ive been thinking about language a lot recently and doing a lot of studying of my irish grammar books and one thing that is always in the back of my mind no matter what is the grief over not being able to speak my own language, having to learn it in schools and at home, picking up a book in irish and feeling this unassailable choking frustration guilt and grief that i cant understand it at all. i can parse bits and pieces, stray words and phrases, but thats it. watching things on tg4 and not understanding a word and drowning in guilt over it. ive always felt this huge impenetrable wall in my mind separating me from from irish. and the prevailing attitude of most everyone i meet and talk to about irish is that yeah its sad that we got colonised and dont speak it anymore, but its dead and useless and redundant. the goverment puppets its corpse on roadsigns and documents and titles, paying lipservice to this unimaginable violence done to us as people that we cant speak our own language, but does nothing substantial that would actually help. is fearr gaeilge bhriste ná béarla cliste yeah but is there not a need for gaeilge cliste as well? this surrender to inability across the nation is such a disservice to the language and the people who speak it. im not talking about people not having perfect irish and still speaking it, of course not like i barely have any irish myself, im talking about the disrespect given to irish that it doesnt need to learnt and loved, only bastardized. my family have spoken english for a hundred years, irish for thousands of years before that, and even in that english, vestiges of irish have lingered in hiberno english form. irish hovers just out of reach for me, i surround myself with it through music poetry tv books, but i never am fully apart of it. and the thing is, something that im only just realising in recent years, is that (white) english people dont feel this! theyre not assaulted from a very young age by the knowledge this grief and inadequacy and the injustice done to their people. they dont even learn in schools about what they did to us! to every peoples across the world they colonized brutalised and exploited, every culture they massacred and did their very best to erase! they have the luxury of not caring! and thats incomprehensible to me, that people can live in this world free of the inherited grief of history, that they dont have to carry the weight of their families history on their shoulders, dont have to live with the fact that something intrinsic to them has been stolen! i have always felt like something was missing, and i cant even imagine living with a sense of wholeness, but for these colonisers that is their life! they dont have to face consequences for what theyve done to the world, they dont even have to remember! i wish i could speak irish, i wish i didnt have to know the ugly harsh syllables of this language. tá brón an domhain orm

Does Leo ever just give himself a good cry by himself to vent out everything going on, cause to see him take losing his arm so we’ll just feels…..off to me?

Oh dear he is definitely affected by it, but he can shut his feelings off because he wants Donnie to be okay first.

He's had his breakdowns, but they've been in private thus far.

My rambling is always cut off by the tag limits 😔

Least favorite misconception/assumption about the historical Franklin Expedition?

This is another one I've been thinking about for days and although it perhaps isn't exactly in the spirit of the question, seeing gifs of poor Fitzjames' ignoble end today has made up my mind.

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My least favourite misconception/assumption about the Franklin Expedition (and an idea I've seen repeated far too often on this site) is that the men in some way deserved their fate.

The idea that they were just some kind of evil white colonialist hive-mind intent on destruction. That they fucked around and found out.

That they got what was coming to them.

I just find that to be such a callous take, and one woefully lacking in any kind of nuance!

As I've said many times before, we mustn't ignore or excuse the evils of colonialism and empire, or the very real damage wrought by the Expedition and its crew members. That's central to the narrative surrounding the Expedition both in real life and in fiction.

But the crew members' participation in colonialism doesn't negate their basic humanity either.

For better or worse they were still people, still human beings, and ultimately, I don't think they deserved their grim fate simply because I don't think anyone deserves that fate.

he was my favorite in middle school

ok so here is the thing.

i'm a very ships-motivated writer. not exclusive to romantic ships – friendships, frenemies, familial, colleagues, mentors, unlikely besties, whatever. i think discussing a potential connection between our characters helps a lot with not only my motivation but kind of having an idea for what sort of situations our muses might find themselves in. connections are ultimately what i love to explore through rp

i'd love to consider this as a shipping call – if you'd like to chat about how our muses may connect and what direction(s) their relationship could potentially take, like this post! i will be very honest with you about what i envision for revie and your muse atm & i am incredibly open to all ideas.

i really need to finish this one day

Buy me a coffee

THIS HAS BEEN SITTING IN MY DRAFTS FOR LIKE TWO HOURS ASKING FOR THINGS IS LITERALLY MY WORST FEAR BUT FUCK IT WE BALL

my mum could really use £30-40 for groceries. We've spent a lot of money fixing stuff this month like replacement pipes and central heating (that really should be our landlord's responsibility..). She only has £150 left but we've still got bills to pay later this month so not much to spend on food and other necessities. Universal credit + her wage doesn't get paid until the end of the month (something is coming next week too but idr) 🥲

Usually we ask family and close friends for borrowing money but no one has been able to lend any aaa

No pressure to donate whatsoever — but if you have some extra money, any support would be greatly appreciated mwah <3

So I've just recently watched Arcane, and it's an absolute banger of a show. 10/10 would recommend.

A part of why I think it's good it because it's doesn't really have heros and villains in the conventional sense. All the "villainous" characters have clear motivations, and the narrative highlights the ways they justify their own actions in a way that frames them as understandable even if they are undeniably wrong.

That is... With two not-so-notable exceptions.

These two assholes, whose names I completely forgot and had to look up.

