this is my jam by disgruntledkittenface | M | 4513 The guy’s eyes are so blue that Harry can’t tear his gaze away, even as he moves to the beat. The searing light shade is magnetic; he finds himself leaning in and yelling, “This is my jam!” only to earn a laugh from thin pink lips that Harry’s definitely going to be dreaming about tonight. “Your jam?” When the guy yells back over the music, his blue eyes sparkling and his lips twisted in a smirk, Harry’s chest literally puffs out with pride at earning his attention. His obvious approval. Tongue-tied, Harry nods and closes his eyes as he lets go, the music reverberating around them. All of the usual inhibitions that keep him in the corner at parties fall away and he bounces around the center of the dance floor, waving his arms above his head. Somehow his towel stays on, even as he starts to think he wouldn’t mind if it fell off. Fuck it. He finally made it here, he’s damn well going to enjoy it. Harry goes to a gay bathhouse for the first time. 90s AU.
beneath the sound of hope by YesIsAWorld | E | 6620 After Louis Tomlinson leaves the set of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” music video, it’s not the band or the experience that he can’t stop thinking about—it’s the curly-haired boy he met while filming. Determined to track that same boy down, he sets off on a short journey and ends up figuring out some truths about himself along the way.
BLVD by kingsofeverything | E | 12091 It’s the first week of summer break and Harry just wants to relax and enjoy his vacation in Myrtle Beach. If only he could stop making an ass of himself.
honey, honey by resurrectdead | E | 13194 It just feels weird to not be able to tell his own mum about how nervous yet over the fucking moon happy he is right now, because this tape isn’t for neither Niall nor Liam. It’s for, well. It’s for Harry bloody Styles. The boy that makes his insides feel like sunshine. Or: It’s 1988, and Louis has to make a mixtape for Harry
enter exit (enter) by louisandthealien | M | 17534 When he’s finally in the hotel, crammed into the tiny phone booth, all he can do is stare at the faded paper sign glaring down at him from the wall. 1 Minute = 11.82 USD Mexico –> United States He has less than a minute to break his boyfriend’s heart, and it’s going to cost him twelve bucks to do it. There’s sand under his fingernails as he dials the number.
Let The Boys All Sing And The Boys All Shout For Tomorrow by Lunarrua | M | 18429 It’s February 1988. Thatcher is in power. There’s a new drug sweeping through the clubbing scene. In Manchester, it’s the eve of a major protest and a new musical movement. And when Nick finds Harry looking lost outside his favourite chip shop, it’s the start of a weekend that will leave an indelible mark on both their lives.
I Just Want You to Know Who I Am by gettingaphdinlarry | nr | 21729 It’s Niall Horan’s senior year and it’s going to be great. He’s got a solid group of friends, a new job, and he gets to take his favorite class again, as long as he keeps a journal his creative writing teacher will never read. When his crush takes the same class, he’s glad he has something to confide in. Even if that something is a notebook that can’t talk back.
Among Lavender Fields by homosociallyyours | E | 70354 At twenty-one, Louis Tomlinson is more than ready to shed the girl next door image that’s been with her since her entry into film in her childhood, but with a mother and father steeped in Hollywood tradition it’s felt impossible. Meanwhile, Harry Styles is a young, struggling musician new to London, friendless yet eager for the next phase of her life to begin. When French director Marie Coutard casts the two of them in her film, it’s a chance for both to break away from the people they’ve been. Together, they struggle through an acting process that’s new and unfamiliar for both of them, learning more than they could’ve imagined about themselves along the way. As they spend long days picking lavender and long nights sharing the things they’ve never been able to tell anyone else, their love blooms. Will the flower fade, or will the love they make among lavender fields be one they carry with them to the end?
April 12, 1983: Murmur, R.E.M.’s debut studio LP (produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon) was released. Here’s the video for “Radio Free Europe,” the album’s first single, also released on 4.12.83.
Transfusion AU! A continuation of my Previouspost.
Transfusion is a symbiotic relationship between humans and Transformers in which the latter gains a boost and visual overhaul by fusing (shoving their human into their spark) with their partner.
Both Bot and Human need to have a fairly close bond to fuse for long periods of time and many bots (both decepticon and autobot) balk at the idea of combining so intimately with an organic- but the ones that have successfully fused see massive increases in physical and mental power.
