#literary lion

[victoriadallonfan]

I know I’m like half a year late to recommend it, but The Sin Squad just put out a great video on how difficult it can be to find actual dog whistles and problematic material in fiction versus paranoid reading (aka gearing yourself up to find a reading to such things where they might not be intended)

I recommend it for everyone to at least give it a few minutes if your time because it’s some solid work and high quality analysis!

[spalanai]

the disappointment of walking into a wardrobe and not finding narnia

[bdazzlebooklover]

Love this beautiful copy!

[icecreamwithjackdaniels]

“When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him — the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.”

— Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love, 1950

[imminent-danger-came]

(4x10 The Jade Emperor)

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(4x14 Better Than We Found It)

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Jade Emperors smiling before their inevitable ends.

[maverick-prime]

fanfiction is worth way more than you might think it is. here's why.

something i don't think anybody ever talks or thinks about is how fanfic helps writers develop incredibly useful skills and tools in the same way that prompts, worksheets, and studying literature does. (i actually think it's much more accessible than many of those types of supposedly helpful methods to build good writing skills. fanfiction makes the possibilities limitless while building upon media that people love and really connect with. you can find whatever you want if you use the right tags in AO3.) to illustrate exactly what i mean, i present these points:

*NOTE: if you're not familiar with fanfic terms, i'll define them as i go! i'm also an AO3 user, so i'll be using that as a basis for a lot of my thoughts.

it’s a really helpful way to get a grasp of how to keep characters consistent in a piece, since you have to work with characters that already have established personalities, backstories, habits, and character traits that carry over from their source material. this can get a bit tricky when writing AUs (alternate universes) or canon divergences (hopefully self-explanatory) in particular, but if you acknowledge that characters are OOC (out of character), this can solve that issue pretty quickly and as long as you make everything make sense within context, you're golden. not only that, but you can fix any flaws that you perceive in a character by adding in your own headcanons (personal ideas/beliefs about a character) or by creating realistic traits in that character that don't exist in canon but make sense for the character. this also works for expanding upon canon traits that are never explored to their full potential in canon.

a great example of this would be tony stark in the MCU. a lot of fanfic interpretations of his character put a stronger focus on his anxiety and PTSD, since the movies hint at those traits existing, but don't do them a lot of justice. another good example that's a bit more broadly applicable is LGBT+ or neurodivergent headcanons. if you really identify or kin with a character and feel that they have a certain orientation, gender identity, or mental disorder/condition, you can make it happen! this often has the great side effect of opening up a lot of possibilities for writing those traits into that character and how they affect the world and other characters around them differently than in canon.

you can think of an almost infinite amount of different scenarios to put characters and story events in. i mentioned AUs and canon divergences above, but there are also fanfic tropes like everybody lives/nobody dies, kidfic, time loop/time travel, role swap, missing scene, and even omegaverse (i'm not explaining that one to you, you're on your own pal) that offer different possibilities for putting characters and story events in all sorts of circumstances and contexts that differ from canon. (continuity soups are one of my very favorite examples of this technique. in a continuity soup, an author working with a franchise that has multiple different continuities can cherry-pick aspects of each continuity they like and smash them all together into a single world. this technique works especially well with transformers, which has, at this point, almost a dozen different continuities that are in fact all canon at the exact same time.) a writer doing this learns how to translate certain necessary story events into a completely different world, or can come up with a whole new world, storyline, or context on their own to play with plot, conflict, characters, and story events.

there are a near-limitless number of AUs out there, and every AU that is widely used comes with its own set of tropes. tropes are another useful tool for writers, because they can either be cliche or they can actually be very helpful for building a compelling plot or for introducing characters in a certain way. there are even fanfic genre tropes that exist, like hurt/comfort, fluff, whump/angst, slow burn, enemies to lovers, dead dove do not eat, crackfic... the list goes on!

