#and frankly I'm just so tired

[emilykaldwen]

Ahhhh I am so here for all of your WIPs, and now I must know more about “Rebecca Stark the Wolf King” if you want to talk about it!

WIP Ask Game

(The main file in this is called 'Robb Stark Now Has a Vagina' just FYI)

There's so many files in my folder that have been languishing for YEARS that I've deleted out so many, and saved a few that I feel very partial to!

So Rebecca Stark was my genderbent Robb Stark AU from.... a decade ago? (yeah this is 2013). She was marrying one of the Royces, Robert Baratheon was being a little weird. I had Kristen Stewart a'la Snow White as the face claim because it fit SO WELL and I made some amazing photoshop art for it (and my first time giffing! and I still have those on my desktop).

Here's a snippet behind the cut!

Father had ventured in his slightly awkward way he had whenever he was forced to remember that his oldest, his ‘Bex’, was in fact a woman. He had simply asked what she had thought of Prince Joffrey.

Rebecca did not care for falsehoods but she understood dangerous grounds. So she had answered carefully that she couldn’t actually say whether or not she cared for him as she didn’t know him. 

“There you are.”

She glanced up to see her mother coming toward her and she spared her a smile. “Are you sisters taken-- Rebecca! Why isn’t he outside?”

Grey Wind looked up at Catelyn curiously, a whine in the back of his throat and Rebecca shrugged. “It felt safer with him.”

“Safer? That wolf needs to get outside, Rebecca. I told you.” 

Rebecca sucked in her lower lip and thought of how in the torchlight the lines on her mother’s face look deeper and more abundant.  There is the slightest wisp of silver at her crown and how queenly her mother looks compared to Cersei Lannister. “It’s not like we’re hosting Lord Bolton and his flayed banners.” She wanted to tell her the truth -- that the King makes her uncomfortable. That the Queen’s eyes pierced her back every time she walked past and there’s nothing she could do about it except hide and it isn’t an option.

Her mother’s hand was warm as it slid across her shoulders, her arm a gentle and comforting weight as Catelyn led them into Rebecca’s bedroom, sitting her down at the dressing table. Rebecca looked at their reflections as she watched her mother reach for the comb to work on binding back her thick, dark hair. The sensation of her mother’s nails against her scalp soothed her and Grew Wind pads to the fireplace and curls up on the rug behind them.

Sometimes if Rebecca looked hard enough she could see the similarities in them. The reddish hue to her dark locks had faded over time but their eyes are the same pale green. The same nose, the same Tully jaw. Rebecca remembered sitting in front of the mirror as a child trying to mimic her mother’s stern looks in a way to get her siblings to listen to her.

“Smile more, Rebecca. A lady should always smile.”

Most of Catelyn’s lines were from her warm smiles. The dimples in her cheeks were evidence of that, the little wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and yet that is where her Stark rears it’s head again. Stern dourness that makes the Stark so sullen.

Queen Cersei looks dour, she thought. Starks look reticent. Serious. Regla rulers of the North.

Frigid Starks, Theon’s teasing voice filters. Ice Queen.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Learning to celebrate the little wins!

[merlins-strawberriesandroses]

The thing no one ever considers while writing up character analyses about Merlin is that. he must have been sooooooo sleepy.

[brw]

Goodbye Krakoa. Stay dead bitch. No more mutant islands.

Can we stop making ethnostates now like can we stop doing that in comics. Can we not keep saying "minorities are safe nowhere but in their own country that doesn't let certain people and also they might not even be safe because Evil People might get jealous and kill them". Ultimately this era has done nothing to explore why ethnostates are bad in any real way. It has done nothing to actually explore how being complicit in the creation of an ethnostate is a Bad Thing. We had some events but we didn't explore anything because we were too scared of making some of our faves look bad. I just actually hate the statements this era has ended up saying and I hate the fact that heroic characters are mourning over the loss of an ethnostate founded by eugenicists. These politics are ugly. And worse yet I see people mourning the loss of the fictional ethnostate like have we all lost our minds.

