pinkletterday

[pinkletterday]

Ever since I got a job as a security guard I can’t take heist movies seriously anymore.

[pinkletterday]

wait how did YOU learn how to walk in heels??

Step one: go to a thrift store and buy a battered pair of knee-high boots in your size. They have a blocky heel, tapered to a perfect one-inch square of stomping force.  They have seen better days; they are about to see better nights. 

Step two: you are thirteen years old and you have just moved to a house in the woods, built on a lot of untouched forest that slopes steeply to a quiet dark river. There are trails cut, tentatively, into the otherwise dense trees, and you have never moved before. You have never lived in a place that you do not know like you know your own hands, like you know your own stride. 

Step three: it is two in the morning on a fall night with a full moon, and there is no screen in your window. It’s easy to open, easy to step out, and with the heels of your boots you don’t even have to stretch for the ground under your feet. It’s soft dirt, turned up by the foundation of the house, and the square blocky boot sinks in deeply as you slide out into the night. Your cat, two bright eyes in the dark and white, flashing teeth, leaps out after you, darker than shadow. 

Step four: The trails are bright under the moon, bare dirt where the rest of the land is years of accumulated mast. As you start down the hill from the house the momentum carries you and you lean back into your heels like climber’s spikes, stablizing you on the slick clay slope where the river used to run. By the bottom of the hill you are running too, on your toes, because you’re moving too fast to stop. You can either run or fall, and this is how you learn to never, ever, fall. 

Step five: At the riverbank the trail turns into shadow under the trees and there’s nothing--you follow the darker-place-in-darkness of a black cat running ahead of you, trusting her night vision when your own fails you. She leads you through the places where the bushes are so close they whip your face, back up the hill until you pass, breathless, where the dark mirror of your brothers’ bedroom windows are shining with reflected moonlight, and you keep going, leaning into the twists and flinging your legs uphill, your heels never touching dirt at all. 

Step six: in front of the house the trails are a maze of flat land, weaving over each other to the road. Your cat picks the junctions, switching back and forth in the longest route between you and asphalt. You’re out of breath but your balance is steadying, your stride shifting, and now you run heel-toe, heel-toe, your weight flying on the balls of your feet. Everything is silver and black, you and the cat and the trees, and you know this place now.

Step seven: When you climb back through the window after your cat, there are mosquitoes everywhere. You take off your boots and climb on the furniture to smash them where they’ve gathered in the highest parts of your bedroom. 

You realize the next morning that there are perfect one-inch-square spots of mud on your ceiling.  

#prose #beautiful #writing

[pinkletterday]

Hi. I'm not really in fandom anymore, but came here to say that this whole fucking furor is ridiculous, over one video of a drunken gesture in poor taste. Until and unless Candice puts out a statement, I will not believe any allegations.

If it turns out that it was true, I will be very disappointed in her. But it does not negate the racist abuse she withstood all these years to bring the best version of Iris West to life, it does not undo her dedication to her charity work and her fanbase. She's still a strong, determined and trailblazing woman who has taken her responsibility as a role model seriously until now.

But I'm afraid this will wreck her career whether it's true or not, because both the industry and wider society will take any excuse to punish a black woman x5 more than any white man or woman. The Flash, with its insistence on being a "family show", where women get stabbed to death on the regular but the lead couple barely kiss, won't hesitate to boot her out if she no longer fits their image. Candice doesn't deserve that.

Honestly though, she works at the CW, home of lab-designed pretty people. Why would she wanna schtupp a man who looks like a shoe? 🙄

I love my Candice Patton. She is the Iris of my heart, always and forever. 🌹

#candice patton #iris west-allen #the flash

[pinkletterday]

me trying to explain why i like a work of fiction to other people

[pinkletterday]

Emojis in the wild... | ayce09

[pinkletterday]

[pinkletterday]

They can’t give us romantic westallen scenes, sex scenes (we barely even get kissing scenes) because “its a family show” but they can show us Iris getting stabbed by Savitar and now getting choked by another evil version of her husband. Yeah sounds like racism to me.

#it really is #i hate how people don't get this

[pinkletterday]

i’m still rooting for Beebo to save the multiverse

[pinkletterday]

Slow Burn • Literal Burn

[pinkletterday]

Wanted: one historical romance series about an aristocratic married queer couple who are 100% supportive of each other’s independent sex lives.  Independent lives in general, since one of them can have a passion for collecting folksongs and hunting game in the Scottish highlands and the other can travel through the most elegant salons of Europe and maybe one of them solves mysteries and the other is a spy for the Crown.  He can be truly in love with his childhood friend the Naval captain, who is off sailing the wide blue ocean most of the year, or maybe fall for a young firebrand revolutionary; and she can seduce the operatic soprano she’s been hastily drafted to play accompaniment for as part of an elaborate plot to catch out a poisoner, or maybe have a long-term relationship with a disgraced nobleman’s daughter who is her personal servant and bodyguard.  The husband and wife really do love each other in a way that has very little to do with sex, and when one shows up in another’s book, it’s usually to bring cavalry charging to the rescue.

