#kassie is a slytherclaw

[amorremanet]

so, I think I’ve decided that, were I a mutant in the X-Men sense, I’d want to have a mutation that gives me mental shielding abilities. like, on the most basic level? yes, I essentially want to have mutant Occlumency. but then, with training and development, I’d branch out some more, learn things like shielding others from any attempts at detection, making literal shields by sheer force of will and mental energy, and actual control over my own mind (i.e., shielding it from itself! no more intrusive thoughts!! no more morbid obsessions!!! this would be literally one of the best things that could happen for me!!) Q: why this power specifically? A: so I could annoy the fuck out of every single telepath who tried to read my mind by learning how to project false thoughts at them, and then making them hear the most fucking obnoxious, annoying, repetitive music EVER any time they try to read my mind. I mean *really fucking annoying*, like… Charles tries to read my mind; he hears some elevator music or the Benny Hill theme song. Emma Frost tries take a peek; she hears the, “a-badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, MUSHROOM!! MUSHROOM!!” song. Jean Gray tries it and she hears that ridiculous, “they're taking the hobbits to Isengard!!” remix. Psylocke gets to hear Weebl and Bob’s song, “Kenya.” Mister Sinister thinks he has a shot; he’s getting a nice round of Aqua’s, “Barbie Girl” or “Put The Lime In The Coconut” — maybe even “Mahna Mahna.” Apocalypse finally goes in for it, and he gets to hear the version of “Jingle Bells” that’s performed by barking dogs. like yes, I’m sure there are easier ways to handle this and better applications for my hypothetical mental shielding mutant Occlumency powers? but see, the thing here is? …I don’t care. I really, REALLY badly want to have the ability to annoy the ever-living FUCK out of every telepath on the planet who thinks, even for one second, that they are EVER getting into my head. *aggressively thinks Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova” at every telepath in a five-mile radius*

[amorremanet]

wow, it's a good thing that I'm functionally dead inside or everything might really hurt right now and that's all I'm saying about the Mockingjay double feature right now

[amorremanet]

tfw someone is trying to fight you on something where you know more than they do and you don't know if you should pity them for their horrid ignorance or go in harder on them because their arrogance and their twice-sized pride have earned them double the fall

[amorremanet]

in the space of five seconds, I can apparently switch from rant mode to, "omg I need to go dig up my somewhat less than entirely above board PDFs of Giorgio Agamben's greatest hits so I can flappy hands about Harry Potter, biopolitics, and the state of exception, this is so omg omg omg, I NEED TO FLAP ABOUT THIS" …I think I have problems. and I maintain that I do not belong exclusively to Ravenclaw.

[amorremanet]

I am seriously taking notes so I can make an actually GOOD and coherent argument about why this post I wanted to side with but couldn't actually do so in good conscience because it is ultimately fallacious ………is this the point where I need to just shut up and accept that I maybe have a problem?

[amorremanet]

me @ other people: you have limits and that's okay!! they are valid and worthy of respect, and so are you!! it's okay for you to take breaks and be nice to yourself!! you deserve to be taken care of when you need some TLC and to have nice things in life, precious bb gumdrop!!!! uwu

me @ self: why are you taking a break after six straight hours of hardcore intense writing what the Hell is wrong with you, you stop that this instant, the limit does not exist Cady Heron now quit your goddamn whining and get back to this unnecessarily intricate project that is built on a bedrock of expecting too much of yourself, I SAID NOW LAZY SO HOW ABOUT YOU DO IT FUCKING *NOW* >|

[amorremanet]

“though i wish the post would stop referring to voldemort as ‘tom’ in this context” — someone’s tags on their reblog of this post

………okay? that’s nice?? good for you???

like, he renamed himself, “Voldemort” as a symbolic attempt to escape the fact that he is a mortal human being just like the rest of us. I mean, yes, in character, it derives from Tom rearranging the letters of his full name until he came up with something that didn’t sound completely silly — but literally, the translation of the French elements that JKR chose here? means either, “flight of death” or, “flight from death.” so… uh, yeah, his big bad scary super-villain name is a very literal representation of his ridiculous notion that death is anything but inevitable

furthermore, he took on that name to distance himself not just from the Riddle family — the Muggle side of the family who wanted nothing to do with him, the father who abandoned him (and I will forever maintain that yes, it sucks for Tom and Merope that this happened but Tom Sr. still had every right to want nothing to do with the woman who raped him and non-con married him via love potion, and the only reason why I also understand Tom Marvolo’s outrage here is that he had no idea what all fucking happened there), every single fucking thing that they represented to him by virtue of being Muggles, which in Tom’s eyes, made them weak and worthless and fragile—

