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#and less engagement on soc posts
19burstraat · 4 months
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anyone want to hear my six of crows x jane austen's emma au. yes of course you do don't be silly. the only person allowed to be silly is me as I descend into madness in the course of trying to cast this. (if you think 'I've heard this before' yes I've posted abt it before tho I think it was on my main)
kaz is emma, a bored, overintelligent rich bitch stuck in a country house with a bunch of shit idiot neighbours and almost no one to entertain or match him. fucking useless dad per haskell / mr woodhouse is a weaksauce hypochrondriac, and jordie / isabella has gone and got married and ditched kaz, the bastard. the only consolation is their neighbour inej / mr knightley, who is rich, sensible, popular, and elegible as hell... glory be, an intellectual equal for kaz!
in order to be less bored, kaz takes on a protege, mysterious randomer and natural son wylan / harriet smith, who kaz decides to mould in his own image and make a good match for. wylan is in love with gentleman farmer jesper / robert martin, but kaz is a snob and tries to push him towards local vicar kuwei / mr elton (I KNOW. I'M SORRY KUWEI), but that all goes tits up bc turns out kaz is a fucking terrible matchmaker, who'd've known.
meanwhile, unassuming and a little cold, but locally well-liked matthias / jane fairfax has arrived back in the village, and kaz busily commences hating on him because he's another accomplished young man and he makes him feel inadequate. hot on his heels comes the mysterious nina / frank churchill (NINA I'M SO SORRY I FUCKING HATE FRANK BUT THIS IS WHAT WORKS FOR THE COUPLES YOU CAN BE A NICE FRANK CHURCHILL ): ), who kaz is kind of fascinated by and enjoys sparring with, and hence kind of misses the really obvious signs that nina and matthias are secretly engaged, even though inej, ever thief of secrets, has lowkey noticed something's up, like matthias getting mysterious gifts from someone. kaz ends up being convinced that possibly it's inej that's pursuing matthias, which nina encourages because it helps her cover, and kaz kinda panics.
everyone has petty village drama which culiminates when kaz sneers at pekka rollins / miss bates (LISTEN. LI actually you don't need to listen bc I laughed out loud when I thought of this comparison but hear me out, if you just think of it as the equivalent of the church of barter scene except instead of 'I buried him' it's 'when have you ever stopped at three?' it kind of works. sorry to miss bates tho who is still kinda my fave austen character) at box hill, which culminates in inej going BOY WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM and kaz is like wow she kind of has a point should I be a better person :/
uhh what else even happens. there's a ball after nina massively encourages one, inej saves wylan from being partnerless and later dances with kaz (think of the gloveless dance scene from the 2020 adaptation? yeah? yeahh??). the regency gender conventions here are getting so messed up lmao, never mind. in emma harriet fancies herself in love with mr knightley and emma is forced to realise that she likes him, so let's say that wylan pretends to be after inej, in order to strong arm kaz into realising that he's wanted to marry inej this entire time. wylan's dad turns out to be minted (I'm stretching the book here to make it work w SOC but never mind) but that's after kaz has admitted he fucked up and sent wylan off to marry gentleman farmer jesper, yaaay. nina's relatives who are stopping her from marrying matthias die and hence there's a massive revelation with 'oh they were engaged this whole time lol', kaz is PISSED bc he didn't clock it. uh. everyone gets married and now kaz can escape the shit village and actually go places. the end.
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jeanmoreaux · 1 year
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I think it’s so interesting and weird that we can remember the books we read so differently (how we interpret characters or our POV in general)
For example with SoC, Wylan was very much ‘tame’ to me and was this runaway rich kid just making stuff up on the go because his dad just decided he was disposable now
And for aftg—I see a lot of posts about how Kevin has a drinking problem but honestly I was reading through that series being like “of course, they’re college kids and under these specifically triggering circumstances I can totally understand why he wants to drink”
GAH 🤣🤣🤣 just a random observation!!!
oh, very much! what you get out of a book is so heavily influenced by what of yourself put into it as a reader. since all our experiences and thought patterns and approaches to a text are so different, we all read the same text but come away with different impressions of the same story. that's soooo fascinating to me and one of the main appeals of reading (or fiction in general). the way you engage with a piece of fiction is so personal.
wylan, for me, always felt like an alter to kaz. i think they have a similar makeup, but circumstances and environmental influences shaped them very differently. kaz is more cunning and violent and all that because he had to be, while all these qualities are much more toned down in wylan, but the potential for them is definitely there. i always explained the fanon 'soft boy' characterisation of wylan with this implicit comparison between him and kaz tbh. since he's a much tamer version of a similar set of characteristics that tameness is sometimes exaggerated in the fandom, i think. and ofc the narrative, at least in the beginning, tries to convince you that wylan isn't like the dregs, which probably adds to this 'soft boy' interpretation as well—even though that expectation is subverted later on. he does have little shit energy (in the vein of e.g. neil josten), but that's very often ignored from what i have seen.
as for kevin, i DESPISE when people make kevin's drinking into an integral part of his character. like, despite what some people might say, he's NOT an alcoholic. he doesn't meet the criteria for a substance abuse disorder. people should focus less on the drinking itself and more on what the drinking means in context. it's meant to show us how poorly kevin is doing mentally AND that he has maladaptive coping mechanisms to deal with the circumstances he's thrown into. like you said, it's not surprising he feels incline to numb some of what's going on around him with alcohol since his life is–and has been–pretty fucked up since early childhood. Drinking alcohol to deal with all the stress is not great, but he just doesn't know any better way to cope. he has never learned to deal with his issues in a healthy manner, but he is getting there with time and help (if the extra content is to be believed). anyway, like i said, it's not so much a drinking problem as it is a coping problem.
i feel like engaging with fandoms always makes you hyperaware of how different and copious interpretations of the same story are. it's as amazing as it is infuriating at times.
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marycontraire · 2 years
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I got an anon ask making me aware that someone was slandering my writing (and directly insulting other aspects of my blog) and had escalated to tagging her posts with a variation on my username.
I'm not answering the original ask because it included a link to the post, and I'd rather not inadvertently sic a horde of anons on this twenty-year-old woman's inbox: she doesn’t seem to have a strong grasp of how fiction works or any tolerance for nuanced portrayals she doesn’t personally agree with, and a friend of mine thought she remembered her blogging about self-harm in the past. She does not seem well, and sending her hate is not going to help with that. I hope she's getting help.
I took a look. (Yes, you can look at blogs that have you blocked. It's not at all difficult. You just navigate directly there using a browser where you're not logged into Tumblr.) Obviously it was pretty hurtful, but it's not even close to the worst incident of cyberbullying I've experienced since I began writing fic, so I simply exercised an option that all of us should use more: scroll past and do not read content that you know will upset you.
Seriously. This is why AO3 has such a robust tagging system. You can exclude tags from searches. I just made a post a few days ago about how you can create your own skins to permanently exclude authors you dislike from your search results regardless of what tags they include on a new fic.
I routinely exclude "Alternate Universe - Modern" from all of my searches because I find those fics uninteresting. Does that mean I think everyone who writes modern AUs has an invalid interpretation of characters I love? No! I know that authors don't expect me to spend my time reading works that I don't enjoy.
You can also quickly back out of fics you start reading when you can see them heading in a direction you don't like. I am incredibly picky about Kaz's characterization in fic (and increasingly so about Obi-Wan Kenobi's), so I routinely close out of fics I dislike after a few paragraphs reveal that the author's interpretation diverges too far from my own for me to enjoy their work. In other fandoms and with other characters, I am more tolerant of those differences and less likely to back out upon encountering a new "take" on a character.
I've blocked the user who made the post (though obviously, as discussed above, that does not shut her out from reading my blog if she's determined to find content that upsets her). I've also blocked another prolific user in the fandom who liked the post.
To the anon who brought this to my attention and anyone else looking for a way to help: the best antidote to negativity is positivity! If you disagree that the interpretation of Kaz I present in a 115,646 word series that I spent countless hours on is "disgusting and borderline ableist," tell me that! Leave a comment on AO3 telling me what you like about my interpretation, or send me an ask on Tumblr! If you're shy, I have anon options open in both places!
Seriously, I cannot overstate how much I enjoy interacting with my readers. It is my favorite thing. It's been a wild ride joining a new and growing fandom like SoC, and although I definitely feel like the fandom wine aunt, I've been pleased to find that for every young person who makes me roll my eyes with petty behavior, there are at least a dozen who are kind, mature, rational, and engaged.
[Ok last thing before I sign off: my favorite part was when this user dragged a certain Discord server, implying that I belonged to it. LOL. Clearly she missed some tea.]
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futureailist · 5 months
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socly · 1 year
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Manoj Kumar Shastrula Empowering SMEs & Startups with Data Compliance
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caswlw · 3 years
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origami cube :)
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phoenixyfriend · 3 years
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👀 PLease tell us your thoughts about the Jedi babies re-growing up among different cultural contexts.
Oh fuck okay
Context: original post, chrono The specific post this ask is referencing: here
Summary of the AU: Disaster lineage got tossed back in time. Anakin stayed 21-ish, but Obi-Wan and Ahsoka got deaged, took new names for time-travel reasons (Ylliben and Sokanth, or Ben and Soka), are now staying with the True Mandalorians under Jaster Mereel because the Force said to, go back to the Temple after about a decade. They grabbed Shmi about three months after arriving.
