First of all, I’m the first person to say that comparing the Death Eaters to Nazis is politically inaccurate and honestly kind of lazy. The structure of Voldemort’s movement is not equivalent to historical fascism in the classical sense. Fascist movements like Nazism relied on mass propaganda, populist rhetoric, appealing to the working class, mobilising huge portions of the population through nationalist discourse, fearmongering and social alienation. Voldemort does not do that. Voldemort recruits primarily through aristocratic blood supremacy networks and old-money elitism. It’s a cult-like supremacist inner circle, not a mass political party built around public mobilisation.

But even putting that aside entirely, what genuinely blows my mind is how people talk about Severus joining the Death Eaters as if he was some fully formed 35-year-old man with a stable support system, financial security and emotional maturity making calculated ideological decisions. He was seventeen. Seventeen. Poor. Isolated. Abused. Socially alienated. Raised in violence. Repeatedly humiliated. Surrounded by people who either enabled his abuse or directly participated in it. And the only group offering him protection, belonging, validation and power was a radicalised extremist circle. And people act shocked that he got recruited?

I’m sorry, but some of you desperately need to leave fandom spaces and interact with actual human beings. Because in the real world, vulnerable teenagers get radicalised all the time. Into cults. Into gangs. Into extremist politics. Into abusive religious groups. Into criminal organisations. That’s literally how recruitment works. You target vulnerable people who have unmet emotional needs and no stable support systems.

And what makes this discourse even more exhausting is how deeply classist it is. Because let’s be honest here: if Severus had been a rich traumatised aristocratic boy from a respected family, half of fandom would be writing 800k redemption arcs about his “complexity.” But because he’s poor, socially awkward, visibly traumatised and emotionally dysregulated, people reduce him to “evil incel nazi.” Which is funny coming from fandom spaces that constantly scream about mental health awareness, trauma, neurodivergence and social justice until the traumatised person is unpleasant, angry, difficult or comes from a background they subconsciously look down on.

Because here’s the thing people don’t like admitting: trauma victims are not always nice. They are not always soft. They are not always emotionally articulate. They are not always healthy. Sometimes they’re bitter. Defensive. Volatile. Socially maladjusted. Hypervigilant. Sometimes they lash out. Sometimes they become deeply unlikeable before they heal , if they ever heal at all.

And Severus never got the chance to heal.

Some of you genuinely talk about a heavily traumatised, abused teenager recruited into extremism the same way conservatives talk about poor kids getting recruited into gangs: with zero structural analysis, zero empathy and zero understanding of how human vulnerability actually functions.

And yes, people can change. This is another thing fandom spaces seem incapable of understanding. Human beings are not static moral caricatures. I’m nearly thirty. I have met people who left cults. People who left extremist political groups. People who escaped abusive ideologies. People who were raised in deeply reactionary environments and later completely changed as adults. That happens constantly in real life. But apparently fandom morality has become so puritanical and chronically online that some of you think a person should be permanently defined by the worst thing they were manipulated into at seventeen, even if the rest of their life is spent trying to atone for it.

And honestly? A lot of this discourse reeks of people who have never interacted meaningfully with anyone outside their own social bubble. Because if you actually work with vulnerable people, poor communities, abuse victims, former addicts, ex-prisoners, traumatised individuals or radicalisation survivors, your perspective becomes a lot less simplistic very quickly. But instead fandom spaces are full of people who claim to care about nuance, rehabilitation, trauma and systemic violence while simultaneously reducing a traumatised abuse victim to a one-dimensional moral failure because he wasn’t “nice enough” about his suffering.

 - Marilyn Monroe, last taped interview, days before her death

Also:

As one of the biggest Ella Fitzgerald fans, she literally helped desegregate her performances. Ella was not allowed to play at Mocambo because of her race.

