#this list is also so american-centric I'm so sorry

[peachdoxie]

You'd think me studying film across three different degrees would make this list easier to compile, but it turns out that I've seen a lot of movies that I don't really like. Here's a list of some that I find interesting, for entirely subjective reasons. If someone else out there has seen all of these movies, I'd be surprised.

[robins-s0ngbird]

Hello, I'm robins-s0ngbird, but call me Serenia/Sapphire! I go by both~

You most likely recognize the name 'Serenia' from somewhere~ It's most likely from my roleplay blog @intergalactic-singer (which is technically my main according to tumblr, but this will act as my main!) for Robin from Honkai Star Rail!

All follows and likes will come from the Robin account, simply because I had 0 idea what I was doing when I made the account..

DO NOT send me donation links or asks, please. i do care, i promise, but i am a minor, i do not have the means to help you, and since i'm a small blog, it won't reach a lot of people.

I'm a Hoyoverse girl, mostly playing Honkai Star Rail, Honkai Impact 3rd, and the occasional Genshin Impact when my friends bother me to play with them. I also play Wuthering Waves, Cooke Run Kingdom, Cookie Run Ovenbreak, Zenless Zone Zero, Dandy's World, Pressure, and Brawl Stars!

Even with my somewhat busy life, I tend to learn all the lore in each game I play~ I also currently run 26 RP blogs across 10 fandoms, but they'll soon increase with my new obsessions.

List of roleplay blogs are here!

I mostly write small stories or my OC lore with my mutuals, which we often tie their lore together. I usually write whenever I'm bored, or someone asks me to write them something. I also send mutuals a lot of random stuff, from music to art~

My current obsession is Shelly (DW), Ginger (DW), and ShellVision (DW Ship). They're my blorbos and just. aughh. heh. :3

（。＾▽＾） (robins-s0ngbird.carrd.co)

Heres my carrd if you need any extra info~! It has some of my mutuals on it, but a full list will be added later~!

Though my blog may mostly be tagless (because I tend to forget them-), heres a list just in case~!

General;

for friendship ~ For anything for my mutuals!

serenias snippets ~ Any random short stories/headcanons

serenias song queue ~ Any music/playlists I share

serenia shares art ~ Any art I reblog, regardless of fandom

Sole Shell AU ~ anything for my Dandy's World Shelly-Centric AU !

Fandom;

beloved gem ~ Anything Aventurine/Aventio related because im very not normal

beloved songbird ~ Anything Robin/Robinhill related

angelic siblings ~ Any Robin post with Sunday in it

elysian realmkeeper ~ Anything with Elysia in it

fontainian actress ~ Anything Furina related

feixiaoposting ~ Anything Feixiao related. I love her sm.

riding the stars ~ Anything Star Rail related

across the sea of quanta ~ Anything Honkai Impact related

all across teyvat ~ Anything Genshin related

Honkai Star Rail;

I fell in love with this game, simply because I saw that it was releasing, and I needed a new game. I never knew that it'd become my main game and fandom I'd be in. I loved the character designs, the lore, and the writing behind it all. I even appreciate the Honkai Impact references since I started playing that too~!

I play on NA, and my uid is 601916942 :>

(also, beware of my Aventurine. just saying.)

Current Main: Aventurine, with a bit of Dr Ratio and Welt on the side~

Current Main Team: Dr. Ratio, Silver Wolf, Aventurine, Lynx

My Favorite Characters: Aventurine, Robin + Sunday, Boothill, Silver Wolf, Dan Heng/Dan Heng Imbibitor Lunae, Welt

Honkai Impact 3rd;

I decided to play this game because, I simply went 'I play Star Rail. I should play this too because its a honkai game!' and suddenly I love this game so much. I fell in love with the characters, the buildup, the worldbuilding, everything.

