#I am an English major

[littlestlilies]

I am a firm believer that any fanfic can be decent — good even — no matter how cringe or wish-fulfilling it is as long as there's good grammar, punctuation and structure.

[rcdiostcrs]

❝  i know you’ve always got my back.  ❞ (zander to anakin) & ❝ if you’re gonna keep risking your life for me than you’re also gonna let me patch you up without a single complaint. ❞ (peyton to jakke) (both from the you can kill me, but don’t touch them meme)

kill me; don't touch them dynamic | accepting

"i'd hope you know, considering how long we've been dating and fighting side-by-side." anakin smiled, tossing a arm around zander. "love you."

jakke looked peyton in the eye. "that's not going to happen. neither of them." others were not to know of his weaknesses. "how about you fight your own battles before i can fight for you?"

[mockramblings]

Oh, I know that one! It's from a Rush song!

girl I would kill myself if I did that lol

[shouldbepersephone]

My brother (currently in college shooting for a PhD in maths) sent me this at 2 am and informed me that I should “put it on the tumbler”

Jobius Strip

[tollundmen]

if you are a professor and you make your final paper a reflection paper you are banned from teaching for a thousand and one years

[queen-ofsunflowers]

Hey you for your question about whether Yusuke should live in the dorms or with Ren, you accidentally made a Y/N poll for an 'or question'.

Personally I'd prefer Yusuke to live in the dorm

Whoops. Thank you so much for pointing that out to me!!

I guess my brain got away from me a little bit while I was making the poll. I'll go and fix it!

[ochechule]

so so bitter about the dismissal of poetry. so so tired of people making a very specific face after i reply "poetry!" to their "what do you like to read?" question. Absolutely Over sensing the disdain in the tone of my friends' voices when they tell me how they never were the type to get it. i shake you by the shoulders so hard i hear your brain rattle: that is not the point! the point is to read a line and let it melt into your bone marrow and feel it tingle every time you get reminded of it! the point is to look up while standing in a tram crammed with people and see a butterfly sticker up on the wall far from any child's reach, and smile because you've read about butterflies in the loving hands of adults before! the point is to befriend the songbird in your ribcage! the point is, after you get hurt so bad you forget the patterns of your favorite season, so bad you can't look at the Moon without apologizing to her, so bad you want to fold yourself into an origami dragon and kill something for the sake of killing, the point is that poetry is always here to show you that someone has felt the exact same way before! and to make you realize how wonderful it is, to be connected to everything and everyone. because it is wonderful

[notmoreflippingelves]

Actually going insane over the implications of Jason asking Dick to be the Robin to his Batman in Battle for the Cowl.

Like I initially took it at the purely surface-level of Jason wanting a partner in the general sense. Which made sense, it's a huge responsibility and a lonely one so an assistant/sidekick/partner seems a no-brainer if you can get one.

But then I really thought about it, because Jason is not asking Dick to be his partner in the general sense; he's not even asking Dick to be his Nightwing. He's asking Dick to be his Robin.

And they both know exactly what Jason means: "Be the light to my darkness. Be the smile to my scowl. Be the hope to my fear. "

He's saying "Be 'Robin'; be the embodiment of Love and Justice and Goodness. Be the exceptional person that you have always been. Be the slightly-less exceptional person that I was when I wore your colors. Be the person that I was in the process of becoming and might have been (or might still be), if only Joker hadn't clipped my wings."

He's saying "I am prepared to become vengeance, become the Night. And I will go further than Bruce ever dared to, because it is what is needed. I will be the necessary evil. But you don't have to be. If Batman is Gotham's curse, Robin has always been its blessing. I will be the brutal punishment to our world, and I am asking you to be its incandescent gift."

He's saying, "Be for me, what we were for Him. Be my anchor, my comfort, my hope. Remind me what it's all for, why it's all worth it. And remind yourself as well."

He's saying "Be 'Robin' again--for both of our sakes."

[neversetyoufree]

Since we'll hopefully be getting out of the VnC hiatus soon, and this new arc seems to finally be turning the spotlight back to Noé and calling out some of his more troubling traits for the first time, I've been thinking a lot about him recently.

