"Oh I didn't like Holly because it was too preachy about Covid, Stephen King should keep politics out of his novels.."

The Stand is litteraly about how the US government would rather let a pandemic wipe out civilisation and bring about the anti-Christ than admit responsibility for a lab accident. 1970s Stephen King's politics would chop you up and line you up like his breakfast cocaine. Silence.

Favorite passages from each fic in the Draco Malfoy and the Mirror of Ecidyrue series

The Mirror of Ecidyrue

Draco spread his arms wide. "Pride. What else do I have?" he asked with the bitterest of irony, only for Weasley to laugh and say with a shrug,

“I don’t know. Us?”

The Heir of Slytherin

I love him so much

It had to be the insanity of the moment making Draco think such an impossible thing. But he thought it.

The House of Black

"'Toujours pur'? Guess this would be 'toujours aimé', huh? Which one would you choose?”

The Wheel of Hecate

“Whatever he is, he didn't taint you, didn't change you, not you. You're the kind of person who could climb down into hell and back out and still not have your brightness dimmed."

The Talon Brand

“We need you, you know. I need you. All of us do. Harry most of all."

"Because I have this fucking wand?" Draco snapped, looking up glaring. But his temper didn't make the skittish Neville pull back for once.

"No," Neville said, with a very Gryffindorish faith in his eyes. "Because you're the one who makes us feel brave."

The Prisoner of Nurmengard

“Draco Black was suffering, bound to Lucius Malfoy, for years, just like Dobby. But Dobby and Draco Black are both free now. We are free, and we are choosing who we want to be."

The Bastard Dragon

“I hope that as your life passes, from time to time, you may think of me, and, if nothing else, remember how very much I loved you.”

while i really liked rhaenyra in 1.10, she was also very inconsistent with the way she’s been written in prior episodes (4-9 mostly), and i don’t know what we’re supposed to take away from her characterization this season.

the last time rhaenyra showed any resistance to violence was all the way back in episode 2, when she flew to dragonstone to peacefully resolve a conflict with daemon that could have turned messy. merely paralleling that moment in the finale, however, does not erase the fact that since the first dragonstone encounter, she has walked off when a suitor propositioning her hand was killed, plotted with daemon to kill an innocent man to facilitate laenor’s escape (and resolved that the people should fear her as their scheme unfolded), and watched vaemond beheaded and expressed no feelings on the matter beyond mild shock. now, i’m not saying she has to jump into battle, but in the book she was outraged that the throne that rightfully belonged to her had been usurped, and offered very blunt terms to the greens -- to cede the throne immediately or die. i would have liked to see some of this resolve in the finale.

rhaenyra has also been neither cognizant nor considerate of the fact that, as a targaryen, the customs of the realm over which she hopes to rule are different than hers. apart from the fact that she passed off her bastards as trueborn, she also complained that the valyrian tapestries in the red keep had been replaced with banners of the faith of the seven, and she stated that the wants of the smallfolk were of no consequence to her as early as episode 4. none of these things are criminal, but they do provide us deeper insight about her mindset. (oh, also: she slept with criston, who was essentially a servant to her, despite his repeated refusal and his esteem for the position of kingsguard, which she knew involved an oath of celibacy.) in this episode though, she gave luke a speech about how targaryens were still accountable to the realm and had to follow their traditions and values accordingly. while this is undoubtedly a nice sentiment, it also defies the core of rhaenyra’s character, given that her lack of awareness on this issue is what results in her eventual downfall.

she also spoke of duty to the realm and earning the throne this episode, which are ideas she has never even alluded to prior to this point. i never got the sense that rhaenyra had much of an understanding of what the responsibility of rule truly means. we’re shown how she fled to dragonstone the moment circumstances at court grew difficult for her and we never see her engage in any sort of preparation for her future duties as monarch. she was outraged about the hightowers ruling in viserys’s stead and giving him milk of the poppy to ameliorate his pain, though she was not present for any of the six years he was left incapacitated by his health while they were. i really can’t fathom how we are expected to believe that this is a character who has understood duty all along.

