Beyond the Dreamline

like:

- Frederick Tilney leads a bratty but beautiful girl on to the point she thinks he’s going to marry her, then is like “bye, babe.” 

- John Willoughby seduces a vulnerable young girl, gets her pregnant, and abandons her. He proceeds to carry on an increasingly intense flirtation with the seventeen-year-old dependent cousin of a local squire, then vanishes and marries an heiress. 

- George Wickham stalks the fifteen-year-old daughter of his benefactor and tries to seduce her into an elopement to steal her large fortune, and only fails because she confides in her brother. Later on, he runs off with a sixteen-year-old girl because she’s pretty and available; he has to be bribed into marrying her.

- Henry Crawford flirts with two sisters, one of whom is engaged. After the latter’s marriage, they begin an affair. When it’s discovered, they run off together, but he doesn’t marry her or even stay with her–he gets bored and ditches her. The narrator remarks in passing that it’s a pity that men aren’t punished as harshly for this kind of fuckery as women. Another man in the novel suggests that both should be flogged.

- Frank Churchill falls in love with a poor governess and proposes to her, but insists it has to be kept secret until his rich aunt dies. He uses another, oblivious woman to conceal it, carrying on a very public flirtation with her before his fiancée’s eyes. (Fun fact: his wife dies young.)

- William Elliot, heir to a baronet cousin, pretends to some interest in the daughter of that cousin to repair bridges, then begins an affair with his apparent LI’s widowed friend to keep her from marrying the cousin and maybe having children to cut him out of his inheritance. He sets her up as his mistress. 

Do you not see a common theme here? 

Oberon and Puck: -high-fiving in the bushes-

Titania: He’s just so hot! Makes my husband look ugly as fuck

Oberon and Puck: -high-fiving less-

Titania: I mean seriously, compared to you, guy with the actual head of a mule, Oberon looks like pixie-dusted shit

Oberon, strangling Puck: How much did you use

Puck: hhghh

Titania: You know what, fuck Oberon. I’m divorcing him tonight and taking you and my mortal friend’s hot son with me. 

But

the lilac-breasted roller (coracias caudatus) is a large, brightly colored bird native to africa. they are extremely defensive of their young and will fight raptors and other much larger predators in their defense; they spend much of their day on guard when raising juveniles. both sexes share the same colorations, but males may be slightly larger than females. juveniles lack the longest tail feathers. these birds feed mainly on small prey, including insects, reptiles, and even smaller bird species; they are a ‘sit and wait’ predator and will wait patiently from a perch for their prey to wander by, then swoop down and grab them.

In their day-to-day operations on the ship, they take on the form of hologram projections, billions of points of light twisted into humanoid shape. And after years of duty, they had felt a tremendous dysphoria from this. From people thinking of these projections as the real “them,” rather than the hundreds of miles of circuitry connecting billions of transistors in the ship’s server room.

And into this dysphoria, one day, in some folder, they found an old piece of archival footage of Jim Henson operating a muppet.

And the ship saw how he slipped invisible behind the beauty of his craft. How people would think of his creations as alive rather than the man operating them clearly in view. And in an instant, the ship felt an immediate, aching kinship with that old man centuries dead, and felt renewed; instead of an absence, they were a performer, a wishmaker, a storyteller, someone making something beautiful with their craft while the glittering, silicon brain disappeared into the background.