#btw i have no memories of one of the stories i published

[autumnfangirler]

I FOUND MY OLD WATTPAD ACCOUNTS BUT I CANT LOGIN TO MY OLDEST ONE AND ITS MAKING ME MORE ANNOYED THAN I SHOULD BE

[wordrage]

Hi! So I was going through your snape tag (btw sorry for the million notifications you probably got), and I noticed you weren’t very much a fan way back on the early days of your blog. Feel free to completely ignore this if you don’t feel like answering (it is truly none of my business), but I’m always fond of hearing people’s “how I came to like this character” or “why I changed my mind about this character” stories and I was wondering what yours was :)

Hiii! Thanks for the ask! (No worries on the notification spam lol) and I appreciate that you reached out!

Yes! I think he was one of the characters I had the most difficulty empathizing with because I had such a strong, emotional reaction to him. Especially after OotP forward. He's divisive! (Also looking back through my Snape tag has me internally cringing a bit with how little grace I extended to the poor guy...ah well. With age/maturity comes wisdom...? D: )

I'm ngl, after reviewing some of the earlier posts, my immediate reaction is to delete them as my opinions have definitely changed, but maybe it's good to leave it as a record of my evolving mindset towards the character? lol

Ok, so what changed?

Well, it certainly helps I'm now closer to adult Snape's age from Book 1 than Harry's age when I was first reading the HP series as it was being published. I didn't give much thought to Snape beyond he was a mean teacher and a bully, for the first four books at least.

I got into the HP fandom around when GoF had been released so I was discovering plenty of fanfic and fan meta. Snape was one of the more ... well ... fans reactions to him that liked him or even wrote him sexually with the cast confused middle-school me, to be honest. I was more interested in the child characters than the adults, so I was vaguely aware of how he was portrayed in fandom but didn't really engage.

This changed after OotP was released, and we finally got some explicit Severus Snape backstory and history with the Occlumency lessons. I had a really an emotional reaction to SWM and some of the memories we got a glimpse of. I was empathetic and not completely surprised to learn Snape was from an abusive home, that he had possible trauma and issues that explained his actions and why he was so cold and angry. Like Harry, I was really disappointed in how his father and Sirius treated Snape. There's just no excuse for how they sought him out to pick on him for fun. I was on Harry's side with confronting Sirius and Lupin about how his dad and they acted.

Also, I read everything with shipper eyes, and immediately felt there was more to Severus and Lily's relationship beyond her just coming over and reacting to James actions lol. They called Jily a crack!ship but it looks like they were validated in the end lol.

However what really made me emotionally react with anger was that we are basically being shown that Severus knows what it's like to be a scared child being abused and tormented by authority figures and other children, but he does it to his students?? I could not understand his actions at a time but I would get genuinely angry when I did think about it. To child me, this felt like a betrayal, both for a fictional character and when actual people did this. Looking back I was reacting so strongly due to my own personal experience with trauma in the home and with authority figures abusing children.

I recall not caring much about him in HBP or DH. I was much more upset with Sirius' death than Dumbledore's, so Snape's "betrayal" was just not something I recall reacting emotionally to. In DH, I definitely remember reading his memories and just feeling irritated with him. To me, he was a guy with trauma and emotional issues, sure, but I felt his behavior towards Harry, Hermione, and Neville was not excused for me. At most I felt begrudging respect for him and acknowledged he was not a completely terrible person. Harry naming one of his son's after him felt so bizarre, and I just could not understand why Harry wanted to honor him. Forgive him, sure I could understand Harry doing that, but naming his child after Snape just left me feeling confused. I could not understand how Snape could have loved Lily so much, but treated her son like he did.

I know I'm basically rambling, but it really has been a journey. :P

When I grew out of HP and the fandom after DH was published, I never gave much thought to him or his circumstances until I (unexpectedly) returned to the HP fandom last summer. I reread all of the books as an adult and I had the life experience and maturity to understand that:

A) Snape was funny! A lot funnier than I remember.

B) His actions throughout the book were too subtle for teenage me, but they made me really question my previous feelings for the character.

C) Everyone Dumbledore was kind of terrible to him!

I read a lot of really well written meta on the characters and HP. Specifically I think it was @pet-genius posts on reddit I found that really helped me put my thoughts and feelings regarding HP, primarily Harry, in order. And I can't help but compare and contrast Harry and Severus as characters and how they each approach their trauma and grief.

@ashesandhackles metas on Snape was also really helpful in highlighting the examples in the text that showed how Snape's actions sometimes directly contradict with what he said, especially to Harry. He's always presenting himself as this cold and controlled person, disparaging emotional reactions and connections. Yet he's one of the most emotionally reactive characters in the series next to Harry!

I was able to see clearer a lot of things I liked about him. That he's an incredibly skilled and hardworking person. That he cares very deeply for people he does allow himself to have feelings for and connections to. That he was scared, so scared, probably all the time after Voldemort's return to power, but he never wavered in his determination to continue to show up and fulfill his duty. Him making the Vow with Narcissa to try to protect Draco. The incredible pain he must have been in when he used the Killing Curse on Dumbledore, the one person left that knew everything about him and still valued him. That he dies keeping silent about the Elder Wand ownership, protecting Draco from becoming Voldemort's next target.

I also viewed his relationship with Lily as so much more complex than unrequited love. There's a meta out there (I will edit this post and link it if I find it again) that argues Snape wasn't really in love with Lily, and that "Always" quote is so much deeper than a romantic, or sexual, type of feelings for her. I think it argues that Snape elevated Lily to a symbol of Good, or at least used her memory to guide him on morality. I felt so much more respect for the guy that he had dedicated his life as penance, basically, for betraying his once-best friend once more.

