#untrue stories

[moreaugriffins]

Question : How many fictional depictions of HG Wells do I know?

Answer : too many

Bonus Question : how many depictions of HG Wells have used their time machine to interview (dead) authors?

Answer : two

[inkskinned]

you're grabbing lunch with a nice man and he gives you that strange grimace-smile that's popular right now; an almost sardonic "twist" of his mouth while he looks literally down on you. it looks like he practiced the move as he leans back, arms folded. he just finished reciting the details of NFTs to you and explaining Oppenheimer even though he only watched a youtube about it and hasn't actually seen it. you are at the bottom of your wine glass.

you ask the man across from you if he has siblings, desperately looking for a topic. literally anything else.

he says i don't like small talk. and then he smiles again, watching you.

a few years ago, you probably would have said you're above celebrity gossip, but honestly, you've been kind of enjoying the dumb shit of it these days. with the rest of the earth burning, there's something familiar and banal about dragging ariana grande through the mud. you think about jeanette mccurdy, who has often times gently warned the world she's not as nice as she appears. you liked i'm glad my mom died but it made you cry a lot.

he doesn't like small talk, figure out something to say.

you want to talk about responsibility, and how ariana grande is only like 6 days older than you are - which means she just turned 30 and still dresses and acts like a 13 year old, but like sexy. there's something in there about the whole thing - about insecurity, and never growing up, and being sexualized from a young age.

people have been saying that gay people are groomers. like, that's something that's come back into the public. you have even said yourself that it's just ... easier to date men sometimes. you would identify as whatever the opposite of "heteroflexible" is, but here you are again, across from a man. you like every woman, and 3 people on tv. and not this guy. but you're trying. your mother is worried about you. she thinks it's not okay you're single. and honestly this guy was better before you met, back when you were just texting.

wait, shit. are you doing the same thing as ariana grande? are you looking for male validation in order to appease some internalized promise of heteronormativity? do you conform to the idea that your happiness must result in heterosexuality? do you believe that you can resolve your internal loneliness by being accepted into the patriarchy? is there a reason dating men is easier? why are you so scared of fucking it up with women? why don't you reach out to more of them? you have a good sense of humor and a big ol' brain, you could have done a better job at online dating.

also. jesus christ. why can't you just get a drink with somebody without your internal feminism meter pinging. although - in your favor (and judgement aside) in the case of your ariana grande deposition: you have been in enough therapy you probably wouldn't date anyone who had just broken up with their wife of many years (and who has a young child). you'd be like - maybe take some personal time before you begin this journey. like, grande has been on broadway, you'd think she would have heard of the plot of hamlet.

he leans forward and taps two fingers to the table. "i'm not, like an andrew tate guy," he's saying, "but i do think partnership is about two people knowing their place. i like order."

you knew it was going to be hard. being non-straight in any particular way is like, always hard. these days you kind of like answering the question what's your sexuality? with a shrug and a smile - it's fine - is your most common response. like they asked you how your life is going and not to reveal your identity. you like not being straight. you like kissing girls. some days you know you're into men, and sometimes you're sitting across from a man, and you're thinking about the power of compulsory heterosexuality. are you into men, or are you just into the safety that comes from being seen with them? after all, everyone knows you're failing in life unless you have a husband. it almost feels like a gradebook - people see "straight married" as being "all A's", and anything else even vaguely noncompliant as being ... like you dropped out of the school system. you cannot just ignore years of that kind of conditioning, of course you like attention from men.

"so let's talk boundaries." he orders more wine for you, gesturing with one hand like he's rousing an orchestra. sir, this is a fucking chain restaurant. "I am not gonna date someone who still has male friends. also, i don't care about your little friends, i care about me. whatever stupid girls night things - those are lower priority. if i want you there, you're there."

he wasn't like this over text, right? you wouldn't have been even in the building if he was like this. you squint at him. in another version of yourself, you'd be running. you'd just get up and go. that's what happens on the internet - people get annoyed, and they just leave. you are locked in place, almost frozen. you need to go to the bathroom and text someone to call you so you have an excuse, like it's rude to just-leave. like he already kind of owns you. rudeness implies a power paradigm, though. see, even your social anxiety allows the patriarchy to get to you.

you take a sip of the new glass of wine. maybe this will be a funny story. maybe you can write about it on your blog. maybe you can meet ariana grande and ask her if she just maybe needs to take some time to sit and think about her happiness and how she measures her own success.

is this settling down? is this all that's left in your dating pool? just accepting that someone will eventually love you, and you have to stop being picky about who "makes" you a wife?

you look down to your hand, clutching the knife.

