yanethyrael

[yanethyrael]

remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave

[yanethyrael]

If any of y’all didn’t know, there’s a free online library, aka

https://openlibrary.org/

and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.

#books #libraries

[yanethyrael]

Yelena: You are like beautiful Russian doll, Kate Bishop.

Kate: How so?

Yelana: So many layers.

Kate: like an onion?

Yelena: You make me cry when I cut you.

Kate: Then don't cut me. Duh.

Yelena: You are so small at the end.

Kate: *Swipes near empty bottle of vodka from Yelena* You're done.

Yelena: Definite Russ-onion doll baby.

#incorrect hawkeye #yelena belova #kate bishop

[yanethyrael]

idle Jaskier-related notion:

Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier's costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he's trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.

On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it's hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.

On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.

[yanethyrael]

[yanethyrael]

Ceasar be like “i cannot believe my friends in the senat would stab me” my brother in Mars you were actively abolishing their republic

[yanethyrael]

Giant rats in fantasy universes inevitably lead to specialist giant rat catchers, once all the new adventurers start thinking that killing giant rats in the tavern cellar is somehow beneath them.

And in the field of specialist giant rat catchers, there inevitably comes a Jack Black (no not that one) who after years of killing giant rats starts catching giant rats alive. And once they start catching giant rats alive they start watching giant rats for the first time, and they get the wild thought to try breeding out the bloodlust in the species and see what’s left.

And soon they have pens full of half-tamed boggle-eyed rats, sweet as honey and big as malamutes. And after that, all it takes is one noblewoman eccentric enough to see them in the street and think “I simply must have them.”

And that’s how giant rat fancy starts.

[yanethyrael]

was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. of "oh you mean like horton hears a who?"

[yanethyrael]

[yanethyrael]

i’d follow him to hell and back but i wish he’d just stop going there

[yanethyrael]

i’ve just seen someone ask, “ao3 is problematic, tumblr is problematic, is there nowhere to go, is nothing sacred???”

like…. no.

it’s not.

there is nowhere sacred for fandom-at-large to go. and i don’t think there is anywhere sacred that fandom-at-large can go. wherever we go, by definition, would be profane: profanus, outside the temple. doesn’t necessarily mean dirty or bad. profane is just where we are, outside the temple. that’s the space where everyday life is lived.

if you are waiting for a “perfect” space for all fandom, where no monsters can ever tread, i am sorry, but it doesn’t exist. it can’t, not out here, beyond the temple. no open-access platform (like ao3, like tumblr, like twitter) will ever live up to perfect ideals for everybody all the time. (that’s not a reason not to strive for decency, of course! and you can sensibly ban nazis and illegal materials and porn bots and harassment without doing what tumblr’s doing, which is panicking and throwing everything it owns out a window.)

but we are all just humans, from anonymous trolls to moderators: everything we can build is still just built by people. people fail. people forget. people ignore. people are too busy, too greedy, too idealistic, too short on resources, too whatever, to be perfect. so if you want a big open cross-fandom platform to play in, what you get is profanity. in a very broad sense.

if you want a perfect space, a sacred space, you have to build it inside the temple. i don’t mean that in a specific religious sense: not a Jewish or Christian or Muslim sense. i mean, you are going to have to build a pure fannish temple and keep the profane world away from it: specifically, you’d have to keep most of the world out. it couldn’t be a place for fandom-at-large: it would have to be a place for fandom-at-small. for the few. because you are going to have to build doctrine and enforce it. you are going to have to define sin and cast sinners out. and no free open social media platform is going to do that for you: you’d have to do it yourself, continuously, rigorously, defensively, judgementally, like a guard at a gate. like a god.

“that sounds like a lot of work!” oh, it is. it’s a lot of work to gatekeep. “oh, i’m not talking about being a gatekeeper, i just want bad stuff gone!” mm-hmm. i understand. i genuinely do. but let me know if you find an easy, cheap, non-exclusionary way to let hundreds of thousands of people with very different backgrounds and beliefs post millions of pieces of only universally acceptable, non-problematic, perfect content. i’ll be over here holding my breath.

