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at least tumblr hot takes are written by an overwhelming majority of just weird nerds and teens who don’t hang out with other gays... on twitter you can stumble upon any unbelievably bad opinion and discover it was written by an nbc showrunner who married the ceo of a startup that converts rental properties into oil wells. like at least nobody here has money or influence

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Enjolras after catching Grantaire playing dominoes instead of preaching republicanism in the Barrière du Maine

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caught up with Les Mis Letters just on Enjolras and His Lieutenants day! all rightt

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!! thank you for tagging me, this looks really interesting! Gotta see if my library will order it in.

In this careful, elegant, and meticulously researched book, Miranda Spieler manages not only to overturn conventional thinking about slavery in France, but also to reconstruct an unknown story about its capital. Slavery and its companion anti-Black racism have long been facets of Paris's past. Through vivid narratives, Spieler permits us to understand the roots of the city's present. Slaves in Paris is a must-read.

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The 1958 Eposette Dress Part 1/4 - Cosette Gifts Eponine a Dress

I don't know who decided Les Mis 1958 should have Eponine and Cosette interacting way more than they do in the brick, but whoever it was I owe my life. Here's my first ever attempt at gifmaking, as an eposette steal for the @lesmisshippingshowdown Summer of Steal!

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y'all check out this les mis ass mural i saw the other day

like, idk if it's an intentional tongue in cheek reference or if the artist was just like "hmmm okay Liberty Leading the People looks great but it's off-center... what's something narrow i can use to balance it out that's French Enough to fit the theme?"

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According to Grantaire, at least, just the opposite!  Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics. I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the good fellow.

(from Night Falls on Grantaire, 4.12.3, Hapgood translation)

I mean, it's Grantaire talking , so you can choose to believe he's lying XD but that's all we have on it!

Is it true that canonically grantaire is really good at math or did i somehow made that up....

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Some of you on this site are so scared of writing fairly conventional anatomy-based sex porn because of the cringe-words and general discomfort with sex. It helps to have had sex, but that's not necessary. After the break, as it is somewhat explicit, here is all you need to do, and it is not a list of euphemisms for penis or vagina or xenoapparatus:

Choreograph it in the same respect that you would any scene. If you can do this, you can have some confidence that your porn is exactly as good as your fights, your key gambling maneuvers, your political oneupsmanship, whatever. The key to writing any scene is to know where everyone is and what they are doing and impart this from the lens of the point of view character. If something feels "off" or weird, check in with yourself: what is the point of view character doing? Say it. She has her nails digging into her lover's shoulders. Was that, what she's doing, the last sentence? Let her react to it instead: the thrill of hot blood against her fingertips is intoxicating.

Many of the "porn mistakes" are just writing mistakes, and writing is an unending dialogue between the material (what is physically happening) and the ideal (how a perspective processes the material, with human and personal limitations but also human and personal additions). When you've firmly established the material, you move back to the ideal, the thought-space, the recollection-space, the processing. Then back to the material. Each action spins out and away from the earth, into the ether, where it is reintegrated, leveraged, subverted, and then returns, changed, to collide with the earth again, changing it in turn.

You do not have to say words for penis over and over any more than you need to keep clarifying proper names in a dialogue, and in fact, even less than this. Remember, unless your character is specifically having sex with the penis, she is in fact having sex with a woman, and her feelings and reactions and ideal likely center that woman more than her penis. Put her in dialogue with the woman rather than the penis and you have your answer: you only need to say cock as many times as you would say "rapier" in a swordfight. Once you know what sword it is, you move to sensation, movement, "large scale choreography", and processing.

The unique thing when talking about genitals is that most people don't think much about genitals when they are having sex. They think about sensations: what feels good, unexpected, painful, pleasant, intimate, jarring, etc. Saying "her cock" over and over is not just a little offputting because it's excessively repetitive; it's like putting "gauntlet" in five subsequent paragraphs. We get that there's a gauntlet and a penis. It feels wrong because the gauntlet is an extension of the striking-appendage and the penis is an extension of a character.

To avoid saying gauntlet over and over, as in any writing, you either get vaguer or get specificer. You describe the interaction with the wrist-plate, where the rapier rebounds from the shape of the steel, or the fingertip sliced-through by the superior blade, just barely shallow enough to spare the digit beneath (specific). Alternately, you get vaguer and describe the strike itself - the reader knows there's a gauntlet there! - a fist thrown in desperation after losing hold of a dagger, the weight both pulling down the blow and putting momentum behind it until it meets the enemy's helmet with more of a thud than a clang as the cheap steel crumples into the leather padding beneath, dented skull-deep.

