people are theorizing what happened so here's what I know:

One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.

the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."

I ran into a truly wild cultural misunderstanding with my father some years ago, when I had to explain to him what “hookup culture” actually was, and that the thing he assumed it was was actually what we call “cruising culture”. His response was “how is that different from dating?” and when I explained how it was different, he said, and please note that this a direct quote: “That’s ridiculous! You can’t expect a woman to stop fooling around with other guys for anything less than a marriage proposal. I mean, she’s not a prostitute, you can’t buy her.” Now obviously there’s like… a lot to unpack there, but I think it’s pretty darn illustrative of a substantive cultural shift around the assumption of monogamy!

This doesn’t include the best bit of the whole thing - she found the Twitter thread!

This is like one of those romance novels where people bond over accidentally writing each other emails but better.

“you cannot ship these two fictional characters because—” actually I can because they are not real people. they are just toys I play with. you cannot apply real-world morality to fiction or how strangers play with their imaginary toys in their imaginary sandboxes.

“ship whatever you want except xyz. there is a limit” so you miss the entire point of what I just said 👌🏻

#me buying my very own copy of dinotopia #because it's for me but it's also for the very young me who wanted the world to be like that #i'm still holding her hand #we can't make the world dinotopia but we can make it a little better for everyone we meet #it's going to be okay

No dumbass, it’s funny because women are usually left out of these pictures. And most of history. While actually, you know… living full lives and contributing to society. Just like men do. But men are always in the fucking picture.

i love this dude he’s made a bunch of other ‘misandrist jokes’ as well

Not to go too off-topic but just want to remind everyone that Will McPhail also gave us this great one in 2017:

it's

every tumblr weirdo watching the first episode of euphoria

     I’ve read in old interviews with Milt Khal’s fellow animators that he did the swaggle to purposefully show off. Moving the head in 3-d space is an exceptionally hard thing to do but Khal upped the level of difficulty to a place many animators wouldn’t go.      Not only are they all doing the swaggle you’ll notice they are all TALKING while they are doing it. This is back in the days where you had to use a timing sheet to pace your animation and a head swaggle doesn’t work if its too slow or too fast so he had to figure out the right speed so it looked natural while the character finishes what they have to say while not interfering with the distinct mouth shapes.       Not only did Khal do it without any shifting weight problems or timing issues he would often do it while moving the rest of the body. This isn’t his signature move just because he was good at it.This is his signature move because he was one of the only people skilled enough to DO IT AT ALL.