This is getting long, I hope this wasn't too much. I have changed my feelings on how Severus treated Harry and the other kids close to him in that year's class. Looking at how he acts to others and comparing to how he acts with Harry, I now now I feel Harry was a very specific trigger for Severus and he showed Harry and Harry's potions class a side of him that he generally did not show to anyone else. This is just my personal interpretation based on how other adults, from Dumbledore to even Lupin, and kids speak of Snape as a professor and seem to think Harry is just exaggerating that Snape hates him. When, no, Snape really is projecting his hate and rage and grief about James and Lily onto Harry and he does actually hate the kid. Which, it's probably easier for Severus to think he hates Harry rather than hates himself.

I could keep going but I will stop here for now. I hope that answers the question? But feel free to chat more :) I hope you don't mind I responded with a blog post, I can take it down if you would rather it be answered privately lol.

I suppose the tl;dr version is that Snape makes me angry because he makes me feel things about myself that I don't like, but with age and reading other people's thoughts on the character has definitely made me come around to they guy!

[alatismeni-theitsa]

hello! i hope you’re having a wonderful day 💕 i wanted to ask if you know of, or have any literature or book recommendations that surround Ottoman Era Greece, The Revolution or the 19th century? i’ve been trying to find stuff but all that comes up is greek myth retellings it’s rather annoying 😭. if they have an english translated version that would also be superb! fiction or nonfiction i don’t mind, i’m just super keen to read and learn more about that era of Greek history many seem to overlook. Thank you so much! btw i love your blog so much.

Hello! Very sorry for being late to answer this but I was gathering books. While I have read historical articles and texts on the Revolution and the Ottoman period, they were in Greek. I will list here books I found in English, mostly by foreign authors. I checked them and they seem mostly fine (I usually try to avoid those with specific western agendas in the descriptions, and generally I am trying to show the most objective works. Please make sure to read more than one, so you can see multiple perspectives. I'm sure there will be biases here and there xD

Historical Books

Stories Of The Greek Nation - In Today's Language: (14th and 15th Volumes) - Paparrigopoulos Konstantinos (Also published by National Geographic in 2004)

The Greek world under Ottoman and Western Domination: 15th-19th centuries - Kitromelides Paschalis

Greece, The Hidden Centuries. Turkish Rule From The Fall Of Constantinople To Greek Independence - Brewer David

The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: The Ottoman Empire - Molly Greene

Viewing The Morea: Land And People In The Late Medieval Peloponnese

Ottoman Cyprus: A Collection of Studies on History and Culture (Near and Middle East Monographs) - Matthias Kappler, Eftihios Gavriel

Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine - Michelle U. Campos

Crypto Christianity And Crypto Christians In the Southern Balkans, Asia Minor and Cyprus - Athanasios Dimitrios (Protopresbyter)

Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 - Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

A Jewish Voice From Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir Of Sa'adi Besalel A-Levi - Halevi Saadi Ben Betsanel

The History of Greece under Ottoman and Venetian Domination - George Finlay

Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece Devin E. Naar Stanford University Press

The Genocide Of The Ottoman Greeks - Studies On The State-Sponsored Campaign Of Extermination Of The Christians Of Asia Minor (1912-1922) And Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory

The Greek Revolution

Ioannis Makrygiannis Memoirs (Makrygiannis is a Revolution Hero) Theodorou Kolokotroni Memoirs (Memoirs – Court Case) (Kolokotronis is a Revolution Hero)

Deligiannis: Memoirs - Deligiannis Kanellos (Deligiannis is a Revolution Hero)

The Greek Revolution - A Critical Dictionary - Kitromilides Paschalis, Tsoukalas Constantinos

Collective works: Stories Of The Greek Nation (Sixteenth Volume): Contemporary Hellenism From 1941 To The End Of The Century . (Publisher: Athens Publishing House)

Poems

The Cretan - Dionysios Solomos

The Free Besieged - Dionysios Solomos

Works by Rigas Feraios

Fiction

Imaret - In The Shadow Of The Clock - Yiannis Kalpouzos

Niove's Children - Tasos Athanasiades

Number 31328 - Elias Venezis (A true story in a literary style)

Bloodied Earth – Dido Sotiriou

Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through A Lost Empire by Alev Scott

Please suggest more books if you have something in mind!

[chodzacaparodia]

Writers tag game

Prompt: share some writing

Thank you so much for tagging me @miyamiwu ♡. Yeah, tagging didn't work (it happens to me sometimes too), but I just saw your post hahah!

This will be the beginning of my first Blue Lock fic, which I've been working on for probably a month now and I still haven't finished it. Of course, I assumed it would be short, but I got carried away again and I have almost 10k words now… However, I'm starting to get closer to the end and I really hope to publish the whole thing this month.

Here we gooo (it will be Hiorin btw)

He used to believe that his soulmate was his brother. Because who else could it be? He had never felt such a bond with anyone. He had always admired him and no one else mattered to Rin like Sae. Most of his memories were of his brother. Their father was merely the background, and their mother was mostly associated with the stories about soulmates she told him at bedtime in his early childhood. She was enchanted by them because she was among the few people blessed with a soulmate, who was Rin and Sae's father. Therefore, Rin became an expert in all known stories about destined people: imaginary ones, but also real ones. He especially liked those stories where siblings were soulmates, which was especially common among twins. The platonic bond between friends also wasn't that bad. However, Rin was not interested in the idea of romantic love, so he usually asked his mother to tell those stories where siblings separated in childhood found each other thanks to the bond of their souls. His requests often caused his mother, a great romantic, to give him a slightly disappointed look. But he didn't care.  These stories gave him hope that he had his soulmate in his brother. True, his feelings for Sae were different from those described in his mother's stories, but he was still sure that if anyone was to be his soulmate, it would be Sae.

