I will pray for wings with my last breath

Elrond: Alright, everyone listen up. We elves have 4 methods of dealing with Accursed Fucking Objects™, as demonstrated by my four parents. 

Number 1, the Elwing Method or Mom Method. This is to hide the accursed fucking thing away and keep it safe and close. This is highly not reccommended if the object can take over its user like the ring can, and Sauron will be searching for it, so this method is out of the question. 

Number 2, the Earendil Method or the Dad #1 Method. This is, send the accursed fucking thing across the sea or to some higher power. According to Mithrandir, the Valar will not take it and Tom Bombadil wants nothing to do with it, so this is also out of the question. 

Number 3 is the Maglor Method, or Dad #2 Method. This is to yeet the accursed fucking thing into the ocean. In this case, it is not a good idea as Ulmo will be very upset and we will still have to contend with Sauron. 

Springtime. The Paschal season. Aviv.

The season of rebirth, renewal, and too much bleeping rain.

The time of flowers blooming, bears waking, trees budding, eggs hatching, and Jews frantically cleaning their homes and screaming this crucial message into the void:

No, Christians, you should not have Passover seders.

“But why?” comes the eternal reply. “The Old Testament is part of our tradition too! Jesus celebrated Passover! Why can’t we?”

Read on, and I’ll tell you.

I know you don’t want to go back to being yarn, but it’s better this way.

I did not have the tools to make you right the first time

and now I do, and now you will be  whole and beautiful

The subject of ‘Covid romance’ and whether authors should be capitalising on that, and questions like: ‘Can we brainstorm some ideas for cute Covid romances’ started immediately. Many said they were in bad taste. Many more said they had zero interest in writing the pandemic. I was one of them. In 2020 I released a book that was a pre-Covid world. 

It takes longer for movies and TV shows (and most other genre books) to be made, but romance authors have been discussing this actively and in great depth for a year now, and the by and large consensus has been that romance is meant to be escapist, and sometimes that means ignoring Covid exists.

But it did bring up the subject: Does that mean contemporary romances without Covid are still contemporary? Or are they now fantasy? Or science fiction? Or alternative reality? (Because heaven forbid published authors just call it a contemporary AU). 

And it’s been interesting reading the responses. And it’s just occurred to me that other people haven’t been enmeshed actively in these discussions in the same way, because romance authors get on subjects fucking fast. So do the fic authors. Covid fanfiction started existing pretty much immediately, as Covid became a thing. 

I’ve managed to avoid all of it, and proportionately, there’s not much.

down the street from me, a nursery has a sign that says don’t panic! and nothing else. i am hoping they are referencing hitchhiker’s guide and not referencing the pandemic. i drive past it on the same day we hear about the impeachment.

it was nice knowing you. there’s a carl sagan quote i love: we are how the universe knows itself.

it is hard. we make a plan together where we both only have 5 dollars and a box of tissues. how do we make bread from stone. i tell him - i will have to resort to eating my tongue. he says - i will help you cook it so it tastes good.

it was nice knowing you. like dark and stormy night, i only hear it when we are being purposefully overdramatic. when we are feigning our ending. our final words, movie-theatre lights.

this time last year, there were people i said see you soon to. and i turned around and walked away and didn’t say i love you.

my teacher asked me once: if you can imagine the last words you’d say to a person, why not say them first. love doesn’t need to hide in the epilogue. sometimes love should take the whole stage up. sometimes you should look to a person and tell them - my life is more beautiful for having known you. thank you for letting me in.

1. We have not yet risen out from under the coastal shelf in the susurrant calm before sunrise. We think of it often, of course. Sometimes at night we hear a lonely gull and for a moment are captured by the imagined drying of salt on our skin. But this we have not yet done.

2. We have not yet been thoughts, nor leaped from head to head on electric road trips half a population wide.

3. We have not yet locked the castle and threaded the ivy though the keyhole, fed the key to the bear ghost that walks under the earth, shuttered the orchard, forgotten the oubliette and drawn a tapestry curtain over the ruins that remain; we have not yet dismissed our petty courts or struck a wedge through the unicorn’s golden chain.

4. We have not yet climbed the stair with the weary ghosts of the twentieth century, or sat with them at that high landing where they have set up their campfires and are resting with their crinolines off and their rifles stacked against the newel-post.

5. We have not yet scattered behind us those casual, careless words, letting them fall to the ground like crumbs; and with them we will attract a cloak of birds all circling and crying for more spare words and more, but this we have not yet done.

6. And although we have hooked the beast, we have not yet reeled it in and it may be that we never do so.

7. We have not yet spoken those words that will crack open the fog and bleed colour back into the white peacocks in this garden. We have not yet opened the screens that shield our yew trees the outside world, and yes they are silver, and through them our eyes would be very big and dark if we cared to look out.

8. We have not yet burned our book of secrets, but be sure that when we do the fire will speak them with ten times the voice of the bone flute and the buried skull, and this and only this is the way that they shall cease to exist.

Sources: https://twitter.com/myangryuniverse/status/1297616494176735234 https://twitter.com/_dankou/status/1298187651728715778

Additionally from that, “ Even down to what form of English you use” - yes!! This!! I was basically expected from a young age in fandom to learn American English and change the way I spoke and if there was something I didn’t understand, I was ridiculed for it. And if I spoke in British English at any point, I was, again, met with ridicule - especially if I used slang that’s common among the working class (which the UK has a huge classism problem).

I could go on forever about the other things I’ve experienced in this way but honestly I’d rather not come across as “woe is me” or anything. Especially as when this topic is talked about, Americans want to believe it’s just a “Europeans wanting to be special” thing and not an international problem where non-Western people have spoken up about this exact problem, too.

But yeah, even though these are things that happen in general being on social media in general while being non-American, it pours over into fandom and what’s expected of you in that regard. And while American and European issues tend to share some overlap, there is no one-size-fits-all experience which people just don’t want to acknowledge.

I think understanding that complex issues don’t always have a black and white answer to it is scary for people to accept (especially as oftentimes situations that should have a black and white answer tend to get treated as though it’s a grey area when they’re not), but alas.

I’m sick of seeing anime fics where people can’t afford to go to the doctor. Sick of reading fics where a high school in Korea somehow magically operates like an american public school. Sick of having tags flooded with Christmas fics every December where non Christian people in asian countries are celebrating a traditional christmas.

WHAT IS NORMAL FOR YOU IS NOT ALWAYS NORMAL FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD.

Yet for some reason that is the norm and it is what everyone does and how everyone writes and it is accepted by one and all on the internet because according to the internet the american way is the right way and everything else is not.

If I were to write fics about non Indian characters in countries outside of India and incorporate my culture in them it would be a crime. People would leave comment after comment going “um actually this is how things work” and others may even send me hate tell me I’m stupid and I shouldn’t write and so on and so forth. Yet, the fact that fandom is so Anglo centric and has almost entirely whitewashed and westernized non white and non american works and characters is “just how things are.”