinking every woman needs to be feminine or there’s something wrong with them. Internalized misogyny is trying to enforce a feminine performance on women around you. The idea that there’s something inherently worse about being masculine than being feminine is radfem-y and disgusting.
“In tale after heroic tale, the protagonist proclaimed he would have victory or death. It seemed that the best he could hope for was victory and death.”
You know something I love about Elayne? It’s that she’s unapologetically a Princess. There’s no “I’m not a regular princess, I’m a cool princess” vibe to her: she loves clothes and jewels and finery, she stares down her nose at people, she throws little tantrums and stomps her slippered foot, she gets very offended when people don’t recognize her or treat her with the respect she feels she is due. She is Peak Princess.
There’s also other aspects of her as a character: she’s desperate to learn and try out new skills, she wants to step outside her comfort zone and prove her worth, she is loyal and loving, she carries around supplies to help injured animals (and Dragons). None of this is in spite of being a princess but rather compliments it: she’s led a sheltered life but cares deeply and wants to be of use to her people.
Yeah she occasionally annoys the crap out of me, but I have mad respect for unapologetic high femmes.
And Aredhel bore to Eöl a son in the shadows of Nan Elmoth, and in her heart she gave him a name in the forbidden tongue of the Noldor, Lómion, that signifies Child of the Twilight; but his father gave him no name until he was twelve years old. Then he called him Maeglin, which is Sharp Glance, for he perceived that the eyes of his son were more piercing than his own, and his thought could read the secrets of hearts beyond the mist of words. As Maeglin grew to full stature he resembled in face and form rather his kindred of the Noldor, but in mood and mind he was the son of his father.
For anyone looking through the notes wondering “Why? Why would you blaze this?” This is a recreation of a very old ad back when Tumblr ads would greenlight literally anything.
Other classics include the Burrito Scope
And some REALLY odd photoshops
Since these gems no longer exist, but I, humble Tumblr user squid-ink-personal, have the capability, I figured that if the ads aren’t going to weird themselves, I’M going to weird them.
Also, the oldest record of this frog photo is this one here, from 2007. This frog pic is as old as some Tumblr users.
fiction is made up and not real. if you read fiction in which terrible things happen, and people are murdered and killed and ripped limb from limb and the main character says “I love this I’m gonna keep doing it” and then he gets rich and famous and is widely adored and at the end of the work the author says “author’s note: I’m writing this book because I love it when people are ripped limb from limb and killed and chopped up in real life, and I encourage you, the reader, to do just that immediately”, do you know what happens?
nothing!
that’s right: you, the reader, a presumably responsible adult, are able to make use of your own damn moral compass and conclude “even though the main character of this book killed people and maimed them, and the author said I should do that too, I’m not going to because that would be bad” and then you can go to bed and not fucking worry about it! it’s that damn easy!
even if you liked the book! even if you really enjoyed all the parts where the main character kills people and tears them apart and says “I sure do love murder and violence”.
you can just, not do that stuff in real life and never fucking worry about it again!
Nothing can change the fact that Dany is intended as a white beauty, educated to regard Westeros as her homeland and Westerosi values as her own. This is a story about a white person who goes into a not-white not-western world with higher ideals and values than everyone she finds therein. No matter how many times a character from Essos accuses her of being a “barbarian”, that almost always comes off as highly ironic when followed by examples of creative cruelty on the behalf of those accusers.
Daenerys is surrounded by lands and food and wine and costumes and cultures that are mostly only allowed to be exotic or gross, or both. This isn’t dependant on the actions she takes in-narrative or of the decisions she makes. GRRM makes it so that most independent decisions taken by the people she has been conquering/freeing end up badly for themselves… or well, but in a way that is, well, barbaric. Even if she doesn’t manage to save anyone, her narrative is a perfect example of a white savior narrative. It isn’t an attack on the character, far from it, but it is the way her story has been/is being written.
Is she though? Dany’s a Targaryen of the Blood of Old Valyria - and the Targaryens used that status to set themselves up as quasi-divine in Westeros. Hence why she’s taught Valyrian from such an early age, to hammer home the point that she’s descended from a higher, Essosi, civilization.
She’s ethnically Essosi, her “white beauty” would be completely ordinary if you plonk her down on a random street in Lys, she has lived her whole life in Essos, she speaks Valyrian the common tongue of Essos - how is she not Essosi?
In addition to crocordile’s bolded point above, some further examples of the way Dany is written as Westerosi/civilized as opposed to the Essosi:
2. In ADWD Dany VII, Dany is receiving reports about the various on-going crises in Meereen and discussing how to deal with them with the Green Grace. It’s all so confusing and insurmountable, alas, poor Harzoos. Quentyn’s arrival is announced, she kicks out all the Meereenese, and then she settles in for a lucid and insightful political discussion with the Dornishmen. It makes no sense for her to be more comfortable gossiping with the Westerosi strangers than with one of her primary local advisors – unless she has some affinity for Quentyn and his party that she doesn’t share with the Meereenese.
3. Dany often is (or reports that she is) the only person observing a group of Essosi committing atrocities who is willing to curtail the violence. Notable examples include the raid on the Lhazareen town in AGOT Dany VII, and the death matches in Daznak’s Pit in ADWD Dany IX.
4. Dany hears the discourse and proper names of the Dothraki, the Lhazareen, and the Masters of Slaver’s Bay, as charged with elaborate metaphor (my sun-and-stars), or unpleasantly buzzing and consonantal (“Kraznys mo Naklos”), or patently unctuous (XXD’s constant encomiums to her beauty). Westerosi people, even when they are lying and manipulating, generally speak in plain language, with traditional word order and grammar, including outliers like old Liddle, the Ironborn raiders, and the Wildlings. (Notable exceptions include outsiders such as the Stone Age mountain clans of the Vale, and Melisandre)
With all of these otherizing techniques that encourage the reader to identify with Dany, and to identify Dany with her plain-speaking, unspicy-food-eating, and properly-dressed Westerosi people, noting that Lys produces white slaves is totally missing the point.
