#thesis kicking my ass

[floweroflaurelin]

I've been busy as hell with school lately but a new assignment is to design a book cover for any book of my choosing!

I'm assuming it has to be an Actual Book but if I had my way I'd be doing Everything Turns to Gold by redwinterroses and darkleweather. That fic has never left my brain

[seatokki]

I miss them already o(—(

[archiverstappen]

[risotto38]

My beloved ❤️

[transgenderlabrat]

Spending nearly 5 hours on an assignment worth only 2% of a mark normally doesn’t feel great but my grad student mentors said that my rough draft exceeded their expectations and they had no big comments on the final draft and that’s worth soooo much more to my ego than 5 hours teehee.

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[fadeintolight]

pont pont vesszőcske

[franzkafkagf]

I HATE ACADEMIA BRO

[inkedkoi]

finishing up my (very belated) sonic prime review/rewrite but before i want to continue, I'm genuinely curious about something:

i've made a list of predictions/theories before season 3 came out and i never got to post them (i did make a bingo card out of it tho)

[haasegawa]

i am soooo tired

[floofwhoknowsdirt]

araina 👁️

!!! Araina my beloved. She's actually my smuggler, but she's weird, because she's based on an old larp character and because i think she deserves to be weird.

Most of her family are all Mysteries People, and they suck so bad that i've decided they kickstart the whole ziost situation.

They had a guy who was Just A Little Bit Force-Sensitive, and sneaky, and good with weapons, and they decided that actually they could improve on that, and genetically engineered their shiny new murderdaughter. intended to be really good at murdering jedi (and sith probably. she was a very versatile tool)

she's old enough that she was active as an assassin late in the war, but then at some point during the probably chaos that followed immediately after the signing of the treaty of coruscant, she runs away from home

She's dealing with it by pretending to be a normal small-time crimelord (later: a pirate admiral. she has a fleet for a while so she's decided that makes her an admiral instead of a captain. she gets a bigger hat for that). This works for a long time! it doesn't work forever!

So that's Araina. Good at lying her way out of situations and better with a sniper rifle, when she has access to one, but just fine with pistols too. just force-sensitive enough to be able to feel when things are happening (or when other people near her are sensitive too, which tends to be useful) but not enough to really do anything with it. Actively Not thinking about how her childhood (if it counts as one even) consisted of laboratories and training rooms and later, once she was 15-16, actual battlefields.

I lover her very much.

[lacomandante]

modern au!

send me an au and i’ll give you 5+ headcanons about it

This made me laugh bc you know how much I've bitched to you about how complicated a modern au is for Teresa :P

While in the main verse Teresa is from Casatejada (Western Spain), in the modern au I think she would have been raised in Barcelona for a good chunk of her childhood, and her family moved to Western Spain, presumably to be with her father's family. So she's both Catalan and a Spaniard and is proud of her heritage. I don't think they would live in Casatejada though, so I haven't settled just yet on where exactly.

I think Teresa works for a government body of some sort- possibly the UN (for this AU I would pretend there was a location in Madrid for her to work at) where she gets sent out to help others, possibly with Women's Health and Rights in third world countries. But again, it's really hard to translate canon events to a modern day without ethical implications...which is why I'm more vague and never settled on a concrete idea. Just something that allows her to be in a dangerous location and meet Sharpe out in the field, but also aligns with her character :P

Teresa and Sharpe actually get to see each other way more in the modern au than the main one bc PHONES and planes and internet! Yay! With him in the military and her constantly working it's difficult to meet up, but Teresa's work allows her to work from home or elsewhere, so either she spends Sharpe's leave with him in London, or he stays with her in Madrid.

Teresa ends up moving to London into Sharpe's flat after a few years. They were never able to fully commit to moving in together because of their jobs and duties, but eventually the distance and time spent away became too much. They wanted to spend time together, and even when they had to say goodbye, they always could look forward to seeing each other. They wanted to wake up beside each other, have their slippers side by side, do laundry and dishes and cook together. They don't like staying in their respective flats without the other because wherever they are is home, and when he finally asks her to stay for good, she agrees and they make love. She moves in very soon after, as she found out they were going to be parents! Teresa still keeps her flat in Madrid, as she does still have to go back from time to time, and having her family to help is invaluable to her when Sharpe is abroad.

When Antonia is old enough and Sharpe finishes his 20 year contract with the army, they decide to move back to Spain and live in Toledo. With Sharpe retired he's very excited to be a househusband and spend his time with Antonia, and Teresa goes to the city to work or works from home. Sharpe likes to update her on the shenanigans their daughter gets up to during the day and he has a beautiful garden in their backyard and Teresa never thought she could be so happy.

Teresa's time in London made her realize just how bland Spanish cuisine is. Sharpe introduces her to roast beef and gravy, wigan kebabs, fish and chips, tikka masala....she loves gravy and can't get enough of it. She learns to make English food when Sharpe stays with her in Spain, and she had a lot of cravings during her pregnancy that thankfully could be sated in London :P

[guppyscolita]

hi there ! How are you ?

Can you do more Peabody X Joey caliente pleaaase !!

Love your art bro ❤👏

Hey, thank you so much Sorry this asks has been sitting on my ask box for the longest time, I just posted a drawing of the plant boys you might like to see haha

[frenchiepal]

oho phonetics!! i've taken a couple classes on it but it's been a while lol. if you like phonetics/phonology then you'll prob like morphology!! there's some similar concepts and stuff and it's so interesting to see how they all interact. i've never actually taken a class dedicated to morphology but it comes up here and there in other classes. semantics is not my strong suit haha it's really a different ballpark! honestly it was a lot like taking logic classes lol. it's really interesting to learn about how meaning interacts with language especially since it's so variable even within one person much less one language

personally i like syntax and phonology best! not the UG/syntax trees type but in my grad syntax class we learned all about the different kinds of things syntax can do/be within a language as well as trends among languages. it was totally different from any class i'd taken before (really difficult but super interesting!!). it really blew my mind all the different ways languages organize themselves like ergativity?? varied word orders?? not having clear word categories?? wild!!! i also really like historical linguistics! so interesting to apply phonological techniques to the real world and look at how language has changed and even reconstruct languages!! it's wild what we can do. anyway sorry! for the long message ahaha

ahh don't apologise for writing a long message i love hearing about my fellow linguistics students' experiences! i'd been under the impression that phonetics is pushed by all unis but that's apparently not the case :')))

syntax is so technical yet so interesting! i remember learning about some languages where single words can act as a verb, noun and adjective at the same time but unfortunately we spent too much time on syntax trees to dive deeper into that😭 historical linguistics sounds so *clenches fist* fascinating, was that a course at your uni?? what does a girl have to do to get some variety in her curriculum.....

(sorry i know syntax trees are not your fav and also fuck ug but pls enjoy this meme)

[franzkafkagf]

yeah sex is great but have you ever found a paper that exactly supports the point you‘re trying to make? 😫🤌

[supercantaloupe]

remember when i used to have original ideas for art/fics/essays.....yeah me neither lol