rhaenyra is impulsive, indifferent to violence, ignorant or uncaring of the wants of the people, and generally uninterested in preparing for her ascension to queen. this doesn’t make her irredeemable by any means, but it is the picture of rhaenyra that’s been painted for us all season. the writers seem to want to have their cake and eat it too; yes, rhaenyra has these flaws which make her an interesting character to watch, but when the crisis they’ve been building to this entire season finally arrives, these flaws are nowhere in sight. rhaenyra can’t be allowed to be anything other than wise, mature, desperate for peace, and as luke puts it, “perfect,” at this critical juncture, even though the character they have established says otherwise.

this mirrors very closely what happened to alicent. up to and including episode 7, we were shown that she had impressed upon her kids that aegon would one day be king, and we were exposed to all of the very understandable reasons that she was aiming for this. she didn’t trust rhaenyra, she knew rhaenyra being a woman posed a threat to her children’s lives (which was only compounded by rhaenyra putting bastards next in line and then marrying daemon), she knew rhaenyra’s faction had no issue executing anyone who obstructed their goals, and it was proven to her that the wellbeing of her family was not important (not to viserys, not to rhaenyra, not to anyone) when aemond lost his eye. perhaps rhaenyra never would have harmed her children, but what matters is that alicent wanted the security of power. this may not a morally unimpeachable position, but i think it’s a very sympathetic one to anyone watching without fan goggles on. but actually, scratch all of that -- what alicent really wanted was to fulfill viserys’s half-baked dying wishes. otherwise, she never would have plotted to seize the throne for aegon! her real flaw is toiling in the service of men, don’t you see? (never mind that viserys named rhaenyra his heir before that, so whether she supported aegon or rhaenyra, she’d still be deferring to her husband.) anyway, what was all that other stuff even for, then?

i understand that rhaenyra and alicent will embrace their darker vices as the war progresses (starting with lucerys’s death and likely blood and cheese, respectively). but *alicent voice* where is coherence? where is consistency? the writers seem to be peddling the idea that these women are blameless, and their future misdeeds are a result of men and the patriarchy, but i disagree. i don’t think either of them are blameless. while the misogyny of this setting and time period plays an undeniable role in this story, it’s also stupid to ignore that alicent and rhaenyra are more powerful than nearly all men because of their positions as queen and heir, and thus had their own agency. they, too, were selfish and reckless and ambitious, qualities which we see amplified in their later, more terrible actions, and i think that would have been a far more compelling story to follow.

😐

Not me shipping Sansa with Podrick in year two thousand and twenty four

a starstruck odyssey is for lovers

Hey, hope you're doing well! Had a couple questions for you if they're not too personal:

1. Whats your favourite story you've written so far? Is it something public? Is it finished?

2. Do you have any long form non-interactive fiction you've written that's available to read? I would genuinely kill to read something like that from you

hi :-) ohh these are fun...

my favorite story is probably My NovelTM which isn't finished yet, i've written a first draft and now it's just been languishing until i can find the motivation to start a second draft. i finished the first draft in august i think, and started editing it pretty heavily before i realized i was just going to have to rewrite the whole thing again. i'm mostly having trouble with the ending, which always seems to be my problem lmfao... anyways it follows the relationship of Angel and Valerie, after Valerie has been missing for a few months and suddenly returns as a vampire with no memory of Angel or what happened over the months while she was away. it alternates between both their povs in both present day and through flashbacks.

so unfortunately for your second question, no, but i do hope to publish Angel and Valerie's story one day, either traditionally through a small press (lol here's hoping) or by self-publishing it. otherwise my only published work is what's available on my itch.io (siren's call, one day hike, etc)

i am working on a short story for vampire jam, which i'll hopefully be sharing next month. it's still in the form of interactive fiction, published in twine, but it's more of a short story than anything like blood choke or tnp. i also have a butch cowboys and zombies story i've been working on for a while, but i'm not sure when i'll get around to finishing it since it's not a priority project.

i do want to write another novel as well, a very old story i've been kicking around for years, but as usual i haven't been able to come up with an ending for it... but maybe one day.

"Oh it would have been more satisfying if the humans had invented a technology which defeated the Martians rather than have them killed off by accident just when humanity's impotence in the face of disaster seems to be confirmed". I

To me that's just a fancy way of saying "Yeah but humans could totally handle the Martians and the writer has a duty to reassure the audience of that!"

