#(which is OKAY. Just acknowledge it)

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[wishesofeternity]

The thing about HotD is that it while it absolutely minimizes the agency and ambition of both Rhaenyra and Alicent, this is specifically used to glorify Rhaenyra and frame her as righteous while condemning Alicent and framing her lacking. That's the key difference in both their textual portrayals that has directly led to 90% of the fandom hailing Rhaenyra as the second coming of Christ while spewing the most hateful vitriol at Alicent just for existing. But y'all are not prepared for that conversation.

[turtleblogatlast]

“Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)” from Steven Universe works so ridiculously well for Leo

[ofswordsandpens]

I'm sincerely very happy for anyone who is enjoying the show but every time I see takes that the show has improved the book characterizations or that the book characters are underdeveloped in comparison to the show...

[quietwingsinthesky]

it ever hit you out of nowhere that castiel is living in a dead guy's body and the show just does not care. it does not care. jimmy novak might as well not exist the moment he or claire is out of sight. cas stole a guy's body and his face and his life, and we can't ever talk about it or discuss it in detail because of how fucking horrifying it is that sam and dean's best friend just walks around in a dead guy suit. there's not even a human soul in there anymore. it's just a corpse. stone-cold body snatcher indeed.

[aroaceleovaldez]

i hope this doesn't sound like a silly or weird thing to send you, but i'm autistic and have long thought of nico and a handful of other riordanverse characters as autistic and i love your posts about why nico in particular seems intentionally autistic-coded. but i've been thinking, if rick did intend for any of his characters to be autistic, why wouldn't he say so outside of the text at least? i can't think of a good reason why not, when he goes out of his way to be explicit about so many other characters' various marginalized identities and has confirmed things like reyna being asexual outside of the original text. so it gives me this nagging sort of doubt that maybe rick just made nico come off as so extremely autistic coded by accident, somehow. if it wasn't an accident i do kind of wish he'd say so because there's next to zero explicitly stated autistic representation in, like, any media so it'd be nice to have here even if not strictly necessary. either way though, like i said, i love your posts and i agree with you 100% about autistic nico! some others i like to think are autistic are annabeth and leo.

(Most of this is gonna be kind of a tangential ramble to your point and i apologize in advance just bear with me)

This actually touches upon something I've been meaning to do a write-up on recently, which is: depending on the coding, that is our explicit statement. In most coding, actually, that's kind of the point. (Also something something Death of the Author.)

You may have noticed a recent trend across media of characters saying things directly rather than expressing them in a natural way, and often this includes incredibly stilted dialogue of characters explaining things in very politically correct, wikipedia-esque descriptions and terminology that make absolutely no sense for the characters' personalities or mannerisms. This is born out of the idea that if something is not stated in explicit terms, no amount of evidence below an outright direct exact statement will ever count - if two characters of the same gender have an explicit kiss and wedding on-screen, it doesn't matter because they never said the word "gay," etc etc.

In PJO, prior to more recent books, we get plenty of examples of characters explaining parts of their identities without direct statements. Percy never needs to say in outright terms that he has PTSD from Gabe - and it doesn't make sense that he would! He's 12! He's never been diagnosed for that. He probably doesn't even know what PTSD is really. But we, the audience, know without a doubt he has PTSD, because it is clearly expressed to us. That is coding. Tyson is coded as having down syndrome. Nico is coded as being autistic. It doesn't make sense for Nico to turn to the camera and explain that he's autistic and what that means, because he definitely never got diagnosed for it and probably doesn't know what that means cause the diagnosis literally did not exist when he was growing up - and heck, autism terminology was still kind of getting sorted out back in 2007 when TTC was published, so it's unlikely we could have feasibly gotten any exact terminology wink-wink-nudge-nudges short of something like how Percy outright mentions other students called Tyson the r-slur in Sea of Monsters. And in fact we see that same exact style of coding with Nico later on in the series. Nico never turns to the camera and says word-for-word "I am gay, I am mlm, here's me wearing my exact pride flags" (until TOA/TSATS, which... did the exact thing i mentioned about characters speaking like theyre trying to get a good grade in therapy, or giving a powerpoint presentation). But it is never unclear that HoO is telling us outright that Nico is gay. It's not just hinted at. It's there, in your face. But entirely because no one ever outright says "gay" specifically it's technically still only coding. We know he's gay, we know the characters have trauma/ptsd, etc etc. We don't need it spelled out - that's just kind of condescending. It's like if you said describing a character with "eyes like moss" means they were "green-eye coded."

Nico being autistic-coded isn't hidden. It's not a secret. It's very overt. If you know what autism looks like, well, yeah, there he is. Even if you only know very vague 2007 media presentation of autism, Nico in TTC is easily recognizable enough as autistic because that's the point. Tyson is easily recognizable as being coded as having down syndrome and it's very clearly very intentional! It's just never spoon-fed in exact terms to the reader because it's not necessary! You've already been told the information necessary to tell you what is up with this character, so just plainly going "oh they're [x] in exact terms" is very much telling-not-showing and feels redundant. And while there are places for that kind of thing, most of the time it's very unnecessary. Sometimes coding is subtle, sometimes it's obvious, and yeah there are times where writers code characters unintentionally, but the textual evidence is there, and that's the whole point.

And that's what Death of the Author is about - it doesn't matter what the author intended at the end of the day, because if it's in the text it's in the text. You can look at author intent to try and figure out what that text means, but the text is the text. A Separate Peace is a very classic example - author John Knowles denies there being homosexual subtext, and meanwhile one of the protagonists living in 1942 puts on a pink shirt while saying he doesn't mind of people think of him as gay. What the author says after the fact doesn't matter - if it's there, it's there. So Rick saying anything outside of the books is completely irrelevant. And Rick talks about this a lot - he actively tells people that his statements outside of the books are just his own thoughts, but what's in the books is what's in the books, and if the text supports it then that's all the evidence you need.

