#at least he’s reading history books

[draconic-ichor]

A closeup of last night’s art.

The boy fell asleep on a certain page 🥺

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

"corsets are only surrounded by stigma because MEN demonized them" you can say it's because of the feminists. it's okay. sometimes feminists were wrong and did bad. it's okay to admit that.

[welcometogrouchland]

i was gonna make a whole seperate post about how context and art seems to imply that the ex boyfriend that got stephanie pregnant was at least 18, if not older, when she was 16/15, which is kinda squicky (i mean not if she's 16 really, but 15 yes) but in my journeys on the Stephanie Brown wiki (real and delightful thing that exists) i discovered the batman chronicles #22 where her UNCLE HITS ON HER???? i think that's what we're meant to get from it anyway the dialogue is subtle (the art is not imo). AND I. WAS NOT EXPECTING THAT. STEPHANIE YOU CAN START AS MANY GANG WARS AS YOU WANT WITH YOUR LIFE THE WAY IT IS WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

[the-holy-ghosted]

how do you think things started. Did Bridgens or Peglar make the first move? Was it before or after John began tutoring him?

Brought up in the book, actually! He taught Peglar how to read while they were on their Beagle voyage and when they came home, he sought Bridgens out again for more lessons. At some point after finding him again, Peglar made the first move on him.

From chapter 28, the first of a handful of Peglar POV chapters. Despite the book being... the way it is, I do like how it does these two. If you were to read any part of it, read chapters 28 and 50. My suggestion to you heehee

[mourningmaybells]

I’m sorry for being a hater I need to spend more energy promoting books and horror book reading… queer and fat horror protagonists have always existed you just to read the original book (smiles sweetly)

[curseofpower]

Currently imagining Tetra being so horrifically bored stuck in Hyrule's basement that when Ganon showed up and ripped the door open to kidnap her she was just like "Oh thank fucking god."

[rotzaprachim]

*breathes in and out through mouth* everyone is scared and grieving and still waiting for news of their families everyone is scared and grieving everyone is scared and grieving*

[nururu]

I realized my disconnect when it comes to talking about one piece, and why I always say I like talking to dudebros more even if they're the worst... Is, I like to analyze literature. I like to analyze the source material and the canonic information. Shipping and stuff is for fun but I see it separately. The intersect bc canon inspires fanon but fanon CANNOT change canon.. I don't mix the two things especially not when I'm doing analysis... So I'll say things that are factual and ppl who are stuck in their headcanons or personal biases will think I'm saying something bad. What I'm saying isn't good or bad. It's not judgmental of the character I'm talking about. Nor is it a bias bc I like them/dislike them. I'm analyzing odas writing and his intentions as an author and what he's trying to say and portray. Most ppl online are too caught up in headcanons and personal bias while having no media comprehension and they think that I'm attacking their made up fanon stuff..... Noooo..... You're over there playing pretend and I'm over here doing analysis. We are not doing remotely near the same activity. They don't always need to intersect. Anyways it's hard to have genuine analytical conversations with ppl fully indulged in fandom and fanon. The only group of ppl who doesn't do that are dudebros but also... They get hung up on other stuff that doesn't matter too. Idkkkkkkkkk.

[tomwambsgans]

tom's straightguysona was constructed by looking to the emphasis of exclusive heterosexuality without necessarily macho masculinity in 40s-modern middle america as well as academia, particularly the excusable effeminacy granted to men in the upper classes due to it simply being a mark of man being civilized, which is perfectly fine so long as you openly lament the loss of true masculinity. and greg's straightguysona was constructed by listening to weezer in middle and high school

[dazzelmethat]

I humanized Jaken for an Edo era historical fiction au that lives inside my head. I've been trying to settle on a face for him.. Independent of him being human or yokai he needs to be able to have a very expressive face.

[petrichorpetals]

So I finished reading Babel and I have thoughts tm

Spoilers under the cut:

So I'll begin this with I went into Babel expecting to love it! And I love the magic system, I love the world building that we do and it had me 100% sold in the beginning. But at about the halway point, cracks started to form. I love the idea of Hermes and I do love the heavy lifting that the book does to make this as period accurate as possible. I feel like the point that the book honestly lost me for the first time was when Robin covered for Victoire and Ramy when they were stealing for Hermes. I hate how Robin doesn't play off innocence at all and immediately folds once Hermes even gets so much as mentioned. I hate that he has to do his own mental gymnastics over justifying giving up one singular safe house that never has any ramifications. I hate how Victoire and Ramy immediately get mad at him for not telling them about Hermes even though they know how secretive Hermes is, and I additionally hate how long it even takes for them to have this conversation other than not now Letty's around.

