#poetic rants

[anxiety-banana]

hello i would like everyone to know that sometimes you can sob your eyes out and have an existential crisis one moment and then suddenly you're booking your driver's test and applying for jobs and crocheting a blanket and maybe life isn't so bad anymore!! maybe you can feel awful and fix your life anyway!! maybe you're allowed to be a wreck and still be good enough!! i am a full on adult and have avoided getting my license for years but now i'm finally doing it because i've grown around the fear!!!! the world didn't crash and burn when i was fifteen!! i did this for myself and i'm going to be okay!!

[go-star-sailor]

transfem wirt truthers wya

[lostmf]

[bibliophilliqueee]

[dragons-for-the-win]

I don't want a partner. I really don't.

But then some days I think how much I would like to be mutually obsessed with someone. To have someone I can't stop thinking about and whom I could write endless books about. To have someone I can slow-dance with, but then laugh at the most random thing ever. To have someone who makes me want to write poetry bc, how could I not? For love songs to start making sense.

But then again, I just want to be someone's first choice no matter what.

[nipsyyy]

I don’t want you to fall in love with me,because we fall by accident. I want you to walk towards me,and then sprint towards me,all on purpose, I wanted you to love me on purpose.

-nipuna

[lo-fag]

just imagine the true crime shit around mr beast in like ten years when hes been left behind. imagine jack weddle's isolation footage getting leaked and how haunting it will be. they said they could make a horror cut out of it. a horror cut. out of footage meant for children.

he was there, locked up, being tortured, because he needed the money. he was there, cracking jokes as he lost count of the days because jimmy said 'dance peasant dance.' he was told to run a marathon when he looked like a corpse and he did because there was no other choice. he couldnt wak for days after and he didnt even get fucking paid.

"If they're faking videos, why couldn't we fake this one?"

jack weddle was driven to near insanity in the name of content so if i see any fucks out there defending James Stephen Donaldson i will rip you apart.

[weatheredcopper]

transness in media is so often represented as something inherently connected to suffering but thats really not the case. being trans is i think inherently joyous and its living in a society that is so bent on crushing trans people that causes all the suffering

[rhaenin-time]

No, House Targaryen is not inherently "doomed" by the very same flaws (and themes) that doomed the civilization that they left.

No, they're not fated to succumb to the Doom that they survived specifically because of the foresight that set them apart from everyone else who perished. Not only would it be terrible, simplistic writing, it would also endorse a terrible, simplistic worldview.

People choosing to make House Targaryen a representation of and thematic successor to not just the civilization that they differentiated themselves from, but the power structure that they chose to leave, literally divested from, and actively worked to prevent from rising again in another form... really rubs me the wrong way.

Why isn't this projection and generalization done for any of the families that come from the cultures that are not coded as other? Why is it only the family that's been separated from their cultural context? Why do the other families each get to be unique, complex manifestations not just of different aspects of their cultures, but of their own specific histories?

Why is the foreign degenerate family both a representation of everything wrong with the culture they come from, and a scapegoat for everything wrong with the system they assimilated into? How is it they represent everything bad about what they left behind, and also everything bad about the land they came to? Even though all those flaws are not only shared by the system as a whole, but are flaws that predate their arrival, that they were punished for resisting, and that they are demonstrated to be incompatible with. Why is it always both?

It just rings so familiar to the way so many people view the other in real life. Because the Targaryens are overtly, and intentionally written as the other. It's the reason so many people identify with them, and it's the very same reason that other people vilify them. They're not just the in-universe other to the 'default' culture established in the text, but they're also given characteristics that we, the reader and audience, can recognize as other and even sometimes anathema to Western Christian culture.

Perhaps the old tales were true, and Dragonstone was built with the stones of hell

A Storm of Swords, Chapter 25, Davos III

I want you to ask yourself: Why is the idea of "fire and brimstone" evil?

To paraphrase the annoying people that love to cite Ramsay when they feel like it: If you look at a morally complex family surrounded by other morally complex families in a morally complex world in a story that's famed for seeking to challenge your underlying assumptions, and think that their association with fire and brimstone is meant to signify their singular satanic evilness, rather than say... challenge that very Eurocentric assumption, you haven't been paying attention.

This vilification mindset where the Targaryens are the singular evil of Westeros is so common to people who seem to want to consume ASoIaF without engaging with the criticisms of the Eurocentric worldview of history at the heart of it. And they end up using the convenient “others” to project all the wrongs of that world onto so they don't need to examine it any deeper.

This is the part where I so often get crucified!

This is the take that so often gets me crucified for "trivializing real world bigotry" in an attempt to "moralize interpretations of fiction" by an onslaught of people with troubling ideologies who then ironically steer the onslaught to moralizing their interpretations of fiction in a way that seeks to either mask or justify their troubling ideologies.

