onceuponanaromantic

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I feel like many other authors who would've decided to branch out with a YA series set within their fictional world would go for something more lighthearted/goofy than the main series. but so far in a hat full of sky pratchett genuinely understands just how fucking serious it is being an 11 year old girl.

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truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

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not to be "comment on fanfic even if they are oooold"

But I just read a pretty good fic published in 2014-2015 (you know, roughly TEN YEARS AGO) and I was like, damn this is so cool, I have to leave a comment, even if you know, they probably wont see it...

The author replied less than an hour later.

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List of media where the title is significantly more accurate than you expect going in:

- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

- Everything Everywhere All At Once

- The Thing

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wishing spiders a successful strike, may they get everything they want

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Mina: "Alright, everyone pinkie swear right now to put Vampire Me down if I hop the line between death and undeath."

Van Helsing and the Suitor Squad: "Depressing, but sure, absolutely."

Jonathan:

Mina: "...Jonathan?"

Jonathan: "Yes?"

Mina: "Will you promise to slay me if I get vampire'd?"

Jonathan: "Mina, I will not lie to you."

Jonathan:

Mina: "Jonathan. I need you to look me in the eye and promise to murder me martyr-style if I get too undead."

Jonathan: "Fine. I can promise to kill."

Mina: "Me? Vampire me?"

Jonathan, making unbroken eye contact with the four guys who just promised to behead and impale his wife if she stops being human enough: "I guarantee there will be killing involved if Vampire You happens."

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Just started reading Sherlock Holmes and all the adaptations are wrong. This man is a delight. He gets excited about hemoglobin and is ecstatic at the thought of Watson as a roommate. He purposefully forgets how the solar system works so he has more room in his brain for crime. He shows Watson the dirt stains on his trousers and he can tell what part of London they come from based on color and consistency. (As far as i can tell Watson didn't ask, Sherlock just gets back from walks and tells Watson about the stains unprompted.) The text specifically says "Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with." Why does every adaptation make him unpleasant and rude, he's literally just eccentric. He's such a goober, I love him.

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Take a break, this cute tardigrade needs time to cross your dash:

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love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded

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As voted by the people, I'm offering my analysis on the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Firstly, and getting this out of the way, I adore the Hound of the Baskervilles. My chosen area of focus in my Master's Program was Gothic Literature, and this novel hits all of my favorite aspects of the field.

But there's more to it that I've noticed.

Chiefly among them being that most of the novel focuses on Watson, rather than Sherlock Holmes. While yes, it may have been a product of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle being bitter that he was forced to bring Holmes back, for this novel in particular, I think it's brilliant.

It operates under the premise that this Hound, this creature, is a Fairy Tale come to life and stalks the moor to bring death to all of those of the Baskerville family. In this sense, Watson, as he normally is a vehicle for the audience, is also a purveyor of a Legend come to life.

Watson, even if Sherlock Holmes is never quite Gothic, never quite horror, becomes a Gothic protagonist the more he lives in Dartmoor and learns about the family. But he's an evolution of a Gothic protagonist, too.

By the 1890s, the Decadence movement primarily took up the reins of Gothic Literature, creating what we know as fin-de-siecle, or the turn of the century. Many protagonists of this age fell to sin, corruption, and hedonism, such as the case of Dorian Gray.

(I find it fitting to use Dorian Gray, as Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle met over a meal that lead to the creation of both A Study in Scarlet and the Picture of Dorian Gray.)

But Watson? He remains steadfast in his nature. He never falls to the era defining corruption and sin, and, even evolves in his deductive reasoning when he finally finds and reunites with Holmes towards the end of the novel.

Even still, he still is, a Gothic protagonist, alongside Sir Henry. They navigate the Baskerville home on the Moor, a crumbling, haunted place, ripe with ancestral sin.

That is what defined the time, even if Watson never falls to sin and corruption. Decadence and fin-de-siecle were defined by all things falling to sin, decay, and rot. What was once glamorous and majestic of the preceding Aesthetic movement had rotted away, underneath.

And, given that Holmes and Watson reunite towards the end of the novel, they yet again defy the era's expectation of Gothic Literature. Their presence is hope, a light in the corruption that drags at the Baskerville family name. While by definition, perhaps a deus ex machina, it works brilliantly.

After all, who else could you go to, when there's a beast of legend killing your family?

As for the Hound itself. It alone is one of the greatest images of late Gothic horror I know. A coal black hound, muzzle shrouded in flame and phosphorous and snapping at your heels... it indeed installs primal, Gothic terror. It makes you ask, what's real? What's not? Can I even trust my reality anymore?

And it's also something that Holmes, for all of his brain and power of the mind, does not know. It invokes a sense of delicious, morbid terror, that while amazed, our detective is just as in the dark as we are before the Hound is killed. And it again, creates another layer of vulnerability that we don't normally get to see.

Lastly, the Hound is also fantastic in invoking the Black Dog Fairy Tales of Europe and beyond. A lot of cultures have a tale, from the Cu-Sith of the Celts, to the Black Dogs roaming England. It strikes fear, because it is used as one of the bases for what we form logic around, as Fairy Tales and folklore so often do for children throughout history.

