#A book they wanted us to forget

[masked-alien-lesbian]

Just seen a reply on one of my posts about A Taste For Royalty and it turns out it has been cancelled. Wonder what it would have been about...

I had guessed that it was going to be a love story between a baker/chef and a prince/princess. The mc is probably the palace chef's or in a tv show like Dancing with the Stars but with baking and nobility. But I guess we'll never know 😭. Thanks for letting me know it was canceled though! 😁

[veronicaneptunes]

A long time ago, we used to be friends... The Veronica Mars pilot aired 20 years ago today- on the 22nd of September, 2004.

[lazylittledragon]

Happy birthday!!!!! Sorry your ex is making it hard for you, please know that you're SO young and there's probably amazing people in your future so please don't destroy yourself over it, you have so much time xx

Also, please ignore if this is overstepping but do you have an Amazon list or something? Already a Patron and bought from the shop but want to go the extra step <3

THANK YOU THIS MEANS A LOT <333

also ahhhhhhhh, yes i do but please don't feel pressured!! that's very sweet though :')))

[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 👍

[eliza-makepeace]

cheerful humming nothing-like-depressed-innkeeper-kote-anymore kvothe my beloved

[triaelf9]

dang, try being a fan of a series in Japan

-limited items that sell out instantly the minute they go on sale, mostly to resellers who put them up on sites for 500 x the price

-trying to collect a physical version of a show when the DVDs are 8,000 ish yen and the DVD holds TWO EPISODES

-Series that only get merch that's a collab with a Brand Name and cost what you'd expect from brands

-Being part of a fan club that DOESN'T INFORM YOU WHEN THEIR LIMITED ITEMS GO ON SALE so they're all gone by the time you get to the page and, even tho it's a preorder, they somehow can't make more.

-The only way to get a figure for not 500 x the cost after preorders are close if you missed preorders (not even after it's RELEASED, just when the ORDERS are shut) is to get EXTREMELY lucky at a used store or recycle shop, and even then it will be marked up.

[wundrousarts]

Going to do a Nevermoor series reread in June + July + August ? if anyone else also wants to do a reread around that time, could be fun to have more of the fandom prepping for Silverborn

Did initially make a roadmap plan to split the books up into weeks on top of already being months, so that people could focus on specific parts and discuss each week….. but between the fact that I messed it up the first time, Silverborn kept getting delayed as I planned it, and I’m actually really bad at keeping to stuff like that (looking at you, Silverborn Countdown Challenge…) I’m deciding to just go for it at whatever pace happens.

[blueskittlesart]

Honestly who is even the target audience for this zelda movie. If it was for kids they would've made it an animation probably, and obviously they want it to reach wider audiences than just people who are already fans of the games, but like. This is a fantasy video game movie full of magic and weird and silly looking creatures, I can't help but feel like that would be off-putting to a lot of people who would think it's silly (which it will be probably. God I just know they're gonna make Link be like super sarcastic and have a bunch of one liners I can't do this)

im gonna be real i think the target audience is mcu fans

[spookygibberish]

Also if anyone is curious here's my big dumb very very roughly ranked list of shit I've listened to over the last yearish

[12freddofrogs]

Look, I didn't actually hate the new Wish movie. I didn't love it, either, but I didn't hate it. Some of the songs were catchy, the more subtle easter eggs were fun to recognise, there was some fun ideas in the magic system.

The thing was, the story had bones in there to be really good, and they missed it. I'm not even necessarily talking about the original concept, about the Star being humanoid (although that would have helped a lot - not even necessarily as Asha's love interest, just that it would have made the Star an actual character instead of a prop). I think what annoyed me more was King Magnifico being set up as well intentioned, and then that was completely forgotten.

He was sympathetic. His goal was to keep his kingdom from burning down. He was traumatised and trying not to let history repeat. And then the movie even went out of its way to inform us that the book - the book he only opened out of desperation - was corrupting, that it was a direct result of a curse that Magnifico was getting crueller, that this curse was permanent, and just... forget about it. Whoops, villain is defeated, toss him in the dungeon without a further thought.

