hi, hello! i'm sassaffrassa on ao3 and i was wondering what CSS you used in your workskin for *Wolf, Fox, Hound?* i've trying something similar and got one that works part way, but it doesn't look nearly as good as yours, and wondered if you might share 😅

Oh, you mean with the Hen Llinge hover translations? Yeah, for sure! Here’s the whole work skin incl. my little arrow dinkus: https://pastebin.com/v5ei7Gye

The HTML set-up works exactly the same way as in La_Temperanza’s How To Change Text on AO3 When the Cursor is Hovering Over It, plus em tags for italics. You might’ve found this one yourself; it was the basis for mine and it’s great except for two things:

It hard-codes the background color & text color of the links to white and dark gray respectively, which is just awful for anyone whose archive-wide skin isn’t white, such as Reversi users.

It’s 2024 and this is a fic, not a webpage! Text underlines are distracting!

To fix this, I removed the color: #2a2a2a; rule from each of the hovertext rules and had each set background-color to transparent and border-bottom to none, and the actual linky part of my code starts with this to get rid of underlines:

a { text-decoration: none; border-bottom: none; }

(You might be able to nix the border-bottom: none declarations in each of the hovertext rules for redundancy if you want? It’s been ages since I last fiddled with this skin and I don’t remember which parts were overkill.)

La_Temperanza mentions CSS entities at the bottom of their work. Note that apostrophes MUST be converted to CSS entities (\2019) or they’ll break the code. When I made the skin there was some fuckery with accented characters, which sometimes needed to be made into entities to show up and sometimes didn’t. I also discovered a goofy bug where sometimes if you have a CSS entity in there, the back half of your text goes missing; fix this by converting the characters after the entity into entities themselves one by one until it shows up properly, sometimes including the spaces. Full list of character entities can be found here.

hope that helps & let me know if this doesn’t make it do what you want it to!

ooogh thinking about psychiatry in the hexarchate now. psych surgery and formation instinct and the endless manipulation of Jedao in the Black Cradle. psychiatry as compliance training all the way through. We can take the crazy out of Jedao, but then he's not brilliant, and there's nothing to do about his suicidal urges other than Surgically Taking Out The Crazy. also we're going to trigger him on purpose to see if his anchor flinches.

and in the face of the total lack of institutional support, one of the strongest through-lines in the books is people coping with what they've been done and what's been done to them, and helping each other cope. Jedao remembering names. Kel Gized nearly breaking down the door to keep Jedao from killing himself. Mikodez advising Brezan to find a hobby and giving Jedao the green onion. Everyone figuring out how to keep going and get what they want, in the face of a psychological-care framework that is solely interested in upholding the systems that hurt them.

Tbh my favored read is that he actually definitely did have children and is just downplaying the likelihood to Jedao, who has a soft spot for munchkins. Revenant Gun ch 18:

The eyes resembled Mahar’s, although that was pure coincidence. They weren’t related; he’d checked, unlikely as the prospect was. But the single point of similarity pleased him nonetheless.

The only possible family member who could have provided descendant relations besides Kujen himself is his father, and there’s no fucking way he knows who his father is. On a meta level this is probably bullshit sci-fi fudging and not an instance of Kujen having kept good track of genealogy records over the years, but you can’t actually determine relatedness genetically after, what, thirty fucking generations? that’s just straight-up not how DNA inheritance works! so if you’re not assuming Magic DNA Testing the only way it’s possible to check is by paper trail. I kind of hc that he knew of or very strongly suspected the identity of those children and did, in fact, do his best to track them down as a teenager with slightly more resources at his disposal.

#men will remake an empire in the image of what they viewed as safety as an exploited preteen rather than going to therapy!

he’s so fucked up i love him so much 😩

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

Yeah, I briefly mentioned Books of the Named as an outlier in that it is firmly aimed at teenagers, which is a really unusual target audience for an animal fantasy; if they aren’t kidlit proper they’re usually just aimed at adults.

