#where the twain shall meet

[spilladabalia]

Screaming Trees - Where The Twain Shall Meet

[stillworkingonascreenname]

ok so on the topic of songs and this fic, I was at the dentist today sitting in the chair, enjoying the fact that there was classic rock playing and soothing my ears while my gums were being tortured and my teeth power washed, and then “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by the Eagles came on and I mentally just froze and was like THIS. This is the vibe of the ending of this fic. And isn’t a relationship like that and a dynamic like the one in the song, isn’t it just hashtag goals? And then I was like oh god oh no don’t get the emotional sniffles, you’ll freak out the hygienist, keep it together girlie because this is way too much to explain to a stranger in the dental health profession

The vibes are very different from the other music you reference in Pink Pussy but whenever I listen to Bathroom Light by Mt. Joy I think about your fic! It is one of my absolute favorites fics for tlt

I hope you’re doing well! I just wanted to share <3

wow this is what i get for using the app! let me brush the dust off this message to say this song is perf for the fic I FEEL IT <3 it's 100% going in my writing playlist now~

also, i hope you liked the ending :)

[aeide-thea]

look, i realize that talking to you guys is not exactly a great way to take the temperature of the cis masses on an issue, but—

a post came across my dash just now in which the OP said twice that it was 'odd' to find herself relating to a male character in the book she was reading, and i'm just. totally fucking baffled by that reaction???? like for me 'relatability' is absolutely never a matter of someone's having a body or social positionality that tidily maps onto mine, it's a matter of, like, personality traits! traumas! attitudes towards the world! it's a metaphor! i'm so baffled by this idea that it would matter at all to someone whether a character shares their exact gender, of all things!

[olderthannetfic]

/765950159275409408 does this anon think het and slash fic exist in totally separate spheres and nobody reads both?? het guideverse is nothing new. there's het guideverse fic in the Twilight fandom. imagining that het fic readers/writers are all heterosexual themselves, or some mystical separate species who gleefully twirl their het mustaches as they trawl slash fic spaces for things to 'steal' and for no other reason, is completely ludicrous. hell, do they think only queer people watched Sentinel?

I understand worrying about the context collapse that happens when fic gets pulled to publish/when fandom tropes/premises like omegaverse get Addison Cained, but like. we're only playing into her hands and validating her feeble defense (which no one believed anyway!) when we treat het and slash fic like distant prehistoric island communities where never the twain shall meet. news flash: the hets are reading your slash and the queers are writing hetfic. I for one don't think we need to start new biphobic discourse about who is and isn't allowed to write guideverse. worry about serial number filer-off-ers if you want, but don't expect anyone to believe that's a uniquely evil het thing.

--

I hope we're past the era when goofy-ass terms like 'bitextual' make sense.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Trucks and Dolls

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: the time of our ultimate triumph issss at hand Rowling: the cassss report says girlss play with dollsss and boyss play with truckss Rowling: finally! sssomeone sssaid it!

Rowling: lisssten to these incredible findingsss Rowling: "it is difficult to guess a person's gender based solely on their height and no other info" Rowling: ok i'm not really ssure what that meanss Rowling: but the conclusssion that transss people should be illegal is obviouss

Rowling: [reading paper] this casss report provesss the ssscientific, indisssputable fact that Rowling: biologically ssspeaking Rowling: girlss play with dollsss and boyss play with truckss Rowling: because of Rowling: [squinting at paper] hormones

Rowling: uh Rowling: ok ssso that's what it sssaysss here Rowling: that sseemss kind of Rowling: Rowling: well Rowling: i guesss that's what we're going with now Rowling: yes actually Rowling: the more i think about it Rowling: the more obviouss and rational thiss ssoundss to me

Jesse Singal: but mommy Singal: what if a girl doesn't want to play with a doll or a boy doesn't want to play with a truck Rowling: oh we will MAKE them want to play

Rowling: every boy WILL play with truckss, every girl WILL play with dollss Rowling: thank god we can count on our government to make thiss a national priority Rowling: instead of that sssilly raw sssewage on beachess issssue

Rowling: i will sssee a britain ressstored to perfect immutable divission between men and women where NEVER the twain shall meet Rowling: and i will persssonally burn EVERY copy of Marlo Thomassss' Free to be You and Me

Rowling: really jesse i'm surprised at you Rowling: a boy who doesn't want to play with trucks wouldn't be a boy Singal: i thought our line was that sex was genitals Rowling: OH MY GOD jesse at least TRY to keep up Rowling: it's about trucks now

Rowling: or Rowling: as we call them here in britain Rowling: lorries

Helen Joyce: dark lord dark lord i have a question Rowling: i'm not talking to you right now Joyce: Rowling: you embarrasssssed usss Rowling: you embarrasssssed usss all Rowling: you had one job, helen! one job!

Rowling: you were ssssupposssed to be vetted as an expert in trans! how do you fail that? Rowling: i mean for god'sss ssake Rowling: how did the australianss figure out you were jussst making shit up? Joyce: i don't know! Joyce: i really did think trans people laid eggs!

[strixcattus]

I think the reason the Greys are the one shared Chapter III with two different variations is that they're also the one shared Chapter III where you can't get both Chapter II voices at the same time.

You can get Cold and Paranoid in the Wraith chapter (slaying the Nightmare in the basement), Stubborn and Broken in the Fury (slaying the Tower, or failing to flee from the Adversary), Hunted and Opportunist in the Wild (freezing in front of the Beast and killing her from the inside), but you can never get Skeptic and Smitten at the same time. It's always one of them plus Cold.

We can see from the Razor that the Voices' perceptions affect the world around you to some degree, and in most Chapter IIIs, where you can get a wide array of Voices (including both Voices from the preceding chapters at once), they're unified in a single possibility. But in the Greys, it's always either Smitten and Cold (Burning) or Skeptic and Cold (Drowned). There's only one combination apiece, so the world doesn't average out the perceptions of the Voices that constitute the Chapter—there are two distinct perspectives on the matter, and never the twain shall meet.