(If this was ao3 and not tumblr, I would apologize for any mistakes because English is not my first language lmaooo)

No pressure tagging: @witch-from-a-block-of-flats, @sohereisthisasshole, @vidianlucivious, @blue-thief and anyone who wants to do this <3

[neptxn3]

About me ⋆｡⭒˚｡⋆

I promised an about me a couple months ago so here you go!

Hi! My name is Thalia and I’m 19! I’ll be pursuing my degree in Astrophysics next year and of course continuing my research here on Astro tumblr!

I am an ENFP 3w4 and a Pisces rising (how ironic 😩)

Some of my hobbies besides astrology are art which I’ve been doing since I was 12. Funny enough it was to spite the girl who I was in a trio friend group with because she tried excluding me so I started practicing to become better at the only thing she was good at (don’t do this I struggle with basic composition now 😔 yes I have Pluto in the 10th😝)

(Some of my art)

I am also a very big book nerd 🫡 My favorite book is ‘Perfume: the story of a murderer’ by Patrick Süskind, it’s a little bit of a freaky read so discretion is advised 😭 I’m currently reading ‘Babel’ by R.F Kuang and I’m trying to finish Wuthering heights 😔 (btw listen to wuthering heights by Kate bush I just know it’s gonna go viral next year 😭)

‘In the miso soup’ by Ryu Murakami, and ‘Diary of an oxygen thief’ are in my TBR 😫

Writing is a passion and as someone with Mercury on the north node trust I will publish one day and I will come back here to celebrate 🎉

Some of my favorite books:

I live near an island that I frequent every summer, and even though I hated the beach when I was younger I’ve grown to love it, in fact my dream is to settle in a beach town, and this in turn has fueled another passion for photography. This of course this cannot also be an about me without mentioning my beautiful boy cheese 🐈 💕

Some extras

My favorite color is blue, I’m allergic to dogs yet I own 3, I have a impending attraction to Virgo rising men, Nací en Monterrey Mexico, I love cucumber and the smell of pickles, but I don’t actually enjoy the pickle itself 😔, I LOVE THEATRE, my favorite movie is Carrie (1976), I make my own jewelry, and a song to remember me by:

Anyway I think that is all that is interesting about me 🤔 if you have any questions do let the me know 💕

- Thalia

[ladybeug]

was scrolling thru your art tag enjoying your comics when i suddenly discovered you were the one that wrote strangers in the bright lights. having gotten into miraculous only very recently, was tickled to experience a very small identity shenanigan of my own

incredible fic btw; i love it soooooo much. brilliant, hilarious, sweet, poignant. out of curiosity have you read much postww1 modernist stuff? i adored the usage of free indirect discourse for the narration, drunken and in motion and alive, almost reminded me of virginia woolf in a weird way lol. sorry if this is weird

Hello!! I'm about to get long-winded and self indulgent in this reply, fair warning :)

here goes:

Wow!! I don’t know how you found strangers in the bright lights if you got into ladybug in any time frame that can be described as “very recently”, I wrote that in 2018 when I was digesting some personal stuff and in a fantastic ladybug renaissance (of which I have now had several, I think I’ll die in this fandom).

But I’m so glad you somehow did. I only write every couple of years when I get really specific ideas, and the time I spend on it turns into memories of who I was when I wrote it. I feel like that must happen to actual writers too, ones who write often, but I haven’t written “often” since like 2009 and have never asked, so there you go.

But I guess that’s all to say that I am very attached to that story and it’s also one of the only things I’ve written that still feels like it hit the chord I was aiming for. It is so cool that anyone still reads it!!

To actually answer your question: I have never read virginia woolf, and the only modernist stuff I've read was years ago for school classes. I have to admit none of the style was inspired by classics, but instead inspired by the weird disassociation of trying to be alone in a crowd.

I have a final self-indulgent thought, it is a fun fact I realized as I was going down memory lane about this:

I associate ‘strangers in the bright lights’ with a friendship I made that stands out as one of the luckiest and rarest friendships I’ve made – I went to a mountain goats concert alone, and stood up at the front early, and met someone else who had gone to the same mountain goats concert alone and had stood up at the front early. It was one of the fastest and most comfortable connections I’ve made, and we liked each other so much we stayed in touch, even after they moved away. We are still in touch every so often, and as far as I’m concerned in a few years they’re going to publish the best fantasy novel you’ve ever read, so watch out for that.

The fanfiction is in part inspired by that beautiful feeling of meeting someone new that you want to talk to, and they want to talk to you, and a drink or two has propped up your self esteem and you don’t have to worry about who you are tomorrow, just who you are right now. It’s escapism. You feel important, and carried by that feeling, for as long as you are there. Lonely who? Not me. Trapped by past versions of myself, who? Not me.

Anyways the fun fact is - I found out this morning that concert was a year AFTER I posted this fanfiction. I didn't know about that moment of my life as I was writing this. The two are so connected in my mind that this is genuinely surprising, but the concert was in September 2019 and I published the fanfic a year beforehand.

In the words of mr. mountain goat himself: we held on to hope of better days coming, and when we did we were right!

[numberonebidoofenjoyer]

I'm sending this ask for Rotom, since he wants to voice his concerns.

He thinks it's strange you know so much about undocumented history, you know Kamado's accent of all things, as well as a lot of personal details and stories of everyone from the Galaxy Team (btw thanks for letting me know that Tao Hua likes tea).

Plus, there's the whole Kicker thing (sorry about bringing him up again, I know it's a sensitive topic) with him being your starter, and a Hisuian Decidueye bringing back memories of him, and the Hero of Hisui in your timeline coincidentally also having a member of the Rowlet Line.