I've talked before on this blog about Noé's inability to recognize or process bad things when they happen to him alone. He bounces back from and idealizes almost any experience as soon as it's over, even when he absolutely shouldn't. It's one of my favorite traits of his, and it's been lampshaded a couple of times in-manga. Louis calls out how weird his attitude toward his kidnapping is during the mémoire 9 flashback, and the "be a little bothered" from Vanitas and co in mémoire 57 has the same effect.

We also recently got a whole extended sequence of Vanitas and Domi complaining about how Noé also never anticipates harm before it might come to him. He waltzes into dangerous situations like it's nothing, almost as if he thinks he's unkillable. Combined with the above, this is just more of his strange brand of optimistic denial. Everything is fine in Noéland! It can't possibly not be fine! He always trusts and thinks the best of people and situations by default, never wanting to expect they may do wrong, and so long as a given event doesn't involve harm to external innocents and/or Noé's loved ones that he can't rationalize away, he compartmentalizes and denies harm once it's done. Thus he carries on in blissful ignorance, his past suffering having no effect on the blithe trust with which he treats the world.

But in addition to all that, Noé is also very notably divorced from the consequences of his own actions. It's not that he's *incapable* of considering his own effect on people, and he certainly tries to be kind and decent, but much of the time, it just doesn't seem to occur to him that people will have reactions to the things he does. He does as he sees fit, and when his deeds impact the people around him, especially if they produce a reaction that could upset him, it bounces off his mind in the same way that potential traumas do.

On the more lighthearted end of the spectrum, this leads to things like Noé never noticing when people are attracted to him. It may also have something to do with his airheaded messiness—the way he's always thoughtlessly making a mess of the hotel room and incurring Vanitas's wrath in bonus materials. On the heavier end of the spectrum, this causes a lot of genuine problems for the people around him. He's largely oblivious to the depth of Dominique's mental health problems until she's pushed to her breaking point at the amusement park, despite the fact that he's inextricably entangled in the cause of them. He also completely loses sight of Vanitas's reactions to him when he gets caught up in his protective rage at the start of the vanoé fight, and it takes an outside reminder from Jeanne and a literal mirror to make him realize that his own actions are part of why Vanitas has devolved to such a state.

This lack of self-perception on Noé's part feeds back into the other problems I laid out at the top of this post, his obliviousness toward his interactions with the rest of the world helping to facilitate his denial. It's part of the happy little insulating bubble that he interacts with the world through. And as the other side of that coin, his automatic, unthinking denial of things that could hurt him is part of what enables him to ignore his own impacts on the people around him. You can't reckon with or worry about harming other people when you live in Noéland where everything must be fine. I think the fact that he wants to be a good person that doesn't harm others actually makes it harder for him to confront the truth of how he impacts the world, because him hurting others is a Bad Thing that would cause him mental harm.

We've seen Noé mess up, understand his mistake, and apologize for it before. He apologizes to Vanitas for making assumptions about him after the bal masqué, he apologizes to Vanitas again at the end of the amusement park fight, and he apologizes to Riche for speaking with ignorance about dhampirs. However, I think the bigger a mistake of his is, the more harm it causes other people (and the more understanding would hurt him as a result), the harder it is for Noé to comprehend his wrongs. He's clearly trying to make things right with Domi, and he's told her that he values her, but I don't know if it's yet occurred to him to conceive of their mess as a situation where he's done her active wrong. He also literally passes out on her mid-conversation, leaving Domi and Vanitas to carry him back to bed when he was supposed to be comforting her.

But I think the most fascinating example, the moment where all this comes together into Noé's most feeble and blatant act of denial yet, is the first time he sees Misha after clawing up his face. The anime actually changes this detail, which is its own can of worms to get into, but in the manga, when Noé sees Misha's injuries in the light of day after attacking him, he immediately fucking turns around.

At the end of his wits at the amusement park, Noé claws a child across the face in a fit of anger and protectiveness. I'm not interested in condemning Noé for this, especially given that the child in question was actively trying to stab Vanitas at the time, but I will say that his actions are quite extreme. Given Vanitas's response and the way Misha's injuries are portrayed, I think it's clear that the manga wants us to see how Noé hurts Mikhail as something troubling and extreme. He gives that kid a pretty horrible injury, and Misha will likely have scars on his face for the rest of his life.