[sysmedsaresexist]

THIS IS AN UNFINISHED POST THAT I GAVE UP ON, but I want to post it because some friends are having a chat and I think it applies, if you'd like to add on, please feel free, otherwise, I'm just rambling and putting my thoughts down

Baumeister (1998) stated: “The multiplicity of selfhood is a metaphor. The unity of selfhood is a defining fact”. In fact, Baumeister presented no facts to back up his assertion, and so it could just as appropriately be asserted that the unity of the self is a metaphor while the multiplicity of the self is a fact.

A Multiple Self Theory of the Mind

I can't stop thinking about this quote, and how much more... right the second one sounds.

The unity of the self is a metaphor while the multiplicity of the self is a fact.

In every situation, we present a different side of ourselves. Who you are at work or school isn't the same person that you are when you're at home, alone. And that's not the same person as when you're with your friends, and that's not the same person that you are when you're with your partner. None of these are the same person that you are when you're visiting your parents, and that's not the same person you are when you're with your own children.

And yet, all of these versions make up one person.

How differently will all these people describe you?

Which ones are right about you? Which are wrong? Which do you agree with and which do you know are the act we put on for others?

And in another sense, what about your inner parts-- your inner child, the cautious part of you, the adventurous part, the kind and the angry parts. These exist within every person. "Part of me wants--" is a common thought in everyone.

It really sounds more appropriate to say that unity is the metaphor. We are all of these versions, but they're uniquely different people.

And it's really not hard to believe that there are people who would be more in tune with these different aspects of themselves. Or is it out of tune, that would cause them to become so different that you notice more?

While this can be applied to CDDs, this quote and this post are not about CDDs.

And that's okay.

These ideas have existed longer than the diagnosis of DID, MPD, and hysteria. While they can definitely overlap at times, more often than not, these conversations are entirely separate.

And that's okay.

They can and do coexist at the same time, together and separate from each other.

We're getting into ideas that go beyond science and psychology. Philosophy, self-awareness and determination, feelings and internal organization that can't be measured, and aren't very well understood.

What is consciousness? Who are we? What makes us... Us? Do we exist as a singular person, or are we an amalgamation of our parts and experiences?

Even as an alter, I have different versions of me. Sometimes, those parts or versions split off to become their own person, and the cycle starts all over. Is it really so outlandish to think this can happen on a less extreme scale to others?

Somehow, these two concepts, CDDs and multiplicity theory, lived rent-free in my head, never meeting in the middle.

Never the twain shall meet.

I know both concepts to be true, but until now, they've never crossed paths in my mind. CDD

But what if endogenic plurality and multiplicity theory are where they meet?

[thedragonagebigbang]

Bang Creator Interview: Tumblr: @thraaaaaaaanduuuuuuuuiiiiiiiiil  |  AO3: chissprincess

The Collaboration period has begun! In these quiet months before works are due, we want to foster a sense of excitement, camaraderie, and celebration among our participants. To that end, all participants were given the option of a formal interview by our mod, Dema, or an informal “ask-game” survey. We hope you enjoy getting to know our phenomenal creators as much as we have!

ONE WEIRD TRICK FOR MAKING FRIENDS IN THEDAS

Vowelthranduil and Dema talk about that OTHER dragon media, early fandom experiences (fantheater, anyone?), and the supremacy of the Reluctant Hero trope

Dema: So! The collaboration period just began. Has this given you a fresh burst of energy for your fic?

vowelthranduil: It's definitely made me think more about my fic. The timing has been weird though because unfortunately, someone over on the House of the Dragon team also made the decision to cast Ewan Mitchell as Aemond and then made the further decision to allow the man to speak entire sentences in High Valyrian a few weeks ago. Up until that moment I was an entirely casual Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon fan but when that scene happened I could literally feel the casual leaving my body. So good news, I'm definitely in fic writing mode and thinking about fics and that includes my DABB fic! Bad news, it also includes like 3 House of the Dragon fics. My poor poor brain lol.

Dema: Hey. Momentum is momentum 😂For a long fic like this, do you have a full outline, or are you being guided by Vibes?

vowelthranduil: For this particular fic I do have a bit of an outline. There's a timeline I'm following of my character's life that I'm trying to follow. But to be honest a lot of it is also Vibes. I definitely don't look at the timeline or any kind of outline as set in stone. I'll change things as needed or if I feel like I have a better idea or if I feel like something just isn't working out. The nice thing about this fic is I know where my ending point is, which is something I often struggle with in my other longfics.

Dema:  Especially when your attention is divided between two very different fandoms, how do you get in the zone for this fic? Or are you allowing some of that HotD inspiration to infiltrate your DA fic?

vowelthranduil: Nah HotD and DA, despite both involving dragons, are very much in Never the Twain Shall Meet territory. Music is a big thing for me, in any of my fics. I have entire playlists for my HotD fics and my other DA fic. I don't really have a set playlist for this one, but I have lots of music that gives the proper vibes and is already sorted into some other easily accessible playlist so I can just bring that up. Or I'll go back and read what I already have, look at some of the art I have of my OC, or even just do a little DA-based research. I don't have the time to get into a full DAI playthrough right now or I would do that too.

Dema:  Have you done a Big Bang before or is this your first?

vowelthranduil: I've done smaller bangs, and I did try to do the WIP Big Bang a couple of years ago, but I couldn't keep up with it between school and mental health issues. I'm not in school now though. I work, but not having homework is super helpful. I come home and have time to do other stuff instead. Like, you know, write fics for Big Bangs mwahahaha

Dema: Do you try to set aside specific time to write?

vowelthranduil: I have tried in the past but I'm definitely not organized enough for that. Plus when something inevitably happens and I don't write at the appointed time or don't write for the appointed amount of time, I just feel guilty, and guilt is the inspiration and motivation killer.

Dema:  Is there anything that reliably creates a writing-mood? Or do you find the muse strikes randomly?

vowelthranduil: It can be pretty random I find. New music will sometimes do it, but unfortunately, there's no guarantee that the new music will be in any way helpful with creating the muse for a particular project so I can't rely on that. I can sometimes use music I already have to trigger the muse when I sit down to write but like...the general "I want to write now" feeling has to already be there. Otherwise it just turns into a long daydream session and I can lose a whole day to that easily without ever writing a single word if I'm not careful.

