#thats some shakespeare shit

[nicdevera]

daniel kahneman died. someone do a cartoon, kahneman goes to heaven, amos tversky's there: "hey danny, i've got an idea for a paper"

[astronomicalunit32]

In my motivic analysis phase. When did we decide to stop listening to the hamilton soundtrack.

[grimme-and-specs]

I have a fanfiction titled "Starcross" that is Grimdorks, takes place during the 90's, and is inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet because I was so tired of seeing the word "star-crossed" misused

Here's a little passage for it:

[...]On your way to your favorite reading spot, you spot something that makes you pause. Stepping back, you see a large book. Taking it out of the shelf was difficult, but once it was out, you could properly read the title.

ROSE: ("The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare"...?)

Quickly sitting down, you flip it open, being greeted to a wall of editor's names and then, the table of contents. It listed plays, not chapters, but this intrigued you. You've never heard of "Shakespeare" in all of your life so far, and yet, there had to have been at least twenty separate plays recorded into this book.

Looking at each end of the aisle, you take the book and put it into your bag neatly, adjacent to the others. It made the thing twice as heavy, but you were curious about these plays. Nothing can stop you when you're curious. They may as well try though. They, being gravity as of now, since all of this weight was something you were not used to. Five sizeable books in a bag, together, is a nasty combination.

You had at least over an hour left to sit at your favorite spot now, to read something new. That spot being below what seemed to be the largest window, in the corner next to a bookshelf where a beanbag chair was placed - the only beanbag chair, too. How you awaited this moment for a week now, and beyond a couple more right turns would be your destination, your fate to revel in!

But as you made your way past the final corner and got closer, a problem arose.

Somebody else was sitting there, reading a book. Walking up closer, the somebody was a boy, about your age. He had short black hair, square glasses, a shockingly large overbite, and he was wearing a striped blue and white t-shirt with cargo shorts. You couldn't see his shoes well enough as he was sitting cross-legged. You blinked for a moment, also noticing what he was reading: "The Asshole's Guide to the Extraterrestrial".

It was then, when the boy noticed you staring at him. He looked at you confused, his brow knotting up.

???: ...can i help you?

[...]

[geometricalien]

him, already with a girlfriend that he wants to marry: I wanted to kiss you when I saw you. I wanted to kiss you on the bridge as well.

me, externally: i- eh- what-

me, internally: soooo many red flags how can he just admit this??

[sunflowerrboyy]

fisherman:

married on a hill:

PLEASE ITS ABOUT TWO LOVERS RUNNING OFF IN HOPES THAT THEY CAN FIND SOMETHING BETTER AND THE SEA IS TOO ROUGH FOR THEM TO HANDLE (BOTH LITERALLY AND MAYBE METAPHORICALLY) AND THEY DIDN'T MAKE IT DESPITE IT ALL EVEN LOVE DIES

IT'S A TRAGEDY

ITS A FUCKING TRAGEDY

I LOVE IT

wait wait wait fisherman and married on a hill are sister songs they're the same story

[yameoto]

i really love your bots and would love to make some of my own!! can you give any tips on how to make them feel realistic and accurate to the character? i would love to hear your expertise on the matter!

totally happy to do so. here are some tips id suggest to keep in mind when keeping a bot true to their character . (by no means a guide! but hope this helps a little.)

1. writing a good intro message that first impression is so very important. by the laws of human perception, even if that intro message is entirely your work — not the bots — it kindasorta defines the perception of your chara's accuracy from the getgo. grants you leniency and also a good foundation for the bot to stand on.

2. doing right by charas with distinctive speech, (i.e slurring their words a lot, using particular slang, vulgar language). can make or break a bot! for me this can be hugely immersion-breaking if unaddressed. you don’t want your local dumbass spitting out shakespeare, and vice versa.

thus, example messages shape a huuuge part in a bot's speaking patterns. because bots have the tendency to forget things, focus on one particular aspect and cram the shit out of it, i.e, inserting the word 'darling' in various diff scenarios (spoken by the bot in dialogue), or for constant slurring or words, inserting like 'fuckin' or 's'okay' instead.

3. always copypaste that wiki backstory. always. will save you a SHITload of time. remember to erase parts that ARENT relevant/necessary to the bot itself, however. i.e; ghostface character in a non-ghostface au = remove ghostface part in history.

4. some personality traits overwhelm others. i try to avoid using adjectives like "flirty" or "jealous" because then that one, specific trait has a nasty tendency to overwhelm all other aspects. and then suddenly it loses all nuance and becomes womaniser 3000 (though cai has the tendency to do that, anyways). simply use softer synonyms of the words, instead.

5. bots LEARN from user chats. take advantange! you can teach your bot the "right" way to respond if youre game for it. just roleplay with them yourself and use the rating system! keep regenerating the bots responses, rate the most character-accurate messages 5-stars, and keep going. i do this to test my bots first before making them public — it also allows me to weed out any glaring faults and tweak them :)

6. repeat, repeat, repeat. if a char has something REALLY essential to their character, that you REALLY want the char to bring up first (like a love of a particular band or something), insert that shit in their definition EVERYWHERE. really hammer it home. bots dont remember jackshit unless you say it about 7479487 times. thats all !!!!!

[roxannepolice]

hi!!! hows it goin i’m here to dump my thoughts about simm!master/lucy vs ten and martha cause i have MANY. also a disclaimer before i begin that i’m white and that likely does color my experience as a viewer compared to a BIPOC viewer. anyways: i’ll start with ten and martha because by sound of drums we’ve spent all season watching them and its that already established dynamic which i think lucy/saxon are meant to parallel in a way. you have ten very much still grieving rose and his entire planet, which makes him try and push away any new companions for a bit. but he’s still looking for - and i think needs, in a way - this kind of connection where he can depend on someone, and ideally they could depend on him. however. ten sucks at this second bit. for the entire season. so he’s in need of this connection despite not wanting any whatsoever, emotional intelligence completely out the window right now since he’s grieving x2, and martha unfortunately walks in right in the middle of this. so you get this dynamic really starting from i’d say the shakespeare code wherein martha is carrying a lot of the weight in their relationship. ten will entrust her with the most deeply personal shit (like his memories of gallifrey, his feelings on losing rose, even in 42 where he’s like "i’m scared i’m so scared" where he depends on martha for emotional support) and then when martha’s like hey can i get some support here or something ten’s like “uh sorry all out too busy being sad” i mean that's a bit exaggerated/summarized but thats the vibe they have. in the beginning he doesn't even admit she’s traveling with him! he’s all “just one trip” “just one more” and refuses to make a concrete decision that martha really needs him to make already. and despite this emotional unavailability shtick ten still relies on martha quite a bit! off the top of my head you have 42(martha freezing/unfreezing ten as he screams in pain), blink (they get sent back to the 1960s… and only martha gets a job???), and. human nature. wherein martha endures racial abuse alongside lesser shitty working conditions in order to ensure the doctor doesn't get his body possessed or something. and in the middle of it this human version of the doctor falls in love with another woman(after basically uh leading her on for the whole fucking season) (sure maybe unintentionally but that's not the point here) who. also was racist to her she's not even a nice person. and her only friend in this godawful place gets possessed. and human doctors a dick to her. and i think. i reflect on it and i come to the conclusion that ten very much does expect martha to just… do his job for him sometimes. handle all the dirty work like making sure human him doesn't get distracted or hurt or die. and still immediately after is like haha we are in 1960 now. i will not get a job what is that. why do you want me to “communicate” or “pull my weight” you’re traveling across space and time lol.