[glitterparpaing]

it seems to be rightfully impossible for Mike Faist to have a major role in a movie/musical without making it unbearably homoerotic

and honestly? love that for him

[unclesamwilson]

remember when black sails said “no we’re not going to break the fourth wall. we’re not going to dismantle it or disprove it. the fourth wall is right behind you.”

[11thsense]

“Jason becomes the joker!” Lazy, boring, unimaginative, pedestrian, uninspired, predictable, cheap….shall I keep going

[ragesingoddess]

Odysseus, on his journey home to Ithaca, was visited by a ghost.

[swinginmandarin]

Rewatching black sails for the first time in its entirety and being two episodes away from the end, knowing what's coming

It's the way silver loves madi and flint too much to continue their war. But his love is selfish, he is putting his love for them above their own wants. And it feels as though he's saying i dont love you enough to wage your war, i love you too much to wage your war. how do you choose one irreplaceable thing over another. how do you choose one irreplaceable person over another. why MUST i choose.

The worst part is that silver doesn't even recognize his love for flint, or flint's love for him. He's able to reconcile his feelings for madi because they make sense to him its comfortable, and he doesn't realize he holds love for flint as well

Despite telling them both that he'll wait for them for however long they need and quite literally creating parallels of his relationships to them, he doesn't realize this.

[tomasz-the-hater]

it must have been said already by someone more eloquent than me, but i find it fascinating how lestat and armand mirror each other in terms of power dynamics and gender roles.

we have lestat. 'how can i say no to you' lestat. the stark father and maker to claudia and somehow later louis, the one that the new orleans tour guide mentions as the master of the house, the one that will not have claudia leave. his violence is loud and physical and outward, his sadism is somewhat acknowledged by him yet keeps happening. he almost kills louis when they fight by his, lestat's, own actions. he regrets it, sure, louis responds to his attacks often, sure. the violence between them is open.

not bothering to clean, only insisting that louis does eat. up to a certain point he even finances louis' wishes and whims. he is promiscuous, he gets lover(s), he is often (though not always) the first to make his desires known (considerable considerables etc etc).

despite the attributes that are considered unmanly (flair for dramatics, inclination to theatre and arts, queerness), he remains the more traditionally masculine figure in the relationship. he is the patriarch of the family, or at least he presents himself in that way in louis' memories.

(it, of course, does not mean that louis falls into the traditionally feminine role. the dichotomy of traditional heterosexual/heteronormative marriage is not fully applicable to even straight relationships because it is primarily a cultural ideal.)

we have armand. 'are you asking, maitre' armand. famously a victim, agentless by his own belief and volition. saying louis can leave in san francisco, yet staying in power by a) mind control (yay!), b) lies, manipulation, witholding information and c) care. he is also violent. he orchestrates louis (and claudia's, and madeleine's) death, yet is discrete about it to the very end; he saves and cares for louis after his suicide attempt, yet all of it is hidden behind mind control for five decades after.

picking lint off the sofa, cleaning up after louis (or claiming to do so) gives armand control over what is seen and what is not, what is kept and what goes. a humble servant rashid. it also gives him a great guilt tripping point: whatever louis does, armand just has to clean up after him, and isn't louis grateful for that? while not stated directly (i think), louis investments in art and real estate are the main source of money for loumand. lastly, an ex-prostitute, armand the one to lay face down while being fucked and seems to have no outside lovers (or louis just has more, ie 128).

not completely feminine, as aren't his gremlin nature and the ultimate violence and power that he keeps over louis both in the '70s and 2022 stay; yet armand still seems pretty much submissive, or wants to be that himself and for louis to be dominant (servant-master, arun-maitre), all the while keeping some control from the shadows. he is the quiet daniel's been longing for, the vacuming valium wife.

the first was louis' husband unforgettable through 77 years of marriage. the second was the proclaimed love of his life and a partnership to spite the first that may have grown into love but not enough to forget lestat. active violent power and shadowy mind control. a kind of husband and a kind of wife to louis, both defining him in and out of partnership

[mistermistyyy]

Me, shaking a Magic 8 Ball: "Am I straight?"

Magic 8 Ball: [Yes]

*4 YEARS LATER*

Me, with a boyfriend: "Guess that 8 ball was wrong."

*9 YEARS LATER*

Me, a trans woman with a husband: "Goddamn it."