writers who have difficulty writing things like romance, intimacy, emotional turmoil, injuries, sci-fi, or magic can easily learn a lot from how different fic writers write those topics (and many others). there are tons of fics that focus a lot on one specific genre and whose authors have developed a really great understanding of how to write those genres. not only can you learn a lot in terms of how to write genre, but you can also learn to develop your own writing style. this is one of the reasons why i think fanfiction is a lot more accessible than traditional books and classics. sure, you could read danielle steel novels or fifty shades of grey (which is itself fanfiction!!) or 1984 by orson welles, but unless you're really invested in the worlds being created, you'll find it harder to appreciate the prose. and, a lot of fic writers are not professional writers, so they don't even care about prose! (this is a broad generalization, and i mean "prose" in a more academic sense because i am literally studying rhetoric and prose for my bachelor's degree. not a lot of fic authors are breaking down writing styles for dialogue, diction, or sentence structure. they just write what they love writing and often develop their own styles out of that, which is also just as valid.)

i myself have definitely not been reading as many books in recent years as i've read fanfics. i go through fanfics like wildfire through a dry field. finding fic authors i love reading has really helped me improve my writing style! not only that, but i feel confident to try writing real romances with kissing scenes, to use actual scientific language to describe in-text phenomena, to describe magical objects and worlds with more clarity, and even to try my hand at writing smut. i've learned to break out of my comfort zone thanks to fanfiction, and it's helped me become a much better writer.

developing a writing style through reading other authors' work is much like developing an art style. any artist knows that you're encouraged to create your own style by mashing together traits from other artists' styles you really love and making them into something that's wholly your own. writing works the exact same way. one of my professors last semester had us do an "apprenticeship" with a short story collection written by a certain author to open us up to styles we like and don't like. she said that's how you create your own style, by figuring out what you like and what you don't like. i've been doing this with fic authors for years, and let me tell you, there are some real literary geniuses out there.

fanfiction helps writers learn to accept criticism as well as suggestions for what to write next. one of the hardest parts of being a writer is having someone read your work and tell you there's something wrong with it. your peers do it, your professors do it, editors do it, publishers do it. i've had the great privilege of participating in multiple writing workshops as part of my university education, but it can be really, really hard to find or create writing workshops outside of an academic setting. sites like AO3 cut out the middleman and bring authors right to their audiences. anyone can leave kudos on a fic if they liked it, and anyone can comment on a fic and chat directly with an author. i know for a fact that most authors regularly check and read the comments sections on their fics for feedback, criticism, and requests for what to write next. you can't necessarily do that with big-time authors like stephen king; you’d have to send a letter that may never be read.

the closest thing this system of interaction comes to is voice actors hopping on twitch streams and taking requests from viewers to say all kinds of things in-character. (this actually has the added benefit of inspiring new and interesting fic ideas.) the community on AO3 is genuinely one of the most accepting and welcoming internet spaces i've ever existed in, with possibly the exception of tumblr. fic authors really value feedback, and they love when people leave comments. sometimes they write fic just for themselves, but sometimes they do it for their audiences too! there's a really deep appreciation for source material and fanon (fan canon) alike in the world of fanfiction, and a lot of that is fostered in the author-audience connection. this is invaluable as a beginning writer, because it can help establish criticism as a valuable tool and not something to fear.

it can be scary when you put so much love into something and people don't like it. but fic readers are some of the most encouraging, wonderful people ever. you can trust them to offer valuable feedback and actually constructive criticism.

in short, fanfiction is a bit like placing a kid into a sandbox that only has a select few toys in it and letting them play however they want. so much creativity can come out of working within certain restraints, and it can really help you develop a lot of skill you might not develop otherwise. more aspiring writers should write—or at least read—fanfiction so they can reap some of these benefits. i wish it were more widely discussed in universities, at the very least, because there is so much to learn from fanfiction.

and if you really think fanfiction is only for gross internet weirdos, i remind you of fifty shades of grey being fanfic of twilight, or that city of bones, the first mortal instruments book, was originally a ginny/draco fanfic. i don't even need to mention the sheer number of more recently published romcom books that are based off of reylo from the star wars sequels. plus, if you really think about it, most modern shakespeare adaptations and homages (10 things i hate about you, leo dicaprio's romeo and juliet, the lion king) are fanfiction! there's no shame in making media of what you love. there's no shame in loving anything in the first place. do what makes you happy, and chances are you'll learn something along the way.