And Letty. Oh how I could go on about Letty.

I feel like my biggest complaint for this book is probably the lack of character development. We hardly ever get Robin's thoughts and opinions on things and in the beginning, that's intentional. He doesn't want to think too hard about difficult things like the professor being his father or even small details on how he feels about his friends besides they simply are. The book tries to explain how they're actually really good true friends when it's glaringly obvious they're friends of opportunity. Ramy is well described and is honestly the character with the most personality in this book. Letty is constantly being excluded from talks either because she's white so she "won't understand" so they never bother to even try to explain, or because she doesn't know about Hermes. I'll save her rant for now but it's both unsurprising that the girl literally named Victory and a descendant of Haiti, the nation that successfully led and won a slave revolt and the option for self governance, was the one to continue on the narrative despite her having honestly less character growth than Robin. Robin as well didn't even feel like Robin at the end, he just felt like we shifted Griffin's character onto him without doing much to support it. I can understand becoming jaded with the world, but the boy that was so wracked with guilt over killing his father suddenly shifting to I'm okay with active murder and slaughter of innocents is too hard of a right. Especially when he was so terrified by griffin doing it!!! Robin left Hermes explicitly because all of these ideas of suffering were so far away that he can't see them to feel compassion towards these people's problems, yet at the end he martyrs himself for this same cause???? We did a full 180% shift without the groundwork or explanation. We started killing off characters without fleshing them out any beyond a name and occasionally a tragic backstory we'll drop 2 or 3 chapters before they die at BEST. Most characters exist as just strawman puppets that we can tug around for plot. We spent so long occupying the tower and I couldn't tell you anything about the end occupants of the tower other than two of them were maybe dating???

Far far too much time was spent trying to shoehorn in our political agenda to the point where all subterfuge and metaphor gets thrown out the window in favor for saying colonialism is bad. What's worse is that it's even a political agenda I agree with! It would have been better if we have characters actually living out the tragic circumstances that we're told they find themselves in other than them being vaguely talked about as things like "Yeah no this shop refused Ramy and I entry" and never expanded on other than that empty statement. I'm not saying that you have to write out a whole hate crime but you can act out some of the microagressions. I think the worst part is that the few microagressions we do get acted out never got any weight... like the scene where Robin gets invited to hang out with the rich nepo baby kids and they treat him as an exotic toy. Robin literally just tells them off, steals their booze, and absconds from the interaction facing no consequences other than a bruised ego. The boys don't retaliate in any way. (As a side note: I do really enjoy how Robin kept comparing his situation to certain Cantonese words towards the end and I desperately wish he was doing that the entire book.)

Another major complaint I have with this book is there's 0 nuance. It's all excruciatingly quite literally black and white. I think Abel is the only confirmed white person besides maybe the professors (who we never get race described to my knowledge) that doesn't turn out to be an asshole. Additionally, we've been led to believe that this system is hundreds of years old and we have no people of color in positions of power? None that are considered British citizens? We're told that the live translators are in high demand and Babel has associates everywhere around the globe, and yet Victoire claims that there's no one that looks like them in a position of power and that they'd never be considered British. As someone that adores that kind of history, I can tell you for a fact that it's untrue. They might not have been 100% treated with the same respect if they weren't light skinned enough to pass but there's been black men with positions of power within Britain. There's probably a lot more people just hiding their ancestry that can pass as white. They even bring up the fact that Robin can pass better than Ramy like!!! There's no one that really waffles back and forth between these worlds like Robin did in the beginning. It's either you live out your life normally and you're acknowledging all the harm done around you and you're okay with it or you fight a losing battle and suffer because of it.

And if that isn't the biggest complaint I have with the book. It honestly felt that by the end nothing fucking mattered at all!!!!! Robin even acknowledges that even by destroying the tower, it's just symbolic and they'll rebuild it later. There's no change to the system at all beyond death at a large scale. It gives such conflicting messages. The parliament was still going to vote to go to war against china, all of hermes basically got destroyed in Britain, and yet the girl named Victory escaped to go find the resistance elsewhere????? The book acts as if the tower going down was one final act of defiance but it went down because like Victoire said, Robin wanted to die. I also hated the way that we waved around Griffin's letter to Robin and once Robin refused to read it the first time it became blindly obvious he never will. Victoire doesn't even tell us what it says other than how she read it and Griffin tells Robin about assumingly their younger brothers also by their father.

