Oh my stars!

This is from 1966 and you can see over a hundred photos on the NYPL digital collections website. It is absolutely gorgeous. These are just a few of my favourites.

Plus Puck's face here:

We’re getting into my least favourite corner of internet literary analysis, which is the psychologisation/pathologisation of characters/behaviours, something that I find even more delicate when the source material is from a country where psycho pop language and mental health discourses are not as widespread as they can be in some parts of the West (psychology, let’s not forget, is not only a western-centric discipline, it can also demonstrate a pro-western bias).

Pathologisation is, first and foremost, a process which is deeply embedded in the social context and the social acceptance (or rejection) of a behaviour. That is the case even for pathologised behaviours that have supposedly ‘objective’ biological markers. 

Addiction, and what constitutes normal or harmless consumption of any addictive substance, does not have a universally accepted definition, especially when it comes to substances whose consumption does not bring on any social stigma (like alcohol or coffee, for instance). Go to one place to another, and people will hold different ideas of what is a normal amount of drinking, or what behaviours around drinking are normal. Some places, for instance, might find binge drinking more problematic than habitual drinking, or the opposite--or just find both perfectly normal and “healthy”. 

Moreover, applying a pathologic lens to character analysis when there are no clear signs in the text that this is what the author meant to explore, or that the subtext pathology would deepen the themes or narratives of the text, is extremely tricky because it often then becomes more telling about the person doing the interpreting than about what is being interpreted. In other words, this form of analysis often ends up skewing the dialogue that is interpretation in favour of revealing things about the interpreter (wrt their ways of perceiving the world or their own personal experiences) rather than revealing anything new about the text itself. 

But to answer your question and not to continue with philosophical rambles about disciplines and interpretation: as someone who grew up with a parent who was a functioning alcoholic, I don’t find that WWX exhibits any of the signs of a person with an addiction, or at least the ones that I am familiar with. He likes alcohol a lot, probably more than is healthy, and has a very high tolerance, but he never showcases (imo) any signs of withdrawal or any urgency when it comes to getting a drink. WWX can go more than a day without drinking; he does not alter pre-established plans to try to find alcohol; he doesn’t get moody or short-tempered in scenes where he’s not drinking or has not drunk in a while; when something goes wrong in his life he doesn’t seem to need a constant supply of alcohol to keep going, etc. He also doesn’t seem to drink to the point of being black-out drunk at any point, and does not engage in particularly risky or violent behaviors after drinking. As far as I can remember, we never see anyone suggest to him that he may have a problem with alcohol, and that he should slow down his regular consumption of alcohol. EDIT: there are actually suggestions in the text that WQ tried to curb down his drinking with acupuncture, my bad, I had forgotten.

mdzs update: I am once again cry laughing at this poor man's suffering. I know they're tragic, I know its not actually Funny from his pov, but hes just.

Art by Higga for Mo Dao Zu Shi

Which makes Fullmetal Alchemist so much funnier because Edward Elric very very much does join The Organization. He’s in fact quite famous for joining The Organization. Where The Organization is a hostile fascist dictatorship with immense military power which is good at both giving orders and punishing defectors.

*MDZS fandom: Lan Wangji's life resolved around Wei Ying as he had nothing else in his life....

They get points for helping him with his jobs, going to town and drinking with him, doing well on night-hunts, basically any time one of them does something with him the others talk to wei wuxian about it and take his answers to determine if that junior gets to move up or down in the rankings.

Lan Wangji pretends to not know about it.

2) There are actually other characters described as "domestic slaves" or the daughters of one in the story, too: Mo Xuanyu's mother (daughter) and Wang Lingjiao. Wang Lingjiao also calls Madam Yu's two servants "slaves" when admonishing them, to which Madam Yu corrects that they are servants and Wei Wuxian muses snarkily that a domestic slave is using the term to insult others like she isn't one, herself.

But for those with neither weibo nor twitter, here are the screenshots:

The way she translated all the scenes of drunken 3 has me convinced that she actually doesn’t like Wangxian. And using ‘sinister’ and ‘evil’ to falsely describe some of WWX’s actions and smiles, constantly having characters call him annoying and making LWJ ‘chide’ WWX as if he doesn’t like him being playful, or making LWJ seem overly strict and even hypocritical in his words and actions makes me feel like she doesn’t like WWX or LWJ either.

Like this is so blatant