The worldbuilding of ASoIaF is an almost unparalleled projection of the Eurocentric worldview. That's what makes the world feel so rich. That's why GRRM and even the readers and audience are able to craft so many details that feel intuitive. But that also means that how you choose to interpret that world is often driven by underlying biases and ideologies that relate to that worldview — especially if you're not willing to challenge them the way George RR Martin does and encourages you to do.

It means that certain potential biases and ideologies people might balk at outwardly expressing in the real world are recontextualized in a way that feels more comfortable to indulge in.

There are countless examples from countless parts of the narrative. Honestly, you could fill books on the matter. But the one I'll point to right now is how the vilification I pointed out earlier is so emblematic of how the Eurocentric worldview often seeks to project their own flaws onto the other or choose scapegoats for systemic issues.

It comes from the same place with how someone pointed out that the baffling bastardphobia that would have medieval peasants giving the side eye is so often people jumping at the chance to “cosplay” as bigots who base their arguments in misogyny and bio-essentialism. Because it's an acceptable channel to indulge in that mindset in a way that they'd often otherwise question, or at least hold back from expressing out of caution.

And there I go again. "Moralizing fandom" for pointing out that fandom is so often used as a 'safe space' to build communities that share and spread troubling ideologies that you're not allowed to criticize because those ideologies have been 'appropriately' decontextualized from their real-world parallels, even though those parallels are still very much there.

But the problem is that it's impossible to simply 'channel' bigotry and leave it in an 'acceptable' space, because bigotry doesn't work like that. It's not a static object you can carry around in your pocket to play with when you think it's safe to do so. It's a blight. A living poison that feeds and grows and spreads. And if you give it a 'safe space' and continue to feed it with 'acceptable' fuel, it will always find its way out.

[mothlingmeg]

I existed long before i met you. I lived before I knew you. I loved things before we ever spoke for the first time. Your perception of me is small and incomplete. I do not owe it to you to change myself or stay in one place forever. I will take up space.

[originalmoonkid]

But I never want to learn the art of letting go. Holding on means holding close every memory, every heartbeat, every trace of love that made me who I am. Letting go feels like losing pieces of myself, like erasing the moments that mattered most. I’d rather carry the weight than lose the beauty in the pain.

[pinkgloomydoll]

i feel like i've become a polished mirror - smooth, reflective, and hollow. i've spent so much time perfecting this surface that there’s no room for anything else. my friends, hobbies, the things that made me feel alive—they’ve all faded into the background, replaced by an endless cycle of maintaining thinness. when people look at me, they see the lustrous surface, but i don’t even recognise the person behind the reflection anymore. all that’s left is this gleaming shell, reflecting back expectations and hiding the ache inside.

[blueikky]

I wonder if anyone has ever heard a song and remembered me, if they have ever read a book and thought I would like it, if they have ever written a poem inspired by me, if they have watched something I always recommended. And, if by chance, they have ever thought they loved me.

[lostmf]

[euesworld]

"Intimacy and magic between two souls is the thing we all search for, someone to share every part of ourselves and so much more.. to mingle souls is an art, a seduction. Like a sacred dance inside of us, causing feelings that change us in ways that we never expected or even expect at all.. we grow, we wilt, and sometimes we don't even know how we feel. But that's part of the allure, the mystery.. all you have to do is pick up a book, it's happened all throughout history."

It may be public cringe but everyone wants it.. don't even try to lie - eUë

[cyberr-v0id]

Too many people relate the ocean to sunshine and summer and relaxation and… that’s just not it.

I mean no hate if that’s what it means to you, and maybe it’s the fact that I AM an ocean child, my family is from the sea and we came to this country across it, but I can just never relate the ocean to an ice cream and a pool floatie.

To me the ocean is wild. It is danger. It is freedom. It is tasting the edge and knowing that not everyone can come back from it. It is swimming as far out the bay as you can when you’re twelve because you’re just so enchanted by the water and what it promises, only to realise that you’ve drifted far from where your family was. It is promises and secrets and treasure. It is alluring, a siren in the back of my mind, calling to me. It is hooked deep into who I am and I know that I can never come back from that.

The ocean is restless and she cares for no one any more than she has to. She would willingly drag me down ti her depths and never let me go, and that just makes me love her more. The ocean is in my heart.

The ocean, the sea, the waves that crash on the rocks in the storm, that rush up up up over the sand banks and into the town. That isn’t a being that is intrinsically tied to sunlight and fruit and sun tans.

Have you never stood on the cliffs, or the end of the pier, and felt the waves crashing below and the salt spray fly onto your face? Have you never felt the tug of a current, or stayed on the shore even as the tide comes up to your legs, then up to the harbour wall? Have you never stepped into her fierce embrace and wished to never leave?

The ocean is restless, yes, and wild, and dangerous. She will be tamed by nobody.