neverfinishawar

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Hugh Grant as Clive Durham in Maurice (1987)

#i’m back from the dead to say that i am so pissed off that i don’t look like him #god has favorites and it’s not me

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i dont wanna really get into the rwrb discourse but i keep seeing the book getting slandered here and on twitter so i am going to say: i know that Red White and Royal Blue has sketchy political points and the Alternate Universe that Casey McQuiston created isn't a Utopia and its flawed -- but its really stupid to me that people seem to be fixating on this. the book isn't meant to be a political thinkpiece aimed at changing people's lives and lobbying a grenade into the political sphere. its a romance novel for fuck's sake.

i get if you dont like their style of writing, or if the dialogue and scenes were too corny for you - that's fine and completely acceptable, but slandering the book on the basis of its politics is so ridiculous because its not about politics. its just supposed to be a book about queer romance. they’re not trying to make political points and i honestly think its ridiculously unfair that examining this book under the lens of nuanced political theory is even a valid form of criticism.

queer people are allowed to have fun books centred around queer romance. queer people are allowed to have books that just exist about queer acceptance and queer love. there's no way in hell this amount of scrutiny and critique would be levelled at a straight romance novel, because it is implicitly understood that romance novels are about the romance, not about making political points. the idea that Red White and Royal Blue is a fundamentally flawed book because it didnt spend like 300 pages critically examining the inherent flaws within the American Government and provide a referenced argument against the British Monarchy is laughable, and honestly it's a bad look that people seem to be overly analysing and looking for a political agenda when there is none in this book.

I'm not saying you have to like rwrb, or that everybody must appreciate it simply because of it's queer-ness, but the book is about a queer romance. Judge it on the merits of a romance novel, and its exploration of queer-ness. Nothing more.

#i love rwrb because of how easy of a book it is to read for me #as a queer person who is usually forced to pick at angsty scraps of representation it was nice to have a cheesy love novel #i really really enjoyed it guys what else can i say

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i apologize to your eyesockets for having to see this, it came to me in a prophetic dream and i had to recreate it as perfectly as humanly possible.

#i am back on the meme grind baby #miss me? #dead poets society #dead poets society memes #richard cameron #dark academia memes #dark academia

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i scrolled down a bit in my gallery and found these gems where some of you said the sweetest things to me or it was just something funny or a nice quote or whatever, it was cool enough for me to screenshot it :)

#<4 #seeing these was the best blast from the past

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season one episode twelve, "later" / francis forever by mitski / boot theory by richard siken / three women by sylvia plath / making amends by @holly-warbs / the cart by mary ruefle / love as depicted by subwayhands on instagram / season six episode sixteen, "nice while it lasted"

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litany in which certain things are crossed out - richard siken // mirages: an unexpurgated diary of anaïs nin, 1939-1947 - anaïs nin // 2x06 - fleabag // love is my religion- ziggy marley // take me to church - hozier // 1950 - king princess // fine line - harry styles // today I'm someone else - chelsea hodson // a letter to fanny brawne, 13 october 1819 - john keats // sacrilege redux - ashe vernon // planet of love - richard siken // song of the fox - margaret atwood // the brothers karamazov - fyodor dostoevsky // sappho // horatio - t. j. klune // red, white, and royal blue - casey mcquinston // the raven king - maggie stiefvater // nox - anne carson // i know what you think of me - tim kreider // figuring - maria popova // journals and miscellaneous notebooks 1838-1842 - ralph waldo emerson // on earth we're briefly gorgeos - ocean vuong // more than friends - faraaz kazi // red doc> - anne carson // 3x10 - wtfock // red, white, and royal blue - casey mcquinston // jenny slate // an oresteia - euripides (trans. anne carson) // wuthering heights - emily brontë // the song of achilles - madeline miller // global cultures: a transnational short fiction reader - elisabeth young-bruehl // red, white, and royal blue - casey mcquinston // a child's definition of love // small wire - anne sexton // the dead poet's society - peter weir // our beutiful life when it's filled with shreiks - christopher citro // stay here - gaho // keith haring diaries - keith haring // latin phrase // hozier // dooms day - bastille // guilty of dust - frank bidart

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you are jeff, richard siken

#you are jeff got me feelin some type of way guys

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scene from dead poets society where they get their diy radio to work and jam to the music even though only one of them hears said music. they are cute.

„radio free america!“

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happy trans day of visibility i love all of you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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of course. i’m happy my memery leaves this great of an impact

i deleted all of these meme posts after an identity crisis, but here you guys can have em back if you want

#for real this was so nice to wake up to #thank you :)))

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i watched dead poets society for the first time since may the other day and i literally couldn’t stop sobbing. i think i sobbed harder than i did watching it for the first time. it carries so much weight after everything the world and i have gone through over the past year. i miss making silly little memes to put on here. i miss it when things were a little bit simpler.

#dead poets society #dps #i’m sorry for the sentimental moment i’m having here but i figured i’d share

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i deleted all of these meme posts after an identity crisis, but here you guys can have em back if you want

#is this a sign that i might be returning? maybe #dead poets society #dark academia #knox overstreet #gerard pitts #neil perry #todd anderson #charlie dalton #dead poets society memes #dark academia memes #hi if you’re seeing this i wuv u

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i’m sorry bean, i just had to take the glory for myself

bye while i was inactive like 20 p//rn bots followed me

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bye while i was inactive like 20 p//rn bots followed me

#plot twist #it was me #i’m the twenty bots

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the future is up to us

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So let's talk about the Lost Generation.

This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.

On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.

And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.

But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.

Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.

Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.

Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.

(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)

It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.

It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.

There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.

It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.

Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.

There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.

We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.

I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.

We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.

I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.

The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.

So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.

Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive."

#thank you to op for writing this #in a time like this it’s so important to remember that we can use history and art as tools to fight back against the crumbling of society #the path we follow will never be a perfect one but that’s what humanity is all about #i wasn’t planning on coming back to tumblr but i saw this and changed my mind #i hope all of you are doing well and if you’re ever in need of someone to talk to #my dms are open