#writing to my mp

[pm-me-people-sucking-your-heels]

What the fuck when did this happen?! Lunchables are now called Lunchers?! Absolutely sickening, cancel Dairylea

[hualianisms]

something i find tragic and messed up is how XL's worst trauma and HC's worst trauma are the same event - XL being stabbed 100 times. why that was traumatic for XL is self-explanatory. for HC, witnessing that was so traumatic that it single-handedly turned him into a supreme ghost king. it was the trauma of being powerless, watching his beloved go through hell unable to do a thing to stop it.

this trauma directly parallels HC's original childhood trauma, of being powerless as a child who couldn't defend himself from his bullies and abusers. he hates himself and judges himself very harshly for being "weak" as a child, blaming himself for his own trauma. just see the way he treats e'ming (who i believe represents the emotions of his child self), the way he drew himself in his mural, and the way he treated the statue of hong hong-er in the extras, and you can guess how HC views his child self.

HC's trauma response was to spend 800 years becoming the strongest possible, extremely wealthy and powerful so that he can protect and provide for his beloved the way he never could when he was a human kid or a small ghost. he also wanted to be as strong as possible so that he never has to feel like that "weak" child again. the trauma of powerlessness truly shapes so much of HC's personality

[southfarthing]

just realised it was my third head injury anniversary a few days ago and i didn't even notice..... those years were so so difficult and it didn't feel like anything was getting better or that it ever would. until it did! 🥹 i have a job now! i can be in the sun! i can read and game and watch a film! i can eat and sleep and walk without constant pain! above all shadows rides the sun and stars forever dwell!!! 🥹🥹🥹

[cream-and-five-sugars]

third day in a row where i wake up, go about my day, and suddenly stop dead in my tracks to remember. yeah. bumbleby is canon now. holy shit

[krikeymate]

Enid laments her lack of pack after another row with her mother. Wednesday promises her that she shall always have a pack, and pulls her out their room. Wednesday drags her into the trees, and Enid is a little confused, but she’s still reeling from the intensity of Wednesday’s words, waving at Eugene as they pass the hives. Enid smiles to herself, and yeah, maybe she doesn’t have a traditional pack, but she has a pack.

They stop, Wednesday whistles. 30 seconds pass in silence.

“Wednesday wha-”

In the blink of an eye, they’re surrounded. Enid stiffens, adrenaline rushes through her, claws and fangs escape with a snick.

Wednesday turns, hands clasped in front of her. “A pack. For you.”

“Wednesday, what the fuck.”

Enid eyes the wolves surrounding them cautiously. 9 of them, all a variety of size, shape, and colour. A close look reveals hidden injuries, small patches of missing fur, scars glinting in the light.

“You’ll find them to be a much more intelligent conversation than your previous pack.”

“Wednesday. What. The. Fuck.”

Wednesday appears visibly confused, brow furrowing. As if this is an entirely normal and reasonable situation.

“You wanted a pack. Behold, a pack.”

Enid startles as one nudges her leg, sniffing curiously. Snapping her eyes back to Wednesday desperate to know what to do, she’s startled by the sight in front of her. Wednesday is petting one, as two others rub against her and another flops down at her feet.

She turns back to the wolf and slowly reaches out, relaxing when she isn’t immediately ravaged. The wolf begins to wag its tail as she scritches its ears and Enid finds herself smiling. Ok, so this was a little cute.

- 🐺 -

“Wait, there are no actual wolves in Jericho, where did they come from?”

“Oh I bought them with me from home.”

“Wednesday, what the fuck.”

[hyunpic]

[rpfisfine]

also im so sorry guys but im gonna be honest i can't do the discord no matter how small and awesome it is and how much i had honestly thought i would be able to handle it and how much i genuinely like and enjoy you guys my ancient mind just wasn't able to withstand it i might check out what you guys are up to and maybe liveblog with you over there every once in a while but overall im just gonna be here on tumblr i think but i am really really happy all of you are having fun and i love you

[writers-in-moominvalley]

Mythological parallels.

[ailendolin]

don't mind me I'm just imagining how eventually Thomas might find out the real meaning of "con". Maybe even by accident, like imagine he's minding his business and then hears, I don't know, Julian arguing about "the pros and cons" of something; so Thomas listens and finds out that con means contra/against, or maybe he asks Julian why would a situation be confident and Julian tells him the real meaning. and so Thomas thinks back to the scene where Alison tells him "it means confident" and realizes that actually, Alison put him as one of the reasons to LEAVE Button House. Like. oh my god it would be devastating. my poor guy now I made myself cry. (but also the angst potential and the fics)

Oh anon, I completely agree. I'm desperately wanting to write a fic about this exact scenario in which Thomas finds out what con means while Alison and Mike are still debating whether or not to sell the house. Realising how truly unloved and unwanted he is, he decides to remove himself from the equation. He can't leave, obviously, but he can retreat to the woods or the burnt down gatehouse - anywhere that's not the house so he can't drive Alison and Mike away and ruin the best thing that has ever happened to the ghosts. No one notices he's gone at first, and then the frantic search for him begins, ending with Alison trying to make things right.

