BBC Merlin really is the most show of all time, huh. Casting 4 almost completely unknown children to play the leads against absolute hotshots Anthony Head and John Hurt. John Hurt, who, plays the world’s shittest dragon. Not to mention casting a Black woman to play the legendary Queen Guinevere in 2008. When they swapped “rests on the shoulders of a young boy” to “rests on the shoulders of a young man” at the start of S4. Magic as a very blatant metaphor for queerness which Katie McGrath all but confirmed in the DVD commentary for 5x13. Complete disregard for any historical accuracy. “Do you know how to walk on your knees?” Arthur’s slutty little S1 necklaces and bracelets. His beautiful brown coat that they nerfed by S3. Bradley James as Arthur Pendragon. You get it.
If your nose is currently unblocked and not runny, take a moment to appreciate it. Wow look at you breathing in with both nostrils and not having to blow your nose every two minutes! You must be so proud of yourself! I’m proud of you too bud, have fun with your clear nose, you deserve it.
highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.
me: oh thomas cromwell, we’re really in it now. every day i get emails.
the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: i was on committees with the duke of norfolk. and they beheaded me.
me: yep. good point.
me: cromwell. cromwell this post has got too big and famous and people are starting to misunderstand me on it.
the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: oh no! you achieved too much fame and status? and now people are misrepresenting you? should we strip your lands and title? have you been beheaded?
One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play’s dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It’s one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn’t catch you.
I keep thinking about this tweet, how meaningful and reassuring it was that when one pillar of my childhoods crumbled, the others stepped forward to show they would continue to shoulder the remaining weight all their own.
And this phrase in particular — “I do not think these things of you” — is such a quintessential Piercian refrain. It’s direct in a way that cuts to the core of the argument. It’s a little old fashioned, a bit clunky in its plainness. It acknowledges the distasteful power an argument may hold while simultaneously denying it room to breathe.
I keep hearing that thing Tammy said about Alanna and Kel—which itself is not particularly meaningful to me—playing in my head over and over like a mantra. Because it’s catchy.
“Alanna prefers “Sir” because she was making a point. Kel prefers “Lady Knight” because she’s making a different point.”
…The clarity! The concision! The oddly plain, repetitive twist, easily avoided, that nonetheless persists and makes you stumble.
The statement cuts straight to the point, but it leaves space for you to draw the conclusion yourself. It’s instructive but not pedagogical. It’s a bit awkward, but somehow that works in its favor.
It’s a way Tammy has of writing that I (an overwriter, an overthinker) have held up in my head as a model for years. As much as I am grateful for Tammy’s consistent stance on the right side of the fight for justice, I am also grateful for her specific way with words: simple, blunt, and unadorned, which has meant something to me for so long.
In ~these times~ it is important for queer people to be reminded of what “coming out” originally meant. “Coming out” did not mean telling all of your co-workers something super stigmatized and vulnerable about you, wearing your queer status on your sleeve in public, informing the police or government institutions about your sexuality, or even telling your parents. “Coming out” meant venturing out into the queer community; being among other queers as a queer yourself.
Coming out isn’t about telling the entire world when doing so is not safe for you, it’s not about arming your enemies with information they could use against you. No, coming out is about making a fulfilling queer life possible for yourself through participation in the queer community. It is about escaping the restrictions and dangers of the cisgender heterosexual world by rooting oneself more deeply into the queer one.
And you can always do that. No matter how oppressed we are. No matter how much the culture shifts and policies are enacted to terrorize us. We are always able to be ourselves when we are amongst each other. And living our queerness has always been a collective social project, not just a matter of personal exposure.
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that gaslight gatekeep girlboss meme, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think modern feminism has been co-opted by corporations. But what you don’t know is that that meme is not from Instagram, it’s not from Twitter, it’s not from Tiktok, it’s actually from Tumblr. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in January 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, “today’s agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss.” And then I think it was a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e, wasn’t it, who reblogged it with an image of the phraseedited over a piece of“Live, Laugh, Love” wall art? And then gaslight gatekeep girlboss showed up in the feeds of eight different Twitter repost accounts. Then it filtered down through Instagram and then trickled on down into some tragic “alt side of Tiktok” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that meme represents millions of notes and countless Tumblr users and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from Tumblr when, in fact, you’re wearing the meme that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”
Ao3 does not need a 1-5 star rating system, you just want to bring down authors writing for FREE
Ao3 does not need automatic censorship, it is an archive, therefore anything can be posted
Writing or reading about something illegal does not mean the author nor the reader condones it, if that were true, you could never read a story involving anything negative
Purity culture is ruining fan culture and you all are fucking annoying
had a fascinating english class that resulted in the notes header “the forcefeminization of victor frankenstein”
what the people want, the people get
you see
my professor’s take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.
evidence as explained:
victor is creating life. he is putting his health at risk (spends two years with little sleep or socialization) to bring life forth into this world
his illness after he is shocked by the creature coming to life is akin to both ‘hysteria’ and postpartum depression
he pretty much swoons, let’s be honest
henry clerval, a man who has been characterized as manly and heroic, has to chase after damsel-in-distress victor and care for him as he convalesces
afterward, he hides what he did and went through, for fear that others will label him crazy and emotional and not believe him. sound familiar?
Victor in general is more emotional than the other characters and is constantly tempering his reactions to not be seen as irrational
the book does not otherwise have central female characters
Also, Shelley’s mother died in childbirth. It’s interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.
in conclusion, Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the first examples of mpreg in English literature
What’s really cool about tumblr is that you can get people to fully agree with a post before they finish reading it, making sure that they got as close to the bomb as possible before it detonates.