[youling-the-ghost]

hey, random person on the internet, maybe don't do this?

[callie-flower]

"proship dni" this, "comship dni" that, "neutral dni" unfortunately the people you don't like are still human and deserve comfort. my fucking god shut the hell up you're just as annoying as they are and protest WAY too much about it. go unlearn your purity morality shit

[stromer]

elliotte said that if anyone was going to be traded yesterday it would've been petey and the SABRES are very interested lol... lmao even

[xoxoemynn]

still hating on s2 a literal year after it came out? yikes. embarrassing.

[naamahdarling]

Augh

[essektheylyss]

I realized that A Crown of Candy is actually the first time I've watched Zac Oyama play D&D, and it's frankly been wild watching how masterfully and quickly he sets up Lapin and the depths of this rabbit. I know it's been said that Zac's an excellent player, but it's one thing to hear and another to actually witness.

I feel like it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the liar spellcaster with the religious bullshit is my favorite right off the bat, but it's funny because the first introduction of him did not endear me to him whatsoever, and in fact kind of off-put me, but every further piece of information about him, and in fact many of his offhand comments, feels like picking up a log on the ground and finding an entire microbiome underneath.

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[thedreadvampy]

unfortunately the world is too fucking messed up so I am currently unable to give a shit about how messed up everything is because it's all too big and if I get upset about any of it my entire ability to be a person will come crashing in

normal service will resume as soon as possible

[dollypopup]

like. . .are any other Polin fans out there that do not give a singular flying fuck about Debling? we should form a club lol because from the very bottom of my heart and with my whole chest: I could not care less about him. Not sorry, I'm tuning into S3 for Pen and Colin and Pen and Colin alone

[selfship-confession-box]

to be quite honest. shipping with CANON (not headcanoned) exclusively gay/lesbian characters as someone of the gender they are explicitly not attracted to is a form of erasure and lowkey homophobic. 'just make them bi' is a bad take. bi people are amazing and valid but not everyone is bisexual??? 'theyre not real' is a bad take bc representation matters and i feel like that doesnt really need to be said. obviously the character isnt real and isnt offended but gay/lesbian selfshippers can see how much you dont gaf abt their identities. gay people exist in real life too!!! homophobia is still so acceptable in fandom spaces and its kinda wild.

Actually this one gets to skip the queue because we just had another anon push their luck about this. I WAS originally going to leave this in queue but now feels like a better time to nip this in the bud.

This is the LAST thing I'm saying about this topic because frankly it's the majority of what we've been getting recently and it's exhausting. All future asks about this topic WILL be deleted. AS STATED ABOVE. DO WHAT YOU WANT FOREVER. YOUR EXPERIENCE IS YOURS AND YOURS ALONE.

TAKING POTSHOTS AT EACH OTHER IS NOT A CONFESSION.

THAT'S CALLED BEING AN ASSHOLE.

k thanks bye

[zebratimw]

[hinotorihime]

the tl;dr of that 1500-word post is this:

the zodiac is fundamentally a timekeeping system, where the signs are defined as 12 equal divisions of the solar year, with the four cardinal signs (aries, cancer, libra, capricorn) defined as beginning at the equinox and solstice points; the names are mnemonic devices and have nothing to do with the physical constellation boundaries...

...therefore ophiuchus is not "the new thirteenth zodiac sign"...

...and the decision to tie the zodiac points to the equinoxes instead of to the position of the original reference stars was deliberate and not because ancient astronomers didn't know about axial precession.

in fact, vedic astrologers have been correcting for axial precession for centuries, because they use a space-based sidereal zodiac instead of the western time-based tropical zodiac; because the current sidereal position of the vernal equinox point, and thus the relative position of the sign boundaries, is in the constellation pisces, the same objective position of the sun (or any other planet) in a birth chart will have different names depending on what zodiac system you're using.

so if the mismatch between the tropical signs and the constellation boundaries really, really bothers you, maybe try looking into vedic? they've got two extra planets, too!

but criticizing the tropical zodiac for not correcting for axial precession is like criticizing a cat for being bad at barking.