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lauraroselam · 10 months

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So I wrote this weird book about queer dragons. It came out the same day as the other dragon book everyone talks about. It was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, though, which was incredible!

However, I'm not sure how to continue to promote this book--people either seem to really like it, or not quite get it. Or it just wasn't what they expected. Which is fine, no book can please everyone, and I knew I'd made some unusual craft choices that was going to make it more marmite. (Or, as my brain tells me at midnight, I'm just a bad writer). However, there's that librarian saying "every book its reader" and the people who love this book REALLY love it, and that makes me so happy. So I decided to write this post and explain its weirdness and lay out what you can expect if you do pick it up. Maybe you're my kind of odd, too. :-)

Short pitch: 800 years ago, dragons and humans were bonded, then humans were dicks, stole the dragons' magic, and banished them to a dying world. But humans have short memories, forgot, and now worship dragons as gods. The dragon "gods" remember, and they do not forgive.

Thief Arcady steals their grandsire's stone seal (which helps them funnel magic) from their tomb. Their grandsire supposedly released a magical plague that killed a proportion of society, and Arcady is locked out of society as a result. They perform a spell to rewrite the seal to have a new identity as they want to go to university at the Citadel and also clear their family's name. Problem? The spell also accidentally calls through Everen, the last male dragon, trapped in human form. Everen has been foretold to save his kind, and now he has a chance: he just has to convince one little human to trust him mind, body, and soul, and then kill them. Then he'll be able to steal the human's magic back, rip a hole in the Veil, and the dragons can return. Good news for dragons, less good news for humans. As you might expect: this does not go to plan. Because emotions.

Grab it now. (Note: there's still a contractual delay so it's not available in US audiobook yet, annoyingly. Hopefully soon). (If you are like "weird queer dragons?! Sign me up" but aren't interested in hearing why the author has made certain decisions and want to go into the text cold, stop here! Death of the author/birth of the reader, etc. Otherwise, carry on.)

You should pick up Dragonfall if:

You like experimental narrative positions! It's all collected by an unnamed archivist who has access to both first person narratives (Arcady, the genderfluid human thief, Everen the hot dragon) and can scry into the past and draw out third person narratives (Sorin, hot priest assassin. Cassia, Everen's sister, who is also hot. Spoiler: everyone in this book is hot). Then to make it even weirder, Everen's bits are technically in first person direct address, so he's writing it all to Arcady (the first chapter ends with: "For that human was, of course, you. And this is our story, Arcady.") I ended up writing it this way for a few reasons, even though it probably would have been simpler to just stick to straight up third throughout, like most epic fantasy does. The big one is that Arcady is genderfluid and uses any pronouns (I tend to default to they when I talk about them outside of the text), and constantly gendering them in the text felt wrong whether I used he, she, or they. This way bypasses that a lot in the first volume, so it's up to the reader to make up their own mind. I also just really love first person direct address as a narrative position. It can be a little confronting, and it makes Everen the dragon sound a bit more predatory at the start. But it's also quite intimate. Is he writing his sections as an apology, or a love letter? Both? You find out at the end. So if your green flag books are: The Fifth Season, The Raven Tower, or Harrow the Ninth, this might also be your jam.

You love classic 90s fantasy. This is in many ways an homage to all the stuff I read growing up: Robin Hobb and the Realm of the Elderlings (the book is dedicated to Hobb in particular), the Dragonriders of Pern, Tad Williams, Lynn Flewelling, Robert Jordan, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, etc. But I wanted to give it a more modern twist. I'm NB and growing up I didn't see a lot of queerness in fantasy, and I clung to the examples I did find (Vanyel, the Fool). Also, not 90s fantasy, but I also freaking loved Seraphina by Rachel Hartman and Priory of the Orange Tree, so those were influences too.

You're not put off by Worldbuilding(TM) and a slower pace. Probably because I grew up on the likes of Tad Williams, I honestly love slow-paced fantasy. I love to luxuriate in a world and take my time getting to know a made up world. In Assassin's Quest it takes over 100 pages for Fitz to leave the forest. Love it. I have a more lyrical writing style, I guess, and I'm pretty descriptive. My stuff always tends to start off slower, set the stage, and then ramps up the pace as we get further along. So yes, my book starts out with some infodumping, depending on your tolerance level of that sort of thing. I worked with a linguist and they made a conlang for the dragon language (hi @seumasofur). There's a map by Deven Rue (cartographer for Critical Role). I got nerdy.

You love queernorm fantasy! This is set in a world where it's considered rude to assume a stranger's gender and so you tend to default to they/them. If you consider someone much higher in status than you, you'd capitalise it to the honorific, such as They/Them. Once you get to know someone, you tend to flash your pronouns to them with a hand signal, since a sign language called Trade is also a lingua franca in the world. 99.95% of all the dragons are also lesbians, BTW. Everen is the last male dragon.

You like frankly silly levels of slow burn. Everen and Arcady can't physically touch without it causing Everen pain while they're half-bonded. They may or may not find creative loopholes. But it's not mega mega spicy, if you're expecting that. I expect the spice levels will gradually go up as the series progresses.

Alright, I think that's more than enough to give you a sense of what you'd find in Dragonfall. If you're open to sharing this post so it reaches more people outside of my little corner of the internet, I'd really appreciate it. Whenever I do any bit of self-promo, I'm always so anxious and worry it'll get like, 2 eyeballs on it anyway or that I'm just annoying people by mentioning that my art even exists. And if you end up liking it, please tell a friend.

I'm loving the recent dragon renaissance! Long live dragons.

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paranoid-borderline-insane · 9 months

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SO @tulipsbymybed and I have been going back and forth with head canons for one Capt John Price and we’ve created this one that’s maybe a little OOC, but its lovely nonetheless

One of our prevailing head canons is that you, as the reader, and John take in Simon (Ghost) after an injury because John doesn’t want Simon’s mental health to spiral, laying in a hospital bed, but the injury is severe enough he can’t be on his own. From then Simon starts becoming a mainstay in your home, becoming a bit of an adopted son to you two, staying with you guys more often than not when he’s not deployed because his ptsd is better in your home environment.

Also based on Tulip and I both having cats, John and you also have cats, I believe we’ve decided on them having 4.

But the newest head canon I started was making John a tiktok for him to teach people how to woodwork, particularly how to build furniture and fix stuff around the house, because another head canon we have is that he builds, like, everything he can in your home. Most famously the many bookcases you need to hold all of your books. He’s particularly well loved women wanting to get into woodworking but have no one to teach them, always open to answering comments to help people learn.

Another reason he’s well loved is because he makes it very clear that he’s head over heels for his wife (you!) and will do anything and everything for you, commenting as he builds that he’s making something because you need it, or adding decorative features that you like.

Since one person commented that they wished John was their dad, and he responded by saying that he’d officially just adopted them, he’s become his little community’s dad. You occasionally feature in videos, usually with John’s prompting or because you commented in the background, but you’re in charge of editing and posting.

Any thirsty comments he receives, and he receives a good handful of them every video, are either ignored, or the particularly bad ones get blocked. This is a place of family and teaching! He’s not doing it to be ogled, especially when he makes it very clear that he’s a very happily married man.

Knows a lot of his audience are queer people with different identities, and tries to always be considerate of that and will go out of his way to make it clear that they’re accepted and welcomed

LITERALLY ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY one day, after it being requested, to celebrate 100K followers or something, you edit together a ‘day in the life’ with John narrating over the finished footage and Tulip wrote an amazing 1k+ words of it 😩

#john price #john price x reader

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nav-ix · 2 years

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Queerness and Hierarchies of Power in The Locked Tomb

I wrote this essay for my sci-fi class and a few people expressed interest in reading it, so I’m posting it! Bear in mind the initial audience I wrote it for isn’t familiar with the series (I cut out some of the straight-up summarizing because if you’re here I’m assuming you’ve read the books, but if the tone seems weird or like its explaining things that are obvious, that’s why). I do use the term “queer” throughout the essay as an umbrella term for LGBTQ experiences, as well as to refer more broadly to non-normative interactions with gender/ gender-like hierarchies. Also, this has spoilers for Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth AND for the first chapter of Nona the Ninth, so watch out for that. Essay below the cut :)

Though there has been an increase in LGBTQ representation in popular sci-fi and fantasy, representation that ends at same-sex attraction fails to actually explore queerness as an experience or identity, or, most importantly, as a lens through which to see the world. Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series, however, is impossible to read without exploring that lens, and as such it is able to explore queerness on more than one level. I intend to analyze those explorations through the lens of queer theory and apply that analysis to how we imagine normative power hierarchies as a whole.