…he also took on the name to distance himself from the rest of humanity (or at least the parts he deigned to recognize as human) and to establish himself as a larger than life Dark Lord whom no one would dare fuck with unless they really, really wanted him to kill and/or torture them and their loved ones. which makes sense as a villainous decision — I mean, we can’t all be fortunate enough to get an intimidating name like, “Gellert Grindelwald” or, “Bellatrix Black Lestrange” from our parents and/or other familial ties, like marriage — but still: he took on the name to deny the reality of his own humanity and he backed up his attempt at doing so through terrorism, torture, TWO attempted genocides, and so on

and…… I don’t feel obligated to validate his attempt at running from humanity and running from death, and to in so doing kind of support what he did in order to establish, “Lord Voldemort” as a name with significance and social baggage attached to it (because using the name isn’t the same thing as cosigning what he did, no? but it is taking part in the discourse that accepts “Voldemort” as his name and as his identity, and given that he built that identity on torturing and killing and terrorizing innocent people, I personally don’t like using it)

………also, calling him, “Tom” is canonically established as one of the easiest ways to piss that genocidal little fuckhead off — like, the only people who do it at any point in canon are Dumbledore, Harry, Hepzibah Smith, Slughorn, Ginny, and Professor Dippet and let’s just run down that list, huh:

Dippet and Slughorn are only seen calling him, “Tom” while he’s still in school, before the “Lord Voldemort” thing is something that he’s really established as more than a ~lol silly inside joke~ between him and his droogs. Therefore, they don’t count; he hadn’t really fully adopted “Lord Voldemort” as his name yet and didn’t have the ability to do so either, so he wasn’t going to be pissy about getting called, “Tom.”

Hepzibah Smith is disqualified for similar reasons: for fuck’s sakes, she only ever KNEW the little shit as TOM, so what else was she supposed to call him? “Martin”? “Algernon”? It’s not like you’re randomly gonna tell the little old lady who you come over and play ~gentleman caller~ with in order to get your hands on her priceless family heirloom magical artifacts that you also have a super-villain alter ego named Lord Voldemort. doing that would probably make her go, “you make me feel uncomfortable, uh can u not” and then, sucks for you, because you wouldn’t get your filthy little hands on Helga Hufflepuff’s chalice AND your boss would be pissed at you for losing a source of valuable artifacts to resell in the shop.

Ginny is disqualified for similar reasons as well: she only calls him, “Tom” in COS…… while she is kind of in the middle of being head-fucked and possessed by his diary horcrux. We know that she did this because, even if we couldn’t infer that he introduced himself to her when she started to write in the damn thing like he does with Harry? Apparition!Tom outright says so during his confrontation with Harry in the climax: “‘No one’s ever understood me like you, Tom. . .’…. ‘Dear Tom… I think I’m losing my memory. There are rooster feathers all over my robes and I don’t know how they go there. Dear Tom, I can’t remember what I did on the night of Halloween, but a cat was attacked and I’ve got paint all down my front. Dear Tom, Percy keeps telling me I’m pale and I’m not myself. I think he suspects me. . . .’” (COS, 309-10) So, TL;DR version here? Ginny is disqualified from the real list that we’re getting at here because she called him Tom without knowing that “Tom” was actually the person she knew as Lord Voldemort (or the piece of his sixteen year old soul that he severed off and put in a Horcrux at the time), and while her ability to consent to shit about shit or make her own damn decisions about anything? was effectively nonexistent because of how he was, “pouring a little of [his] soul back into her” (COS, 310; italics original)

now that I think of it, technically, we can count Ron and Hermione on the official overall list. but they don’t count as deliberately calling him, “Tom” in order to provoke him or make a statement either because: a. they call him “Tom” in COS without knowing that, “Tom Marvolo Riddle” and Lord Voldemort are the same person; and b. they don’t do it to his face, they just do it while talking about stuff with Harry.