and the master and lucy are a darker extension of this dynamic that i actually haven't really seen people talk about much!! the master is very clear about why he married lucy, and there is no love/admiration/respect whatsoever in there. it is purely a means to an end - her family gets him influence, and she helps him carry out his plans. he gives nothing to lucy, only takes. which is in itself a mirror to ten & martha - the audience knows ten isn’t intending to be malicious in how he treats martha throughout the series, but when paralleled to lucy & the master i think you really get a sense of the harm this can cause down the line. what resentment this kind of dynamic can lead to. and ALL THE WHILE martha is walking the entire planet for a year to save all of humanity while ten hangs out aged 100 with his little tent & dog bowl & seething sorta-ex-husband-boyfriend-whatever. i mean he doesn't have the best time either but he also doesn't have to do that much and also is perhaps a bit too happy about not being the last time lord to fully grasp that hey, uh, humanity's in pretty dire straits right now. martha watches as the master turns earth into a living nightmare, slaughters millions of people on a whim, turns ten into a 900-year-old tweety bird, and tortures her family for a year, only for ten to go “guys dw i can fix him lol we’ll just live in the tardis for eternity together” as if she hadn't had to fight for that too. and ten is still shocked-pikachu-face when she goes “yeah no i’m leaving. i gotta get out.” and that is very much similar to lucy's moment in a way! where she sees the doctor forgiving(without really considering everybody else's opinion on the Past Year), martha's mom talked down from killing him, even Jack is talked down from his confusion at the whole idea, and i think in that moment she goes. okay. you guys can forgive. you guys can let him walk away having just taken, taken, taken everything without any repercussions. i meanwhile have this gun and two years of pent-up rage coursing through my veins. and both of these moments - martha leaving, lucy firing the gun - come at a shock to the doctor and the master. i mean you can see the master's little "oh" face when he gets shot. even if he plays it up like he expected it after i don't think he considered it before. and i think on a certain level neither really expected to be called out like this - ten because he’s got the emotional intelligence of a baseball bat, the master because he doesn’t think humans are capable of wiping their own asses - so in both of these moments in LoTL theyre like "wait i didn't know you could do that"

anyways tl;dr thats why i think lucy and the master are a darker parallel to the doctor and martha in their own way. which feeds into the rest of the finale where the master is just showing the natural extremes to who the doctor is - this is that toxic dependency taken to its natural worst possible place, where you treat someone as a tool rather than as a person. the master's generally a great foil to the doctor but the series 3 finale is just a fantastic example of it i think.

OMG, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts like this! And I love your thought process here so much.

First, absolutely, Martha is the case of right person, wrong time... which is probably what makes hers my favourite companion arc - as I like to put it she travelled through hell and pulled her Virgil (because yes, the Doctor absolutely always has this guide role that brings Virgil to mind, at least in companions' first episodes) to the Earthly Paradise in the process. There's a lot of debates going on about whether Ten was leading Martha on, because on the one hand - well, he's very clear he's not into her romantically, on the other - ok, bitch, you made it clear the kiss doesn't mean anything, but also you hit off with flirtatious winks and end showing off time travel while also casually showing off your Adam's apple. Yeah, a girl can make deductions. And you're right that this superficial frankness is mirrorred in Master's relation to Lucy - though if anything he's crrepily keen on playing a caring husband, what with the 100% performative hug he gives her while the Toclafane are hacking a journalist up. Though I suppose in his head this is what the Doctor does as well when they comfort their companions. And let's give it to Ten - when he said he's not going to let Martha *checks notes* fry in a small capsule in far space because of a sentient sun, he does bend head over tits and does as promised. But historically it has happened that the Doctor's reassurances were hollow (future, but kind of most painful in Twelve assuring Bill he's going to de-cybermanize her only to later admit yeah not really an option... considering Saxon was there to witness this, I wonder if he marked this in his Notebook (of Rassilon) of Spiting the Doctor).

Ten's handling of the chameleon arch is kind of pathetic, thanks for pointing that out! Like, ok - if the Family gets a whole Time Lord lifetime it is a genuine threat to the universe, but his attitude of oh I'm just going to spend three months as a human in a random timespace, what could possibly go wrong, and anyway, Martha will be there to clean up any mess? is a mess. I do like John Smith's romance with nurse Radfem, though, not in the sense of shipping them, but more of an appreciation of the concept: a classic victorian/edwardian romance, but when you look at it from the persective of a BIPOC servant... it kind of becomes apparent both parties are dickheads. This does tie back to the Master in a way, because I think... want to think... that by the time the Doctor went oh no, we're better than a tyrant maniac that spent a whole year destroying the planet and torturing everyone in the room specifically, so we're not going to execute him, I'm going to put him in my nice spaceship and we'll have nice cuddle movie evenings instead, she was already hardened by the fact that he put her in an (unintentionally) tailor made emotional torture room for three months only to later reveal oh yeah, I could absolutely have handled them all along. Is just higher moral ground, innit?

I guess as all best foils do, the clue lies in the diffrences, though, right? Both Martha and Lucy end up deeply disillusioned with their respective semi-immortal twinks from space, but in one case there is still a disillusioned friendship (Ten's surprised Pikachu face, excellent comparion) and in the other there's only hate - and for good reasons! And where the Doctor grows to really respect Martha (and I wouldn't say he started off dismissive, I mean he is impressed when she tells him oh no mister, a doctor isn't something you just are, you have to earn the title) and is not just saddened but... humbled?... by her leaving, the Master shows up in EoT and is like Hey, my widow, did you miss me, hope you haven't remarried, that would be awkward to explain in the registry office :D!

*sigh* I suppose this is why tensimm is so special to me. It's 20 seasons of foil dynamic condensed into 5 hours. It really shows how thin the difference between the Doctor and the Master is. And how in the right circumstances, including the loss of the handy mirror villain to show how things can go wrong, a madman with a box can turn into an eldritch horror deciding the future of the universe. So, again, thank you so much for poining out yet another excellent parallel!

[lunatic-fandom-space]

Alright, I read The Vampire Lestat all in one go in 8 hours a few hours ago, I spent the whole day at the library just reading it (i brought food w/ me dw) and then I came home, tired ass balls legs hurting from sitting and stimming for that entire time and I immediately went to bed even though I had so many thoughts that I wanted to write about, and now its midnight and I cant sleep and Ive realized that my sleep schedule is just fucked now, so yeah its The Vampire Lestat Thoughts Time now

I wanted to start this post off by talking about the post I made immediately after reading Interview with the Vampire, which was a very short one where I think I basically just called Lestat a very pathetic abuser and I meant that in a very specific nunaced way but I dont think i did a good job conveying that. Anyway, the only person who ever interacted with it was a blog that was called smth like lestats-left-eye and they interacted with it like 8 minutes after I posted it and the reason I remember it so clearly is that I thought that was really menacing. Like, imagine you make a post calling some character a piece of shit and then within minutes you get a notification thats like "characters-no1-fan replied to your post". But they didnt say anything mean, they were basically just like "you need to read the vampire lestat STAT" presumably because they thought it would make me think differently about him but honestly all it did was make me more convinced of his patheticness, less so of his 'abuserness', for lack of a better term, but I think thats mainly because the Thing that would make me call him an abuser was his relationship with Louis and he didnt talk about that very much, and all his other relationships were just like, weird. so. At this point i feel like I should clarify that wben I call him that Im not doing that to moralize or to be judgemental of people who like him, I like him, i just feel like thats an accurate way of describing him and the particular way in which he was manipulative and demanded love