Instead, you know what I think would have done wonders for making the plot more cohesive and fitting together the themes, plus actually tying together that whole "A wish is the most powerful magic!" lore, and even giving what should have been a protagonist but was kinda just a torch a real, actual scene?

Have Star grant Magnifico's first, truest wish.

Not directly, click his fingers fix it. That's against the theme of working for your wish. But have Star pull out of the pile of wishes the one that Magnifico made twenty, thirty years ago when he first pulled up on this little island and put down the first bricks. The wish that no magician, no evil would ever harm this kingdom.

And then, while Magnifico is frozen, staring at his own wish for something more, he looks at the green flames around him and actually, honestly sees them.

They said that curse was unbreakable, but they also said that a wish is the most powerful magic that exists, and this is a star that came down solely to grant it. The wish glows brighter, the green stretches for them, but Star is there and the wish wins. Curse breaks. The world glows again, and there's just a king, collapsed and human again, and Asha is the only one willing to sit next to him as he stares at his kingdom.

And then, just to properly tie the movie back to the beginning, Asha gets the job as the apprentice that she'd been interviewing for. She can keep the wand, sure, fine, but what she needs is to actually study. Her new wish is to be able to help people make their wishes come true, and neither the stars nor the king are going to click their fingers and make that happen for her. Magic takes years to learn, but it turns out Magnifico is actually a pretty good teacher.

If you wanted to finish the movie on her 18th birthday that got mentioned several times as upcoming but never became relevant, that would be thematic. Maybe she makes the wish in private, glowing, pulls it out of her chest to see herself as a fairy godmother, before she puts the wish back into her chest to go back and work on making it real.

[corfisers]

two weird things that happen to me more often than i'd like and feel like they are on the opposite ends of the same spectrum: forgetting that i do actually speak two languages and forgetting that some people who post here in english speak only english

[alagaisia]

Hey if you’re still enjoying and engaging with Harry Potter in any capacity you can unfollow me 😊 please and thank you

Like. I get it. I was super into it as a kid too. I did not have the social context to pick up on the antisemitism or transphobia or sexism or fatphobia or bioessentialism or racism or anything else. I also picked up on surface-level language of Fighting Back Against Evil and ascribed my own values onto what that meant and thought we were all on the same page. I remember when the original kids who grew up with the books started becoming adult fans and picking up on the (blatant!) antisemitism and everybody was still mostly willing to give JKR the benefit of the doubt on it. (“She was writing kids books!” They said. “She didn’t know she was penning a global phenomenon! She picked a common literary trend in European fairy tales (antisemitic caricature) and didn’t examine it closely. It’s a mistake anyone could make,” we said. “She would probably do things differently now. After all, she word-of-god confirmed the vaguest hints she dropped that Dumbledore might be gay,” we said.) There was actually a span of several years where biases inherent in the actual real content of the Harry Potter series were coming to light and even the people pointing them out still seemed mostly to think it was an unfortunate accident.

That time has passed. Years ago! We are long past the first months of “maybe she doesn’t realize this seemingly-feminist tweet she liked was made by a noted TERF” and then “how could she not realize that these many veiled TERF-y things she’s retweeted have implications for the many queer fans of her work” and finally “oh wow okay JKR just dropped an entire transphobic manifesto on twitter. I guess the transphobia was the point.”

Yeah, there were a few months after that where people were still processing and still working through how they felt about Harry Potter and all of its flaws with the context of the now open transphobia of the creator. I was there for that. Remember how I was one of the kids who built it up into something noble and worthwhile based on my own beliefs about what messages it was probably trying to convey? Turns out it wasn’t trying to say any of those things, and when you take the time to examine all of the terrible shit that made its way into the text whether JKR intended it to be there or not, the whole series falls apart. It’s weird to discover that there’s a room in your house that’s rotten to the core, but eventually you figure out you can’t live like that, still going in there and holding your nose and pretending it’s still the same room you thought it was when the termites were only inside of the walls and hadn’t yet started chewing their way through the furniture. Because what’s going to happen is that they are going to infest the rest of your house. If you decide you can ignore transphobia and antisemitism and everything else just because you liked the color of the wallpaper, the rest of your principles are going to crumble too. You get rid of that fucking room. You put those books on a high shelf in the back of your closet behind other outgrown clothes and interests and you move the fuck on.

