#maybe you should reread the post

[lotus-pear]

TWELVE KAY LETS FUCKING GO we are back to an even number i’m so glad ‼️‼️‼️‼️

[slavhew]

i draw myself a lot

[gjsxj0]

mindless rambling in tags don't mind me

[mamawasatesttube]

saw someone being wrong about kon on the internet again (i know. shocking) and you are all so lucky i'm sick and feverish and lazy because i DID just seriously entertain the thought of writing up a small essay complete with issue and panel citations about why it's simply incorrect to say that kon never really seemed to reciprocate any sort of crush on tim before geoff/tt03. this is just not true. you dont have to actually ship them but to downplay their importance to each other even in the earliest days is simply incorrect. i'm too tired and achy to bother digging through comics to pull up all the issues that have the bits i want to point at but like... they were both very mutually important to each other from early on. it was in no way shape or form one-sided, whether you want to read that as platonic or romantic. man.

[james-spooky]

this is a test

[dont-offend-the-bees]

Hello, uhm, may I ask if you're going to continue lonely bones? I know it's been a while but I was rereading it right now and just whoa

Have a great day <3

You are in luck, anon — chapter 3 will be posted this week (if all goes according to plan abdjnsbdjsnnajd) and I have plans to complete the final chapter before the year is out 💛 It is only 4 chapters total it will NOT be abandoned this I swear to thee.

[theskymahtin]

yo WHY did I never notice that hennessy HAS A FISH SCALE TATTOO ? aka a tattoo probably very similar to the one she later gives ronan.......... i need a moment

[Image ID: photograph of a paragraph from pg 70 of Call Down the Hawk.

Transcript: She had changed since she'd left in the car. Her kinky hair was now pulled up in a ragged black topknot. She wore tinted glasses, a rabbit fur coat, a lace bralette white against her dark skin, and leather leggings that exposed a fish-scale tattoo on her lower calf. More pastel tattoos covered her knuckles, which were also smeared with paint. He still couldn't tell how old she was. She could be twenty-five. She could be seventeen.]

[captain-space-kin]

oh okay so you're more likely to trust the incest shipper than the normal one

“How dare you say we piss on the poor” looking ass

[stevebabey]

SO, i’m not the best writer, but seeing your latest post abt stevie and the necklaces spurred this ramble so enjoy <33 also hope u have a good day and sorry for dropping this in ur inbox <33

•••

steve harrington is 100% the type to put your necklaces on for you. rings too. bracelets, anklets, really any-freaking-thing as an excuse to put his hands on you (in a not total skeeze-ball way thank you very much)

he likes that you rely on him, for the little things most he thinks, when you smile at him and move your hair out of the way for him to clasp your necklace on.

the necklace itself is a dainty thing he bought you for your year anniversary, and even if steve himself thinks you deserve something better, it’s your favorite piece of jewelry and you refuse to take it off other than to shower and sleep. (granted you used to sleep in it, before you realized it would cause your hair to tangle so you stopped).

and one day, steve is surprised to see you hunched at your dresser sobbing- on a day where it feels like nothing can go right and this one thing is weighing too heavily on your shoulders. and when he pulls you back to see what you’re holding, he has to stifle a laugh at the tangled chain that you’re cradling as if it was going to slip through your fingers.

and so, as calmly as steve harrington can ask (which is pretty calmly he likes to think) he asks for a pair of tweezers, and for you to go wash your face off in the sink and take a breather. you do that, of course, because who wouldn’t listen to steve harrington, who talks to you in moments of panic as if he’s scared you’re going to leave. (and he’ll never tell you, but he makes wishes at night that you won’t do just that).

and when you come back, face clean of tear tracks and actually being able to breathe- you feel silly. silly that you let a necklace of all things cause a full on come-apart. and so you’re nervous when you go back into your room, because you know your boyfriend is in there and you’re painfully afraid that he’s going to make fun of you and…and…

oh.

