amuseoffyre

[amuseoffyre]

OFMD Parallels: 1x01, 1x02, 1x03, 2x01, 2x08

What I love about these parallels is how much the moments say about the differences as well as the similarities:

Polite Menace versus Lime Ricky - Stede wants to earn respect for his manners and approach, while Ricky simply wants to show off and take credit for a plan that wasn't even his to begin with

Gentleman versus Minor Prince - Stede is the firstborn son of a belligerent merchant-class man who earned his fortune/rank and begrudges the fact his son will automatically get it without the work, piling decades of emotional abuse on Stede because of it, while Ricky is a Minor Prince who - while low down the familial pecking order by dint of his birth - is still high-enough born to not only summon an entire Naval fleet but to lead it as well. (also, hello parallels with the Badmintons as well - they were younger sons of the upper class/aristocracy based on their ranks in the navy. Stede is landed gentry, next up are the Badmintons and other Naval officers and then Ricky is above them all. brb rolling around in the layers of different flavours of class issues).

Make people feel underdressed and suddenly you're the one in charge - both of them are swanning around the republic in fancy outfits, but the difference is that Stede's is designed to catch the eye on his big debut and make him stand-out in a world where he is desperate for recognition while Ricky's entire outfit is just a screaming alarm of excessive wealth with plush velvet, gold and that massive freshwater pearl on a gold chain all the time. He would never end up dressed down in scraps and cast-offs the way Stede was in S2. He wouldn't allow it.

M'Noses! - look at the difference between their reactions to Jackie in this moment. Stede drops the facade and persona - "I'm Stede" - and shows the due deference and respect to someone with a knife in his face. On the other hand, Ricky yowls "don't you know who I am? I'm a minor Prince!"

Captain Kidd - both of them have a fascination with piracy, but their approach is to the pirate world is different. Stede wants to be a part of it, fully embracing it all and "I've never felt so at home", but Ricky refers to Kidd as "deranged" and talks down on "these rubes".

Not a pirate - Izzy as the barometer of whether someone is piratey enough makes me happy. When he first met Stede, fully agree - along with Stede's crew - that he was rubbish, but by the middle of S2, Izzy is acknowledging Stede as captain because he earned it. He saved the crew and helped them escape and things have changed. Ricky, on the other hand? Nope. Never. Coming in with daddy's toy soldiers and killing everyone does not a pirate make.

#ofmd #ofmd parallels #ofmd meta #prince ricky #stede bonnet #long post

[amuseoffyre]

[amuseoffyre]

samba's bts feels so essential to me bc like. the final product was very good! no contest on that imo. but I feel like in a weird transitional period during the media landscape it just feels so... vital? to have this info? the constant cutting down of the final product and the s2 bts being sweeter and gayer than what came out + being a *successful* show that was axed during a rise of strikes/ai/etc and budget cuts feels important and I'm thankful for his work

#ofmd #ofmd bts #and knowing he got permission to show what they snipped? #I appreciate the production team so much for that

[amuseoffyre]

Rhianna Pratchett confirming her father wouldn't be a """gender critical""" activist (whatever the hell those GCs stand for) if he were still alive

#terry pratchett #Pterry did wonderful and wild things with gender #he had nonbinary characters #he had characters throwing expectations of the gender binary out the window #he had drag queens and dwarf kings who publicly declared themselves women #he gave Polly a sock packer #so much fantastic dismantling of the binary

[amuseoffyre]

The most valuable thing I learned doing a Masters degree with depression, anxiety and ADHD was to change my “things I’m bad at” list to “things I can’t do on my own.” Stop thinking of them as things I could do if I tried hard enough, and accept that I can’t accomplish them by effort and willpower alone; they’re genuine neurocognitive deficits, and if I need to do the thing, then just like a blind person reading or a mobility impaired person going up a storey in a building, I need to find a different method.