The queerness of the series is overt and unmistakable by the beginning of the first book. The protagonist, Gideon, is a butch lesbian. This is a characterization that makes this series distinct from many others of the genre; LGBTQ representation often takes the form of attraction and relationships between characters of the same gender, but does little to explore other nuances of queer identity and experience. From the beginning of Gideon the Ninth, however, Gideon’s queerness is clear by her personality alone, outside of any relationship. She is gender-nonconforming both as a woman and as a cavalier; she is muscular, her narration is blunt and often crass, she resents the elaborate sacramental face paint that she is required to wear, and her attraction to women is shameless and unmistakable. Swordsmanship is what she excels at, but rather than the delicate rapiers that cavaliers traditionally use, she prefers to fight with a huge two-handed sword. Even outside of Gideon, there is an overt queerness to the setting and many of its characters. Of the first book’s ten central female characters, at least six are attracted to other women in some capacity. Not only this, but their attraction to one another is framed as normal and assumed; there is no circumstance where anyone needs to come out.

In this setting, traditional and patriarchal gender roles take less precedence in the power dynamics between the characters. But that does not mean that other parallel or allegorical hierarchies are absent. Though the series has checked more than enough boxes for queer representation, it continues to explore queerness by a broader definition, by establishing new normative hierarchies of gender and power and exploring the ways in which they are subverted. In the absence of traditional patriarchal heterosexuality, the characters in the book exist within the dynamic of necromancer and cavalier. Initially, we will explore how Gideon and her necromancer exist within this dynamic, and the degree to which her treatment of the dynamic is non-normative.

Gideon was not trained as a cavalier, but when there is no one else to fill the role, she has to hastily learn those traditions and behaviors. Already, she is in the position that many queer people find themselves in—she must learn to successfully imitate conformity to a role she doesn’t identify with. In order to do this, she must learn to fight with the delicate rapier, as opposed to her heavy, military-grade two-hander. She has to learn to apply daily the sacramental face paint of the Ninth House, which it is made clear that she hates wearing. She pretends to have taken a vow of silence, as her crass jokes and mannerisms would make the ruse immediately obvious. All of this she does at the command of her necromancer, Harrowhark, who is the heir of the Ninth House, who conforms fully and perfectly to the standards of a necromancer, and whom Gideon hates. When Gideon does conform to these standards, she performs exaggerated caricatures of devotion to Harrowhark in ways that highlight her nonconformity, such as saying things like “I am your creature, gloom mistress, I serve you with fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady…I am your sworn sword, night boss.” (GtN 151). She pairs exaggerated, ironic declarations of loyalty with nicknames that make fun of Harrowhark’s necromantic pretentiousness. This reaction is a familiar one—for many people forced to embody gender roles that they don’t identify with, irony is the most comfortable solution.

No power hierarchy, least of all a patriarchal hierarchy, is simple. Hierarchies that deal with both power and identity are at risk of being oversimplified into a win-or-lose model, but I think that that is a misrepresentation. To imagine patriarchy as a game in which men oppress women for their own gain assumes that men are the winners in the dynamic. In reality, I would argue that there is no winner. I think the most helpful way to imagine patriarchy is as a hierarchy, but not one with men at the top. In fact, I would argue that no one is at the top, except for, perhaps, patriarchy itself. In a patriarchal model, women are trapped as the objects of desire; their bodies exist to be exploited and consumed. The objective ideal of patriarchal femininity is characterized by smallness, by the ways in which women are available recipients of power or sexual desire. Men, however, are trapped too. They are trapped as the desirers, divorced from emotion and intimacy, except in those instances where they are desiring women or engaging in violence with other men. The objective ideal of patriarchal masculinity is characterized by the ways in which men exert physical and sexual power over both women and other men, with varying degrees of associated violence. Both men and women are rewarded for the ways in which they conform to these ideals and punished for the ways in which they fail. Critically, however, those objective ideals cannot be reached. Judith Butler, in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, describes gender as “a performance with clearly punitive consequences…” explaining that “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.” Butler continues, arguing that “there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact…” (Butler 552). There is no way to successfully embody normative masculinity in ways that will not cause oneself harm, just as there is no way to successfully embody normative femininity, because both of these standards exist somewhat divorced from the complexities of real personhood. Though queerness, by nature, defies definition, I am defining it in part as the instances in which people fail to conform to these hierarchies, and how, in doing so, they construct and embody non-normative models of gender.

In the power dynamic between necromancer and cavalier, even the most normative, conforming participants find themselves punished by the ways in which they have failed to conform perfectly, often by the inevitable incompatibility of that perfection/ideal and their personhood. The hatred between Harrowhark and Gideon is mutual and codependent, and is perhaps one of the only ways in which Harrowhark fails to conform to her role. This power dynamic continues to function as an allegory for patriarchy, in which Harrowhark benefits from the power she holds over Gideon, but nevertheless is both trapped and harmed by her role in it. Because Harrowhark’s existence as a necromancer depends on her exploiting people like Gideon, she is consumed by and beholden to the guilt of her position. She resents it, and because she has no one except for Gideon, she has hated her for her entire life. Likewise, men benefit from their position in a patriarchy, but nevertheless are trapped within it, and harmed by the roles they are asked to embody.

Even the first Lyctors, who worked alongside God since The Great Resurrection, who created the framework and thus should conform to it perfectly, are hurt endlessly by it. The first Lyctors are characterized as bitter and hateful in general and toward one another. Though many of the details of their history and origins are vague, we know that the love they had for their cavaliers has taken the form of ten-thousand-year-old grief, even as their necromantic power continues to feed on those souls. One of the Lyctors says, referring to another, “I never saw her cry except once…the day after…When she became a Lyctor. I said There was no alternative. She said…We had the choice to stop.” (HtN 121).

How else are these dynamics complicated in the other houses, and within Lyctorhood? We see several examples throughout both Gideon the Ninth and its sequel, Harrow the Ninth, but some stand out more than others. Putting Gideon and Harrowhark’s Lyctorhood aside (for they do, tragically, achieve it), there are several other characters that stand out and complicate our understanding of the dynamic. The characters that most clearly subvert the dynamic of necromancer and cavalier are the pair from the Sixth House: Palamedes and Camilla. Throughout the first book, they are depicted much more as equals than many of the other duos. They are lifelong friends, and though there is no romance between them, they are close and familiar in a way that makes Gideon uncomfortable to see, as her own necromancer-cavalier relationship is so fraught. In the first book, the characters face a series of tests which introduce many of the component parts of Lyctorhood. In several of these tests, the necromancer is not yet asked to kill their cavalier but is required to use their body or soul in some way, and the cavalier is required to submit to that process. Palamedes is one of the first necromancers to realize what Lyctorhood will eventually require, and refuses to engage with any test that has the potential to harm Camilla. When she does come to harm, he cares for her wounds. At the end of the first book, he sacrifices himself to save several of the other characters, Camilla among them. In all of these instances, he refuses to conform to a dynamic which would put him in a position to hurt her. Though neither of these characters are explicitly queer in the traditional sense, the way that they subvert the dynamic of Lyctorhood functions as a queer-ing of the normative hierarchy.

Their dynamic exists in contrast to that of the Third House. Long before it is necessary, the necromancer Ianthe uses the body of her cavalier, Naberius, as fuel for her necromancy. “At one point [Ianthe] beckoned Naberius forward and, in a feat that nearly brought up Gideon’s dinner…ate him: she bit off a hunk of his hair, she chewed off a nail, she brought her incisors down on the heel of his hand. He submitted to all this without noise.” (GtN 188). Ianthe is the only one of the necromancers who willingly and intentionally becomes a lyctor. Her relationship with her cavalier is antagonistic, but both of them know their roles; she treats him almost like an annoying pet—dismissing him, mocking him, nicknaming him “Babs”. This hardly matches the loyalty and devotion we see in the other pairs, but as a result, Ianthe is the perfect candidate for Lyctorhood. She was consuming her cavalier before she was even aware of what Lyctorhood would entail. However, though she is rewarded for conforming to and embodying that hierarchy, she does not escape the harm entirely. She has a twin sister, Coronabeth, who is neither necromancer nor cavalier, but who trained in the ways of a cavalier in the desperate hope that her sister would choose her instead of Naberius. When the others find that Ianthe has killed Naberius, they also find Coronabeth, “eyes swollen from crying,” sobbing and “utterly destroyed.” She tells them, “She took Babs,” seeming in every way as if she is mourning the death of Naberius. But then she continues, “And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.” (GtN 394). In the second book, Coronabeth offers her life again to a different necromancer, one who she has loved since childhood. She says, “Save me…bind me to you, or who knows where I will go? What throne will I mount, if you don’t bind me down?” (HtN 551). Again, she is refused because the necromancer in question loves her. Coronabeth is heartbroken by the refusal to take her life because, as someone in the position of a cavalier, the only way she knows how to love someone is through literal self-sacrifice. Ianthe loves her sister more than anything else, but she is divided from her by her refusal to kill her. Even Ianthe, who embodies the power hierarchy perfectly, is harmed by the structure of Lyctorhood and its incompatibility with the complex love she feels for her sister.