Perhaps Stapleton knew about this, and preyed upon it on purpose? It's fascinating to think about.

All in all, this is why I adore this novel. Gothic Literature, character evolution, and Fairy Tales...? It's brilliant.

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Fantastic depiction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers for this modern obi.

It's not the first time I post Van Gogh-inspired kimono items, but the textured here are really *chief's kiss*

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origin stories.

(Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial's prompt FFF 281: Ripple Effect. Enjoy!)

Tell me a story worth listening to.

Tell me a story worth keeping.

It always begins in the silence. It doesn’t have to be an absolute silence, not the kind you find only in the hush of a dark forest, or the emptiness of space. It can be the silence of a single mind in a crowd, or the silence of a single droplet of water in a darkened bathroom. It can be loud, even, but you would know all about that.

The city on a hill shines brighter from the water, but then all cities do. All cities shine when coated in the fading mist of a dream and some kind of illusion. What makes it real is the sand beneath your fingers and the blood beneath your skin.

(As a witch, you know this story better than the rest of them, but I will tell you anyway, because it is the telling that matters, not the story.)

The city on a hill is paved in cobblestones. You cannot reach it by land, nor by sea, nor by plane or airbus or submarine. There are many stories about how to get there, but none will work for someone who tries to walk the same path twice. That’s the trick of the city: you can only enter it by finding a path in yourself, and no two people can walk the same path into the city.

I found it by going upstream. I was a fool, I fully admit to it, to trust an old witch when she told me that there was no cure but to pass through the edge of a river running into the sea when the full moon broke the surface of the water. Desperation makes a girl do silly things, and I was desperate at the time. The world turned on me, and I turned on her back because my sister was dead and my lover dying and I was all that was left. I assume that someone better than me would have found a better solution, but I was the only one left standing when all was said and done. So I did it. I walked up the stream, checking the rivers for its passageway and doing the calculations to see where precisely a river might meet a sea.

Having made the closest approximation I could, I took a deep breath, and stepped into the water.

It would have killed me. It should have killed me.

It didn’t.

I held my breath for as long as I could as the sea water stung my eyes and my lungs burned with the effort of it. I walked through the water and asked the sea for her grace. And then I reached the end of the road, or what should have been there.

I passed through rock and ended up on dry land. They asked me how I had survived and I said I didn’t know. I pulled myself out of the water, and sat on the rough hewn rock, soaking wet, salt stinging the cuts on my face and body. It had taken my maps from me, but at least my ink bottles had remained airtight in my bag. My pen, when I finally pulled it from my bag, had somehow survived the journey too.

The ones who had pulled me out of the water celebrated me. Not all manage it, and for three days and three nights, they fed me and clothed me warmly and in exchange, asked for my story. Like any good traveller, I gave it. I told the story of a horrible battle and of death, and of the water itself. I told old stories about the wind as it blessed my face, and the sunshine long before the dark days, and the fire that sparked blue in the middle of an old laboratory. I was selfish, I admit, but I kept the stories about dark nights in the laboratory and silence in the room when others came to find us, and I kept the stories about how precisely people had died to keep me safe. Everyone loves a good story about a sacrifice but this one was mine.

On the third night, they told me that the answer lay at the edge of the forest, where an old oracle sat. I thanked them, pulled my bag of stories with me and made my way out to the forest.

The forest was darker than I had dreamed, and the stars danced above, turning. I don’t know how long I spent in there, only that the river ran in the distance, and that somewhere, far away, the world had kept turning without me. I could not save the world. I could not save the only people who mattered. But I could try and I would be damned if I didn’t.

So I said, thank you to the birds. I followed them where they ate, and I learned the path from them. I remembered the song of the wind, and I sang it back to them in exchange for keeping myself alive in the darkness.

But I was changed. I didn’t realise that until the end of the road.

I still seek a cure. I cannot give it, time has passed and there is no way back upstream through time. But I want to know it anyway. That was my curse, that was how I got here, but now, let me know anyway.

“You are a healer,” the witch said. “You said you were a storyteller.”

“I am a storyteller. I cannot heal anymore.”

The witch looked, in the darkness of the cottage, eyes warming with the flickering fire. “Oh no, you are a healer, all right. No storyteller would have come all this way to ask for an answer.”

“Yes, but I can’t go back, which makes my cure useless.”

“It’s a ripple effect.” The witch smiled.

“I couldn’t do it either, when I started. But that’s what makes you a witch.”

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Everyone gives Sherlock Holmes a hard time about being mean about Watson's writing, but honestly imagine you told your roommate "sure, you can write up an account of my work for the newspaper," thinking it would be like, about the murder, but then he publishes it and it's 90% about you, as a person, and it's a huge hit and now everyone in London knows that you hoard newspapers and do cocoaine when you're depressed. Because I think you'd be little miffed too.

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How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

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Ask yourself, would a small woodland mouse wearing an apron and/or jaunty corduroy vest do this activity? If not, stop immediately.

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I deposit an ancient deed to a property passed down through generations that certainly isn't haunted.

you receive one (1) angry ghost explaining that you can't get rid of them that easily