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Me too, Verin, me too.

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best part of wheel of time fandom so far this season is watching people discover in real time what shohreh aghdashloo's voice sounds like

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Top moments from The Expanse FedCon 2019 panel (Pt.2):

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🔥🔥🔥

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behind the scenes of s3 of The Wheel of Time

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George O'Brien in the middle of an original lobby card for Paid to Love (1927)

George's daughter with actress Marguerite Churchill. Orin O'Brien, born in 1935, is the subject of the 2025 Oscar winning documentary short, The Only Girl in the Orchestra. The double bass player became the first female musician with the New York Philharmonic in 1966. The film was directed by Orin's niece Molly O'Brien and includes clips from George's film career.

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In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

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greatest philosophical questions of the century: are children's cartoons politically significant? do audiobooks count as reading? is booktok destroying women's brains? are a middle class americans the most oppressed group of all time? who's stupider: children or schools? is sexual inexperience the truest sin? are pad users more oppressed than tampon users? should people eat quinoa specifically if we ignore all other foods on earth? is taylor swift underrated or overrated? is it pedophilia to dress stupid? is intra lgbt community slur reclaiming okay? does autism stop you from going to the club? is being a misogynist actually more progressive than not being a misogynist? france? should people who don't like spoilers be killed on the street or should people who say spoilers be killed on the street? is calling something gross fascism except when i do it? is it more progressive to be bilingual? among others

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Do you have a favorite saint? :)

Hard to choose one. I like Saint Brendan the Navigator. He gave communion to a mermaid.

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"Tell his children that government is more powerful than any corporation.

And the only reason they think it tilts the other way is because we poor public servants are always looking for some fat, private-sector payoff down the road.

But I'm not looking.

And by the time they can pull the strings to force me out, it'll be too late.

Their family will be ruined. Their mother, the children, their children, all of them, pariahs!

Outlaws. Hunted and on the run for the rest of their days until we find them, and nail each and every last one to the wall."

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shipping isn’t about what the writers or actors say is or isn’t romantic. shipping isn’t even about romance a good percentage of the time. shipping is about seeing The Dynamic and going absolutely hog wild in your mind and your friends dms about it.

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Me leaving comments on fics.

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reblog and put in the tags a fictional ship/couple where, in your opinion, they’re just so firmly each other’s that you cannot imagine them being shipped with anyone else

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My obsession for these two has reached the heights of a five-chapter fic. Slightly AU, lots of angst, morally grey everyone, and Verin being...well, Verin. (It's done nothing to cure the obsession. I'm still obsessed.)

Summary:

Liandrin lives from hand to mouth, tavern to tavern, always moving on and hiding her ability to channel. That all turns upside down when she meets Verin, but nothing is as it seems with an Aes Sedai.

Read on AO3

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heads up! pinterest is now using your data to train their AI. if you use pinterest for aesthetics, make sure you go into your settings > privacy and uncheck this box, as it's turned on by default.