[elmp]

It Has A Little Bit Of A Longer Snout Than A Lion

Please. Do. Not. Fucking.

Ever. Tell. Me. How. I. Feel.

About. Shit. For. Me.

[thelastrenaissance]

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a fantasy novel by C. S. Lewis. The novel was published on October 16, 1950.

“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather,

C. S. Lewis.”

C. S. Lewis “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”

[not-really-a-poet-blog]

a lion, maybe 

the moon follows me 

as if I am a majestic creature,

close, but not close enough

it opens its mouth as if 

to smile,

or gape in awe

by: anonymous

note from the “not-really-poet”:

this is part of a larger poem, but i thought i’d share a piece of it now. thnx so much!!!

[astrogirlythings]

[gennsoup]

"The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack. The round world Should have shook lions into civil streets, And citizens to their dens. The death of Anthony Is not a single doom, in the name lay A moiety of the world."

William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra

[changelingchangewing]

I love revisiting beloved books from my childhood. I’m rereading The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe currently and it is an absolute delight.

[red-sea-itinerary]

or. add your own suggestion! (or make a Lion Hunters poll of your own 👀)

[sailforvalinor]

🦁

[annafromuni]

Marjan Kamali's The Lion Women of Tehran Makes My Heart Swell

The Lion Women of Tehran is Marjan Kamali’s newest release and I cannot contain my excitement. I fell in love with The Stationery Shop and have been awaiting another book from her since I closed the back cover, unwilling to let the smells and senses of food and cooking from my mind. The Lion Women of Tehran has not disappointed on that front either, reinforcing my appreciation for cultures where…

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"There is some attraction and superficial plausibility in the idea that you can’t quantify human actors with statistics, etc. This is part of why this ideology is so attractive to people who are in vested in their own individualism, rugged or otherwise. But, of course, the cult of individualism is based on the idea that the behaviour of some humans can always be predicted. The individualist is, by definition, the guy who stands apart from the common herd. He (because it is a gendered subject) likes to wax ruefully about accepting the reality of what ‘humans’ are really like as a way of ruling out utopias—but he implicitly separates humans into the schlubs and the inspired. Even the superficially liberatory idea of ‘self-ownership’ espoused by many praxeological Austrians and libertarians is a coy way of conceptualising people as commodities, which is probably how these supposed lovers of liberty so often end up defending slavery. The excuse for this partiality to the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and the attendant indifference to those of the subject class (whatever the social content of these categories may be at any given time), is that private property is the basis of liberty. But this manages the impressive feat of being both a tautology and a contradiction. It’s a tautology because it assumes the point under question. It’s a contradiction because if private property, while conferring liberty on its possessors, also structurally curtails the liberty of the propertyless, then the concept of liberty becomes a luxury to be enjoyed by a few. From here the libertarian is inescapably pushed towards somehow justifying the inequity, towards explaining “Why yes, it is a luxury to be enjoyed by a few—and quite right too!” The justifications are easy to find. You need only look at the many and drastic specific inequities generated by capitalist society, generalise from them, and amputate history and context so that they appear to have no cause save for some primordial fact or another. The necessary amputation of context is especially striking in the case of the libertarians, because a whole host of the inequities they seize upon to justify hierarchy are based on the imperialism they profess to be against. It helps that one can be against today’s racist wars— though not on the grounds of anti-racism, except of the most specious variety—while quietly accepting and utilising the racial inequities inherited from the racist imperialism of the past. As usual, reactionary thinking is dependant upon amnesia."

- Elizabeth Sandifer, with Jack Graham,

'No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty: A Subjective Calculation of the Value of the Austrian School',

From the Book 'Neo-Reaction: A Basilisk'