But one of the biggest missed opportunities came from Robin's name. His real name was stolen from him by his father and he was forced to become Robin. Robin tries to reclaim back that part of himself by rejecting his father but he never tells the audience his true name. It's even hinted in the book that he remembers it still, and yet he dies with us only ever knowing him as Robin. Honestly it should have been a ceremony with Hermes of reclaiming back the heritage stolen from you by reclaiming your own name. It'd work for security too since when pressed for associates, they can't give up Robin if they only know him as Xiu Ling. It would have added so much depth to the characters if Victoire named herself that. There's so many missed opportunities that this book had that it ignored in favor of trying to advance the worldbuilding and push the story's morals.

Okay I've talked around her for long enough. It's time to talk about Letty. There's so much going on that it's hard to figure out where to start. I think parts of Letty were written well. I think the book accurately was foreshadowing the way that they were purposely leaving her out of the loop. The way she occasionally had to dress as a man to have any respect. You can see the way they isolated her on purpose and I agree that in her position I would have gone a little mad as well. But then we have her indoctrunated into Hermes and the way they weren't looking for her in conjunction with the professor's murder like they were the other three. That one honestly made no sense, (beyond the obvious trying to foreshadow her betrayal) but something that genuinely made me angry was the scene where they were actually being honest with Letty about how people are being racist towards them and Letty started crying for them. Robin says a line that was the equivalent of "It's funny how we told her about all the horrible stuff we deal with and we've become the ones to comfort her" and it immediately pissed me off. Yes I understand that this is meant to be synonymous with white guilt and white people making themselves the center of poc narratives, but it doesn't fully work here. It's not always shown, but they do make an active effort to hide how badly they're treated to Letty since she "doesn't understand" without making an effort to educate her. Of course she crying! She's being told that her best friends in the world are being treated like shit when she actively forgets how the world views them as nothing more than their skin color. Letty has never been shown to be actively racist, just borderline maliciously ignorant. And some of the things that they get mad at her for "not noticing" are things that happen behind closed doors that she couldn't have been aware of???? Like the professor wanting Victoire to wear slave chains thing. It's a fucked up thing that we as an audience cry along with Letty when we find out about it. By insisting that Letty shouldn't be crying for her friends, you insist that the audience shouldn't either. I really don't know what response they expected out of her. They literally describe Letty as basically having a "delicate sensability" and yet they expect her to basically go :/ damn that's fucked up anyways how about lunch? Did they want her to passionately write the schoolboard? You're telling her a pitiful story and berating her for being willfully ignorant, of course she's going to cry that she never noticed! Society had also trained her not to notice to begin with! That shit needs to be unlearned from the impassivity ingrained in us by society.

But Letty's betrayal. Other than her loose foreshadowing that we were talking about earlier, it honestly comes from nowhere. Letty later tried to justify herself that they were threatening violent and criminal acts but the only one actively doing that was Griffin. Everyone else at Hermes only tolerated his violent tendances and agreed to them only as a last resort option. They were literally about to leave to go spread out pamphlets for god's sake, not start an active blood war like she tries to say. Also what was her fucking plan there? They're planning on being potentially violent so I'm going to stop it with more aggressive violence? I really really don't buy the part of her being an admiral's daughter so she's a good shot. Her father was negligent towards her to the point where he barely taught her anything, there's absolutely no way that he taught his DAUGHTER how to shoot. They also tell us this fact as though we ever saw Letty shoot a gun before this scene. The reasoning that her friends were indoctrinated into almost committing violent criminal acts is a solid one, but I genuinely don't get the sudden shift of valuing being patriotic over her friends that she'd previously professed she'd die for. Telling the police because she's worried for them is one thing, but actively coming back to lead the charge and shoot one of them is another. And especially her shooting the boy that she liked???? I'm with Victoire and Robin in asking Why????????? It's so out of left field entirely. But I will say that Robin is assuming a LOT when he tries to say that she shot him because he didn't like her back. You could tell that wasn't the full truth, but we'll never fucking know because Babel is allergic to characters having moral nuance so she just says that she killed him and didn't mean to. Letty and Robin both experience such hard right shifts in personality by the end that they're unrecognizable.