I still play on the American server, with my UID being 107786863 :3

Current Main: Senadina (sorry Elysia)

Current Team: Senadina, Helia, Coralie

My Favorite Characters: Elysia, Kiana Kaslana, Bronya Zaychik, Welt (again), Senadina, Griseo, Kevin Kaslana, Li Sushang, Shigure Kira

Thank you for reading~!

aventurine dividers at the beginning: @preydatory robin, boothill, and ratio dividers: @kaeyaphile

[frociaggine]

Any fiction recommendations? I’ve repeatedly read Locked Tomb, natch. I’d love something similarly brainwork inducing but maybe a touch lighter. Also not fantasy or sci fi…I need something to listen to while I do a ton of chores, and those can be hard (for me) because the unfamiliar proper nouns get confusing. :/

anon!! I'm terrible at reccing anything based on “if you liked TLT” because TLT is like five different genres in a trench coat, but I TRIED (⭐) Here are some brainworm-y recs that aren't sff — where by brainworm-y I mean that they stayed with me for a while after I finished them, but aren't overly confusing. (most of them are books, but available on audio)

Podcasts: a tumblr pal recced me the deviser based on me liking the eldritch elements of tlt; it's short and horror-y, and I really enjoyed it.

I haven't checked out the new TMA yet but I see many TLT peeps who are enjoying it (or S1 of the original The Magnus Archives could be a good entry point if you haven't ever listened to it)

TV: Unfortunately I hardly ever watch live action stuff BUT if you haven't seen either IWTV (the series not the film) or Yellowjackets, I do rec those! There's a lot of overlap between these fans and TLT fandom on my dash. His Dark Materials also goes hard and you might enjoy it (dysfunctional characters! worldbuilding! religious weirdness!) but it has more sff elements than other stuff I've recced. Oddball out of nowhere but The Great is a fun show if you enjoy the meme moments of TLT + people being gleefully horrible + having feelings despite your best intentions

Animanga: Utena (!!!!!) also Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, which occupies a very similar space to TLT in my brain

Books!

✧ I went through my “women unhinged” goodreads shelf and found some books that are avaliable in audio format, and might appeal. These are wildly varied in scope and ngl the criterion was just “at least one person (besides myself) who enjoyed tlt also this book” and the similarities stop there. It's all vibes baby! Still, I tried

my heart is a chainsaw by stephen graham jones (horror, slasher), bunny by mona awad (horror, wildly unhinged), the witching hour by anne rice (horror, gothic)

matrix by lauren groff (historical, lesbian nuns), anything by sarah waters (historical fiction + lesbians), rebecca by daphne du maurier (historical, gothic)

the plot by jean hanff korelitz (litfic, thriller), sadie by courtney summers (thriller, coming of age). anything by gillian flynn (thrillers with terrible women).

✧ I really enjoy Tana French thrillers for the strong sense of place, great prose, and the complete emotional turmoil of her character-centric narratives. If anything sounds up your alley, I enjoyed the witch's elm + dublin murder squad series. They're murder mystery procedural but the messy characters really elevate the novels. Available in audiobook also

✧ American Elsewhere, technically scifi but set in New Mexico. Somehow, cosmic horrors who have taken over a quaint little town and worse! They are enforcing HETERONORMATIVITY upon it! They also have tentacles. The main character rocks

✧ Sundial by Catriona Ward: insane, gripping psychological horror. A mother and her unsettling daughter take a trip to the isolate desert ranch where the main chracter grew up. Surrounded by unsettling science experiments

✧ A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan: when the parasocial relationship is so strong, it accidentally summons a hellmonster from another dimension

✧ SFF adjacent, sorry, but set in the real world (historical, tho) — Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge, a middle grade novel with fairytale elements that gave me more brainworms than any kids book ought to, mostly because I LOVED the main character. She occupies a very similar place in my brain as Gideon does. This is actually the only book on the list that I'm not sure is available in audio format, but if you get a chance and it's up your alley, I'd check it out

I hope there's at least ONE thing you'll like in here! lmk (also. lmk if you don't have access to a way to borrow audiobooks but would like to)

[bajoop-sheeb]

I can't help but notice that all of the people in your anti-colonialism by "marginalized people" book rec list are people who were born and grew up in either the US or, in one or two cases, another white Anglophone country. I.e. the imperial core.