The Locked Tomb deals with two notions of queerness: the first is the representation of LGBTQ characters whose identities don’t conform to traditional, patriarchal ideas of gender, and the second is the subversions of the normative power hierarchies that are unique to the story’s setting. These two levels of exploration don’t occur completely separately, however. In fact, as the story develops, we begin to see the interaction between these two kinds of queerness literally embodied in certain characters. In the third book of the series, Nona the Ninth (I will reference only the first chapter, as the full text has yet to be released), there are at least two characters whose Lyctorhood has been performed incorrectly in some way. Palamedes, the Sixth House necromancer who sacrificed himself in the first book, used necromancy to prevent his soul from truly dying. When we encounter him again in Nona the Ninth, his soul is living in his cavalier’s body, alongside Camilla’s own. Again, in normal Lyctorhood, the cavalier’s body is killed, and their soul is consumed by the necromancer, effectively killing the cavalier outright. But in the instance of the Sixth House pair, it was the necromancer’s body that died, and both their souls live in the cavalier’s body, neither consumed by the other. In every way, this pair subverts and outright reverses the standard operation of Lyctorhood.

Likewise, there is another Lyctor who failed to completely consume the soul of his cavalier. When the soul of that necromancer was killed, his cavalier’s soul, named Pyrrha, surfaced and now lives in his body. Palamedes lives in the body of his cavalier, who is a woman, and Pyrrha lives in a body that previously belonged to her male necromancer. Pyrrha is very much a woman whose body would be traditionally thought of as male, and Muir doesn’t shy away from describing her as such. In the first chapter of Nona the Ninth, for example, she is described as “wearing pyjama pants and a string vest and no shirt, so the orange glow of the hot plate ring lit up all the scars on her wiry arms.” Later in that same scene, she shaves her face. In the case of Palamedes and especially Pyrrha, their subversion of the Lyctorhood dynamic results in bodies that embody gender in non-normative ways.

(note: that bit was kind of hellish to write, because my audience is unfamiliar with the series and I’m already cutting out so much of the convoluted plot, so I just did my best to leave out the fact that two essential characters have the exact same name lmao. In any case, that is why I did not name G1deon here.)

The phrase that repeats throughout the series is “one flesh, one end.” It refers to the bond between a cavalier and a necromancer, and it is the oath they make to each other. As Gideon sees cavaliers and necromancers who care for one another deeply and as equals, it is implied that this phrase refers to the epitome of devotion to one another, a dynamic in which the cavalier and the necromancer are equals. However, as the true process of Lyctorhood is revealed, the phrase’s meaning turns dark, referring instead to a process in which the necromancer’s body and power is both the flesh and the end. However, though Lyctorhood grimly recontextualizes this phrase, it doesn’t change the interactions that Gideon sees between many of the cavaliers and necromancers. At one point, the Fourth House cavalier asks Gideon if she and Harrowhark have been paired for a long time. Before she answers, Gideon sees Palamedes bandaging Camilla’s wounds, and sees the necromancer from the Fourth House braiding his cavalier’s hair, and she “contemplate[s] the sight of the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound… [as] Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon…[Gideon] still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.” (GtN 275-6). Though the dynamic between the two is modeled after a relationship built around harm and unequal power, the relationships that occur within that framework do not always emulate that harm or imbalance. This reflects a real phenomenon, in which the ways that we might define gender within a patriarchal framework are disproven by many of the people embodying those identities.

In some ways, the dynamics of gender do exist as a result of the framework of patriarchy; that the ways by which we define femininity or masculinity revolve around their roles within heterosexuality. As with any categorization of identity, however, there are always people whose performance and engagement with the category defy the bounds of its definition. Likewise, though the normative necromancer-cavalier relationship is epitomized by the self-sacrificial, grief-filled, exploitative model of Lyctorhood, there are versions of that dynamic that defy that definition, that subvert it or refuse the harm that is seemingly inherent to it. The pairs that seem to embody the initial understanding (and not the later, darker meaning) of “one flesh, one end” most strongly are pairs such as Palamedes and Camilla, who would refuse to ascend to Lyctorhood once they know the cost.

In deconstructing the patriarchal framework that defines femininity and masculinity, I often feel that the question is: what is salvageable here? Is anything? The Locked Tomb series argues, in part, that we are shaped by our broken cultures, and that to accept the rewards of such hierarchies is to inevitably hurt one another. There is a cynical way of looking at it, and that cynicism is characterized in Harrow the Ninth by a letter left by an enemy commander, a character who hates everything that the nine houses stand for. She says, “The only thing our civilization can ever learn from yours is that when our backs are to the wall and our towers are falling all around us and we are watching ourselves burn, we rarely become heroes.” (HtN 403). This commander, however, is characterized almost entirely by her hatred, and though her letter sums up this argument well, I believe that it is only half of what the series is saying. The Locked Tomb says that there are things here that are salvageable; even if we are shaped by our broken cultures, even with our backs against the wall, there are ways to reject that harm without leaving ourselves and our identities behind. It argues that the nature of humanness is that we, as people, will always love one another in ways that fail those hierarchies. Though the hierarchies of identity, gender, and power only ever give us options to love in ways that hurt one another, our personhood is complex in ways that makes queerness and queer love inevitable.

#ta da! there she is #like i said earlier lol we shall see if the events of Nona and Alecto render any of these points moot #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #the locked tomb #gtn #htn #ntn #tlt #essay

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olderthannetfic · 7 months

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I actually wish people would argue a bit more for their points pro or contra dota. It's such a good topic of discussion, and has so many facets you could talk about. Learning how critically apply it in your day to day literary adventures is interesting to say the least. Instead it feels like everyone has exactly ONE view on it with no nuance. Just generally, but since it's topic here rn, I think it might apply as well. Like, what if knowing about the author is an important factor in the story? If a queer person writes about specifically their queer experiences, then that's a whole of a lot different than a cishet writing about what they think or have observed they think is queer experiences. Knowing that certain parts of a book come straight from someone who's lived definitely hits different in some cases, than someone writing something they've never experienced and thereby might not even be at all accurate or even damaging. But what if it's a story where that doesn't matter at all as well? Where it doesn't matter if the queer story is written by a queer author or not, because that's not the focus of it as such. If you remove the author from the story and it stands strong amongst other queer stories written by actual queer people, what does that tell us about the circumstances of the writing? I think one space where dota can be applied, but I don't often see talked about is the "same character different authors" scenario. You know the ¨if two people from completely different backgrounds write the exact same character and story, how do you judge the character?" Again, queer since this applies to me (see what I did there lol). If a queer author and a cishet author write the exact same character and people consider the character offensive because of the portrayal, does it even matter if the author is queer? What about situations where people changed their tune from "this is offensive" to crickets when they found out it was a queer instead of a cishet author writing said offensive character? I've seen this happen a few times, and it was always interesting. Does that mean the story was offensive to begin with, even when written by a queer person? Or did you just not like the writing of a particular queer author, for whatever reason, so you assumed they must be cishet? Or why is death of author such a relatively big thing even though it came from seemingly one person, and even seems to be kinda flawed or raw-edged in its application? Is dota a thing of self interpretation or were/are there actually clear guidelines, and if there are, are they still applicable? What if you dota the text introducing dota? What if you actually look at the reason why the author wrote about dota? I've definitely seen some works where, when put into the context of the authors other works, it was very clear that certain messages being a lot more negative than positive. Vice versa as well, but often it's the former. I think the biggest thing I recall at least based on content was a book trying to mimic pro-queer rhetoric, but when you looked up the author you found out she's a massive terf and anti queer/LGBT activist. Suddenly all the positive lines could be read with a lot more hidden, and suddenly not so hidden malice against queer people. But then again, at the end does it matter if nobody sees these messages if they don't know about the authors beliefs? Or should you be aware at least to some degree about what the actual intent is? Sorry sorry for the rambling, but I think that applying dota all flat like a rug just ignores the nuances of writing, and just the social aspect behind some of it. Also I like looking at different angles of topics like these. : D

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coffeeandcalligraphy · 2 months

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After death | Lost Gods

He looks at the skyline ahead of him, its famous shapes that tourists gape at like they’re observing a gorilla in an enclosure. It’s all grey to him, not just because of the looming storm but because the grids of buildings and lights have become boring in a way that seems fatal—this city is a dead thing on earth, he doesn’t care what anyone says. It’s all post-mortem—the blinking traffic lights, shafts of sunlight interrupted by high-rises, yellow taxis honking, honking, honking, like they’re shouting a prayer. He feels sort of like that too, caught in kitschy after death.

A little Harrison art <3 !! And an excerpt from the opening of Lost Gods!

4 years ago today I finished writing his very first solo novel, Moth Work, & I’m kind of in awe of how far we’ve come in that short time… 4 novels & 2 novellas narrated by this man who’s a little embarrassing and a whole lot profound (but you didn’t hear that from me!). A few more thoughts under the cut, but here’s a little note I made myself in 2020, the only note I’ve ever made after finishing a book (possibly because finishing this one changed my life a little).

TW for mentions of: mental illness, trauma in the mental health system, internalized homophobia

Technically I finished Moth Work at 2:34AM because I lived on the west coast at the time lol.

I don’t usually celebrate or remember the anniversaries of finishing books. But I wanted to celebrate this one because a) it’s Leap Day & I haven’t been able to commemorate what I was doing during the last one for 4 years, & b) because finishing MW was such a significant accomplishment!

