I’ve got to let go of this anger because I don’t have enough time to be angry over stuff that doesn’t matter in the end.

honestly just in general it's very exhausting to try to analyze media that is literally meant to be analyzed, only for the replies to be filled with people arguing not against your analysis, but against the premise that the media can be analyzed at all.

i don't even know what to say about it without starting to really betray my frustration, so i'll just settle with— just don't engage with analysis posts? I'm serious. if you're typing a response to a media analysis post, reread what you've written and ask yourself "is this comment/response against the very concept of analyzing the media at all?" and if the answer is yes then delete it all and go sit in the shame corner. throw your curtains away if you want to so bad and stop telling me that I'm not allowed to hum and haw at the fact mine are blue

No, but the Hunger Games did need the romance plotline. See, Snow got it all wrong for the cause of the districts' rebellion. He thought an act of love is entirely separate and different from an act of rebellion, that the two are mutually exclusive. But we saw even in Katniss' though process that the two are mixed. And for the districts, the two are the same thing. For seventy-four years they've been forced to watch their children, grandchildren, siblings, niblings, friends die in the Games or through exploitation, are told it's an honour for them to die for the Capitol and are not allowed to grieve. And then suddenly this girl comes up and plants her feet and says 'no'. She survives through illegal hunting, avoiding the miserable death via starvation or the terrible community home. She doesn't stand by to watch her sister die, she volunteers. She doesn't treat her friend's death as one of a tribute to the Capitol, but as the horrible killing of an innocent little girl who deserves to be memorialized. She thanks and humanizes another district's people. She gives another tribute a merciful death. She refuses to give up on the man she loves, repeatedly. Defying all sense and establishment.

That is rebellion, for the Districts. Love, loyalty, grief, kindness, mercy - they're all rebellious sentiments.

And romantic love is an integral part of that. Not the be all end all, but an intrinsic part. We see sisterhood with Prim, we see friendship with Rue and Finnick and Johanna (and Gale and Madge a little bit), we see mentorship and connection with Haymitch and Boggs, so of course we need the romantic angle with Peeta. Of course we need the dandelion that grows after the war, the dandelion that started it all through one act of kindness to the starving girl he loves.

sunstone..? perhaps???

anon ur so real for this... they're my faves since i first played rw

havent drawn them in a loong time though so i doodled these real quick :^)

necromancy of

so i work for a small regional museum. remotely, i should add. the museum itself is about 2000km west, so i've never actually been there but i research and write articles about local history for them. and because the town was only formally settled in the 1920s and a lot of the museum's supporters are older, the majority of the history i write about is within, or just outside of living memory. this means that people will comment on our posts with memories or connections of their own. they'll tag their friends and family and say 'remember this?'

a few week ago, i wrote a week's worth of posts about immigration, largely displaced persons in the aftermath of the second world war. there was an outpouring of memories and people tagging their family members and sharing them. our notifications were blowing up with people saying "thanks for writing about my uncle" and "i knew them when i was young, but i never knew their story" and "she looks so beautiful here" and "our families used to get together for dinners, i'm still friends with his daughter."

regular people, non-historians, are inclined to think of history as a monolithic past leading up to the present; an easy timeline of textbook names and events. and we think of museums largely the same way. you have the louvre and you have the smithsonian and maybe a modern art museum or a niche museum for skeletons or canoes or one specific guy. museums are reserved for the big things, but they're also for the little things and people that will never be in textbooks.

and i'm thinking about the way people responded to those posts, seeing their own history remembered with the same reverence as the big stuff. maybe you never knew the people being written about, or maybe you did, and for a few days, they are alive again, and your neighbours and your classmates and your councilmen are remembering your family, and they are alive.

a friend reeled me right back into vento again

It wouldn't be so hard to make decisions if it wasn't for *gestures at the unknown*

JOSEPH QUINN Interview with Foquinha

It's kinda shocking to me how few people seem to know how prevalent the 'my great grandmother was cherokee' myth is and how it's almost never actually true, especially when it comes with things like 'never signed up' or 'fell off the trail' or 'courthouse burned down destorying the documentation' etc etc.

People just don't even seem to know the history like.. when the Trail happened. My great great great grandfather was 2 years old during Removal in 1838, so peoples 'my great grandmother hid in the mountains!' is so clearly wrong. And we have rolls. From before and after removal, rolls done by cherokee nation and others by the government, rolls that were not stored in one random flammable courthouse. It's not difficult to find the actual evidence of ancestry.

And just.. there are lots of ways those family stories get started. It was a practice during the confederacy to claim cherokee ancestry to show one's family had 'deep roots in the south' that they were there before the cherokee were removed. Many people pretended to be cherokee and applied for the Guion-Miller payout just to try to steal money meant for cherokees - 2/3rds of the applicants were denied for having 0 proof of actual cherokee ancestry. [We even see lawyers advertising signing up for the Miller roll just to try to get free money.] And the myth even started in some families in the cherokee land lotteries, where the land stolen from us was raffled off, including the house and everything that was left behind when the cherokees were removed. We have seen people whose families just take these things stolen from the cherokee family and adopt them into their own family story, saying that they were cherokee themselves.

