Like A Magpie, I Live For Glitter, Not You

the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.

this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.

therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:

- being a cow

- being an almond

- being a woman

- being a coconut

- being in the omegaverse

- being an oat

(list is exemplary and not finite)

Batman: Year One (1987)

This sketch is incredible. Perfect moment to capture. 10/10 for the artist.

Link to post

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

It's all over the place in classic literature. Crack open a Jules Verne novel and you're likely to find caricatures of brown people and cultures, even when the characters are sympathetic to the plight of the colonized peoples - incidentally, this is the biggest reason I can't recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to everyone, despite Captain Nemo being one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

You can't escape it in modern cinema, either. You'll see white heroes venturing bravely into jungles and tombs to steal from natives who don't know how to use their resources "properly." You'll see them strung up in traps, riddled with sleeping darts, forced to flee and fight their way out. Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, a remarkably inclusive franchise in many other ways, had an extended sequence of the white heroes escaping from a cannibal civilization in the second film.

And when fantasy RPGs want a humanoid enemy, the "bloodthirsty natives" are the first stock trope they jump to. World of Warcraft is one of the most egregious examples, with the trolls - blatant racist caricatures with faux-voodoo beliefs, cannibalistic diets, Jamaican accents, and a history of being killed in droves by (white) elves and humans - being raided and slaughtered in nearly every expansion.

It doesn't matter how vibrant and distinctive the real-world indigenous, Polynesian, Caribbean, and African cultures are. It doesn't matter how much potential these real civilizations offer for complex and sympathetic characterization. Anything that doesn't make sense to the white western mind is shoved under the same "savage" umbrella. They're different. They're strange. They're scary. They have to be escaped, subjugated, eliminated, ogled at from the safety of a museum.

Modern writers, directors, and developers don't even seem to realize how horrifying it is to present the indigenous inhabitants of a place as "obstacles" for non-native protagonists to overcome. "It's not racist," they say, "because these people aren't really people, you see." And if you dare to point out anything that hurts or offends you as a descendant of the bastardized culture, you're accused of being the real racist: "These aren't humans! They're monsters! Are you saying that these real societies are just like those disgusting monsters?"

No, they're not monsters. But you chose to design them as monsters, just as invaders have done for hundreds of years. Why would you do that? Why can you recognize any other caricature as evil and cruel, but not this?