As a non-American I wonder whether, due to the cultural hegemony of the US and other Anglophone countries, the perspectives of people who have spent their whole lives in the Imperial core (even if marginalized in other ways due to their race or some other attribute) can be considered "authentic" depictions of the effects of colonialism in the way that you are presenting them. I find that people from the US, even POC people from the US, are often pretty incapable of understanding non-US perspectives on social justice issues because they're rarely exposed to them and because they grew up brainwashed with media that treats the US as the center of the world, so they overlay the US framework over everything.

I would perhaps have liked to see more recs for authors writing about colonialism who actually grew up in countries that have been affected by colonialism, or at least in countries that aren't as rich and powerful as the US and are therefore heavily dependent on the political whims of powerful Western ones. I'm sure there's a bunch of people in South America writing SF/F, for example, considering their long tradition of awesome magical realism. Or South Africa. Or India (I note that Salman Rushdie is not on your list, for example). I'm not writing this to be pettish, because I don't know enough about it either and would actually like to know, I just feel like perhaps we should all be a bit humbler when talking about this since a strictly US-centric perspective is still a VERY limited one when talking about colonialism (by definition an international, intercultural phenomenon), even when written by POC.

I also wonder about your definition of "marginalized" and if it doesn't fall into the same US-centrism that I talked about in my previous paragraph (even if we assume that "marginalized" means "marginalized as it relates to colonialism" and ignore other forms of marginalization). Is a person from, say, the Balkans, marginalized enough to write about anti-colonialism, or are they exactly the same as a white American in your perspective? Does it matter where from the Balkans? Does it matter if they're Muslim or Christian? How about a Ukrainian person? How about a Ukrainian Jew? Is a person from Bosnia or Ukraine, who went through a war in their lifetime, less qualified to write about war than Kuang, who grew up middle class and went to an Ivy League school (and honestly did a really shitty job of portraying a war in The Poppy Wars), just because they're "Caucasian"?

Also, people are allowed to acknowledge flaws of books written by POC without being automatically labeled as racist, you know. Finding Babel too heavy-handed or on the nose has nothing to do with finding POC characters annoying or unrelatable and sorry but, yeah, IMHO it's really on the nose and annoying about it. It's the writing style that's the problem, not the themes. Also the central metaphor, IMHO, makes it completely useless as a colonialism allegory because if you can destroy colonialism by destroying one magical uberpowerful whatsit, your book is kinda not serious enough about nuanced representation of sociological and political forces to be considered impactful anti-colonialist literature. Saying that as someone who loves Butler and Jemisin. Thea Guanzhon, for example, is a Filipina born and raised in the Philippines and still lives there, which makes her book way more of an "own voices" account of colonialism than Kuang's could ever be in my accounting, but that doesn't mean that her account of colonialism has any particular nuance to it (so far it's just the backdrop for the enemies to lovers romance). So even assuming that Kuang's account is resonant enough with enough people (which I know it is because her book is super popular), who is more deserving of being on your "own voices" list, Kuang or Guanzhon?

I also wonder why white women in particular?

The simple response to all of this is that the post you're referring to broke containment.

I debated replying, because I can't help but feel your message was written in bad faith. But I'm going to try to give you the benefit of the doubt.

You are absolutely right about the limitations of the original list. I truly didn't expect it to reach so many people, and I am not nearly as well-read as I'd like to be when it comes to literature written outside of the West. Please take a look at the reblogs, where a bunch of awesome people have done incredible work filling the gaps I left.

I struggle with the rest of your message. I explicitly stated that I do not expect people to enjoy specific books written by BIPOC authors, simply that I've noticed a very frustrating pattern. And yet you suggest I'm saying that if someone doesn't like Babel or The Hurricane Wars, I'm saying they're racist. Be serious.

Even as a child of multigenerational immigrants, I'll freely admit that I personally have a very US-centric perspective on social issues that I need to work on, but it's wild of you to say that all POC people born in the US are "pretty incapable of understanding" global issues.

When I wrote "marginalized" in the original post, what I really meant was "BIPOC and BIPOC queer people.” I should’ve been more careful about the wording.

