dhwty-writes

[dhwty-writes]

one of my worst writing sins is abusing my power to create compound words. i cannot write the sentence "The sun shone as bright as honey that afternoon." no. that's boring. "The sun was honey-bright that afternoon" however? yes. that sentence is dope as fuck. i do not care if "honey-bright" is a word in the english dictionary. i do not care if the sentence is grammatically correct. i will not change. i will not correct my erred ways. the laws of the english language are mine.

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[dhwty-writes]

My brother in law recently became a veterinarian and it has really driven the point home as to how fucking bonkers veterinary medicine is. We don't expect human physicians to really know much outside of their own specialty - a dentist, an otolaryngologist, and a maxillofacial surgeon are three totally different dudes. Meanwhile a veterinarian at a wildlife rehab center is doing orthopedic surgery on a hawk and then doing rounds on baby hedgehogs in the hedgehog NICU and administering antibiotics to a ratsnake. And he also knows how to perform surgical interventions on a cow! What the fuck! Those are all totally, wildly different kinds of animal!!

Shout out to veterinarians, they know Too Much.

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memes are fun and relatable and all that, but don't let them discourage you. all of that stuff that doesn't make it into the final product is part of how the final product gets made

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Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn't committing to the bit

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i love when sibling characters are fucked up from the same event but in opposite ways

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i saw a recent post that irritated me greatly. in short it expresses irritation with “medieval fantasy” because the characters within it do not feel like real medieval people: they are modern people in medieval attire. it had 2k notes last i saw. on the one hand i should be sympathetic to this. i am often tearing my hair out on this blog about how asoiaf/hotd fandoms refuse to engage with the characters as very much not contemporary people, people who are embedded in a radically different social and political order and whose views and actions are shaped in real ways by that order. (asoiaf would probably - erroneously, imo - be a an example of the fantasy that features modern people in medieval garb, on which more shortly). but it instantly makes me prickly. why do you think you can know and capture how medieval people thought? do you think they all thought the same way? do you not realize the question of “what medieval people actually thought” is such a vexed question for historians as to often feel nearly unknowable?

like, which medieval people? a 6th century merovingian king has a radically different mental landscape from a 10th century andalusi slave girl has a different mental landscape from a 12th century saxon knight colonizing the baltic has a different mental landscape from a 14th century tuscan mystic. and that’s just a consideration of the vast swathes of time and geography and ethnicity and gender and social class encompassed by “medieval”, not even taking into into account count the eternally tricky ingredient of human personality that makes outwardly demographically identical neighbors divergent individuals with their own historically elusive interiority.

a good example of this arrogance masquerading as expansiveness in relation to fantasy fiction is another recent-ish post that annoyed me, taking grrm to task for “bad medievalism” because he has cersei lannister scold her small son for weeping, and telling him to stop because kings don’t cry. doesn’t that ignoramus know that the middle ages had very different gendered standards for men’s tears, that kings are recorded weeping without it marking their masculinity negatively to their contemporaries?

well, yes, he certainly does!:

here sansa stark - of the same social class, and drawing on exactly the same historical models that would have informed the wider cultural background of cersei’s own gender formation - tells another of cersei’s sons that men, famed heroes no less, do cry. cersei’s son is scornful.

sansa is a very typical little girl. she’s not presenting anything radical. this is an opposing, equally or more culturally normative view. cersei’s is not the only or unchallenged one, and only if you ignore the factor of individuality - that she is a specific person with a specific upbringing and specific hangups and insecurities around masculinity and femininity - could you come away with the idea that grrm is claiming crying is condemned in men in westeros full stop, rather than within the lannister family. just as people in 21st century america have very different views about the acceptability of men’s tears, just as it means different things across families and communities and contexts, so would it have for medieval people. what a lessening of medieval people’s humanities to imagine you can pin down their universal feelings on so weighted a subject, or any other.

[dhwty-writes]

Do we know why Aegon IV did that? Like okay fun drama and civil war but like why💀

When he was eighteen months old he tried to beat his newborn brother to death with a dragon egg. The best part of his character is that there simply is no answer as to why anything.

[dhwty-writes]

”how to adapt carmilla to a modern audience without it seeming lesbophoic—“

sorry but the very foundation of that era of vampire literature was the horror of seduction and the damnation of young women who “gave in” vs. the purity of young women who “overcame.” carmilla’s seduction isn’t vilified explicitly because she and her victim are both girls, but because a girl/young woman finding pleasure in seduction by anyone was considered damnable, ESPECIALLY being seduced by an immortal & undead creature who is quite literally & eternally damned. the virtuous heroine must reject those advances, be it carmilla or dracula.

perhaps instead of trying to to retell Carmilla with a pro-lesbian spin, we should just do a faithful adaptation of the story & enjoy that story as a window into the zeitgeist of another time and allow ourselves to acknowledge both its triumphs and its pitfalls

[dhwty-writes]

"i love bells hells because they create their own problems and then don't solve anything. they're like. 'we're living on hard mode. we live on the hardest mode of life' and they're too weak for it" <- YELLING at my friend's commentary on the hells

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Gods become mortals. And their followers? Well, they become what’s basically a fan club. And what does that make the gods? Why, Exandria’s first influencers, of course.

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official elon musk hate post reblog to hate like to hate reply to hate

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well look who it is. my old friend. the conses of my quences.

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I have joked in the past that about stannorexia however I do need you to understand that I was being serious about Stannis Baratheon being anorexic that one is real

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I like to imagine that sometimes after he’s had a hard day parenting, a demon tries to invade Percy’s mind to get him to invent the vape and he wakes up in a cold sweat screaming.

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Hate Hate Hate stories that reward characters for refusing to do triage. 'I refuse to choose only one to survive even if it means both die' [plot contrives for this to be the only way both survive] is so weak. Making difficult decisions with no good outcome is not a moral failing