Ratha is also kind of weird because usually the hard cut-offs for books marketed to teenagers vs. adults are whether the characters are teens / young adults and whether there is Actual Sex On-Screen in the book. With some wiggle room. I’m aware that quintessentially YA title Breaking Dawn has on-screen fucking, for instance, though it got away with it by being 1) a juggernaut moneymaker and 2) very softcore and light on details. and like—

well look if regular animal fantasy is kind of getting away with presenting violent content as okay for kids by using animal characters as a level of abstraction between us and the violent content, Ratha’s Courage is the only one I’ve ever read that kind of seems to be using the fact that the characters are animals to get away with actually quite extreme sexual content, like, the scene where basically the entire female cast (all cats, remember) gets kidnapped and collectively forced into heat where they’re trying desperately to fight being forced to want to be raped is a fucking lot. (I’m positive Ratha watches several of her clan mates have penetrative sex in this scene but it’s possible the book gets away with it because I don’t thiiiink that Ratha herself has sex, though it’s been a while.)

From a speculative fiction perspective Clare Bell is obvs exploring difference in behavior and biology, that’s the whole thematic thing with the sapient Named and sub-sapient Nameless species. (I kind of suspect if I reread these books as an adult I might find them somewhat ableist. Anyways.) The biological fact that cats go into heat is a significant point of divergence from humans and would alter the culture and behavior of a sentient species that experienced that, so it makes sense on one level to go there. On like, a marketing level, uhh, having Actual Sex On-Screen is okay in YA if they’re non-human animals I guess???? Publishing categories are wild.

Also, lmao, I hear this a lot and it’s always interesting to me. I totally skipped the adult-returning-to-kidlit stage of “Damn, this is fucked up” because for career reasons there has been functionally no period of my life where I actually stopped reading kidlit. Kidlit has always provided an outlet for the dark, messy parts of kids’ psyches and it’s so funny how adults who graduate out of it forget about that until they come back. I’m personally much more interested in the unique ways kidlit frames graphic and challenging content than the fact that such content exists, but I spend basically all my time managing our kidlit collection so I’m pretty deep in the weeds here. Ofc I also don’t give a shit what kids read at any age; anyone of any age can read from any section for any reason. My point about Ratha above is just that the standards for sorting any given book into a particular age section are WACK.

i had a kid (could NOT have been older than 13) ask me where the Warrior Cats series was, so I showed them the chapter books and they were like “they’re in the children’s section? I thought they would be in YA” and I was (delicately) like “well...they were written for children” and this fuckin kid was like “do you know how violent they are??” like first of all yeah kiddo all the graphic evisceration was a formative part of my childhood, welcome to the club. and second of all. WHAT are you trying to accomplish here

@akilah12902

#Warrior Cats #I gotta do an actual side by side with Watership Down #Because I think they're actually very similar levels of violence #(to be clear I'm not complaining)

actually I have been thinking about this since yesterday and I am going to Talk About animal fantasy under the cut

bc. okay. I did actually recently reread the original Watership Down myself since Joe Sutphin’s graphic novel adaptation released! I don’t really know that kids these days are still reading it (I never see it circulating, RIP) but it is ofc meant for children just like Warrior Cats and uhh yeah, I would say they’re pretty equally graphically violent. The main difference is that WCats is a low fantasy soap opera and working at all times on a heightened level of drama that makes even plausible cat-on-cat violence feel somewhat more fantastical, while WDown, Bunny Fascism aside, feels far more grounded in the types of real violence rabbits engage in/are exposed to. Fiver and Pipkin bleeding from the gums from chewing through the peg to save Bigwig from getting garrotted or Bigwig fighting to the death in the closed quarters of the warren tunnels are no more or less graphic than Bramblefur staking his half-brother through the throat in a failed regicide plot or Lionblaze in the berserker ecstasy of being the prophesied Best At Fighting, but like, they certainly have different vibes.

i kept thinking about this though because I don’t think either is much of an outlier in animal fantasy. It's been a while since I read Guardians of Ga’Hoole but I remember it also being about as violent as Warriors. Yellow Eyes by Rutherford Montgomery is an old one but regularly placed in children’s sections when it is and boy does that one not shy away from what hunting dogs are bred to do to cougars! Same for the abridged versions of Call of the Wild, honestly, those still tend to leave in a lot of the animal-on-animal violence.