Why white women in particular? When it comes to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist fiction (written by Anglophones) the authors that I see most highly and frequently praised are white women. I'd list the specific ones I'm talking about here, but 1. I don't want to be hunted for sport by their fans, 2. I've actually enjoyed some of their work, and 3. they're only a small part of the problem and I think people should be allowed to write whatever they want as long as they can handle the criticism. But I'm sorry, white women. I'll do better next time. I also want to use this moment to apologize to all the dumbasses complaining about my tone/me being "shouty." Reverse racism is real, and we must all stand vigilant hahaha miss me

You telling me to be humble feels a tad hypocritical, but sure, I'll take that under advisement.

[spuddlespudloves]

Fuck Shit Up - Fiction Edition

A non- comprehensive list of shows/films/books that get the revolutionary juices flowing (arbritrarily divided into sad vs empowering categories by me, and in no particular order)

Feel free to add to the list - particularly content created by women of colour and non-England centric stuff

FUCKING SHIT UP: we can and we WILL smash the system

Damnation (Netflix TV Series)- western meets antifash in this striker vs strike breaker epic. Great plots and characters and white supremacists getting shot in the head, what more can you want?

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - A++ cinematography, great action, and Charlize Theron for the gays

Snowpiercer (Netflix TV Series) - I enjoyed it and it's a fun premise about a class system running on a train which holds the last humans since everything froze over

Pride (2014) - feelgood movie of the century - miners, gays and gay miners solidarity - true story

Sorry to Bother You (2018) - a sureal masterpiece - watch it for a good mindfuck

Pose (FX TV Series) - an amazing look at 1990s New York ballroom culture - chef kissing noises

The Dispossesed (Ursula Le Guin) - sci-fi that plots out what an anarchist society might look like - there’s other books in the series too -  it takes a bit of getting into

Newsies (1992) - a musical about a newspaper boys strike - still not watched it so review tbd

Made in Dagenham (2010) - unions & 1960s costumes yes pls - a true story about a sewing machinist strike in the 1960s - take it with a pinch of salt

Brassed Off (1996) - a heartfelt tale about a fictional mining village in Barnsley towards the ‘inevitable’ end of the miners strikes - accents are surprisingly passable and there’s a young Ewan McGreggor to oggle

9 to 5 (1980) - Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin kidnap their boss and take control of their office. What more could you want?

The Parable of the Sower (Book) - an absolute classic by Octavia E. Butler, I'm really excited to read the sequel

Enola Holmes 2 (2022) - gets an honerable mention for the matchgirl strike scene

SHIT IS FUCKED UP: social realism and tough times

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist (Robert Noonan) - A fictionalised look at difficulties of working life in the early 1900s - he died of TB before he had finished editing it - it takes a bit of getting into

Love on the Dole (Walter Greenwood) - similar vibes to the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist but set in the 1930s in northern England - just found out there’s a film brb

The Plague (Albert Camus) - a very timely book about the rise of plague (and metaphorically fascism) in a town in Algiers in the 1940s  - only read if you want to feel validated in your mask wearing and antifascism

The Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC TV Series) - the stories of several tar layers dealing with working life and unemployed life in the 1970s/80s - dare you not to cry

The Handmaid’s Tale (Book or TV Show) - interesting look at ideas about how reproductive rights can fit into patriarchal systems

I, Daniel Blake (2016) - you will cry, and cry and cry again - a harrowing look at the brutality of the UK benefits system

Sorry We Missed You (2019) - another Ken Loach film about the brutal way delivery drivers are treated

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy) - the king of depressing plotlines brings you his saddest book. This will fuck you up. Social mobility is a lie and you’re sad and alone in the world. Basically any other Hardy book is an equally good choice.

Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck ) - the king of depressing plotlines about the phalacy of the American Dream - again, social mobility is a lie and you’re sad and alone in the world- also recommend his other books such as the Pearl

Peterloo (2018) - an important telling of the Peterloo massacre, a significant moment in English worker’s history - a lot of the background is spelled out if you don’t know a lot of the history. It's a bit cheesy and heavy handed at times

[fbfh]

STAR ANON HERE... I'm just curious what are your fave emo bands....

