Thinking about gym teacher Harry. I bet he was a fun teacher. I bet it was really easy to goad him into ditching the lesson plan to have a race day instead, or to turn the school hall into a mass dodgeball game, the whole class vs him and he'd still manage to hold his own. I bet he'd get roped into running so many clubs, staying late every day of the week. Running and football and rugby and gymnastics and dance, insistent that he's great at all of them. Getting involved in the pastoral care side of things because he cares so much about his kids, even if they're only in his class an hour a week. Using his dialogue tree skills on his students to try and find everyone some kind of sport that they love, trying to make sure no one is left out. And as he starts to slow down, as his chronic pain starts to get worse, starting to understand more and more why some of the kids don't really participate. Still pushing himself to participate in everything because he loves his kids and he wants to do the best for them, still running and lifting and throwing himself into competitions but losing more and more often, getting more frustrated that his body just won't cooperate, having to sit out and watch the kids play from the sidelines instead of hurling himself into the middle of the match. Sitting with the kids who won't join in, talking about their interests instead, about art and literature and entroponetics and finding something to get them hyped about the world...

anyway my stance on "reading the classics" basically boils down to the fact that what is or is not defined as "a classic" is somewhat arbitrary, and therefore it makes no sense to treat "the classics" as some sort of uniform genre that you either like or dislike. Whether you liked Great Expectations has no bearing on whether you'll like 1984 or Rebecca or Pride and Prejudice or East of Eden or Frankenstein or Crime and Punishment. Because those are all vastly different books. "I don't want to read Classics; they're all boring and probably sexist or something." <<free yourself from the arbitrary category of "classic." It just means a lot of people liked the book. You might not. but you might. Treat it as an individual title.

Sir Kay, Seneschal of King Arthur's Court, Harold J. Herman / Illustration from the Mabinogion / The Quest for Olwen, trans. Gwyn Thomas and Kevin Crossley-Holland / The Story of Merlin, trans. Rupert T. Pickens / Illustration from The Quest for Olwen, Margaret Jones / Wace's Roman de Brut, trans. Eugene Mason / The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest

a collection of sir kay and sir bedivere: companions/lovers/worse, for @queer-ragnelle's may day parade

people are comparing conor and kel to will and jem when there’re matthew and james right there to do so. like conor and kel’s relationship is what happens when matthew and james don’t resolve their problems. i haven’t read chot properly but until choi their relationship was already on its way to a toxic one. them being unflinchingly loyal and loving each other so much yes but also then starting to keep secrets from each other and all. tho in comparison conor and kel also have a power imbalance (of conor being the superior one) that math and jamie don’t have thankfully; what i’m tryna say is that we can find more parallels in these two pairs rather than in jem and will who are the epitome of a perfect (brotherly/parabatai) relationship.

i love anthologies. anthologies are so sexy

Ever wonder what happens to those final girls? After all their plans go belly up and all their weapons fail? After their defenses crumble and they've been shot in the head? After they've trusted the wrong people, made the wrong choices, and opened themselves up at the worst possible moments? After their lives are ruined and they're left at thirty-eight years old with nothing in the bank, no kids, no lover, and nothing to their name but a couple of ghosts and a handful of broken-down friends? I know what happens to those girls. They turn into women. And they live.

The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix

you all are giving alex way too much credit, I honestly think he just thought it was a funny idea to use exaggerated gen z slang

Paleolithic Media Catalogue

Hello everyone :) Short story first: When I began brainstorming for my prehistoric story, I started wondering what other prehistoric fiction there is out there. I was not familiar with it and have not seen much. That's when I started my grand literature review and began a search for what fiction exist out there. I wanted to know what kinds of stories are being made with this time period. What are the common themes or recurring ideas (I found lots of humans and dinosaurs works. And time travel). Since I've had a growing collection on my computer, I decided I should keep on enlarging it and put it online. It's nowhere near complete. I'll slowly keep accumulating the collection as I find more. I only have fiction books and comics right now. I still need to work on the film section.

You can access the blog here!