So as far as the cultural background goes, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka had similar upbringings. She spent a few years on Shili first, but both spent the majority of their childhoods up to age 13/14 being raised in the creche. So that's the basis that they would default to, in a vacuum.
Nobody is raised in a vacuum.
Along with the Jedi cultural background, they're being raised by Tatooine natives in a Mandalorian environment.
Shmi and Anakin are both former slaves who have desert survival baked into their bones. The longer Anakin spends around her, the more his accent slips, the more he talks about old folktales, the more he uses idioms that don't exist on a cityplanet like Coruscant. All the things that he tamped down to be a Jedi come floating back to the surface, and Shmi's never known anything else. Anakin's knowledge of slave customs make her feel more comfortable, which in turn makes him feel better, and so on.
Mandalore is just... the culture they're living in. You don't grow up in a new culture with a new language without picking up on it personally. (Source: I moved to the US when I was a little under two years old.)
I think the thing I'm going to focus on as an example is the way each of these cultures approaches family, and then maybe how they approach the keeping of peace/what peace means.
Jedi: Where you come from means little, only the legacy you leave behind in your students. Mandalore: You protect your clan and your children; adoption is a major cultural value, if not actually practiced consistently. Tatooine: You can lose your family at any time, so you value what you have in all its forms. You don’t forget where and who you came from, to family of blood and family of choice alike. You cling to your memories and what little you still have of them, to what your master cannot take away.
These are all valid ways to approach family, and each of these approaches can have significant meaning to different people. But they do all, to a certain degree, conflict with one another, despite all three being fairly communal cultures.
The Jedi have a culture, one that’s built on a shared ability and religion over thousands of years. It’s not just an organization, but a continuous community with legends and traditions and art and records. But it’s one that is built on new blood coming in from the outside, volunteers who join because the religion speaks to them (near literally, given the nature of Force Sensitivity), given up by families who couldn’t or wouldn’t teach them in a way that let their talents flourish instead of pushing it all down.
For the Jedi, a culture built on people coming together due to something they have in common intrinsically that their families of blood do not, it makes sense to put emphasis on letting go of that past when they can, and to place importance on teaching lineages. It’s not just the official master-padawan pairs, either, but that’s the most obvious and easily paralleled element. Moreover, a lot of the Jedi culture is about gaining knowledge, so obviously spreading it is good, and also on supporting the galaxy to make it a better place; to view the Jedi order as a heavily communal culture would make sense, since their values are all about selfless betterment of the universe, which on a larger scale is about the galactic conflicts, but on a smaller scale is about supporting their own community, the children and the ill and elderly.
So that is the specific culture that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka grew up in, one that holds blood family as relevant but not particularly crucial to one’s identity, but is structured so people leave behind legacies through education in a manner that often becomes adoptive family (depending on your definition, I guess). Jedi are encouraged to connect to their home cultures, if not their families, with practices like the coming of age hunt for Togruta leading to the young Jedi taking a trip out to Shili to engage in that cultural milestone. This can also be viewed as a way for the Jedi to maintain personal connections to the wider universe, a (not entirely successful, but certainly attempted) way of keeping them from becoming too isolated and insular from the universe at large, and losing touch from what the galaxy actually needs of them.
They’re now growing up with two cultures that do place emphasis on blood and found family.
Mandalore, as presented in The Mandalorian, has their traditional values set as being heavily associated with their armor, battle skills, and childcare. While that’s clearly a set of values that aren’t actually followed by everyone with full sincerity, we can assume that these stated cultural values do have at least some impact on the way the society is structured, since we do see more traditional characters (Jaster, Din) adopt orphaned children and then have the Mandalorian elements of their immediate circles support that claim.
(We’ll ignore Jango and the whole clone army thing because the amount of Sith influence is up for debate and also holy trauma, Batman.)
However, we also see that a lot of Mandalorian culture is built on their family histories. On the New Mandalorian side, we see emphasis placed on the fact that Satine is House Kryze and that she’s a duchess. Her bloodline is relevant, though not the most important thing about her. On the Death Watch side, we have Pre and Tor placing emphasis on the fact that they’re Clan Vizsla, descended from Tarre, that this is important to why they deserve what the darksaber represents, this is part of why they not only deserve to lead, but should for the good of Mandalore.
Bo-Katan’s armor is a family heirloom. Boba’s armor was Jango’s, but before being Jango’s, it was Jaster’s. Armor is important enough to pass to family, but the family can be adopted. This all tracks.
The resol’nare specifies loyalty and care for the clan/tribe among the six tenets.
These two elements seem relatively well-balanced: the importance of adoption and the importance of family as a larger unit on the level of a house or clan.
And then you have Tatooine, which also balances blood and adoption, but for entirely different reasons, that being this: it can always be taken from you.
For all that a Mandalorian could historically expect their family to die in battle, and a Jedi could expect to lose their master the same way if things went poorly, those were usually choices. A Mandalorian was raised to walk into battle, and then they could make that choice to do so. It wasn’t often much of a choice, but they could feasibly turn their back and choose to be a farmer or a doctor or something, and support the people who went out to do battle instead of being the one on the field themselves. A Jedi could choose to be a healer or an archivist or join one of the Corps.
A slave does not get that choice. A slave can be killed or sold on a whim from their master. It’s not a one-time trauma, but an ever-present fear. Your parent, your child, your sibling, your spouse, all of them can be separated from you at any time. You can always lose them, and you have no choice but to grin and bear it, or try to run and die before you reach freedom.
In a context like that, I imagine Tatooine places a very heavy emphasis on family, both of blood and of choice, and on treasuring what you have while you have it. A person is always aware that they can lose whoever they have in their life, and so they make the most of their times together, have clear and consistent ways of expressing that love (I imagine primarily direct verbal confirmations and physical contact, practical gifts like water and fruit). Childcare is important, elders are venerated. Those who survived that far have valuable wisdom, and the children are to be given what happiness they can have before reality wipes that ability from them.
The family ‘networks’ among Tatooine slaves are smaller and tighter knit. There’s less trust for outsiders, but once you’re in, you’re in until you are taken away. Still, families are torn apart regularly, and often can’t contact each other after being separated if they’re sold far enough away, so families stay small because they’re always being broken up. Unlike Mandalore’s tribe/clan system, or the Jedi’s wide, loosely-structured community, Tatooine’s slaves form smaller groups that cling for as long as they can, and try to support each other. (There are selfish ones, of course, especially the newbies, but... well. Most try.)
Tatooine is also much more likely to assign a familial role (e.g. referring to an elder as ‘grandmother’). It’s not uncommon in the others (multiple Jedi refer to their masters as a parent or sibling, like Anakin’s “you’re like a father to me” line), but it’s not as baked-in that such a role should be given.
So on a structural level, we have two people from a community culture with little emphasis on blood family or formal familial roles are now being raised in a community that has them asking “what can you do for the people around you first, and then the wider world?” by people who tell them “your family, blood and found, is the most important thing you have; never let anyone take more from you than they possibly can.”
And that shit has an effect.
For all that Sokanth and Ylliben were once raised with a knowledge that their duty, their goal, was to better the galaxy as a whole, they are now being told that the community that raises them asks their loyalty back, because societies are built on support networks, and if you support the tribe, it will support you. There are parallels to that kind of thinking among Jedi, because it is basic social theory, but it’s not presented as the same kind of cultural value. It’s not given as something to strive for, just a basic fact.
This, for instance, means that once they’re back at the Temple, they have a tendency towards suggesting study groups and other ways of supporting people in their immediate circle, often structured in very unfamiliar ways. Again, this isn’t uncommon among Jedi, but it’s not done in the same way, or with the same emphasis. The Jedi also often approach problem-solving in a different order, so the step of “meditate on it and you may find your solution” often comes before “gather information from people who know more about it than you do,” while Ben and Soka have by this point learned to do it the other way around, because that’s what the Mandalorian system taught them: rely on your family first.
Meanwhile, the Tatooine element of their upbringing has them being much more willing to just... casually refer to ‘my dad’ and ‘my sister’ and so on. They use those words. It’s not just “my master is like a father to me,” but “this is my father.” They don’t hesitate to talk about the family they had and still have in Mandalorian space. None of the Jedi begrudge them it, really, but it’s always a shock to hear for the first time, and between the Tatooine refusal to pretend the connection is gone and the Mandalorian tendency to err on the side of roughhousing as affection, they’re just... odd. It’s not like none of the other Jedi know family outside the Order--some of the old books had Obi-Wan visiting his brother on Stewjon once in a while--or like none of the active Jedi are loud or boisterous, but the specific manner in which Soka and Ben interact with the Order, especially when their dad is around, is very weird.
More Soka than Ben, really, but that’s mostly just because Ben’s a very quiet person until he gets a little older, so it’s harder to notice on him.
Point is, while they still hold to their duty to the wider galaxy and will continue to keep that duty above almost anything else in their lives, the way they talk and act about the subject of family, especially in private, is heavily influenced by their new cultures.
This is already very long but I promised I’d talk about peace so let’s go:
The Jedi seek peace as an absence of war and conflict in the portion of the galaxy under their purview, in hopes that they will prevent as much suffering and death as they can.