you’d seen steve harrington doing a bunch of domestic things, too many to count on both hands. from grocery shopping, to babysitting, to wearing a cheesy apron and grilling, you’d felt like you’d seen it all.

but to walk in and see him, big hands with your neon pink tweezers between his fingers, balancing your silly tangled up necklace on his knee as he sat cross legged on your bed… you think you fall all over again.

you sit in silence while he gets it untangled, and when he does, you shift your hair out of the way and allow him to clip it on for you. he presses soft kisses on the nape of your neck after, even when you murmur you’re apology of blowing it out of proportion and you’ll understand if he thinks your silly.

steve harrington doesn’t respond to that.

he wants to say, and he thinks he will later, when you’re cuddled together in bed, nose to nose- that nothing you do is silly. that how you react is normal because your human, and he loves you so much that his chest aches.

but he doesn’t say that now, not when your voice is heavy with what could become tears. instead, steve simply takes your left hand, spins that little ring you have on your thumb (and totally doesn’t picture a ring on your fourth finger thank you very much), and asks if you want to go on a date with him that night to get your mind off the bad.

and when you agree, because you definitely agree, steve simply smiles at you- and uses your necklace to bring your lips to his.

says ur not the best writer and then drops the most beautiful shit in my inbox 😭

like?? god, getting so used to him doting on you in that way that you just pull your hair aside, it’s instinct now, because steve is always there n ready to help?

calming you down, fixing the necklace, picturing a ring on the fOURTH FINGER!!! and offering the date to distract u from the shit day 😩 god FUCK and USING THE NECKLACE TO PULL YOU IN FOR A KISS? EVIL!!! U ARE EVIL FOR SAYING THIS!!! HE SO FUCKING WOULD he’s so boyfriend i’ll die, i’d do unspeakable things to make him mine

thank u so much for dropping this splendid gift into my inbox it made my bad week ASTRONOMICALLY better <3 i enjoyed ur ramble so much & i hope u have the best day MWAH

[strangerhands]

if any of you ever notice me liking, un-liking, and re-liking your posts, (sometimes multiple times a day. sometimes multiple days apart.) please (try to) ignore me. i am sorry. i am insane. thank you. have a good day

[a-frog-in-a-bog]

Why are you traumatized by ace flags, they're just colours, they won't hurt you

the formative experience of seeing some of the most vile homophobia and racism on here from people with an ace flag in their icon in the name of defending asexuals from the mean evil queers when i was a teenager (tumblr ace discourse)

[gutfaced]

I’ve come to counter claim the ‘all black boys are a threat’ and counter with the fact that physically they look like they’re strong contenders but both are shown to have empathy, thresh spares katniss for her care towards Rue after saving her. Reaper cares for Dil and ‘buries’ the dead tributes to respect them post Mortem as human beings.

re: seeder, chaff & district 11 potrayals

hey! so! it's not really a counter claim if i already know and agree with this. i was saying that the physical trait that suzanne wove into certain black characters will overshadow their good deeds in some cases. wasn't even me who said that they were “all threats” and that wasn't even the sentence? i literally said in my post that their LOOKS make them seem that way but they're empathetic and end up doing good deeds, which very much does outweigh their appearance most of the time.

and DESCRIBED. not is.

[callixton]

gregory davies schrödinger’s bisexual

[emerynn]

In a post that was… a long time ago, you put in the tags:

“i JUST wrote an essay on this omfg i have SO many thoughts about sir gawain and the green knight”

The post was about how Gawain literally had no way to win in SGATGK. You were talking in the tags about shame culture and the instability of the moral culture and symbols and identity and the like, and I was wondering….Do you have a link to that essay or something?

If not then that’s totally fine, I just ALSO have many thoughts on sir Gawain and the green knight and love not only the poem but the essays and academic articles and stuff surrounding it, and that essay honestly sounds really interesting and cool! So I thought I’d ask, but yeah!

