#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]

To the anon writing about how antis are hypocrites because they're Hannigram fans and antis at the same time: I've said it once and I'll say it again: THEY'RE WEIRD ABOUT SEX SPECIFICALLY.

Fandom is full of people with deeply weird relationships to sex, whether it's because they're young or from conservative backgrounds or queer/kinky and haven't processed it yet or any combination of the above (NB none of this should be equated to being ace: most ace people I know are normal about sex, just not personally interested in having it. Those who aren't belong to the above categories).

This is why places like Tumblr love their horrifying/edgy sex metaphors: "sex is when I put my finger into your wound" etc. It to the point where it's become trite and overdone, but these same people will balk at bog common fetishes like CNC and the like.

It's the actual act of sex, as something with genitalia involved, that they feel the need to sanitize and hide. But they also want to interact with it, because it's an unresolved thing in their heads, so they do it through three levels of metaphors while attacking anyone who does it openly. You can either like twee stuff like Heartstopper OR you can like edgy stuff like Hannibal or Hazbin Hotel where the characters never do have the fucked up sex the show is teasing at, but NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET BECAUSE THAT IS DANGEROUS AND PREDATORY.

This gets exacerbated when women are involved, because many people have very personal hangups about the way women are treated in society, and they think that making this everyone else"s problem is somehow helping fight The Patriarchy.

Look at anti discourse and 95% of it can be described as "weird about sex and/or women", with the pedophilia accusations basically used as a fig leaf over one of the two (children are vulnerable, women are vulnerable, young women=children, etc.)

They don't care about stuff like gore or physical violence or explicit untriggerwarned descriptions or parental abuse, because it's almost always about sex and/or women.

--

[sitp-recs]

Hi girlie, hope you’re doing okay!!

I was wondering if you could plspls rec some married drarry fics-any type of married drarry (angsty, kidfic, sickfic whateverrr). Except fics where they break up or divorce or something my brain can’t handle that level of angst (medium angst is okay)

Anyways dw about responding quickly I hope you’re not too busy! As always love your account. Thank you queen

Hi there, of course! Here’s some married Drarry with low levels of angst for you:

Peculiar to them by @maesterchill (M, 2k)

Draco is looking for Harry when he spots it. It's peculiar. And therefore perfect.

Proves the Rule by @sweet-s0rr0w (M, 4.5k)

The first time Harry spots his husband in another universe, he's arm in arm with Astoria Greengrass.

Matters of the heart by nerakrose (G, 5k)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I See You by @l0vegl0wsinthedark (E, 7k)

It’s always worth the wait when it’s been a while.

Surviving the Horde by FleetofShippyShips (T, 7k)

Draco has managed to avoid Christmas at the Burrow for ten years, but not this year.

Up The by @shiftylinguini (E, 7.5k)

Or: Harry's had madder ideas.

Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright) by @pineau-noir (E, 9k)

Sex is hard to come by when you're 40 and have kids.

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. Until, one day, they do.

[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.

[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.

[henrysglock]

Another Fun Mothergate Installment: The Grocery Store Incident

This was supposed to be a short one...but as usual it turned into a rabbit hole.

1.06 The Monster (Timestamp: 19:05)

Well, well, well. What do we have here?

A guy who moves to have the Henward positioned hands (with a watch on the left one signifying a righty) as soon as El enters his line of sight paired with a) a Papa line, and b) a line asking about El's mom.

More specifically, though...he does the inverted Henward hands.

While asking where Mom is.

He is not Mom. He doesn't know where Mom is, but he'd like to. (The camera cuts back to El as soon as the topic shifts from asking about Mom to asking about Dad, and she calls the guy a mouthbreather.)

The scene in 1.06 is cut with this dialogue from Brenner, who wants El to search the darkness for the demogorgon:

Which is directly referenced here, in 4.08:

"Was I looking for him?" and then a specification on Henry, which is met with No. No.