Neither of those used "gauntlet". Both used the concept of the gauntlet. This can be done with anything that you establish - once it's on the stage, it's not off until you take it off.

Of course it helps, to an extent, to have had the kind of sex you are describing. It helps more to have been thoughtful about your own sensation and reaction and action during sex in general; few people really do this, but doing it is extremely useful for writing, the same way riding a horse and not thinking about it will lead you to over-describe the tack you're familiar with vs. riding a horse and thinking about it will help you develop a coherent material dialogue with the content of your own narrative. To an extent, to write about sex, you need to have some level of comfort thinking and reading about sex. Anyone can do those two things, and allow themself to think: at the moment of being penetrated, is her shaft sliding into my fragrant blossom? Or is the sensation more like pressure, more like pain, more like an insistent heat, more like an awareness of her and her shape or an awareness of myself and my limits or my pleasure?

As in sword fights, it helps to imagine yourself in the scene rather than only observing it, when it comes to blocking out a scene like something other than stage directions or a video game novelization.

The last thread this leads me to is pussy. No one wants to write pussy, unless they do. So they write entrance, which you can only really write once before it sounds goofy. Or cunt, which not every character would say. There is not really a cock of pussy, at least in my literary opinion. So how do you say this stuff? How do you say "into her pussy" if it causes you physical pain to write pussy?

You may not need to specify at all. When penetrating someone, you are penetrating a person, not just an organ. Depending on the nature of the sex, you may want to get into more or less detail, but I'm not talking to the people who are already writing about the color of the labia and the specific tactile sensation of a blood-flushed clit, okay? I'm speaking to you if you have stopped and made a terrible face at the thought of "pussy" and then deleted it and written "cunt" and cringed again.

My hot tip, as connects to all the rest of this, is that if there is not a word for the place you are stabbing her, you are just stabbing her. You are dragging your fingers over her until she yields. You are lining yourself up with her, pressing in, adjusting cautiously until she wriggles her hips, urging you to get on with it already. You are drawing your hips back against the friction of her trembling body. Could any of these be her asshole? Her neovagina? Her alien hole where she excretes salt waste? Of course! If it's important to specify, specify! If what's hot about fucking someone is the logistics of the hole, then by God, logistics the shit out of that hole without shame. But what makes porn hot is not the hole itself. It's the interaction with the hole, gone warm and molten as her desperate breaths come quicker. It's how the hole makes you feel. Fuck you.

Word choices for describing sex organs are an expression of how the perspective character feels about them. A heavily euphemistic description may either reveal something important about the character and her misgivings or set the narrative itself up for subversion - the girl who winces and thinks of her penis as "her manhood" is going to have something to unpack later or even during sex. The dispassionate "shaft" could either reflect disinvestment, to be dramatized later on, or set up that disinvestment to be subverted, as the humble shaft becomes the instrument of orgasm.

Think of how anime often has internal-monologue turning points to explain where a character's last reserve of energy comes from - the setup, the dead parent, the tragic past, the loss of a friend, it comes from somewhere, and the payoff to winning the duel is catharsis. It's just a more straightforward way of illustrating the point of most building-to-a-climax, which porn often deliberately does: you can only pay off on what you set up. Otherwise you revert to tropes and the underdog-hero wins for no reason and the girl-hero cums and it doesn't even matter because ten thousand she/hers have cum exactly that way in ten thousand prior okay scenes. The difference in payoff is all in a setup that the payoff can reintegrate: a material and an ideal that unite in a moment of pure emotional release.

I can't make you better at writing sex scenes than you are at writing fight scenes, but if you follow this advice you can be just as good.

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Being pissed abt a nonissue is so fun.... #myhill

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Galaxy brain(?) moment when I realized that "Gimme Three Steps" by Lynyrd Skynyrd is just a Paul Gavarni comic come to life.

"I SAID WAIT A MINUTE MISTER I DIDN'T EVEN KISS HER, DON'T WANT NO TROUBLE WITH YOU."

"I WAS SKEERIN FEERIN FOR MY LIFE, I WAS SHAKING LIKE A LEAF ON A TREE"

"IN WALKED A MAN WITH A GUN IN HIS HAND, AND HE WAS LOOKIN FOR YOU-KNOW-WHO."