outside of any narration reflecting his internal monologue, Harry only calls him, “Tom” or, “Riddle” in COS (which doesn’t count because, as we’ve established over and over and over again in this list, he doesn’t know who he’s talking to or about in COS), and then, he knowingly does the thing in their final confrontation in DH, where he first goes all, “‘You don’t learn from your mistakes, do you, Riddle?’” which earns the, ‘italicized to show how pissed off and affronted he is’ response of, “‘You dare—’” not just because his desire to be recognized as either Lord Voldemort, or as one of the alternates that arose when people started fearing that name… but also because Harry went to his surname first, which reaffirms not just his humanity and his ties to mortal people, but also throws it in his snake-looking Blood Purist blatantly allegorical fantasy Hitler face that he can’t ever change the basic fact of who his biological father was. The meaning of this can change — but Tom Jr. refuses to consider any other possible levels of significance here because he’s stuck in his essentialist as fuck, overly simplistic as fuck, “all or nothing” mindset that makes the entitled five year old who has a temper tantrum over not getting a fucking pony for Christmas look perfectly reasonable and open to compromise by comparison so Harry plays into that because he knows this about Tom and throws it in Tom’s face that the, “neither can live while the other survives” clause doesn’t specify which of them will be the dead one when this is all said and done. and then, when Tom’s been all YOU DARE!!!! at him, Harry is just the BEST little shit ever and breaks out, “‘Yes, I dare… I know things you don’t, Tom Riddle. I know lots of important things you don’t. Want to hear some, before you make another big mistake?’” (DH, 738) — which is not just Harry making sure that Tom knows that Harry isn’t buying into or terrified of the total myth of Lord Voldemort anymore, and it’s not just Harry trying to piss Tom off by reminding him of who his father was one more time… it’s also: a. a symbolic way of Harry marking Tom as his equal, the same way Tom did by trying to kill an infant (in Harry’s case, he accomplishes this by using Tom’s name and thereby denying the validity of the whole idea of Lord Voldemort. because Harry uses his given name with all of the mortal and paternal associations tied to it, the confrontation isn’t Lord Voldemort vs. Harry Potter anymore and it isn’t Tom Riddle vs. The Boy Who Lived, or even Lord Voldemort vs. The Boy Who Lived; Harry makes it into Tom Riddle vs. Harry Potter, two people who are human beings, no more and no less, completely mortal and only ultimately distinguished from Muggles because they can do magic); and b. Harry deliberately invoking and using one of the only entirely good things that Dumbledore ever taught him (even if it was by accident on his part): using the name, “Tom” with Dark Lord Voldingdong is one of the only ways you can put him the fuck in his fucking place and let him know that he is not the one calling the shots in this scene.

finally, we have Saint Albus Percival Wulfric Fucking Brian Dumbledore, who: a. I will fully acknowledge my bias about because I hate him completely, I hate him more than I hate Molly and Arthur Weasley and that fucking says something. and I am totally hella biased about Saint Dumbledore. because I hate him. there is my acknowledged bias; and b. I can completely acknowledge, while still very passionately hating him, that Dumbledore is the fucking king about going, "child, please" and kicking Tom-mort Voldingdong off of his high horse and into his fucking place by calling him, "Tom." and he is totally where Harry learned it from, as we shall see here. we get two examples of this in the canon, as opposed to the handful of instances when he uses, "Tom" before there's really any reason why, "Lord Voldemort" could be used instead. the first comes in OoTP, when Dumbledore shows up to save the day in the Department of Mysteries — which, naturally, happens in a chapter titled, “The Only One He Ever Feared” because…… that’s how Tom feels about Dumbledore, and tbh, it’s one of the only times in which he actually acts like one of the most brilliant mages to ever wave a wand because he should be hella terrified of Albus Fucking Dumbledore. the entire fucking world should be hella terrified of Albus Fucking Dumbledore. and not even just because of how he’s brilliant and powerful and won the Elder Wand from his ex-boyfriend in 1945, either. that’s just PART of why we should be TERRIFIED of this asshole. I wrote a whole tirade here but then decided to give it its own post later, just… the important part is that Dumbledore is literally the only person who has ever beaten Tom-mort Voldingdong at the game of making people fanatically loyal to it, and he did it without making (most of) them aware of how he was manipulating the shit out of them and sending them off to their deaths if he felt that it served his idea of, “for the greater good” and the majority of them had no idea that he didn’t care about them in the slightest, outside of how they fit into his plans and how they could be pieces in his games. this is literally one of Tom’s only examples of actually thinking the right thing because, DUDE. SERIOUSLY. EVERYONE SHOULD BE FUCKING TERRIFIED OF ALBUS FUCKING DUMBLEDORE. EVERYONE — but anyway, when Albus shows up in the DoM, he throws around, “Tom” by way of telling Tom that he’s not that great and that he’s wrong about ALL THE THINGS, especially about death being the single worst thing in the world that could ever happen to anybody. and then we get to HBP, specifically the Pensieve flashback scene that’s in the “Lord Voldemort’s Request” chapter, and we get this little number right here:

“So, Tom… to what do I owe the pleasure?” Voldemort did not answer at once, but merely sipped his wine. “They do not call me ‘Tom’ anymore,” he said. “These days, I am known as—” “I know what you are known as,” said Dumbledore, smiling pleasantly. “But to me, I’m afraid, you will always be Tom Riddle. It is one of the irritating things about old teachers. I am afraid that they never quite forget their charges’ youthful beginnings.” He raised his glass as though toasting Voldemort, whose face remained expressionless. Nevertheless, Harry felt the atmosphere in the room change subtly: Dumbledore’s refusal to use Voldemort’s chosen name was a refusal to allow Voldemort to dictate the terms of the meeting, and Harry could tell that Voldemort took it as such (HBP, 442).

…so, yeah. there you have it: Harry learning what it means to call Voldemort, “Tom” instead of, “Lord Voldemort” or some other related bullshit nickname, and learning it from watching Dumbledore do the thing himself, and starting to learn something Very Important that JKR needs to have Harry learn when the time comes for him and Tom to have their final confrontation.

and the thing that Harry needs to learn here is that you CAN'T let Tom Marvolo Riddle keep thinking of himself as Lord Fucking Voldemort. you cannot encourage him in this. in order to have any real say in the situation, no matter what it is, you NEED to remind him of what he REALLY is: a human being; a mortal person;

a scared detrimentally selfish little fucked up overgrown child having a temper tantrum because he can't live forever or be king of the playground;

a torture happy murderous genocidal asshole who's spent his entire fucking adult life (and most of his late adolescence) stomping around, trying to prove that he exists by “purging” the world of the so-called “impurities” that remind him of himself, and completely destroying everything about himself and his soul in pursuit of something he can never have;

Tom Marvolo Riddle, just fearful, prideful little man with a mutilated soul, who has put so much energy into convincing himself that he isn't living in a state of constant terror over his own humanity, and who has distanced himself from his humanity so much that he can only even recognize his anger and his fear and his powerful sense of wanting, and who has only made himself utterly fucking pitiful in his attempts to make himself immortal and all-powerful;

Tom Marvolo Riddle, who is a sad, scared, pathetic excuse for a human being and who makes this obvious in the one VERY crucial aspect of assessing his personality and motivations and values where Dumbledore and JKR were wrong because… actually, no? Tom Riddle CAN understand love. he is PERFECTLY CAPABLE of understanding it and in another lifetime, he could have even managed to express it to someone else in a constructive fucking fashion, MAYBE even one that wasn't necessarily unhealthy, if a LOT of things went VERY differently…

no, see, Tom Marvolo Riddle's ultimate failing, both as a villain and as a person in general, is NOT that he is unable to understand love in any of its myriad forms. it is that he is so scared of death and so scared of someone else being able to have any kind of control over him and so pathetically horrified of the idea that his happiness could depend on another person and/or their wellbeing (what if Death took them from him?) and/or how they treat him and think of him and react to him…

literally, he is so scared of being "abandoned" like he thinks his parents abandoned him, he is so scared of being "conquered" and "weak" like he thinks that Merope was for dying, he is so scared of being "foul" or "common" or a "fool" like his "unworthy" Muggle father, he is so scared of being "disgusting" or "disappointing" like Morfin and Marvolo Gaunt, who lived in a filthy little hovel, inbred as fuck and hardly living up to what Tom-mort Voldingdong thought Salazar Slytherin's ~noble legacy~ deserved from his so-called heirs, who didn't even deserve the title, unlike Tom, who saw himself as Slytherin's One True Heir

(I mean, to be fair, part of this is on JKR here because she's so insistent on saying THE Heir of Slytherin throughout CoS when it's technically inaccurate…… but then, in light of the more clarified timeline we get from GOF and more so from HBP, we get confirmation that Tom knew about the Gaunts. he knew that there were other Parselmouths who'd been to Hogwarts and who considered themselves Salazar Slytherin's heirs — and he saw what a fucking mess they lived in and considered them an utter disgrace.