I started MW in January of 2019 because I was struggling emotionally. At the time, I was racing to figure out “what was wrong with me” before flying across the country for uni in the summer (SPOILER I WAS JUST AUTISTIC LMAO), which led to a lot of stressful and traumatizing appointments with doctors. I desperately needed a book to cheer me up but a different one from my WIP at the time, especially because in 2018, I’d both discovered my voice and become really afraid of messing it up!

I also was taking a religion class at the time that was emotionally difficult for me because I felt reallyyyy alone and especially isolated in my queerness that I’d been hiding for a couple years at that point (& that I literally would not talk about at all, not even to people I trusted). When it became very clear I needed an outlet to explore my feelings (of being “unhelpable,” internalized homophobia, a general sense of aloneness/isolation) the decision of what I was going to write became pretty clear.

I’d written 3 stories in Harrison’s POV that predated MW starting in late 2018 (they were also my first explorations in third person present tense, which fun fact, I only tried in his POV because I’ve always written my notes ideas in that POV/tense combo, even when I only wrote first person!). I hadn’t written in a different POV character’s head beside’s Reeve’s since 2016, so it felt natural that the second character I felt closest to (Harrison!!!) could be a narrator. Funnily at this time Lonan was my favourite so I’m actually surprised I did not choose him but can we imagine how different things would be if I had???

I started Moth Work in my notes app (ICONIC) on January 16th 2019 at 11:37pm! The first chapter came pretty quickly, is actually quite non-linear for a bit, and was overall a lot of fun to write. I’d planned for the project to maybe be a short story or at the most a novella (does this sound familiar), nothing very long and definitely not a novel. I believe the goal word count was 5k which is so funny bc that’s exactly how Changing States & Lost Gods started!!!

And then the project stagnated, it wasn’t something I’d planned to write seriously, and I didn’t pick it back up until August of that year when my therapist at the time suggested I try to complete a “reach goal” as I was reaching Crisis and I guess I was so done with everything going on in my life that I was like okay fine!!!! I will write Moth Work as a novel!!!!

This book literally flew with me across the country… I wrote a lot of it late at night in my dorm with all the lights off after a long day on campus. I wrote a lot of it in my intro to sociology lecture LMAO. I wrote a lot of it on my phone. It was the first project (no literally) where I intentionally explored queerness, especially my own feelings as a (sort of?) catholic at the time. I explored atheism a lot! Something I needed to process my own feelings about faith & God. I explored what it’s like to be this completely unhelpable person because you’ve decided there’s no possible way to help yourself anymore (hiiii Lonan). I also explored (a bit like a premonition), what it’s like to care deeply for someone you can’t help (but that you very badly want to help).

And I almost didn’t finish the book! The imposter syndrome and insecurity went crazyyy when writing Moth Work. I didn’t feel like I was writing the First Person Retrospective Flowery Literary Fiction I’d deemed as the only possible “good writing.” (Still LOVE but I really was struggling seeing a very minor style shift, which is funnily much closer to my writing now than when I was writing the “best” way.) I deleted so much from this book. I couldn’t look at it. I was so embarrassed by it!! I made ultimatums with it!! I edited it so much but still couldn’t stand it! It was literally the safest space I had and I could barely be there a lot of the time!!!

SOOOO this is why I’m very proud of me for finishing it lol & while I would typically have celebrated the anniversary idk, in 2021, bc it didn’t exist until this year it felt apt to sit with those feelings now. I’m really proud of 17-year-old Rachel who was undiagnosed autistic & convinced I was a lost cause, who was sooo afraid of being queer I could only think of that through Lonan (& sometimes still do thx king 🫡) who literallyyyyy wrote a masterpiece in my collection that contains some of my best work (even if I only realized that 4 years later) & that’s been the start of EVERYTHING!

This is so much more than a book or an anniversary!! Somehow I made it through all the things I didn’t think were possible and now have written 2 books & 3 (writing the fourth) novellas allllll in this world. AND 2 additional novels in his POV!! Also thank you baby Rachel for Jeremiah. Like hello!!!! This is the only place I felt safe to be myself when I couldn’t be with anyone else! And there’s something priceless about that…

And it’s all bc of Harrison!!! Whoever I saw in that man in 2019… girl thank you!! Can’t explain what it’s like to grow with that character (who is sooo much more than that to me). Never would I have predicted where I am now. And IMO, that’s all thanks to him so ily fictional man in my head, this is soooo his day LOL.

& if you were here since the first MW update & made it this far… I MUST KNOW!!!!

#art #GETTING GUSHY UNDER THE CUT I COULDN’T HELP IT #tl;dr ily harrison #also everyone weigh in - what’s he listening to?????#IM THINKING OF READING SOME OF MW FROM THE PRINTED COPY #AT THE STREAM TOMORROW!!! SO COME!!!!#CELEBRATE THE DAY!!! YAYY!!!

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swamp-world · 1 year

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god i am SO frustrated with all of the shitty one-dimensional lean-in “feminist” takes on Goncharov now that everyone’s finding out about it. like. you can’t just boil it down that easily yk?? Katya is easily the most three-dimensional Scorsese woman, but I don’t think that’s actually because of Scorsese. even Roger Ebert pointed out that it was most likely Jwhj’s writing that allowed Katya (and also Sofia to a lesser extent) to actually be a person and character in her own right!! (i think it was Melissa Park who wrote about how this reflects early elements of Jwhj’s queer journey and life? read her book The Last One Looking for more)

it’s just that I’ve seen a lot of posts about what a #girlboss Katya is for faking her own death and making out with goncharov AND andrey AND sofia (YES they made out you can’t convince me that just because they were in disguise they didn’t both mean that) and don’t get me wrong I love that as much as anyone else but like

you can’t take this out of its context. the whole “and then she faked her death and used her feminine wiles” thing can absolutely be done in a subversive and empowering way, and I’ve seen some fanfics or reimagined endings that have her live and take over the mafia herself, but i personally hate that because like.

the whole thing takes place against the backdrop of the immediate aftermath of the russian revolution and the wars, with how it shows the intergenerational trauma at hand (i could go on for HOURS about the role of the kitchen table, it made me cry when I first saw that scene) and so to try to put 21st century feminist models on top of something that’s immediately engaging with the tensions of what feminism meant in a soviet context at the time (AND an italian context too, I’m thinking about The Catholic School right now, because while the events in that took place two years before Goncharov was released, it provides a good (fictionalized) encapsulation of the social context that inspired Jwhj), through the lens of a mainstream American man, is just flattening it down too much. it’s a miracle that Jwhj got credit for writing this at all, and that their writing actually managed to make it through as intact as it did (and I think in the 1996 remastering we got to see a bit more of what it could have looked like without studio interference, and also without Scorsese being Scorsese) but it’s clear that a lot of their vision for what the film could have been about and could have said was really overshadowed by Scorsese’s own style and goals. it’s no wonder film bros like it, right, but that doesn’t mean we have to give it to them wholeheartedly

BUT that also doesn’t mean we need to girlbossify it so that it can be easily digestible in a single sentence. twitter is dying, let’s stop with the 280 character film analysis takes, especially with something as rich as this.

#goncharov #goncharov (1973)

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evelhak · 8 months

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What are some series (any media) that aren't well known, but you enjoy, and would encourage other people to seek out?

I love this topic! Thank you for stopping me from aimless scrolling for another hour. It's always a little hard to determine what is well known but I'm just gonna have to go with my surroundings, so I'm gonna talk about some that I've never seen anyone mention on any social media.

Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi

I feel like it should be quite well known, but maybe it's just not in the spaces I'm in or with people my age. But this is a very intricate and suspenseful sci-fi book trilogy by a Finnish author who writes in English. It begins with a thief trapped in a virtual prison. It's highly conceptual in the design of its world and the author is definitely not holding your hand explaining how everything works, but for me it was part of the charm and a wild and satisfying experience, it really sparked my imagination when I was attempting to visualize it all, and I didn't mind if I didn't understand everything because interpretation is the whole point of reading for me. The characters are also complex enough for a character driven taste. If you are looking for something that is highly stimulating for an abstract thinker, try it.

Syysmaa-sarja by Anu Holopainen

Sorry, this is just in Finnish... and the reason I never see anyone talking about it may just be that every Finnish fantasy nerd read it ten or more years ago like me. Although it would be nice seeing younger people find it now! It's a very overtly feminist fantasy series of 6 books, where people are divided into religions that worship a different tree. The mainstream worships oak which is very patriarchal, and the books focus on people (often women, queer or neurodivergent coded people) in very different and difficult life situations, who come in contact with a small group of rowan worshippers who are trying to create possibilities for a different kind of life and society. These were my favourite fantasy books as a teenager.

Lumikki Andersson series by Salla Simukka

These books have English translations, I don't know what quality, because I only read them in Finnish. But it's a YA "thriller" trilogy you should not read as thriller. It's a character driven modern Snow White with elements of thriller and mystery. Lumikki Andersson is not clear on everything that happened in her past, but she doesn't want to be a target so she has mastered the art of appearing insignificant and uninteresting in any given situation by impressive micro level acting and analysing people's every gesture. The main character is the point of this series and her internal world and observations are wonderfully written. If you like old mystery and gothic novels, if you read Sherlock Holmes for the character, if you love fairytales and satisfying analogies, you should read these poetic and insightful explorations on personality, trauma and survival.