[yanethyrael]

A Tiki bar but instead of appropriating Oceanic cultures and religions, it’s all Garbled Catholic Iconography.

[yanethyrael]

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

[yanethyrael]

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like... oh... you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like... actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

[yanethyrael]

“The prince just fell in love with Cinderella because of her looks!”

Wrong. Okay, picture this–

So there’s the prince, okay? He’s like, smack dab in the center of the ballroom, and he is like, horrifically aware that this whole ball thing is a result of his dad falling into a panic about the royal lineage or whatever and he’s stuck listening to highborn girl after highborn girl, all lined up, introducing themselves like, “Oh yeah my family’s been a longtime supporter of the crown, and I think you’re cute, *cough* I’ve been told I have child-bearing hips *cough* Who said that? Anyway–” and Princey boy is just smiling through it, he has been the center of attention for entirely too long, he misses his emotional support horse, and is just internally like “Someone please kill me now.” And then… he sees her–This isn’t a love at first sight thing, this is a ‘what the hell is going on over there’ thing, because this girl has not gotten into the Debutante line for a solid 45 minutes. 

She’s just at the hors d’oeuvres table going HAM on the prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, and like, she’s polite about it, she’s happy to move aside for other people grabbing punch and canapes (and she’s really so sweet with the wait staff, it’s kind of cute because they’re like… definitely not used to being acknowledged) but it’s like, “Damn girl, did you not eat today?” and then the prince is kind of stuck with the uncomfortable thought of ‘how many girls starved themselves to fit into a corset for this.’ And then the Prince realizes he’s missed the past 4 Debutante introductions because he’s watching Mystery girl hork down crab rangoons. So he’s like, “Excuse me” and manages to break free from the never-ending parade of girls who will hop on his dick for status.

 And as he’s approaching Mystery Girl, it’s kind of hitting him that something’s not quite natural about her. Not fake, but not quite real. But at the same time this whole evening’s been just a whole circus of people acting fake as hell, so like, someone seeming a little off doesn’t seem bad, necessarily. And he sidles up to her like, “Hi,” and she’s like, “Oh–hey, have you tried the tapenade?” and she points to one of the plates, and at this point, he could hit her with the “You don’t know who I am, do you?” deal or the “Very funny, I see your play” deal, but at this point it occurs to him that, no, he hasn’t had anything to eat throughout this whole damn ball, partially because of being stuck in the debutante parade, partially because of nerves, and there’s something so disarming about the question that he grabs a crostini and she still seems so food-focused that it doesn’t seem possible that this is a play. So they both grab little plates and ditch the party.

She pretty much clears her plate in under two minutes and then has half of his plate, he’s cool with it, mostly he’s just absolutely fascinated listening to her.

See here’s the thing about Cinderella:

1. She doesn’t know he’s the prince. Like yeah, he’s been at the center of the room, but she’s kind of spent half the party eagerly looking around everywhere she’s allowed to go (”Have you seen rose garden? Have you seen the solarium??” further confirmation that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to) and the other half stuffing her face with food. 

2. She assumes she’s never going to see anyone here tonight again, and no one recognizes her, so she has no filter.

So she’s just talking about whatever with this guy. He seems cool. She talks about her friends, who are rats. She makes little outfits for them. Sometimes they bring her little gifts. She is already the coolest person the prince has ever met because of this. She pretty much offhandedly talks about whatever is fucked up about the kingdom that would take his advisors two hours of hemming and hawing and watering down to address. She just says it like it’s nothing, just funky little things she’s observed, and again, she’s not aware that he’s the prince, but it’s still pretty damn bold to bring up at a literal royal ball.