I need a warm hand to cool me down I need a soft voice to drown me out I need a emptiness to fill my soul I need a question mark to make me whole
I’ll be the boy at the back of the bus with my eyes on the back of your head you’ll be the girl on the front seat telling your friend that he never really cared
Like the thing about Loki in Norse mythology is there’s like 8000 myths about Loki just being chaotically mischievous and the other gods are like lol oh that scamp, no matter how disastrous his schemes are, their reaction is still pretty much always ‘haha oh that’s just Loki.’
EXCEPT for basically….one myth. Where Loki’s instrumental in the death of Baldur and the gods are all WHOA TOO FUCKING FAR DUDE and send him to Hel to be tormented for all eternity, leading to his ultimate escape/release in Ragnarok to end all things and lead the army of the damned and his monstrous children to pretty much…eat all the gods, destroy Asgard, and burn the World Tree all to the ground so it can all start over.
Here’s the thing though. Norse mythology spanned centuries. The tales of Loki as the mischievous trickster god were told for centuries.
However, for most of that time, the myths were told as part of oral traditions passed down generation to generation, until they were finally compiled in manuscript form in the 13th century, roughly. This is when pretty much all the sagas, as Norse myth compilations were called, are considered to have been written down for the first time, and so they included thousands of stories that had been told over hundreds of years.
They were also regional, though there was a lot of overlap, given that the Vikings traveled widely and regularly across the various parts of Scandinavia. Still, different parts of Scandinavia had their own sagas. Norway had different sagas than Denmark who had different sagas than Iceland, etc. Even though all of them featured primarily the same figures, they each had their own unique stories featuring the gods. However, very rarely did they have radically different takes on those gods.
Now what’s significant about the fact that pretty much every saga we have, where these myths were all finally written down and preserved, is from the 13th century….
Is that pretty much all of Scandinavia had converted to Christianity by the early 12th century, with active worship of the Norse gods being scattered and mostly underground from that point on.
Why is this significant?
Because it means every Norse myth we have a written recording of was not written by people who still actively worshiped those gods. Nor were they intended to be read as such at the time.
They were written down by Christian scholars who wrote them AS stories. They were intended as collections of their regions’ cultural histories, but not by or for people who still actively believed in these stories or the figures they featured. They weren’t like….TRYING to be super accurate, is the thing. The scholars who wrote these sagas were writing down the stories that had been passed down for generations, but through the lens of people who saw them as stories their ancestors once believed, not ones that pertained to their own current worldview.
And they were writing these sagas for an audience of people who similarly believed as they believed.
Which means that inevitably, some things got ‘adjusted’ to fit the current world view, the zeitgeist of the scholars writing down the stories and that of the people who would read or have the stories read to them from thereon. Because again, they weren’t aiming for being 100% faithful to the tales as they’d been told to them. They were just treating them as stories. And what do you do when the story you’re writing down has elements that don’t make that much sense to you because they were born of and aimed a worldview that doesn’t match yours?
Well, if you’re the Christian scholars writing the Norse sagas, you ‘tweak’ those elements until they make a story that fits your worldview.
So remember how I said the various sagas were regional and had a lot of overlap but some stories were distinct to some regions and didn’t show up elsewhere?
Yeah, Ragnarok is one of those.
Thousands of sagas encompassing centuries of Norse mythology and oral traditions were written down all over the various regions of Scandinavia in the 13th century.
Ragnarok only showed up in one.
The most famous, granted, but still. Everything we’re told in Norse myths about the death of Baldur and Loki’s role in it, leading to his punishment and torment in Hel and his ultimate release and bringing forth the armies of Hel to slay the gods and end the world?
Comes from the Prose Edda and the later Poetic Edda, from Iceland.
Which had primarily converted to Christianity as far back as 1000.
Now, the Vikings? Were actually surprisingly not a big doom and gloom people. Pretty much every assumption of them as such comes from how synonymous we regard Ragnarok with their culture.
It is after all, the ultimate Judgment Day myth, isn’t it? Right up there with Christianity’s Book of Revelations. An apocalyptic end of the world scenario, a war between heaven and hell, where everything is destroyed so that the world can basically start fresh with a clean slate. Nothing old ‘deserves’ to survive, pretty much the only way for a world free of sin and evil to arise is from the ashes of the old, after everything has been cleansed with fire.