This is interesting, because Brenner specifies between Henry and One:

So no, she wasn't looking for Henry. She was looking for the "Soviets" (I'm staring at the Russian Shadow and their demodogs, specifically the cut-open one that parallels both Henward's banishment in ST4 and Henward's exorcism from Will in ST2. I bet if El had asked if she was looking for One, she might have gotten a different answer from Brenner. We can't be sure, though).

But wait...what did Henry say, exactly?

If we balance Brenner's habit of truth-cherrypicking against a) his naming conventions for Henward, and b) all the other details stacked up against the two guys...

Then this remains Henry:

Right-handed:

With a middle part styled to look like a side part:

Which would mean he is Henry, in red:

(right handed)

And he is Edward, in green:

(left handed)

It also means he is Edward:

(natural side part)

and he is not Henry based on his handedness:

(left handed)

Which means that we were right. There is a distinct difference between these guys, two of which are never shown saying the sleepyhead or "not awake yet" lines (in fact, the inverse hands one doesn't speak at all):

First pass through NINA:

Mom lines said by Edward, and only he is shown.

Second pass through NINA:

Mom lines still only said by Edward.

Third pass through NINA:

Mom lines overlaid on El.

I'm not going to touch on the "look who finally decided to join us" weird hands guy too much, because I genuinely have no idea what's up with him and his in-between style.

I will note, though, that he's got the "shitty knockoff" vibes of someone who's meant to seem like the first guy...and he also isn't shown saying the Mom lines. In fact, he's specifically cut so that he never says those lines. When we see those lines said by a Henward, they are always said by the natural side-part Henward (read: Edward).

Ne'er the twain shall meet, or whatever.

All the mom lines are either visibly said by Edward, or they're overlaid on El.

And funny enough about our initial shopkeeper guy?

As soon as the conversation about El's parents ends, his hands abruptly swap position across the camera swap.

Hands clasped:

Cut to El:

And then BOOM. Completely different position:

If you watch it in real time, it's a lot more jarring than it looks in screenshots.

I'm telling you guys...this has all been set up since ST1. The references are all there.

[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.

[aeide-thea]

overthinking things as per uʒ but:

[a transcript is under the cut, for anyone who prefers that format. <3]

aeide-thea sent a post "love sports love when people write about them in a normal fashion"

aeide-thea: lol i AM insane but the more i contemplate this post the more it irritates me actually

elucubrare: what aspect of it?

aeide-thea: like i have no particular stance on the success of this lyricism but as a general position i feel like. yes actually anything can come under the besotted lens of a prose stylist and get elevated thereby. cowardly and boring to laugh at writers not being 'normal' when in fact the elevation of the everyday into the ecstatic is one of the highest and best uses of language. like YES defamiliarize that shit. YES hallow it.

elucubrare: yeah ok, i'm with you!

elucubrare: i also have a half-articulated thought about Not Liking Sports and dismissing them as a tribal marker on the internet & so this description of a player like someone on tumblr would talk about idk. a supernatural man feels like it's unpleasantly transgressive

aeide-thea: yes i think you're onto something! like there's definitely a way in which a certain kind of (maybe especially modern, maybe especially on tumblr) writer feels like there's Their People and then there's Sports People and never the twain shall meet, and like, it's not that i don't recognize the incongruity myself but i also think the joke IS fundamentally based on the idea that anyone who loves a sport is a dumb redneck which like. IS instinctively how i feel about football but there are enough sports i do love that i can check that impulse in myself and recognize my own arbitrary bias

aeide-thea: like admittedly i haven't *read* eg roger angell's baseball writing but i feel like there used to be more room for the idea that an american writer could write about an american pastime (which like. problems of their own there but.) without it being like. writing is for nerds and sports are for jocks!! no—i'm tempted to say 'miscegenation' but i think that's probably an offensively reductive metaphor. however i do sort of feel like it's on the same spectrum of tribalism however far apart??

elucubrare: yeah i agree!