Charity Bishop's books

These are speculative fiction books with a Christian twist, so proceed with caution if you need to. I got into them when I was studying theology and wrote my master's degree analysing different concepts of God in self-published Christian fiction. I am not religious and my interest in religion is psychological and anthropological and as such I often find fiction books written by religious people about religion interesting. In terms of literary merit, I've found these books to be the most enjoyable ones I've read in this genre, with well developed characters and plots where faith works as an organic part of the whole speculative element instead of the story just being a tool for preaching which is quite common in this genre.

I was going to do more than just books but I got tired now, so good night Tumblr. 💙 I'm always ready to give recommendations.

#book recs

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pansy-picnics · 8 months

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HE'S BEEN GASLIGHTED, HE LOVES LANCE NOW. I WOULD NEVER FAIL HIM

LANCE IS A COMPLICATED CHARACTER JUST LIKE EUGENE AND I NEED PEOPLE TO TALK ABOUT HIS DYNAMICS WITH OTHER CHARACTERS LIKE ANGRY AND CATALINA BECAUSE OMG I CANNOT THINK OF A CARTOON THAT WROTE ABOUT A PROBABLY QUEER BLACK MAN ADOPTING AN ASIAN DAUGHTER AND A DAUGHTER THAT'S. WHATEVER TEH FUCK CATALINA HAS GOING ON. BUT HE'S SO SPECIAL??? HE'S AMAZING??? ALSO THE FACT THAT TEENAGERS ARE VERY RARELY ADOPTED AND HE SAID FUCK THIS AND TOOK THEM IN ANYWAYS BECAUSE HE REMEMBERS BEING A TEENAGER ON HIS OWN TOO

LITERALLYYLYKYLYKY OH MY GOD???? NO BECAUSE. no bc kiera and catalina parallel lance and eugene as kids almost EXACTLY imo and its SO important in a sense that like. ok i don’t think the rise of flynnigan rider is canon necessarily bc that book was a mess but lance and eugene’s interactions in it are so GOOD it drives me crazy.

basically lance at that age (like 11-12) is portrayed as a kinda shy and anxious kid who tends to keep to himself but is really nerdy and smart and well aware of his surroundings. he’s still a kid and he can be dumb and impulsive but he’s emotional and clings to people who show him affection. eugene’s the opposite, he’s super charismatic and talks his way out of things easily but he never really thinks before he acts and it gets him into trouble really easily. but together they balance each other out, and eugene is super protective of lance bc he knows he’s the more shy and cautious one.

they’re such a good team bc they balance out each others strengths and weaknesses perfectly. but lance actually has a point where he felt betrayed by eugene and it hit so hard despite the plot being so messy. LIKE HE GENUINELY TOLD HIM OFF AND STOOD UP FOR HIMSELF AND IT WAS SO GOOD?? and then theres the whole alleged scrapped lance and eugene backstory episode which might not even be real but its CANON TO ME EVEN IF ITS NOT BC THATS HOW GOOD IT IS. yk the one where eugene almost got adopted and lance was afraid of being left behind so he broke a window and blamed it on eugene so the couple wouldn’t want him anymore? Yeah. Yeah i think about that a normal amount actually!

AND ITS BC. ITS THE SAME DYNAMIC KIERA AND CATALINA HAVE. WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT. AND I THINK ITS CLEAR THAT THE REASON LANCE CHANGED SO MUCH FROM THAT POINT TO WHEN WE SEE HIM IN THE SERIES IS BECAUSE…. EUGENE WASN’T THERE ANYMORE. THINK ABT IT. THEY BOTH BALANCED OUT EACH OTHERS FLAWS. LANCE WAS SHY AND CAUTIOUS BUT EUGENE WAS RECKLESS AND CHARISMATIC. WHEN THEY GOT SEPARATED LANCE HAD TO TAKE ON A SIMILAR PERSONA BECAUSE THE SHY KID HE USED TO BE WOULD BE KILLED IF HE GOT LEFT ON HIS OWN!!!

LANCE SAW HIM AND EUGENE IN KIERA AND CATALINA. THE QUIET AND CAUTIOUS BUT CALCULATED ONE WHO’S ALSO A LITTLE SHIT AND THE RECKLESS AND CHARISMATIC PROTECTIVE ONE. HE SAW THEM TOGETHER AND HE REMEMBERED WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM AND EUGENE. HOW THEY GOT TORN APART. AND HOW HE HAD TO CHANGE HIMSELF TO SURVIVE. HE TOOK THEM IN BECAUSE HE KNEW IT WOULD HAPPEN TO THEM TOO.

Godddd I’M SO. there are so many traits and little details abt him that just got passed off as jokes or one liners in the series but they SHOULDN’T BE. GODDD HES A CHEF. HE LOVES FOOD AND COOKING HES A THEATER KID!! HE LOVES LITERATURE AND HE LOVES MUSIC!!! I THINK HE LOVES THEATER AND DOESN’T FEEL AS AFRAID IN THAT SENSE BECAUSE HE TRULY FEELS LIKE A DIFFERENT PERSON ON STAGE. ITS WHY HE DOESN’T LIKE SINGING AS HIMSELF BUT HE’D ABSOLUTELY KILL IT IN A PLAY.

and god it annoys me so much bc whenever anyone DOES talk about how lance got done dirty in the series nobody actually brings up WHY….. i love this series too but we cant just sweep the issue under the rug. theres a reason they only played him for comedic relief and made him look childish and stupid IT’S RIGHT THERE ITS BECAUSE HES BLACK. AND YES WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT. I LOVE THAT THEY HAD HIM ADOPT THE GIRLS IN THE END AND IT WAS SO SWEET BUT HE WAS STILL THE BLACK BEST FRIEND TROPE AND HE DESERVED SO MUCH BETTER!!!

HE LITERALLY JUST HAS ADHD AND NOT TO MENTION THE FANDOM ALWAYS ACTS LIKE EUGENE IS THE STRAIGHT MAN OF THE DUO WHEN THEY’RE BOTH EQUALLY DUMB AND SILLY??? AND THEY BOTH SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO BE SILLY. people always talk about lance getting into varian’s stuff even though EUGENE DOES THE SAME THING AND HE’S JUST AS BAD. AND YALL AREN’T CALLING HIM IMMATURE. ITS RACIALLY MOTIVATED!!! AND IT MAKES ME SO MAD!!!!

he’s not stupid in fact i genuinely think he’s the most emotionally mature out of the entire cast. i think he came to the orphanage as a young child rather than from birth and he had a mom who he loved very much and who taught him to manage his emotions well and bc of it he’s very in tune with himself!! and he’s very much the dad friend!!! he’s just a silly guy and he wants to make his friends laugh but sometimes he ends up sacrificing himself for others too much!!! and he needs to care about himself too!!!

God i just. I GET SO INSANE ABOUT HIM HE DESERVED SO MUCH BETTER. GTRRRRAAASGHHGHHHHH.

#tts headcanons #tangled ask #ask #pansy rambling again #lance tag #IM INSANE IM INSANE #LANCE STRONGBOW #GOD.

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alesuggestprompts · 2 years

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How to know what story you want to tell: observe, steal, adapt

Part one: the plot

This is an unusual post because this time I won't give prompts.

Instead I'm going to show you a way you can identify what you want to narrate starting from who you are and what you like.

This can be applied for every kind of fictional story: novels, short stories, graphic novels, dramatic scripts and so much more. Be creative!

First: the art of discerning

Before we start this creative exercise, I have to underline that this post will be divided in two sections: the things you like and the ways you like.

Often we can like a story because we feel connected to the plot and the themes in it and other times we are more attached to it due to its way of narrating things.

It is important to know the differences between those two in order to have a clear idea of your self-made prompts.

When you feel like you've understood the difference, we can go on

The plot

What you like

Choose from 5 to 10 stories you really like and make sure that they are told through different medias (like, not only books or tv shows)

Don't take too much time thinking: grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down all the stories you feel connected to.

Tip: if you feel you have too much stories you like, think about the ones you'd really like to watch/read /listen to again.

Now, for every of them write down the reasons you like it. Don't take too much time thinking: every small reason that comes to your mind is worth adding.

Here are some examples:

Our flag means death

- historical setting seen with modern lens

- normalization of queer identities (amd lots of them)

- mix of humor and important themes

- centered around masculinity with feminist lens (and portrait of healthy masculinity)

- about mental health too

- unsual romcom

- amazing soundtrack

To the lighthouse

- stream of consciousness

- 1900s UK

- awareness of human emotions and thoughts

- feminist themes

- subtle queer themes

When you're done, chose a blank space and divide it in two columns:

In one you write down the things you like

In the other you write the way you like

Example: "stream of consciousness" falls in "ways I like" while the "queer rep" goes under "things I like"

Side note: depending on the media you're going to use, some things aren't usable (like, if you're going to write, "amazing soundtrack" is useless) but make sure to write them on first place, they may give you some ideas on how to adapt them to your chosen media.