Dema:  How long have you been writing, fanfic or otherwise? Have you always been a writer?

vowelthranduil: I mean I can definitely remember writing as a kid, doing creative writing projects in school and stuff. I didn't really like it very much because I felt really confined. Like I remember this one time in Catholic school we were writing stories and I wanted to write something with a lot of magic but this was Catholic school, so I didn't dare do that, I had to turn it into something that would be acceptable to the teachers there. So I felt really stifled. I didn't even find out about fanfiction until I was about 14 or 15, when we finally got internet at my house (and this would have been around...like the late 90s in a pretty rural area). I was in the Star Wars fandom at the time, though of course I wouldn't have described it that way because I had never heard the term "fandom" before and didn't really have access to a broader fan community outside of my immediate friend group (for anything, not just Star Wars). But yeah once we got the internet I found fanfiction pretty quickly. I don't remember how exactly. But it was really cool and to be honest, it was something I was already doing sort of. You know how kids invent their own stories to play out alone or with their friends, that kind of thing. And I had been reading the Star Wars novels at the time, and I wrote these really corny plays that my friends and I actually performed. So I guess it depends on how exactly you want to define "fanfiction." If we go by a strict definition of a story, then the first one was probably when I was 14/15 after I found my first fics on the internet, and it was a self-insert fic of the most obvious caliber. If we include those plays, then a little early, around 13. If we go by the first ones I shared online....probably 16/17? But I legit don't remember for sure on that. And I've been doing academic writing for ages, like all of my degrees are in the humanities and social sciences, really writing-heavy fields, so I legit don't remember a time except my very young years when I haven't been writing SOMETHING regularly. (Hey look at that, I wrote you a novel.)

Dema:  I want to know more about these plays. That is SO cute and so lovely.

vowelthranduil: Oh god. They were like…I'm trying to even remember anything at all about them right now lol

Dema:  What part did you play? Do you remember that?

vowelthranduil: I think I legit wrote them with all of my friends in mind as the characters. Like I was the bounty hunter who was originally working for the Empire (and I was a Falleen, not human, so I was basically covered in green face paint) and....I was hunting Luke Skywalker for some reason. Because this is Star Wars so like, of course. And my best friend/boyfriend (look I wrote a trilogy and we started dating somewhere in this timeline lol) played Luke and wouldn't you know it but my character married Luke somewhere in all of this/ Oh and we defeated the Empire I'm pretty sure. Because...of course we did?

Dema: Incredible. I love it

vowelthranduil: Oh I wrote a play based on a Midsummer Night's Dream at one point too. God when was that? Must have been around the same time.

Dema:  A Star Wars play??

vowelthranduil:  No, this was straight Shakespeare fanfiction

Dema:  Oh, even better

vowelthranduil: We made sets out of cardboard boxes and stuff it was truly wild

Dema: I am delighted. When did you get involved with the DA fandom?

vowelthranduil: I THINK it was around the time DA2 came out? I'm actually not 100% sure except that I know DAI was nowhere near out yet. Like I don't even think it was a rumor. I had a friend who played DAO and was always talking about it and how great the romances were and stuff. I really wanted to play but I was super nervous because up until then I had only ever really played the Sims and like, Oregon Trail (the super old-school one and also Oregon Trail 2 I think). And of course DAO was kind of expensive so I was really nervous to spend the money on something I might hate, especially since I had tried Skyrim and not really gotten into it. But then it went on sale for like $5 around Black Friday (but also that low price is what makes me think this was proooooooooobably right before the DA2 release) so I decided I could take the chance for $5. It's either the best $5 I ever spent or definitely in the top 10 of best $5 I've ever spent.

Dema:  Do you have a favorite game in the franchise?

vowelthranduil: Oh DAI definitely. I'm really attached to my Lavellan.

Dema:  Is it the character-driven plot that made these games feel different than games like Skyrim? I do think it's so interesting how you're very multi-fandom but DA is the only game-fandom you've mentioned.

vowelthranduil: Yeah I don't really know what it is either. Some things just really grab me sometimes but I'm never entirely sure why. Like I've always been really into Star Wars but I never got into Star Trek. I enjoy some of the other big sci-fi franchises like Battlestar Galactica but I wouldn't say I'm "in the fandom." Until very recently the big book/movie/TV-show-based fantasy fandom was Tolkien. I've always kind of assumed that was a right-place-right-time kind of situation, i.e. my first real exposure to it was the Peter Jackson movie in 2001 and it just kind of hit me at juuuuuuuuuuuuust the right point in my life to become a part of me or something. What the hell was it about Ewan Mitchell speaking a few lines of a conlang that dragged me out of 13 years of being a casual into joining the HotD/GoT fandom? Damned if I know. So yeah, I'm not entirely sure what it is about Dragon Age that gets me vs. other games that by all accounts feel like they should be similar. Maybe it's that there's something relatable about them for me? I'm not really sure, kind of thinking out loud here as it were. But like in DAO I think it's kind of easy to relate to someone like Alistair, right? Like he's a nice, kind of goofy guy trying to find his way in the world. In DA2 we've got some real, recognizable struggles happening, and sure they're couched in these very fantasy tropes of "magic" and "elves" but a lot of the basic ideas are very real-world. I suppose in DAI there's something very similar to what's going on in LotR, where you've got some poor unsuspecting little guy who just kind of gets chucked into events whether they want to be there or not but then they get to choose over and over to do the right thing, perhaps even at their own expense, and save everyone in the process. It's an entirely thankless task for them and the world is never going to remember them properly (as we find out in Jaws of Hakkon -- rather painfully if you're playing a Lavellan imo) but someone has to do it and it might as well be you. Er, them....You know what I mean.

Dema:  Yeah! And I get what you mean. Timing has such a big impact and it's fascinating how some media clicks and others don't. Alright we're down to the wire here so if you've read the other interviews, I think you know what I'm about to ask 😂Do you have a misleading clickbait title for your bang fic you could share with me?

Vowelthranduil: lol omg

Dema:  Without giving anything major away that would identify your pitch lol

vowelthranduil: So coming up with titles is literally the worst, hardest, and least-favorite part of writing fics for me. I currently have a doc titled "absolutely the most bizarre fic concept I have ever had" and it's literally just...a romance fic with a slightly odd pairing lol

Dema:  Well. You definitely do not HAVE to do this lol

vowelthranduil: So for this one I guess I might go with something like ONE WEIRD TRICK FOR MAKING FRIENDS IN THEDAS

Dema: Perfect! I don't think we have a one weird trick yet! I honestly love "absolutely the most bizarre fic concept I have ever had," that made me laugh. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today!vowelthranduil: Yeah thanks for interviewing me!

