Goodbye, My Rose Garden

historical, romance YA

in the early 1900s, during the women's suffragette movement, a Japanese woman travels to England to meet her favourite novelist

she ends up employed as maid to a noblewoman who agrees to help her in exchange of one, perplexing request- "kill me".

angsty and melancholic, very period drama tropes- sapphic yearning, love poetry, escaping to a small coastal town, arranged marriages, the intimacy of undressing one another.

social commentary on contemporary feminist movements, class divides and prejudices about women's economic and bodily autonomy.

storytelling, women's authorship, early sensational "girls love literature" as proof of lesbian lived history

TW: period-typical homophobia, mentions of social alienation and infamy leading to the deaths of queer historical figures, suicidal ideation, threat of social outing.

Recommended for fans of: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Fingersmith, the love letters of Vita and Virginia

if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.

this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.

incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?

⭐ Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz // Disco Elysium // Nach all den Nächten, die voll Sternen hingen by Erich Mühsam

Thinking about Disco Elysium and stars. Something about communal experience and simultaneous isolation, hope and idealism, fear and beauty and terror and burning. The inherent horror in the vast romantic starscape of the sky, the melancholy and loneliness inherent in the untold distance, a communal experience of something too enormous to fathom. Stars bear witness to humanity, to the millions of tiny people crawling on the face of Elysium. They watch the people, and the people watch back, and make up stories about the stars. Stars symbolise love, hope, something unreachable and unattainable.

The way that the light of the stars reaches every single being in Elysium, from human to phasmid, but no matter how far it reaches it is still a cold and distant glow, always on the verge of going out. A moral brilliance, a holy light to strive towards, something always at risk of burning out, but there's a dichotomy too. A duality between the stars as brutal unfeeling observers, moralists even, like the aerostatics flying overhead, tiny dying lights that watch impassively over every terrible thing in the world, and the flipside; stars as the burning kernels of hope, furious burning flames that parallel Harry and his golden-orange forest fire nature. Stars as the light of communism, the star-and-antlers. They're hope and dreams- a million years in the stars. Rockstars and superstars. The light of a brighter future (however short-term that future might be) coming towards them at the end of the tunnel. It makes me think of Sacred and Terrible Air and the light pollution in Vassa- ending light pollution as the world ends. "You may laugh at this, but in the evening, when the big world in the distance swells into a bloody maelstrom, families come out into the street in Vaasa and are insignificant together. Only distant explosions disturb the deep peace of the winter night, its flawless starry sky. Everyone watches, heads tilted back." The stars are a shared experience. Something that everyone watches, insignificant together, when there's nothing more that can be done. Light in the face of darkness, community in the face of inevitability. Togetherness. The stars are there in the church with the ravers. They're there watching Harry and Kim together. Insignificant together. In dark times, should the stars also go out?

disco elysium / l'internationale, eugene pottier / history, antonio gramsci / sacred and terrible air, robert kurvitz / revolution, vladimir mayakovsky / words of a rebel, peter kropotkin

Keep smiling through, just like you always do

"She's calling out to me. I can feel it." / "Sora saved me once. And...I heard him call my name. He needs me."

every once in awhile i remember that Percy Jackson et les Secrets de l'Olympe: Apollon et Artémis, Les Jumeaux Terribles exists. like yeah there's just a random French-only ghostwritten companion book. huh.

Here it is. The thing I’ve been lying about never doing. I’ll probably (hopefully) never do it again i just wanted to try drawing them as young adults but i have no interest in trying this again (at least not anytime soon). I knew i probably wouldn’t like it much anyway because it was just a quick project i wanted to try out so i did something fun with the style. It’s also very messy just— in the way i organized it, you know? So yeah not exactly aesthetically appeasing

Anyway please don’t expect this kind of thing from me again (but enjoy)

worst tropes

men dating women in the same career/field as them an get silent/bitter because she's having a big moment/is more accomplished than him

men dating women in time-demanding careers and then are upset that their careers demand their time

men with podcasts

men dating independent/emotionally unavailable women and then are upset that they are independent/emotionally unavailable

men who can't drive

best tropes

friends to lovers

men who can drive

love on purpose, love that's intentional, love that's not rotten work because it's you

I really hate posting or acknowledging fandom drama unless it serves to support or encourage people who are feeling down about it but this is a tricky one for me to translate because I'm mad af!

