#Things seem vague

[buggachat]

honestly just in general it's very exhausting to try to analyze media that is literally meant to be analyzed, only for the replies to be filled with people arguing not against your analysis, but against the premise that the media can be analyzed at all.

i don't even know what to say about it without starting to really betray my frustration, so i'll just settle with— just don't engage with analysis posts? I'm serious. if you're typing a response to a media analysis post, reread what you've written and ask yourself "is this comment/response against the very concept of analyzing the media at all?" and if the answer is yes then delete it all and go sit in the shame corner. throw your curtains away if you want to so bad and stop telling me that I'm not allowed to hum and haw at the fact mine are blue

[fandom-geek]

btw, the violinist in tmp 4? he's probably james smithson, of "founder of the smithsonian institute" fame

so what do we know about our violinist? he grew up in alnwick abbey, he was illegitimate and had legitimate full siblings, a father "certain of his celestial significance", and he has a nephew to whom he leaves his violin

and smithson? well, his father restored alnwick abbey in the 1750s, which was in ruins up until then. smithson was the only illegitimate child of any of the dukes there in the 1700s, which is when the statement is set

smithson also left his estate to his nephew after his death, with the condition that his fortune would establish the smithsonian institute if his nephew died without any children.

here's a point of divergence, however. in our timeline, smithson was a chemist and mineralogist. in tmagp's timeline, he was a violinist. however, as u/New_Helicopter836 pointed out to me on reddit, when smithson's body was disinterred by andrew graham bell, his right little finger was such that it suggests he played "the harpsichord, the piano, or a stringed instrument such as a violin"

looking at smithson's life, he left for university in 1782, so it's likely that tmagp 4 is set around the same time. it might be a bit earlier since the royal court orchestra moved from mannheim to munich in 1778 (putting smithson at about 13), it might be another point of divergence, or smithson is describing it this way to call back to its earlier significance. i'm not sure, but it's weird either way.

all that said, i'm not terribly sure why smithson describes his father (sir hugh smithson/percy, duke of northumberland) as "certain of his celestial significance", especially when the only other time he says celestial is to describe the violin's music. the user i mentioned before found that sir hugh, a major patron of architectural projects, had an observatory built, but i find smithson's language too specific. is his father an avatar too? mannheim is only a bit north of schwartzwald, after all, and this is about thirty years before tmag 23 where albrecht writes to jonah magnus.

let's look a little at smithson's bequest to found the smithsonian institute in the first place. smithson asked for it to be "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men". the magnus institute, notably, is described in the arg as a place of education, and it was founded in 1818. although smithson died in 1829 and his nephew in 1835, the original smithsonian (the columbian institute) was granted a charter by the us government in 1818.

the letter is strangely absent of any names for the violinist or his family, and i can't help but wonder if this is why. and if it is because this is smithson - is this related to why the magnus institute exists instead of the magnus archives? the smithsonian, before it was renamed, was originally granted a charter by the us govt in 1818 - the same year that the magnus institute was founded in tmagp.

this is set 30 years before we know anything of jonah magnus, at least in tmag, so is it possible that he persuaded smithson to fund his educational institute focusing on the supernatural? the changed course of smithson's life from scientist to supernatural violinist would certainly be conducive for that, not least to mention the strange absence of his fortune from his letter to his nephew.

[booasaur]

Special Ops: Lioness

[macdenlover]

we don’t acknowledge enough how dee used to be a pageant winner when she was a kid and how much damage it did to her. she worked her ass off and got recognition for being pretty and talented at a young age and it was the only source of self esteem she could garner in a family that constantly berated and talked down to her. she sought after that external approval because it was the only way she could prove everyone around her wrong. her dream of being a performer didn’t come from a self-aggrandizing delusion— she genuinely showed a lot of potential when she was younger. but she went through an unflattering puberty and her spinal condition got worse and that natural talent she had as a kid plateaued way too early. the “former gifted kid” dilemma. she slowly lost the thing that promised her that she was good, but she was so desperate to keep holding onto it that she tried anyway. again and again and again no matter how much people made fun of her because it was always about proving them wrong. but after a while she couldn’t jump anymore without anticipating the way it feels when she hits the ground face first. self-sabotage became her way out, choosing to rather live in the fantasy of her own unrealized potential and blaming those around her for her lack of success, than having tried and crashed again. she’d rather buy lottery tickets over and over and never scratch off the numbers than to see that she lost. that self-sabotaging behavior bled into other aspects of her life too, from friendships to relationships to therapy. her own short lived success is what made her grow into embodying the cycle of failure.

[anniebass]

two pals being nineties and stuff

scene from Stuck on Rewind on ao3

[canisalbus]

Hey, I’m new to Tumblr, but I’ve seen your characters around the internet and I love them so much!! Everyone has so much love for Machete and Vasco and your art is so cool to see! Do you have any tips for an aspiring artist and creative writer?

Hi! Welcome to tumblr! I'm glad to hear you like my dogs :]

I'm not really a writer, and I also completely lose my confidence when I'm trying to explain my art processes. So this is probably an obvious, unhelpful platitude at best, but one thing I've realized is that you should allow yourself to be self-indulgent. If you're the primary target audience of your own work, it generates passion and keeps you inspired and motivated. I like to believe that people who see your creations are more likely to respond to them positively if they can sense that you're putting your heart and soul to them.