[bonaesperanza]

I'm rereading the Lymond Chronicles right now and, as a lover of twisty, strategic bastards, I have to say that Dunnett understands things about how to write them properly that few others do. Everything that happens in these books lands in a very heavy, physical way - like, you can almost feel the physical thunk as events land, whereas most other twisty bastards books feel like floaty CGI whose physicality you're never really fully buying, fun as the special effects are.

So I tried to do a little analysis as to why, because I live for a twisty strategic bastard narrative :)

Lymond has a personality and is driven by his emotions, despite his cleverness and chessmaster tendencies - he doesn't do everything out of strategic consideration, and you can clearly see his fault lines from the start - glimpses of suppressed emotion, flaws that may be his undoing, irrational choices that clearly fulfill a psychological purpose but not a strategic one. Everyone is allowed to be pathetic and annoying and unlikeable. And all this is allowed to shape the plot - sometimes the character will be allowed emotions and a personality but not where it impacts the plot, so you will get a sort of a parallel lines thing where there's an "emotion" plot where the character is perhaps allowed to be flawed and show off their personality, and which perhaps impacts their interpersonal relationships, and a "competence" plot where the character always performs near-flawlessly and their emotions never enter into the game, and never the twain shall meet. No matter how controlled and self-possessed someone is, it strains my credulity when a person is portrayed as someone in possession of major personal flaws or psychological anguish, and yet this is never allowed to spill over into the way they interact with the "competence" plot or derail them in any way. Especially if they are portrayed as someone suppressing everything for efficiency's sake - they are going to crack at some point, and the stitches are going to burst open like a shaken bottle of soda with innards flying everywhere and hitting everyone around them, and if they're not, you're clearly not putting your character under enough pressure. Which makes for a boring story. The fact that Lymond is 100% human 100% of the time actually makes him look more competent and impressive, not less.

He is allowed to fail, because flaws are human and failure is human. The more convoluted a plan the more possible points of failure it has, and this is especially the case if large chunks of it rely on understanding and manipulating human beings: humans are messy complex dynamic systems, like the weather, and are therefore difficult if not impossible to predict to that degree of granularity. Lymond is allowed to misjudge Scott, for example, he is allowed to have his convoluted plans go wrong, and this is allowed to derail him: sometimes he bounces back, yes, but he is not constantly failing upwards, and his failures do have unfixable consequences sometimes. If they never did, the narrative would become boring and void of tension and emotion. The fact that the difficulty of pulling off these plans is realistically portrayed through the inclusion of stochasticity makes me admire his capacity to pull them off as often as he does more and not less.

He is allowed to fail in a way that's his own fault - combining my previous two points, it's not always that circumstances have conspired in such a way that he couldn't possibly predict or influence it; his failures are often a consequence of his own flaws and his own psychological hangups and blind spots, and are therefore all the more pleasing to read about because they tie into the emotional and personal narrative of the books. (Though I do also love the narratives where the brilliant hero does everything right and yet is trapped in a set of shifting wider historical circumstances where whatever he does is doomed to fail eventually, like Bel Riose from the Foundation books or even Thrawn.)

Another important point is when he's allowed to fail - I read somewhere that a deux ex machina or a similar contrivance that kick starts the plot is more tolerable and less suspension of disbelief-breaking than one which resolves it at the climax, and I think that it's kind of the opposite with failures of twisty bastards? So many people writing them seem to adore the competence porn too much to let them fail at crucial moments - if they do fail, even if it checks all my previous points, it's at the beginning, so that they are then allowed to use their cleverness twist out of the situation - see Eugenides in Return of the Thief, whose stubbornness and jealousy loses him the support of his foreign allies, but who then manages to pull through despite it (and is then vindicated by them never having had the intention to help in the first place due to realpolitik considerations). Or Miles Vorkosigan in Memory - he has a lapse of judgement at the start, but he makes no further lapses of judgement, and even his emotional journey of depression and reexamining of his life (the series' high point of characterization complexity tbh) has absolutely no bearing on his efficient functioning within the plot itself.

Which brings me to, consider also the role that this failure has in the narrative - because unless you're writing something that's just hardcore sociological storytelling (again, like the Foundation), this is a story about individuals, and a climax with personal stakes is almost always more satisfying than a more impersonal one where the hero gets to show off his cleverness. When Lymond fails in The Game of Kings, it swerves the plot from a very mechanistic, spy-novel-esque intrigue of finding the right man and clearing his name, to a psychodrama that forces him to confront his brother and face his past emotionally, and that also airs all of Lymond's flaws and misconceptions and pent-up emotions, but also all of Richard's, because this is the driving force of the narrative and it's so much more satisfying to watch it unfold than it would have been to watch Lymond bounce back and execute everything with flawless mechanical accuracy. Compare this to the climaxes of most new canon Thrawn books, or most Vorkosigan books (the one big exception is Brother in Arms - actually the more Mark the book has, the likelier it is to have an emotion-driven denouement), or all of the Inda books, or all of the Gentleman Bastards books - at best they will put a loved one in danger or kill them off to generate personal stakes, but what does Thrawn's personality, for example, have to do with the resolution of the plot in his books? I love those books, but they don't land nearly as hard. Compare and contrast Tyrion's trial in ASOIAF - Tyrion is also a twisty bastard but the process of him defending himself and running away doesn't involve his wits - it involves confronting his father and brother, about whom he has massive emotional baggage.

Anyway the TL;DR is you should all read the Lymond Chronicles.

[sitp-recs]

i saw this post (https://www. tumblr. com/decolonize-the-left/714105517373620224/battle-couples-has-gotta-be-one-of-my-favorite) and was wondering if you had any recommendations for a similar vibe?? if not or you don't want to that's totally fine just thought you might have some ideas! thanks!!

Hi anon, oh I love that so much! Battle couples are the best and the “power couple” trope fits Drarry perfectly. Here are 5 fics that came to mind:

Mortal Frame by @tackytigerfic (M, 6.6k)

Draco’s on a mission, and this time it's personal. But it's not easy to track down something that no one wants to talk about, especially when Harry Potter keeps popping up everywhere Draco goes. Though at least he’s on Draco’s side this time, and if he happens to be useful, and kind, and great in bed—well, Draco’s not exactly complaining.