Classic Southern Rock 🤝 Les Maris Vengés

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Tumblr right now, watching all the censorship bills fail to mention it: nobody fucking move

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HECK YEAH SEWER DIGRESSION APPRECIATION SQUAD , it's probably my favorite in the book :D Along with the convent digression and the gamin digression :D (I have come to appreciate Waterloo but the competition is intense!) Good luck with the ending of the book!

more Les Miserables thoughts as I near the end of the book

-“gewgaws” is a word I was very surprised to see in the text — in a book from 1862 by a French author !

-THE NOTORIOUS HISTORY OF SEWERS PART ISNT EVEN THAT LONG !!!!!!!!!!! oh my god

-like. everyone harps on Hugo’s case about “haha the endless ramblings about sewers” but ?? like ??? it was shorter than the Waterloo part which was *also* only like. 50 pages total in my edition. The convents history bit felt longer honestly and none of the above were even boring or “pointless rambling” it’s all extremely relevant to the characters’ emotional landscapes and why they act and say and feel that which they act/say/feel and thus to the plot itself as well

-also not only is it *not* boring, but it is intensely, incredibly, vividly evocative and does an excellent job of conveying the mood and the environment and the situation almost tangibly to the reader!! The entire sewers part makes you feel the desperation and horror and impenetrable darkness and terror and almost total insurvivability of the path Jean Valjean traverses. The convents part— honestly, it does so many things, that could literally be its own very lengthy commentary/observations post, but among other things— explains (w/ reading comprehension and understanding of Themes TM to be fair) a lot of the emotional landscape for Jean Valjean and Cosette in the latter part of the book as well as Hugo’s critiques of the church and comparison of different types of prisons and dehumanization and. and and. is it uncomfortable? Yes! Does it make the reader recoil in horror and almost visceral discomfort? Yes! And it is supposed to, that is like one of the main things / the whole thing he’s doing! he is in fact Making A Point and not just being arrogant or something. it’s all so relevant and adds to the story

-like I’m sorry but honestly I have like < 200 pages left in the whole book and I have not once been bored or felt like it is a slog/uninteresting/irrelevant/etc to get through. This entire book has been so gripping and engaging and has been on my mind pretty much 24/7 since I started reading it. It’s so good, y’all… like… so, so good. Oh my god. oh my god. did you all know Les Mis is good

-barricade scenes were of course extremely heartbreaking, I’m going to need at least 3-5 business days to recover, the [warning SPOILERS] (then again the book is 150+ yr old) Mabeuf & Gavroche parts in particular were so devastating— the black shawl moment oh my god my heart is in pieces— as was all of it, all of ittttt, truly, oh my god

-M. Gillenormand thank you for being less (although not none) of an absolute ass once Marius is convalescing oh my god, he’s starting to get Zuko’s “not as much of a jerk as he could’ve been” award 🎖️

-Cosette and Marius are so incredibly 19yo/ late-teens about everything and I love them so very much. They are so sweet and kind and good and earnest and so, so deeply stupid /affectionate /adoring /fond so glad I am reading this at an age many years removed from my own teen years so I can truly appreciate how very much Like That they are and that’s another testament to his great writing

-the whole discussion of revolutions vs riots and the names given to things based on their success/failure and who is quantifying that and what rhetoric is being employed was absolutely incredible

-so much symbolic resonance and similarity in this book all throughout with that in LOTR and whether intentionally or not (on Tolkien’s part) (ofc) (linear time etc) it feels like they’re almost in a dialogue arguing the same ultimate goal but from different points and getting there along different routes and I have So Many Thoughts about it and it is so, so good

I’m sure I have many, many many more thoughts about it too— as I said it’s pretty much on my mind 24/7 right now— but this is some stuff I have been really ruminating on and going !!! about in my mind (and to anyone irl who will listen when I go HEY I HAVE MORE LES MIS THOUGHTS lol) (@ sister @ mom thank you for your patience lmao) (I just want everyone to read this book and scream about it with me because it is. So Good. Have I mentioned that it’s so good)

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Ne pas trouver de voiture... (When you can't get a cab...), from the series Les Petits malheurs du bonheur by Paul Gavarni, 1838.

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Who's narrating it, now?

IS THAT GEORGE BLAGDEN??