Now contrast this ‘myth’ with pretty much every other Norse myth that’s survived. Larger than life tales of grand adventures, noble quests, gods walking among mortals in disguise and heroes fighting giants and stealing from dragons.
Where the closest thing the Norse pantheon has to a devil figure is Loki, the god of mischief….not even evil, but MISCHIEF, because a far more accurate representation of the Vikings’ world view is that sometimes shit happens, because Loki the god of chaos likes to make a mess of things. And what do you do when that happens? If you’re the Vikings, you basically just shrug, go “well, that’s Loki” for you, and drink some more mead.
Loki isn’t vilified in a single myth until Ragnarok, because the Vikings didn’t hate him. And they certainly didn’t fear him. They LAUGHED at him. In nine out of ten myths, Loki ends up the subject of ridicule himself, as he has the tables turned on him or outsmarts himself
Until Ragnarok.
Which, granted, could very well be another Norse myth that was passed down generation to generation in Iceland, land of frequent volcanic eruptions and likely inspiration for Musplheim, the land of the fire giants.
BUT. Which could equally likely, and far more plausibly given the overall context of Norse mythology, simply be a story the scholar who wrote the Prose Edda made up to ‘finish off’ his saga of the world according to the Vikings, from beginning to end.
An ending his Christian audience of the times would understand and identify with a lot better than they would understand the concept of a devil-figure that existed to be LAUGHED at, to show how little the Vikings feared some mythical figure with the power to lie and deceive them….the complete opposite of the way Christians feared Satan.
Basically put….Ragnarok, for all that we think of it as the ultimate Norse myth….DOES NOT MAKE SENSE in the context of almost EVERY single other Norse myth AND in the context of how Norse society viewed the world and their place in it, or their gods and their relationship with them.
Same with Loki’s depiction in Ragnarok.
What both Ragnarok and Loki’s role in Ragnarok DO make sense in the context of, however, is in a bastardization of Christianity’s own doomsday tales of a Judgment Day, stylized to fit the trappings of Norse mythology and feature their gods instead of Christian figures.
With Loki recast in the role of the Devil, as he was the closest fit they could find to that.
And with Baldur, god of light (a Norse god who is at best a footnote in Norse myths other than Ragnarok, and certainly was never the major pantheon figure he’s assumed to be), recast in the role of the Christ figure. Whose death starts the ball rolling for Judgment Day and who is destined to return for it, to triumph over Loki/Satan and preside over the new, purified world once it’s reborn from the ashes of the old one.
Anyway, tl;dr, don’t believe the hype, Ragnarok’s probably not even an actual Norse myth but the invention of Christian writers who were like lol this would make for a great Book of Revelations fanfic AU, and Loki was almost certainly never regarded by actual Vikings as some evil, malicious world-destroyer who would lead armies of the dead at Armageddon whoops I mean Ragnarok.
tl;dr of the tl;dr Loki’s not actually evil and more on how Christians bastardize things.
THIS. EXACTLY THIS.
I tell this to my students every time I teach Norse Mythology. You have to pay attention to the sources.
“What is jam? What makes something authentically jam? Can bacon really be made into jam?
It was all very Existentialist.
The answer to those questions is a bit complicated and non-definitive. The U.S. FDA has defined jam and jelly in very specific and mathematical terms (such-and-such percentage of juice to fruit to water to sugar = jam/jelly); it also uses jam and preserve interchangeably, for the most part. While interesting, the FDA’s definitions did not matter much to me because the FDA wasn’t really using the terms in the way that we usually use the terms. Also, the FDA wasn’t comprehensive in its definitions. It didn’t tackle other fruit spreads like marmalades or curds, for instance.
The more I looked into, the more I thought, dude, this information would make a good infographic.”
Sooo it’s all gelled juice depending on size of the fruit?
Favourite thing: When a character finds out just how badly someone they care about has suffered and you can see the immediate shift from shock/horror into a fierce, protective anger.
Especially:
The initial look of shock turns to horror. Then the full weight of what they’ve discovered hits them - their friend has been hurt. Someone has hurtthem.
Their eyes narrow. Fury burns in their eyes, absolute unforgiving.
![[insert clever title here]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/avatar_1742e719a52f_30.png){kind=avatar}