Two Zinnias and the Scent of Lemon by @the-starryknight (M, 16k)

The Ministry didn’t turn bad overnight. Harry didn’t suddenly turn rogue either. Between covert Legilimency links and Polyjuice disguises and running and running and running, Draco has forgotten what it is like to have a safe harbor that isn’t a person. If there’s an art to fighting back, then they’ll find it hand in hand.

Burn the Curtains and the Wine by @nerdherderette (E, 24k)

There are two versions of Harry Potter: the wizard who is the Ministry of Magic's most dangerous and successful assassin, and the husband who leads a staid life of domesticity with a reformed Death Eater. And never the twain shall meet.

The Boy Who Only Lived Twice by lettered (E, 54k)

Harry Potter is an Unspeakable. Draco Malfoy is the wizard who shagged him. Adventure! Intrigue! Secret identities, celebrities, spies! It's all right here, folks.

A Pocket Full of Stones by waterwings (M, 68k)

A curse is spreading through the wizarding world, erasing memories of the war. Harry Potter is on the case! Where Draco is the DMLE’s most wanted dark wizard and Harry is the private investigator tasked with bringing him in. It goes as well as one might expect.

Far From The Tree by aideomai (E, 112k)

The arrival of Harry Potter’s children—snapped back in time, the children themselves guessed, twenty or so years—was the most interesting thing to happen at Hogwarts for years.

[grison-in-space]

One thing you have to understand about me as a scholar is that before I fell wholly under the spell of behavior, I trained as quite a good population geneticist. There is still a large part of my heart devoted to the subject and the addictive intuition I can use when I'm studying it.

What this means is that when I think about disentangling what biological sex even is, I start with the chromosomes themselves. Mammals have a gene called SRY that lives on the Y chromosome, which is tiny and mostly chewed up in our species and several others. If this gene is expressed, the embryo expressing it triggers a cascade of hormonal signals during development that encourages the developing fetus to turn its budding gonads into testes, spin its genital tubercule into a penis, and generally walk along a particular well trod path towards one kind of reproductive destiny. If it's not expressed, by default the budding reproductive system develops ovaries and a clitoris instead.

This is is where it gets complicated.

See, that's how it works in mammals, but that's actually a strange setup in its own right when you think about genetic sex determination systems. You can really get quite exotic with those, including baroque variations on haplodiploidy[1]. But even if you insist on limiting your understanding of what biological sex is doing to mammals... well, for one thing, SRY isn't the way that sex chromosomes always worked. Monotremes don't have that gene. In them, as with birds and their W chromosome, the sex determining part of the heterogametic chromosome[2] is distributed across the whole chromosome, not confined to just one single gene.

And there are reasons that sex specific modulation genes might migrate to the heterogametic chromosome in any case. All sexual dimorphism creates an inherent tension between the expressions of genes and specific variants that are best for any given fitness optimum in each sex, you feel me? Think about the way some show chickens have to be bred to win at shows, between "best hen" and "best cockerel" competitions: often, breeders maintain separate lines for each sex, and never the twain shall meet! There's a pleiotropic pull that makes it harder to select for particular traits in a really dimorphic species. Transpositions of genes from one chromosome to another can mean a relaxation in the conflict of sexual dimorphism by more closely coordinating sex-specific expression.

This is one of the reason dosage compensation is a thing. Everyone remembers those little stories about Barr bodies and tortoiseshell cats, right? How every body with at least two X chromosomes is a mosaic of cell lines that silence and ignore all but one of those chromosomes? In cats where the locus for "no eumelanin" (i.e orange pigment only) happens to sit on the X, heterozygote animals (that is, torties) have hair cells that are a mosaic of cell lines that decided to turn off the X chromosome with the "black" allele and cell lines that decided to turn off the orange X? The thing is, most phenotypic variations are not driven by changes in coding regions: they're driven, often very strongly, by changes in gene regulation. This is why having an extra copy of an autosome is almost always lethal in humans: the sole exception is trisomy 21, which we usually know as Down's syndrome. Adding another whole chromosome's worth of gene product to the system for any but the very smallest of chromosomes just isn't survivable for long unless you have a mechanism to even out the imbalance of gene product--and the X chromosome is not a small chromosome in humans. It's what, somewhere between six and eight in size? (Autosomal chromosomes are named biggest to smallest.)

To make this survivable and okay, sex chromosomes get all kinds of special tinkering. They need to make sure that gene expression between sexes, in species with sex chromosomes, is as perfectly equal as possible. A surprising amount of the time, you'll find sex differences whose main function appears to be keeping things in some other system totally the same, minimizing variation between sexes rather than creating them. Bodies are complicated things!

So ANYWAY: if you want to understand sex differences as they are, outside the realm of typical genital development? You have to understand that biological sex is a function of tons of different systems that might or might not uniformly all co-vary in the same direction. For example, let's take a list of five imaginary traits, each of which can be scored on a scale from -1 (most masculine) to +1 (most feminine). If sex is a single uniform thing, you'd expect all of these things to covary, such that you'd see a relationship like this imaginary dataset:

Ind 1: 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.8 0.8

Ind 2: 0.1 -0.1 0.3 -0.2 0

Ind 3: -0.7 -0.6 -0.8 -0.5 -0.9

[1] Haplodiploidy means that if you have one copy of all your chromosomes, you develop as male; if you have two copies, female. This is how bees and ants and wasps work. In some cases, as in cottony cushion scale insects, you can even do a frankly bizarre thing in which you have some haploid "invasive male tissue" that exists pretty much entirely to fertilize your eggs so you can lay diploid daughter eggs without having to bother to find a male.

You can see a strong covariance of traits between these individuals, such that some measure of sex is inflected along a spectrum that then gives rise to the five related traits, with a filter for noise laid over top. But this isn't usually what we see in the sex differences literature: with the exception of reproductive organs themselves, usually we actually see results more like this:

Ind 1: 0.0 0.1 -0.4 -0.8 0.3

Ind 2: 0.7 -0.6 0.1 -0.7 -0.4

Ind 3: 0.5 0.3 -0.2 0.1 -0.8

See how variation at one spot doesn't do a good job of predicting the next in this data set? All of these traits are variable, and all of them have some individuals who don't quite cluster with "their" group. It's the covariance between the scores on various "levels" of sex that is low: that is, real differences between sexes exist, but we don't know why they're there, and scores on each don't correlate well with each other--especially for behavior.