I always do this thing when I read media where I describe what the reading experience is like and for Babel it was like being constantly on a slow moving train passing by set after set. Large swatches of the story felt like a montage rather than a story we could see taking place. It felt like a slideshow of events shoved together. I truly believe that if this book was several novels and we learned to go heavy on the character work and development as well as adding conflicting narratives within the story it would easily be a 5 star book. Give the characters a personality beyond their suffering and make them less of strawmen from their culture. Like for fucks sake, we showed a Chinese girl on exhibit whose feet were bound and just went isn't that fucked up lol anyways and just moved on. We were being told that the girl is just a spectacle to be gawked at, but that's exactly what the narrative treated her as too! These characters don't exist beyond their suffering they endure and have no personality beyond that. We have a political regime that is actively harming its citizens, no longer passively, and people just go about their day as usual uncaring about the destruction around them. The British can put up with passivity but the effects of the seige on Babel made it to where they could no longer passively not care. They went into this tower with no plan and honestly it would have gone better with the pamphleting!!!! It had the same effect!!!!!!!! The bad press and social outcry would have pressed them to doing something, but the narrative decides that the government just doesn't care. You can really tell that at the end the author didn't know what to do with the story so they decided this is the best course of action. It's also blatantly obvious that Griffin was originally meant to be the main character, the author got hit by writers block, tried to write out the story from another perspective and liked that one better. Griffin's sudden death to Sterling wouldn't have as much forced backstory otherwise.

[catominor]

This Years Thoughts On Reading. tbh

the past year i read a lot more than i had in quite some time. to be fair, i didn't finish most of the books i started, didn't start most of the books i want to read, and spent most of my time wasting time on social media still (i don't know why i can't stop doing this. i don't even enjoy it past a certain point). i didn't do well in my university classes. but for a really long time i've found it very difficult to read at all, even to read fiction. i read a lot of fiction (by my standards) this year, especially historical fiction set in ancient rome (though i also read some other good books, favorites among which are probably queer by william burroughs, night side of the river by jeannette winterson, and invisible cities by italo calvino. i also read quite a few short stories and a bit of poetry), i read or started /some/ nonfiction, i read or started /some/ ancient literature, and i had a poem and a short story published in my university's poetry journal and newspaper respectively...

but, really, i feel a little in over my head. i don't really feel like i can do this, by which i mean i still don't think i'm trying hard enough at university. i feel behind everyone else, despite the fact that since i've transferred to a different university having done 2 years before, i still have this and another year before i graduate. even though most of the people in my year will be 2 years younger than me i feel like i am behind them (did i mention that i did badly on my exams last year?)

especially before university i was never a particularly good student, honestly (i was like. a C average, though in my 3rd and 4th years of high school i started to try a little harder) and i think i spend a lot of time now fruitlessly wishing that i had tried harder and taken more of an interest in things. i still wish i tried harder. i still wish that passion was enough to fuel me to actually focus on filling out my historical reading. i wish i just didn't feel so stupid sometimes, honestly. sometimes i'll open a book that's a bit dense or technical and it just makes me feel like the biggest idiot in the world. i wish i was better at articulating my thoughts. i also wish i understood literary analysis or criticism. in a lot of ways now i feel dumber than i was a few years ago, and i don't know why.

[nostalgia-tblr]

[fideidefenswhore]

In November and December, he dismantled her household, dismissing her attendants one by one, beginning with [Lady] Pole. Catherine's supporters blamed Anne. It was simply to please her, they murmured, that Mary was to be demoted. It was even said that she would be shut up in a nunnery, or forced to marry a nonentity. And when Henry gave New Hall and its park to Anne's brother, George, and his wife, Jane, as their new country estate, it seemed that such fears might prove all too true.

Children of Henry VIII, John Guy

[llycaons]

imo the novel and donghua both have a lightheartedness to many of their scenes that almost comes off as bizarre, jarring when you consider what else happens in the story. they jump between arcs and tend to abruptly shift tones, and the scenes that are supposed to be happy often come off as extremely irritating. to me. might have been a translation issue? meanwhile cql has committed many timeline crimes but I'll always prefer its more serious tone and gravitas, which makes wwx feel like a more grounded and realistic character and makes the dramatic scenes hit so much harder

[generic-lab-assistant]

On some Lincoln assassination stuff