The Mandalorians are varied, but Jaster Mereel’s group (which is the community the Skywalkers are with) is likely to view peace as unrealistic to achieve in the long term. They do not seek war, but they know the world they live in, and are prepared to protect against violence as their first resort. They always expect an attack, even if they don’t seek it.
The Slaves of Tatooine view peace as the calm in a storm. It is the status quo. Nobody has escaped tonight, for the guards aren’t searching, but neither is anyone dead. The Master you have is in a good enough mood to not sell you, to not kill you, to not beat you. Peace as an absence of suffering is impossible, so you seek for your master to be peaceful, that is to say: not raging at you.
The scope of each of these narrows significantly. From the known galaxy, to the wars that meet Mandalorian space, to the household one serves.
A community like the Jedi can choose to address peace as something to be sought on a large scale as an absence of war. They primarily function within the borders of the Republic, which has its problems but is largely structured to prevent such things from occurring until the Sith interfere. The Jedi have a structure that allows them to address peace as an ideal to be sought, at least within the borders of the territory they serve.
Mandalore, meanwhile, has been at war on and off for... ever. When they are not at war with themselves, they’re at war with someone else. ‘Peace’ is just the time between wars, and they know that if they do not attack first, they will be forced to defend. Jaster Mereel was known as the Reformer, and part of that was that instituting a code of honor, one that was intended to prevent Mandalorian warriors from acting as raiders and brigands, but rather acting as honorable hired soldiers, or taking roles such as the Journeyman Protectors. Given that, I imagine that he views war as something inevitable, but also something that can be mitigated.
War doesn’t touch Tatooine.
Oh, it might raise taxes and import rates. It might prevent visitors who come for the races. It can do a lot of things.
But to a slave, these are nothing. The only thing war does is affect the master, the person who chooses when their slaves get water, when they get beaten, when they are no longer useful enough to keep around or keep alive.
The peace of a slave’s live is dictated by how much abuse they are subjected to by the person who owns them.
What this means for Soka and Ben is... well, they are viewed as war-hungry by the people who don’t know them very well. They have armor. They focus on fighting, both with and without their sabers. They know tactics better than most masters. They claim that war is coming, and don’t seem too sad about it.
(It is a fact to them. War will come. All they can do is meet it. They’ve already done their mourning once.)
They also... well, Shmi tells them things in hidden corners. How to duck their head to hide the hate or fear in their eyes. How to watch for the anger in the tendons of a hand. The laugh of someone who enjoys the pain they’ve caused, not just the adrenaline of a fight. She is free, and so are they, but she has not forgotten how to hide in the shadows until the master’s ire has turned elsewhere. How to be small and quiet and unseen until the danger passes.
A Jedi’s first resort is words. Their second is their saber. But the Jeedai hold their heads high, and the Mandalorians do the same.
“You rely on the Force, and you have your pride,” she tells them, her hands on their own. “But there will come a time when you will not be able to remind people that you are free. You will not be able to say that you are a person, that you deserve the respect of a living sentient. Perhaps it will be a politician who treats everyone like that. Perhaps you will be captured by an enemy. Perhaps you will be undercover. You will not be able to fight, with words or with weapons, and you will have to know how to survive.”
Tatooine does not have peace. Tatooine only has survival.
And while Jedi fight for the survival and peace of the universe, they are refined and composed. Mando’ade fight like warriors of old, and Tatooine slaves fight like cornered, rabid anooba.
The galaxy comes first, but when the chips are down and the Sith come out to play, Soka and Ben do not need refinement, because they know how to toss aside their pride and live.
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janemechner · 2 years
Text
something so silently disheartening about getting 0 interactions on my drawings aside from likes. which is only a feeling i experience online. i can’t say that i’ve ever truly been hurt by someone not liking my work besides maybe a partner, and if anything it will engage me in seeing an outside point of view, and overall feels more warranted.
it feels like we’ve learned to use soc media as a professional tool and less of a platform for comment and critique. except there are no tangible interactions. art is to be viewed, consumed, and forgotten about. or maybe my art just sucks and isn’t provocative enough to garner words! i don’t know! but posting to instagram especially gives me a hole in my chest.
it’s probably also a case of what posting as a 14 year old gave me in regards to my perception- receiving such an abundance of feedback so instantly (back when i used the internet as a teenager with no social life and made my friends online) was bound to program me into expecting a feeling of attention after every post. it’s a very micro feeling of disappointment now, but nonetheless overbearing. which is strange because in any other aspect of displaying my work i’m generally not one to feel vulnerable. online interaction however provokes so much insecurity. will develop this thought more.
the feeling is mostly born from instagram, and i think tumblr doesn’t provoke it as much is because interaction isn’t as sudden or abundant. as well as not creating a curated feed, the tumblr blog isn’t an identity whereas instagram is curating the self into a brand. theres an artist who explores the relationship between giving children gold stars for doing well and receiving likes ugh i can’t remember her name does anyone have any similar sources i could read
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firelxdykatara · 3 years
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Ship whatever you want obviously but Leigh Bardugo has posted before that she wrote Shadow and Bone to cope with an abusive relationship and said Alina’s feelings reflect hers so I understand her not wanting to redeem the darkling
I’m gonna be real honest, here: then she shouldn’t have baited the audience from the very first book.
Like, I sympathize, but I’m not gonna stop criticizing bad writing just because it comes from a sympathetic place. (And, frankly, it makes very little sense to me that she’d condemn the Darkling to a fate worse than death [in the sequel books] because she was writing s&b to cope with an abusive relationship, but then she.... put Alina in an abusive relationship. Mal, in the books? Is horrid. And Alina has to be reduced to a shell of herself in order to make the relationship work. And like I can understand writing that way if it’s all she really experienced in terms of romance but that doesn’t make the writing any less bad.) But that also doesn’t change the fact that Darklina was heavily, heavily baited from the moment the first book was teased.
“A dark heart. A pure soul. A love that will last forever.”
That was the tagline for the first book. If I’d picked up Shadow and Bone, seen that tagline, read the back cover, and then someone told me that the Darkling dies and Alina winds up with her childhood bff who wouldn’t give her the time of day until someone else wanted her? I’d have been baffled. And from what I can tell, having read posts by people who were following the books from the start, Leigh also heavily baited the fandom up until the final book in the trilogy was released, people realized they were baited and got mad, and she decided she hated the Darkling and Darklina and everything to do with them (to the point of eventually doing him and his relationship with Alina even dirtier in sequel books released nearly a decade later; honestly, that’s nearly Bryke levels of pettiness).
So, at the end of the day, I don’t really care that Leigh didn’t want to redeem the Darkling. I don’t really get it (especially since she herself admits that Kaz Brekker is, morally speaking, even worse), but if the books were well-written and marketed as childhood friends falling in love and defeating a great evil, I wouldn’t really care. It probably would never have caught my attention, but I wouldn’t think anyone had much of a reason to feel cheated. As it is, though, I suspect that Leigh knew that the real money is in enemies-to-lovers relationships--they generate the most buzz, the largest followings, the most fan engagement--and decided to pull a bait-and-switch rather than being honest about her intentions from the beginning.
And that just means I really don’t respect her, at the end of the day. I’m grateful for SoC/CK (though I have my issues, and Helnik is another example of how allergic she is to enemies-to-lovers having happy endings or fulfilling lives together), and I love the show, but I just don’t have a whole lot of respect for the author as a creator.
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azenta · 2 years
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How can I determine if I am a Sx/Sp or a Sp/Sx 9w8?
As a word of advice, I wouldn't recommend looking how each variant affect the core to determine IVs or even the core type, it usually creates pointless confusion and dumb mistypes.
In this case, the best way to determine which you are is by noticing if you are synflow or contraflow, independently of your core. Variants are their own, so get to the core of their concept before seeing how it will play in a 9 core (independently of its wings at first). I won't elaborate on each, it wasn't the question, neither do I have the patience to do this rn, so I'll focus on syn vs contra flow.
Synflow is more about creating and maintaining the flow of things, while contraflow is disturbing and challenging the course of the flow.
By flow, it means how fluidly the "energy" flows between the concerned subjects/objects. Let's take the easiest example to illustrate this abstraction: relationships. Synflow would mean someone who facilitates creating, maintaining and/or the caring of relationships. They allow to somewhat create a flow, power up the flow or preserve the flow between them and one or many people. Contraflow on the other hand disturb, challenge and/or redirect relationships. So, they divide the flow, destroy flows and/or preserve from the flow between them and one or many people. It is a more chaotic/destructive force, but this destructiveness should be seen as rather a purging force, not sheer annihilation. Contraflow declutters the shit that could interfere, while synflow simply add indefinitely. In both case, it can create problems, but both aren't inherently nuisible. Briefly, the negative of synflow is to create overflows which ironically damage and potentially destroy as well, while the negative of contraflow is to simply block and dry up the flow, which also causes damage and potentially destroy.
So, in the end, flow means how well things interact with each other. Synflow stimulates the flow, contraflow brakes the flow. Therefore, you need to notice if you tend to ease this flow or brake it, then see how you ease it or brake it to be sure of which IV you use.