What you're looking for

Then, write down all the things you wanted to see more but (almost) never did. Challenge yourself to write as many as possible in a limited time (like, 5 minutes). It can be whatever comes to your mind, like "more neurodivergent characters" or "black and white comics when narrating a memory"

When your set time ends or when you feel like you're done, divide what you wrote in the previous two columns.

What you'd have changed

You could stop here, but if you want more:

Write down from 3 to 5 stories that disappointed you and try to point out in what way they did it.

For everyone find one or more thing that you'd have changed to make them better.

Example:

" 120 BPM"

I didn't like how it focused more on a single tragic story in the end -> I'd keep telling about the story of the group (it will be translated into "focused on story of a group of people")

Then write them down on your two columns.

Your personal prompts

Now, you have two long lists of things only your own person you'd have put together and you can make prompts out of it.

There are two ways you can do it:

Find a pattern:

you may find out you've repeatedly praised historical fiction and have wrote several times "queer rep" and you want to make a comic liking a more realistic style and mixing written paragraphs with drawing (and maybe found out you don't fancy vignettes so much), so you'll go for it.

Creatively mix things together:

you've written "stream of consciousness", " space ships " , "feminist themes" and "found family" and you want to make a story starting from those things.

Advanced tip: what to avoid

If you feel like, you can write down from 3 to 10 stories that everybody seems to like but you don't really fancy.

Then, for everyone you can list the reasons you don't like it.

You'll may find out that you like fantasy worlds but don't like do-it-all-magic or that you're bored of quick romances, and that's ok.

You can then make a list of things you may find pressure to add but don't want to, and feel free to not narrate in your own story.

Final advice:

You now have some prompts that came out form who you are and what you like. Experiment with them, have fun, try them out and don't be afraid of changing some things if you feel to.

This is your story (or stories) and the only way to measure its worth is to see if it makes you happy.

Go out and write, draw, record and plot and don't be afraid if it sounds too much "you" or too less common like.

This is about you and your creativity, and I'm pretty sure that out there there are people who can't wait to see your work.

I'm already rooting for you.

And if in your creative process you'll accidentally find yourself here again, you'll likely find the second part about creating characters from your own liking.

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jasper-pagan-witch · 1 year

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An Itemized List of My Tarot Books

When it comes to divination, tarot is my bread and butter, my sweet cheese, my good-time pal, my partner in crime, and so on.

Complete Book of Tarot Spreads: Includes 122 Layouts. Authors: Evelin Burger and Johannes Fiebig. Publisher: Sterling Ethos. Additional notes: I don't like how often the G-slur is used to refer to the Romani. Tarot is Italian, Catholic, and a product of the Golden Dawn. You don't have to use slurs for Romani people to sell your tarot book in the year...okay, 1997 from its original German in 1995, but the point still stands. I just scribble out the slurs and use some of the spreads. I don't need them to teach me how to read tarot, and frankly, I don't recommend getting this book for that purpose.

Kitchen Table Tarot: Pull Up a Chair, Shuffle the Cards, and Let's Talk Tarot. Author: Melissa Cynova. Publisher: Llewellyn. Additional notes: This was my introduction to Melissa Cynova's works. I was impressed with this book, and it's one of the first ones that I recommend to people who need help figuring out tarot. Not only does it go into all 78 cards, it also talks about their reversals!

Psychic Tarot: Using Your Natural Psychic Abilities to Read the Cards. Authors: Nancy Antenucci and Melanie Howard. Publisher: Llewellyn. Additional notes: I don't actually believe that you have to be psychic in order to use tarot. I refuse to believe I'm psychic, I'm just putting together the symbolism and meanings of the cards and applying them to people's situations. But if you're into all that psychic shit, this is a pretty okay book? It sure as hell isn't perfect, but it's here.

Queering the Tarot. Author: Cassandra Snow. Publisher: Weiser Books. Additional notes: I never actually wrote the review of this book, but it's...both inclusive and alienating. My main complaints is that the only card that is even vaguely a-spec is the Hermit and the Wheel card entry treats "nonbinary" as synonymous to transfeminine (and frankly the author should have just used transfeminine for that entry). It also misuses the term "karma", uses the erroneous term "Judeo-Christian", and isn't an easy read if you can't handle walls of text or have dyslexia, but it's very personal, sex-positive, kink-inclusive, and reassuring. It includes pushes for activism (but recognizes that there are people who can't do that stuff). Overall, it's clear that it was the author's first book.

Tarot for Troubled Times: confront your shadow, heal your self, transform the world. Authors: Shaheen Miro and Theresa Reed. Publisher: Weiser Books. Additional notes: Review here. This was first published in 2019. Let that sink in for a hot minute. Anyway, I found this book to be...clearly written for women in the text but not the cover or marketing.

The Book of Divination: A Guide to Predicting the Future. Author: Michael Johnstone. Publisher: Arcturus Holdings Limited. Additional notes: This is a BEEFY book. Even with chapters dedicated to tarot, playing cards, tea leaf reading, crystal divination, Chinese astrology, Western astrology, I-Ching, numerology, palmistry, Futhark runes, and prophetic dreaming, there's also a MASSIVE list of divination methods in the foreword. Unfortunately, my old enemy (the racist pseudoscience phrenology) gets a mention here, but there are also some hilarious divination methods such as "slap someone in the face with a single rose petal", scrying with wine, and "drop pearls onto a surface and see how they bounce and roll". And unlike many rune books, this one actually appreciates history and talks about how the "blank rune" was invented in 1980s - because let's not forget that runes were a writing system, and having a "blank rune" makes no sense when writing things down.

#jasper post #personal #the jasper way #books #jasper's bookshelf

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smirk47 · 2 years

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“You think that one can have one’s emotions for nothing. One cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.” – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Shows up to the @pasitheapowder April Hiatus Book Club FULLY a month late and with zero Starbucks:

Soup of Feelings(TM) is CORRECT. Damn.

I had a frustratingly busy month and it has taken me until now to actually sit down and fully read De Profundis. I finally finished it today, and I just want to say that I am deeply thankful to Jackie and Molly for making me aware of its existence and giving me a good reason to read it now.

I honestly cannot remember if I ever learned about Wilde’s trial and imprisonment before. If so, it was only in the vaguest sense. Most of how I thought of Wilde before this was based on my love of Importance of Being Earnest and Dorian Gray - both of which I read about 20 years ago (and which I now VERY much need to re-read, both in light of what I now know about Wilde AND in light of the fact that I am a very different person now). I knew he was witty and hilarious and cutting and that he made me laugh and his work felt surprisingly modern when I read it in high school. I was far enough from realizing my own queerness that I’m not even sure his queerness truly registered with me. Learning about this part of his life - and death - and getting to read about it in his own words feels like finding a lost puzzle piece in queer history and literature that I didn’t even know I was missing.

Uh, I could ramble extensively about my thoughts and feelings about all this (and about the passages you guys quoted, which are essentially the same ones I had bookmarked while reading as well. Oscar Wilde was real fucking good at words, guys. Who knew!?) but in the interest of brevity (pfft. Yeah right. I suck at brevity.), here’s some random thoughts:

You absolutely covered this, but the moment that really shifted my whole understanding of the letter was when, after FIFTY FULL PAGES of describing every way Bosie was the WORST and had RUINED him, Wilde – in the midst of yet another rant, asks simply: “Why did you not write to me?” THIS. Holy shit. I literally had to stop and read that out loud to my friend when I first got to it. What a crystal clear moment of understanding. That really truly is what the entire ~120 pg letter boils down to in the end. In the face of suffering and public shaming BECAUSE of this relationship, and in the complete absence of any direct communication from Bosie, how easy it is to see why Wilde would change his tune so drastically from the way he wrote to Bosie before prison. How understandable that his thoughts would turn over and over again to all the worst parts of their relationship and hold them up in exhausting detail as a shield against missing this person who has caused such pain. And still, despite that literal, exhaustive laundry list of grievances, he can’t stop himself from essentially saying: I miss you. Where are you? Why are you not here for me. It is so simple and so deeply, heartbreakingly relatable.

Very much appreciated the background you guys gave about Robbie Ross and Bosie – I didn’t know most of what happened after Wilde’s death! Bosie especially was kind of a big question mark for me as I was reading, because this is such a one-sided account, and I knew so little about him otherwise. Reading between the lines, I do have a lot of sympathy for him, and I do believe he loved Wilde deeply. And like, I am SURE Wilde was not always picnic to date either. But uh … big ol’ YIKES about Bosie’s politics. Oof. Why dude. Why?

Holy shit, I’m not sure anyone could have possibly scripted a more fucking ironic or dramatic way for Bosie to finally learn what Oscar wrote. My. God. The Drama. The Messiness. BRUTAL is exactly right. Because yeah: as much as the letter seems to be an extremely accurate (and thorough!) accounting of Wilde’s feelings about Bosie and his memories of what really happened WHEN HE WROTE IT, it was also coming from such a place of pain and bitterness and shame and longing. And it is MEAN even though it is also ultimately somewhat forgiving. And I’m sure a lot of it is true, but I’m also sure a lot of it is unfair. And dear god, if any of that shit were directed at me from someone I cared about in a letter I was reading IN PRIVATE I would fucking crumble. Cannot even begin to conceive of how you would recover from hearing it for the first time in court of all places.