***

As for where I am in my reading, the one's I've finished reading are Earth's Children series (book 1-4. Dropped it afterwards lol. I made a post on with fanart) Dance of the Tiger and it's sequel Singletusk (They were good! I'll upload my review on the blog), and Sisters of the Wolf (It was ok!). I got my hands on The Inheritors and excited to start reading it. I REALLY want to read the Shiva trilogy, but I found no PDF online... and it's out of print :( There is certainly old copies on ebay. And I want to read Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. There seem to be lots of good books out there.

I had ✨A Thought✨ (about forgiveness)

I can't be the first one to connect these clips like this, but here goes...

Crowley doesn't like that he's a demon. He makes the best of it; our boy (gender neutral) is nothing if not able to adapt. But he resents having to be Evil(tm) by definition, seems to only just accept his snake side (under sufferance), has taken a more human name, distances himself from Hell any chance he gets, etc. And we all remember how he reacted to "you're the bad guys".

At the bandstand, he calls himself unforgivable. Aziraphale has just said "may you be forgiven" and snek's like "lol no did you forget i'm your eViL hEreDiTarY eNeMy" (poking in his own wounds again like he does it for a living); he puts himself down with references to his demonic nature as a sort of challenge to the angel and he's expecting to be rejected for what he is because he hates that part of himself. (And Aziraphale certainly has a habit of bringing that shit up, too; it's a self-defence mechanism, for sure, and Crowley isn't stupid, but I bet it still stings.)

But we know Aziraphale doesn't actually think Crowley is bad. (Right? Nobody believes he thinks that. RIGHT?? Please tell me no-one actually believes he thinks that)

He knew already by Job that Crowley is more "properly good" than most angels. He also knows Crowley has nothing but disdain for Heaven (if he hadn't picked that up by now he'd be very stupid, and it's underlined so many times in the show and the book that Aziraphale is not stupid). So what if when he says,

he's actually saying "you're not unforgivable, it doesn't matter what you are, you're better than all of them"?

He knows by this point that he has to leave, and Metatrash is most likely watching through the window so Aziraphale knows he can't say much or they'll be in trouble. Maybe this is all he could think of to communicate that Crowley is the best being he knows in all of Creation and that had he any choice, he'd pick him every time?

Were you someone who was or is fond of reading books, growing up ? Because you're so excellent at writing. Like, nowadays its so difficult to find any book with half the narrative structure or interest your writing has. Feels like you were someone who liked hunger games at some point.

no yeah you read me and my preteen hunger games obsession like a book T-T admittedly tho, i am kind of currently in a reading slump not for lack of trying, but just because,,, i feel like a lot of recent horror/thriller/mystery stuff has been kind of preachy, lately? idk how to explain it, but i feel like darker genres feel the need to come with some greater life lesson they can serve up to the reader on a silver platter within the first hundred pages which very much goes against my 'tell your silly little story and i'll decide how it's changed me as a person later' mentality to fiction. i will resist the temptation and forgo posting a detailed list of all the books that have been added to my DNF list in the past month and their many issues but know that it is exhaustive.

I forgot how much I enjoyed reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

i'd love to hear your thoughts on klaasje

i love klaasje soooo much she's so interesting to me and i really love how they made her parallel harry in a lot of ways, but i think that specifically could be a separate post

one of the things that ruins me about her is like... she's so young to be in this situation. she's only 28 and she's become a fugitive from entities that she's not even sure are actually chasing her, which is a special kind of hell. in her eyes, her life is over, and it had barely begun. this wasn't even her plan, she was dragged into everything as a result of the capitalist machine: she did odd jobs until a banking firm picked her up and found out she was really good at corporate espionage, and because that was what finally gave her life stability, she stuck with it. she caused people to lose their jobs- some, their lives- and helped these larger companies destabilize smaller competitors and corner the market. she only did it a few times, but she tangibly ruined people's lives, including her own. and she clearly feels terrible about it, but she can't undo what she's done.

