There are moments which mark your life. Moments when you realize that nothing will ever be the same and time is divided into two parts; before this, and after this.
Authors Convinced Fanfic is Illegal/Requires Permission
Terry Goodkind: “Copyright law dictates that in order for me to protect my copyright, when I find such things, I must go out and hire lawyers to threaten these people to make them stop, and to sue them if they don’t.”
John Scalzi: “Let's remember one fundamental thing about fanfic: Almost all of it is entirely illegal to begin with. It's the wild and wanton misappropriation of copyrighted material”
Diana Gabaldon: “OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.”
Robin Hobb: “Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen.”
Anne Rice: “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.”
Anne McCaffrey: “there can be no adventure/stories set on Pern at all!!!!! That's infringing on my copyright and can bear heavy penalties…indiscriminate usage of our characters, worlds, and concepts on a 'public' media like electronic mail constitute copyright infringement AND, which many fans disregard, is ACTIONABLE!”
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: “No. Absolutely not. It is also against federal law.”
Lynn Flewelling: “Whether you are writing about Seregil or Fox Mulder or Sherlock Holmes, if you do not have legal permission from the author, their estate, or publisher, then you are violating US copyright law. It is creative piracy. Doesn't matter how many disclaimers you put on, or if you're being paid. It. Is. Illegal.”
After watching both Hannibal and all of the Saw movies I can say that these two women deserved so much better. They were both in such vulnerable situations, ones where they needed love and care and all they got was abuse and manipulation. Of course they're not completely innocent, but if they actually got the help they needed instead of being thrust into a world of violence, because they think that it protects them, then maybe their lives would have been different.
And I think it's very easy to dismiss these two as deranged murders, complicit in violence on the first viewing, but deep down both of these women truly care about others. Amanda, killing Adam because she doesn't want him to suffer, and Abigail, being haunted by the girls because she feels immense guilt. I mean, when she's with her dad hunting, she says how deer are similar to a 4 year old human being, how they tread carefully not to step on the plants, she humanises an animal because she cares. And as stated before, they're no saints (especially Amanda), but they're not cold hearted killers.
Oh, and fatal neck wound in front of the only person they trusted, left to bleed out with no one that truly knew or loved them
They're so scared in those moments because all that fighting for survival meant nothing in the end. I think Amanda sums both of their characters up perfectly:
John needed more help with his games, Hannibal needed to get closer to Will. They were used and then discarded.
Girls are like, "He can fix me," and the He in question is a cold-blooded killer with a god complex, who will sacrifice them to achieve his ultimate goal.
Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement,” which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who... uh... made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice.
After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I'm sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle.
And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and...it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men's female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.
from Mr & Mrs Smith, cf Margulis vs Dawkins, Graeber vs Hobbes, and critiques of Randall Collins's (via Weber) conflict theory
That's right, Bill Watterson, who pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth ever since Calvin and Hobbes ended in 1995, is coming back with a new graphic novel.
I can't even begin to describe how world-changing this news is, guys.