What a fucking ride. How amazing to have this window into the thoughts and actions and feelings of THIS person at THIS point in their life. How amazing to think of how much has changed since then, and how horrifying to think of how much has barely changed at all.

#the pasithea powder #hiatus book club #is fucking awesome #I can't wait to re-read Wilde's works now that I've read this #and I also can't wait to re-listen to Pasithea with all these references and all this context in mind #long post

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kitewithfish · 1 year

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Reading Meme for Feb 1 2023

What I've Read Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir - Oh, man, the last third of this book is just payoff after payoff - stuff that I was certain was going to be left to be resolved in the next book was just laid out in front of your eyes and it worked so damned well. This was my second attempt to read this book - the first time, just after it came out, I made charts and tried to keep track of all the characters and figure out the mystery of the whole thing, well, I had some trouble. The second time around had a much better result when I just let the whole thing wash over me. I really enjoyed this book and I'm starting on the next one immediately. Penric's Fox - Lois McMaster Bujold - I am still really enjoying this series, which are short mysteries set in the Chalion universe with a metaphysical 'odd couple'- a young human man with no background in magic is host of a centuries-old demon who has the memories and personalities of nine previous women hosts as part of her constituent parts. They fight crime! It's also got touches of the kind of settled affection that I tend to associate with long-married couples who still adore each other. Penric gets roped into solving murders that are short and clear, with a cast of interesting recurring characters and a boss who is a badass woman in her 70s. The mysteries are a bit straightforward but explore some of the interesting edge cases of how magic in their world works. Fun palette cleansing reads. (I which Bujold had a little more eye for queer relationships in her books but what she does provide is emotionally solid, so, meh.) I'm Not As Think As You Drunk I Am - Mardiaz173 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/33021898 - Clark Kent/ Bruce Wayne - DC comics universe - This was just a nice short little fic where Superman wants desperately to date Batman, but Bruce Wayne keeps showing Clark a side of himself that few people get to see. Which will our hero choose? (I read this on the recommendation of the podcast Clio/Mireille for their Sept 2022 episode on Superman/Batman Identity Porn fic.) It is a fun fic and a charming podcast. Living With a Tiger by x_los - https://archiveofourown.org/works/33488392 - 人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù - Original Luò Bīnghé/Shěn Yuán, post Post-Bingge vs. Bingmei Extra - I am delving at last into the fic for the Scum Villain fandom, and I love the set-up on this. X_los wrote an AU that really delves into a grey version of the characters from the canon, and I really enjoyed it. (If you don't care to read the canon, this is still mostly intelligible on its own.) The tags are accurate. What I'm Reading Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir has got her hooks in my soul. Like with Gideon the Ninth, I was spoiled by tumblr osmosis for some elements of this book, but I honestly don't think it matters! Starts basically directly after Gideon the Ninth and I am glad I followed my friend's recommendation to start this book immediately upon finishing Gideon, as my poor memory would not have helped with understanding this book. I find these books do very little explicit handholding of like, "Character realized that this new development related back to This Setup from Chapter 2" and yet Muir does indeed set up enough reminders to guide you back to the points you need to recall for the payoff to be satisfying. What I'll Read Next Phoenix Extravagant - Yun Ha Lee - Book Club The Uncle's Story - Witi Ihimaera - The library wants this back and I don't want to give it back! I might end up having to buy more of the Ihimaera books I want to read - local libraries are NOT great about having these around, and I am slow. The Good Lord Bird Library books Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys Unnamed Midwife (whole series)

Owned and need to read: Frey Marske's A Restless Truth, and Susanna Clarke's Pirenesi California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, Kraken's Sacrifice by Katee Robert, Even Though I Know the End by CL Polk, True Colors by Karen Traviss, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Like Real People Do by EL Massey, Tom Stoppard, invention of love. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe, Aphorisms of Kerishdar

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therend · 3 years

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Did I ever tell you about that time my extremely homophobic parents chose a legendary queer name for their child (=me)?

I once wrote about how pronouns in Persian are not gendered, and it means you can simp about your same-sex love interest without lying or having to come out. Well, it's not the only occasion these pronouns are extremely helpful for ✨the gays✨. For example I have written many queer stories and sent them to official writing competitions for school, and no one has suspected anything because I usually don't use names in stories. Note that almost any kind of queerness is illegal here, and I have had my share of trouble in school because of it. But even though I am usually very clear about, for example, the gender of my characters, as clear as you can be without saying it, no one in charge ever thinks I write gay because – well, heteronormativity, baby.

But I'm not the only one who – intentionally or not – does this. If you ask any random Iranian to name three poets, "Hafez" would definitely be one of the names they give you, most likely the first. We know a lot of his poetry by heart, and reading his works is an important part of many holidays and celebrations. Even though a lot of the times, the "lover" he talks about is obviously a woman, most of the times it's just as obviously a man. It's more than just implied, it's clear as day, and you just need to open your eyes to see it. Which, people don't. I don't remember the exact words, but I do remember a Persian literature scholar write something like we're lucky Persian pronouns are not gendered, or else everyone would know how queer this whole thing is.

So let's get into my name. Negar means beautiful artwork, but at some point in the history of Persian literature hopeless romantic poets (including Hafez) used it so often as a pretty way to call their lovers that now it's also known to mean lover, or beautiful beloved. My parents intended to name me something else, but then, a few days before I was born, they opened Hafez's poetry book randomly, three times in a row, and each time, they saw a piece of poetry in which he was calling his lover Negar. I'd like to believe it's because, no matter what others keep telling me, God knew that I was going to be hella queer, and was totally alright with it. This is how I got my name. My parents, of course, didn't notice the queer content.

Another thing about it is that the word itself is gender neutral, and a lot of the times it's used for things other than people. Other than the meanings I've said so far, it also means "to paint", "to write", "to create", "to make art" in general. When Hafez used it, he used it to describe men, and for a long time, it was natural to call beautiful men Negar. Now, it's perceived as a girl's name, and my parents chose it for me because they believed I was a girl. If I didn't love my name this much, I would have loved to change it to something like Rock or Sock or River, but I do. I think its history fits the genderfluid/genderqueer person I was born to be perfectly. :)

#I once again find myself ranting about this #I'm pretty sure I haven't said any of this here before; so at least there's that.#but a lot of my friends would scream if they see me talking about this again wlsjkaksj #so what I'm gay and wil not apologize for being so #Persian #language #Farsi #Hafez #dark academia

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crossdreamers · 3 years

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Lesbians support transgender people

Lesbian trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” are claiming that transgender culture is erasing lesbian identities. Given all the noise they make, you may get the impression that most lesbians share their beliefs. This is not true.

In fact, my own experience from Norway tells me that most lesbians embrace the T in LGBTQA, and see that transgender people and lesbians face the same kind of oppression: Attacks from reactionary people who believe the cisgender/heterosexual gender norm should apply to everyone.

The lesbian erasure narrative

Over at Advocate the lesbian writer Sarah Fonseca (photo above) takes a look at Abigail Shrier’s transphobic book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and touches upon the the “lesbians are going extinct” narrative.

She writes:

Naturally, the assertion of Shrier that lesbians, tomboys, and lesbian tomboys are going the way of the dodo bird seeks to create pandemonium among queer girls who identify as such.

And Irreversible Damage dares to inflict this very damage at a critical moment when lesbian social spaces that weren’t already shuttered are suffering due to national lockdown, and our community’s women — sociable, tactful, and independent of others’ transitions — are left to their own devices...

As a lesbian reader of sound gender, I still find it enormously unpleasant to be repeatedly told that I do not exist or that my gender and sexuality will inevitably shift, all because of a societal trend and its societal pressures; it is all too reminiscent of the comments foisted upon many of us by heterosexuals upon coming out.

Fortunately, Shrier lacks two pieces of vital information. First, the lesbian is the mistress of silently and confidently auditing her own gender. She continues to exist because she abides by no one’s stringent rules...

We are hardly obsolete. If anything, we are just getting started. Our first mission? Disavowing Irreversible Damage. Our second? Taking care of our trans siblings. Our third? Reversing the damage that Shrier has done to lesbian reputation. The fourth? I do not know, but I hope it involves dancing and queers of every stripe, imagined and yet to be.

Abigail Shrier, who is a privileged white, straight and cis woman, is using the lesbian extinction scare to create a split in the queer community, not because she care about lesbians.

Enriched by trans people

In an article in the British Independent, Carrie Lyell puts it this way:

I don’t recall a plethora of columns offering solidarity from heterosexual “feminists” before so many latched on to lesbians as a way to push their agenda on trans issues. There was no faux-concern from our “straight allies” on any of those occasions, no calls to celebrate my swashbuckling swagger. Straight women were often the first to tell me to grow my hair, shave my legs or be more “ladylike”.

