#vineler

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

Wait, wait. So. Carlisle is a doctor, right? But. Human Carlisle was a preacher's son. Not a doctor. And. I'm just realizing, I'm sure the books say something about this but I must have glossed over it. Carlisle... as a vampire... learned to be a doctor. Before meeting the Volturi even???

This man just. walks into idk 18th century med school. and is like "Don't mind me I'm definitely not afflicted with a strange condition, let's just learn from these cadavers"

Do you think he did a residency??? Young Carlisle, eating rats in the sewers by night, understudy at some hospital by day. Germ theory wasn't even a thing then! Oh my god I bet he killed people by mistake from infection due to unsanitary hands. Do you think he realizes??

And. And. And. Medicine was a whole different bag of bones back then. The cadavers were often stolen! Sometimes by the teaching doctors! Somehow I can't see this son of a preacher-man digging up graves, but he had to have tacitly condoned it.

What even is this man? I mean we know he's big no judgement with the vampires killing humans, but by god he really doesn't judge anyone does he???

(Any early-Doctorage meta thoughts you have would be appreciated!)

@therealvinelle has a great post that covers pretty much everything you're asking

Oh, anon, the books said a lot about this. I think the movies briefly mentioned it but it wasn't that important to them so they kind of skipped it.

It's to the point where there's not much meta to be had, we pretty much get the whole story.

But yes, Carlisle starts out as a vampire hunting priest, and this does not go well for him. He then has a terrible time trying to kill himself only to find he could eat animals, goes to Volterra, yada yada, then leaves.

So yes, the medical career was pointedly after the Volturi (though Meyer keeps her timeline weird and vague about when Carlisle was with the Volturi and how long, but it seems he showed up there within a few decades of turning if that and left a few decades later)

We learn than Carlisle afterwards pursued a number of things in university, enrolling himself, trying to decide what he wanted to actually do with his life (among these apparently was music I believe) but he eventually settled on medicine.

Carlisle predates doing residencies and just slinks in at modern medicine as we recognize it in the western world (he would have just been starting/been after we decided "actually, we need to cut up bodies to study anatomy"). So yes, there were a lot of things people thought they knew at the time and did that Carlisle would have been caught up in to then learn "oh fuck" later.

That said, we're told canonically that Carlisle often goes back to university to make sure he's up to date with the field, so he's not telling you that your humors are out of whack if you visit him.

But yes, he's a weird dude.

[rankheresy]

Tom Riddle's Horcruxes Episode

New episode has dropped! @therealvinelle and I spend over an hour talking about Tom Riddle's horcruxes: which are real and how real are they, what are horcruxes, and did Harry really jump into a frozen over pond in winter that one time?

Here on spotify.

Also, in all the usual places.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Young Americans are more pro-Palestinian than their elders. Why?

Originally posted 12/23/23; updated 12/24/23

This is a thought provoking article about how different U.S. generations perceive the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. To encourage people to read the entire article, this is a gift 🎁link so that anyone can read the article, even if they do not subscribe to The Washington Post.

Although I am from an older U.S. generation, I condemn the Netanyahu administration's decision to pursue Hamas at the unconscionable expense of tens of thousands Palestinian civilians, including many children.

However, reading this article helped me to also understand why, being born in the decade after the Holocaust, I don't absolve Hamas of their terrifying behavior on Oct. 7th--unlike many younger people seem to have done. Although I strongly oppose the apartheid Israel has imposed on the Palestinians (and I do believe that Palestine should have been a free separate state long ago), I still don't think there is any justification for such a terrorist act against Israeli civilians.

I encourage you to read the entire article, but here are a few excerpts:

Across more than two months of war between Israel and Hamas, public opinion on the conflict has continuously shifted. But there has been a constant: a divide between the views of older and younger Americans that has shown up both during the war and in the years leading up to it. [...] Each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel, Dov Waxman,director of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said. Beliefs about the world tend to form in our late teens and early 20s and often don’t change, he said. Older generations, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, tend to see Israel as a vital refuge for the Jews, he said, and see its story as one of a people returning to safety in their homeland after living for 2,000 years as a scattered diaspora facing persistent persecution. In the decades after its founding, Israel was a relatively lower-income and vulnerable country. [...] But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with enhanced walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. This generation formed its idea of Israel from reports of Palestinians denied access to water, freedom of movement and fair trials, under the military control of what was by then a relatively rich, nuclear-armed power. “When I was in college it was the Oslo peace process, and I still remember that Israel — pursuing peace with the Palestinians and the hopes that came along with that,” Waxman said, of the ’90s. “Younger Americans have no memory of that.”