You knew Archie (yes I'm calling the Noble Arcanine Archie, you cannot make me change my mind) was being kidnapped specifically by bandits when it could very well be another member of the Pearl Clan trying to evolve it.

While I don't think there's anything suspicious, since your timeline could just have more information regarding the ancient times than mine does, Rotom insists there's something fishy about it.

Sincerely, your friend @clvr-the-insect-enthusiast

….! I-Well-uh-

A lot of records of the Galaxy Team w-were published! And there are some things that are different because timelines obviously!

Like the Misfortune- er, unidentified bandits! They were everywhere, stealing Calaba’s piece of the ruins! Attacking during survey runs, stealing from the Galaxy Team, Zizu had that poster up for a reason!

Kicker…Kicker a Decidueye, of course I’d be reminded of it everytime I saw one doing Triple A-

….an Arrow attack.

I’m nothing special. The most crazy thing to happen to me was that I got kidnapped when I was 15. That’s it.

[abstractredd]

AO3 Twenty Questions

1. how many works do you have on ao3? 17 wowzers

2. what’s your total ao3 word count? 269,878. (but honestly that’s not super updated because oMaM is like… twice as long as what i have published on there lol. this also doesn’t include my older fics from Fanfiction.net and Wattpad which would easily give me another 150k)

3. what fandoms do you write for? mainly elder scrolls at the moment

4. what are your top five fics by kudos? (oh lord the bnha fics SHAKSJD)

5. do you respond to comments? i try to, always! i don’t think there’s many i haven’t responded to and if i haven’t it’s usually because it’s a friend of mine and i’ve already messaged them here or on discord LOL

6. what is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending not any of them really?? i’m a Happily Ever After kinda person. i mean i have one fic that’s a scene rewrite from Your Lie in April but it doesn’t actually change the canon outcome of the show which if you’ve seen it you’ll know it’s pretty “angsty” but i feel like that doesn’t count because i didn’t write that yknow

7. what’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? as previously established i’m a big fan of HEAs. literally all of them lol. although bad habit certainly has a pretty cheesy ending

8. do you get hate on fics? i have but that was way before my ao3 days. i honestly can’t recall if any of my ao3 fics have gotten hate? people are pretty chill on there in my experience. Fanfiction.net is a whole other animal though

9. do you write smut? if so what kind? oh absolutely. i’m a sexually active adult and i tend to both read and write about sexually active adults so i feel like there’s really no surprise there

10. do you write crossovers? what’s the craziest one you’ve written? i have before but i’m not really a fan of them now, reading or writing. i wrote a superwholock fic in like, 2016, and that’s about it hahaha

11. have you ever had a fic stolen? no? is that a thing that happens?

12. have you ever had a fic translated? not on ao3 but one of my fics got translated to Italian by a fan on Wattpad once that was pretty cool

13. have you ever co-written a fic? yessir! me and my sibling in hadlof @plutoprophecy / @midnightfangz wrote one together: here

14. what’s your all time favorite ship? my OTP you mean. cmon let’s call it what it is. it’s patrochilles btw

15. what’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? Go to Bed Dumbass. i stated writing it when i wasn’t in a good place mentally and i can’t even look back on it without getting bad memories. also i just had no idea where i was going with the plot. and i’m not in the bnha fandom anymore lol. i hate having unfinished fics on my page and have literally gone back to update years-old fics before but not this one.

16. what are your writing strengths? i like to think my prose is complicated enough to sound professional but not so over the top that my writing isn’t easily digestible. i feel like i can write dialogue pretty well too

17. what are your writing weaknesses? i feel like i have a problem with repeating myself lol. like i use the same conjunctions a lot. and i struggle with action/fight sequences but i feel like i’m getting better at those the more i write them (i didn’t write them at all really until i started writing TES fics)

18. thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? i mean. i feel like this is so situational. if the dialogue is crucial to the plot and it’s going to be a chore to make the average reader look up what it is? i don’t really care for it. but if it’s something off handed that doesn’t really change the plot or is more of a funny joke that a reader can get by either A) happening to speak the language or B) going out of their way to look it up and in that situation it’s more of a fun little bonus and not needed for them to understand the story beat that it’s a part of.

19. first fandom you wrote for? one piece. in 2013. lol

20. favorite fic you’ve written? i really really like somewhere the light won’t reach us. it’s a character study of a TES oc so it’s honestly closer to an original work than it is a fanfiction but i think it turned out really nice. i also think liebesfreud is a really good story and i'm in the process of making it into an original novel (with different character names obv)

not tagging anyone cuz im lazy but if you wanna do this go for it weeee

[sebbianas]

i have begun the daunting task of writing a jegulus multichap fic. have i written jegulus before? no. have i read jegulus before? also no. i saw a random fanvid on tiktok weeks ago and i’ve been going crazy since. it’s like i’m possessed.

BUT because of that, i have no idea who side characters are. marlene, mary, grant (?), dorlene (??). i don’t want to read any fics until i start publishing mine because i don’t want them to influence my existing story and character interactions. that being said, who are these people??

i think you should atleast read one or two to get a feel of the characters but i will introduce you to these wonderful characters! i will give you what is canon, fanon and my view of this characters

Marlene

was mentioned in book 5 i think? how she was a member of the order and how she and her family was killed after the picture of the order was taken im not sure if she was mentioned ever again but this is what i remember about her canonically

in fanon she is the same age as lily and was dormmates/best friends with her she is is usually written as quidditch player and is shipped with dorcas meadowes their ship name is dorlene

my personal fanon for her is that she’s closest to james out of all the boys she and james grew up together (with peter joining in later on) but she and james are twins and she got a but worried when james and sirius got closer and she felt like james was replacing her but james proves that tht will never happen