In any case, there's quite a lot of good reason to think that SRY might actually not be the end all be all of genetic variation according to sex, even though it casts a deciding vote in which direction of gonadal development a given individual starts on. How much of variation between sexes in mice is actually a function of SRY and its androgenic changes, and how much is a function of the genes on the Y and the cis acting regulation of those genres, is an open question.

So the thing I'm reading about is: there was a random mutation in a mouse line that deleted SRY, producing mice that are XY but otherwise develop as fully fertile females. On the other hand, there are also transgene constructs that have SRY transplanted to one of four autosomes (the Four Core Genotypes model). This lets us disentangle the effects of chromosomal sex from, essentially, SRY- vs SRY+ positive (or testicular anatomy or whatever) development. It's extremely cool shit and I'm very interested in brushing up.

And that's what I was excited about, folks.

[2] The heterogametic chromosome is the Y chromosome in an XY system or the W in a ZW system-- as contrasted to the homogametic chromosome, which appears duplicated in ZZ or XX individuals. The distinction between the two is which sex is which: XX animals are female and XY male, but ZZ animals are male and ZW animals are female. Either works fine.

[adiduck]

so about that TOTALLY PLANNED ot4 ending for tiny prophet luke... >_> (WHY NOT, ADI. WHY NOT.) ok i don't have any questions really i just want more about this verse, it feels like a hug after a long tiring day.

LMFAO that is NOT planned you hellion (<><><>) I am actually extremely fond of No Choir's dynamic being owenberu and codywan, the two couples joined in domestic unithood and never the twain shall meet. I think that there is not NEARLY enough demonstrations of mixed families where NOT all the people involved in raising the kid are screwing each other, weirdly! There was a time in our history where it was expected that your entire extended family would all be involved in living life and sharing the burdens of adulthood, and along the way somewhere we have lost that idea in favor of the nuclear family. I intend to let these four adults be family without it having to be about sex. In this essay I will--

okay okay anyway. No Choir is my love, my light, and I will one day return to the next installment, which is from Owen's POV as he tries to build an extension onto his homestead while his entire family has a meltdown around him and Beru mostly shrugs sheepishly about it, having kind of caused half of it by accident. <3 ONE DAY

[henrysglock]

Where did you come from? Where did you go? Where did you come from, Closet Guy Joe?

Okay this has been fucking me up since Tattoo Post One and Tattoo Post Two. These two posts are kind of like. required reading for this post, because they demonstrate the distinct discrepancies between the tattoos given to various "One"s.

So we know that whoever Closet Guy ⬇️ is?

He's probably not Vecna, just based on the sheer size and style differences between the tattoos.

But what's getting me right now (and I'm not sure if Em has discussed it yet, he may have at some point), is this:

Not only is Closet Guy not Hallway Guy (unless passing through a storeroom door can magically change someone's hairstyle, color, and texture)...but he's also not aligning with any of the side-parted Henwards we see in the massacre:

His part is far left (screen right), and I mean "centered over the arch of his eyebrow" left. He's blonde blonde, and his hair texture is fine/smooth with a swoop.

The left-side images have that smooth, swoopy texture, but the part isn't far enough left. The bottom middle and right images have a correctly placed part, but the waves/curls are too tight.

So when the hair texture is right, the part is wrong; when the part is right, the the texture is wrong.

It's always "ne'er the twain shall meet" when it comes to this guy, I swear.

Hallway Guy lines up here:

but Closet Guy doesn't seem to have a match anywhere.

So who is Closet Guy?

And if you want to feel even more insane? Look at the full sequence.

Green-grey grading:

--[camera cut]--

Natural grading:

--[camera cut]--

Blue-teal grading:

WHAT KIND OF FUCKERY???? I MEAN JUST LOOK AT IT:

WHO ARE YOU!!! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!!!! I'm genuinely. I don't even Know what to say here. I'm flabbergasted.

[cookinguptales]

chuplayswithfire said: You might like the visual novel Digimon Survive? The concept of Digimon is children/young adults who team up with digital monsters. Traditionally its a more shounen series, but Digimon Survive takes that concept and puts it in a dramatic horror/survival setting where the characters have to struggle to come together and survive after being transported from the world they know. It has tactical battle elements, but is primarily a visual novel. It's a fun stand alone Switch game!

If that's not to your taste, you might enjoy Fire Emblem Three Houses, which is another tactical game for the Switch, in which you play as the character Byleth, recruited to be a teacher at an academy, where you choose to mentor one of three houses filled with students of varying political positions, each with a rich story and character development. The first half of the game takes place at the school and the second half several years later, in a war setting.

--------

Okay here's the thing about digimon

you need to bear with me here okay

when I was a child, there were two factions. there were the digimon kids and there were the pokemon kids. never the twain shall meet. OH the fights we had! OH how we hated each other!

which one was I?

well, here's a photo I took at the pokemon center in kyoto last month so

I AM NOT SAYING IT'S RATIONAL I'm just saying that my eight-year-old self would beat me up if she knew I got into digimon now.

AS FOR FIRE EMBLEM, I've heard about that one!!! is that the one where if your party member dies in battle, they like. die-die. if so, can I turn it off? I feel like I couldn't handle that, like. emotionally. if a character dies due to plot, okay, but if they die because I suck at video games I'd feel Guilt.

[invisibleraven]

Omg chaos prompts

You'd marry me if I asked, right?

Sweet tarts, bonus points if they're not actually dating when it's said 😆

"You'd marry me if I asked right?"

Carrie lowers her book to see Reggie sitting across from her, cheeky grin in place as he snags half of her cookie. "Hello to you too Reginald."

"Oh yeah, hey. So...?"

Carrie sighs, marking her place, knowing she wasn't getting back to her book any time soon. "Why are you asking me this? You don't need a green card or anything right?"

"Nope, it's to prove a point to Flynn," Reggie replies, popping in the last bite of cookie, and flags down the waiter to get her a new one, plus a coffee for himself.

