#well !!! nothing left to be said

[inkskinned]

the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

[lilacthebooklover]

me, looking at the most toxic, awful, horrendously unhealthy fictional relationship in the world: why can't i have what they have? :(

[ganondoodle]

so with echoes of wisdom .. i havent watched any of the trailers beyond the very first one and the thumbnails/screenshots and what others have said about it-

but with the world inside the rift being called "Welt des Nichts" aka "world of nothing/void" in german ('still' in english, for some reason) and demises title in french being "avatar of nothing" ... yeah my anxiety is shooting through the roof again

(hopefully you can be a little more forgiving for me being anxious/weird about it bc demise is my blorbo)

i had similar worries with totk, that werent proven true thankfully, but the darn book is making it all worse again with all those weird lore things the game doesnt even so much as hint at AND potential retcons- im in for a really rough time huh, not just stress in real life (more in tags.. its alot) but now about my specific hyperfixation from two things even (AND artblock still..)

weird as it may sound, i dont want demise to get more lore, partly bc i dont believe theyd do anything with him that i would like (given their track record) but much more importantly- the fact that he has this little lore about him is precisely one of the reasons why i fell in love with him, i tend to like characters that are neglected by the narrative, and his story being both so flat and already done meant i can be very creative with what i come up with for him without necessarily contradicting anything in canon (which is ... or was a big point of how i wrote destiny's story and lore, working with canon in a way that reframes it all without straight up ignoring it ... but i suppose i urgently need to let go of that and accept i spend alot of time working things that will go to waste :( ) AND not having to worry that there will be more stuff with him that would massively change not only what im writing but also potentially how i feel about him since the game he was briefly in was the oldest chronologically and ended with his death- i didnt expect them to mess with anything that far back and thought theyd just go forward and leave the timeline behind and wouldnt mess with it again, given how botw seemed to be a sort of 'fresh start' that seemingly regarded the past as the past that needs to rest and that the timeline was finally no longer a discussion if everythings unified through botw and one thing going forward

but i suppose i was very wrong with that .__.

right now the only thing that motivates me still is the left over determination and spite to work on my zelda comic, since i have never gotten this far and really want to get something done for once, but i cant lie that im feeling like i should pause all work on it too to wait and see waht the book and the new game will do .. either to determine if i still have the will to keep working on it after those things are out (my love for tloz has been taking alot of hits lately ..) or if i have to change stuff (mostly bc of my lore problem trying to not ignore it ..)

[icantalk710]

Not a bad get from work's sample sale the other day tbh 😌

[the-shy-artisan]

Literal “Ghost” of Sparta

[flowercrowngods]

i don't know how to be merely acquaintances when we used to be friends. or i think we used to be. i don't know how to yearn for a simple hello when you've been heaping your affection on me months ago, and i don't know how to talk to you when you won't say anything. when suddenly it's all about me. you know i have nothing to say, you know my brain is void of everything but horribleness and i cannot tell you about my day because i don't even know about my day. i cannot tell you about my day when i know you won't listen, when i know you'll apply your philosophy to my world and don't believe me when i say that everything is terrible. i don't know how to be the person you seem to think i am, or the person you want in your life. i don't know if you want anyone else in your life now that you're in love and sappy, found another recipient for your affections, leaving me empty and wounded and yearning.

you said you missed me. said it many times, while i was gone. now i'm back, have been back, and i wonder how you missed me, why you missed me, when you won't talk to me. i think you mistook missing for worrying. i think you mistook caring for a feeling of obligation. i think you like missing me more than talking to me.

and i think i can't breathe with how much that hurts

[ppenguinpperson]

@theanoninyouraskblog your favourite lads <3

[swagging-back-to]

finally went and got my GED diploma a year after i graduated :)))))

[sqlmn]

Local man who survives by identifying smells dragged into a candle store and promptly suffers. (I got so lazy in the end on the last part sorry it's very not accurate heights and stuff)

[lususnatura]

i was talking about this a bit with ramone, but y'all know how i mentioned that it's likely that blamore has one of those 'special containment' cells that villains like killer croc and man-bat in arkham have as well? wellll... i can guarantee y'all that on one of the rare occasions that that they have let it into a common room (because it's basically treated as if it's in unofficial solitary confinement in arkham a majority of the time unfortunately), blamore was SO desperate to get out of there because they put a power dampener on him and because arkham is just terrible in general, that he pulled out one of the plants growing in his ribs (which is considerably painful for it to do, by the way) to give to ivy.

and she of course proceeded to break them all out of there because she can turn even just a little plant into something capable of tearing the asylum apart so... yeah JSJSJ whenever blamore is desperate, it gets inventive, and that may be even more dangerous than when it has it's powers because at least you kind of know what to expect with them — but whenever it's robbed of them... it can become particularly nasty, let's just say that ☠️

[butnotbubblegum]

using the tags to vent my current emotional state into the void bc ig story feels like a bad plan for this, don’t read them if you’re having a bad day, they’ll probably not help in the slightest.