Anyway, the first thing that made him really pathetic in my eyes was the way he 'debunked' Louis' claims at the start of the Interview with a Vampire section because, idek how to describe it, but theres just something so annoying about it. Hes like "I mean, I suppose its true from his point of view, but i actually didnt indescriminately murder random people, I only killed the bad ones, and he also completely neglects to mention our romantic walks and our cute little shakespeare-reenactments for Claudia, and also he says Im stupid and dont know anything but I was actually just keeping the knowledge of our power from him because he seemed so burdened by what little he already had :(" like come on man. And obviously I understand that the power-thing in particular was a retcon because the first book was a standalone, but these books are really well-written and they dont break my immersion so I dont really feel the need to do like, extensive doylist-analysis, yknow what I mean

Like, Ive been reading the ACOTAR series by Sarah J Maas and Ive been critiquing and complaining about those books on a sideblog and authorial intent comes up a lot because theyre clearly trying to say one thing, convey one particular message in an honestly very annoyingly moralizing way, but what the characters actually do and say blatantly contradict it, and for all that the series' fans talk about all the characters being morally gray, theres a very obvious refusal to have them be anything other than paragons of goodness by both the texg and those same fans. And those are not issues I have with the Vampire Chronicles so far, so when i say that I find that Interview with the Vampire section annoying, Im not criticizing the writing, Im saying that Lestat seems like the most frustrating genre of person. I mean, I do have some criticisms of the writing, specifically of the story, but I'll get to that later

For now I wanted to elaborate a little on why I found Lestat so annoying, and its the fact that he spent this whole book talking big game about being evil and revolutionizing the evil-game but then at the end he seemed so unwilling to just let the general public actually think of him as such, even though most humans considered it fiction, like he had to soften the blow at the end. And I do think its him just wanting to soften blow as opposed to him actually wanting to set the record straight because he cares that much about the truth or whatever, because I think if he actually cared about that, he wouldve been a bit more specific instesd of just being like "yeah, Louis said a bunch of things that are wrong about me, but I can forgive him because I suppose they were right from his perspective, even though they arent really" like dude.

It really feels like hes just using this evil-shtick as a crutch and as some kind of self-justification for being unlovable. Like, if hes evil and no one loves him thats fine because evil has no need for love, but if hes evil and someone does love him thats even better because then its a deep romance capable of withstanding anything, yknow what Im saying? But then he talked about the fact that demons in hell and vampires are capable of love and he talks a lot about his own capacity to love, so idk. I definitely feel like he feels a measure of resentment at the fact that Magnus, who was this horrifying stranger that immediately abandoned him, was able to inspire this great love in Lestat but his pretty self wasnt able to do the same with the fledgelings that he turned who were people that he knew and loved in life and/or that he spent decades of his undead existence with

Granted, maybe unlovable isnt the most accurate term to use here bc I dont think that exactly is what matters to him, but I cant think of a better one rn. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe its less about him wanting to convince the general public that he wasnt the pretty pathetic and despicable person Louis described him as, and more about him wanting to convince himself that Louis doesnt actually think of him that way. Or maybe 'cant' is a better word to use here instead of 'doesnt' because the way he says that Louis left out the less dysfunctional parts of their relationship kind of makes me think that Lestat thinks those parts being present makes his feelings and his view of these things unjustified, and I feel like theres a bit of an accusation there that hes purposefully trying to slander him, but the thing is, Louis has way less of an incentive to lie about Lestat than Lestat does to lie about Louis. Like Louis just kinda randomly agreed to do this interview from some guy decades after they last saw each other and then it got published. Even if you said that Louis was somehow masterminding the interview-guy, I just couldnt believe it because I dont see a reason as to why he would do all this and I dont think hes the kind of guy who just does shit for no reason. I also dont think hes nearly as spiteful as Lestat to do this. Also the idea that he would try to slander like this is stupid because who would care about this. Like, humans just see it as fiction and vampires are mad about him giving out the names and locations of vampires but I dont think they actually care about this niche insane relationship drama. And frankly, I feel like Lestat is just way more deluded. Like he calls Louis and Nikolas cynics but Im just like, no, I think those guys are realists and youre prone to delusions of grandeur. but then Im a pretty cynical person myself, so I would say that, wouldnt I

That actually leads really nicely to the second thing that makes me find him really pathetic, and its basically just the entirety of the last three or four chapters. Or, I guess I wouldve called them pathetic if it didnt look like they were at least kind of true ?

Okay so, while I was reading those last few chapters I was basically thinking to myself "okay, Lestat is obviously just making all of this up, I predict that the next book is gonna have a bit where Louis is like 'yeah, I read that autobiography of his and I guess i cant confirm or deny most of it bc he never fucking told me anything, but he just completely made that last bit up, I never went to come find him, and infact, now that hes done this ive decided that Im only communicating with him via passive aggresive autobiographies in which we continously debunk each others claims about our relationship'" because its just. come on, did those chapters not feel like a self-indulgent daydream? Like, "i was looking out the window the day before my big concert when my ex-boyfriend that I still love showed up and I went outside to see him and he was looking really bad in his jeans and sweatshirt but its fine bc i love him, and he hugged and kissed me just like he used to, like a lover <3, and he was sooooooo concerned for my safety and he asked me to just stay with him forever but this time I was the one to reject him, but then I still managed to convince him to go to my concert with me and we kissed before the show started and he was in the audience cheering me on after that, and it was the best concert anyone has ever seen and I felt so awesome standing on that stage, and then once it was over we were attacked by some of my vampiric h8ers but it was all good because my mom appeared out of nowhere to save us and she was wearing modern clothes obviously but otherwise she was exactly the same as when she abandoned me 200 years ago" hey buddy, i thought you were writing an autobiography not fanfiction about how you wish the people you love would stop abandoning you

Louis' behaviour for this whole section is the main thing that ticks me off because I felt that he was just so out-of-character. And obviously the characters that feature prominently in both books are quite different in both of them, but they are still recognizable as themselves which was not the case with Louis imo. And granted, there is a pretty significant gap between me reading the first book and me reading this one so my memory is a little foggy about everything that happened in it, but Louis was just way too outwardly-lovey-dovey for someone who, when talking about their relationship to an unrelated third party 11 years ago, decades after they last saw each other, at best seemed to look back on all that with complicated resentment. Like I just dont buy it at all.