[See more excerpts from the article under the cut. Those excerpts are worth reading because they are quite thought provoking.]

A racial justice lens Joey Ayoub, a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, podcaster and academic, says young Americans are more likely to conceptualize the Palestinian cause as a sister issue to U.S. efforts for racial justice. There is a “visual parallel,” he said: of an armed soldier or police officer dominating a space inhabited by a populace with limited power, whether in a town in the occupied West Bank or a majority-Black neighborhood in the United States. [...] Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, said conflict between Israel and Palestinians seems to be seen by the young left, especially on college campuses, as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a white oppressor,” though a significant portion of Israel’s Jewish population is of a non-European background. (Some are the descendants of about 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries and Iran after Israel was founded.) “It’s a bit of a curiosity,” he said. “One could tell an oppressor-oppressed story where the Jews, and Israel, is a story of the oppressed: kicked out of all these countries, going back to their homeland, surrounded by a broad set of dominant countries in the region that wants to destroy it.” Shifting demographics One explanation for the generational divide, experts said, was that fewer Gen Zers and millennials identify as conservative or Christian — demographics more likely to sympathize with Israel — than older groups. [...] Another “major factor” in older generations’ feelings toward Israel is their greater religiosity, according to Waxman. More than three-quarters of Americans 60-64 are Christian — with increasingly higher numbers for older brackets — compared with about half of adults under 30. “It’s, I think, for many religious Christians, somehow a kind of atonement in supporting Israel and Zionism,” Waxman added. “Genuinely, a feeling of Israel as a consequence of this long history of Jewish persecution” by Christians. Some Christians, particularly among evangelicals who are especially likely to sympathize with Israel, believe that Israel was promised to the Jews by God, and that the return of the Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy of the events that will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ. But even outside of this belief, the idea of Israel as a sacred land for Judeo-Christians has an emotional resonance that is simply not present for the increasing number of secular young Americans. [...] Social vs traditional media Dana El Kurd, a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute, said different types of media consumption have probably played a role in how people have formed their views on the Middle East. Americans 45 and older are most likely to get their news from TV networks and their websites, and Americans younger than 45 are most likely to get their news through social media, according to 2022 YouGov polling. The regular use of TikTok in particular is correlated with criticism of Israel, a New York Times/Siena poll found this week. Ayoub, whose interview podcast “The Fire These Times” with Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jewish, and Armenian perspectives has mostly Gen Z and millennial listeners, said that new forms of media facilitated access between content creators and consumers without “having a gatekeeper.” This has downsides, including “a huge uptick in misinformation” online, he said, but also positives, including allowing traditionally underrepresented groups to reach an audience. [...] “I’ll give an anecdote,” El Kurd said. “My students, when the war broke out, said that they had gone onto TikTok and toggled between the different locations,” to see what kind of videos were popular in Israel compared with Gaza, the West Bank and other places. “It had never occurred to me before to do that.”

I encourage people to read the entire article.

I am strongly opposed to the apartheid that Israel imposed on the Palestinian population. But being from an older generation, I am also less likely to wholly embrace some of the (in my opinion) more simplistic generalizations that younger generations claim regarding Israel.

For instance, many younger people assume most Israelis are predominantly of white European ancestry, but there is evidence that about half the Israeli population is not of white European descent, including those who always lived in the region, those from Ethiopia and Northern Africa, and the descendants of the 20th century expulsion of 850,000 Jews from other nations in the Middle East.

There are also some estimates that only 20% of the general gene pool in Israel is white European. This in turn leads to questions about the assumption of many younger people that white European Jews engaged in a "settler colonialism" of Israel. Still, some form of colonization DID happen, even if it might not fit a strict definition of "settler colonialism."

But it is important to remember that most of the Jewish colonizers around the time of Israel's founding were refugees who had survived the Holocaust, or were running from Eastern European pogroms/oppression, or who were expelled from Iran and Arab nations. What is tragic is that many of these Jewish victims of persecution and oppression and/or their descendants ended up implementing or supporting oppressive practices towards the Palestinians in their attempts to create a Jewish state where they could finally feel safe.

In many ways, all the nations of the world who oppressed and persecuted Jews for centuries have some responsibility for this mess. But that does not absolve the Israeli leaders from their oppressive choices towards Palestinians (especially their current choices that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians)--just as Israeli oppressive behavior does not absolve Hamas leaders for their decisions to employ terrorist tactics against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th.

