taryn duarte defender

Educate yourself people. Read classics. It's 2025. At this point everyone should've read the raven cycle

there's a delicate balance between "seeing something on my dash so often i end up caring about it unexpectedly" and "seeing something on my dash so often that it gets added to the blocked list with extreme prejudice"

that pistachio completely sealed in its shell is scared and alone, like a miner trapped by rubble. you need to free it by any means necessary. get the gun from your dad's cabinet

There is a quality of books (or movies or shows) that I can best describe as “stickiness,” which is separate from being good or even enjoyable: a sticky book is one I just keep thinking about. Sometimes it’s because a book is very good (e.g. The Locked Tomb), and sometimes it’s because a book is very bad (e.g. ACOTAR), but there are also very good and very bad books that are slippery, such that when I’m done reading them they slip from my thoughts like water from a hydrophobic surface.

the idea that every summer will be as hot if not hotter than this for the rest of my life is unbearable i need to (remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health) murder an oil executive

today I found out my mother doesn't know what dandelions are and now I'm wondering what other strange secrets she's been quietly harboring

to be honest i think there’s a large number of people who conflate the very real and widespread phenomenon that women tend to be written off as just mothers or love interests in order to diminish their importance in a given story with the fact that a huge reason they’re sent to narrative purgatory in this way is BECAUSE the labels of “mother” and “girlfriend/wife” are systematically devalued and seen as inherently inferior because they’re terms that have been associated with ownership and/or control over women. like the amount of people who’ve told me that a certain female character is uninteresting or badly written because she happened to have a kid or be a man’s girlfriend or sister just to find out she was actually fleshed out very well and carried significant narrative importance frustrates me soo bad. there’s a huge problem with how those roles (specifically “wife” and “mother”) are systematically devalued and yet also perpetuated as the only viable options for women to achieve their societal roles in the patriarchy but acknowledging the devaluation of those labels to begin with is an important discussion in itself.

i just saw a review of the mighty nein ep 3 that described molly’s dialogue as “being written by a child guessing what an adult would say” and anyway i just want to say it is so much fun watching people experience this journey for the first time. that’s all

when a mutual reblogs something ive already liked i unlike it and then like it again. its my way of kissing them on the forehead

i love when i “make a mental note” of something. it’s gone within 20 seconds

james baldwin was so right when he said “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world