I got some other advices and warning before concluding. Withdrawness and Sp tends to be easily confused, but I'd recall withdrawness is an imperative to be called a 9 core. Sx or Soc won't make a 9 less withdrawn, it will show differently, but it won't make it less self absorbed. While Sp dom won't make the 9 an absolute shut in, it makes the 9 more preoccupied with how they invest their "resources" (energy, time, money, etc.), thus not necessarily more self absorbed, but more prudent. Soc blindness also won't make the 9 a shut in, it simply means the 9 will be clueless or indifferent toward engagements (Soc).
If you want precisions or have other questions, don't hesitate to ask. I can say a lot more around those topics, but I try to limit myself to the most efficient answer, or else I would write freaking book long post lmao.
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xiyao-feels · 3 years
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Part Four: My thoughts on the effects of these changes on our interpretations of the characters, and some miscellaneous final notes
Intro - Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4
Okay, so. That's a list of changes. What kind of effect does it actually have on our interpretation of the characters?
For JGY, it's perhaps more subtle than you'd think. The complaint from JGY stans about FJ I heard most often, prior to watching it, was that JGY involves NHS in his brother's killing—whereas in MDZS, as shown, if anything he functions as NHS' protector. This is definitely obnoxious, but to my eye the worst changes are the perhaps more subtle ones. The JGY of FJ is significantly different from the JGY of MDZS and CQL in two ways: first, he has more options available, and second, without ever making an explicit claim, the text nevertheless sends the strong message that he is /not actually in danger from NMJ/.
What do I mean about more options? To begin with, he teaches NHS the corrupted SoC. This carries some risk of LXC finding out, and a much greater risk of NHS finding out—as, indeed, he does. I don't see how this could plausibly be a risk worth taking for JGY; the narrative's insistence suggests either that he has some way to mitigate that risk, or that he's secure enough he can afford to be so careless. His ability to achieve such strong, immediate affects via musical cultivation, despite his weak cultivation level, adds to the general sense that FJ JGY is much less constrained than MDZS or CQL JGY, as does JGS' complete absence from the narrative; it would be easy to forget that JGY is under any social/political pressure at all, even though this is a constant theme in NMJ and JGY's confrontations in MDZS and CQL, and the pressure and danger from JGS specifically is central to their confrontation at the stairs. The lack of any hint of or history of disrespect to LFZ from the Nie men, given what we see of their interaction in CQL, is yet another example of FJ ignoring the constraints JGY actually has to work with.
And, of course, FJ suggests that he has the option to actually cure NMJ, when the fact that he doesn't is in my opinion central to the morality of the decision, to understanding JGY's character, and indeed to many of the themes of the text. (In fact as a friend pointed out to me it suggests that NHS or indeed anyone could learn the music to cure him, although FJ does not seem to realize the implications of this itself.)
This ties in with point two: that JGY is not actually in danger from NMJ. We never see NMJ attack him—NMJ's violence is reserved for other people. Furthermore, we see him (and later NHS) stop NMJ's violence by the quick application of the uncorrupted SoC; this includes, as I've mentioned in previous sections, a scene where JGY protects NHS from NMJ's anger via cultivation, while in the nearest MDZS scene JGY protects NHS from NMJ's anger very explicitly by being a more appealing target. Watching FJ, it would be very difficult to understand how much danger JGY was actually in, and how much he was a target of NMJ's violence.
Even in CQL, NMJ tries to kill JGY at the stairs, drawing his sabre on him after the stairs kick—and even that first attempted blow, before they exchange words outside, could have caused JGY serious damage. In MDZS, after the stairs—where NMJ would very likely have succeeded in killing JGY if LXC hadn't intervened—though WWX admires JGY's skill in finding the right words to convince NMJ to "give him another chance," JGY is only able to do this by promising he'll do something that would probably get him killed, and then promising NMJ that he can kill JGY if he doesn't do it. Moreover, NMJ ends his own life by kicking down a door to kill JGY on the spot, because he did not like the way he was talking about NMJ to LXC. This is a very, very far cry from anything presented in FJ.
The idea that JGY could actually cure NMJ goes to this as well. NMJ is as violent to JGY as he is because of the sabre curse; JGY's choices are endure this, and hope to survive, or...kill him quicker, and hope to survive. He doesn't actually have a choice that involves not being subject to NMJ's violence. Ignoring this fundamentally changes JGY's character, who is so defined by the constraints under which he suffers, and indeed by the lack of physical security he has until he becomes Jin-zongzhu.
What then about NMJ's character? Honestly I don't even have the words for this; it's a profound insult to his original character. The thing is, it's not just that NMJ doesn't doubt the righteousness of Nie cultivation practices, although he very much does not. It's that NMJ would never do something he secretly thought was unrighteous, never mind /shape his life around it/. If he believed something wasn't righteous, he simply wouldn't do it. This is literally the heart of his conflict with JGY, and it repeats throughout the text again and again.
Further, and less flattering to NMJ: NMJ is absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his own judgement. It's not just that he wouldn't do something he thought in his heart wasn't righteous; he's never the kind of torn he is shown to be in FJ, and he never doubts his own judgement. When NHS challenges him here on whether he's qualified to decide the fate of evildoers, who are after all still evil, part of him clearly thinks NHS has a point. But NMJ absolutely, one hundred percent believes in his right to play—if you'll pardon the phrase—judge, jury, and executioner. It's not just JGY, although it very much is, also, JGY; at no point does he seem to believe anything but that he has the absolute right to kill JGY if he decides to. Indeed, some of his worst violence to JGY is a result of JGY challenging his assertions of righteousness, at the stairs. We see it with XY, both in MDZS and arguably even more clearly in CQL as well: in episode 10 he instantly decides that XY should be executed, and is about to carry out that execution when WWX intervenes—and then he's offended about WWX's intervention! The only reason he doesn't carry out the execution on the spot is MY's argument that keeping XY alive can be used to harm the Wen. And, of course, we see it with his attitude to WQ and WN, although people are so often determined to ignore this. Please note that he argues /against/ JC and LXC's defense of them, both in MDZS and in CQL; if ever there was a single incident that could have changed at all how things came out, it would be the very respected sect leader Nie, whose sect is after the Jin the strongest surviving sect post-Sunshot, speaking out in their defense at the conference convened to determine what to do about the fact that WWX just made off with them.
Now, thematically, I think part of the point of his character is that his inflexibility is...well, inflexible; his condemnation of people who are in bad positions does more harm than good. Returning to JGY for a moment, I also think it's telling that NMJ doesn't take effective action to accomplish his goals re: XY. This isn't even just because JGY killed him—if he had actually killed JGY instead, then he would have found quite suddenly that he'd killed Lianfang-zun, the war hero who killed WRH, his own sworn brother, JGS' beloved son, etc etc etc. It would not have gone well for him. Part of the point is that—in a corrupt system, acting as though the system isn't corrupt will itself lead to injustice. Making NMJ himself knowingly complicit in the corruption of that system rather defeats that point.
I am also, I admit, /extremely/ annoyed that /he/ is offered the understanding that he had no choice because of his position, while JGY's difficulties are ignored, and when a) although from what we see in MDZS it would certainly have been quite difficult, he did actually have a choice b) the movie strongly suggests (with the ready willingness of the Nie men to follow him when he rejects the ancestral method of balancing, their respect for sabre-weak NHS, and the lack of opposition from any other area) that it would not, actually, have been that difficult, socially speaking.
I think in terms of the effects this has on people's interpretations of JGY, probably this makes them think that NMJ at the stairs rejects the specifics of JGY's argument, and contributes to a general lack of engagement with the substance of what JGY is actually saying (and the lack of substance of NMJ's reply). People mostly ignore NMJ's similar stance towards WQ, so I suspect this doesn't have much effect there; I have on occasion seen the claim that he was right to condemn her as well, but I mostly don't think it was coming from an FJ-inspired place.
When it comes to NHS…mmm. As I said, CQL makes him less amoral at the beginning, although it doesn't prevent his total—I'm not even sure you can say 'carelessness towards collateral damage' in the current timeline when from his perspective collateral damage would be a good thing, since it would be blamed on JGY. Not to mention the way he treats QS, what he's implied to do with MS' body... I suspect that FJ!NHS is where you get man-of-the-people NHS, who would /totally/ have built those watchtowers instead of that awful JGY if that awful JGY hadn't cruelly murdered his brother because a) he's Evil and/or b) he's ambitious (and also evil), and what other considerations could there possibly be?
To which I can only say: fucking spare me. I suspect the characterization here of NHS and of the Nie men contributes generally to fandom's idea of a much more gentle and progressive cultivation world than either MDZS or CQL supports.
In summation: FJ is, considered as providing any kind of interpretive light on CQL and/or MDZS characters, a terrible movie. If you are not fully familiar with the relevant portions of MDZS, I don't see how you could come away from this without absorbing significant falsehoods. Although I certainly can't and indeed don't wish to tell anyone what they should or should not consider canon, I do think it's important to know that incorporating FJ into your personal canon is going to result in an extremely different characters than not doing so, and if you want to argue with CQL or MDZS fans about characters' characterizations based on FJ, it's not going to be a very productive discussion for anyone involved.
A few miscellaneous notes:
-The change in the narrative of NMJ's violence extends beyond the replacement of his primary target. In fact, there are three things in particular I want to pull out.