STAR ANON MY BELOVED!!!!! HOW ARE YOU DOING I MISS YOU <333 first of all, amazing question. I know the defenition of the emo genre is a little loose, but my favorite emo/pop punk bands are currently palaye royale, fall out boy (obvs), and paramore.

palaye royale own this fucking ass okay. remington leith.... ooooh my god. he has singlehandedly made me reconsider my stance on rpf. vampire!remington???? oh my god. oh my god. if I could drown in his voice I would. his cover of closer my nine inch nails actually brought about the second coming of christ. at the very end of no love in la where he goes "I SAID THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS LOVE IN LaAaAyEeee-"????? dead. actually dead. the boom is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard in my life, line it up is my FUCKING ANTHEM, and dying in a hot tub live is my favorite video on the internet. I don't use the phrase "eargasm" every, but I genuinely can't think of any other way to describe remi's voice. Emerson is an amazing drummer and incredible artist (I am SO jelly of his ability to draw architecture) and Sebastian is a brilliant guitarist and is the brain cell posessor (and probably has to routinely keep remi from jumping off stuff and breaking a limb with only partial success.) the grittiness and sincerety and emotion in remington's voice really just scratches my brain in a way that nothing else does. If I could get his voice made into something tangible I would open my skull and rub my brain against it for hours. I fucking love him.

fall out boy need no introduction. "doing lines of dust and sweat off of last nights stage just to feel like you" from 27??????? lives in my head rent free. been into some of their absolute headbangers from american beauty/american psycho and infinity on high recently like novocaine, jetpack blues (i'm sorry but "do you reMEMBER HOW WE USED TO SPLIT. A. DRINK. itNEVermattEREDWHATitwas. I think." I WANT THAT TATTOOED ON MY FOREHEAD!!!!!!!), thriller (OFC) and i've got all this ringing in my ears all singlehandedly describe my brain chemistry. that's what dopamine sounds like. ALSO fourth of july will never not sound like season 3 of stranger things to me. yk all the promo art where they're all turning around???? that but in gif form while the first few notes are playing. I wish someone would make a slightly harringrove centric edit of the starcourt mall incident and the fair and everything. if anyone knows about any season 3 fourth of july edits PLEASE send them to me because "i'm starting to forget just what summer ever meant to you"????? pls

PARAMORE. FUCKING PARAMORE RAISED ME. paramore got me through my teenage years almost singlehandedly. I remember when after laughter came out. I fucking love this is why. It's almost all I've been listening to. all we know is falling???? brand new eyes???? literally paramore have ZERO SKIPS it's insane. also (maybe I just haven't heard of them) but it's really refreshing to have a female lead singer in a pop punk band bc (again as far as I'm aware) that's not as common as having a male lead singer and IF I COULD MAKE MY INNER MONOLOGUE BE HAYLEY WILLIAMS VOICE??????? PLS- listen all I wanted was you is amazing obviously but my heart?????? MY HEART?????? I wanna scream that at someone and mean it. bucket list. I can't even reccommend any paramore songs bc if I try to think of good paramore songs I'm just going to list their discography. no fucking skips and I stand by that. Hayley's solo albums also feel very twilight bella swan depression forest angst core which I FUCKING ADORE. first thing to go is tattooed in my brain, specifically paired with this scene from the greatest romcom of all time french kiss. match made in heaven.

also lip candy don't have a lot of songs out yet AS I AM TYPING THIS I JUST SAW THEY RELASED AN ALBUM????? BRB LISTENING TO THAT NOW but they sound like what I thought teenager music would sound like when I was a kid (like they nailed it fucking perfectly) and have a very nostalgic feeling and sound to them which I adore. if you stay home and never be the same fucking slap. they slap and a half. it's giving demigod adventurecore roadtrip music.

[mirekat]

Hello! Sorry if this is a weird thing to ask, but I'm working on this essay about section 28 and I was wondering if you had any recommendations on super basic LGBTQ+ historiography? It turns out going from studying early modern history to very recent stuff is a trip because as an early modernist I could read books from the 90s and it was mostly fine, but now if I read books from the 90s, section 28 was still in law!