If you had some family story about being cherokee and you wanna have proof one way or the other, check out this Facebook group run by expert cherokee genealogists that do research for free. Just please read the rules fully and respect the researchers. They run thousands of people's ancestries a year and their average is only around 0.7% of lines they run actually end up having true cherokee ancestry.

on the topic of polemical language one of my literature classes is an lgbt literature class (even though its more about film lol) but its taught by a "queer studies" professor who is a radical leftist nonbinary butch lesbian and they have the absolute best takes about the word queer and the fact that their department is even referred to as queer studies. idk its so funny to see someone fully aware of the concept of slur reclamation but 1) is much older and actually lived through the movements where the word queer was still transgressive and polemical and 2) is so completely unaware of the baffling notion that developed online that slur reclamation is about something "not being a slur anymore" OR about reclamation being about a list of people who get to say a word and a list of people who dont. like theyve iterated many times about how the word queer as a reclaimed term and political statement doesnt have anywhere near the radical power it used to have and you can tell theyre disappointed by that fact.

i’m getting so tired of people thinking that everyone is mad at the writers simply because a silly little ship didn’t become canon. no, i’m fucking mad because they literally had will’s character arc revolve around mike and el’s relationship drama and that he was sidelined once again, with barely any plot relevance of his own. it’s the fact that in volume one, it seemed like mike and will’s friendship was finally going to start getting better again (”friends, best friends”), but instead, mike regressed right back to where he was and treated will like trash in volume two. it’s the fact that will’s narrative with his unrequited love was essentially pointless, except for how it helped further mike and el’s relationship, because even without his feelings for mike, a lot of us already knew will was gay. it’s how they took will’s moment in the van, his beautiful monologue about his feelings for mike, and then had mike’s monologue to el be eerily similar to what will said instead of having mike discover for himself what he should say to el on his own. it’s the fact that will has been suffering over and over again, and having nothing narratively come out of it. so no, i really don’t give a shit about byler and if it’s canon or not. i give a shit about will byers and how his character has been sidelined, treated like garbage, and only used to further the development of other characters and their relationships instead being treated like the main character he’s supposed to be, by being plot relevant and having character growth for himself, and only himself. that’s why i’m angry.

steve falls in love with eddie because he's this perfect amalgamation of everyone he's ever loved.

there's nancy's curly brown hair, of course, but also her fierce stubbornness and her bashful little smile when steve is being purposefully obtuse. there's tommy's passion, his impulsivity, his need to get under steve's skin in the best way possible. there's jonathan's quick remarks with a crooked grin and heather m's soft touches on bruised skin and robin's flailing hands when she talks that steve loves so much.

there's even the dorkiness of his kids that only amplifies when eddie's around them, all their talks of fantastic worlds that steve knows nothing about but nods along like he gets it. there's the bright blinding smiles that seem to pull at every face in the room when they win, hooting and hollering in a harmonious chorus.

steve falls in love with eddie for all of those things but also for all of the things he possesses on his own. his charm and his wit, his need to make steve smile every waking moment. the way he knows when steve needs quiet and dark so he closes the blinds before wrapping him up in his steady arms.

eddie falls in love with steve for all of the things that seem new to him.

he's never had a guy treat him like steve does, never had soft smiles and cards on valentines day, never had date nights or kisses in the daytime or a hand that fits gently against his own. he doesn't feel like a dirty secret pushed away to closets and out of windows. he doesn't see the quick glances around to make sure no one's watching before he gets into steve's car like he's used to getting with old partners. he doesn't get shushed or ignored or heartbroken.

he's used to being shrouded in darkness but steve is like sunshine, his love warming eddie like sunrays in and of themselves. he's used to confusion and questions but steve makes him feel wanted. makes him feel loved back.

steve is protective and smart. he sees through the bullshit eddie's built up around himself and holds him when those walls inevitably crumble down. eddie falls in love with steve because he sees him for who he truly is and loves him because of it.

they fall in love with each other because their jagged edges were made for one another, like puzzle pieces in the wrong box finding their way back home. they fall in love with each other because nothing else has ever felt more right. they fall in love with each other because everyone they loved before was a trial, a test, pushing them together whether they knew it or not.

for the longest time i just assumed that the "transformation of the day" jingle was actually in the sims 4. i didn't realize that it was something they decided to edit in themselves until i got the DLC with the scientist career, and discovered (to my disappointment) that it doesn't actually play that sound when you use the sim ray in the game

now i'm slightly entranced by the fact that they felt the need to not only add the sound effect every single time they use the sim ray, but to consistently do it even after the hiatus. i love their brains like why did they do that