JKR uses the money made from her transphobic antisemitic children’s books to actively funding hate groups and to lobby for legislation that will and has actually affected the actual lives of trans people in an entire country. We are past the point of grieving something you were wrong about in childhood. Kids are wrong about a lot of stuff. You grow up and you learn new information and you change your behaviors based on it. You have to choose. It is transphobic to pretend there is not transphobia where there is. It is transphobic to support the work of someone who is using those funds to take rights from trans people with every fucking dollar. It is hateful to continue to engage positively with a story that at its very core is rooted in hate and bigotry and prejudice. You can choose to do all of those things but you cannot claim ignorance of them and you cannot choose those things and still pretend that choosing them upholds the values we convinced ourselves that Harry Potter stood for over a decade ago as uninformed children. You cannot choose to do those things and pretend to still support your trans and queer and Jewish neighbors. I do not want you in my neighborhood. Leave.

[fvckw4d]

The concept of queerbaiting annoys me. I was told that it refers to a work of fiction pretending to cater to a queer audience but then pulling back from it to avoid alienating homophobes, which is an incredibly specific thing. But a lot of people seem to think that it instead means "any time there's any gay subtex, metaphor, or ambiguity" or "whenever something from 1995-2012 was being a normal amount of homophobic for the era."

[falderaletcetera]

because I'm partway through a reread and queueing up a bunch of reblogs about it, and it seems only fair to recommend it first:

Jack Farris doesn’t want to save the world, just every person he knows, encounters, or hears of. It’s a bit of an issue. S. Grey doesn’t want to save anyone but himself. He wants to know everything and majoring in sagework at the Academy is the best way to do that. Laney Jones left her home to avoid the constraints there, only to find different barriers holding her back at the Academy. Eager to learn, to excel, to escape, she has far from given up. Rupert Willington Jons Hammerfeld the Seventh would just like everything to be orderly, thank you very much, but it seems the only way to make monsters and myths (and malicious but mundane men) stop rampaging through his world is to go out and do some hero-ing himself. They are put together as an unwilling study group, but they become something more.

this is Beanstalk. It's first in a trilogy, all self-published, all free on the author's website, and the series is one of my favourites. It has:

– found family, with platonic relationships front and centre

– an adventurer's academy with a complicated legacy, where "hero" means a coloured armband and a diploma

– worldbuilding (appreciative), featuring an interesting magic system and monsters of all kinds, many of them people

– a red-headed boy named Jack, seventh son of a seventh son, who left the forest and grew like a beanstalk. You may recognise parts of his story. You may recognise others down the line.

– there's a whole cast I don't want to spoil except to say I'm currently rereading the first book and really looking forward to reaching the rest.

– there's definitely casual queer rep though. what do you take me for.

– honestly the writer (hi @ink-splotch!) writes all these characters with a complexity and love that I really admire. Some of the chapters that affected me most aren't even about the main cast.

— you may know the writer from her fics, the interactive games Stay? and More a Haunting than a History, or the podcast Second Star to the Left which she co-created with Aysha Farah. I can highly recommend most of the above and will get around to MaHtaH eventually.

If anyone's interested, I'd advise you don't go looking for spoilers. There most definitely is angst, but less so in the first book - hit me up if you want content warnings!

[skitskatdacat63]

Thank you guys so much for all the cute picrews you replied with 🥹🥹🥹 im obsessed seeing what you've come up with!!!! Here are some I made 🤭🤭

+ ones my friends who know nothing about f1/vettonso made:

Friend on the left: why did she make Fernando into such a fuckboy 😭😭 and i was like "...hahaha yeah that cape outfit is from another thing I made :)"

Other friend of the right: she said she was trying to make them look like other characters. I think she said Fernando was one of the Three Musketeers and Seb was Luke Skywalker djkfkgl. And she also forced me to give a "presentation" on the racesuit ref PowerPoint I made 😭😭😭

I love how they didn't question the shipiness of it at all hahaha, one of them was like "oh are these your gay racing drivers? Very cute :)"

[faunandfloraas]

okay but the fact seungmin has still been keeping a journal this whole time... he's making a future memoir so much easier on himself