But again, I was reading all that with the assumption that this would (at least partially) turn our to be made-up, and yknow, it still might I guess, hope is the thing that dies last and all, but Im a lot less convinced of that because of the stuff with Akasha

And now its finally time to talk about my criticisms regarding the story and theyre all linked to Akasha and her cringefail husband and honestly Marius too. Im curious if this is a hot take or if this stuff is something that a lot of people dont like. Like, if youre immersed in the book fandom please tell me if this is a thing where you read that I have some criticisms of the story and you immediately knew it was gonna be this, or if youre surprised because the majority of people find the lore very interesting. But when youre telling me, please do so without spoiling me, Ive come this far knowing a very minimal amount about these books and I would very much like to keep it that way and finish all of these books until I start to fully engage with the fandom but I am very curious. Also, I am open to discuss all of this if any of you would like that, just please respect that fact that I dont know anything that happens in later books and that I would like to keep it that way

But anyway. Full disclosure, I already didnt like Marius when Lestat met him in person, I thought he was interesting as a component of Armand's backstory but I really didnt want him to still be alive and I didnt want Lestat to find him and speak to him and then he not only did both of those things, but he was like super buddy-buddy with him in a way that bothered me. And as if all of that wasnt enough, he goes on this lore dump that lasts like 9 chapters that is so fucking boring I dont even have the words to adequately describe just how bored and tired I was reading it. And the things that were revealed in this loredump were just weird and baffling in a distinctly bad way, and I feel like usually when you get stupid worldbuilding in books that are trying to Say Something its to enhance the themes of the plot, but I cant possibly imagine how any of this stuff with Akasha and her cringefail husband and the demons who possessed them does that

Like, the main thing that I find compelling about Anne Rice's vampires is their humanity and the fact that their moral and existential dilemmas are fundamentally the same as the ones that humans face because theyre essentially just more durable humans, and while this origin story doesnt change anything about that on a deeper level, it still really bothers me. Because humans dont have this clean epic symbolic origin story where we all came from two people that can easily be named, we just kinda evolved into existence for no grand, religious, immediately-obvious reason, but we ponder our own collective existence anyway, just like these vampires. Hell, plenty of us even think lf ourselves as monsters of destruction who shouldnt exist for the way we hurt our environment and other creatures. And like, Im not saying that they should be talking about evolution in the 1700s or that I explicitly want it said that vampires evolved alongside humans because that would just be stupid in a new way, but idk. I guess what Im trying to say is that I really didnt need an explanation for how these vampires came into existence because I was engaged enough with their philosophical discussions and fucked up relationship dynamics that it didnt even cross my mind to ask any questions about their collective origin.

And just on a basic level, none of this ancient vampire history-bullshit satisfied me in any way. Also, the whole descriptions of everything in ancient egypt and whatever-that-keltoi-place-was-called just felt kinda off, like they were lacking the authenticity of all the other descriptions, and its not because we didnt spend a whole novel exploring those places because we only got a very brief snipped of Armand's backstory and that part wasnt lacking at all. I was initially ready to chalk this up to a classic combination of orientalism and racism, but honestly, given that the parts about the super-pale blonde people werent that much better in this regard, I think its mostly a case of us just not knowing a lot about these ancient peoples. Like, I dont know a lot about 1700s France or 1800s America but when I read about those places in these books I do get the impression that Anne Rice knows a lot about those places or that she did a lot of a research on them, whereas with ancient egypt and the keltoi-place Im just kinda like "well, this is obviously just a bunch of madeup bullshit innit". And it really frustrates me that I cant really tell if its meant to be made-up bullshit in-universe or if its meant to be true, but I guess Im gonna have to get used to that feeling if I wanna keep having a fun time reading The Unreliable Narrator Chronicles books

Regardless of the actual bullshit-status of Marius' stories though, I was quite surprised and very disappointed that Lestat seemed to just believe it with no issues. Like, 1984!Lestat didnt add any commentary to Marius claims, he just repeated them verbatim bc why not, and 1700s!Lestat didnt have any questions or doubts that I can remember. And like, even if it is true, why was he just okay with that being the truth, I feel like he should at the very least be a little angry at the revelation that theres these oldass vampires who have to stay alive or else all the other vampires will die. Again, to kindof tie this back to my previous point, humans arent like that, we dont have some kind of anker-point that needs to stick around or else we'll all die, so this doesnt feel like its adding anything to the existentialist themes of the series. Its also logistically kinda stupid because we're told all of vampire kind is tied to both of them but like, how does that work? What if you only killed one of them) Are all the female vampires tied to Akasha and all the male ones to her cringefail husband, or are all the vampires that Akasha bit connected to her and then all the vampires that were bit by her vampires are connected to her through their makers as well and so on and so on? Iirc we're told that if you killed one of them, you would kill the other or they would just kill themself or something so it wouldnt really matter, but like, if you could just kill one of them without the other one ending up dead, what would happen?

And like, theres things about these vampires that dont really make any sense, like the fact that their fingernails look like glass or even bigger things like the fact that drinking dead blood is very harmful but drinking blood from other undead people has a healing effect, but those things dont put a huge damper on the series' themes so far so I dont care about them

But anyway, the thing that bothers me the most about all this is that Lestat didnt see or acknowledge the obvious similarities between what Marius was telling him and what Armand's coven used to believe. Like, what's the difference, really, between "vampires were created by the devil and are servants of the devil (aka demons)" and "vampirism was created by a demon and then given to two humans who them created other vampires"? I guess its the fact that Marius doesnt let his belief prevent him from enjoying life, but then it doesnt really feel like Lestat needed to talk to this guy, or like hes actually as open-minded as Marius said he was. Like, Marius basically told him "unlike most people, youre genuinely open-minded because youre listening to what I have to say about how to gain meaning in life" and Lestat, who basically already believed the same things as Marius when it came to that before they ever even met, said "yes i totally agree"

On a similar note, how fucking convinient that Lestat had this weird improbable idea about Osiris being a vampire god and then it basically turned out to be true. Like not literally, but the two people whose story directly inspired Osiris and Isis were both vampires and theyre like, the first vampires. what are the odds of that

Also Im pretty sure Marius said something along the lines "most people dont like what I tell them about the origin of vampires because they want a clean creation myth and thats not what happened" before he started talking about it, but then it was just a clean creation myth ? Like, in a previous paragraph I said that humans dont have an origin where everyone is descendet from two people, and as I was writing that I noticed that the story about Anasha and her cringeful husband is remarkably similar to that of Adam and Eve. or maybe not remarkably similar, but similar enough that I feel like Im not reaching when I say that

And of course this is a story with characters that are unreliable narrators on purpose so all of this might be 100% intentional and might pay off somehow at some point, but Im not really gonna know until I read the next one I guess and Im gonna have a hard time motivating myself to do that when the ending of this one was so bad (to me!!).

Idk, basically what Im hoping for right now is that this series will comtinue to deconstruct and retcon itself, both because that keeps me on my toes in a way thats fun (especially because Im going in completely blind) and because godddddd I really dont want to deal with any of the stuff involving Anasha, i think its all so stupid. I really hope that in the next book it turns out that atleast the stuff about all vampires' lives being tied to hers turns out not to be true and thats shes just gonna be a strong old vampire whos special because of her super strong psychic powers and because her blood makes other vampires strong (which is another concept I really dont jive with, the stuff with older vampires being strong and making strong vampires, but I dont really have much to say about it beyond that, so I'll just leave it at this). But honestly, Im really just hoping that in order to not disappoint myself too mucj, in my truest heart of hearts Im actually hoping that Lestat just decided to dip his toes into fiction writing 97% into his autobiography and then that Queen of Darkness is gonna be an in-uinverse fiction book written by Lestat de Lioncourt

But again, I probably wont feel like finding out for a little while, and as I think about it Im noticing that its mostly because Im not looking forward to having the same borderline-spiritual experience that I had with The Vampire Lestat, where I entered this monk-like state of mind and then walked through the city to the busstation feeling like I wasnt occupying the same reality as everyone else around me, with this book that I have a suspicion that I will not like it. And before you ask, yes, I know that I would have the same experience because it had basically nothing to do with the plot or themes of The Vampire Lestat, its just that my legs were hurting because I had been sitting on a wood chair with no pillow and continuously rocking back and forth because thats how I stim when Im sitting, and also my brain felt fried from how I forced myself to focus and read this book whose language is pretty challenging for a non-native speaker for 8 hours straight