Instead I found comfort in the LGBT+ community and learnt resilience from those around me. While the world tried to box me in and crush my queer spirit, I was lifted up by lesbians, gay men, bi people and, yes, trans people.

Lyell (photo from twitter above) is the editor of DIVA, a queer magazine. She writes that she has never met a trans person who has tried to convert her.

“Not for one minute have I felt erased by trans people,” she writes: “If anything, I feel enriched.”

The great majority of lesbians feel this kind of kinship with trans people, and support them.

They used the same tactics against lesbians

In another article Fonseca points out the similarities found in the way the cis/heterosexual majority used to invalidate and attack lesbian women:

Queers and trans people have historically witnessed our bodies be weaponized in pursuit of the same old Cis American Dream by those on both sides of the political divide.

In the sensational Women’s Lib text The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan was quick to distance herself and her movement from lesbians, writing them off as “disruptors” and members of “extreme left groups.” ...

Unsympathetic to lesbian concerns about child custody and sexual liberation, she referred to the burgeoning group of dykes seeking representation in the larger women’s movement “the lavender menace.”

The same tactics were used against gay men and lesbian women as the TERFs are using now: the sexual predator tropé, the mental illness narrative and the “stupid people seduced by extremists” invalidation.

All the leading lesbian magazines support the trans community

Remember that back in 2018 the world’s leading publications for lesbians came together to send a message of support and solidarity to the trans community. They wrote:

DIVA, Curve, Autostraddle, LOTL, Tagg, Lez Spread The Word, DapperQ, GO Magazine and LezWatch.TV believe that trans women are women and that trans people belong in our community. We do not think supporting trans women erases our lesbian identities; rather we are enriched by trans friends and lovers, parents, children, colleagues and siblings.

We strongly condemn writers and editors who seek to foster division and hate within the LGBTQI community with trans misogynistic content, and who believe “lesbian” is an identity for them alone to define. We condemn male-owned media companies who profit from the traffic generated by these controversies.

We also strongly condemn the current narrative peddled by some feminists, painting trans people as bullies and aggressors – one which reinforces transphobia and which must be challenged so that feminism can move forward.

We are really concerned about the message these so-called lesbian publications are sending to trans women and to young lesbians – including trans lesbians – and we want to make in clear this is not in our name.

Photo of Sarah Fonseca from Posture Mag.

See also: “Lesbians Turning On Elliot Page Is Not An Isolated Event, And We Need To Talk About It.”

#lesbian #lgbt #lgbtqa #trans #transgender #nonbinary #enby #lgbtqi #glbt #terf #terfs #gender critical #transphobia

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qqueenofhades · 3 years

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Hi. You made a post a couple of days ago about how queer historical fiction doesnt need to be defined only by homophobia. Can you expand on that a bit maybe? Because it seems interesting and important, but I'm a little confused as to whether that is responsible to the past and showing how things have changed over time. Anyway this probably isn't very clear, but I hope its not insulting. Have a good day :)

Hiya. I assume you're referring to this post, yes? I think the main parameters of my argument were set out pretty clearly there, but sure, I'm happy to expand on it. Because I'm a little curious as to why you think that writing a queer narrative (especially a queer fictional narrative) that doesn't make much reference to or even incorporate explicit homophobia is (implicitly) not being "responsible to the past." I've certainly made several posts on this topic before, but as ever, my thoughts and research materials change over time. So, okay.

(Note: I am a professional historian with a PhD, a book contract for an academic monograph on medieval/early modern queer history, and soon-to-be-several peer-reviewed publications on medieval queer history. In other words, I'm not just talking out of my ass here.)

As I noted in that post, first of all, the growing emphasis on "accuracy" in historical fiction and historically based media is... a mixed bag. Not least because it only seems to be applied in the Game of Thrones fashion, where the only "accurate" history is that which is misogynistic, bloody, filthy, rampantly intolerant of competing beliefs, and has no room for women, people of color, sexual minorities, or anyone else who has become subject to hot-button social discourse today. (I wrote a critical post awhile ago about the Netflix show Cursed, ripping into it for even trying to pretend that a show based on the Arthurian legends was "historically accurate" and for doing so in the most simplistic and reductive way possible.) This says far more about our own ideas of the past, rather than what it was actually like, but oh boy will you get pushback if you try to question that basic premise. As other people have noted, you can mix up the archaeological/social/linguistic/cultural/material stuff all you like, but the instant you challenge the ingrained social ideas about The Bad Medieval Era, cue the screaming.

I've been a longtime ASOIAF fan, but I do genuinely deplore the effect that it (and the show, which was by far the worst offender) has had on popular culture and widespread perceptions of medieval history. When it comes to queer history specifically, we actually do not know that much, either positive or negative, about how ordinary medieval people regarded these individuals, proto-communities, and practices. Where we do have evidence that isn't just clerical moralists fulminating against sodomy (and trying to extrapolate a society-wide attitude toward homosexuality from those sources is exactly like reading extreme right-wing anti-gay preachers today and basing your conclusions about queer life in 2021 only on those), it is genuinely mixed and contradictory. See this discussion post I likewise wrote a while ago. Queerness, queer behavior, queer-behaving individuals have always existed in history, and labeling them "queer" is only an analytical conceit that represents their strangeness to us here in the 21st century, when these categories of exclusion and difference have been stringently constructed and applied, in a way that is very far from what supposedly "always" existed in the past.

Basically, we need to get rid of the idea that there was only one empirical and factual past, and that historians are "rewriting" or "changing" or "misrepresenting" it when they produce narratives that challenge hegemonic perspectives. This is why producing good historical analysis is a skill that takes genuine training (and why it's so undervalued in a late-capitalist society that would prefer you did anything but reflect on the past). As I also said in the post to which you refer, "homophobia" as a structural conceit can't exist prior to its invention as an analytical term, if we're treating queerness as some kind of modern aberration that can't be reliably talked about until "homosexual" gained currency in the late 19th century. If there's no pre-19th century "homosexuality," then ipso facto, there can be no pre-19th-century "homophobia" either. Which one is it? Spoiler alert: there are still both things, because people are people, but just as the behavior itself is complicated in the premodern past, so too is the reaction to it, and it is certainly not automatic rejection at all times.

Hence when it comes to fiction, queer authors have no responsibility (and in my case, certainly no desire) to uncritically replicate (demonstrably false!) narratives insisting that we were always miserable, oppressed, ostracised, murdered, or simply forgotten about in the premodern world. Queer characters, especially historical queer characters, do not have to constantly function as a political mouthpiece for us to claim that things are so much better today (true in some cases, not at all in the others) and that modernity "automatically" evolved to a more "enlightened" stance (definitely not true). As we have seen with the recent resurgence of fascism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and xenophobia around the world, along with the desperate battle by the right wing to re-litigate abortion, gay rights, etc., social attitudes do not form in a vacuum and do not just automatically become more progressive. They move backward, forward, and side to side, depending on the needs of the societies that produce them, and periods of instability, violence, sickness, and poverty lead to more regressive and hardline attitudes, as people act out of fear and insularity. It is a bad human habit that we have not been able to break over thousands of years, but "[social] things in the past were Bad but now have become Good" just... isn't true.

After all, nobody feels the need to constantly add subtextual disclaimers or "don't worry, I personally don't support this attitude/action" implied authorial notes in modern romances, despite the cornucopia of social problems we have today, and despite the complicated attitude of the modern world toward LGBTQ people. If an author's only reason for including "period typical homophobia" (and as we've discussed, there's no such thing before the 19th century) is that they think it should be there, that is an attitude that needs to be challenged and examined more closely. We are not obliged to only produce works that represent a downtrodden past, even if the end message is triumphal. It's the same way we got so tired of rape scenes being used to make a female character "stronger." Just because those things existed (and do exist!), doesn't mean you have to submit every single character to those humiliations in some twisted name of accuracy.

Yes, as I have always said, prejudices have existed throughout history, sometimes violently so. But that is not the whole story, and writing things that center only on the imagined or perceived oppression is not, at this point, accurate OR helpful. Once again, I note that this is specifically talking about fiction. If real-life queer people are writing about their own experiences, which are oftentimes complex, that's not a question of "representation," it's a question of factual memoir and personal history. You can't attack someone for being "problematic" when they are writing about their own lived experience, which is something a younger generation of queer people doesn't really seem to get. They also often don't realise how drastically things have changed even in my own lifetime, per the tags on my reblog about Brokeback Mountain, and especially in media/TV.

However, if you are writing fiction about queer people, especially pre-20th century queer people, and you feel like you have to make them miserable just to be "responsible to the past," I would kindly suggest that is not actually true at all, and feeds into a dangerous narrative that suggests everything "back then" was bad and now it's fine. There are more stories to tell than just suffering, queer characters do not have to exist solely as a corollary for (inaccurate) political/social commentary on the premodern past, and they can and should be depicted as living their lives relatively how they wanted to, despite the expected difficulties and roadblocks. That is just as accurate, if sometimes not more so, than "they suffered, the end," and it's something that we all need to be more willing to embrace.

#history #medieval history #queer history #meta #long post #anonymous #ask

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