#not in a purely positive way

[star0rice]

This is the first time I've posted something generative on tumblr in almost six years.

[mysteriousbeetle]

cass' most underrated beef is her beef with tim or more accurately his beef with her. like it's the beef with the most presence in canon but i've never seen people explore it or anything.

[draayder]

it's so difficult to talk about the societal shift many transmascs face once they're read as male I'm white so I had a very gentle shift especially compared to many POC, but I still felt it. interactions with women that were previously simple now required additional care and effort. gestures that had previously read as friendly now seemed intimidating and predatory. it sucks to lose that solidarity that I didn't think twice about before. it sucks to have to consider if I'm going to make someone uncomfortable by acting the way I always have, because I'm still the same person and it doesn't seem fair that I have to change how I exist in the world in order to be a man

and I get it. believe me I get it. I was on the other side of those interactions before, I know how intimidating it is to have a man talking to you in a way where you can't quite be certain he isn't flirting. that he's not going to take things badly. you have to be closed off or else you're accused of leading him on. I'm not blaming any of the women for this. this is another problem brought about by the patriarchy

but for any trans men or transmascs out there in the thick of that change and feeling uncomfortable and weird about it, you're right. it isn't fair, it does suck, it shouldn't have to be this way. you're not whiny for feeling this. it gets better over time and you learn how to exist again, but it's rough for a while. hang in there

[anghraine]

Speaking of the social context of P&P and Austen in general, and also just literature of that era, I'm always interested in how things like precisely formulated hierarchies of precedence and tables of ranked social classes interact with the more complex and nuanced details of class-based status and consequence on a pragmatic day-to-day level. I remembered reading a social historian discussing the pragmatics of class wrt eighteenth-century English life many years ago and finally tracked down the source:

"In spite of the number of people who got their living from manufacture or trade, fundamentally it was a society in which the ownership of land alone conveyed social prestige and full political rights. ... The apex of this society was the nobility. In the eyes of the Law only members of the House of Lords, the peerage in the strictest use of the word, were a class apart, enjoying special privileges and composing one of the estates of the realm. Their families were commoners: even the eldest sons of peers could sit in the House of Commons. It was therefore in the social rather than in the legal sense of the word that English society was a class society. Before the law all English people except the peers were in theory equal. Legal concept and social practice were, however, very different. When men spoke of the nobility, they meant the sons and daughters, the brothers and sisters, the uncles and aunts and cousins of the peers. They were an extremely influential and wealthy group.

"The peers and their near relations almost monopolized high political office. From these great families came the wealthiest Church dignitaries, the higher ranks in the army and navy. Many of them found a career in law; some even did not disdain the money to be made in trade. What gave this class its particular importance in the political life of the day was the way in which it was organized on a basis of family and connection ... in eighteenth-century politics men rarely acted as isolated individuals. A man came into Parliament supported by his friends and relations who expected, in return for this support, that he would further their interests to the extent of his parliamentary influence.

"Next in both political and social importance came the gentry. Again it is not easy to define exactly who were covered by this term. The Law knew nothing of gentle birth but Society recognized it. Like the nobility this group too was as a class closely connected with land. Indeed, the border line between the two classes is at times almost impossible to define ... Often these men are described as the squirearchy, this term being used to cover the major landowning families in every county who were not connected by birth with the aristocracy. Between them and the local nobility there was often considerable jealousy. The country gentleman considered himself well qualified to manage the affairs of his county without aristocratic interference.

"...The next great layer in society is perhaps best described the contemporary term 'the Middling Sort'. As with all eighteenth-century groups it is difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation between them and their social superiors and inferiors. No economic line is possible, for a man with no pretensions to gentility might well be more prosperous than many a small squire. There was even on the fringe between the two classes some overlapping of activities ... The ambitious upstart who bought an estate and spent his income as a gentleman, might be either cold-shouldered by his better-born neighbours or treated by them with a certain contemptuous politeness. If however his daughters were presentable and well dowered, and if his sons received the education considered suitable for gentlemen, the next generation would see the obliteration of whatever distinction still remained. The solid mass of the middling sort had however no such aspirations, or considered them beyond their reach.

"...This term [the poor] was widely used to designate the great mass of the manual workers. Within their ranks differences of income and of outlook were as varied as those that characterized the middle class. Once again the line of demarcation is hard to draw..."

—Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (29-34)

(There's plenty more interesting information in the full chapter, especially regarding "the poor," and the chapter itself is contracted from a lengthier version published earlier.)

[messangerforthestars]

“We need more morally gray characters” you guys can barely handle topaz and jade.