Sir we cannot even handle climate change and I'm sorry to tell you that it's not entirely due to a lack of technological expertise

TW: 200th rant about the stupid "HP fans are all complicit in antisemitism and transphobia" discourse, brought to you by my OCD-induced suicidality.

I've by now become so wary of trans people and enbies on social media, especially Jewish ones. I'm like "this person is GOING to be on their Harry Potter bullshit and trigger the hell out of my OCD" and my hackles go up automatically. Then my OCD goes "haha you hate them because they're Jewish and/or trans, you're an antisemitic transphobe so they're clearly right about people who defend HP! SUFFER bitch!" Cue hell loop until my brain is flayed over anything nobody actually even said or did.

I don't even LIKE HP that much anymore, why is wanting to stop having PTSD episodes about stupid shit the thing that also dropkicks me down seven circles of hell??? It's made all the so-called "leftist" enclaves of the internet a minefield. Why are people with OCD everyone's favourite collateral when it comes to stuff shitty rich assholes do? Is it so fucking hard to stop making up thought crimes to attack people over??

It's an extra layer of horrible when the same people have no problems applying "no ethical consumption under capitalism" to stuff like Coca Cola and Nestlé products. Y'all can't possibly live without child slavery chocolate or making brown people drink Nestlé's toxic filth or anything that's subjecting Indigenous communities and people in entire Global South continents to long, lingering, horrible deaths, but this one franchise whose author royalties are funding the UK transphobic lobby is the one line that matters. Fuck all the trans people in those places I guess. Every single Global North consumer moral policing is western leftists's dehumanization of our people writ large. Fuck all of you.

funny when, in inheritance, there’s a moment when saphira tries to help eragon by lending him her power, and he says she can’t help him because it’s “his mountain to climb”. she tries to argue but he replies with “besides, if i were flying, it would be on borrowed wings, and i would gain nothing by it other than the cheap thrill of an unearned victory”

i totally agree with the sentiment and i’d think it’s great of him to say so, if it wasn’t for the fact that that’s exactly what the blood oath celebration has done for him. i understand that, narratively speaking, the main reason for making eragon into an elf is because, otherwise, it would’ve been insanely hard for him to acquire the abilities necessary to defeat galbatorix, but i sitll think it’s a very cheap way of making him get the upper hand, or, if not that, a chance to win. i mean, in the end, paolini makes his own villain so impossible to defeat that he needs to fundamentally alter his main character in order to allow the story’s climax to take place. 

and then the fact that having eragon say this now makes him into a bit of a hypocrite. like, he has such a problem with saphira helping him now, “because it just wouldn’t be an earned victory” but he didn’t seem to mind when the elves made him look like them and have their abilities, even though he obviously hadn’t worked to achieve them by himself in the first place. i’m the first one that finds the whole “eragon gets a few months of learning x and suddenly he’s really good at it” a bit annoying, but i’d rather have that than him being an elf for all intents and purposes.

okay so the estranged married couple in my Goudge novel did NOT get back together, he DIED off-page without being reconciled to his wife whom he had not seen in years and Charles is NOT going to suffer for not being faithful to Lucy, it is totally treated as a matter of course and instead of any reckoning with that Lucy has now been unfaithful to him??? with one of his friends!?? and most loyal supporters ???? !!???!??? what is GOING on akksksksjsjejejekek

hello upper middle class northern usamerican tumblr user. i want to play a game. you will notice that you are in a super america convenience store in rural kentucky - you have three minutes to purchase a snack and drink of your choice and make normal small talk with the cashier. however, if you use the word "cryptid" or generally make reference to appalachia and its inhabitants as "wild", uncivilized, or lacking restraint around alcoholic beverages during your time here, i will personally tie you to the chassis of a four wheeler and tip it into the river. live or die. make your choice

After the release of the Underworld Saga, I finally understand what it means to be heartbroken…

(What’s with the tags? Mhm just excuse my emotional ranting…)

Oh also when I start dropping the Red White and Royal Blue book quotes expect a FLOOD I'm highlighting the fuck out of this book

the branwens have strilalonde energy.

qrow is a dave strider that started drinking his problems away like a true lalonde

raven is a rose lalonde if rose was raised by striders and developed a sudden hatred for wizards

god forbid a woman do anything