Hey Anon! First of all, thanks so much for coming into my inbox to talk Sir Gawain with me - a very unexpected but very welcome surprise! I'd completely forgotten about that post I reblogged, but yeah, I took a Middle English paper in my second year of uni, and the Sir Gawain essay was my favourite one to research all term. It's just such a fun poem, and like you said, there's so much great discussion to delve into for it. It's been a little while since I thought about it though, so it's so fun to have a reason to shift my brain back into medieval mode again!

It was just a weekly essay (we had to write an essay each week on a different text/author/group of texts), so it was rather frantically researched and wasn't something I was able to spend loads of time on. I don't think I came to any particularly new or interesting conclusions, and I didn't post it anywhere or anything. That said, given that it's pretty short, I'm happy to copy and paste it here for you if you'd like to read it! Like all my uni essays, it was written the day before the deadline in a slightly sleep deprived haze, so it's not the best thing written on Gawain by a long shot, but it'd be lovely to have someone outside of my supervisor read it! Obviously just please don't use it anywhere or plagiarise it, but I assume that goes without saying lol

If you do get around to reading it, I'd love to hear your thoughts! But no pressure at all ofc - honestly it's just super nice to be asked! I'll put it below a read more, along with my sources - thanks again for the lovely message anon :)

‘For man may hyden his harme,   bot unhap ne may hit, For there hit ones is tached   twynne wil hit never.’ What do you understand to be the meaning and significance of Gawain’s last words?

Despite Gawain's confidence in asserting the green gridle as a signal of his fundamentally flawed nature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deliberately complicates the reader's ability to interpret the girdle - and by extension, the poem's moral - in such easy metaphorical terms. Gawain's initial symbol, the pentangle, embodies an honour system which sees morality as intertwined with reputation, making Gawain's apparent goodness into a static symbol whose worth depends on its ability to be interpreted by others. By replacing it with the girdle, the poem alludes to the instability of a community-based chivalric moral code. In offering the reader multiple interpretations of the girdle, with Gawain's held in no higher narrative esteem than Arthur's or the Green Knight's, the poem suggests the limitations of relying on community for moral validation, which ultimately leads to a performance rather than practice of morality, and therefore stunts any opportunity for personal growth.

Gawain’s certainty in labelling the girdle a metaphorical scar, to ‘remorde to myselven/ The faut and the fayntyse of the flesch crabbed’ (2434-35), is immediately challenged by two alternative perspectives – the Green Knight’s, and Arthur’s.[1] The Green Knight suggests Gawain take the girdle as little more than a trophy, ‘a pure token/ Of the chaunce of the Grene Chapel at chivalrous knightes.’ (2398-99), ‘pure’ acting in direct antithesis to the charge of sin that Gawain lays against it. Arthur and the court, meanwhile, have an emotionally opposed reaction to Gawain, greeting his morose confession by ‘Laughen loude thereat’ (2514), and appropriating Gawain’s symbol of personal shame into one of communal honour: ‘For that was accorded the renoun of the Rounde Table,/ And he honoured that hit had evermore after.’ (2519-20). The poet presents the reader with three inharmonious definitions, with no individual appearing the obvious source of authority. Thus, Gawain’s attempt at using the girdle to signify a universal truth in his aphoristic statement, ‘man may hyden his harme, but unhap ne may hit’ (2511) is radically undermined. Through offering, and refusing to discredit, alternating interpretations, the Gawain-poet makes his own description of the girdle’s ‘abelef as a buderyk bounden by [Gawain’s] side’ (2485) ironic in the passivity of its phrasing – Gawain may say that ‘unhap ne may hit’, but Arthur’s swift reinterpretation of the girdle repositions it from absolute symbol to simply a belt that Gawain has tied to suit his subjective purposes, and may just as easily untie. This ending marks a significant transformation for the reader’s understanding of the Romantic world Gawain inhabits, previously one in which symbols and epithets can be interpreted to indicate moral truth about an individual; a transition made clear in the movement from the pentangle as Gawain’s symbol, which Ralph Hanna describes as ‘the emblem of a world where meaning is clear and exemplary’ to the girdle, ‘to which meaning must be assigned’.[2] The Gawain-poet upholds the pentangle for its symbolic potential, pausing the narrative to interject, ‘And why the pantangel apendes to that prince noble/ I am in tente you to telle’ (623-24). The and the details provided in relation to the pentangle – ‘Hit is a synge that Salomon sette sumwhyle’ (625)’, ‘Englych hit callen/ Overal, as I here’ (629-30) appeal to the desire for a symbol with absolute meaning. The interpretation that follows of the pentangle’s application to Gawain, representing his five virtues, associates the accuracy of historical and linguistic information about the symbol with the apparently also objective information it relays about Gawain’s moral character. As Putter and Stokes suggest, ‘ethics and aesthetics come very close together in this poem’; in a reputation-based society, a kind of metaphorical vision is encouraged, which allows symbols like Gawain’s pentangle to be correctly interpreted as indicative of his nature.[3] Thus, the Gawain-poet provides the reader with the girdle as an alluring signification of an absolute moral truth, only to complicate this moral to such an extent that the girdle comes to signify the opposite, replacing the pentangle’s moral idealism and certainty with the suggestion that morality may be subjective.