And regardless of how justified he may or may not have been in hurting Misha in defense of Vanitas, it's clear that Noé himself is upset by the true extent of what he does to Mikhail's face. When he looks at him in the light of day, when he sees a numb-looking child with his face wrapped in still-bloody bandages, though we only get to see a small segment of his face in that moment, he looks sick. He knows that he's done something troubling, and I'm sure he feels all kinds of heavy and unpleasant emotions.

This is one genuinely bad thing he's done that Noé cannot deny. He can't rationalize this one away and make it all copacetic. He can't conveniently forget the emotional reality of suffering and harm, because that reality is standing ten yards away from him. And he can't just apologize for things either, because apologies cannot undo physical harm, and frankly, I'm not sure he'd be able to give an honest apology for his one. Sickness at the results of his actions doesn't mean he fully regrets hurting Misha, at least not at this moment when emotions are still raw.

But Noé, confronted with this undeniable source of guilt and pain, is still ultimately unable to look the pain he's caused in the eye. A problem piercing through the happy veil of Noéland and forcing him to acknowledge it doesn't mean he's capable of reckoning with that problem. Instead he just. turns away from it.

Noé, forced to acknowledge a harm he's done and unable to employ all the many layers of automatic insulation that usually protect him, physically turns around because he cannot bear to look at the person, the child, that he's hurt. He employs the very last possible form of avoidance available to him, even though it's useless in the ways that matter. Not looking at Misha doesn't mean he gets to un-know the fact that he maimed him, but he simply cannot bring himself to look.

Noé is extremely good at playing "I do not see it" with things that hurt him. He's good enough that I think he has genuinely no idea he's doing it a vast majority of the time. Whatever mental shield he has that's protecting him is automatic enough that the badness that could hurt him doesn't ever even seem to cross his conscious mind. But no matter how automatic and subconscious, this tendency of his is still, and the end of the day, nothing more than an unhealthy coping mechanism, and this moment helps to put that to our attention.

What's the difference, really, between him cheerfully acting like Jean-Jacques and Chloé's assaults never upset him and him turning around so he doesn't have to look at the wounds he gave Mikhail? Noé can't look at pain, can't acknowledge the things he finds upsetting (at least not things that cause him alone pain, as others' pain often triggers his savior complex and spurs action). This scene with Misha throws that into the light, forcing Noé to desperately cling to his avoidance in an obvious and physical way.

Even when there's no way to deny the harsh reality of having done something he finds horrific, Noé Archiviste cannot make himself look directly at a painful truth, be it others wronging him or his own wrongdoing. It takes an external hand to step in and force him to turn his head and acknowledge/reckon with a problem. And even then, who knows if intervention can always be successful.

The start of the dham arc so far has drawn a lot of attention to this pattern of behavior, with Vanitas having to sit Noé down and explain to him in detail why his words said in well-meaning ignorance make Dante so upset. This is Noé being forced to look at a harm he caused because he couldn't or wouldn't look at and comprehend the problem (his fellow vampires' racism) in the situation he was in. But upsetting Dante is ultimately a low stakes problem for Noé. He put his foot in his mouth and offended a peer; he didn't shred Vanitas's little brother. He's able to accept his wrongs and feel his discomfort without resorting to physically turning around and avoiding the issue.

I want to know what Noé will do if/when this arc forces him to confront a source of pain he can't handle in a context that's more high stakes than a social faux pas. I want to see what he'll do when something really forces him beyond his ability to believe that everything is fine. How badly would he have to be hurt to lose his ability to filter an event/events through rose colored glasses? How badly would he have to hurt someone else? Or is his instinctive shield good enough that he'll never get out of it on his own? And if so, who else might step in to make Noé own up to reality?

Teacher and the Archivistes are becoming plot-relevant now, and our attention is being drawn to Noé's issues. I think there might be something coming soon that even Noé can't turn away from and cheerfully pretend isn't hurting him. Teacher even ends his appearance at the amusement park with a little speech about having to "wake and face reality," which makes me even more certain that a wake-up call for Noé is imminent.