But like you said, the fact that Thomas was one of her arguments for selling the house alone would absolutely devastate him, and reinforce how alone and unloved he feels. I think it would be hard for him to move past that - because how can he ever trust her again? How can he trust anyone again when the people he loves keep lying to him?

As a Thomas fan, all this just makes me so sad because everyone has found a home and family at Button House over the course of the show except for Thomas who is merely tolerated but never truly wanted. And as I said before, no matter what you think of him as a character, he deserves to get the same support and gentleness the rest of the ghosts extend towards each other. He's not any worse or more annoying than they are - he just never got the chance to grow because the people who are supposed to make him feel loved and safe have never truly opened their arms to him.

[steddielations]

Virgin Eddie Fic Rec

Part One Here

many ways, many days, to say ‘i love you’ - morningberries

(so much tension, so good, also there’s a black g string appearance)

good to me - MixAddams

(so incredibly tender and well written)

summary:

“Let me go, alright?” said Eddie again, trying to slowly pull his elbow from Steve’s grasp. “You can call up all your old buddies and laugh all about it as soon as I’m gone but don’t, fuck, just let me leave, ok?”

“Wha-? Eddie I’m not going to tell anyone, you said it was a secret,” said Steve, still holding on. “Why would I tell anyone?”

edge of heaven - bdelaney

(top eddie getting edged. lord)

feels so good i could explode - deadratz

(subby top eddie ahhhhh)

kiss me through the phone - bdelaney

(this had me fanning myself)

i wanna feel the heat with somebody - bdelaney

just a taste - AnneTheCatDetective

(steve showing trans eddie his mouth skills god)

summary:

Steve is just... a really good friend. Who thinks Eddie is straight, apparently. And who wants to help him with that, if not in the way Eddie would like him to.

It helps a little more than Eddie bargained for.

look into my eyes and baby whisper “fool” - bdelaney

pool boy - Lynn1998

(the tension in this one god. also eddie in a speedo everyone cheered)

summary:

“Wanna get my back?” He offered. Steve shut his mouth as he realized it was open, and then nodded. He traded Eddie the glass of iced tea for the lotion, and then opened the cap with shaky fingers. Holy fuck. He was really about to touch him.

“Y—you sure?” Steve double checked. He wished he didn’t stutter so easily around Eddie. Usually he was able to be pretty confident around the girls he wanted to date, but Eddie somehow always made his tongue feel out of place.

“Iced tea and a rub down? I’m not gonna say no,” Eddie hummed and then took a sip.

so, man in the mirror (make another home here) - gorgeousgreymatter

(possessive steve possessive steve possessive steve)

fear is fading fast - amiparanoidmuch

(robin helps eddie lose his v card to steve its amazing)

Research (i won’t treat you like you’re oh so typical) - Rougesgallery

(i love when eddie’s the one clueless about flagging this is great)

summary:

“What do you know about flagging?”

He looked at her. “Like semaphore? They tried to teach us in camp but-”

luck favors the bold and the stupid - snoods

(this one goes crazy stupid, read and you will see)

it might walk like a duck - callmenewbie

(trans eddie beloved)

More Here

[hualianisms]

my extremely specific roman empire is bk 4 fenglian angst: best friends who grew up together then were broken & traumatized by war & then lived together, getting so close to one another that they were like family & witnessing your best friend at their absolute rock bottom but not knowing how to help & barely scraping by each day struggling to make ends meet & trying so hard to make it work but not being able to, but not for lack of trying bc the love was there, it was there, it didn't change anything, it didn't save anyone, there were just too many forces against it, but it still matters that the love was there.