Although I still support a two-state solution, I believe there are no easy fixes to this situation. The conflict, for both Israelis and Palestinians is an emotional powder keg fueled by thousands of years of transgenerational trauma (both within the region, and outside it in the case of the Jewish diaspora). This in turn affects the perceptions and responses of both Israelis and Palestinians. Sadly the current conflict has only added a new layer to the transgenerational trauma of both groups.

Anyway, after reading the above article, I realize that coming from an older generation, my perspective on the Israeli-Hamas conflict is different than the perspectives of some younger people. However, I still think there should be an immediate cease fire, and that the Biden administration should STOP supporting Israel, unless Israelis agree to end the fighting, fully support a rapid international humanitarian aid effort for the Palestinians in Gaza, come to the table to negotiate peace, and finally allow the creation of a free Palestinian state.

Originally posted 12/23/23; updated 12/24/23

[ddzzaaii]

Eat the Night dir. Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel

[thecarnivorousmuffinart]

Lily Evans from The Man Who Would Be King by me and @therealvinelle, circa 2024

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

Are you guys still working on the secret fic? I haven't seen any posts on it in a while, but I haven't been super tuned into Tumblr.

secret fic by me and @therealvinelle a secret fic about secrets (and roasting @therealvinelle)

Oh yes.

You see, I too must find out what happens next episode in secret fic.

[absencesrepetees]

best secret place (caroline poggi & jonathan vinel, 2023)

[genevieveetguy]

Il faut regarder le feu ou brûler dedans, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel (2022)

[fnipoli]

[knightlymoon]

woemben

[soulchronicity]

@skullzy20 grim reaper moment

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

I know practise is the one true way to get better at something: but what other tips do you have for others to improve their writing? What has worked for you? What hasn't?

How long have you (and Vinelle) been writing?

All my writing tips are here.

Generally though, here's a few things off the top of my head.

Just Do it

You got it, the only way to get better is practice, and that means sit down and write. Don't get intimidated by a blank page, something is better than nothing, but also don't be afraid to rewrite an entire thing if you need to.

Just sit down and do it.

Get Someone to Look at it, Get Their Real Opinion

Get someone to look at your work and ask for honest feedback. Ideally, this is someone whose writing you admire/think you can learn from. Regardless, though, you have to make it clear that you're not afraid of honest to god criticism and do actually want to improve.

A lot of people I see asking for advice substitute it for asking someone to a) validate their writing b) tell them only when they have a few typos. This encouragement is nice, crucial even, but it won't help you improve.

You have to be willing to be honest with yourself and have others be honest with you in turn.

Read Everything

Read things that are good, read things that are bad, think about why you find them to be good or bad.

What Doesn't Work

Any cheap trick that will tell you "all you need to be a good writer is to do A, B, and C, and always avoid D" if it was that easy, everyone would be Shakespeare.

Character sheets are nonsense. They turn whatever character you have into a 2-D pile of waffle. If a character is only a pile of traits, likes and dislikes, they fail to be real on a page. And you can almost always tell what quirky character came from a character sheet.

There are no golden dos or don'ts. Having a character more powerful than other characters isn't always bad. Having a character with 'flaws' doesn't always make them good and complex.

The Hero's Journey and other plot structures are helpful only to a limited degree. Yes, you need a climax and catharsis, but don't marry yourself to a particular outline and tell yourself that you can't stray from it because you have to follow the structure.

You got anything, @therealvinelle?

[rankheresy]

Who Dunnit? Again? The Riddle Murders

Rank Heresy is back with a new episode, another murder mystery, this time asking if we're really sure Tom Riddle murdered the Riddles. (Once again, the answer is, it's probably the person it looked like which was not Tom Riddle and god that boy isn't murdering all the people we thought he was).

Check it out on our usual platforms.

[im-tempted]

Oh god I need to listen to the Beatles at some point

[ddzzaaii]

after school knife fight dir. caroline poggi & jonathan vinel

[thecarnivorousmuffinart]

so, while I was listening your and vinelle's magnificent podcast, I made a couple of drawings! not exactly fanarts, but I decided to send them anyway in hope that they'll convey how strongly I love your metas and fanfiction lol. you have such an interesting way to look at fandoms, and I feel immensely grateful that you guys share it with us

this one meant to be a fanart to the prologue of The Man Who Would Be King, but I got a bit sidetracked. now, I'm not sure it can qualify as one

this one is renesmee and her horrifying gift cosplaying together as madonna and the child

this one shows my completely imaginative plot of Bella trying to create some good new year memories with renesmee after last year disastrous volturi visit. the photos look appropriately eerie

Oh my god! This is beautiful and I'm so flattered anon (and amazed the podcast induces fan art of any kind).

Look, @therealvinelle, praise for @rankheresy, blogs, fanfics and fan art!