Either that, or Noé's going to mess up and hurt somebody even worse than he hurt Misha later this arc, and in that case, we might get to see a feat of denial even worse than him literally turning around to avoid looking at the wounds he caused.

[casscainmainly]

I headcanon that Jason, Cass, Barbara, and Duke are the major lit lovers in the Batfam, but they have very different tastes. Jason's taste leans toward British literature, stuff like Shakespeare and Alexander Pope (and Austen of course), but he also enjoys dystopian novels like Brave New World, 1984 etc.

Cass loves contemporary novels, including romance (stealing this from Shadow of the Batgirl!). She prefers stories with happy endings, and she also loves detective fiction, specifically British/American Golden Age - I think she'd adore Agatha Christie's cosies.

Barbara has the most diverse reading taste, and is the only one who can discuss books with the others without it devolving into a fight about whose taste is better. Her specialty is feminist fiction, stuff like Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Audre Lorde. She's not big on poetry, though.

Duke is THE poetry fan. He's a big defender of contemporary poetry, particularly poetry by POC authors, and loves Hanif Abdurraqib, Toi Derricotte, and Ocean Vuong. He does love Harlem Renaissance too, but makes fun of Jason if he brings up Langston Hughes (along the lines of 'oh is that the one Black poet you know?'. Jason, as a genuine Hughes fan, hates this). Duke, like Cass, loves detective fiction, but he prefers hardboiled noir over cosies. Cass and Duke get into tons of fights about this.

Duke and Jason both loathe BookTok, while Cass enjoys it. Barbara is neutral but prefers BookTube. They tried to form a book club once but Barbara didn't show up (she knew what would happen), Duke left halfway (he can be very elitist in his literature views), and then Cass threw Jason out a window (he insulted her reading taste).

These are just my thoughts, feel free to disagree/add on with any of your own!

[raspberry-arev]

I've finished Nona the Ninth. Cried like a little bitch thank you. The people in this book just loved each other, strangely, deeply, truly, and I liked the first two books but this one made my heart flutter <3

[I can't stop thinking about how this was the first time that Harrow's body knew... genuine parental/friendly affection? Holding hands and hugs and braiding hair and dancing and forehead kisses. The body smiled and giggled freely. It pains me that Harrow was not in the body at all to feel it, but... You can't take loved away]

[atopvisenyashill]

i was thinking more about characters Performing Gender, but not necessarily Transgressing Gender. I wound up focusing on Ned and Sansa bc I feel like I understand them the most but-

Sansa as a hostage is imo the most obvious (bc it’s so well done) moment of someone clearly Performing Gender but not being transgressive in that performance. Which isn’t to say it’s not a complicated performance; it’s a fine line Sansa walks between weaponizing her gender to protect herself without seeming too fake. She’s trying to placate the Lannisters by playing the perfect, dedicated, air headed betrothed because it’s the only defense she has - if she outwardly rebels, she will be punished in a likely violent and/or sexual way (which isn’t even conjecture - when she says “or maybe he’ll give me yours” Joffrey has her struck with an armored hand). She’s not quite successful in being convincing but that’s because it’s a rather extreme situation; despite no one believing her, she does make herself seem meek and stupid enough that no one suspects she’s plotting to escape with Dontos until she’s well away from KL. The fact that she even has Dontos to confide in is because of Sansa’s relationship with gender! When she saves him, she covers her rebellious slip by playing up Joffrey’s intelligence & his role as King; she reaches for “tools” of her gender AND of ~proper manhood~ to save a life and herself from another beating. Her retreats into the godswood and silence are very much Sansa attempting to recharge from these draining interactions, the same way a knight would need to stop and eat and rest after a fight. She is fighting, constantly, by forcing herself to stay within the narrow confines of a specific type of gender performance as a way of shielding herself from harm.