First, and despite his near assault of NHS, FJ!NMJ is portrayed as much less...well, scary, than MDZS NMJ, and even to some extent CQL NMJ. NMJ habitually takes out his anger in undirected violence towards objects—the boulder when he hears his men talking about MY, the boulder(/pillar in CQL) after MY kills WRH, the door he kicks open to kill JGY before he qi-deviates, the table he cracks in his anger around NHS delighting in fans rather than knowing where he sabre is; even, though here at least it is a clear deliberate choice, his burning of NHS' things. In FJ—well, I don't want to say there's none of that, he does at least break NHS' paintbrush and I could be misremembering other things, but it certainly seems a lot less prevalent. And more than that, people simply don't react to him as terrifying! In FJ, NHS after NMJ /nearly hits him/ is still a lot less scared of NMJ's anger than NHS is in this parallel scene in MDZS, where he does not (ch 49):
One day, the moment he returned to the main hall of the Unclean Realm, he saw about a dozen folding fans, all lined in gold, flattened out one next to the other in front of Nie HuaiSang, who was touching them tenderly, mumbling as he compared the inscriptions written on each one. Immediately, veins protruded from Nie MingJue’s forehead, “Nie HuaiSang!”
Nie HuaiSang fell at once.
He really did fall to his knees from the terror. He only staggered up after he finished kneeling, “B-b-b-brother.”
Nie MingJue, “Where is your saber?”
Nie HuaiSang cowered, “In… in my room. No, in the school grounds. No, let me… think…”
Wei WuXian could feel that Nie MingJue almost wanted to hack him dead right there, “You bring a dozen fans with you wherever you go, yet you don’t even know where your own saber is?!”
Nie HuaiSang hurried, “I’ll go find it right now!”
Nie MingJue, “There’s no need! Even if you find it you won’t get anything out of it. Go burn all of these!”
All of the color drained out of Nie HuaiSang’s face. He rushed to pull all of the fans into his arms, pleading, “No, Brother! All of these were given to me!”
Nie MingJue slammed his palm onto a table, causing it to crack, “Who did? Tell them to scurry out here right now!”
Even though he nearly hits NHS, even though he actually kills many of his own men, he is simply not presented as nearly as scary.
Second, and not unrelatedly, in FJ the narrative focus of the consequence of NMJ's violence is on his own pain at his men's death, and NHS' pain at seeing him kill them. In MDZS, this is more complicated. We see, of course, his violence to JGY, and the consequences to JGY of that violence; at the stairs, for example, kicking JGY down the stairs he gives him another head wound to add to the one Madam Jin gave him. Moreover, his increasing rage actually /damages/ his relationship with NHS. We see this notably in NHS' reaction to NMJ burning his things (ch 49):
Nie HuaiSang’s eyes brimmed red. He didn’t even make a sound. Jin GuangYao added, “It’s alright even if the things are gone. Next time I can find you more…”
Nie MingJue interrupted, his words like ice, “I’ll burn them each time he brings them back into this sect.”
Anger and hatred suddenly flashed across Nie HuaiSang’s face. He threw his saber onto the ground and yelled, “Then burn them!!!”
Jin GuangYao quickly stopped him, “HuaiSang! Your brother is still angry. Don’t…”
Nie HuaiSang roared at Nie MingJue, “Saber, saber, saber! Who the fuck wants to practice the damn thing?! So what if I want to be a good-for-nothing?! Whoever that wants to can be the sect leader! I can’t learn it means I can’t learn it and I don’t like it means I don’t like it! What’s the use of forcing me?!”
He then runs off the field and locks himself in his rooms, not even letting anyone in to bring him medicine. The next we hear about NHS is in the next scene, not two months later, when LXC describes NMJ's recent troubles (ch 50): "These past few days, he has been deeply troubled by the saber spirit, and HuaiSang has argued with him again." Now, they clearly continue to love each other, and NHS is clearly devastated by NMJ's death; but in the months leading up to NMJ's death, their relationship was unusually strained, not closer than ever.
Thirdly, I think the narrative ends up distorting the way NMJ's sabre rages work. Not completely—the example where he almost punches NHS is actually a pretty good example—but consider his final violence to his men. He kills them, /not/ because in his rage he feels that killing them would be righteous punishment for whatever they have done, but because he hallucinates that they are WRH's puppets. But I don't believe we see NMJ hallucinate anything until he actually qi-deviates—at which point he hallucinates that they are /JGY/, and while in CQL at least JGY has confessed to the corrupted music before he starts hallucinating JGYs, in MDZS his anger is, again, about how JGY was talking about him to LXC. When NMJ is violent to people under the effects of the sabre curse, it is because he is angry, and in his anger that violence feels reasonable. There is not as far as I can tell anything that suggests that his sabre-affected rages feel differently from the inside than his more regular rages—nor do we ever see him apologize for the harm he does in his rages, precisely because, to him, his rage and hence his subsequent violence feel like entirely appropriate responses to the situation. I think this goes to point two, above; it would be harder to induce sympathy for NMJ if, say, he killed his men because they were challenging him, and at no point acknowledged he has been wrong to do so.
-You could probably do something interesting here with considering this movie as splitting JGY's character between NMJ (the man who makes difficult decisions due to his political position), NHS (the weak but skilled cultivator), and NZH (the loyal and extremely competent subordinate), even as it ignores the much greater difficulty of JGY's position, that his weakness is because he lacked NHS' opportunities and his skill obtained despite lacking them, that unlike FJ NMJ he actually does need to make those difficult decisions to achieve his goals and does indeed achieve them, etc. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
-I greatly resent the clear and extensive visual parallels between NHS' bow to JGY, at the end of the film, and MY's bow to JGS after JGS kicks him down the Jinlintai stairs, and the way the similarity is taken as indicating parallels beyond the visual. This is, first, because their positions are not at all the same. I am certainly not saying NHS' position was in any way comfortable or good; nevertheless, he is at that moment a clan leader who is surrounded by men who, from the film, would not hesitate to die at his command. There is not really anything about the presentation of the Nie men in FJ that suggests that if NHS went outside that room with JGY and announced to them that JGY had killed NMJ and they should attack him now, his men would do anything other than try to kill JGY immediately at his command. This was, needless to say, very much not the position of the young teenager MY, far from home, injured, humiliated, and made a public joke; perhaps more subtle is that NHS' position at NMJ's death, though he is politically weak and though he has just suffered a devastating loss, is still more secure than /JGY's/ at the same, as JGY—far from being a clan leader with the absolute obedience of his men—is not even JGS' acknowledged heir. Indeed, in many ways the focus of NHS' enmity on /JGY/, rather than JGS who commands him, is an extension of NMJ's focus on JGY rather than JGS when it comes to achieving XY's execution, and in both cases extremely advantageous to JGS. Certainly NMJ would not have been able to get away with harassing Zixuan as he does JGY on the matter of XY; likewise, JGS would never have risked Zixuan in an attempt to kill NMJ as he does JGY. The advantage of JGY as assassin is that if he kills NMJ, JGS wins; if NMJ kills him, JGS also wins (an incalculable political advantage); and if he is caught, his background makes him both easily severable and an ideal scapegoat. Also returning to framing of the bow—and while this is much more trivial it is a recurring petty imitation—I have seen matched gifsets suggesting that JGY was also swearing revenge on JGS at this moment.
-The last words JGY says to NHS are "Restrain your grief;" in English of course this comes across as extremely insensitive, but see drwcn's post for some cultural context; it's actually a common expression of condolences.
-I believe this is whence the idea that MY's headpiece in CQL used to be NHS', because we see kid NHS wearing it in the flashbacks; let us say, if you don't feel the need to accept FJ as canon, I don't think you need to accept that, either.
Previous
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star-anise · 4 years
Link
And then there's people who treasure getting to "punch" others because they've been "punched", and they feel - maybe deep down, in an inchoate, unexamined way – that fairness dictates that there be someone they get to "punch" in turn. The people who "punched" them used the rhetoric of fairness, or justice, or being wronged, to justify abusing them, so they feel when they're wronged they should get to "punch". Sunshine, that is not how this works. Nobody is entitled to have victims on demand. That is not what "punching" is for. Even if we allow the "punching up vs punching down" standard, it does not mean that because you had a bad day at work or a fight with your spouse that you are entitled to find someone of more status than you to use as a punching bag for the sake of soothing your emotional disregulation. People are not things to be used, and most specially not things to be used as drugs for self-medicating bad moods. So when, then, does one get to "punch"? If "punching up vs punching down" is not adequate, what's the alternative? I have some thoughts of my own, but at this point I think it would be less useful to say. I think it would do us all a world of good to actually stop and think about the question. And by "think about the question", I mean stop rushing forward with what well may be specious post-hoc moral justifications for doing what one wanted to do despite the klaxons of one's conscience, and sit with the question and engage in some moral reasoning.
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Text
Crossover (5) Masterlist
Links Last Checked: May 11th, 2022
part one, part two, part three, part four
Disney
Something That I Want (ao3) - frickinggzazzed
Summary: Phil meets a cute boy under unconventional circumstances. Perhaps fairytales aren't complete rubbish after all.
Harry Potter
Bahamas And Butterbeer (ao3) - fourthingsandawizard
Summary: Tired of hiding his magic from his Muggle viewers at Playlist Live, Dan decides to take a spontaneous trip and tweet about it, much to Phil's exasperation.
Secret Admirer - helloanonymouswriter
Summary: Dan’s in Slytherin. Phil’s in Ravenclaw. Dan fancies Phil.