Heya! And omg it's not weird at all--thank you for asking! Other than the piece of my brain that's reserved for Star Trek, this is my whole intellectual life and I will talk about it endlessly.

I feel like I should preface this with the caveat that I do mainly English history, and mainly postwar history, so my reading list is skewed in that direction. That said, trying to answer this made me realise just how few surveys of UK LGBTQ+ history actually run all the way up to 2003! There's a good volume of LGB historiography covering c.1880-1967, a decent amount about the Gay Liberation Front and HIV/Aids activism, but when I went back over my exam list the only survey I saw that covered Section 28 repeal was Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society (the 2017 edition). Weeks is basically the doyen of the field, though--his Coming Out (1977) is still the text all us whippersnappers have a go at to prove ourselves--so he’s good to have in your bibliography. There's also a chapter on Section 28 in Trans Britain (2018), ed. Christine Burns. The book is more a set of personal essays than a survey, and it's not pitched at an academic audience, but it’s still the only text I know that covers UK trans history from 1950s-present.

If you're looking at the big sweeping questions that have defined the field, there’s a crucial split in the mid-2000s. On the one hand you’ve got books like Harry Cocks’ Nameless Offences (2003) which is a history of gay Victorian men--as in men he defines as gay--in the tradition of Weeks. And then you’ve got books like Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London (2005) covering 1918-1957, which are asking instead how ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ became identity terms in the first place, and how we should tell queer stories when our subjects didn’t define themselves that way. Sharon Marcus Between Women (2007) made a similar move to Houlbrook’s w/r/t Victorian women’s relationships. Laura Doan even had a public fight with herself about it: Fashioning Sapphism (2000) calls itself a history of interwar lesbian culture, and Disturbing Practices (2013) repudiates the earlier book, arguing that we can’t project concepts like ‘lesbian’ onto women who desired women before that desire was called lesbian. The intro to British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Brian Lewis (2012) has an overview of this kind of push-and-pull between historical methodologies; the essays in it run through the 1970s. 

Other texts building off this 2000s historiography I can think of at the moment:

Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Postwar Britain, 1945-71 (2017)

Simon Avery and Katherine L. Graham, eds. Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c. 1850 to the Present (2016-v eclectic but intro and post-80s chapters might be useful)

Brian Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Alison Oram, Chris Waters and Frank Mort have a lot of articles that cover the 20s-70s; might look up their faculty pages for ideas. 

Zooming out further, there are a handful of foundational US history texts that get cited in most UK bibliographies as well. I’d say the ‘essentials’ trilogy would be Kennedy and Davis’ Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993; 2ed 2014)--which you mentioned you’d read!--George Chauncey’s Gay New York (1994) and Susan Stryker’s Transgender History (2008; 2ed 2017).

Finally, this is all v white and Global North and Anglophone and (mostly) not trans-inclusive, which is...well, the field to some extent. But it’s getting better! Idk how much of this would go directly into a paper on Section 28, but for good measure here are some historically-minded works in my own wee subfield: Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child (2018), which shows how gender in the US can’t be disentangled from race; Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Professing Selves (2014) on medical transition in post-70s Iran; Howard Chiang’s After Eunuchs (2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific which literally came out three weeks ago so I can’t speak to it yet but I’m hype for it. 

Ooh, and if you like oral histories there’s the Oral History Digital Collaboratory, which is North American-centric but has a big list of digitized projects!

Anyway, that’s a by-no-means-exhaustive overview. Putting this out into the world in hopes that anyone else among this tumblr crew of supremely well-read folks might have other recs! What are your queer/LGBTQ+ history go-tos?

(Also, OP, I’d love to hear what recs you have for the early modern period!)

[a-hog-in-a-hedge]

@the-empress-7

Okay this is long: They're pissed at the Brits for not falling for their shenanigans, and that's because the Brits (and us royal watchers) know the social contract of the monarchy, including:

The history of the monarchy

The purpose of the monarchy

The protocol of the monarchy

The structure of the monarchy

The duties of the monarchy

The relationship between the monarchy and the public

Americans (no offense to my fellow Americans) know literally none of those steps unless they've taken Brit history or pay attention to the monarchy. Americans see royals as American celebrities with American values who also have:

Titles

Tiaras

Gowns

Diana

Jewels,

and think that is the monarchy. So when Meghan says, "They were mean and didn't accept me," Americans look at their list of criteria and think, "But she fit perfectly!" and proceed to force their identity politics onto a different country with a different culture, different government system, different history etc, and make accusations against said entire country and peoples.

