Into A Blossoming Wood

Jonathan Labillois. Still Dancing. 2014.

steve and tony at the beach…

"look at this mf's breakfast " tony said as he was having an alcohol for a drink

Joke aside, one of the points of this AU is to highlight things their adult selves would (probably) never do. Their mental instability is more severe because they experienced trauma at an earlier age and didn’t have time to process it—especially after they decided to don their hero’s capes.

MY AU #1

MY AU #2

Oh, by the way, this is the background for Steve’s wings accessories, which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I forgot to draw them

Let's be precise about what @queercodedangel got wrong.

What the IRD list actually was:

A private notebook, handed to one person at the IRD, listing individuals Orwell thought were unsuitable to write anti-stalinist propaganda - not people he wanted arrested, surveilled, fired, or harmed - and none of them were.

Orwell believed these specific people were Stalinist sympathizers who would undermine the work of countering Stalinism. You can legitimately think that was a bad call - it was certainly a morally complicated one for Orwell. It was not, however, the act of an imperialist snitch. It was the act of someone who hated authoritarian Stalinism enough to do something uncomfortable about it, while continuing to publicly criticize the British state.

The tension between those two things evaporates the moment you understand Orwell's position: Stalinism wasn't socialism. It was fascism with better branding, and it was destroying the socialist project from within.

History proved Orwell right.

Orwell:

Got shot through the throat while fighting fascists in Spain

Spent decades producing some of the most devastating critiques of British imperialism ever written, including Burmese Days, and Shooting an Elephant.

Called himself a Democratic Socialist his entire adult life and meant it.

Wrote that "every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism."

@queercodedangel is taking one late-life episode, stripping it of all context, and canceling one of the sharpest anti-totalitarian, anti-imperialist pens of the twentieth century - because he wouldn't excuse Stalin's crimes. That's apparently the price of admission to the 2026 left - being ignorant enough to deny that Stalin was a monster.

Calling that "snitching" tells you nothing about Orwell. It tells you that for some people, anti-Stalinism is a greater sin than imperialism ever was - and you can only take that position if you know nothing about what Stalinism was.

That sucking vacuum of ignorance where actual knowledge should be doesn't inspire a single second of hesitation before they confidently preach provable falsehoods. The less @queercodedangel knows about Orwell, the IRD list, or Stalin's crimes, the more confident the verdict. This is what happens when a generation decides memes and reels are sufficient substitutes for actually reading anything.

Orwell spent his life fighting this kind of epistemic laziness - the willingness to flatten complex realities into politically useful, emotionally resonant, self-affirming fictions.

This is why Gen Z desperately needs to read the Orwell and Huxley they've been told to avoid.

They're eepy :]

With filters (since my laptop colors always look way less saturated when I transfer to my phone 😭 I like them both this time so)

"Shall the nightingale forged of iron, also bleed and wither, fading unto eternal demise?"