"Dare I even ask?'

"I was whining to Flynn about being single," Reggie starts.

"Lianni dump you already?" Carrie snipes, getting the other half of her cookie before he can reach for it.

He shrugs. "You know the drill, she wanted a good time with a rock star, I wanted a loving relationship, and never the twain shall meet."

"You also have terrible taste in girls," Carrie snarks.

"Which was just what Flynn said!" Reggie exclaims. "She said that if all I really wanted was a loving relationship I should just marry a friend, and it would all sort itself out."

"And this led to you asking me?" Carrie narrows her eyes.

"Well I can't ask Julie, she and Luke are hella engaged already. Flynn doesn't like guys other than aesthetically, Kayla is aro, and I don't know the other Candis all that well."

"You are bi, you could always ask a guy," Carrie replied, taking a long sip of her latte.

"Well Luke is with Julie, Alex is with Willie, and none of them are poly. Nick ended in disaster and no offense to Bobby, but he and I barely managed to be roommates during college, no way would we be able to handle being married," Reggie said, ticking off each name as he said them.

"You need more friends," Carrie stated.

"Maybe, maybe," Reggie sighed. "Don't take it like you're my last choice or anything. But you're the best one."

"As rom-com as the whole married to your best friend idea is," Carrie said, "I would prefer to be in love with the man I intend to marry."

"And you don't love me."

"Not romantically, no."

"Could you?" Reggie asked.

Carrie sighed, putting down her cup. "Reggie, while I do agree that a friendship is a great basis for romance, I don't think us getting married would work out well. I'm driven and a perfectionist. You're all go with the flow and easy going."

"You ever heard the phrase opposites attract?" he asked with a smile.

"You know leading psychologists say that they may attract but they almost always repel each other way shortly afterwards," Carrie replied.

"So that's it? Cruel rejection and a lifetime alone?" Reggie said, hamming it up, throwing his hand to his forehead and Carrie couldn't help but giggle.

"Reggie, you're a great guy, someone just hasn't seen it yet," she assured him, reaching over to pat his free hand. "Tell you what, if we're both still single by 35, ask me again and I'll be your back up."

"Sounds good," Reggie said, polishing off his coffee. "So no to the marriage?'

"For now, yes," she said, giving him a kind smile and picking up her book once more.

"How about a date?"

She looked at him, his earnest expression, the hopeful look in his eyes. Reggie was cute, sweet, really talented and hell, Carrie hadn't been on a date since dumping awful Colin. "Why the fuck not?"

"Sweet!" Reggie exclaimed. "Pick you up at seven?"

"Sounds good," Carrie stated, and waved as he went off, a skip in his step. And found even though she picked up where she left off in her book, she couldn't concentrate, too consumed by the thoughts of the date.

The date that turned out to be the best one she'd ever been on, capped with a kiss that made her toes curl.

And the next time Reggie proposed? It was for real-as was the super enthusiastic yes she gave in reply.

[nuagederose]

Dark Roots of Earth | Chapter Eleven: Where the Twain Shall Meet

ao3 link

Christine found herself in what appeared to be the backseat of a car somewhere, albeit underneath what appeared to be a tree somewhere. Despite the darkness outside, she could make out the shape of the silhouettes of the branches above the sunroof. Stars dotted the sky like the holes in a pitch-dark ceiling.

She caught the unmistakable smell of firewood burning outside, and her mind immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion.

With a rub of her eyes, she sat upright in the backseat and peered out the window right across from her. She was met with nothing more than darkness; she shifted around for a better look out there to the campsite that awaited her. The dark figure before the roaring campfire sat upon the flat surface of a log with something long and thin. She recognized the head of long shaggy hair down past the shoulders, but it was hard for her to tell if it was jet-black or a mere dark chocolate color. The figure lightly strummed at the thing on its lap, and it took her a moment to realize that it was a guitar.

“Chris?” Her voice echoed over the top of the car door as well as the dark ground out there. The figure shifted around on the surface of the log as if to see her. She spotted the bulbous tip of the nose as well as the full lips and prominent brow, the latter of accentuated by wire-framed glasses.

“Alex?”

The light of the flames washed over the side of his face, which in turn accentuated the full shape as well as the soft texture of his skin. Highlights danced about his gray streak to make it resemble to a plume of smoke and some little flames as well. The rim of his glasses shimmered under the light of fire; through the veil of the darkness, she recognized those eyes in all of their bright glory like the ocean upon a sunny day.

“I was wondering when you’d wake up,” he confessed to her, and he shifted to the side a bit and patted his hand on the flat surface of the log right next to him to coax her closer. His voice was low and smooth, like that of molasses; Christine opened the door and climbed out of the backseat. She ambled on over to him with the darkness at her back and all around her: nothing more than a clear path before her as she reached the edge of the clearing, and she could feel the heat from the fire right there, even at Alex’s side.

“Have a seat,” he beckoned her, and he shifted his weight to the side: Christine eyed the guitar, with its heavy dark mahogany body and pristine strings that shimmered in the flames, perched upon his lap, and she took her seat there next to him. She shivered as she looked in past the flames and into the darkness: she recognized the smooth glassy waters of the vast alpine lake.

She didn’t recognize the area but she knew where they had wound up in, however.

“It’s not often I get to play the blues for a girl right under the stars,” he said as he lightly strummed the metallic strings of the guitar with the edge of the pick as well as the pad of his index finger. He shifted his weight and extended his leg out before him as if to take in some warmth from the flames before him.

Christine shivered as she huddled closer to him and the warmth and safety of his body. She never believed that she could feel a sense of home with a human being, but she did right then and there with Alex. Even outside under the stars and by the edge of the lake, he was warm and soft, the way a home should feel.

“When did we even get up here?” she asked him in a broken voice.

“About two hours ago,” he replied as he tucked the pick inside the palm of his hand. “You were still sound asleep when I pulled in under the tree there. I didn’t want to wake you so I set up the tent solo.”

“Aw. You should’ve woken me, though. I would’ve helped you pitch it and everything.”

“You were pretty groggy, though,” he pointed out. “We left the house at such an early hour, so I let you sleep. I really didn’t wanna disturb you.”