Fitting to his interpretation of the girdle, the Green Knight disdains the kind of performative morality that underlies the reputation-based structure of Arthur’s court, associating it with the pride he has apparently come to test. Thus, he announces, ‘What, is this Arthures house […]. That all the rous rennes of thurgh ryalmes so mony? Where is now your sorqudrye and your conquests[..]/?’ (309-311). The Green Knight’s condescending tone relies upon the inevitable tension between the hyperbolic tales he is aware of, and the disappointing reality. There is a metatextual element to this speech, as the contemporary reader, too, would have heard tales of Arthur’s court’s ‘conquests’, and thus what is within the text a challenge to the pride of Arthur’s court becomes an implicit challenge of the implausibility of the Romance genre. As Ad Putter suggests, in Sir Gawain, the poet appears to deliberately use this fantastical genre to pose ‘an interpretative challenge […] how can we take it seriously?’[4] His response is to explore the psychological ramifications of existing as a character within this canon. As Gawain’s despair at the end of the poem indicates, this mythological society in which reputation is paramount has a fragile moral core. When Gawain flinches during the beheading scene, the Green Knight chastises him by saying ‘Thou art not Gawan’ (2270), alluding to his famed reputation. But what this truly reveals is that no one can be ‘Gawan’, who would not fear his head under a falling axe – within a genre predicated on hyperbolic acts of knightly courage, the Gawain-poet radically asserts the humanity that underlies Gawain’s character and makes living up to his generic reputation impossible. In doing so, the poem not only further undercuts Gawain’s shame at not fulfilling this reputation, but it discredits the entire notion of morality based on chivalry – based, fundamentally, on how good one is judged to be by others, rather than by an internalised moral compass. As A.C. Spearing suggests, the ramifications of this society manifest in a ‘criteria of conduct […] not fully internalized’: thus, Gawain ‘fails to recognize’ that his initial retention of the girdle ‘is a sin’ until it infringes on his reputation – that being, until the Green Knight reveals his knowledge of it.[5] Like Arthur, who responds to the Green Knight’s challenge of the court’s reputation by blushing – ‘The blod schotte for schame into his schyre face’ (317), Gawain, caught out in his lie, feels ‘All the blod of his brest blende in his face,/ That all he schrank for schame’ (2371-72). Their identical responses betray how Gawain’s embarrassment at his contradicted reputation, rather than actual feelings of moral guilt, lie at the core of the shame he associates with the girdle.