You Light Me Up - icequeenjules26
Summary: From their 17th birthday on, wizards could try performing a spell to find their soulmate via marks on their arm. Phil was anxiously waiting for the day to perform it, but he never really expected it to fail…
Love, Simon
Be My Muse (ao3) - t_hens
Summary: Love, Simon AU
Blue's Clues (ao3) - illbealonedancing
Summary: Phil had tried to keep his coming out as un-lifechanging as possible. But when, at the end of the day, he finds a note in his locker with an email address written on it, his life changes in the best way possible.
A Dan and Phil Love, Simon!AU.
Homo Howell vs The Heterosexual Agenda (ao3) - CanDanAndPhilNot (enbycalhoun)
Summary: Dan had a normal life. At least that’s what he would have said two weeks ago. Before he found that creek-secrets Tumblr post about the closeted gay kid at school. Before he made a secret email account so he could respond with a simple “THIS.”Before his daily routine was staring at his phone and computer anticipating the next email from Fish. Before Matthew, the seemingly innocent nerdy theater kid found and screenshotted said emails. Before said nerdy kid was blackmailing him. Yeah, Dan had a normal life. And if by normal, you meant dealing with all of that on top of trying to hook Matthew up with one of Dan’s best friends so he wouldn’t tell the entire school about Dan’s sexuality? Sure, Dan’s life was fucking normal.
aka a Love, Simon AU that’s based on both the book and movie.
Sherlock
In A Changing Age (ao3) - jestbee
Summary: Phil is breathless and happy by the time they are back in the hallway of Baker Street, and as they lean against the wall, their heads beside each other, Phil thinks that he might have kissed him then.
Random Movies
Bruised And Scarred (ao3) - flymetomanchester
Summary: Phil wasn't expecting Darry to hit him. He wasn't expecting the Socs to show up either.
Famous Last Words - sudden-sky
Summary: it chapter 2 au:
the menacing clown from dan, phil, and the rest of the loser’s childhood comes back and it’s up to them to stop it.
Life Finds A Way - dxnhowell
Summary: Dan and Phil in the Jurassic Park world! With a genderswap twist. Daisy and Penelope are sent to Isla Nublar to check out the upcoming Jurassic World amusement park. Daisy wanted a nice trip, wanted to see some dinosaurs, and hang out with co-workers. Nothing more, and nothing less. Unfortunately, a dinosaur breaks out of containment and all hell breaks loose.
Skin and Scales (ao3) - iihappydaysii
Summary: Phil is the velociraptor handler at Jurassic World and he has a very special connection with the park’s male raptor, Dan.
You Forced My Hand - xinyanhowell
Summary: Dan and Phil are Jedi apprentices at the Academy. Things get… interesting when a training duel gets out of hand…
TV Shows
Do You Know How in Love With You I Am (Please Notice) (ao3) - phantasticworks
Summary: Based on a Phan!The Office AU drawing by @laurainlilac on tumblr
Dan works at a small paper company, but the brightside to this boring career is that his best friend Phil is just a few feet away at reception. The downside to this is that he’s hopelessly, irrevocably in love with said best friend. Oh, and Phil is engaged, too.
A short little story about best friends, being in love, and pining hopelessly after the boy you think you can’t have. But, don’t worry, there’s a happy ending in here somewhere.
I Could Fill My Diamond Pool (ao3) - marina_rocher
Summary: “So you died, but Phil hasn’t. Not yet. He’ll be here, eventually. Well, he could also get to the, you know,” she nods to the ground, and Dan’s head starts spinning even faster.
(Dan dies and goes to the Good Place. Phil will join him soon. In a few decades. This is not as angsty as you might expect.)
Shining Bright and Growing Strong (ao3) - QueenOfAllCorgis
Summary: Game of Thrones Crossover. Phil was not pleased that his father had basically bought him a husband in exchange for an army. He was equally displeased that his new husband was scared to death of him.
Something About A Savior - dxnhowell
Summary: Dan has been living at The Hilltop ever since the “world ended”, and has been working as the doctor. Unfortunately for him, things change when The Saviors drop by for a visit. But, will it really be such a bad thing for him?
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bluewatsons · 4 years
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Liesbet Van Zoonen, From identity to identification: fixating the fragmented self, 34 Med Cult & Soc 44 (2013)
Cultural and social theories of identity have in common that they assume both individual and collective identities to be multiple rather than single, to be dynamic rather than static, and to be volatile rather than consistent. In addition, they propose that identity is something that we do, rather than something that we are. Most research in this area has been informed by these axioms, and as a result we know quite a bit about how different groups and individuals, in varying contexts, use different cultural means to perform their identities, both for themselves and for others. Recent innovations in these theories, particularly those coming from queer studies and addressing the notion of intersectionality, have further intensified the understanding of identity as a relatively flexible outcome of specific social and cultural acts. All of this work has been articulated with a wider acknowledgement of ‘diversity’ as a desirable goal for social and cultural policy, not only to improve the quality of public services like education, broadcasting or health care, but also as a necessary element of commercial innovation and organisational value.
While most identity theories have acknowledged the structural and discursive constraints that enclose diversity, there has been less attention for recent forces that actively work against multiplicity and towards the fixation of single identities. The current volume is meant to bring these forces out in the open, and make them part of our theories and research about identity.i I will first present three widely different examples to clarify tendencies towards such univocality. Then I will show how these cases are part of a new ‘field’ of identity management, which is usually understood as emerging from post 9/11 challenges, and from the growing economic weight of online transactions. However, identity management as it is currently evolving, guided, in first instance, by clear state and corporate interests, also needs to be seen as inevitably producing cultural tensions and conflicts around identity.
Three examples
In 1993 The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner showing two friendly dogs in front of a computer, with the one saying to the other: ‘On the internet nobody knows you are a dog’. The cartoon captured the then current hopes about the internet as a space where the confines of individual and social identities could be left behind, and where new and creative modes of anonymous interaction would transgress off-line gender, ethnic and other divisions between people. Such sentiment was also expressed by serious academics, like Sherry Turkle of the MIT. Her book Life on the Screen (1995) offered an in-depth analysis of how (then still textual) online experiences enabled people to experiment and play with identities, and helped them ‘to develop models of psychological well-being that are in a meaningful sense postmodern: they admit multiplicity and flexibility’ (p.263). Nowadays, however, the anonymity of the internet and the construction of online personas that do not reflect offline identities have been reconstructed as ‘risk factors’ of internet use (cf. Van Zoonen, 2011). Governments, schools, parents and other concerned parties now standardly warn against online imposters, bullying and identity theft, and social network sites like Facebook or Google+ have policies requiring users to register with their real names and data, and prevent them from having more than one account. A version of The New Yorker cartoon that covers the 2013 situation, could still have the same caption, but would likely show more dangerous, even deadly dogs, evoking the meaning of ‘dog’ as the bad guy.
It is not only in the context of internet use that once celebrated discourses of multiplicity have been annihilated by constructions of duplicity. In the post 9/11 mindset that pervades Europe and the United States , the multiple identities of migrants, and of Muslims in particular have been reconstructed as possibly suspect. In the US this has taken the form of a revival of American patriotism, in Europe it has expressed itself in the proclamation of the death of multiculturalism. Governments across Europe are now exerting considerable pressure on their old and new citizens to identify more clearly with their ‘own’ nation’s history and values. The French, for instance, launched a controversial national debate in 2009 asking ‘what does it mean to be French’ resulting often in discussions about the possible ‘Frenchness’ of Muslims, and in proposals to fly the flag in French schools and to stage official rituals for the acknowledgement of French citizens. An Italian parliamentary committee proposed in early 2012 to make the national anthem compulsory in primary schools, therewith upsetting both the separatist North- and South Italians and the German- speaking inhabitants of Trentino. The previous Dutch government has proposed legislation that enforces singular Dutch citizenship: migrants to the Netherlands will no longer be allowed to keep the passport of their country of origin, Dutch expats requesting foreign citizenship will lose their Dutch passport.
Another example, this one of a more ‘popular’ (as in ‘by the people’) desire to fixate identities, can be found in the many genres of reality television. Audience research about the ‘mother’ of all reality TV, Big Brother, has shown that a key appeal of the program was to discuss whether candidates were ‘themselves’ or ‘fake’. In addition, BB-candidates across the globe would talk among each other about how they felt they could or could not ‘be themselves’ in the house (cf. Van Zoonen and Aslama, 2006), therewith assuming the existence of one real self that is rather than a constructed multiple self that does, as identity theory would say. The notion of such a real self that needs to be found and shown, is exaggerated, paradoxically, in make-over reality programs. In these programs, participants and their hosts invariably engage in conversations about doing the make-over for oneself and not for others, or as Heyes (2007: 21) says about the standard narrative in cosmetic surgery reality: ‘An authentic personality of great moral beauty must be brought out of the body that fails adequately to reflect it. Thus, in this context, cosmetic surgery is less about becoming beautiful, and more about becoming oneself’ (italics added-LvZ). The appearance of ‘authenticity’ as a key asset and value in contemporary western societies has been noted in other fields as well, for instance in tourism, commerce, politics and celebrity culture. A critical perspective on authenticity will include that it is an ascribed rather than an innate or essential quality. Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder and as the discussions among reality TV audiences testify, it is part of a negotiation and not an easily and objectively observable ‘fact’. The more important point in this context, however, is that the importance of the concept of authenticity points to a wider popular desire to identify ‘real selves’ that are true, single and consistent (see also Dubrofsky, 2007).