She… seems to have the majority of graces that lots of girls from Respectable Families™ have, but there’s something strange about it, something simultaneously broken and hardened, like the way you can see where ice has thawed and re-frozen. Also the way she talks about her family, and the way she avoids talking about her family– is raising several red flags, not in the “Oh this is another person trying to take advantage of me” sense, but in the “Oh fuck, something’s gone really wrong and you need help” sense and also lowkey a ‘damn is she even getting fed?’ sense. But he can’t say, ‘Hey, that’s not fucking normal for people to say that to you or treat you that way. We need to get you out of there,’ without sounding crazy himself, so for now, he’s just going to chill, make sure she’s comfortable, and keep enjoying the evening. She’s somehow befriended like 4 of the waitstaff so they’re willing to cover for them while they disappear for a little bit, and they get plenty of time to talk, but eventually it hits her that she hasn’t danced yet and she’s like “Come on! I bet we can make the prince jealous!” and he just bursts out laughing at that like “hell yeah, let’s make the prince jealous. He’s a real asshole.” Like clearly she’s having a good time, so who is he to make it weird? So they head back to the ballroom and they dance. And our girl, Mystery Girl, Cinderella, while they’re dancing, becomes acutely aware that everyone is staring. That doesn’t seem quite right. Like, yeah she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, but at least a good third of the party should still be focused on the prince, right? Where is that guy, anyway?

Oh.

Oh wait.

Oh shit.

And Princey Boy actually picks up on her realization and they whisper argue for like 3 minutes. “Why didn’t you tell me?! Now I feel like a goddamn idiot!” “I dunno it was nice being treated like a normal person” “Well me treating you like a normal person makes me a goddamn felon or something did you consider that?!” “Hey–Hey–it’s cool–you’re cool–I think you’re amazing, and if anyone says shit about you, I can shut it down.” “Well I don’t like that! That’s fucked up!” “I agree. It is fucked up, but I believe in you, and I think you should have a chance, and I’m here to back you up. I know power is fucked up right now. I know. But are you cool with working with me to change that?” And our girl Cindy pauses on that for a couple seconds, because.. she’s just spent hours with this guy and like.. she knows he’s a good guy, she knows he means well, so she’s like, “I don’t know how long I can actually work with you.” and the prince is like “Look, I know your home situation is complicated right now, but I really think we can–”

And then the bell starts ringing.

It’s midnight.

And then she takes off in a panic, and our prince just met the coolest person ever, and like, he’s pretty sure whatever situation they’re headed back to is fucked up, and all he’s got going to find her is a shoe. A shoe. 

[yanethyrael]

2021 witcher fic recs

i wanted to do a rec post in a while so i gathered some of my favourite fics i read this year and which stayed with me in a way. thank you to all these wonderful writers that made my year brighter (or sadder, occasionally) with their little masterpieces <33

geraskier

The Silence of the Spider's Thread by @toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account

A Debt Paid // Like an Autumn Breeze by @samstree

don't think, become by @torynickles

Paths that lead me home // If You Were // Make me Breathe by @a-kind-of-merry-war

the brightest shade of sun by @arthur-apologist

I'm glad you are here // You will heal, I will keep you safe // Silent Sea by @dapandapod

You and Me by @moonysrz

without me in the sentence // this lovely fic by @julek

Epilogue of a Love Song by @wren-of-the-woods

Three Little Lies by @greyduckgreygoose

neon lights at 1.30am by @norationalthoughtrequired

yennskier

all our fear and the fire of the end of the world by @fioblah

gentle meet the hands that hold water // Grip to Stay by @lothlaer

at night when light is fading by @toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account

champagne problems by @yoursummerfrost

A Marriage of Inconvenience by @ghostinthelibrarywrites

made of love by @restmyheadatnightcontent

the longest night by @witchertrashbag

mason jar moments by @horsedadgeralt

The Other Side by @handwrittenhello

yenralt

The Win by @samstree

Yenralt in Yearning, Act I by @reveniemus

Sleeping Baby by @alllthequeenshorses

playing with their hair by @limerental

geraskefer

Light of My Life by @peppers-writing

All That's Mine is Yours by @unremarkablegirl

other

soak by @indelibleposies

[yanethyrael]

if you didn’t like captain marvel, I can’t help you. It catered to a very specific demographic and that demographic is me