The poem thus exposes the flaws of a communal morality system, in which morality becomes more rigid and absolute – either the individual does, or does not, maintain their idealised reputation. Hence, Gawain’s assertion that if he is flawed, he must be fundamentally flawed: ‘Now am I fauty and false, and ferde have ben ever’ (2382). In this sense, the poem’s ending is further unsettling, as Arthur’s absorption of the girdle as a performance piece into the mythos of the court signifies his ignorance as to the dangers of this [MS1] structure. He continues to assume an externalised identity predicated on reputation, and as such, will continue not to scrutinise himself internally. Gawain may view the girdle as a metaphor for shame, and Arthur for honour, but, as David Aers notes, ‘none of this is of much consequence since nothing much will change anyway’; the absolutism of the Arthurian court prevents moral development.[6] The poem’s ending becomes bathetic, as the self-destruction inherent to the Arthurian court is stressed in the characters’ ignorance to their need for moral progression. Indeed, this is made all the more tragic as Gawain has already demonstrated within the poem that he can progress towards his idealised reputation, even if he can never truly fulfil its requirements. When he initially places his head down to receive the Green Knight’s blow, Gawain ‘[shrinks] a little with the schulderes for the scharp yrne’ (2267). As the Green Knight notes, such an act is contrary to his hyperbolically brave reputation, as ‘Gawan […] that is so good holden,/ That never arwed for no here.’ (2270-71). However, Gawain’s response demonstrates his ability to grow towards this role, as he determines not to flinch a second time, and successfully ‘graythly hit bides and glent with no member’ (2292). As Ralph Hanna suggests, the beheading scene is heavily charged with symbolism connoting rebirth, from the New Year setting, to the description of Gawain ‘Never syn that he was burn born of his moder/ [….] half so blythe’ (2320-21), to the spilling of his blood onto white snow, which Hanna calls ‘a tabula rasa on which Gawain must learn to write what he […] is now.’[7] If Gawain has emerged from a metaphorical death morally absolved and able to discover himself anew, then the positive potential of this revelation is immediately squandered in his curt refusal of Bertilak’s invitation back to his castle. His identity is still wholly externalised, and therefore his first instinct upon gaining an apparent greater self-understanding is to return to the court to vocalise it.The Arthurian court has a holistic and restrictive grip on individual identity in Sir Gawain, inescapable not because there is no opportunity to do so, but because the knights themselves – represented in Gawain and Arthur’s definitions of the girdle as still performatively signalling their reputations, just as the pentangle did – are ignorant of the very ways in which their potential is stunted by the structures they inhabit.

In showing the multiple, often conflicting meanings the girdle is given, the poem uses Gawain’s quest of self-discovery to destabilise the very moral structure at the core of the Arthurian court. In doing so, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight suggests the limitations of an external moral compass, and instead encourages the cultivation of the kind of more nuanced, internalised mortality that Gawain fails to realise.

Sources I quoted from: These are definitely worth reading in their own rights, since they express everything I had to say, and do so far better than second-year me ever could! You might have already read it, but if not, I'd particularly recommend the Spearing. I loved his interpretation, and it ended up forming most of the basis for my argument.

[1] The Works of the Gawain Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed. by Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), p.401; all further references to this text will be made in the body of the essay.

[2] Ralph Hanna III, ‘Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle’, Viator, 14 (1983), 289-302 (p.290).

[3] Putter and Stokes, ‘Foreword to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, The Works of the Gawain Poet, p.246.

[4] Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (London; New York: Longman, 1996), p.45.

[5] A.C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet; A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp.224- 25.

[6] David Aers, ‘Christianity for Courtly Subjects: Reflections on the Gawain-Poet’ in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1997), p.99.

[7] Hanna, pp.295-96.

[clonerightsagenda]

Speaking of adaptations I will probably watch while in recovery, given it looks like L&Co aged up the characters, I wonder if they adjusted the talent loss timeline or if the characters are that much closer to aging out. Lucy might be ok but hopefully the others are polishing their resumes. Probably not though.

[dontwanderoff]

im considering making percy jackson the next class novel in my class but like, do i think the kids will actually enjoy it and that they're definitely the right age for it OR am i just wanting to do it because i want to read it???