she came to martinaise to hide because no one cares about martinaise. she was staying in a hotel room, pretty much constantly on drugs to numb herself, fooling around with the odd resident, but she wasn't doing much to permanently establish herself- we see no evidence that she was trying to do any work or find someplace to live in the area. martinaise was never meant to be a place to start over, off the radar; it was just supposed to be a place where she could self-destruct in peace. when she tells harry that martinaise isn't the kind of place that calls the cops, that had been a deciding factor in her move there. she wanted that- she wanted a place hostile to people asking questions, hostile to anyone with an outside agenda. she knew that even if the residents wouldn't be particularly sympathetic to her situation, their outright hatred of outside enforcement would go a long way towards keeping her hidden, and her looks and charm and manipulation could fill in the gaps. she wanted to stop looking over her shoulder. she thought she could finally stop causing harm, and then lely gets killed and she thinks it's because of her, and because she leaves before the end of the case (or gets arrested), she *may never get to find out that it wasn't*. (yes, you can argue that dros killed lely because he was obsessed with klaasje so it's ""her fault"", which is how klaasje would probably see it if/when she found out, but it's NOT klaasje's fault. it was not something she wanted or intentionally did or even knew about. she is not to blame for dros' obsession.)

she's manipulative and a chronic liar and she'll throw anyone under the bus to save her own skin, and she'll feel bad about it later, but she won't hesitate to do it again. as we see her, she's deeply selfish: the things she talks about, she talks about in the context of how it serves her. the freedom of revachol, for example, she brings up because in a free revachol she wouldn't be extradited, not necessarily because she has some great love for the city. i think she shares some of harry's ability to know what buttons to push to get people to do what she wants: she'll exploit anything she can to throw harry off her. disco, his attraction to her, his love for the city, potentially his hatred of capitalism and/or the moralintern- she'll grab anything she can find and twist until he lets her go. and here's the thing: we're seeing all these traits when she's at her worst. she watched a man she liked be murdered right on top of her while she was already paranoid that extremely powerful people were out to get her, cracked under the stress of watching him rot outside her window and got the cops involved, then immediately realized her mistake and tried her hardest to slither out of her own mess just one last time. as much as we can joke about her being a girlboss and all that, she's a terrified, emotionally scarred young woman who (rightfully!) has NO idea how to handle the situation she finds herself in. and ruby's immediate fear of harry- so intense that she, the ex-madre drug runner and current union thug, immediately ran and hid upon hearing of his arrival- couldn't have helped reassure her. we can say all of these things about her, and i wouldn't say anyone is wrong to dislike her, but i think it's important to view her through a sympathetic lens if you want to truly understand her.

all of this kinda boils down to the fact that she's become a creature of fear. if she had a signature skill i would argue that it would be half light, or something like it. everything she's doing in the game, she's doing for self preservation. even the overwhelming amount of *partying* is just fear management. and she's good at hiding it at first, but the more you press her the more you watch her break down. she's traumatized. her wounds are freshly reopened. she's scared. of course she's scared: you're a cop with a horrible reputation and she's a fugitive who was the only witness to a convoluted murder, and the murder happened to be of a man she really liked, if only briefly. you'll have to forgive her if she's not squeaky clean. it's hard to be, in revachol.

Me: [uses the word "debonair" perfectly in a sentence, knowing it's the right word for the job]

Me, ten seconds later: [searches up "debonair" in the dictionary because I don't have a fucking clue what it actually means]

I know it's a part of like, making flawed characters and telling realistic stories and all that, but God am I tired of reading books from the perspective of a really shitty man. I know it's satire sometimes or storytelling or this or that but I'm sorry there's only so many times I can read a man's internal dialogue objectifying women, sexual assault fantasies, or casual fetishization of lesbians or Asian girls without losing it just a little bit.

a lot of people clearly felt very empowered by her concepts and she should’ve realized she was a role model to many people, but aside from an interview where she said she wants to protect nęwjeäns she didn’t really talk about feminism or female unity or smth like that. anyway idc for this discussion there’s not much to be said from me besides how awful it must be to victims and people who saw her as an inspiration

but imo a lot of people projected values they wanted her to have onto her.

it’s the same as when ppl for years insisted hyüna and dаwn went public with their relationship to “change dating norms in the industry” or “challenge parasocial relationships” when in reality they just wanted to be in a public relationship and leave cube

i started sleeping with a teddy bear at twenty-one years old. i'm starting therapy next week. i don't really remember who taught me that growing up means killing half of yourself, but i spend every night hoping against hope that it's not too late. to scream into the wind. to undo this damage. i'm trying to find reasons to stay.