These two are some of the few characters framed as completely and totally unsympathetic. This is very intentional because each one is meant to exemplify what exactly is wrong with the place they help lord over.

For Piltover, the story presents it as an elitist society full of decadence that doesn't care for anything except for it's own economic expansion.

Of the main characters that could exemplify this, there's Jayce, who's actually a pretty decent guy who wants to use science to improve lives but gets stuck in the politics of it all. There's also Mel, who at first seems to be the very pinnacle of an ambitious corrupt politician, only for the story to juxtapose her with her war mongering mother and have her start a relationship with Jayce, which rounds her character and also paints her as sympathetic.

So when all your main characters to complex to properly convey to the audience the problems of your society, you have to show it off through the side characters. Hence, we have Hoskel (that I originally misspelled as Holdaak for some reason lol)

Hoskel is in no way sympathetic. He's fat and greedy and stupid. Mel gives him a children's toy and he's still trying to solve it six years later. When there's a crisis, his first concern is his wine shipments. He's everything wrong with Piltover, so when the audience is done being captivated by the compelling characters, they can look at Holdaak and go "ah yes, this is why the poor is repressed and the government is completely corrupt."

Same goes for Zaun. It's hard to use Silco as a way to represent all the problems with Zaun because the audience is too focused on his compelling relationship with Jinx. Yes he's a kingpin controlling the masses with drugs, but the audience can see how he got there, and right now he cares more about Jinx than his own power.

Meanwhile we have Finn, a lesser kingpin complicit in Silco's regime and actively riding off of his coat tails for the sake of his own power. He's dissociated with the plight the average Zaun denizen to the point that he can't even breath the same air as them without choking on the ground.

When the audience is wondering why Zaun is so much worse after Silco took over, they can look at that guy and go, "ah yes, it's because people like this guy are benefitting from the addicted masses."

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Ok but Anton now being in a position where he’s pretending to be August is really interesting both within the context of Anton and Calla’s relationship and the wider context of Chloe Gong’s work. Calla has pretended to be the real Calla for so long that she doesn’t even remember her real name, and now, Anton is also in a position where he must masquerade as someone else in every aspect of his life. Just like Anton was the only one who realized that Calla wasn’t really Calla, it seems like she’s going to be the only one who realizes he’s not really August.

This is especially interesting within the wider context of Chloe Gong’s work as role reversal is is used a lot. With romajuliette, we had the lover and the liar. With benmars, Ben was originally the one who saved Marshall, but in OVE, Marshall is the one who looks out for Ben from the shadows. With high tide, it was originally Rosalind who was being wielded as a weapon, but in FHH, Orion is the one who genuinely becomes nothing more than a tool. With olivercelia, Celia pushes Oliver out of the way of a bullet, angering him because he doesn’t accept her willingness to value his life as she values his own. Then in FHH, he sacrifices himself to keep her safe, angering her because she doesn’t accept his willingness to value her life as he values his own. With philas, it was Phoebe who was the liar and protecting everyone from behind the scenes then it was Silas. (Arguably, they fit pretty well into the lover and the liar too but that’s not the point right now.)

Then outside of the context of romantic relationships there’s more. With the London trio, it was originally mostly Orion and Phoebe looking out for Silas because he felt horrible all the time in London, then by FLF Silas is constantly trying to look out for Orion and Phoebe in the aftermath of their family scandal. With Alisa and Roma, Alisa was the one watching from the shadows who had to be found in the original duology, but in FLF, it’s Roma who’s waiting it out and trying to find the right time to contact her.

Ok there are probably a lot more, but that at least illustrates how much of a running thing this is. It usually forces the characters to better understand each other. It’s generally a very interesting way of playing with which character has what information or what degree of agency in the narrative while never allowing it to be constant. And what does thins mean for Anton and Calla in Vilest Things and in the rest of the Flesh and False Gods Trilogy? Who knows? Maybe Anton will understand Calla better after taking on a role so similar to the one she has played her entire life? It will certainly further complicate the power dynamic as they are both now the only people who know that the other isn’t who they say they are. And what about Otta Avia? She won’t know that the person she recognizes as August is really Anton, and she knew something that August didn’t want to get out.

i genuinely can’t remember anything from June but this one text exchange i had while under anesthesia sums it up pretty well. i think.

I hate how some people point to certain things to claim that Dean bullies and controls Sam when those moments were clearly cases of Sam indulging Dean (which he actually does a lot). Like I just saw someone say that Dean has power over Sam because he always picks the music in the car. When that actually happens because Sam wants to make Dean happy and doesn't actually mind whatever Dean picks, so Sam just lets it happen. When he does want to listen to something he'll just put it on despite Dean's protests like in s12 with the Vince Vicente music.

And it's really kinda sad because Sam humoring Dean is probably the most frequent way he shows affection. It's sweet. People are missing out when they don't see that.

downside of my joke post about reunified Ireland is that I have to see people assuming I'm not Irish and that I shouldn't care and that I don't have years of watching the different political tensions in Ireland like.

girl help I'm having ideas above my ability-to-kill-my-darlings level

Apologies if it doesn't exist / sounds stupid,

Is a "Corrupted" Arthur a thing that exists? Like how in their Dreamswap Version we had Dream with red eyes, the demonic looking wings? Just curious

nah he don't, not in fatal flaws. it's just a dreamswap timeline thing because the light/dark magic thing only exists in that version of the story