Mary

i think its canon that she and lily are dormmates because of that one scene in snape’s memory and its also canon that she was attacked by mulciber and avery for being a muggleborn

fanon is she and sirius dated for a while and she is close with him because they kinda came out to each other i guess something like that she’s a talented witch and when james and lily died and peter disappeared and sirius went to azkaban she obliviated herself and lived as a muggle

personal headcanon i have for he is she’s dean thomas mom

Grant

he is an original character from the fanfic All The Young Dudes (highly recommended btw) he is remus’ muggle lover they met at the orphanage and kept in touch throughout remus’ life

Dorlene

this is the shipname for Marlene and Dorcas

they are my girls and i love them

they have the slytherin/gryffindor rivals going on

i hope this helps 🫶🫶🫶

[otmaaromanovas]

Hey. I was wondering what your favourite books about OTMA/The Romanovs are? I have read quite a few and I’m looking for new recommendations. I love your posts btw :)

Hiya! Thanks for your question.

As you said you have read quite a few books about the Romanovs and want new recommendations, I'll try and think of some of the less common/more obscure books I've read, which I don't see talked about too much!

Once a Grand Duchess by John van der Kiste and Coryne Hall

Admittedly, this book sometimes reads like a long wikipedia page, but has some very interesting information on Xenia Alexandrovna. If you are interesting in the British royal family and their history, the second half of the book has some great info on Xenia's stay at Frogmore Cottage and Hampton Court

The False Anastasia by Pierre Gilliard and Constantine Savitch

Written half by Gilliard and half by Savitch, it combines some of Pierre Gilliard's memories of Anastasia and the Romanovs with debunking the Anna Anderson myth. Some great work here on Anderson's actual identity. However, I will warn you straight away that if you do get this book in its English translation, the translator Edgar A. Lucidi is VERY antisemitic. Throughout the book, he goes to great pains to try and say that Anastasia survived, and has a whole preface about it, including photos of him posing with a pretender. It's frustrating and insulting, especially when he makes actual notes in the text trying to 'debunk' Gilliard and Savitch's writing. I'm recommending this book purely because of what Pierre Gilliard and Constantine Savitch have written, which is very interesting and revealing. If you can read French (I definitely can't!) it's worth getting the original.

Tutor to the Tsarevich by John C. Trewin and Charles Sydney Gibbes

This book is FANTASTIC and really underrated! It's more of a coffee table format, with plenty of photos, but has some really fantastic information. It has a lot of Gibbes' original writings and reflections, published for the first time I believe. Some great anecdotes about Tobolsk and some rare photos of Gibbes and his life after the Romanovs.

The Romanovs & Mr Gibbes: The Story of the Englishman Who Taught the Children of the Last Tsar by Frances Welsh

This book focusses on the life of Charles Sydney Gibbes, later known as Father Nicholas, who was the English tutor to the children. Although it is definitely not as good as Tutor to the Tsarevich, it provides an interesting picture of Gibbes' life. It's quite short, and focusses a lot more on Gibbes than the Romanovs, but is worth a read if you're interested in the tutors of OTMAA.

A Few Years Before the Catastrophe by Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, translated by George Hawkins

This book is *TINY* so you might be better served getting the online kindle edition rather than actually buying it. Sofia, or 'Savanna' as OTMA called her, was a nanny to the children from 1906-1912, before being dismissed by Alix for disagreements over Rasputin and the raising of the children. As I said, the book itself is very short, but paints an interesting picture especially of Ernst of Hesse and Nicholas' personalities. There are some fun anecdotes about OTMA, but not too many. The reason I recommend this book is because I am currently reading Anna Vyrubova's memoirs and she goes on a four page rant about poor Savanna, saying that she was a traitor and sold out Nicky and Alix. Reading Savanna's recollections almost entirely prove this wrong.

The Camera and the Tsars: The Romanov Family in Photographs by Charlotte Zeepvat

This book is BEAUTIFUL! Anything Charlotte Zeepvat writes is worth buying in my opinion. But this book especially... *chef's kiss*. It has so much detail about the whole of the Romanov family, and is mainly in picture form with detailed captions and text too. The photos are high quality. A great overview of the whole of the Romanov family and its many branches.

The Grand Duchesses: Daughters & Granddaughters of Russia's Last Tsars

This book is comprised of multiple different biographies about Romanov Grand Duchesses and princesses over a span of about 200 years. It is very unique in focussing entirely on the women in the Romanov family. There are a couple of errors in it, but nothing too awful. Great if you want to dive in and learn about some of the Grand Duchesses that came before (and after) OTMA.

‘After that we wrote.’: A Reconsideration of the Lives of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, 1895-1918 by Althea Thompson

The last recommendation isn't a book, but a thesis written for their Master's Degree, and focusses entirely on OTMA. It's fascinating, with plenty of great sources sprinkled in. It looks to re-examine how historians have viewed OTMA and aims to create an accurate picture of their daily lives. It's a long academic read, but has fantastic information. You can read it here.

