#but i have no idea what to do for folklore

[theamazingannie]

Me before tour began: Honestly, all I need is Cruel Summer and august and I will be fine with whatever else she chooses.

Me after seeing the set list: Wait where’s x???😭

[harapeveco]

If I’m not misremembering, Eve said knk would have approximately 50 chapters and we are already in chapter 43 so I think it’s time for all of us to collectively panic

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

writing new characters for supernatural but british and this story wants so bad to say something about the concept of migration and immigration and the consequences of leaving your home and building a new one. And I don't know what it wants to say about that or why

[bookshelf-in-progress]

I've had an odd nostalgia for the Once Upon a Time series of mediocre short-novel-length fairy tale retellings. I've been wanting to read the retelling of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" from that line.

The trouble is that there is no such book.

Which makes me want to write it.

Unfortunately, the only straightforward traditional retelling of that fairy tale I want to write doesn't fit with that style.

But thinking about it got me excited about that old idea all over again.

[mbat]

[sillimancer]

you see, Your Honor, you HAVE to pay me to live in Ireland, it's research for a magical girl series--

[shinmiyovvi]

Primis Ji Eun as a Jeoseung Saja

This took me a while but here is reaper baby (I don't know what to color for the soul she's holding but let's say the color of the soul is yellow-orange)

Alt versions:

[wlwaerith]

honestly lrb i have had no interaction with mitski fans & i hope it stays that way but the ridiculous bog prince / fae king / etc shit hozier fans have going on makes me feel violent <3

[ghostfartooo]

Countess Orlok and her guards

[spiderrmax]

the urge to start a one shot series where every one shot is based off a track from a taylor swift album grows stronger every day

[snowynightlight]

Remembering the time when I ordered a pack of Taylor Swift stickers and end up with two packs of them

I still have them somewhere in a small box 👀

[kindred-spirit-93]

HOO BOI. i desperately want to write volumes about this topic alone but ill stick to a tag rant because is have so much studying lol.

demeter they could never make me hate you. you were imo the only sensible person in the myth(s) actually and a good mum. fuck u zeus

The story of Hades and Persephone isn't an abduction romance, or even a tragedy of not being able to be in two places at the same time. It's about how fucking wild it would be to have a mother who gives a shit about whether you're dead or alive, and whether you are happy.

[monsterblogging]

"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

[diah-the-demon]

I rlly need to come up with a middle name

[squimoo]

Apparently one of my newer hobbies is watching long form youtube videos on theology and understanding and absorbing about 10% of what I am being taught but enjoying them anyway.

[grison-in-space]

golly, I am being wordy today.

Via Metafilter:

Someone on MeFi tagged me in and asked me to chime in in my capacity as a rodent person, so here were my thoughts and observations:

First thought, looking at that video: that is no house mouse. Not only is the head wrong--too narrow at the back, eyes are a bit big--but that very clear countershading is not something you generally see on wild house mice. So what kind of mouse is it? If this was in the US, I would assume it was a Peromyscus (deer mouse) species, which often gleefully invade our homes, but do they have Peromyscus in Wales? In North America, this is relevant because deer mouse species often have very elaborated burrowing and pair bonding systems, and this looks like nesting behavior off the top of my head. What sort of mouse is this? The Woodland UK Trust suggests that this is probably a wood (or field) mouse: Apodemus sylvaticus. (There are glorious big photos there which can help you see what I mean.) Okay, I don't know that much about Apodemus spp. behavior, so what do we know about their nesting behavior? Well, I chased a couple of false leads, then circled back to find out what is notable about wood mice, which is that they are known to not only navigate by the use of landmarks, but to organize their environments to place small objects around their environments in order to make navigation and orienting themselves across their large territories more effectively! So this mouse is probably irritably putting things back in place as an aid to its own memory of where everything is and where it can most effectively pilfer snacks, nest locations, or other useful mouse items within its environment. That is, the mouse wants a tidy shed for exactly the same reasons a human might want a tidy shed: so it can find things it's looking for when it wants to! Wood mice, by the way, are human commensals and quite common in Europe and the British Isles, so this is in no way a refutation of the idea that this behavior might have influenced human folklore and ideas about house spirits or similar. Certainly wood mice, like any mouse, are unlikely to turn up a bowl of milk if there's one put out for it--although neither are house cats, which would certainly prey on them.

rather delighted, so I'm sharing this more widely over here.