[southfarthing]

it's so important to me that aegnor is the most beautiful ethereal elf you've ever seen and andreth is like. ok. no facial features that really grab anyone's attention

what draws aegnor to her is all the things about her that seem to contradict each other. the way she looks so at home in middle earth, so at one with the heather as her bed and the stars as jewels in her hair, when aegnor knows her fëa is not of middle earth. the way she is so young compared to him, yet the way she talks with such knowledge and heaviness, and the way her eyes hint at memory long before her years, but memory that weighs on her and lends wisdom and passion to her words all the same.

he cannot help but be bewitched by her, to try to make sense of her, while knowing every glance he steals of her in the still water of the lake brings him closer to his doom. he looks anyway

[asleepinawell]

one of the biggest things I've gotten out of this replay of dark souls 1 is that not being able to warp between bonfires in early game and only being able to warp between a few specific ones later is one of the game mechanics that really helped define the mood and atmosphere of the game for me. yes i absolutely complain about this when I'm stuck somewhere, but the feeling of being this tiny person lost and a million miles from home and cut off from the safety of firelink shrine is so vital to the game

being near the start of tomb of giants and wanting to go back for something but knowing I'd have to go through a chunk of the catacombs again made me feel like just a little guy stuck in the dark with monstrous enemies and that is exactly the feeling that makes me love the game

i want to be a nobody stranded and alone in the land of ancient gods who don't want me there. the fact I'm a pawn being set up to relink the fire and perpetuate this dying age, fated to never have my name remembered, is the point to me. I'm walking through someone else's story and have so little control over my path and that's perfect

[krikeymate]

Imagine that instead of Goody’s sacrifice healing Wednesday, it instead only stalled the wounds, paused the bleeding. Long enough to get help... or to take down Crackstone. And she does, and she stumbles her way out of the gates and into Enid’s arms and they hold each other because it’s over and they did it and then Wednesday’s legs collapse from under her. And, oh, she’s lying in a pool of her own blood and it’s getting harder to breathe and she can barely feel Enid’s arms around her anymore. Enid’s yelling and crying and emotional and Wednesday finds herself reaching for her face, fingers running over the fresh scars, and her lips twitch. It’s not a smile but it is, and she needs Enid to know. “You were Marvelous,” her hand slips, and her eyes close.

[beeseverywhen]

"All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system. Governing depends on attracting a broad coalition of voters, inevitably involving compromises that leave a party’s base disgruntled.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that as we move closer to a general election, the discontent from the anti-Labour left who claim there is little to distinguish Keir Starmer from Rishi Sunak in the battle for the premiership is only getting noisier."

"The argument is threefold: there’s no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and Labour; Starmer supposedly can’t be trusted because he has dropped pledges he made in the 2020 leadership election to shift his party towards the centre; finally, the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens.

With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the urge to debunk these sentiments may seem like an expression of paranoia. But all three aspects of this narrative are comprehensively wrong, including the reassurance that it is safe for anyone who would prefer a Labour government to vote for another party in Labour-Tory contests."

"But what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win. James Kanagasooriam, of the polling company Focaldata, has written about the “sandcastle” nature of Labour’s likely majority; his forecast is that there will be many more marginal seats in the 2024 parliament compared with 2019. If more than predicted numbers of those who voted Green in the locals decide they can afford to do so in the general election because Labour is so far ahead in national polls, that will boost the Conservatives.

Next up is the idea that Starmer’s dropping of some of his leadership pledges makes him dangerously untrustworthy. But this is the product of a system in which the tiny unrepresentative slice of the electorate that is a party membership pick their leader before voters choose their prime minister. Anyone hoping to be PM would have to shift position between a leadership selection and a general election: a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members with the comfort blanket of a policy platform such as the “free broadband for all” 2019 pledge that was roundly rejected.

Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most egregious aspect of the anti-Labour left argument is there isn’t much to choose between Starmer and Sunak. Yes, Labour’s “Ming vase” election strategy has seen it take a much more cautious fiscal approach than many of us would like: it has effectively adopted the Tory macroeconomic worldview and with it a set of spending constraints that no one sensible thinks either party could stick to in the wake of the election.

That is frustrating for anyone hoping this election campaign may illuminate some of the tough trade-offs facing Britain; but it would have been incredibly risky for one side to go it alone on this. The alternative is Labour walking into the trap and handing the Conservatives a “Labour tax bombshell” election campaign.

From a commitment to scrap the Rwanda plan to making clear that in an ideal world Labour would discard the two-child benefit cap, there are plenty of reasons that it is preposterous to think that a Starmer government would make the same trade-offs as successive Conservative governments that have financed billions of pounds worth of tax cuts for more affluent families by cutting tax credits and benefits for low-income parents. The six pledges Starmer launched two weeks ago may be incremental, but Labour needs voters to believe they are deliverable, and they are indicative of a very different set of priorities than those that animate Sunak."