Animal fantasy is interesting bc as a prose genre it exists almost entirely in kidlit (notable exceptions are Books of the Named / Ratha’s Creature in YA and Tailchaser’s Song and Raptor Red in adult fiction, but few others) but it is still regularly quite graphic. All of the characters being animals is a pretty powerful level of abstraction when it comes to working with heavy themes. For instance, Redwall. Mattimeo would be a hell of a different book if the chain-gang of trafficked children wasn’t, y’know, mostly mice. (Jacques doesn’t usually revel in graphic depictions of lethal force, but man sure could craft a drawn-out sequence of graphic suffering, cf. that one scene where Martin is staked out for the seagulls.) And the characters being animals makes for highly fertile thematic ground for interpersonal / interspecific violence, but also predation, autonomy, displacement, and abuse. Watership Down and Animals of Farthing Wood both deal with displacement caused by human development, Black Beauty with the abuse of working animals. Mrs Frisby & the Rats of Nimh and Silverwing are both about animal experimentation; Nimh with lab rats and Silverwing with Project X-Ray. Avi’s Poppy uses the threat of an apex predator to tell a story about totalitarian control. More recently, Scary Stories for Young Foxes marries familial abuse with the natural tendency of foxes towards infanticide. Several of these are not just thematically heavy but also pretty graphic in their depiction of their subjects!

Ofc this is not what all animal fantasy is like and this genre can also just be tropey fantasy fun (Mistmantle and Swordbird come to mind) and it can also just be regular fun (Dick King-Smith and Ralph S. Mouse and Catwings). Many different things one can do in this space. And also, kids’ books as a whole are often far more graphic and violent than people expect them to be, because kids like violence and it’s good for them to have an outlet for their bloodthirsty tendencies. But! Point is. You can do all sorts of fucked up stuff to animals in fiction as long as they’re the heroes of their own stories and kids eat that shit up. I’m not a kid anymore and I still eat that shit up. Man, I fucking love animal fantasy.

i had a kid (could NOT have been older than 13) ask me where the Warrior Cats series was, so I showed them the chapter books and they were like “they’re in the children’s section? I thought they would be in YA” and I was (delicately) like “well...they were written for children” and this fuckin kid was like “do you know how violent they are??” like first of all yeah kiddo all the graphic evisceration was a formative part of my childhood, welcome to the club. and second of all. WHAT are you trying to accomplish here

CRYING over the framing of “why it’s awesome: this bird independently invented oubliettes!” holy shit

grain of salt here tho: this finding is a bit controversial. Qninba et al. don’t seem to have directly observed a raptor placing a bird in a hole, and raptors do sometimes start plucking prey before they kill them, so the birds may have ended up in holes after escaping.

also there’s a good photo of a live but tailless chiffchaff in the paper, but this whitethroat (also from the paper, found in color from a reporting outlet) does not look stuck to me, lmao. Maybe I have an unrealistic idea of how squeezable little sparrow-type fellas are?

On the other hand, the authors do have local corroboration of the phenomenon, some of the holes are described as small enough to restrain the movements of the birds inside them, and it would be weird for the raptors to be frequently losing prey they’d already started plucking. very unusual thing to observe happening more than once or twice no matter what!

The original report is from 2014 and I can’t find any more recent reporting on these raptors. Someone should go back to Essaouira and see if this population is still doing it.

very cool but also kind of a dick move

he seems like he was a very normal and sweet/altruistic kid aside from the trauma!! and then he made himself into THAT. men will literally do brain surgery on themselves rather than go to therapy.

the (horrible) possibilities I’ve managed to come up with, vaguely in order from most to least plausible: (CW: CSA, Kujen’s backstory)

Forced to kill them by someone else. I doubt Halash specifically (beginning the relationship like this seems like it would be difficult to offset with a fridge) but possibly an act of random sadism from a soldier or other person associated with the regime. I am a bit partial to this but I fear I may just have Exordia on the brain.

After becoming a concubine he leveraged this position to get his family also taken in as slaves in Halash’s court in an attempt to provide them what he thought might be more security than the streets, & they were killed purposefully or by neglect by the people who they were given to.

Mercy kill situation. (Seems very unlikely for Kujen to decide any given scenario is Worse Than Death. Maybe possible if either of them were already dying, tho’ that makes the “responsible” part dubious.)

His sister’s death was accidental but his fault and his mother turned on him, requiring he defend himself. Kind of a reach, esp considering his age, but not impossible? He was already engaged in survival sex work before he met Halash, so either he started doing that after his family’s death or his mother was not capable of protecting or providing for him, and if the latter, possibly she was unstable in other ways??