Nico specifically is a case where yeah, he's clearly autistic-coded. It's very obvious and very obviously intentional when he's younger, and as the books progress it remains a background trait of his but is still notable (except for when it gets forgotten in TOA/TSATS like everything else, including the adhd/dyslexia, but i digress). It's a clear pattern within the first few books that Rick is intentionally including. It doesn't make sense, especially for the year the book was published, for the reader to be directly told in explicit terminology that Nico is autistic, because the reader is already being told that Nico is autistic.

And yeah, Rick doesn't mention Nico being autistic-coded outside of the text, but he also doesn't mention Tyson being coded as having down syndrome. He also said one time that Percy doesn't have PTSD at all, which is very incorrect starting from book 1. Again, Death of the Author. Whatever Rick says outside of the books does not matter, because he already said it in the books. And there's plenty of other stuff in the books that Rick doesn't touch upon, particularly relating to character identity - did you know Leo is Native? Sammy mentions that the Valdez family is Native in Son of Neptune but we don't get any specifics and then it's like never brought up again anywhere. That happens all the time in the series - and outside of the series - Rick can't possibly address every single point to confirm/deny everything from the books. That's what analysis is for! And that's why my blog exists 👍

[atthebell]

also i know this is probably by nature of how much i block people and again the fact that i don't open the main tag but i have not personally seen a single instance of toxicity from red team fans on here

[theosconfessions]

@ohsosims

if youd like to read the stephens from the beginning you can over here:)

if youd like to read the stephens continued you can over here:)

theo- scarlett brought up something she first approached me about this. about making it a making peace thing. im kind of thinking this is more FOR YOU than anything. dustin-oh.. for me? theo-for you. dustin-then if its for me why do it on tiktok? theo- well because shes also a bitch[smiles and nods] dustin- dont call her that [huffs a laugh] theo-look im cool to do this...in front of everyone. i think its a good idea to put my shit out there. dustin- but you can just talk to me theo. theo- i know. dustin-then TALK theo.dont do an interview for fucks sake. just talk to me. theo-i know i can talk to you about anything but i told scarlett i would do it her way. so thats what im going to do . answer her questions. bobbis questions. and have it recorded so that one day..when im long gone.. you can rewatch it. and get mad all over again. get happy all over again. feel my love all over again. i dont know, i just have to leave you okay.i want you to be okay that you spend the rest of your life with me dustin- theo... theo- i fucking love the shit out of you, really.. dustin-i love you too, but theo. theo- naw no more mushy shit. im okay..just remembering.

[cienie-isengardu]

[storywestistrash]

i am actually so tired of the way westerners treat eastern europeans

[dimonds456]

I'm mid-James apology and holy shit this is actually a GOOD apology?? MUCH better than the first one if nothing else.

Will update if anything dramatic happens.

Edit: check the notes and the replies. I had just woken up, this was the first thing I did lol. Yeah it was bad.

[wonder-worker]

Is it true that Elizabeth of York birth celebrated like she was a son? I have seen some historians say this.

Hi! Yes, Edward IV did celebrate his daughter’s birth as though she was a male heir (“a prince”).

While we have no contemporary reports at the time of Elizabeth of York's birth, we know that Luchino Dallaghiexia reported that the birth of Edward and Elizabeth's third child, Cecily of York, "rejoiced the king and all the nobles exceedingly*, though they would have preferred a son'. Wanting a son (ie: an heir) was typical for their time period, likely enhanced by Edward and Elizabeth's unprecedentedly controversial marriage, her very unsuitable origins and his own status as a usurper. The fact that he was described as being "exceedingly" delighted at the birth of his third daughter in a row regardless does support the claim that he would have gone over-the-top to celebrate the birth of his first legitimate** child.

Hope this helps!

*Bizarrely, I have seen several historians and blogs using Dallaghiexia's letter to claim that he was bitterly disappointed at Cecily of York's birth. I don't understand how historical reading comprehension can be so poor that "rejoiced the king exceedingly" has somehow been rewritten as the...exact opposite of that. With no self-awareness whatsoever. **His illegitimate daughter Margaret (known as Elizabeth for some reason) was almost definitely born before his marriage. We don't know the birth dates of his other two illegitimate children: I think the likeliest conception date for Arthur was in early 1470, but it's unverified; and we know nothing about Grace (which was in fact her surname, not her name) other than the fact that Elizabeth Woodville seems to have been very attached to her.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Lord of the Empty Isles

sci-fi/fantasy

set on a supposedly utopian planet recovering from a climate crisis, where bonds between people are able to be seen and manipulated (by some people)

follows a young man whose brother was cursed and killed by an infamous outlaw 5 years ago, and he’s finally able to curse him back - but it rebounds, as he’s somehow fatebound to the outlaw

to find a cure and save them both they have to team up, and he quickly finds out that the resources the outlaw is stealing go to the thousands of people neglected on prison planets, and he has to go against what he thought was right to help them

no romance, aroace MC, focus on platonic relationships

arc from netgalley, out june 6

[lettheladylead]

"carro, thats a search and find activity book for children. why did you purchase it all the way from the UK?"

well you see. it is simply because

every page in the book is based in a different city or country and dickie appears iiinnnnnnn New York City:

Egypt:

Netherlands:

and Malaga!!

plz enjoy the dickie art

[themostfuniveverhad]

.

[gorillawithautism]

i share my thoughts expecting to engage in genuine discussion. instead i get people misinterpreting my words, dismissing my feelings, and generally being dickish about it. thanks. very helpful.