Let's take a deep breath.

The thing is, about fandom! When you first get here, or get to a new one, or whatever! It's weird, there's etiquette built in, there's invisible rules. But the main thing is like, we're all here because we can't be normal about our blorbo, right?

And it's okay if you project on your blorbo! It's okay if your version of them isn't completely canon-accurate! It's okay if you are isolating a single aspect of their personality/backstory to play with because it speaks to you! YOU ARE ALLOWED TO DO THESE THINGS.

It's also okay if the canon has conflicting information! It's okay if a theme went over your head and you don't consider it! It's okay if you're the only person in the fandom who notices a certain quality and you're the only one talking about it!!

There is enough room here for all of us!

The ENTIRE POINT of fandom and fanworks is to ask questions about the characters, to dissect them, to put them back together. The point of transformative fanworks is to TRANSFORM! If we weren't so deeply invested in these universes and didn't have questions and didn't want more content about all the blank spots, we would just CONSUME THE CANON LIKE A NORMAL PERSON AND MOVE ON WITH OUR GODDAMN LIVES. We wouldn't be bothering to write fic and make art and RP and decode meta! We wouldn't be making this into a hobby and talking about it all day!

It's from LOVE.

So.

I get it, it can be intimidating showing up in a new space or into a new hobby. And sometimes we can step on toes if we don't know all the invisible rules and etiquette. But what I can promise you is that you don't need to make room for people who are rude to you, who try to tell you that their way is the only way, who consistently want to insult you for asking questions, noticing themes, playing with other versions of the characters.

We are ALL HERE to be silly and dick around and have fun, and when someone is being an asshole about it, I think it looks worse for them than it does for you. One of you is minding your business and having fun and the other one is trying to tell everyone what to think lol.

Please protect yourself from bullies; don't let someone police the way you read canon, or the way you speak about your fav, or the fanworks you create. These people are not your friends, and they are not your audience. You do not need their acceptance to have fun and make things.

Fandom shouldn't be this fucking exhausting, yall. It costs zero dollars to be nice to people and let them enjoy their fucking blorbo in peace and you look like a fucking asshole when you don't shut the fuck up about it and sow discord in a shared space.

People's horrendously OOC takes do not affect you at all even a little bit not even when they're so so so so so OOC that you think you need to be Fandom Professor rising from your well to shame us! It cannot and will never hurt you, so leave them the fuck alone and let them have fun!!

Tinytoki and friends.

銀魂　小さくなっちゃったVer. (Gintama Became Smaller Ver.) illustrations.

[eng]: okay this is a question for ppl who speak French as their native language! i speak it as a second language, right? but i’ve always been curious: what is the transition like when it comes to shifting from using “vous” to address a person to using “tu”?? is it like a friendship/intimacy upgrade?? does there need to be a conversation about it before hand (like “what are we?”).

[fr]: j’ai une question pour les personnes qui parlent français comme leur langue maternelle. je le parle comme ma deuxième langue, hein ? mais je suis toutefois curieuse : la transition de utilisant de « vous » à « tu » — comment fonctionne-t-elle? est-ce qu’il y’a presque comme une promotion de l’amitié ? Devez-vous avoir une conversation à l’avance (comme que sommes-nous ?) ?

the more i read of this book the more is cements in my mind that this was never meant to be a snow apologist book people just don’t have any reading comprehension anymore

How does Bruno comfort people? If he can comfort them

2023 reads

Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy

Imperial space opera trilogy

a soldier who was once a starship AI with thousands of bodies but was betrayed and is now a single human body, encounters one of her old lieutenants on an ice planet and helps her while on her mission of vengeance

in book 2&3 she becomes part of a new ship, protecting a remote system & becoming familiar with the different people & culture while discovering injustices, politics, and murder

interesting cultures, characters, and use of a singular pronoun (she)