[otaku553]

The eventual kazuha and sanemi dynamic

[mira-likes]

I found the scene of Fan Xian and Fan Jian jumping around with the discipline ruler and putting on the anger/punishment act very entertaining, but I just saw someone’s comment that like “Fan Jian knows he can’t hit him” and that made me pause. Can Fan Jian get away with flogging Fan Xian (the emperor’s biological son) if he wants to? How much of his approach to parenting Fan Xian is down to him being well aware that the emperor is looking over his metaphorical shoulder?

[lemm-moxx]

Dude i really need to write a proper post abt monstale this aus been brewing for over 2 years 😭

[cent-scratchnsniff]

i was rereading the story dialog for the sephirah while ago (upper layer so far considering i have a doc to contain all of my ramblings and thoughts once looking it over and getting actual lines to be able to know exactly what was said to base my feelings off of rather than the pure unfiltered pain or i suppose somewhat shock at first and those garbled memories of what happened) and after reading tiphereth's and then going to netzach's again it's just.

imagine you have to see what is deemed your other half, the person keeping you sane, your only companion you actually love and like, your literal ‘twin’ have to get crushed but some bum that never does his job and can easily be seen as 'not meeting standards' does get the same treatment at all when your own brother had been destroyed for less like spiraling into some dangerous stains of thoughts (thought be fair he did end up not as respondent and at that point already had what i'll inadequately describe as 'memory leakage' . But from the general idea of the side of tiphereth). he'll be more better than that drug addict ever will be in her eyes, someone who can't even do a report on time and even then is half assed to where at that point they'd just do it themself in the first place. he'll be way better, someone who is quite literally her family. yet why is her brother the only one that needs to suffer through that constant degradation of the soul? the constant wiping of the self? the memories made and lost? why the hell is someone that should deserve it in her eyes, someone so unmotivated and lazy, someone who she deems as a person not able to do a single thing right, not having that happen to them? why is it the person she loves so dearly, so close to her that she wishes would've stayed instead of some now hollow husk and imitation of imprinted memories when that hasn't happened to Any One Else? why does she have to go through all of that, having to see someone that she used to know and adore turn into a hollow husk and imitation of what once was - having to feel as if shes already looking at a walking corpse with memories shoved inside - just for someone like Netzach to not end up crushed to pieces.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I'm so heavily anti-advertising that all pitches sound goofy silly to me/I can never take them seriously, so I have no idea how I'll manage to to advertise my game even if I do finally finish it soon-ish lol...

[wonder-worker]

"As for the government of the kingdom, [Edward V] had complete confidence in the peers of realm and the queen."

"According to the Crowland continuator, [Elizabeth Woodville] seems to have taken the king's place in listening to his council immediately after Edward IV's death. It does appear that she expected to have some role in her son's kingship, and the Crowland continuator’s report of the letters sent to her by [Richard of Gloucester] indicates that she had good reason to expect to be able to work with him and the other councillors: 'the duke of Gloucester wrote the most pleasant letters to console the queen; he promised to come and offer submission, fealty and all that was due from him to his lord and king, Edward V, the first-born son of his brother the dead king and the queen'."

"[However], in what was Gloucester's first coup, Edward V was separated from his household and Woodville advisors. When the young king questioned the move, Buckingham was reported to have told the boy 'It is not in the business of women but men to govern kingdoms'. The blunt remark referred to the authority of Elizabeth Woodville as queen and the power she must have anticipated within the new political climate left by Edward IV's sudden death. [...] While the veracity of this scene is questionable*, the words attributed to the duke no doubt seemed plausible to Dominic Mancini who believed they exemplified the popular sentiment held by men [...]."

— Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard the Third / J.L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503 / Alexander R. Brondarbit, Power Brokers and the Yorkist State, 1461-1485

*One of Mancini's key sources seems to have been Edward V's own doctor, John Argentine, who attended to him in the Tower. It's very likely that he was the one who recounted this scene to Mancini, which suggests that it should probably be considered more credible than not.

[crystal-verse]

that promised guide on how i draw g'raha's face, feat. notes in the upper right corner and my own little specbio/au way of drawing him in the lower left

(shoutout to @fell-court for providing the reference screenshots!)

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Your silly ray pfp edits bring me joy he's so silly

Ray internally whenever he sees his two best friends

[loderlied]

conceptually i enjoy most of the new arcane season but holy shit did this need at least twice or ideally even thrice as many episodes to tell the story.

[emiko-matsui]

I don't know if Jake knows it, but Hardwon was so jealous of Galad that he was slightly attracted to him

[adelinamoteru]

batfam is written like a business conglomerate more than it is an actual family in comics verse

I don’t remember whose post I saw that said this bc I consume content at an alarming lightening speed, but someone on here talked about how basically past jason (but obviously still including damian) the title of family is used so flippantly towards the relationships the rest of batman actually have with each other instead of the reality of them being literally more like business partners