I’m “bad at” working on long-term projects without an imminent deadline or someone breathing down my neck? Okay, let’s change that: I can’t work on long-term projects without an imminent deadline and someone breathing down my neck. So let’s create an imminent deadline and recruit neck-breathers. Find a sympathetic prof who will agree that 3 weeks before the due date they expect me to show them my preliminary notes and bibliography. Get a friend I trust to block off an hour to sit with me and keep asking, “Are you working on your project?” Write a blog post about my progress. Arrange to trade papers and proofread them with another student.

Accept your limitations and learn to leverage them, instead of buying the neurotypical fairytale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough.

[amuseoffyre]

Aziraphale always protected the eastern gate in one form or another. A collection of human knowledge gathered within his walls in the world that happened because of the humans who went outside the walls.

Kind reminder that the A. Z. Fell & Co. bookshop was designed by Aziraphale as:

An Eden to return to — for him to guard, for Crowley to feel safe in;

A giant compass showing the directions of the world.

No matter how lost either of them is, they’ll use it to find each other.

#good omens #good omens meta

[amuseoffyre]

Soft dom Stede Bonnet, at your service.

Keep the faith, crew. We will have a blackbonnet wedding!!

#ofmd

[amuseoffyre]

Also shout out to people who get hit once on the helmet, the object designed to protect their noggin, and don't survive

one of my greatest pet peeves in fiction, and it is truly stupid I know, is that no one seems to understand how genuinely hard it is to kill someone via stabbing. stab wounds have a mortality rate of like 5%. especially abdominal stabbing. tv shows and movies show dudes getting stabbed one time in the lower abdomen with a tiny knife and then they fall over. like what did he die of precisely. that man died of Small Knife

[amuseoffyre]

star wars fans really just make anything up

[amuseoffyre]

He's the dark mirror to Stede, what Stede could have been if Stede had been pressured and squeezed and changed by what his dad told him a man was meant to be, like the Badmintons and the the other Naval officers.

Like Stede, Ricky claimed to have been an "odd" one, someone who was ostracised, choosing to leave behind his life of privilege to carve out of a life of his own making.

Only - unlike Stede - he's not there because he's seeking freedom. His fixation on being a minor Prince is so key: he feels hard-done-by and overlooked. Minor Prince instead of just a Prince. He wants the attention and glory and a little kingdom all for himself. He looks down on the Republic and its denizens, while Stede happily says "I've never felt so at home".

Like Stede, when all goes wrong for him, he runs back to the world he knew before. But unlike Stede, Ricky doesn't learn some valuable lessons about himself and life along the way. Instead, he turns back to the so-called 'civilised' world and takes the money and power he's always had access to as a weapon to destroy those who offended him.

Stede is looking for freedom and acceptance and wants a chance to make things better than the life he had before but Ricky? Ricky is looking for somewhere that he's the King of the castle and if he has to lie and manipulate and slaughter his way to the position, he'll do it.

Special mention to both of them delighted by pirate nerdery (Stede talking about Blackbeard etc and Ricky talking about 'that deranged Captain Kidd'), bulldozing their way into the Republic dressed up all fancy and trying to forge a brand that goes royally tits up and ends with Jackie's knife in their faces.

i don't know why the fandom isn't more interested in Prince Ricky.

as a narrative device, he's perfect. Stede has a lot of foils, but Ricky's my favorite. Ed is the cool to Stede's dork; Izzy is the competent to Stede's incompetence; Jack is the rudeness to Stede's niceness--

But Prince Ricky? He's exactly Stede. Rich, ambitious, self-centered-- they even look alike.

But Ricky doesn't have Stede's kindness.

That's it.

The narration tells us that we're telling Stede's story, and no one else's, because Stede is kind.

#ofmd #ofmd meta

[amuseoffyre]

[amuseoffyre]

[amuseoffyre]

[amuseoffyre]

Our fandom forbearers did NOT suffer through Anne Rice, strikethrough, and other bullshit for fucking ACOTAR and Harry Potter fans to fucking ruin it for all of us by selling fanfiction. I am not losing novel length yaoi epics because some of you don't know how to act in fannish spaces and yes I do blame the booktokification of fanfic but I also blame those of you that treat fandom like content to consume and not a community to engage with.