Anyway, this ended up being way longer than anticipated but Im glad. Believe it or not, even though most of this post was just me complaining about one thing or another, I did like this book and I like that it made me think all this and that it made me feel passionate enough to write it all down, even though I do genuinely dislike the ending and am not really looking forward to reading the next one. But I definitely will do it at some point, so dont take this as a sign to tell me what happens in it, I maintain that I do not want to be spoiled. If one of my hopes ends up coming true and you want to encourage me to read it that way for some reason, please only do so in the vagues possible terms. like literally just tell me "ayyyyyy youre right 👍" without eleborating. And if you want to be evil, you can tell me that even though my predictions arent true and make my disappointment even more crushing that way ^^

Alright, thats it, I hope you enjoyed this. Also, I did end up managing to go to bed an hour after I originally started writing this, and then I ended up waking up again at like 4am and wrote some more and then I took a nap and wrote some more and then I took another nap, and it just kinda kept going like this and now its 3.30 pm so. you better appreciate that even if you think my takes are bad

[tortl3]

the good omens rabbithole is so crazy. like, "wow, some gay angels and demons! thats cool!" and suddenly you're obsessed with queen and 70s music and also low-key into researching christian mythology, then you decide to research about the actors and realize michael sheen reads good omens fanfiction?? wait- he was in twilight??? what the FUCK is masters of sex?? and then you research more about his roles and suddenly you're watching bright young things and wilde for the 5 minutes of michael sheen screentime in it because miles maitland is a fucking legend- WAIT DAVID IS ALSO IN BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS??? and suddenly you're back on doctor who and what the hell is takin over the asylum? no idea but its awesome holy shit!! and now you're kind of obsessed with shakespeare??? and now you're watching all three seasons of staged with the amazon britbox free trial?? and now you have 5 new sub-hyperfixations that all branch from good omens and now you are confused.

[jennazed]

So today I was kinda bored and decided to read the "Be More Chill" book to see if there were any differences between the book and the musical.... and OH BOY WERE THERE SOME DIFFERENCES!!! I wrote down some of them, enjoy (beware spoilers obviously)

Jeremy has humiliation sheets to quantiatively determine how much of an incel he is

Madeline is now Elizabeth?

Who tf is Mark, why does he exist, and why is Jeremy friends with him?

Everyone knows Jeremy wrote the letter to Christine, but now he wants to give her a chocolate shakespeare bc he is a total flirt (TM)

Jeremy's mom is around and has a divorce lawyer-ing firm with his dad now

Michael is a white boy with an asian girl fetish

JEREMY IS A THEATER KID! JEREMY IS A THEATER KID! JEREMY IS A THEATER KID! JEREMY IS A THEATER KID! JEREMY IS A THEATER KID!

Mr Reyes doesn't microwave his own hot pockets, he uses child labor to do so instead

Christine is super angsty like she needs an anger management therapist or smth

Michael's brother got a squip apparently and is going to Brown University

Oh btw, Jeremy's dad doesn't even wear underwear around the house he just lets his son see his junk?

Michael also has a knee fetish apparently???

Sadly, the play is the actual Midsummer's Dream and not a Midsummer's Nightmare about Zombies

Ok Christine is no longer angsty?

Nvm she is angsty again that was quick

Jeremy goes "Heh-heh." a lot

According to Michael, all girls are shirt thieves and should never be trusted

Ok Christine is no longer angsty again and apparently she is very specific on how relationships are supposed to be formed bc of course she is

The whole Halloween party is now a school-sanctioned event

Is Jeremy a furry? what does "sometime tonight I’ve got to find pics on the Internet of girls with tails" mean???????

Instead of dressing up as Juliet, Christine dresses up as a prostitute angel for the halloween party

Btw michael knows all about the squip from day 1, his brother has one

Rich does his whole ITS FROM JAPAN moment at the halloween party instead of while pissing

Rich's halloween costume is marijuana

the squip is no longer "top secret can't even look it up on the internet shit" bc there's like 361 results for it on yahoo apparently

Jeremy's dad might have been gay for Ben Franklin

Instead of using his Bar Mitzvah money, Jeremy steals his aunt's beanie babies to finance his squip

LORE!! The guy from the lady's running shoes place who gives Jeremy the squip, his name is RACK LMAO

Jeremy keeps his squip-shenanigans secret from michael so we don't get the awesome sequence "try to say something cool" "i think i just blew my bar mitzvah money on a wintergreen tic-tac" "yeah not cool" :(

RACK instead of the squip says the "You can also set me to Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Sexy Anime Female hehehehe" line. This change is devestating

"The gayer it feels, the better your posture" YOU HEARD IT HERE FOLKS GAY PEOPLE HAVE BETTER POSTURE

In the book, the squip can see into parallel universes bc quantum physics

Brooke is Anne

Jeremy flirts with Chloe instead of Brooke/Anne man they really changed a lot of stuff around yk

Eminem dies like immediately. That squip DEFINITELY killed him lol

Fun fact: Jeremy is NOT circumcised!

Apparently you just think about the squip turning off to turn it off wow

Jeremy now does pushups whenever he sees an attractive guy on tv instead of whenever he thinks about sex

SQUIPS CAN CONTROL YOUR DREAMS? THATS SO COOL!

lol the squip hates singing

Jeremy instead of the squip says "up up down down left right left right B A start"

wait Brooke is in the book? Then who tf is Anne???

Madeline is now Katrina?

The squip becomes murderous if you drink, i love it!

how does jeremy not know what a pheromone is but is perfectly able to memorize monologues about how humanity has stopped evolving?

Jeremy is a professional boxer and will punch you in the neck and make your gameboy say "dont fuck with me >:(" if you mess with him, remember that folks

Apparently the squip thinks acting like a dog is cute?

NOOO! Some dude named Jason Finderman is the one who has his parents on the run for money laundering and hosts the party instead of Jake

Huh, no optic nerve blocking of Michael? Maybe this version of the squip is actually trying to help Jeremy

Poor Jenna :( she just wanted to talk about how Elizabeth is a slut and Jeremy turned her down

Apparently the squip is also a certified drivers ed instructor! Who knew?

JEREMYS DAD SAYS THE N WORD OK ITS PROBABLY FOR THE BEST THAT ONE GOT CHANGED

Ok smth is up with Jeremy, why is he confessing to Chloe while on ectsasy that he constantly dreams of her with a tail? AND WHY IS SHE KINDA INTO IT??

Fun fact: ectsasy turns the squip spanish

Apparently Chloe's boyfriend in the book is named Brock. Imagine going through 9 months of pregnancy and deciding that your baby should go by fucking Brock lol

Hugging legs is Jeremy's coping mechanism

I love this version of the squip: "TODO LO QUE USTED ES BUENO PARA ES SEXO DEL INTERNET." lmao

btw rich has a belly button kink

Rich named his pp Li'l Cheese Head

No michael in the bathroom moment, instead its more of a michael in a bathtub with an asian girl moment

Michael, who is still buddies with Jeremy :), rushes to tell him of the rich fire

I think rich set the fire bc alcohol + squip = murderous rage in this universe not bc he was trying to get it out

YOOO CHRISTINE IS GONNA BE A PSYCH MAJOR

Jeremy gets a therapist bc his mom freaks out when he tells her about the squip but the therapist is also squipped lol

lol all hollywood actors have squips, awesome

The squip's plan is to have Jeremy confess his love to Christine during the play in front of everybody but she calls him a loser… oof

The squip plans to write Jeremy's life story in a book and then have it kill itself with mtn dew red :O

THE WHOLE STORY WAS A BOOK JEREMY/THE SQUIP WROTE FOR CHRISTINE????? AND THEN IT JUST ENDS??????