[somfte]

okay i've had quite a lot of rum and i'm truly not trying to start any shit but "Love, for flint, is inseparable from political alliance." was very confusing to me because it seemed like the opposite of my interpretation of flint and how he loves

i know the post was about eleanor but i don't see him as *loving* eleanor. he has some affection for her, and he is kind when she is in distress. but it's not LOVE. he cares about eleanor more than most random nassau people but at the end of the day... when he says "eleanor guthrie has been arrested" to silver it's just, like...facts and news of the day, he's not distraught about it. he's more focused on silver and silver being his quartermaster and that partnership, that's what that scene is about. the news about eleanor is just exposition

everyone we see him love, he does so regardless of whether they are politically aligned

miranda

thomas

silver

miranda goes behind his back and sends that letter, and after they fight about it he comes home with an apology book because he's ride or die even if they disagree

a core part of the london flashbacks is that james and thomas have very different ways of seeing the world, different political opinions, and he falls in love with him *because* of that. "Strange pairs, Lieutenant. They can achieve the most unexpected things."

he loves silver so much he lets silver point a gun at him and tell him that what flint wants (the path to his political goals) is a nightmare, and then he lets silver [REDACTED]

the way i read it is that flint loves with his whole ass EVEN IF it's politically inconvenient for him, and it often very much is

[danmeichael]

"shen qingqiu is a liar who is lying about his feelings so we can't ACTUALLY tell how he feels about anything"

so you admit that you can tell he is lying and by extension you can actually discern what his true feelings on the matter are and that he's just unwilling to admit to them.

[sukibenders]

When it comes to Penelope I feel like a lot of her fans take any valid criticism towards her and turn it into hate, which does her character a disservice. While some people do hate on her, a lot of it holds valid reasons. Admitting that she has hurt many people isn't wrong because she has, it's been shown on throughout the show and the impacts it can have. From labeling Daphne as "unmarriageable" during her first season and events that followed, her labeling Eloise as being part of a group of rebels, the terms she used to describe Kate [and Simon]-- which carried racial undertones no matter how you try to spin it, who didn't even know personally at that point, what she did Marina. All of these were very harmful and to say that none of these characters should feel angry, that they should just forgive Penelope without any work put into it is very laughable (especially because she's still writing as Whistledown and put many, namely women, at risk during a time where reputation is everything--something in which Penelope herself faces). With this being said, criticizing her actions, at least for me, doesn't come from a complete place of hate but more so from believing that she can be better if she puts in the work. By ignoring all that she's done and having her get her happily ever after so easily in the end, to be honest, would ultimately feel lackluster. I feel like she still has room to grow, but it will take a lot of work and, I personally, think seeing her renavigate who she is with who she wants to be outside of Lady Whistledown would be very interesting.

[lumisails]

Black Sails really changes everything, especially if you're a pirate fan. Which may sound obvious but what I mean is... I've always loved Pirates of The Caribbean so fucking much, some of my favorite movies of all time. And then today I... Was looking at this Jack Sparrow figure I have and it... Dawned on me. The whole thing about pirates being stories. Being portrayed as a stereotype of the actual people who lived through that era, people who were probably closer to what we see in Black Sails than what we see in PoTC... And yet, we grow up with these stories. "Stories they tell their children". Treasure Island is a children's book. Most of the stories that feature pirates are meant to be told to children. It's just...Insane how now, at 32, I'm presented with something that changed my entire view on something that has been with me ever since I was a kid. I can't even remember when I started going crazy about pirates?? It may have been bc of PoTC when I was like 11. But I know that I have watched Muppet's Treasure Island at a younger age and many of the things I watched growing up featured pirates in some episodes like Pokémon, Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob. Freaking Peter Pan and all of its adaptations.

And the same could be said to other types of figures that we mostly know stereotypes of. Fe, I am a Norse Pagan and I research and learn a lot about the ancient Norse people and they are very different from the stereotypical image we have of Vikings. And these are the examples I can think of rn because they are the ones that are most present in my life, but I'm pretty sure it goes beyond pirates and vikings.

And then, you can go beyond historical stuff. What about the way we see people who are not from the same culture as ours? Especially poc cultures. All we know are stories and said stories are often painted in a bad light. Sure, these people can advocate for themselves, but not everyone will do their research and try to learn what's beyond the stories.

This post definitely went way farther than where I first intended when I started it out lol. But I hope it all makes sense and that I don't sound completely insane. But at the end of the day, Black Sails changes the way you view the world itself.

[sandyhorse333]

why are you gay

i just felt like it

[cream-and-tea]

i can’t believe they fucking blacksails-ed carpenter. what the fuck.

[lord-squiggletits]

Wanted to send an ask as well to hopefully provide some distraction from…recent events.