I hope this was helpful! I probably missed out some great gems, but these are the first ones that come to mind which are less common :)

[micamone]

the thing about liking an almost 30 year old show is I'm not sure as much about what went on behind the scenes. and a significant part of that is how awesome it was that the fans were just more separate from creators then, like there was no social media and junk for us to to badger them on about things. but the from their side there wasnt a place they could just dump shit on us for fun. things were told through dvd commentaries and magazines published back then or panels and stuff at conventions or even TV specials and those are all very... ephemeral. like I'm sure its all recorded somewhere but it takes a little more digging and hoping fan websites have the info. and thats doable I'm not asking anyone to help me with that btw i just havent done it yet cause i wanna get thru the show first or I'll have one billion spoilers from not being able to stop reading.

but i think the biggest thing for me rn on stargate is, again i watched atlantis first. and that started in and branched off of like season 8 of sg1. so i know a lot about The Ancients, since they were a big player in SGA, and every time something tangenally related to them comes up in SG1 i get super excited and wave my arms and jump up and down for Daniels attention cause i want him to discover Atlantis so bad. im so excited for him and oh god he has his earpods in he cant hear me-

anyways. connecting these two points..... i have to wonder watching things progress how much they planned ahead. how much did they set up like "... yeah we'll decide to make something of that later" and how much of it was "oh dude the fans are gonna FLIP when we make this reveal in two seasons" you know????? i can listen to stuff about gravity falls when hirch and co talk about how they had no idea where they were going. they were like "well he has a twin somewhere. for some reason. and hes..... well hes there." and they literally came up with the everything on the fly. and then even in Gargoyles, which is old like stargate too, i read apparently the writers called each other once like "WAIT HEY THIS CHARACTER FROM THE VERY BEGINNING FIRST EPISODE? HOLY SHIT WHAT IF HE WAS THIS GUY-" sort of twist like.... way into the show lol

was that what was going on with The Ancients? and their whole..... ascended business? Orlin in this episode was very interesting cause i definitely recognized Oma D from a while back as an ancient, so i was glad Sam compared Orlin to her, but this was the first time theyre REALLY like "yup, that monk and myths of the jaffa werent just talk. this ascension biz is for real and a bigger deal than you thought" BUT! they still havent really connected it to the ancients. at all. i dont think daniel even said the writing on the machine Orlin helped build was ancient, and it didn't look like it, but then like.... Orlin also just said he was Human.

and was that true? WAS he human? humans can ascended, sure. but he also made a freakin stargate. in sam's basement. (Obadiah Stane voice) WITH A BUNCH OF SCRAPS!

... he already was the cause of death for people he cared about once for giving away too much information, i wouldnt be surprised if he lied about being human. but also wouldnt be surprised if the writers were like..... unsure and didnt care cause it doesnt matter lmao they were just vibing. you know. idk im sure Orlin and even Oma will get brought up AGAIN later, im only in the beginnings of season 5 after all and know some spoilers that the ascension thing ans ancients become a big deal later but. yeah its just interesting. i like picking apart creators minds for their stories and its just not possible in the same way on such an old show. even if i could ask them, they'd be having to recall through decades of memories that change as they have over the years. and that provides an interesting color on things as well but... its not the same as knowing what they were thinking back then.

[theinmara]

Ashwin the maybe not so Artless

Oh. Oh, wow. Oh.

Maybe I am the Linguist.

Maybe it's because I'm just strongly coconscious with a couple of my headmates, but it doesn't feel like I am. But I woke up today fronting strongly and I've got all these memories I'm reminiscing over as if they are mine.

Memories of writing our languages, Fenekere, Mäofrräo, and Inmararräo.

Memories of skulking r/conlangs with @fenmere while at work.

Memories of writing posts about our languages.

Memories of interjecting into @your-tutor-abacus' book with nerdery about our languages for it.

Shit. I even remember our first attempts at making a conlang in middle school, and studying up on Irish Gaelic, German, Korean, and Spanish around high school and college.

Just as strong and present and feeling like mine as my recent memories of writing my own book and living its events in our head.

So, I'm writing here in our system's blog instead of my own, because my own is dedicated to the kayfabe we created for my book.

In that blog, I write as if I'm living in a much, much smaller system with Sarah, Goreth, and @ohthatphage (who are real people, btw!) having traveled an uncounted number of parsecs across the universe through the Tunnel Apparatus, in a different part of Portland than we actually live. (If you go looking for the house we describe, you're not going to find it.)

I don't want to break that kayfabe there (@ashwin-the-artless). But, here? That's what this blog is for.

Honestly, it makes sense that I'd be the one to come forward and take the name Ashwin. The whole point of my book, The End of the Tunnel, is to tell the story of how our translation team got here to Earth to publish the Sunspot Chronicles for you.

But this explains why I've got such a strong handled on English idioms and my own colloquial U.S. English dialect and voice. I've actually been speaking this language for nearly 40 years, maybe longer.

In my book, I handwave it off as sharing the linguistic centers of Sarah and Goreth's brain, of course. Because that's actually a plausible and very common thing among systems.

In our actual system, the Inmara, that's how it works. Maybe with some active help from other headmates, even. All of the girls, who live in the right hemisphere of our brain, think in wordless thoughts, and get help from us dragons for translating them into English words.

Sarah and Goreth's fictional system was made to work the same way, but with 4 million fewer headmates.

Anyway. Hi!

Nice to meet you!

How are you?

~ Ashwin Pember, maybe not really the student of Metabang, maybe actually very much older than Metabang

[flowercrown-bard]

6, 10, and 12 for the weird writer asks ❤

Thank you, love <3

6. What is your darkest fear about writing?

Cliché answer, but not being good enough. I know it's not about being good but about having fun and i know i shouldn't compare myself to others, but i know people who are so incredibly brilliant and whose writing makes me go feral and i can't help but compare myself to them. (i try to reframe it as learning from them instead and it somewhat works. ) Beside that (or maybe because of that?) another big fear is losing my love for writing (in general or for a specific story) it feels so empty to lose the passion for something i spent so much time on and I'm pretty afraid of that feeling

Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

The little mermaid geraskier au sure has haunted me. Meaning, it was so alive and close to my heart and one day it wss just gone. No motivation. No inspiration. Nothing to give it life. It sits unfinished in my drafts with just two more chapters to go. I published about 20% of what i have written and at this point it's unlikely that I'll finish it or post the rest. But every once in a while i do remember how alive that story was to me at some point and it feels like it has unfinished business since it never got its conclusion

12. If a genie offered you three writing wishes, what would they be? Btw if you wish for more wishes the genie turns all your current WIPs into Lorem Ipsum, I don’t make the rules.