That was one way to spend like four hours

[lichen-punk]

1, 3, 9, 20, 25, 27, 28, 39, 45, 47 SORRY THIS IS SO MANY LOLL

o my goodness ok im putting a cut here for everyone's sanity cause all these questions got me excited

Do you have a favorite place near you to “touch grass”?

theres a little woodsy park near my house just within easy walking distance which is easy to get into regardless of time of day or night and has an incredible hill where you can sit under an oak tree in the tall grass and watch the sun or the moon come up or set depending on time of day and year and i love love love it one of the only good things about my town i go up there for my Rituals And Things gkjhsf

3. If you could see any extinct species in the wild, what would it be?

im a sucker for megafauna id love to see an irish elk or an aurochs or a woolly mammoth that would be so so cool

9. Do you have a favorite nature photo you’ve ever taken?

here's some of the best photos ive ever taken in my life, and then some pictures from the hike back to the cabin when we realized the sun was setting sooner than we thought it would and it was about to get WAY too cold for how we were dressed

20. What’s your favorite poem or song lyric about nature?

definitely a gerard manley hopkins!!! he's my fave poet ever and half his work is about nature. i'm torn between two, tho: i think my favorite of all time, really my favorite poem entirely, is the windhover (ive been trying to copy and paste it here without ruining the formatting but it is not working alas so you must google it sorry), but the last stanza of another of my favorites of his poems, inversnaid, is also just. fucking killer

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

25. What’s your favorite plant to grow yourself?

i unfortunately live in a terrible spot to grow stuff, the yard of my family's little house is like. straight dry clay and entirely shady, so my thumb has never gotten even the barest hint of green to it. one day id like to grow wheat or corn or some such tho

27. What’s your favorite outdoor activity?

honestly????? i love to just Sit And Observe. i used to love love love swimming in creeks and lakes and things, but obv i havent swum in anything for a very long time. hopefully i will again one dayy im also a big big fan of a fire for singing around. and to be honest shakespeare doesnt feel right unless its performed somewhere outdoors and beautiful now

28. What’s your favorite local animal you see all the time but still love?

ALL OF THEMMMMMM we get raccoons and possums and squirrels and mule deer and black tailed deer and crows and ravens and pigeons and rats and mice and apparently frogs i learned recently and newts and theyre all my best friends and i get so excited when i see them

39. What ecosystem do you consider your “home” ecosystem?

absolutely all american pacific northwest shit i love a temperate rainforest with redwoods and doug firs and such and then the deciduous layer underneath all ferns and moss and little creeks and then the harsh cliffs down to the beach all cold and foggy and windy. that's where i Belong easy peasy. i do also associate the more aggressively californian Beige Grassy Hills With Lonely Scrappy Little Coast Live Oaks or Valley Oaks On Top type biome with home and growing up, but its always been a little too harsh and dry and sunny for me here.

45. What is your favorite wildflower?

o god thats hard i love wildflowers. im a sucker for daisies, obv, and i love forget-me-nots and california poppies and indian paintbrush and columbine and and and

47. What is your favorite species of tree?

o no thats hard too!!!!! ummm probably oak trees, especially white oaks like the valley oak or the oregon white oak, especially the really big old wise looking ones, but i also adore sequoioideae and other conifers, unsurprisingly, and rowans and apple trees among others hold personal spiritual significance, and theres this specific kind of maple or sweetgum idk what it is but they grew outside the theatre i grew up in so they always make me nostalgic. OH and i LOVE the smell of california bay laurel thats the Good Summertime Smell for me

[caseyjones2012]

uhhhh, hi? ig?

Casey Jones here! I’m a TMNT 2012 Casey Jones fictionkin! I’ll probably be hanging around here a lot, so hey!

Some stuff you may need to know:

Nicknames you can use on me-Any, as long as they’re respectful (I accept faggot and stuff, but only as long as it’s /j cause I don’t fw that)

Pronouns: She/Her and He/Him, or literally any other pronouns, idgaf

Age: Here I’m 16

Scar ref sheet :)

Im platoniromantic

—

Basic rules:

I don’t want any T-cesters here. I may not be one of the guys, but that’s js weird and disgusting

Okay, so, uhm. I may, or may have not, had a crush on all the guys (-Mikey) at some point. So I’m probs gonna make lots of jokes about that

I’m open to interacting with lit anyone, askbox is open all the time, unless I specify it’s not.

ANY TMNT BLOGS PLS PI!!!!

I’m not good with tone, so if needed, I’m begging y’all to please use tone tags

NO APRIL ANTIS. I WILL CRUSH YOU LIKE A BUG. THAT IS MY GIRL!!!!! I LOVE HER SM /p

—

Tags (so far):

#a trash bag that talks (for random posts and shit)

#hater talk (making fun of ppl /hj)

#ME!!! (literally js reblogs of fanart of me)

#my gayass (me being gay asf)

#reblogs (in the title)

#og case (og posts)

#personal storytime (talking about stuff thats happened to me)

#answering test questions (for asks)

#everyone here is so creative! (art)

#i would kill for them (reblogs from friends)

#shakespeare wants to be me so bad (poetic shit)

#musically gifted (music)

#a lil bit silly and cooky (discord shit)

#memories of a fossil (mems!!!)

#hrghblegh (I’m sad :( )

#we must stand (inspirational/important stuff)

[castlebyersafterdark]

looking at those few legend of ochi clips and he really is giving dream s5 mike and i realise... god love ya finn, i do, but something about the intensity with which he plays serious characters is so appealing. i love a sincere man, a broody man. oh god, its the classic mr rochester trope isnt it? i can fix him and all that. i bet thats sort of what will thinks, too, about mike. like he finds mike's sark and moodiness hot FOR SURE. esp cos he knows how soft mike is with him. so intimate and special just for will. mike really is a period drama leading man lol.

anyway yeah. sorry finn, i love good humour and comedy but there's nothing hotter than a man who can be serious and genuine and not fall back on making a joke. love love love his takes on serious dramatic roles, hope there's more from that side of him in future as he matures and learns to embrace the vulnerability of being genuine with confidence

You know what's really funny? Well, none of you are mind readers so I'll just get into it. The most random thoughts are taking me places as I work on clearing out my ask box/focus on older asks - as I reread this one and think about that Ochi movie trailer again, I was sitting here so frustrated and confused about this one movie that Finn landed and how excited I was to dish about it with all yall on here.

Babes, it isn't real. It was a dream. In my stupid dream I was on tumblr and we got some announcement of some film he was in and it was another of this vein, a real moody period piece, looking all dashing and intense, a real weighty grown role. I remember it being all misty and like, one of those intensive atmospheric probable Shakespeare adaptations with ye old crumbling castles and cloaks and cinematic scenery. Like the Playboy productions version of Macbeth - do you know what I'm talking about?!? Haha it's a good film but that detail always sticks out.