Ned yelling at Cat is another big one, and I’ve seen the scene referred to as Ned using his patriarchal power to scare Cat, which is a great description. It feels like a Performance because Ned is putting on this terrifying Lord Stark mask in an attempt to get Catelyn to stop asking about Jon (and Lyanna). This is not how he usually acts with those he loves! When Ned is with His People, he is welcoming of questions, curiosity, emotion, even transgressive thought (to a point! the idea that Ned is a feminist because he lets Arya learn to fight is Not accurate but you can’t deny he allows significantly more flexibility wrt gender expression than most of the fathers we meet in this series. the bar is in hell tho). Yet when Cat asks him about Jon’s mother, Ned scares her so well she stops asking & still remembers the moment bitterly over a decade later. And if that snippet we see through Bran’s eyes of Ned praying that Cat will forgive him does come after she asks (like it’s suspected), it’s clear not only that this is a performance he’s putting on & weaponizing against Cat, it’s one he does not like using as a weapon against someone he is close to. After using the power his gender gives him to cause harm, he retreats to the godswood and silence to pray and rest, much like Sansa. A spiritual cleanse, the way a soldier may pray after battle, to reset and reconnect Being A Proper Man to Being A Kind Man.

I think there’s something interesting in that two of the characters most widely defined by how well they adhere to Westerosi gender norms both dislike feeling like they had to weaponize their gender. They are exhausted by the performance, because it’s a performance. This isn’t Sansa getting excited over tourneys, or Ned teaching his sons to fight; it’s toxic masculinity, it’s structural misogyny. It’s something they’re good at, excel at, and connected to something they enjoy but when it’s paired with violence, whether done by Ned or done to Sansa, it crosses over in their minds from an innate part of themselves (The Gender) to a performance necessary due to survival (The Gender Role). And that after these performances, both retreat to nature & god as a way of resting and cleansing from the experience.

[kataracy]

Kataang Week 2024 DAY 1 // Cultural Sharing

“I’m nervous. Am I doing okay?”

“You’re doing amazing Sweetie.”

[raspberryusagi]

Me, rambling to my wife about this crackpot theory I came up with in the shower about how Les Miserables may have been an answer to The Count of Monte Cristo, or at least could be read as such: ... But then Valjean didn't personally screw Javert over like Dantes' enemies did-

My wife: Are you sure Valjean didn't screw Javert? I thought I read that on AO3 once.

[foursaints]

hi <3

first of all, i wanted to tell you i'm always stalking your blog (in a non creepy way) because i love everything about it. mostly i love how you use your big brain™️ to share some insanely detailed headcanons about some silly dead gay wizards (i mean that in the nicest way possible. i'm a little bit in love with you actually . anyway i'm digressing)

second of all, i wanted to know if you could share some of your thoughts about bartylily🤲🏻 because i'm fairly sure you're the main reason i'm hooked on them

much love <333

ANYTHING for bartylily... lately i've been attached to the idea of a college au where they're Rival Campus Radio Station Hosts.

barty is a spectacularly unmotivated senior who dropped out of a prestigious engineering degree to study practical SFX for horror movies instead. everyone has vague, peripheral knowledge of him after an incident where he was found passed out naked in the campus fountain. his apartment with the slytherins isn't technically a frat house but there's a structure in the kitchen affectionately referred to as the "Leaning Tower of Miller Lite" & barty has a nearly imperceptible crescent-shaped chip in his front tooth from a keg-standing mishap. he wears a lot of chains and has several john carpenter themed tattoos and he REEKS like cigarettes. so many pairs of mystery panties turn up in his laundry hamper that his housemates have started calling it the Lost And Found.

he has a deeply beloved & charmingly unpolished radio show in the primetime spot which mostly consists of him having his friends on, spotlighting terrible underground bands, and making drily ironical, beautifully mean jabs.

lily is an overzealous sophomore who's triple-majoring in three equally unmarketable degrees (it's, like, polisci & international affairs & communications) who's blessed with the gift of taking every single thing that happens on campus WAY too serious. she runs their Model UN like it's the navy. she's the RA who is always marching around her floor in a spaghetti-strap tanktop & bunny slippers with a scrunchie on her wrist, shaking her fist at people. there was a period following her breakup with james where she was literally reading Machiavelli for inspiration. she's right on the precipice of the cool-girl academic meltdown that will lead to Serious Character Growth, but she isn't quite there yet.