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

i had a kid (could NOT have been older than 13) ask me where the Warrior Cats series was, so I showed them the chapter books and they were like “they’re in the children’s section? I thought they would be in YA” and I was (delicately) like “well...they were written for children” and this fuckin kid was like “do you know how violent they are??” like first of all yeah kiddo all the graphic evisceration was a formative part of my childhood, welcome to the club. and second of all. WHAT are you trying to accomplish here

i had a kid (could NOT have been older than 13) ask me where the Warrior Cats series was, so I showed them the chapter books and they were like “they’re in the children’s section? I thought they would be in YA” and I was (delicately) like “well...they were written for children” and this fuckin kid was like “do you know how violent they are??” like first of all yeah kiddo all the graphic evisceration was a formative part of my childhood, welcome to the club. and second of all. WHAT are you trying to accomplish here

my original tags:

#the thing is before he was admitted to Nirai Academy Prime he was living in a Vidona orphanage #so this had to have happened BEFORE the heptarchate annexed Erchanno #and frankly i don’t have textual support for this but i get the vibe that he was already on his own when Halash picked him up #which means he was LITTLE when they died! #what the hell does ‘responsible’ mean for a fucking. ELEVEN year old? YOUNGER?? what HAPPENED!?

@invariant-ice:

#re op's tags #also what does 'responsible' mean to an adult with a surgically removed conscience?? #safe to assume he doesn't have survivor's guilt or anything and he still considers himself responsible?? #sidenote does the vidona orphanage come from the ttrpg? #hexarchate stories timeline has him becoming halash's concubine at twelve and entering the nirai academy at fourteen #and i think in revenant gun he says he was fourteen when the kel came knocking

He must have done something that was both purposeful & directly causal to their deaths, if not straightforwardly murder, because YEAH. I feel like mutilating his own conscience might not have necessarily changed how he thinks about things that happened prior: like, I don’t think that post-surgery he wrangled himself around to thinking things he considered himself responsible for beforehand weren’t actually his fault, I think he just didn’t feel bad about any of them anymore. But if it was an accident he most likely would have updated his perception of responsibility as an adult freed of guilt. but then like, what did he do???? and why??

the orphanage thing is actually from his journals. Revenant Gun, ch. 6:

One of my classmates asked me why I don’t just call the Vidona, the hexarch said. As if I don’t remember what life was like in a Vidona orphanage. I’m not sure the girl would thank me.

This is also the chapter that we get the only other piece of information we know about his sister, which is that she was about 5-7yo when she died:

Spotted her again, the hexarch said in what looked like quickly dashed-off handwriting. And, in the margin of the next page: My sister was about her age when she died. [...] Six years old and she already knows.

(btw, this means either he and his sister had a somewhat significant age gap or he was VERY small when it happened. TOO SMALL)

He does not actually give a specific age for how old he was during the Erchanno annexation, just that he was admitted to academy at fourteen. I think he probably tested out of the orphanage and into the academy dorms within a few months. Long enough to have been miserable, short enough that it wasn’t a huge part of his childhood / he doesn’t feel he was failed bureaucratically (cf. RG chapter 23, “The Kel were good about getting us into orphanages and arranging for our educations. I tested into Nirai Academy very young.”). This could put the date of annexation either early in his fourteenth year or late in his thirteenth.

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

one of my favourite things is seeing posts like this that are clearly a reference to some fandom or piece of media, but having no idea what it’s referencing, so i’m just reading it like. yeah that would be weird huh

7.2k into this nightmare of a 2nd person fic and the “what the fuck am I DOING” mood is starting to hit. giving me access to a word processor was a mistake. I wanted a quick little two-scene oneshot but it’s getting longer

Sylvia Legris, The Principle of Rapid Peering

Andean Marsupial Frog (Gastrotheca orophylax), female carrying eggs, family Hemipharctidae, Santa Clara, Alto Putumayo, Colombia

Photograph by Camilo Zapata

if you’re wondering how it’s going, yesterday I coordinated my jewelry to what I intended my outfit to be, as I do every morning, and three hours later I went in the bathroom and realized I’d put on the wrong fucking shirt