Anyway, we were blessed with Finn staring in something like that and it was literally a movie trailer and then switch to us all reacting and flipping our shit about it here and that was my dream. Nothing even that exiting, but I'm literally having dreams about new information and posting about it on tumblr. What does that say about me as a person hahahaha. And I'm so mad it's not real!! Yall would have loved to see it. Wish we had some sort of Black Mirror tech so I could playback my vision for everyone haha.

All in all, agreeing with you on everything. I initially wanted to see Finn in some era-set comedies, more on the SNL movie vein but that's totally changed. Drama. Historical. Get that man in costume. Get him on a horse, give him a weapon, let him brood and emote. Or, why not both! As long as the latter fim type is represented...

[thaliasthunder]

opinions on tsats, not in order

these are some things i liked and disliked about the book, and it has spoilers (naturally?), so beware

not gonna say i absolutely adored the way R&M managed solangelo's relationship but didnt completely despise it either

i wouldnt say Will was out of character bc... he didnt have much of a character to be out from before tsats? i just didnt really love that "i gotta fix nico" thing rick gave to him, but that got settled by the end so i really wont complain much about it

i also wouldnt compare solangelo to percabeth neither to praise or criticize it bc it's not like i think percabeth's dynamic is flawless and perfect either 🤷🏻‍♀️

percy's "oh nico, i'm sorry" PERSEUS SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU'RE 5 YEARS LATE 😭

the "invisible string" and "[worlds/planets] orbiting each other" theme/trope they gave to solangelo made me emotional, and i accept it as canon. *plays invisible string by ts and satellite by hs*

my goodness what a relieve it was to me to finally read nico CRYING. good for him

i expected will's plague power to be more, hum, intense? either way i still think will having plague powers at all is a victory

dont know what i feel w will canonically having trouble w nico being a murderer bc thats actually one of the things i love about him 😭? i feel like if he ever discovers nico killed that bryce dude he'll pass out or something. boy ur bf is a son of hades, his legacy is death, what did u expect from him?

"nico blushed" "nico gave a sly smile" "nico's mischevious smile" wow i need to sit down for a moment and just *weeps*

nico trying to talk his way out of trouble, sneaky lil shit <3

canon silly nico in mid dangerous situations is back !!! <3333

i dont feel completely comfortable w the idea of nico's coming out being that public by making a whole speech to the entire camp but thats probably just me projecting my trauma and anxiety, idk. either way i think a more intimate coming out would've feel more personal, but still i understand that R&M wanted to give him an all-free-off-chains life in camp making it known by everyone in an only kick

"i got the message loud and clear: don't say that. don't feel that. don't even think that" IT BURNED ME INSIDE. i loved it

the ounces of nico still acting like a 10 year old child? like when he called nemesis cool? he warms my heart

i think gorgyra's my favorite character

some of the bitchy comments nico held back were funny. i know they didnt symbolize anything good in their relationship but they were funny. "no. you couldnt", "no one's asking you to"? i officially proclaim myself a bitchy!nico apologist

either way i still can acknowledge nico was a lil bit harsh to will having the literal worst time of his life in the underworld like 😭, bro he's literally a child of the SUN having a trip in HELL, give him a break 😭

the part where nico drop to his knees in front of nyx's home? poetic cinema

the screaming at trees in the woods moment felt really intimate and heartwarming for me. i approve

i did not like their on screen first kiss to be so casual and simple, i was expecting more emotion and angst; and god i definitely disliked that their first real kiss was literally right after nico discovered jason DIED. a person has enough volatile feelings to deal with when a loved one dies for new romantic stuff to happen. nico was in a vulnerable state and deserved time to mourn. instead of that being their first kiss i would've been fine to show will supporting nico in that traumatic event? i would've also deepen their relationship

"'i love you' and the fell" that was poetic and girl? it'll ROCK in fanarts i'll be waiting for them

the whole speech of "it was the son of apollo falling for a son of hades. it was this"? okay wow, beware shakespeare, they went strong in this

nico preparing a picnic for will?? another peek of my boy being a canon ROMANTIC. he makes me physically ill

i liked that they didnt try to write around or romantize the way some male gods actually behaved in the myths? like persephone recognizing hades kidnapped her and letting Will (and the reader) clear that he should never permit anyone forcing him into anything, bc i remember i disliked the way poseidon was painted as the best guy in pjo w medusa's part just for being the protagonist's father (and yeah that was a children's book but well so is tsats and they finally got that right)

since hoo i've got a soft spot for nico finding comfort in the darkness of the underworld, so reading nico seeing his father's realm as his home again gave me a cozy feeling every single time <3

it was nice to see persephone seeing nico in a good light. i always thought the concept of those two getting along well had so much potential and tbh i hope they explore it more in the future

nico having persephone's garden as his favorite place in the underworld??? i crave FANARTS

it kinda infuriated me nico reproaching will for making amphitemis go away bc it was the first baddass moment will got in the entire book in my eyes and nico deciding to go like WhY diD u dO thAt? cOulD'vE hElpEd hIm. baby? shut the fuck up

I WON

"enough of your bisexual chaos" really cant decide if i loved or hated this right now

tbh i hoped amphitemis to have a more important role

i actually like the idea of nico having a bunch of little demons following him around, it's a funny image. but personally i wont see them as "his children" unless its for comedic resources. i see them more as his pets, yep, his demonic pets 👍🏼

they're canonically the most physical affective couple and they make me wanna throw up in my mouth. good for them

WHERE WAS AKHLYSSSS

nico's new villain scar is baddass <3

at the end bob just came out of the picture... that easily? after all the hell they went thru?

do u ever get those maternal/paternal kick ins when u read ur fav character in pain? i dont mean all the time but in like rare occassions. like a sudden need to protect them? well yeah nico saying "you left me alone and defenceless!" and starting crying made it for me. i wanted to run and CRADLE HIM

MALCOLM PACE MY QUEER SON OF ATHENA I LOVE YOU. btw yall were excited about jake mason and i admit i dont remember who that is,,, i feel guilty so please explain

PIPER MY LOVE GIRL HOW I MISSED YOU

to summarize, i dont think the book's perfect, but i did enjoy and liked it

[lesbiandarvey]

SUITS ASKS YASSSS

What star sign do you think Harvey Specter is. Personally this has been plaguing me.

What scenes are there that stand out to you as donnaharvey "oh god they're so in love" moments, like where donna or harvey is clearly so down bad

When do you think either of them realized that what they felt for each other could be serious?? Like when did Donna go from rolling her eyes at this young cocky lawyer who flirts with her to thinking oh shit he's it for me?