[rollercoasterwords]

jkr, death of the author, and the marauders fandom

ok so i saw this comment a few days ago on tiktok, and i've had thoughts spinning around in my brain about it ever since, so...here's my take on why comments like the one above, while likely well-intentioned and also not very serious, are still maybe not the best way to engage with hp fandom.

since getting involved in the marauders (and, by extension, hp) fandom, i've seen a lot of people making "death of the author" comments online or joking about how they just pretend that jkr didn't write the books. and while i understand the impulse--jkr is a vile human being, and most of the people who engage with the marauders + hp fandom want to make it very clear that their own views do not align with hers--i think this approach of trying to just "remove" jkr from her work demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about what death of the author actually is.

this post that i saw a few days ago summarizes it really well, and here's a link to a free pdf of the actual essay if you'd like to go straight to the source (it's not very long! only 7 pages). but essentially, death of the author does not mean "let's pretend this work was created in a vaccuum by no one because we don't like the person who made it." barthes is arguing about meaning within the text, arguing against the idea that every piece of literature has one true meaning instilled into it by the author which then must be sought by readers. instead, the text can take on different meanings for different readers, and those meanings are what matters. "a text's unity lies not in its origin (author) but in its destination (readers)."

let's take an example from the hp books: wolfstar. the people barthes is arguing against might claim that wolfstar can't be "real" (the fact that we're talking about fiction notwithstanding) or is somehow not "valid" because the ultimate Truth of the text comes from the intentions of the author, and jkr did not intend for remus and sirius to be a couple. but in barthes' words, "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." barthes would argue that jkr's intentions don't matter, that what really matters is the way that readers are engaging with and drawing meaning from the text. if we adhere to death of the author, then wolfstar as a couple is not any less real or valid than any other reading, because what matters is that readers are picking up on homoerotic subtext and drawing meaning from it--whether it was included intentionally or not.

so--that's death of the author. and i think it's a great thing in hp fandom; i think it's fantastic that readers are prioritizing their own meanings and interpretations of the work over anything that jkr may have intended. but saying "fuck you" to jkr's intentions and the idea that the only Truth that matters is the author's does not mean we should just pretend that she had nothing to do at all with the creation of the work.

again, this post summarizes it really well--but essentially, even for readers who adhere to death of the author in their thinking about literature, it is still important to understand a work in context. understanding who wrote a work helps us to understand what sort of biases--subconscious or conscious--the person might have written it with, and it helps us to read the work critically and identify those biases lurking under the surface.

it's no secret that jkr is an incredibly biased woman. when she wrote the hp books, she wrote her own biases into it, and if we simply pretend that she had nothing at all to do with the work, then we deprive ourselves of important context we should be using to critically engage with it. it's important to understand how jkr's biases infect the series, because if we simply take things from the work at face value, we risk perpetuating those biases.

now, a caveat here -- i will say that, in the grand scheme of things, i don't think fanfiction is the be all end all of social justice. i understand that it's a hobby. but those falling back on this misunderstood conceptualization of "death of the author" to try and remove jkr from the work already seem preoccupied with morality to a certain extent, already seem to be the type of people who want to engage with the work in a way that doesn't perpetuate the biases of its author. so to do that, we have to acknowledge who wrote it, turn a critical eye on her writings, and think about how we might adjust our own work accordingly to avoid perpetuating the many biases bound into the fabric of the text. for an example, take house elves--if we loudly proclaim that jkr has nothing to do with our fandom as a means by which to make the text magically "unproblematic," and then pull aspects of the wizarding world like house elves into our own work, what narratives are we then perpetuating?