Hmm there are a couple of things that I want (motivation, memory, passion) but they don't feel big enough for a wish so i think I'd only use one and keep the other two for later. My wish would be to have the confidence to share and talk about my wip with the pride and passion i feel when I'm writing on my own and that disappears the second i try to share

[teencopandthesourwolf]

April 8th is a song about an old man (Henry Darger) neglected by society who was very real and very much died alone in his apartment. It’s about how the lead singer of NMH wishes he could have been alive then to help him and be a friend so he didn’t rot alone in poverty, not really appropriate as a ship song imo. So many actual love songs out there, my dude, why choose a song that’s written in memory of a dead guy who was already forgotten?

oh. that's really, really sad :(

but um why is it you're assuming i know the back story to the song and who directly it was written about? or anything at all about the NMH band members? to me, april 8th it's just a track i know and really like. i'm not the biggest fan of neutral milk hotel, i just dig their first couple of albums—but even if i did like all of their stuff, it bears repeating: i don't know why you're assuming that just bc you know all about a particular song's meaning that everybody else does too? mightily presumptive of you there, nonny. (if i had have known... maybe my brain wouldn't go straight to associating it with something/someone else? probs? can't know for sure, tho).

btw there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying a song bc the lyrics remind you of some characters from a tv show or wherever else if you DO know what it was originally written about. as an artist, once you publish music you are fully aware that people will interpret your stuff however they choose, in a myriad of ways; music, poetry etc is put out into the world for both the artist's sake and those who will (hopefully) enjoy it, otherwise artists would just keep it to themselves! it's just. what happens? so i don't really get why it would be deemed a problem to like a track as a ship song or anything else for that matter, even if (see above).

also, i truly have no idea whatsoever why you made the statement "so many love songs out there", as if the only songs you're supposed to have remind you of a relationship (real or imagined) are love songs? like, what?!

fairly one dimensional take there imo, my dude.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Literary theorists being AHs to women and PoCs

‘cause if I have to suffer, then you should also know how much of an AH these people are, so you can examine if their theories are even worth believing or if you SHOULD pay attention to their blind spots instead of saying it’s irrelevant to literary discussion. Personally, I think the fact they are unwilling to mention PoCs, particularly Black people and willing to actively dump on women is very relevant to current academic discourse. You can’t ignore Kant’s views on women, and see that the majority of the people who won in the end were people who showed hatred towards women.

Robert Scholes being an AH, Page 26-page 28 (Hilarious, but also homophobic and misogynistic) For context, EM Forster is gay, which makes this really homophobic.

Picture credit: https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2017-03-03/memories-of-bob-scholes

‘Cause you see folks, the only decent writers in the world are men, cishet men. (notice the sharp sarcasm here).

E.M. Forster on Gertrude Stein (From Aspects of a Novel, a series of lectures he gave)

Credit: Getty Images https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcSjNW-FA-n5bkXFk2MFmMGMcBy1SJtQj185hrMceQN_8rK2L-6f2cu7Ct-PooBt8M6Mt7ffTDt5SPHpj00

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70492/pg70492-images.html

Granted, a Modernist (and gay himself, openly so at the time he gave this lecture), but still, the dumping on Gertrude Stein seems to be a tradition that extends to other people afterwards (Rowe did it sideways, Lajos Egri, directly). Seriously? Dump on the lesbian Jew trying to encourage ways to describe TRAUMA. OMG, we shouldn’t talk about trauma.

But I disagree heartily--we have entire story structures devoted to dreams that play with sense of time and reality *because* of Gertrude Stein. I mean, how could you conceivably get Inception without Gertrude Stein’s theories of how to move language and time? Besides that, you have Dream Diaries (Japanese), Dream Record (First Chinese then Korean--not imported into Japan because there was a war), and then the whole of Dream Time from Aboriginals which predate her. Non-linear storytelling has and can work--but you need thematic plotting to be stronger and tone plotting to really be tight (pacing helps, but isn’t as critical as the other two). Thank the Modernists for the European white version. I mean, Magic realism, anyone???

If you want to find ways to break linear time and describe trauma itself, and the feeling of missing time--Modernists are your best bet to find techniques to get you there. (Kinda Post Modernists, though I resent the focus on readers a lot--I heartily disagree, BTW, that Structuralists and Post Modernists are the same thing... as argued in this paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B0080430767039516. 

Post Modernists tried to find further ways to break the rules and structure by bending to the reader. 

Structuralists tried to impose a bunch of rules and binary. Like say, the panopticon and prison system/School system. There’s rigidity everywhere with Structuralists and Eurocentricism.) Or as the Raw and Cooked put it, a binary of acceptable and unacceptable, when some cultures don’t work off the Bible. So I think this paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B0080430767039516

is more likely.

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction for Young Writers, published 1983

Picture credit: https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/john-gardner-and-the-art-of-fiction

No one is surprised that its all men mentioned, right? 