The US can be a bit ethnocentric and also has one of true biggest and most influential media systems; Meghan knows how this dynamic can be used to her advantage. She tried to manipulate the Brits into thinking she was joining their culture by saying all the right things ("my new home in London,") but her actions, behavior, and issues she play to were very American-centric, allowing her to manipulate Americans into identifying with her and protecting her. Forcing an entirely different culture onto others in their home country is bound to receive adverse reactions, and naturally the British rightfully became put off and fruatrated by her, and expressed as much - as they should be allowed to do with public servants as part if their social contract (that's one of the keystones of American democracy, Meghan 🙄). When she realized she wouldn't and couldn't have it both ways she dropped the "my new home in London," schtick and completely leaned into the persona and issues that would resonate with the biggest media system - an American-centric ones. With the dumpster fire of problems in America currently, people don't have time or care for her so she decides to go back to the Brits to try and garner anger, knowing that negativity builds, so that she can get the sympathy of the Americans back. It's a cycle I'm worried she will try to continue for awhile, however, luckily, the reaction length is becoming shorter.

Sorry for the freaking dissertation! I'm a psych grad student and utterly fascinated by social psychology and sociology; I could talk about those subjects all day long and there's a lot of those at play here 😅.

I hope the people that managed to make it through the end of this long ass paper enjoyed my analysis!

Why are H&M lecturing Brits rn? Did their US voting gig fail? Their BLM in US ?

Cause only the Brits are still aware that they exist. 

[thedalishelves]

Hey! I saw that you were vegan and I have a bit of a problem that maybe you could help with (or not, it's cool either way). I have wanted to change my diet to be a vegan for the longest time, but my parents just deadass don't respect it? I'm young, so I live with my parents and I eat what they cook and etc, and when I expressed the desire to be vegan, or at least vegetarian, they ignored me. Sometimes I have to go days w/o eating bc they cook meat n such. Any tips or is this unfixable for now?

first of all that’s really cool that u wanna go vegan and thank you for asking me!! i dealt with this too! i first went vegetarian when i was 13 and my parents convinced me to just give up red meat. after about two months i excused myself from the dinner table one night and just sobbed in the bathtub for like 20 minutes because i felt so bad about eating a chicken. after that they realized how Extra i am about this and reluctantly let me do my thing (with some persuading from me: tips will follow)

also this is gonna be long sorry omg this is what happens when ppl ask me about being vegan jfdkshafks i’m putting it under a cut just bc it would literally take up people’s entire dash

so i’d recommend going vegetarian first for sure. it’s what i always recommend anyway. slowly phasing out animal products will help SO MUCH with adjusting and cravings. i was vegetarian for 4 years before i went vegan! but for you specifically it’ll expand the amount of stuff you can eat that your parents make. meat is the staple in a lots of families’ meals, but i’m guessing they’ll often make a little side dish or something? eat a lot of that!! 60% of what i ate was the green beans and rice my mom always made for a side dish

ask to help your parents with cooking! try to separate your food whenever possible. so like if they’re making spaghetti with meat sauce (gross ik my dad always used to make it), just say you’d prefer it without the sauce and grab a little bowl before it’s mixed in with the meat. (i used to add butter to it.) basically just any dish that could be vegetarian: take a little serving before the meat is added. i did this all the time and it gave me a lot of good meals (another example in case this is vague: i’d scoop a bit of salad into my bowl before my mom added bacon to it)

also i found it really helpful to ask for VERY cheap vegetarian/vegan foods. i’d always ask my dad to buy beans and lentils and because they’re like 50 cents a can or whatever, he couldn’t reasonably say no. (these are so versatile, even if you don’t know how to cook. making a bean salad is so easy and i used to eat them all the time! also AMAZING source of protein and iron and so much other good stuff)