Are there any parts of world building in the TF IDW universe that you wish were explored/expanded upon more? Or that you want to explore in your writing? Like certain aspects of pre-war Cybertron, cybertronian culture, post-war Cybertron, etc?

Okay this is actually perfectly timed for a rant I wanted to go on about the way mnemosurgery is written in IDW1 because I hate how JRO basically made it an ontologically evil field of medicine both intrinsically and in terms of the average person who does it, like

First of all I want to preface this by saying I'm not accusing JRO of having any particular beliefs, this is just my commentary on how things came off and how his writing style contributes to both virtues and flaws in his writing. So I might say "he's basically saying this" but in the sense of "unfortunate implications, accidental or purposeful, in his writing."

But like... it makes me so mad because the worldbuilding around mnemosurgery kind of makes no sense to me? It seems like a really fucking wasted opportunity to cast basically every mnemosurgeon in the continuity as evil and to make it so that even just doing mnemosurgery is basically a toxic, destructive act that will literally kill you? Honestly, I don't think JRO even came up with mnemosurgery as like, "here's a thing that exists in this world and how it works" so much as, he took a character-first approach to writing (as he always does) and wrote mnemosurgery to work whatever way would work best for Chromedome and other character-related conflicts and plot points.

Like, mnemosurgery can view/alter memories from a living person but from a dead person it can only get moments from right before death. Makes sense. Mnemosurgery slowly kills you every time you do it??? Uh... honestly that comes off more as a handwave to make it so that any time the LL needs information they can't just needle it straight out of whoever's mind they need bc of course Chromedome can only do it when it's really important after all. Mnemosurgery... is only ever used for brainwashing people? Like, literally every mnemosurgeon except Chromedome is evil (and cartoonishly so, for Trepan and Sunder, like literally unredeemable monsters in every way) and any time they actually enjoy their field of medicine it's bc they're a sadist that likes to manipulate and oppress people? Kind of... uncreative.

Mnemosurgery is ADDICTIVE?? You're addicted to needling people's brains because mnemosurgery is ontologically evil and then it literally kills you? Okay like... do I even need to explain how tone-deaf it is to incorporate addiction of all things into the worldbuilding here? "You're an addict which makes you dangerous to society. The good ones stop doing the addictive thing because they're morally strong/care about others/aren't hedonists, but the bad ones who only care about doing their drug of choice are evil because the fact that they don't quit shows that they don't care about other people and OF COURSE the main/only fate that awaits addicts is their inevitable death by their own addiction!" Like, we get enough of that shit in real life, JRO. Did you really have to take an already heavily stigmatized condition like ADDICTION and slap it onto your ontologically evil mnemosurgery where the evil ones are evil because they love abusing/manipulating people and don't care enough about dying to stop being addicted to mnemosurgery? Come the fuck on.

Like, I understand that "the science of studying/altering memories" is heavily laden with nightmare fuel as is, and I don't have a problem with that (and stuff like the Institute) because the mind/memories are an intrinsic part of personhood, so any scientific field around it (or any government that wants to sponsor it) will abuse that knowledge just like with any other field of medicine. But to use human examples, why the fuck does mnemosurgery have to be inherently evil? What about stuff like Alzheimer's that degrades ppl's memories to the point of not even remembering a few seconds ago? Wouldn't it be beautiful if mnemosurgery could help with that? What about psychological issues where maybe people with intense PTSD/trauma/etc could have their worst memories be removed/dulled so that they become mentally stable enough for psychiatric/therapeutic interventions to become effective? What if someone has a TBI and wants help recovering the memories they lost?

What about non-scary, non-medicinal applications of mnemosurgery? What if someone just really treasures the memory of a particular day with their best friend and visits a mnemosurgery every couple years so that information creep doesn't slowly alter their memories of that precious day? What if it was possible for mnemosurgeons to intensify memories, so that maybe someone could have a happy memory intensified and think of it any time they're sad, struggling, having mental health struggles, etc? What if mnemosurgeons could take/copy memories from people's brains and convert them to video format in a way that other people could watch it? Imagine the sheer potential present in that when it comes to preserving history through literal firsthand testimonials of what happened! What if a mnemosurgeon could transfer memories from one person to another-- what kinds of breakthroughs in empathy, communication, and understanding others could happen if you could LITERALLY see a conflict from another person's perspective? In those ways, mnemosurgeons would basically be able to act as a hybrid of doctor, psychologist, diplomat, mediator, and archivist all in one!

But no... instead we just got "Mnemosurgery is evil and pretty much only used for brainwashing, 99.8% of all mnemosurgeons are evil creeps, oh by the way it's also addicting and will literally kill you if you do it too much." SMFH.