…or at least, he saw that he and Morfin were the only Heirs of Slytherin still alive and hated Morfin but needed him to take the fall for the Riddle murders with the Ministry and go to Azkaban instead of just dying.

so, when memory!Tom tells Harry that the two of them are probably the only Parselmouths to attend the school, he's very deliberately erasing the Gaunt family's history and distancing himself from even the magical side of the family — just like how, back in the orphanage, bb!Tom tried to distance himself from Merope by telling Dumbledore that she couldn't have been a witch because she died shortly after giving birth to him — because this is what he feels like he NEEDS to do. he can only become the very best, the best there ever was, if he distances himself from and ultimately just destroys the less than good elements of his past and his heritage — like the Riddles, like the Gaunts — and associates himself only with Salazar Slytherin himself.)

because Tom Marvolo Riddle is so fucking terrified of his own humanity and of everything that goes along with it, that he has made himself as much of an island as it is capable for someone to be and distanced himself from close relationships as much as he possibly can (dude, he's closer to Nagini and the basilisk than to most other humans) — and in order to convince himself that he's right about this, HE DENOUNCES LOVE ENTIRELY AND CHOOSES TO IGNORE IT AND SEE IT AS FUCKING WORTHLESS

(this, tbh, is probably something he used to manipulate both Snape and Barty Crouch Jr., and a big reason why he actually seemed to trust both of them as much as he can trust anyone — well, aside from the part where Snape is a gr10 A+ liar who lies, and a fucking grandmaster Occlumens, and an actor who can play ALL THE ROLES if given the right motivation; and also aside frm the part where Barty Jr. isn't fanatical about The Cause like Bellatrix because he's a fanatic for Tom himself and his interest in The Cause is… at best debatable?)

……all of which goes back to me calling him, "Tom" instead of, "Lord Voldemort" or so on because……… motherfucker, no

you do NOT get to just erase your entire history in a deliberate and desperate bid to paint yourself as the One True Fucking Heir of Slytherin and build up the myth and the mystique of your fucking trash-basket super-villain alter ego……

………just for you to turn right the fuck around and bring down nothing but DISHONOR in trying to live up to your oh so ~nooooble~ ancestor and build up something better than his legacy and ~finishing his ""noble work""~ of fucking muggleborn genocide

like. how can I break this down for you in the most direct way possible, Tommy.

you may think you look like a dark lord but you will NEVER bring Slytherin House any honor

DISHONOR. DISHONOR ON YOU, DISHONOR ON YOUR SNAKE, DISHONOR ON YOUR WHOLE FAMILY OF WHICH YOU ARE A PART BECAUSE YOU NEVER MOVED ON FROM THEM IN YOUR LIFELONG QUEST TO DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM THEM, YOU ONLY MADE YOUR TIES TO THEM THAT MUCH STRONGER

the greatest gift and honor would be giving you, Tom Marvolo Riddle, a mother-fucking reality check and kicking you out of the position of One True Heir of Slytherin, in order to be replaced by someone who can revolutionize things and shake them the fuck up in constructive ways and actually make Slytherin House into what it SHOULD be and what it DESERVES to be, instead of the fucked up stagnating cesspool of swaggering, stuffed-shirt, bullying Blood Purist BRATS that it's been made into thanks to PEOPLE LIKE YOU

someone like…… oh, I don't know. maybe me?

or at least a character of my choice who can somehow act as a fictional surrogate for my desires to do that. possibly Albus Severus Potter. I mean… he's got Peverell blood — and thus possibly Slytherin blood — in him too, and I maintain that he's going to choose Slytherin because it terrifies him but then Harry tells him that choice matters and more than anything else, AlSev wants to be his own person and NOT Harry Potter 2.0 like everyone seems to want him to be, and I also maintain that Harry should not lose his ability to speak Parsletongue and that if any of his kids inherit the thing, it should be AlSev, because AlSev is my nextgen bb darling

but way WAAAAAY more importantly here:

all you care about is yourself, Tom Marvolo Riddle — which I am deliberately calling you because you need to be brought down a few thousand pegs and because you need to be reminded of your own mortality and because I refuse to acknowledge the validity of the bullshit mythical version of yourself that you built on the corpses and traumatized innocents you created with your fucking attempted genocides and because I want to piss you off, you ignorant self-obsessed obnoxious grandstanding undeservedly full of yourself little fuck