[amuseoffyre]

"What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 millions people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women's pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn't carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America's founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn't paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."

-- "How Far Would He Go", TIME Magazine's interviews with Donald Trump, April 30, 2024.

I know we're saturated in coverage of Trump and it's easy (and probably better for our mental health) to usually ignore most of the articles when we see them, especially since he's so full of shit and infuriating. But it's also important to recognize that he is going to be the Republican nominee for President and he could absolutely be elected in November, and if you thought his first term was scary and dangerous, you need to understand that in a second term he's going to have people around him that are better prepared and VERY willing to do the crazy shit that he wants to do to this country. They aren't even hiding the fact that they are seeking vengeance against political opponents whom they feel have wronged them, and are ready to fundamentally dismantle the democratic foundations that are barely holding this country together after nearly 250 years.

Just look at what Trump says about the people who he incited to attack the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and halt the peaceful transfer of power that has happened every four years since 1789:

"Trump has sought to recast an insurrectionist riot as an act of patriotism. 'I call them the J-6 patriots,' he say. When I ask whether he would consider pardoning every one of them, he says, 'Yes, absolutely.' As Trump faces dozens of felony charges, including for election interference, conspiracy to defraud the United States, willful retention of national-security secrets, and falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, he has tried to turn legal peril into a badge of honor."

Oh, and please note that Trump -- a former President of the United States and possible future President of the United States -- said on the record in these interviews with TIME: "There is a definite antiwhite feeling in the country and that can't be allowed either." We are at a point where political leaders are outright saying that in this country again, and it's because of Donald Trump.

So, take the time to recognize that Trump is straight-up telling us the country we're going to be living in if he wins again in November. And understand that your vote matters -- and WHO you vote for matters -- because, as I've been saying for years now, ELECTIONS HAVE FUCKING CONSEQUENCES.

[amuseoffyre]

“𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐲: ‘𝐎𝐡, 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐠 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐬, 𝐄𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐡. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰, 𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐩 𝐢𝐭. 𝐈𝐭’𝐥𝐥 𝐠𝐨 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲.’ 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐲: ‘𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲, 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜!’ 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰, 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐝𝐨𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐬. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐑𝐨𝐜𝐤 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐡𝐢𝐦, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝.” Elizabeth Taylor chats with Whoopi Goldberg on the debut episode of The Whoopi Goldberg Show, originally broadcast in syndication on September 14th, 1992. An early trailblazer in the fight against HIV/AIDS and a staunch and outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, Elizabeth committed her time and energy to the cause when her friend and co-star Rock Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS prior to his passing in 1985. Elizabeth went on to become a co-founder (alongside Dr. Mathilde Krim) of the first AIDS research center amfAR, and later founded her separate Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 with the specific focus of providing nutritious meals (as well as medical and financial assistance) to people living with HIV and AIDS. She also lobbied the U.S. congress to contribute more money for AIDS research and education, devoting the last twenty-six years of her life to the cause. After Elizabeth passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, a large portion of the $115,932,000 raised at the Christie’s auction of her legendary jewelry collection was bequeathed to her charity in order to continue providing the services and assistance she believed were important in perpetuity. Still actively raising funds today, Elizabeth’s grandson Quinn Tivey is now an officer and co-trustee of her foundation. Reflecting on his grandmother’s humanitarianism and advocacy, he recently stated: “The fight against HIV/AIDS was such a vital part of her legacy, and although the fight is far from over, I’m honored to see the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation continue her work, educating legislators, raising awareness for the public, disproving myths and decreasing fear and stigma. Grandma stood up for what she believed in, living boldly and courageously. She would never buckle under pressure, and she certainly would not support the status quo if the status quo didn’t feel right.”

[amuseoffyre]

It actually is so sad the religious politics of the era don’t come up as much as they ought in black sails. rip charles vane I know you would have loved calling flint and jack esoteric early 18thc sectarian slurs if the writers had let u

#black sails #definitely not bonny prince charlie #lad wasn't born yet #but they could've had a lot of fun talking about the Old Pretender XD