[missholoska]

happy torisans tuesday ✨

[solaestial]

"Happy birthday."

[volitioncheck]

does near every single post-canon DE fic out there need to be tagged ‘Sober Harry Du Bois’? i’m getting so tired of it.

do i expect every single piece of fan content to have to fully delve into the often-depressing always-complex topic of addiction? not really. sometimes you just want to write/read a silly fluffy romance one-shot, whatever. i get it. but i think my issue is specifically with the fact that for nearly every sillyfluffy au out there, there almost must be a ‘sober harry du bois’ tag. and it does feel very slapped-on more often than not.

i think to me it is an unconscious statement that nothing *good* can ever happen to harry du bois until he is completely and permanently sober. before solving the next big case, he has to be sober. before quitting the force, he has to be sober. before falling in love with kim, he has to be sober. before accomplishing anything, starting any sort of recovery, making any life improvement, he must first be sober.

sobriety as a goal, as a journey, and honestly as a concept in of itself is not as cut and dry as so many people think it is. and i think it would serve a lot of people well if they did some introspection on the implications of how nearly every single post-canon fic that isn’t dealing directly with harry’s addiction have him as completely sober instead.

if the plot of the fic isn’t going to touch directly on harry’s substance use (and again, i’m not demanding that every single fic should), why does that mean that sober!harry must be the default?

i think i am just tired of reading a casefic, a smutty one-shot, a fantasy au, whatever, where it almost seems that before getting on with the plot, the author feels obligated to first assure us that the harry we’re reading about is a Sober Harry. it’s established with a couple lines in the exposition, probably about his improved appearance, a tag up top, and then never brought up again; a checkmarked box. like the societal image of An Addict has completely prevented people from being able to imagine a person just, continuing to live life, while still struggling with addiction.

life happens, with all of its backslides and achievements, mundanity and changes, to people with drug addictions just as much as people who don’t. is a post-canon harry who isn’t sober not worth writing about?

i think so. i think the game we all played thinks so too. in fact i think that sentiment is woven into the game’s very core. i just wish i saw that reflected in our fan content more.

[foxstens]

so when will we stop forgetting that the first and only time we see sober!andrew smile

it's because of kevin

[bumblingbabooshka]

Patreon Request: Spock [Patreon | Ko-fi]

[ciderjacks]

can’t read any Chilwife fic or read any fanon chilwife stuff at all because I have a very specific interpretation of their marriage & her as a character that no one else understands bc no one else is me… I suffer from success every day

[arctixout]

Jan: so there's rumors that we are- Nace: GAY! MARRIED!!!! Jan: -together. Nace: MARRIED AND TOGETHER!!!!!! Jan: Nace: AND THE RUMORS ARE TRUE! Jan: jesus fucking christ dude

[habken]

your art looks like that of a really cool indie comic i would read forever

thank you that is so nice :')) one day.. one day i'll be living my comic making dreams

[communistkenobi]

What I’m about to say is probably a much less generous interpretation of what people usually intend when they say “transphobia hurts cis people too,” but the problem this framing runs into, over and over again, is the implied argument that often runs underneath it, which is that if transphobia were contained to just trans people, that if 100% of its targets were transgender, it would be somehow more legitimate or more reasonable, even if you still concede it’s wrong to be transphobic to trans people. Like the logic being used here isn't that transphobia at its core is destructive and irrational because it harms trans people, it’s that the people doing the transphobia are doing it “wrong” by picking the “wrong” targets. And I think this framing tends to put a lot of emphasis on individual transphobic actors or individual instances of transphobic violence (eg people attacking cis women who “look like men” in bathrooms, transvestigators, etc) by way of arguing that these bigoted people are incapable of governing their own bigotry appropriately, that it keeps spilling out into the broader cis public (where it ought not to be) because they’re too stupid to recognise their real targets and mistakenly keep picking the wrong ones, and because of this we need to do something about it. Like what keeps getting highlighted in conversations where I see people repeat this line are the bigots’ errors in judgement, that these pattern recognition errors (this continued failure to clock “real trans people”) are too frequent for the cis public to ignore - effectively, transphobia is spilling out of the transphobia department and into other departments of social life, and this is the problem that needs correcting. Fundamentally what I keep hearing when people use this argument is that reactionaries are getting too unruly, too imprecise in their targeting mechanisms, and that this is the cause for concern, not the underlying bigotry itself. Yes, transphobia is expansionary, it will continue to find fresh victims even in hypothetical futures where “the transgender problem” has been fully dealt with, but that shouldn’t be your primary concern lol

[dartalias]

im doing some math to calculate and figure out the exact timeline of Rise of Kyoshi

More especifc Kuruk's time and early Kyoshi's/""Yun's"" era, like what was the order of what sequence of events

Intil now i have that:

the poem to Hei-Ran happend before he met Ummi

considering he died some time before Rangi being born, thats would have mean Ummi probably meet his already in the very end of his life

And for what i remember Nyahitha was wayyy before that

The point until now is:

Ummi probably never met, or met like only once, Kuruk supposed companions

And i BET she and Nyahitha talk shit about them together