#i forget which book

[aprillikesthings]

#channeling church camp AU Adora here

This is funny to me in part because, as you (...and that au of Adora) know, the original definition of "canon" was "which books are actually in the Bible"

(which is debated between branches of Christianity of course)

It became a fandom thing way back in the original Sherlock Holmes fandom! So many people were writing "pastiche" (fanfiction that attempted to copy Arthur Conan Doyle's writing style) that they had to have another word that mean "only the Holmes stories ACD himself wrote"

So they called it canon!

And here we are over a hundred years later debating which things are canon, and I think that's great

Personally I'm old-school enough that for me actual canon is only the actual media in question--so for She-Ra, anything in the show itself is canon, but Don't Go technically is not.

Though I'll be the first to admit I treat it like canon lol

(there's been other uses of "canon," like the "canon of western literature" aka "the books that, at one point, you have to have read to be considered educated," wikipedia has a page about this idea)

it is funny seeing people use leaked development to say something is “canon”

that’s not what that means

[egophiliac]

do skully have pokemon?

Pumpkaboo is the obvious one, but y'know, sometimes the obvious one is the right one! (we'll say SUPER SIZE Pumpkaboo, just for fun. big pumpkin for big skeleton boy.) and another person actually also suggested Greavard, which I somehow hadn't considered, but feels so perfect that I feel like I should have. dangit.

(they can also have little Nightmare Suit costumes :D)

[sunshades]

sorry #posting again but it's been on my mind cuz i once again saw a post and i just. really really hate the way this bit is so often taken out of context to make her out to be dismissing and belittling him just cuz she felt like it, because a lot of the story does hinge on the fact that this was in fact a reasonable worry

heathcliff of course has reasons to take it personally, but the context of the entire canto tells you why this was a problem to begin with. we also see it during the rest of the game, cuz he mellows out as the cantos go, but we can't forget at the start he was out there killing his coworkers. then in canto vi we get more about it. nelly starts here jokingly:

but by the end she's very serious about it:

the cycles of abuse is ofc one of the main themes in the canto, like in the book where heathcliff assumes for the second generation the role of their own hindley; in game he's growing both in the shadows of hindley and of his other mirror selves. but it can't really be ignored that the problem WAS there and he was shaping up to be just like them (a person used to violence to the point even someone as close to him as the woman who raised him had reason to believe he might hurt her!) and that catherine is discussing it in the hopes of figuring out a way to give him a place to heal and grow out of that absolute hell that was growing up in the heights. it just feels really weird to always discuss that part as if catherine was being cruel for no reason, when heathcliff himself admits that he left because he feared he'd murder her

instead by the time of the canto, while hindley, linton and nelly all comment on him not having changed, he continously chooses to be the better man, avoiding unnecessary fighting, lending a hand to people in danger, and ofc standing strong against the erlking's provocations and attempt to turn our heathcliff into another just like him, to continue the same cycle.

BUT it's important that back then he was a person who wouldn't have done that, a person who would have hurt his loved ones, and that what he had in mind was taking revenge on them- because he grew past that in the course of the story, then that character development is much more meaningful. and that's also why it's so important to all the people around him, who had seen him start to go down that same path as hindley, to become the worst version of himself--

because in the end he didn't become like that! he did change and become that better person, and they noticed!

[homosekularnost]

network effect (2020)

[sforzesco]

machiavelli and biagio (and a third person), hard at work in the office :)

[almonddirge]

You are the upright young master of a very conservative clan. Against their wishes, and your own, you have fallen for a rowdy boy your age who causes nothing but trouble. Regardless of your feelings on your own homosexuality, you seethe to yourself over why it had to be him in particular.

One day, he brings you rabbits to keep as pets. They start fucking in front of you. To your horror, that they are both male. Your name is Lan Wangji, and you might be beginning to think the gods are out to get you.

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[mechieonu]

i know that disney is too big to boycott effectively but that shouldn't translate to "and so we should keep buying their products like normal" but rather "at the very least we should try"

[ricky-mortis]

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby being published, so I drew Gatsby and Nick to celebrate :)

[gardenwalrus]

went down a rabbit hole looking into george martin’s estranged eldest son and my god this guy is strange

[proselles]

people saying that Glinda isn't gay are so insane to me it's like in the original books she lived out her years with 100 of Oz's most beautiful women for nothing

[kingly-court]

I’m legitimately gonna explode if I don’t find someone else who understand the background tragedy of the Gleeful Family in Gravity falls.

[bookhobbit]

Reread Small Gods and so therefore now I must reread the sequel to Small Gods, We Must Tend our Garden by DesdemonaKaylose

[lewkwoodnco]

And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “you know I’d die for you, luce”

[fumifooms]

thanks for infecting me with marchil its so so fun to just see them pair themselves up in the background now

especially love how much she picks him up like a cat (and when he has the opportunity to do it to her too he just lugs her around like a sack of oats) gosh i love them they're so funny

YAAAAAA 🎉🎉 I’m so glad to hear it welcome to the sillies corner 🤝

THEY’RE SOOO SO FUNNY

They’re worsties that cannot get enough of each other

[fictionadventurer]

This is probably the wrong way to do it, but the only way I can get ready for Lent is to take what Chesterton might call a Robinson Crusoe approach. I'm going to go without certain things during Lent, so I get excited to enjoy the things I'll have, especially if it's something I don't appreciate enough during the months when I'm not fasting. Like, I give up sweets during Lent, so now's the time to get excited about pretzels. I'm giving up my phone, so it's time to get excited about other things I can do with my free time. Stuff like that.