Univocality and control
The three examples show how commercial, governmental and cultural forces actively work against multiple and performative experiences and practices of identity. The current requirements for passport pictures may be seen as the metonymical expression of such forces. The normal everyday expressive face, with its smiles, nods, and tilts, with its glasses, colouring and covering has to be brought back to its bare features: no smiles, mouth closed, head uncovered, eyes visible, head not tilted, shoulders straight. These are all presented primarily as technical requirements to enable the officers of border control and - more importantly - facial recognition software to authenticate the person carrying the passport. Yet, the implicit cultural message of such stripped faces is unmistakable: there is one true original self that can be recognized and objectively authenticated.
Most other forms of ‘identity management’, the en vogue term for a diversity of mechanisms to authenticate individuals in specific contexts, demonstrate a similar tendency towards single and stable identities. Magnet and Rodgers (2011), for instance, have shown how the full body scans used for border and other forms of security screening are rather insensitive to bodies not conforming to standard abilities, sizes and gender. Such technologies actively construct disabled, oversized or transgender bodies as deviant and suspect. In practical terms this leads to these individuals being selected more often for further screening, in cultural terms it implies a return to a discourse of normalized dichotomous identities, female or male, able or disabled and nothing in between. To paraphrase Magnet and Rodgers (2012: 111), full body scans mercilessly turn bodies inside out in a search to discover ‘the truth’ of an individual identity. Further evidence of how identity management technologies tend to undermine the gains of understanding identities as multiple, comes from other forms of authentication. A recent documentary series by UK Channel Four, about technological advances in the House of the Future, shows how the father in the family has difficulty using the computer-controlled thumb-print door entry system, because his thumb is worn by decades of manual labour. More generally, academic research has shown that the fingerprint recognition does not perform equally for, for instance rural and urban populations (Puri et al., 2010). Likewise, various research in the US has shown how the particular state requirements of voter-ID laws negatively affect the turnout of African-Americans and other minorities (Sobel and Smith, 2009).
Many of these issues have been heavily debated within a civil liberties and privacy framework, with George Orwell’s 1984 and Bentham’s Panopticon as the regularly evoked popular and metaphoric short cuts to the risks and problems of identity management. In these discussions, the classic concern is with governments violating their citizens’ privacy and human rights, through surveillance , registration or data base linking. However, as Lyon (2007) has covered extensively, the everyday life worlds of, among others, work, consumption, leisure and health are also pervaded by surveillance technologies and the infringement of privacy. As a result, the civil liberties agenda has expanded to these sectors but also to the increasing relations between these spheres of surveillance and the threats of ‘federated identity management’, i.e. the interlinkage of databases and authentication procedures across and within domains. Google’s recent change in privacy policy is a case in point: under the new regime Google says it will collect information from all its services (a.o. Gmail, YouTube, Google+) into a single account profile, in order ‘to provide better services to all of our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful or the people who matter most to you online’. Among the many people and groups raising privacy concerns, were – paradoxically – some 40 US state Attorneys General, representatives of a government that itself is regularly accused of breaching privacy and civil liberties.
Social sorting and consumption
Yet, while privacy and civil liberties issues dominate these controversies, there are authors who claim that such discourse offers a limited understanding of the risks of identity management. Lyon (2007: 115), for instance, argues that ‘the kinds of issues that are raised by urban data profiling, CRM [customer relationship management – LvZ] and security operations go far beyond the narrow confines of ‘privacy’ and ‘data protection’.’ He analyses in detail how various technologies and processes of identity management place people in social categories that are decisive for their everyday choices and opportunities: self-evident is the categorization of certain young men as likely offenders, but customer profiling may lead to price and perk advantages and disadvantages for specific customers, geographical profiling is of direct relevance to the maintenance or abolition of local stores and services, and health screening unevenly affects access to health services . Lyon concludes, therefore, that social sorting is as big a risk of identity management as the breach of privacy and the erosion of civil liberties is. It is in this context, in particular, that identity management also undermines the understanding of identity as multiple, not only because it puts people in certain fixed categories, but also because, of necessity, it needs to identify people as belonging either in one, or in the other category, but definitely not in more than one. It is telling that Google under its new privacy regime not only requests the usage of real names for registration but also allows itself to ‘replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services’.ii
The Google case is only the most brutal expression of a wider movement towards customer experience marketing (CEM). In a converged online/offline commercial environment such a process entails the ability to engage with a customer across a plethora of channels and ‘touch points’, and thus requires a continuous tracking of a uniquely defined consuming entity. If successful, this does deliver all kinds of consumer pleasures: Amazon is usually mentioned as the company that has indeed managed to offer its customers an enhanced positive experience because of its continuous registration of personal data and preferences.
On the other hand, there are many examples of the rapidly increasing cross-channel advertising going wrong. Avid Facebook users are continuously baffled by the bespoke advertising showing up in the sponsored frame of their profile page, leading mostly to one of two reactions: ‘how do they know I like this’ versus ‘why do they think I like this’? Both, however, cause consumer irritation and – predictably – Facebook users themselves have developed apps to remove such ads. Regardless of the success or failure of CEM procedures, and regardless of the fact that they become ever more detailed and reflective of our personal buying histories and preferences, as customers we are put into the all pervasive, but univocal identity of ‘consumer’. Our multiplicity is recognized only as far as we have bought products or services expressing it.
Counterforces
The field of identity management then, as it is currently emerging, is pervaded by structural tendencies towards control and single identities. However, as a ‘field’ in the sense that Bourdieu developed, as a set of social positions and actors sharing specific actions and activities, tensions and contradictions are inherent and inevitable. Bourdieu’s field theory connects, in that sense, to Giddens’ proposition about a ‘dialectic of control’, whereby all rules and regulations produce their own opposition. Control and univocality as dominant features of identity management thus will construct their own political and cultural resistance, as was already clear in the anti-ad Facebook apps mentioned above. Privacy and civil liberties activists have successfully built a political agenda and achieved considerable success, for instance, with the abolition of a UK identity card scheme and the rejection of a Dutch national electronic patient data, but also with mobilizing a support base that makes them a respected stakeholder for national and pan-national governmental consultations.
Such activism against the control dimension of identity management also has cultural counterparts. Urban surveillance systems across the world, for instance, have witnessed artists performing in front of their CCTV cameras, and facial recognition systems have been countered with makeup and hairstyles that prevent facial detection. The award winning design project CV Dazzle, in particular, was set up out of concern about surveillance and privacy, and a desire ‘to show how we could adapt to occularcentric, surveillance-societies without retreating into anonymity, and, in doing so, celebrate style and augment privacy.iii
There has been much less visible discussion of and opposition to the single identity that is assumed in most current technologies and practices of identity management. This may be because univocality is considered less of a problem in a cultural climate that prioritizes ‘authenticity’ and is obsessed with being oneself, which – indeed – assumes one instead of multiple selves. Apart from the cosmetic surgery make-over television programs mentioned earlier, there are many other popular trends that further suggest a hegemony of a single identity. The search for the inner self , for instance, has created an industry of spirituality that produces a wide variety of commodities and services to help this still growing group of seekers. Political, social and corporate elites are nowadays judged as much on their authenticity as on their competence: ‘authentic leadership’ is the latest buzzword in a host of management manuals, in which it is proclaimed that ‘knowing your authentic self’ is a prerequisite to good leadership. Parenting guides are full of good advice to parents to ‘be true to themselves’, but also to allow their children to be themselves. In the (popular) arts and culture domains, ‘authenticity’ is a key concept to mark artists that have remained ‘true to themselves’ or ‘sincere’ as opposed to those who have sold out to commercial interests and have become dupes of the culture industry. In his diverse writings about authenticity, the Italian philosopher Ferrara (1998) has analysed extensively how contemporary obsessions with authenticity are a response to the postmodern fragmentation of identities. While he suggests that philosophically it is entirely possible to articulate authenticity with fluid and multiple identities, he also acknowledges that the more popular deployment of the concept presupposes an essentialist understanding of the self as unified and stable.
In such a cultural climate, it may be unlikely that there will be strong forces opposing the construction of a single identity that is typical for the emerging technologies and practices of identity management. Yet, as Lyon (2007: 177) argues, ‘when there is pressure towards finding single unique identifiers (...), the existence of multiple identities (...) is a constant challenge to the would-be hegemonic system’. Indeed, there are some occurrences of such opposition, most notably the successful mobilization of support for a change in the Australian passport. Since 2011 Australian citizens can chose male, female or X as their gender on their passport ,with X the option for intersex people, and allowing transgender people to identify as male or female. The changes came about as a result of pressure from an Australian group advocating gender and human rights, claiming that the dichotomous male/female registration discriminates against transgender and intersex people.iv While the acknowledgement by the Australian government of a third sex seems a relatively straightforward change of policy, on a cultural level it also fundamentally undermines dichotomous gender discourse and works, therewith, in close alliance with the project of feminists and other progressive forces to undermine stable notions of gender and other essentialist categories (notwithstanding the inevitable follow-up question of why having to register gender on a passport at all).