there are also quite a few sneaky “accidental” vegan foods that you can request from the grocery store that won’t make your parents think: ‘ugh she’s a vegan now.’ some examples: oreos, most cake mixes (there’s lots of recipes online where u just add water and/or soda!!), loads of different chips, many cereals (if u eat them dry), instant ramen (even the ones that say beef and chicken). i know that’s a lot of junk food, but there’s also some healthier(ish) prepackaged meals: this list is good (even though peta is a garbage company i reluctantly admit they have good resources sometimes) (it’s american centric tho but there’s loads of these lists online!). since i’m guessing you don’t go grocery shopping so you aren’t able to look at the labels, you can look it up online and ask your parents to buy it (and you can do this in an indirect way if they’re not cool with it, like ‘hey can u buy the sweet spicy chili doritoes instead of the other flavour next time i like it better’ that kinda thing)

so those are some tips on how to get some food! you should also ask for multivitamins since if you’re basically going to be picking and choosing what your parents put in front of you then you might miss out on crucial vitamins that is otherwise easy for vegans to get if they’re picking their own food.

obviously the ideal thing here would be to get your parents to be on your side!! i have no idea what your relationship with your parents is like so this might not be applicable at all, but in case it is i’ll give you some tips that worked for me.

the best thing that worked for me in the beginning was that i promised i’d cook my own food. as a wee 13 year old, my mom still made my lunch but i asked her for just a plain cheese sandwich and she was okay with that. for dinner, she’d still make the same old side dishes that i could eat, but if she was making chicken, i’d fry up my own tofu or put a couple veggie dogs in the microwave. i don’t think she’d have let me be vegetarian if she had to cook my stuff separate for me. (also, by the time i was vegan i was so used to cooking my own food i just made all my own meals and had gotten good at it by that point!)

at first i just explained to my parents that it was unbearable for me to eat animals. like i literally could not put it into my mouth unless they essentially force fed me. (once again, i was super extra) as my anecdote at the beginning explained, they saw how serious i was lmao. however, my mom did not understand me being vegan until very very recently!!! over the years i’ve casually mentioned various facts about the meat and dairy industry that have opened her mind a bit. and she’s even stopped eating pigs now!! i always find it helpful to say that i do it for multiple reasons: for animals, for the environment, and my health. that usually gets through to people because they realize i’m not just doing some dumb trend or whatever. if at all possible, show them a documentary?? i’m guessing they’d be like ‘hell no’ but just in case (and for your benefit too!) my favourite is cowspiracy (on netflix). it has changed SO MANY meat eaters’ minds!! (the documentary maker was a meat eater too!)

but i realize how engrained this is in certain cultures. my dad is italian and by this point (after 10 years) he realizes that being vegan is a sustainable diet (which he didn’t believe before) but i think he’d rather die than give up meat. and my other side is polish which means their diet is basically carbs and meat and carbs with meat. none of my extended family understand what the hell i’m on about. it’s very frustrating but if you stick with your resolve to not eat meat then they’ll eventually realize you’re serious and maybe make one dish for you at christmas instead of just giving you a piece of bread

if they REALLY are against you going vegetarian, then i obviously absolutely cannot recommend that you starve. you can always go vegetarian/vegan when you move out, and that wouldn’t be your fault at all!! a compromise might be to go pescatarian or even just cut out red meat. (though if you’re anything like me this might not end well haha. it’s worth trying though as a last resort)

i know it’s such a tough situation!!! my sister is vegan too and literally EVERY DAY we text each other about how ignorant and disrespectful our family members are about this. it’s something pretty much every vegan goes through i think, because there are some WACK ideas about eating animals and those who choose not to.

so tl;dr: if you can, try to tell your parents honestly how you feel and try to give them facts. offer to cook your own meals. ask to help your parents cook so you can try to make the food vegetarian. request foods from the grocery store that are a) cheap and/or b) accidentally vegan.

i really hope this helped!!! i was so scared and overwhelmed when i first when vegetarian and had no idea what the fuck i was doing and it makes everything so much worse when your family is unsupportive. i truly wish u the best and please come to me with any follow up questions!!!