Slytherin House deserves a better class of Heir — and I'm gonna give it to them :)

[amorremanet]

tl;dr point: it's past three in the morning and I'm having an existential crisis because I don't have an opinion about something frivolous. I bet you thought that I was quality when you followed me and I'm truly sorry for misleading you. I don't know what I did to mislead you but I'm sorry.

like… even ships I don’t really care about, I have some kind of opinion of?? “it’s okay but I’m not really invested.” “eh, I can see the appeal but I’m not really into it personally.” “hey, whatever, it’s not my thing but… friend, as long as you’re doing your thing responsibly and not being a dick to other fans, it’s none of my business. you go have fun doing your thing. ♥” and so on.

but??? I can’t even get there at all with Jordan and Lydia, I just?? I look at their canon scenes and it’s like, “oh cool two characters I like are in a scene together” but… I only get moved by the two of them as individuals in these moments?? not by their relationship?? …so sometimes I go looking for arguments from either side here and, like. it doesn't help?? ever??

I mean, on all sides, there are a lot of posts that are really just bashing other ships, characters, or fans while pretending to be pro-M*arrish, or posts that are straight up nonsensically bashing the ship in order to go, “MY SHIP IS BETTER BECAUSE OF REASONS,” or posts that are just otherwise bullshit. but?? even the posts that are solid on all sides, they’re just… not? convincing me of anything? at least, anything beyond, “well that person sure does have an opinion don’t they, cool cool cool”

I just??? I honest to god have no idea what I think or feel about this ship and I'm kind of losing my patience with myself and my shenanigans here because I so don't even care what the opinion is anymore, I just want to have one and to know what my position on the thing is while still keeping my mind open to the possibility of someone coming along and changing my mind with a really good fic or a really great meta or something, just?? I am so?? like???

for fuck's sakes SERIOUSLY, even when I don't CARE about things, I have SOME kind of thoughts about them, even though they all eventually end in, "I don't really care, it's not my business, I'm not interested, I mean I could care about it probably but I don't so, etc. etc." my opinions can be bad. my opinions can be ignorant or ill-informed or misguided. my opinions can be wrong and in that case, I hope I get the chance to change them someday.

BUT THE PREREQUISITE THING HERE IN EVERY CASE IS ACTUALLY HAVING THE GODDAMN OPINION

AND I SERIOUSLY CAN'T FIND ONE ABOUT JORDAN AND LYDIA AS A SHIP??? I'VE TRIED SO HARD BUT I JUST???

…I just?? I don't know what to do anymore?? I am not fucking equipped to handle this kind of situation, I've had too many teachers who told me that if I didn't have an opinion then I wasn't thinking enough and I don't know how true that statement is but it's one that I've internalized for sure not least because most of my teachers were way better parents than my blood parents, and then there were all kinds of tie-ins like, "maybe you just aren't thinking for yourself enough," "maybe you're not thinking about it in the way that you need to think about it," "maybe you need to think harder instead of longer," etc.

and the endgame result here is that I have no goddamn idea what to DO with myself if I don't have an opinion about something, it doesn't even matter how totally frivolous the thing is, as long as I have an actual facts fucking OPINION about it because then I can use my actual facts fucking opinion orient myself in the fabric of the conversation and I can use it to participate if I care to and to engage with people better and I will actually know what I think and/or feel about the thing, I just

I can't take part in discourse without an opinion position to start from and that's unacceptable to me????

……I think that I seriously base so much of my sense of self on being an argumentative little shit, and I base so much of my sense of my own damn personality on knowing that I'm argumentative and I like to be right (or to at least prove that someone else is wrong) and on owning those things, and I base so much of my intellectual self-worth on my ability to have opinions and argue both for and against them even when I honestly don't give a fuck about the issue