"Starmer is not without weaknesses, as shown by the days he took to clarify an interview last October in which he gave the impression he thought Israel had the right to withhold power and food from Gaza. But there is no doubt whatsoever he would make a vastly more compassionate and competent prime minister than Sunak. To encourage people to put that outcome at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning."

[crossedwithblue]

You're a Mansfield Park fan?

Yes!

IDK if you intended it as such but I am going to take this as a license to ramble about MP on main.

I think the thing about MP is that people (especially people who aren't as quite intense about JA than I am lmao, or who have only read P&P before) often come to it expecting a light-bright-and-sparkling romance like P&P, and are surprised when that isn't the case. Hell, I felt like that too on the first read, because the pop-culture perception of JA is that she was a romance writer first and foremost - but the romantic happy-ever-after is shoehorned into a few paragraphs on the last page or two, and not even shown on the page. MP isn't a romance novel at all - I have minimal English lit knowledge outside of JA, but I'd class it as more of a bildungsroman, maybe? Or a predecessor to those modern Literary Novels all about objectively nasty people being nasty to each other? (More on this in a min) I would very much welcome corrections from people who do know what they're talking about, though!

To me, JA isn't actually a romance writer most of the time. She wrote really good romances because she was really good at characterisation and at understanding and describing how personalities interact to form relationships, and romance is just one type of relationship. It's just the one that pop culture tends to focus on when it comes to JA (I mostly blame Georgette Heyer but of course there's an essay to be written on that too). The only JA novels I'd describe as true romances are P&P, of course, and Persuasion - the rest have romance as just one among many other dynamics as a supporting or side plot, or a tool to reveal characterisation, rather than being the main focus.

Fanny is also a very passive narrator who tends to be acted upon rather than acting herself, which tends to irritate people, but MUCH more on that in a minute.

I think MP is in some ways sort of... cruel. It's certainly the most openly incisive and potentially upsetting, with depictions of complex abusive/toxic family dynamics that could probably come straight out of a domestic/familial abuse/neglect resource. The point where I started to enjoy MP was when someone told me to embrace the schadenfreude - everyone besides Fanny and Edmund (possibly - both points very much up for debate, but they are at least trying their best in the middle of a family that doesn't give a fuck, really) is either an actively terrible person or at least a pretty bad enabler. That did help me find the humour in it, but personally I certainly find it a bit hard to read at times, especially the Mrs Norris scenes. It's not usually my first choice when I want to be cheered up.

This also tends to surprise people, I think, because the pop-culture image of JA, (probably in large part due to her Victorian relatives wanting to protect her posthumous image) is of a twinkly, proper, sweet-natured spinster lady.

Which she was not. Anyone who's seen extracts of her surviving letters knows that she had a biting, frequently uncharitable sense of humour (miscarriage jokes aren't a great look, Jane!) - and we know Cassandra destroyed the really juicy stuff, so that's got to be the tip of the iceberg. This is certainly apparent in all of her books, but can be ignored much of the time - but not in MP, where uncharitable descriptions of awful people are pretty much the core of the book.

Finally, we come to Fanny, the extremely divisive heroine (not least because of that name lol). Personally I tend to imprint on pathetic small girls who need looking after, but Fanny is a massive turnoff (lolol) for many people. I think that's just a personal thing but I enjoy the effect of her frequently becoming another layer through which the narrative filters - JA was a master of free indirect speech, of course, often with deliberate ambiguity about whose POV is being reported - omniscient narrator or character or both in agreement - and if it's a character, then which one? Fanny usually says and does little, but observes very keenly and astutely, which interacts in a really interesting way with the narration.

Also, I'd just like to point out that Fanny is Like That because she is an abuse victim. She may not be the most compelling heroine for everyone, but she isn't going to "just stand up for herself". The one time she does, the Bertrams punish her for it pretty harshly by sending her back to an environment that they know will be bad for her physical health (!)

Bit of a tangent but I am also a huge fan of Jane Eyre and I think there are interesting parallels to be drawn between Fanny and Jane. Jane Eyre is a fiery, independent character who manages to get out of bad situations one way or another, mostly through sheer dumb luck (don't get me wrong I love my girl Jane but How did she leave that parcel on the coach...). If she'd stayed at Gateshead, I could see her gradually getting beaten down until she became a lot more like Fanny - because other than Jane's innate temper, they have quite a bit in common - they both do, when it comes down it, have a very strong sense of self (yes, even Fanny) and the ability to reject things that they know are morally wrong, no matter the potential cost.

That turned into a bit of a defense of MP because I usually hear people dissing it and so that's what I end up thinking about. Lots more to be said on the Crawfords and the Bertrams, of course.