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Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

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i don’t grow out of my interests they simply become absorbed into me as i get older like tree rings

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Poor Zuko

He just wanted to join the Gaang but now the blind girl is moving metal, the sweet watergirl is bending blood and the kid is talking to spirits

At least he can count on Sokka to be normal. Oh, where did you say that sword was from?

Yeah, that’s right, fucking outer space

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It's not that I think Zuko took lightning for Katara because he loved her, or that she healed him because she loved him, but I do think that it's only after the adrenaline fades that they truly realize what it means to care about someone so much that you do the impossible for them. I think they will always have this between them, this understanding that transcends whatever other relationships they may have, romantic or not. Katara's hands still remember what it felt like to hold Zuko's heartbeat between them, and if everything she touches still carries a bit of that heartbeat, bleeding out from her fingertips, she doesn't show it to anyone, but the firelord somehow knows, somehow always finds her hands, catching her fingertips in his warm ones briefly in passing. And if Zuko is always seeing shadows in the thunderstorm, a torrent of memory in the split second before lightning strikes, he is soothed by the silent eyes of the Water Tribe ambassador, watching him from across a crowded room.

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There are a lot of people who are watching Shōgun who describe it as unlike anything they’ve seen. To me, the beauty of the series can be summed up by these two thoughts.

Despite the fact that Yabushige was a selfish backstabber who only thought of himself and absolutely deserved his ending… I was still sad because he was such a relatable character.

Despite the fact that Toranaga achieved everything he did and avoided as much bloodshed as possible, and brought about the Edo period, one of the longest periods of peace and stability in Japan… at the end I still was like “Is he really the good guy? Or just the winner and the lesser of two evils?”

One of my favourite things in Japanese dramas (and culture overall) is the power in the absence or something. I didn’t need to see the battle of Sekigahara to know its importance. I didn’t need to see over the top tears to feel their grief. I didn’t need to see dramatics to get the point. I mean, the best part of ep 10 was Toronaga asking Blackthorne “Are you done? We have work to do” after Blackthorne nearly kills himself. I laughed so hard at that line.

I think the idea of the power of something’s absence is another thing that many western viewers won’t be used to, which is what is sticking with them.

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I don't know if it's because he values Anjin and Mariko more or if he just hates him but for a guy who sacrificed himself for him Toranaga really likes to give Buntaro shit, and I am here for it. Episode 7 he basically told him he would accept his request if he admitted he was a cuck whose wife would rather fuck a caveman. Dude goes for the throat if you try to drag him into your relationship drama.

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there’s so much pathologizing over why enemies to lovers is a popular trope (something something the normalization of abuse something something) when the simplest and less moronic answer is that narratives thrive on irony and reversals, and there’s no greater irony than characters going from hating each other’s guts to loving each other unconditionally. raw thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

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i am once again drawing them cuddling

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Jude and Cardan by giannyfili

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Tumblr is where girls go to be alone with other girls who are being alone and that's why I've been using this site for so long

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the cupboard under the stairs

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the vanishing cabinet

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god I would be UNSTOPPABLE if I was capable of consistently initiating tasks. just you wait. you'll be waiting a while but just you wait

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love when fanfic writers are like “I love this character” & proceed to put them through shit even God has blacklisted, baby the middle ages called they want to hear your ideas

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Nothing gives the same kind of random ego boost like managing to finally clean up your home and making it nice. Like ooh look at me, I'm living like people do, I made myself iced tea and I am eating my snack from a real plate. I got floors and shit.

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It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

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Literally any show can be improved by adding more older women. Not many know this, but it’s true.