A gentle breeze wafted up from the lake waters, which in turn sent a shiver down her spine, even in spite of the hot fire that burned before them. She thought about Chris and how he would have loved it up there with the two of them. Indeed, this reminded her of a time during one summer vacation in which she thought about inviting him out to the Poconos with her parents.

“I wish we had some marshmallows,” she confessed to him.

“We’ll go into town in the morning and fetch some,” he suggested, and then he turned his head for a better look at her. “Maybe we can get some chocolate bars and graham crackers, too?”

“Ooh, yeah! And some cocoa, maybe?”

“If you’d like,” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “I decided I’m gonna start watching my weight, but… anything for my Strawberry Girl, though.” He gently kissed her on the forehead, and she curled her toes inside of her shoes at the feeling of his soft lips. She shivered again, that time from the feeling of another wisp of breeze over her.

“I am so cold,” she breathed to him.

“Really? Even with this hot fire burning before us?”

“I’m getting a bit of a breeze from the lake,” she explained. “Like every so often, a little gust will come up and sweep over me, and it’ll make me shiver down to my bones.”

“Here—” He set his guitar down next to him, and he stood up a bit, and she noticed the folded heavy blanket that was underneath him.

“Keeping it warm,” he explained, and he picked it up and unfurled it over her. Christine clutched onto the edges of the blanket so she was completely wrapped from head to toe. Indeed, he kept the blanket warm and it was very quickly growing warmer with the heat from the fire.

“Better?”

“Yeah, quite a bit,” she answered, and he inched even closer to her.

“I should be warm, too…” He cleared his throat and plunked his guitar back upon his lap. Christine gazed down at the strings and the way they seemed to glow from the light of the flames. For a second, she truly believed that she had returned home, away from the rest of the world and to the tender feeling that resided within his body. She slithered her arm out from under the blanket and under the body of the guitar to around his waist; he smiled at the feeling of her arm there.

“I just love when you hold me like that,” he confessed in that low breathy voice that she loved so much. It seemed a bit difficult for him to strum his guitar with her arm around his soft belly, but he also seemed more than happy to have her hold him so close.

“You really wanna watch your weight from here on out?” she asked him.

“May as well. I wanna be here with you forever.”

She gently kissed him on the side of the neck at the sound of that.

“Even though you look really sexy all chubby, I love you no matter how big you are,” she told him.

“I guess it’s a little better to be a bit chubby, anyway,” he pointed out with a wink. “Be a little chubby and indulge every now and again.”

“Help yourself to a s’more and a few little kisses…” She kissed him again on the neck, and that time, he momentarily stopped strumming.

“I should probably tell you that Nelly should be up here by the morning, too,” he added as he nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Nelly’s gonna be up here, really?”

“Yeah, she called—right when I was pitching the tent, too—she said she’ll take us out to breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“You oughta just eat everything in sight during breakfast,” she suggested. “You know, just be bit of a pig for breakfast so you don’t eat as much during the day.”

“Just fill up my belly to as full as I can make it with the works and then cuddle up next to you so you can feel me,” he joked.

“I just… love the thought of you with a full tummy,” she confessed.

“Best feeling in the world,” he said; through the dim light and the protective shade of his glasses, she noticed another fire as well, one that burned within those deep eyes. She licked her lips as she could feel what he was feeling right then as well.

Without even looking at his guitar, Alex moved his right hand onto the neck for a little picking action.

“Nice li’l solo there,” she remarked.

“I can do it in my sleep,” he boasted.

“Can you now?”

“I could curl up and go to sleep in the tent with this thing on my body and I can be strumming something up right from my dreamland,” he said.

“I think I could curl up and go to sleep in the tent laying on your body and I can be strumming something up right from the heart of my dreamland,” she retorted, to which he chuckled.

“Wanna go in the tent and have a little fun before we go to sleep?” he offered her with a sly smirk on his face and a twinkle in his eye, a twinkle despite the shadows over his face.

Christine cupped her hands around the full shape of his face and kissed him on those soft lips: it was interesting given she had the warmth of the fire on the right side of her face and the cool, wet feeling of the breeze from the lake and the forest on the left side, which in turn was paired with the warmth of his body and the cold feeling at her back. A dance of fire and water under the stars, a feeling that she could never seem to find back in the city, or even in California when she was with Eric.

She was reluctant to release him, and when she did, Alex held still and shuddered a bit.

“God, you’re such a good kisser,” he whispered.

“Let’s go,” she whispered back to him, right as the fire let out a loud crack!, which shook them both. Christine gasped, while Alex hesitated for a moment, and then he burst out laughing. She silenced his laughter with yet another gentle kiss on the lips. He let his glasses slide down his nose a bit so she could see into his eyes, now hooded and darkened with a feeling that she wanted to know about once they were in the safety of the tent.

He scooped up his guitar while she kept the blanket wrapped around her body so she could remain warm on the walk over to the tent. He had pitched it up right behind a tree trunk and a ways away from the fire and the lake’s edge: they would be protected once the wind picked up some more over the course of the night.

He tucked his guitar in the far corner of the tent so it would be away from the door, and she lay down on the soft rollout mattress, still with the blanket wrapped around her, even with the sleeping bag there. By the light of the fire still out there, she watched him take off his shoes followed by his shirt. His skin was smooth and milky, kissed by that olive Levantine tone; the sprigs of hair on his chest were rich and dark, and she reached up to run her fingers through them.

“Hang on…” Alex slid his legs under the thick sleeping bag and he inched closer to her; it was a struggle for Christine to be under her own given the blanket but she somehow did it. Even in separate sleeping bags, she managed to be close to him, to touch him and feel him without any prying eyes or interruptions until the next morning when Nelly would show up.

“I’m in love with you.”

She swore that she had imagined herself saying that, and she had no idea if the words came from his cherry lips or from her own. But she heard the words anyway, and they echoed through her mind as if she wandered through the catacombs under the city in search of the one she loved.

“I’m in love with you.”

The second iteration jarred Christine awake, and that time she found herself back in her bed and her apartment: the morning sun filtered through the shades, and she only had one thing on her mind.

She hadn’t had a dream like that in a long time, either.

“Take me home,” she whispered to herself, and the sound of Eric and Chuck giggling amongst themselves in the next room was everything she needed to know about the day ahead of her.

She had to see Alex that day, and she hoped that he would keep his promise.