#writing prompts #arranged marriage #royalty au #polyamory #writing

[pinkletterday]

Does anyone know where I can find some nice POC photography?

Im trying to make a character inspiration board but most of the photography is of pale skinned and skinny people.

[pinkletterday]

#hahahahaha and he played jason todd too #jason todd!batman #dean winchester as billionaire bruce wayne! #i'm dying #why is this not a thing #petition the cw #omg bruce and ollie vying for barry's affection!!! #cw do you copy #someone fic this imma die #jensen ackles #batman #dctv #stephen amell #arrow #olivarry #bruolivarry? #batflarrow

[pinkletterday]

stephenamell: The 1st meeting of the Actors who are soon to be unemployed support group went great.

#lmaooo #i love stephen man

[pinkletterday]

*hyperventilates*

call...an ambulance...

*passes out*

Candice Patton at Entertainment Weekly Comic Con Bash

July 20, 2019

#the cause of death is fucking manslaughter #arrest this woman she is a public menace #staaahp #but actually don't #candice why are you like this #what have i ever done to you #so thirsty #ded of gay #goodbye world #candice patton #the flash

[pinkletterday]

Reminder that things that have not aged well or been revealed to be problematic are still important to people who grew up with and related to them. Critique all you want, but stop trashing media just because you don't understand their generational context or value.

[pinkletterday]

Colour is the *foundation* of racism.

The darker the skin the lower down the racial hierarchy.

White-passing people are oppressed because they aren't considered white *enough*, or "white infiltrators".

Race can be arbitrary and geo-politically varied. The Irish, Italians and Armenians were not considered white in the US until the Naturalization Act and anti-miscegenation laws codified what it meant, albeit flimsily. This meant that white-passing people of colour would still be considered as dark as the darkest of their race (Latinos), while dark-skinned people of white races would be considered as white as the fairest (Italians). The Japanese were considered white by Germany but Japanese American people still interned by the US.

However, racism at its core is the systemic oppression that disenfranchises Black, Indigenous, Roma, Latino, Arab, South Asian, East Asian people under the global superstructure of white supremacy. It is not restricted to North America. It is not different in Europe for the black and brown-skinned. Race was the rationale for white colonization and is in fact the whole reason the Global South even exists. It's the basis of slavery and Orientalism. Islamaphobia is a phenomenon based on the racialization of brown bodies.

Your "white people racism" is xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and white ethnic disenfranchisement, all of which are separate from but intersect with racism.

White Jews, white Irish, white Eastern European and white immigrants all still have white privilege and can be complicit in racism against People of Colour. You can't remove yourself from one axe of oppression to validate another. No one anywhere has a leg up on a white person by being black, brown, Indigenous or East Asian. Especially not in Asian and African countries themselves. The ones in closest proximity to literal whiteness will always be the beneficiaries of institutionalised racism.

Now please, for the love of God, stop with the "white people also experience racism" posts. It is not a hot or revolutionary take. It's a sad, bad, tired one that doesn't understand what racism even is.

#racism #colonialism #imperialism #white supremacy #social justice #anti-blackness

[pinkletterday]

pick-me-ups for writers

for the self-conscious beginner: No one makes great things until the world intimately knows their mediocrity. Don’t think of your writing as terrible; think of it as preparing to contribute something great.

for the self-conscious late bloomer: Look at old writing as how far you’ve come. You can’t get to where you are today without covering all that past ground. For that, be proud.

for the perfectionist: Think about how much you complain about things you love—the mistakes and retcons in all your favorite series—and how you still love them anyway. Give yourself that same space.

for the realist: There will be people who hate your story even if it’s considered a classic. But there will be people who love your story, even if it is strange and unpopular.

for the fanfic writer: Your work isn’t lesser for not following canon. When you write, you’ve created a new work on its own. It can be, but does not have to be, limited by the source material. Canon is not the end-all, be-all. 

for the writer’s blocked: It doesn’t need to be perfect. Sometimes you have to move on and commit a few writing sins if it means you can create better things out of it.

for the lost: You started writing for a reason; remember that reason. It’s ok to move on. You are more than your writing. It will be here if you want to come back.