The Australian case shows that - like privacy -, univocality needs to be recognized and constructed as a risk in current regimes of identity management, in order to develop more desirable alternatives. Such a recognition forms the main legitimation for the particular angle of this special issue of Media, Culture and Society. The articles invited all critically address the tendency towards univocality in different systems and contexts of identity management. Aaron Martin and Edgar Whitley deconstruct the popular belief that biometric technologies enable the unique identification and authentication of individuals. Miriam Lips looks at current e-government policies fixate identities in ways that are contradictory to traditional notions of citizenship. Moving the discussion to the body as a location of identity and identity management, both Shoshana Magnet and Katina Michael and MG Michael explore whether and how medical technologies function as quartermasters, as it were, for future rigid developments in identity management.
With this collection of articles we feel we have contributed to constructing the single identity assumed in identity management as a social and cultural problem that needs to be solved. A further necessary step would be to search and select cases in which the multiplicity of identity is not only allowed at a discursive level, but also flexibly managed through technological institutional practices. The new Australian passport is one rare example thereof, and a further identification of other such ‘good practices’ would certainly help to break up the automatic univocality in current identity management. At present, the most likely sector where proposals and prototypes of such good practice will be found, is in the triangle of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The similarly called TED global network and the European PICNIC platform both offer talks, conferences, events and performances about innovations that are typified by user-centeredness, collaboration and openness. In fact, both bring together a wider movement of creative experimentation in which identity management issues also occur. At the PICNIC 2011 festival, for instance, UK hacktivist and artist Heath Bunting presented his ‘identity bureau’ in which he develops procedures for people to construct a new legal identity based on legal documents, that can be passed on to someone else after it is no longer of use.v To illustrate with a not so arbitrary example: an academic commuting from Amsterdam to Loughborough to teach and do research would not have to go through the almost insurmountable hassle of acquiring a national insurance number, tax code, health care, pension rights and a bank account for non-residents, but could simply buy the identity that allows for all of that off the shelf of an identity bureau. Needless to say that Buntings ‘expert system for identity mutation’vi could make him the object of UK and US governmental scrutiny because of the potential criminal and terrorist abuse they envision if Bunting’s multiple identities would catch on. Such a security reflex, while understandable, prevents a more extensive exploration of safe and trustworthy multiple identity management systems that would satisfy the practical quandaries of some people’s everyday lives, but – more importantly – acknowledge the cultural diversity and multiplicity that typify us.
References
Ferrara A. (1998) Reflective authenticity: rethinking the project of modernity. London: Routledge.
Heyes CJ (2007) Cosmetic Surgery And The Televisual Makeover. Feminist Media Studies, 7(1): 17-31.
Lyon D (2007) Surveillance studies: an overview. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Magnet S and Rodgers T (2012) Stripping for the State. Whole body imaging technologies and the surveillance of othered bodies. Feminist Media Studies, 12(1): 101-118.
Puri C, Narang K, Tiwari, A, Vatsa, M and Singh, R (2010) On Analysis of Rural and Urban Indian Fingerprint Images. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6005: 55-61.
Dubrofsky RE (2007) 'Therapeutics of the Self’: Surveillance in the Service of the Therapeutic. Television and New Media, 8(4): 263-284.
Sobel R and Smith J (2009). Voter-ID Laws Discourage Participation, Particularly among Minorities, and Trigger a Constitutional Remedy in Lost Representation. PS: Political Science & Politics, 42(1): 107-110.
Turkle S (1995). Life on the screen. Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Van Zoonen L (2011) The rise and fall of online feminism. In: Christensen M, Jansson A, and Christensen C (eds) Online territories: Globilization, Mediated Practice and Social Space. Peter Lang Publishers, 132-147.
Van Zoonen L and Aslama, M (2006). Understanding Big Brother: an analysis of current research. Javnost/The Public, 13(2): 85-96.
Footnotes
i This introducing article is part of a EPSRC ‘large’ grant on Identity Management, led by the author: IMPRINTS, EP/J005037/1.
ii http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/, Last accessed March 15, 2012
iii http://www.core77.com/blog/core77_design_awards/core77_design_award_2011_cv_dazzle_student_winner_for_speculative_objectsconcepts_20115.asp, last accessed August 28, 2012.
iv https://www.passports.gov.au/web/sexgenderapplicants.aspx
v http://www.picnicnetwork.org/heath-bunting-1, last accessed March 14, 2012.
vi http://irational.org/cgi-bin/cv2/temp.pl, last accessed March 16, 2012.
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queer discourse done actually okay
I saw a cool interaction on Oxfess - a public fb page for anonymously complaining/ “confessing” oxford students and residents. I thought i’d share this cos i thought it was a really well thought-through post.
First Person: I’m gay, but I haven’t ever done anything to do with LGBTQ soc because they seem to use the word qu**r for everything and it makes me have flashbacks of my homophobic father :)))))
Second Person: I really get you, but also, it's really unreasonable to expect our community to stop using our own language?
I used to be EXTREMELY sensitive to the words 'gay' and 'lesbian' for the exact same reason - they reminded me of my abusive father, and of my horrible upbringing. It made engaging in our community really fucking hard because those words were absolutely everywhere! I was so mad for a while - I didnt get why people couldn't just call themselves something else? Why did it have to be a "gay club" or an "LGBT society"?
But then I got my head on straight and realised that I couldn't expect people to stop using that language. Yes, they're words which have been used in horrible ways by horrible people for decades, and really wounded me personally, but they are also our community's rallying point, identity descriptors, and so forth.
My friends and, eventually, girlfriend, are still cautious about what language they use around me - we call ourselves WLW rather than a 'lesbian couple' between each other. Just like I would keep my house nut-free if my girlfriend had a nut allergy. But I don't expect the community to avoid those words, that's not fair.
Trauma therapy helped me to get past my association of my father with such words, as did engaging in the community itself actually. I know it's such a typical narrative, but creating a found family of people like me really did help me to be less triggered by such words. I still find them hard, but there's essentially a massive content warning right there - a space in our community will/will likely contain these words, and I can prepare myself, self soothe where necessary, apply coping mechanisms, and choose to remove myself if the words are bothering me too much.
I hope that you can engage with Soc, because I've found the community in Oxford to be wonderful overall, but I also hope that you, and anyone who is angry about our community's language, reads this and thinks long and hard about it. (Emphasis added)
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ibuproffie · 5 years
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things my brother has said while reading crooked kingdom by leigh bardugo
the book “white hot anger shot thru kaz” or sum ~ my brother “hERP DERP WHiTE ANGER for an ANGRY WHITE BOI”
when jesper tells wylan “but it’s not all that i want” and gets interrupted by kaz before he can finish the steamy moment ~ “kaz brekker, master cockblock”
while kaz works thru his inej feels: “look, he’s even cockblocking himself here!”
every kaz @ jesper shithead moment: “stop! in the name of love!” or “get over it you emo fuck”
when jesper comforts wylan after he’s freaking out about his mom: [slowly and with a lot of deliberation] i…like jesper. is that so wrong? me: no?? him: i feel gross just saying that
“good god nina, keep it in your pants!”
[in reedy dwarf voice] “it’s my aesTHETic to watch ppl get bREKKed.”
[about inej] “who has two thumbs and was sold into sex slavery?? THIS GUY!!”
[about soc matthias] “nina WHO? ain’t no time for tolerance when you’re on that GRIND! we STAY grisha hunting-DJEL first, team second”
pekka rollins @ kaz: you’re like me but with less style; my brother: you’re literally wearing green pants shut the fuck up
my brother: you know who pekka rollins reminds me of? me: who? my brother: that one song from leprechaun in the hood (if you’ve never heard of this, this is the sole reason i am afraid of white people) 
we have a running joke about that one time that kaz and wylan quite literally crashed jan van eck’s dinner party (i.e. falling through the ceiling and landing on the dinner table) and kaz got gravy on his coat. every subsequent chapter he’s like “bUT DID HE CHANGE HIS GRAVY COAT THO?” and it turns out kaz never did change his coat until he returned to the slat to fight per haskell, so yeah those really emotionally charged chapters w jesper and inej he was wandering around like a fuckin dumbass w gravy on his coat (and that’s how ck was ruined for me a smol bit) 
the book: “inej was wrong. he knew exactly what he intended to leave behind.” my gremlin lookin brother: CUM.
 “just imagine…you’re drunk and playing the same three-note song on a tin whistle, out w the Lads and you see this scary ass boi hacking away at ppl w a cane-by what logic do you decide to ENGAGE HIM IN SINGLE COMBAT?! someone needs to come get their mans” [he has a point] 
after the disastrous kuwei x jesper kiss: “alright, so apparently we’re getting kuwei yul-bo is a loser, coming 2019. [shakes his head in grudging admiration for kuwei’s shenanigans] greasy catfish looking ass.”
[jn the tone of maddie from f the prom]: “kaz, you riled?”
[jesper fakes food poisoning to avoid the cops] “poop jokes?! when will your fave ever? also sten’s stockpot sounds like the place you would listen to the sex offender shuffle on your ipod nano correct me if i’m wrong”
[wylan scams the merchant council into making them think he’s literate] “oh, it’s about to get ALL cam jansen in this bitch!!”
[describing kaz] “he’s a lot like panic at the disco, but more panic and less disco.”
read my six of crows post here:
https://ariistides.tumblr.com/post/180925066709/things-my-brother-has-said-while-reading-six-of
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