elucubrare: i think when i think about mid-century sports writing that i've been aware of, it's less overtly lyrical or flowery than this, but it *does* take its subject seriously or metaphorically the way this does

aeide-thea: no exactly. and like. idk if you've read that famous DFW piece on federer but like. would be very curious to see if OP would make fun of that the same way or if the fact that it like. has lit cred would stop them

aeide-thea: like dgmw i know i've done a lot of objecting lately to like. people pointing out Amusing Incongruities (see also: 'blorbo' in the NYT) and i know i sound like a humorless idiot but the thing is, it's not that i don't get where these posts are coming from! i just think the fundamental 'humor' of them is predicated on false dichotomies

elucubrare: yeah for sure!

elucubrare: i think here i think the snippet *is* a bit much but i would think that no matter what the subject was

aeide-thea: oh i super don't disagree!! but i also think like. it's tricky to evaluate the success of a snippet stripped of all buildup and ALSO i don't actually think the post was taking issue with the craftsmanship (where i'd probably have agreed with them/you!), but rather just laughing at the fundamental *attitude* regardless of execution?

elucubrare: yeah, i agree!

elucubrare: i think also this is a place where ur crusade against "normal about" comes into play b/c it really does sneer generally but say nothing except "this is not how *i* would have approached this"

aeide-thea: god no exactly. like fundamentally ALL you're ever conveying with 'normal' is like. 'i don't have to actually explain or justify myself bc Everyone (Who Matters) Already Understands so really this is just a general sneer to amuse and bond us, the preexisting in-group'

aeide-thea: like. articulate! your! objections!!! you might find in the process of having to explain yourself that you don't actually agree with yourself! learning and personal growth might happen (god forbid)!

aeide-thea: (also unrelatedly how do u feel abt having portions of our sportswriting convo reproduced 4 public perusal. 'pls no' is totes ok, i can always make my own post if i care that much i'm just feeling lazy lol)

elucubrare: (Go for it!!)

[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.

[sitp-recs]

Helloo, do u by chance know any fics where harry and draco fight or argue, about anything. So theres like a lot of angst but then they also make-up so theres also fluffiness

Sure, here are some recs for you! You might also enjoy my break up/make up reclist :)

Try Again, with More Conviction by FleetofShippyShips (E, 3.5k)

After a mission goes sideways and they're lucky to walk away unscathed, Harry doesn't want to deal with the ensuing argument and floos home mid-angry tirade from his partner. He doesn't count on Malfoy just flooing through right after him to pick up where they left off.

Packing the Flat by marguerite_26 (E, 6k)

Months after their explosive break-up, Draco insists Harry return to their flat to remove his belongings.

but first, we fight by @nv-md (E, 8k)

Fighting with Draco Malfoy has never been quite this thrilling...or this frustrating. Harry's always horny, Draco's in denial, and there simply isn't enough time in the day to fight crime and watch your ex-archnemesis wash his arse.

Til Our Compass Stands Still by china_nightingale (M, 9k)

Harry and Draco eventually realise that things don't always go to plan, even if it's a plan they've been carefully crafting to keep themselves safe from each other.

The Things They Never Say by bixgirl1 (E, 9k)

Harry and Draco don't know how to talk. So they do other things instead.

Let's Dance To Joy Division by Femme (E, 12k)

Let the love tear us apart, I've found a cure for a broken heart...

I'll never be your chosen one by Andithiel (E, 15k)

Draco doesn't know what exactly he’s doing with Potter, he doesn't know how their unspoken agreement even started, and doesn't know where it will end. The only thing he knows is: he's not in love.

Vanishing Cabinets by Romaine (E, 18k)

Take one Wizarding Family Values politician who has a secret life, and add one Auror who detests discrimination of any type, but becomes a bit obsessed with said politician, and you have enough sparks to ignite a Beltane fire.

Burn the Curtains and the Wine by PalenDrome (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.

Make Me a Headline (I Want to Be That Bold) by dicta_contrion (E, 31k)

Draco never expected to see Harry doing that again. Especially with someone else, in a grainy photograph that's landed on his desk one Monday morning.

Potential Gravity by zeitgeistic (E, 32k)

Draco is not good at Cards Against Humanity, but Harry’s not good at being human, so it all works out. Except for the explosions. And Harry’s inability to live when Draco’s not around.