her well-made and well-researched radio show is relegated to the midnight timeslot, and even though all her friends listen to it she probably got into a spat with them for saying something along the lines of "obviously i dont care if its just YOU listening to it, remus!!!". she hate-listens to barty's show which she considers (lily voice) An Affront To Collegiate Journalism

they trade barbs at every function and absolutely nobody but the two of them takes their insane imaginary Radio Beef even remotely serious whatsoever. but it's dead serious TO THEM!!! lily is probably camping out in actual bushes with actual binoculars to sabotage his show, and the worst part is that it's actually working. she ISN'T obsessed with him (shut up!!!!!), and barty is mostly just aggravated on principle that the Uptight Lowerclassman Ruining His Life has such nice legs.

and they absolutely bone like crazy about it

[pennyserenade]

i have thought in great detail about coriolanus and sejanus, and whether or not coriolanus ever really liked sejanus. i think that the novel/movie are purposefully constructed to make this ambiguous, but i prefer to veer on the side of "yes, he did."

coriolanus' way of loving people was...lacking, to say the least. even with tigris, he thought awful, mean things about her, but it was evident he cared very much for her. the problem with coriolanus was not that he couldn't love -- it was that he could not love without first being assured that his investment would yield positive results for him. at least, he could not readily admit to himself that he was loving until he knew it was going to work out for him.

his character is very succinctly summed up by sejanus, when he tells him, "I remember that from school, watching you watch other people. Pretending you weren't. And choosing the moments you weighed in so carefully" (397). without fully knowing the totality of it, sejanus got it all too right: coriolanus took people in, measured them out, decided what they meant to him, and weighed in when he thought it'd benefit him. coriolanus was calculated in all things, most of all in love—a thing he knew made you vulnerable.

but that's not to say what coriolanus said to himself was the exact same thing as what he felt. if it was, i do not believe he would've done half the things he had done for sejanus--even given the prospect of reward in the end. this is part of what makes coriolanus descent into evil so heartbreaking: a part of him was good. he did want for connection and comfort, even if he had a real fucked up way of going about getting it. coriolanus was a dog that bit without fully knowing why; it was a protective instinct he used, because so much of his life had been filled with loss already.

in the book, after coriolanus snuck his father's handkerchief with lucy gray's scent into the tank of snakes, he went to sejanus' house. this is an incredible detail that so many people tend to overlook when they talk about coriolanus and sejanus' friendship. the beginning of the chapter reads:

"What had he done? What on earth had he done? His heart raced as he blindly turned down one street and then another, trying to make sense of his actions. He couldn't think clearly but had the dreadful feeling he'd crossed some line that could not be uncrossed" (287).

we start this chapter with a frenzied, rattled coriolanus, one terribly afraid of what he had just done and the consequences this action might have later. he was scared and isolated, and he didn't know what to do. a little further on, collins writes: "His feet had carried him far from home, but he realized the Plinth apartment was just a few minutes away. Why not pop in?" (288).i find this construction of words to be fascinating, especially in relation to coriolanus--a character we have come to known as calculated and precise, even in moments when he has to think on his feet. one could argue that during this part of the book, and in this state, it makes sense that coriolanus might wander that far from his home absent-mindedly. it shows how out of touch with himself he had become, and just how much the act he had just committed disorientated him. but i think it was more than that. i think coriolanus wanted to go to the plinth's house, that he was seeking comfort after he had done something incredibly dangerous (something, arguably, that sejanus might have done), and he could not admit it to himself. and his original intention had been to see sejanus, but sejanus was asleep.

the fact that collins wrote "his feet had carried him" and "he realized" is so brilliant. i’ve got lots of opinions about why she chose to write the book in a third person point of view. one of the reasons i think she did it has to do with the fact that coriolanus was distancing himself from himself--shedding culpability through phrases such as these, especially in moments like this. coriolanus did love sejanus, but he simply could not admit it to himself because sejanus was not a safe or wise investment to make. coriolanus refused to give credence to his need for him, and it ended up killing the boy in the long run.