(no, really. trying to assume opposing points of view is something that I usually try to take very seriously. my speech/debate coach and one of my favorite history teachers in high school both taught us that you have to be able to make attempts at assuming the points of view that disagree with your own so that you can find their points and their weak spots and come up with better sorts of counterpoints to more efficiently dismantle their arguments and/or, if you're really good, you find ways to twist their arguments and their evidence so that they actually come out in support of your own position)

like??? …I seriously feel like I don't know who I am anymore. because I don't know what my opinion is and technically speaking don't actually have one…… about a Teen Wolf ship. …I am a child, I am a fucking child with a drinking permit and an obnoxiously precocious vocabulary. who the fuck gave me permission to adulthood

[amorremanet]

Godric "you must have X many great deeds to your name and/or Y much potential to do shit that'd be worthy of getting written in some badass epic poetry or else you can't sit with us at lunch" Gryffindor

…why does anybody let me talk about anything ever

[amorremanet]

evil is always possible, and goodness is eternally difficult

or: "I'm trying to be a decent person right now but I'm also angry and petty and vindictive and spiteful and being a decent person is hard, especially over things that don't actually matter in the grand scheme of things"

I found comments by JKR from earlier this year that I missed at the time (amidst a bunch of awesome posts, and included in a good post but wow I just really don’t like it when JKR says things)

I am now trying to remember how to be a good, respectful person who doesn’t unfairly bash on canon ships that other people love just because they annoy the Hell out of me, because the ship and its shippers have done nothing wrong in the present moment and lashing out like I’m feeling the impulse to do? is a Bad Thing to do

…but wow, this is really REALLY hard to swing after spending a lot of my early formative fandom years being called a lesser fan and told I was reading the books wrong or had to be (a long list of ableist slurs, most of them related to intelligence, but not exclusively) because I really didn’t ship the thing or think that the characters belonged together romantically at ALL

(and I got sort of personally offended by the implication that they did because of how often I was on the receiving end of, “but you just ARE that one of these characters, you are Character A and Character A is you” because… I was ickle and a fandom bb and it felt like people were telling me that I had to be with Character B or someone like them and I didn’t want that ever in a million years)

like for fuck’s sakes… full disclosure because I hate being coy and don’t want to get asked later: Character A is Hermione; Character B is Ron. on the old FictionAlley message boards, one of their ship names was, “the HMS Trees,” because and I quote (as I remember), “saying that you don’t believe in Ron/Hermione is like saying that you don’t believe in trees”

and I’m trying so hard to get myself grounded enough to remember that it’s not fair to be a dick about R/Hr just because I don’t like the ship, because that’s not fair especially when the current R/Hr shippers are a LOT better than the ones who were loudest when I was a fandom bb — but… whines.

it’s still hard to manage basic fandom decency 101 level stuff with R/Hr because of how many of my early fandom experiences involved either having to just refuse to talk about the ship because I couldn’t tell if I’d be insulted or not (all over just not liking the thing) or having to get insulted and told that I was reading the books WRONG for not liking the ship

and I want to be a decent, respectful person who doesn’t ship-bash like that…… but I also really, REALLY want to be straight up mean and I just kind of want to vent the pent up frustration that I was never really allowed to vent back then even though it isn't fair OR even remotely okay at all, period, because the people who made me frustrated back then are not the people who I'd be hurting now and they don't deserve to suffer now because R/Hr shippers were douchecanoes ten(-ish) fucking years ago, and know it’s wrong but I still really want to do the thing and just

*quietly whispers* I don't like the thing. I'm trying not to be a dick about it but in my heart of hearts, I'm just really kind of a bad person. I'm gonna just… watch some Community until I calm down enough to go to sleep.

Hermione/Luna = my one true love for both of them 5ever ♡‿♡

…in that I do like other ships for them (just not that one, and there are a few others that I'm not so fond of but their shippers were never gross to me and mine or anyone else for not shipping them so we're good), but. I just. Hermione and Luna are in love and they'd be so good together and wehhhh, bbs. T.T

[amorremanet]

I need enough money and social savvy to get some fake credentials and convincingly pass myself off as a journalist in an elaborate scheme whose endgame is to ask Tyler Posey about what he tried to put into the scene from this week's episode of Scott getting doused in gasoline, and what choices he made with his performance there and why, and what connections he made to Motel California there, and what was Scott feeling, and weh feelings…

…yes, the elaborate scheme is absolutely necessary, why wouldn’t it be.