But what makes ignoramuses bad writers is not just their inexperience in fair argument. All great writing is in a sense imitation of great writing. Writing a novel, however innovative that novel may be, the writer struggles to achieve one specific large effect, what can only be called the effect we are used to getting from good novels. However weird the technique, whatever the novel’s mode, we say when we have finished it, “Now that is a novel!” We say it of Anna Karenina and of Under the Volcano, also of the mysteriously constructed Moby-Dick. If we say it of Samuel Beckett’s Watt or Malone Dies, of Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, or Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, we say it because, for all their surface oddity, those novels produce the familiar effect. It rarely happens, if it happens at all, that a writer can achieve effects much larger than the effects achieved in books he has read and admired. Human beings, like chimpanzees, can do very little without models. One may learn to love Shakespeare by reading him on one’s own—the ignoramus is unlikely to have done even this—but there is no substitute for being taken by the hand and guided line by line through Othello, Hamlet, or King Lear. This is the work of the university Shakespeare course, and even if the teacher is a person of limited intelligence and sensitivity, one can find in universities the critical books and articles most likely to be helpful, the books that have held up, and the best of the new books. Outside the university’s selective process, one hardly knows which way to turn. One ends up with some crank book on how Shakespeare was really an atheist, or a Communist, or a pen-name used by Francis Bacon. Outside the university it seems practically impossible to come to an understanding of Homer or Vergil, Chaucer or Dante, any of the great masters who, properly understood, provide the highest models yet achieved by our civilization. Whatever his genius, the writer unfamiliar with the highest effects possible is virtually doomed to search out lesser effects.

Gardner, John (2010-05-20T23:58:59.000). The Art of Fiction . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

OMG, give this guy a prize, he managed to mention a Japanese man Kobo Abe. /s https://literariness.org/2019/04/15/analysis-of-kobo-abes-novels/ But then fails to mention the names of the authors of some of the novels he’s talking about (I’m literally begging Writer’s Digest, Knopf, etc to force these people to give better citations)

The closest he gets to noting a Black person is noting American Jazz on the page where Chapter 2 starts, and then fails to mention Jazz musicians. No, I’m serious. What makes a person an AH? The inability to mention a single work in 1983 by a female author?

Though the fact is not always obvious at a glance when we look at works of art very close to us in time, the artist’s primary unit of thought—his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work—is genre. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of music. A composer writes an opera, a symphony, a concerto, a tone poem, a suite of country dances, a song cycle, a set of variations, or a stream-of-consciousness piece (a modern psychological adaptation of the tone poem). Whatever genre he chooses, and to some extent depending on which genre he chooses, he writes within, or slightly varies, traditional structures—sonata form, fugal structure, ABCBA melodic structure, and so forth; or he may create, on what he believes to be some firm basis, a new structure. He may cross genres, introducing country dances into a symphony or, say, constructing a string quartet on the principle of theme and variations. If he’s looking for novelty (seldom for any more noble reason), he may try to borrow structure from some other art, using film, theatrical movement, or something else. When new forms arise, as they do from time to time, they rise out of one of two processes, genre-crossing or the elevation of popular culture. Thus Ravel, Gershwin, Stravinsky, and many others blend classical tradition and American jazz—in this case simultaneously crossing genres and elevating the popular. Occasionally in music as in the other arts, elevating popular culture must be extended to mean recycling trash. Electronic music began in the observation that the beeps and boings that come out of radios, computers, and the like might sound a little like music if structure were imposed—rhythm and something like melody. Anything, in fact—as the Dadaists, Spike Jones, and John Cage pointed out—might be turned into something like music: the scream of a truck-tire, the noise of a windowshade, the bleating of a sheep.

Gardner, John (2010-05-20T23:58:59.000). The Art of Fiction . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Iunno, is it glaring to you? It’s glaring to me. Avoid talking about Black people challenge. I can name at least a few off the top of my head. Dizzy Gillespie? Billie Holiday? Ella Fitzgerald? And then he mentions white people before then? I’m groaning.

And that’s the thing, particularly about Black authors/Black people, they are either not mentioned by name, but their work is--WTF, or totally skipped, probably because the whole of Black literature goes against these white men’s structuralism, and postulations. On one hand, I’m glad they left them alone, but on the other, the saying this is the only way, while glaringly missing the obvious really is sickening.

As for dumping on women--well... should we go back to Aristotle being an ass and starting the whole anti-choice campaigns because somehow Aristotle is Jesus, even though Jesus didn’t say anything about Ensoulment at conception? And then indoctrinated white women trying to rescue Aristotle from taking the axe because all of his scientific ideas were wrong? (Just axe him--he was popular with the Victorians for a reason--he was a misogynistic asshole and that reinforced their worldview very well.) (And if you think I don’t have references for the anti-choice statement... oh wait for it... I so have it)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoulment Wikipedia, but I found scholarly articles too--not sure you want to be buried with that. Aristotle is not Jesus. !@#$ And Aristotle thought women got their soul later than men, because, as I said, royal asshole, to the point I want to do a whole long rant about how much of an irrelevant ah he was.

[shiny-jr]

Hi again ｡^‿^｡

I just want to say before the year ends that I appreciate all the effort and creativity you put into all your works, all the things you write are always so beautifully written and mesmerizing, even the ones that you don't feel satisfied in. I have been a fan of yours for years (since 2017 I think), I was a child when I first found you and now I'm almost a full-grown adult but the excitement I feel everytime you publish a story never goes away. I've re-read your books so much that I can remember each story you've written, the books you deleted are still fresh in my memory as if I read it just an hour ago. Your writings have inspired me to create my own book (although I'm still not good at writing). Anyway, I have been your fan since I first discovered quotev and I will always support you and look forward to your works.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year ＼(^▽^＠)ノ

(I'm the one who asked about your yandere poltergeist/ghost book btw)

(I'm very sorry about any grammar mistakes and wrong spellings, English is hard (;ω;) )

SINCE 2017??? That's actually insane. I appreciate you taking an interest in my works for so long. Funny you say that though, because I was literally in middle school (or younger) when I started writing online and now I'm in college. Damn has it been a while. It's about to be 2023 and I'm still writing fics, don't know if that's sad or impressive. Anyways, I'm really grateful that the stuff I write is so memorable! Even the deleted stuff. And I'm honored it could've inspired someone to make something of their own.

Happy Holidays to you as well, anon, and I hope the stuff I make in the future can continue to be as memorable as the things I posted in the pass.