i think this tendency to just ignore jkr is particularly common in the marauders fandom, and understandably so! especially with newer social media like tiktok drawing in younger fans who didn't grow up with the books in the same way, i'm increasingly seeing this phenomenon of marauders fans who have never even read the books themselves. and i don't think that's a bad thing! in fact, i think it's pretty cool to see the fandom so far removed from jkr's work. but it is still harry potter fanfiction. even if it's being written or read by somebody who's never read the harry potter books, their knowledge is still coming from fanon, whose starting point of growth is still canon. it is still important to understand the context of the work which this fandom grew out of if we want to critically engage with it.

at the end of the day, i understand that it's uncomfortable to consume work that is in any way tied back to a person as vile as jkr. but i think it's important to evaluate for yourself how you want to engage with that work, whether you think it's possible to engage at all with harry potter media ethically while knowing that the woman who created it actively perpetuates harm against marginalized communities with her rhetoric. it's important to understand and address these uncomfortable questions; we have to acknowledge the ways in which the fandom is inextricably linked to and stained by jkr if we want to create and engage with fanwork that isn't stained in the same ways.

[notanotherinfjblog]

Productivity

ENTJ: Do you know those moments when you’ve got so much to do that you have no idea where to even start and so you start making a list of things that are too unimportant to waste your time on right now? But at the same time you’re wasting time by not working on the things that actually are important. You’re just making lists of all the tiny aspects of your work that you can throw out just to make yourself feel like you’re doing something.

INFJ: No, I don’t know those moments. I’m less productive, you see. When I’m overwhelmed by all the stuff I have to do, I panic and stare at the wall for three hours.

ENTJ: You’ve been doing that a lot lately, haven’t you?

INFJ: ... yes.

[toastsnaffler]

hour and a half unpaid overtime I think that's a new record for me. on a day where I was supposed to have no overtime no less. funny how I only have 3 of those this month and the 2 so far I've had to work overtime anyway 👍

[mediumsizedpidegon]

Imagine: you are Idril and you hate your cousin viscerally and this hate is later justified in every way possible. He is a monster and a traitor and as unlike your belovéd aunt as possible. And he dies, and he does not come to the Halls of Mandos and does not reembody. Perhaps you are horrible for thinking this: but you are glad. You are glad he is gone and unable to return. He was a nightmare who crawled into your stainless city and tore it down when it was least expected. He made your father love him, and then he betrayed him, and you will never forgive nor forget it. Now there is no way he can hurt you, your husband, your son, your people– and there is no one he can betray.

and then your aunt reembodies.

Your aunt reembodies and yes, she died for that monster, but she was blameless for she was forced to marry evil and birth evil and love evil. But now she's reborn without those cobwebs of enchantment and you are prepared for her grief and rage over having been controlled. She will not be the same. But she will be back, at long last.

Except. she comes back and none of these things happen.

She doesn't care that her son is evil and treacherous, more his father's son than hers. She doesn't care. She grieves for your city and in the next breath she wishes for her son's return. So you love your aunt and your aunt loves the creature of your nightmares– the betrayer that nearly killed your son and brought your home to ruin. So you love your aunt but she does not listen when you tell her to let her son go because she never saw–

and so your aunt leaves. and it feels like betrayal. like your cousin ruining your family further from beyond the grave.

she still visits, but no one in the family knows where she lives. She is strange– both the steely eyed aunt you remember and yet sometimes she looks like she has never seen you before. you try to break the enchantment that she must be under to keep looking for your Marred cousin, but there is nothing for you to find. all your trying does is send her into a rage the likes you have only seen once before: when she dragged your father away from following your mother in death for your sake.

you love your aunt, and most days, you are sure your aunt loves you.

but you cannot understand her, and in this you have lost her as surely as when she died.

[winged-wolf-s-collection-of-arts]

thinking more thoughts!!

Kiley time-

I uh- kind of poured all my chaotic energy into her, and separated her from the rest of the npc cast? Otherwise the dialogue would get totally fucked, and my ‘I need to hit this story with a drama nuke’ desire would cause trouble.

So she’s uhhh off on her adventure of a different genre. (But stuff she does Will affect things... dun dun dunnnn) but dude Wow she would be so irritated by Jun. Good thing we’re going to Sanctuary to leave them and take Preston.... OR THAT IS WHAT I WOULD SAY if she didn’t want to be anywhere near the vault!! We’re going somewhere else, babeyyyyy! Maybe talking with him and Murphy would bring some understanding (is what I would say if I were doing big character development in the beginning but we’re not!!) Shoving my desire for conflict into this.