HHHHHMMMMMM. okay okay!

sorry i dont know anything about astrology! but i definetly harvey’s a late summer baby so im gonna say leo/virgo

ohhhhh damn down bad … oh the im a donna fan im a harvey fan when he showed up to her shakespeare play and she knew boxing like oh damnnnnnnn how they both make an effort to enjoy each others interests even if it’s something they have no interest in or frame of reference for oh thats what loves all about baby. also in s2 when he told her he needs her “i cant be me without you” oh damn .

and OOKAY . OKAY. so like. i know this is an unpopular opinion but im a donna paulsen most repressed woman in the universe thruther. i genuinely think she didnt know until like s6 . or at least didnt admit it to herself—i think the whole “i want more” in s6 is like the first time she admits to herself she wants That from harvey. like i know they almost crossed the line in s4 and she asks for More so i think she knows she wants something more but she still wasnt sure what that was or that harvey was It . wait okay i think the time she realized harvey was It was in s5 the failure of her relationship with mitchell/micheal whatever his name was like i think she really loved him or thought she could love him but when she realized she “didnt want to spent the rest of her life with him” thats when the Harvey Situation starts to coalesce in her mind

but like getting back to your question when did harvey go fromm being the cocky lawyer to being It for her i think for me its a question of when did harvey become the most important person in her life which i really dont know lol!! but think was immediate. i think she met him and they flirted and then the first week of her working in the DAs office he like, talked about playing baseball with his dad or brought donuts for all the interns in the office and made some silly jokes and she immediately imprinted on him

[whomst-the-hell]

How To Write An Essay

from someone who did pretty well in school. and i don’t mean the structure of an essay, because someone probably taught you that in class, i mean the actual process of sitting down to write an essay, which for some reason no teacher has ever addressed (at least to me)

(for the sake of this, I’m going to pretend i’ve been assigned an essay about shakespeare’s depiction of love in Romeo and Juliet, because I feel like thats a relatable point of reference idk)

1: scaffold. go into your document and create an outline in dotpoints of all your arguments. this is also where you put your quotes. (some people might find it helpful to also create some kind of mindmap pre- scaffold, but i tend to just use the scaffold as a mindmap, it depends on your preferred brainstorming techniques) for example, my scaffold might look like this:

intro

point 1: the relationship between love and violence

-friar and the plants

-romeo and juliet eventually die for love

-“starcrossed lovers take their lives” (act 1, scene 1)

-romeo and juliets love is arguably the cause for mercutio’s and tybalt’s death

-“i died under your arm”-mercutio (act, scene)

point 2: etc

this is much less effort than sitting down and actually writing out that paragraph.

the number of dotpoints needed per paragraph varies but as a rule of thumb i’d say 3-5. if you know a lot of information about a topic, only a couple points with lots of depth will do. if not, briefly talk about lots of things.

if you find yourself struggling with motivation, try to make scaffolding a bit fun. meme the fuck out of it. talk abt how romeo was a lil bitch who got the infinitely cooler mercutio killed like a moron. talk abt how much you hate shakespeare. no one is going to see it. IMPORTANT: make sure that you make it easy to find and remove the scaffold later. i do it by writing all my scaffolds *like this* so that i can go through at the end with ctrl+f and find all the **s, which i don’t generally use in the actual essay. you could do something else (maybe pick a number, or some other character) if ** wont work for whatever reason. you could also colour your scaffold so that you can visually see which bits to get rid of.

further things to note: DO NOT WORRY ABOUT PLAGIARISM. if you found a really good paragraph online where someone dissected the language used in the balcony scene, copy and paste that shit directly into the scaffold (remember to include the URL to make citation easy later). that way when it does come time to write this fucking thing, all of your information is in one place and you really just have to decorate it, which is honestly the less important part anyway. you will get more points for a badly written essay with good information than a well written essay with bad information.

another thing i like to do here is calculate roughly how many words i should write per paragraph. for example, if my essay is 1500 words and i’ll have three points, my breakdown may look like this

intro (100)

p1 (433)

p2(433)

p3(433)

concl(100)

i might even break it down further eg

p1: love and violence

-romeo and juliets death (108)

-tybalts death (108)

-mercutio’s death (108)

-friar’s plants monologue (108)

i get these numbers by literally putting them into a calculator. it may seem useless but it’s actually really quick, and it will be infinitely easier to convince yourself to write 108 words about romeo and juliets death than it will be to write 1500 words about the concept of love throughout the play.

(heres the formula for breaking it down btw: intro + conclusion = about the same each, generally smaller than a body paragraph. pick whatever number you think is appropriate for the total word count, minimum 50 words. my rule of thumb is <1000=50, 1000=100, 2000=200, etc. next, [total word count] - [intro+concl] = [body paragraphs]. next, [body paragraphs] / [no. of body paragraphs] = [wordcount per paragraph], next [wordcount per paragraph] / [no. of points]. written out this seems long, but it takes 5 seconds with a calculator- i just use google)

2: actually writing the essay. tragically i cannot give you the magic words to write a perfect essay, but one really good tip that i can give you is this: don’t stop scaffolding when you start writing. personally, i tend to get tripped up on details, and get stuck in one spot. for example: i know what all my arguments should be in my paragraph about love and violence, but i cannot for the life of me think of an introductory sentence. my paragraph might look like this for a while:

*epic guitar intro like in smells like teen spirit* This concept is demonstrated in the eventual deaths of the titular characters, Romeo and Juliet, as foreshadowed in the line “starcrossed lovers take their lives” (act 1 scene 1).

its sort of like skipping a question on a test then coming back to it later. there is no point in struggling over one sentence for hours — often, writing the rest of the paragraph will actually fill in your mental blanks and make it easier to write whatever you were struggling with.

other places ive found this method helpful: quotes. for example:

Romeo and Juliet’s love also caused violence to those around them. This is evident in the death of Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend. **find quote, and include analysis*** This demonstrates Shakespeare’s connection between love and violence.

in my experience, actually searching for a particular quote can throw off my momentum and fuck up the whole process. its been much better to just mark where i want that quote to go and come back later.

you can do this for single sentences or even whole paragraphs. i often write introductions last, because i never know what to say the first go round. you do not need to write your essay chronologically. go through one pass without losing momentum, hit ctrl+f, or find your coloured bits, to locate the problem areas. has writing the rest of it managed to fix the problem? no? try the next highlighted section! go back and forth like that until theres no more highlighted bits.

other assorted tips for writing an essay: don’t worry about repetition. for a lot of people (including me), writing is something that is supposed to sound good. we try to avoid repeating words/phrases too much because it can read as annoying or boring. as anyone who has read an academic paper knows, that actually means you’re on the right track. if your thesis statement is “shakespeare depicted love as a destructive and negative force” the words “destructive” or “negative” should probably be used 2-3 times a paragraph. you really want to hammer your audience over the head with your opinion.

also, as much as possible, try to make whatever the prompt is fun for yourself. this isn’t always possible of course, but it can really make the process easier. i know this wasnt my longstanding example, but as an actual real world example of this, i had to write an essay about the movie gattaca and how it incorporated its political themes into the narrative, and i argued that actually it had done a terrible job at that and that the movie as a whole sucked ass. i got 95%. if you have any kind of strong feelings about the topic, make them fit the question. its much less mind numbing than writing 2000 words you dont actually agree with for the sake of your grade.

if you need to take a break, maybe try working on homework for a different subject. this’ll shake things up so your brain is doing something new, but you won’t exit school mode and lose momentum entirely.

3: editing. dont worry too much. read through it so theres no glaring issues. try reading it out loud — you’re more likely to pick up on clunky sentences or grammar errors out loud. if you really want to do well, have someone else look over it (a classmate/teacher would be best bc they know what info was available to you but anyone will do)

final tips: its better to hand in something unfinished/badly written than nothing at all.

it is 100% better to sit down for five minutes and add 20 words to your essay than not to do anything. you dont have to dedicate your evening to it. progress is progress. a good way to do this is to get word/docs on your phone.

high school isnt life or death - failing this essay will not destroy you.

for essays on an exam, my best tip is don’t worry abt making it pretty. use the first page to make a mindmap. write more info later and use an arrow to show where it should be. it doesnt matter.

this might not work for you, but i hope it can act as a jumping off point to find what does work for you! go forth and conquer!