[amorremanet]

Sometimes, I'm pretty sure I should be more actively embarrassed about the amount of time and consideration that I've put into whether or not I would ever actually go through with Kolinahr when: a. Star Trek is still unfortunately fictional; b. if Star Trek ever came to pass in the real world, I wouldn't get to be a Vulcan because I'm a human which stinks because Vulcans by all appearances know by feels better than humans do in a lot of cases; and c. if Star Trek were ever real and I were a Vulcan or partially Vulcan, I would probably not go through with Kolinahr anyway for reasons.

I should probably also be kind of ashamed of the fact that of those three things, only the third is really an issue for me because it means that I've spent a lot of time and energy thinking about the ins and outs of doing a thing that I could never do anyway only to conclude that if I actually had the chance, I probably wouldn't take it in the first place so all of my navel gazing really hasn't had a point to it, it's just kind of been idle self-examination and self-character study for no real purpose and… I mean, I can pull out all kinds of justifications for why self-identifying with any kinds of fictional categories of stuffy stuff things is totally a legit thing to do, whether it's Hogwarts Houses or Star Trek species or whatever?

but I just really really don't like it when my idle self-analyzing doesn't really amount to anything more than getting to know myself better. I just want it to like, mean and/or accomplish something more than, "well I guess I understand myself slightly better as a person now." because that's fair and it has its value, sure, but it's not constructive enough for me to really feel okay with just letting it exist on its own terms or whatever.

[amorremanet]

I started taking a silly "what kind of character are you" quiz and had to stop because none of the potential solutions to a potential Evil Overlord showing up on the scene matched with how I would handle the situation. I mean, yes, I would technically overthrow the Evil Overlord but only because I presume that everything they'd be doing as Overlord would be wrong and if I overthrew them, I could set up a puppet government that I and a council of trusted friends and advisor could rule from the shadows and that would be ostensibly run by an adorable vacuous little figurehead of my choosing. We would be a beautiful femme oligarchy and the stuff of conspiracy theories and we would make the world a better place whether people want it to be or not. …see, it's posts like this that make it a visibly good thing for everyone that my really truly greatest ambitions in life are to write my thesis and dissertation, to get tenure at a good school, to debate Henry Jenkins about fandom and fandom studies and preferably in a public forum, to maybe have a Dead Poets' Society moment where I really realize how much I've impacted and inspired some of my students, and to not teach 101 level intro courses forever. Because I would be terrifying otherwise.

[amorremanet]

See, here's the thing: I know I'm not a good person a lot of the time but like for example, in the case of my research project? I don't want to be stuck on the lecturer track forever. I want fucking tenure. I will bust my ass to get it because I know I'm not just entitled to have it and without hard work, it would be meaningless anyway. But I still want it which means I have to do work and part of the work is scholarship and if I'm doing the work and loving it and dedicated to it, then who really cares that one of my other motivations for doing it is less than admirable on the grounds that it's petty and vindictive as fuck?

[amorremanet]

so my dad got home from going to a thing downtown and as a reward for trying to have a father/offspring moment while we were both in the kitchen well he got rewarded with hearing a rant about how I'm legitimately getting myself into an enormous research project that won't ever even get published in completion because I'm not publishing the whole thing as a dissertation anywhere but rather plotting it out as a dissertation for the sake of thoroughness and then picking and choosing parts of it to submit to conferences or anthologies or peer-reviewed journals thereby hopefully gaining academic credentials and advancing my career… because there is this one person I've gotten into fandom wank with before and I really really really dislike her and if I were a different sort of vindictive and petty, I would just reblog all of her posts and add "[citation needed]" to them at every point where she needs a citation but the sort of vindictive and petty that I am is the sort of petty and vindictive who plots out approximately 300+ page multiple-chapter research papers interpreting the text in question (and fandom reactions to it but to a considerably lesser extent) with MLA or Chicago Style citations and fucking footnotes and shit and all the trimmings just because she is legitimately wrong (like this isn't even an issue of, "all interpretations are valid as long as they are based on the text" because her interpretations are NOT based on the text; she invents things that never happened and then claims that they did so yeah QED, she is wrong) and I don't like her and I figured out a way to do something constructive with how much I don't like her so I'm writing a dissertation that I'm not even getting a degree for and it's gonna be pretty awesome.

[amorremanet]

perpetually irrationally over-defensive of the validity of combination Hogwarts Houses, or: I'm a fucking Slytherclaw and you will pry my combination House identity from my cold dead fingers, motherfucker, so fucking help me: the Tony award winning musical based on the medieval Kabbalistic midrashim.