Ella Fitzgerald: “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt… she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.” thisisnotmyfairytaleendingg (Source: dmvnessa)

ALSO:

In August 1956, Monroe began filming The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier staring and directing. The production was complicated by conflicts between him and Monroe. He angered her with the patronizing statement “All you have to do is be sexy” and his attempts to get her to replicate Vivien Leigh’s interpretation. She became pregnant and miscarried during the production, which heavily worsened her depression and increased her drug abuse.

She was on courses of strong medication, had invasive surgery to try and limit the damage caused, and despite trying for a baby numerous times, suffered many miscarriages because of her condition. The miscarriages especially sent her into deep depression, since she desperately wanted to be a mother.

There is speculation that the condition may have been one of the triggers in her drug dependency as well, because when you have endo, you will take whatever you can to stop. it. hurting.

Because they've never met or spoke with a scientist.

Nifty little language game here.

I can read back to 1500 with basically no difficulty

at 1400 I have to read slowly and carefully, but I can understand all of it save a couple words

at 1300 I can still comprehend most of it if I read slowly, but a much larger percentage of the words are unfamiliar to me, even with context

as someone who has also read a fair amount of mcu fics over the years, it has always annoyed me so much how team iron man supporters baby tony stark and villainise team cap because they dared to disagree with the narcissistic man child. i will skip basically any fic that has ‘not team cap friendly’ tagged cause it’s just absurd to me the way people portray team cap. tony stark is an incredibly flawed character and it just irks me the way his fans overlook all of his flaws and villainise anyone who doesnt worship the ground he walks on.

And also not to mention that if irc, Natasha dumped all SHIELD/SHIELDRA files on the internet in 2014 so Tony had pratically 2/3 YEARS to see anything about his Howard Stark who’d been a co-founder. Zemo did that in, what, one year post-Sokovia? Tony does not need to be hand-fed information and infantilized like so many of his fans think—this is the same guy who openly, and dare I say, with irreverent glee, hacked SHIELD’s database on the Helicarrier in the FIRST Avengers movie! We’re supposed to believe he hacked the Pentagon at like 15 on a dare (or because he was bored) so you KNOW he has the capability to figure it out on HIS OWN.

He some twenty years or more to suspect foul play in his parents’ deaths and he DIDN’T.

I was just doing some nosing around on Wikipedia and found out that there was actually an International Eugenics Conference in NYC when Steve Rogers was 14 (MCU timeline) years old.  He would have already heard a lot about how he was considered unfit and unworthy of life by the Eugenics movement popular at that time.  But how much worse would that have been? 

If you think he wasn’t fully aware of the bullshit they were spouting daily, you’re dead wrong. He’d hear more than ever about how people like him should be forcibly sterilized and were nothing more than a burden on society. 14 is such an impressionable age.  I don’t know how he wasn’t ground down by that.  It shows what inner strength and determination that sickly young man had.

So goddamn right Steve Rogers knows what it’s like to be bullied by an entire social movement and how wrong the “Prevailing Wisdom” can be and how you better stand up for what you believe or the next thing you know there are concentration camps and madman running entire countries.

I sure do. I think she was meant to stand in for about 99% of the people Steve came into daily contact with at that point in his life.

And it is kind of “funny” how none of the movies since CA:TFA have even touched on the trauma of Steve’s early life.

“Who are you to stand so fearsome

With your wavy locks of auburn hair and eyes of emerald green?”

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

after losing control of the signal fire there’s a FUCKING TIMESKIP and when the next chapter starts everyone’s hair is several inches longer and their clothes have rotted to shreds and they’re still just kind of chilling!!!!

IT TAKES THE TERRIBLE IMPERIALISM MIND-POISONED EXCESSIVELY BRITISH BOYS IN THE ACTUAL BOOK SEVERAL MONTHS TO COMMIT A SINGLE ACT OF INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE, EVEN THE ONE (1) CHILD WRITTEN AS AN ACTUAL SOCIOPATH

AND then when they DO turn on each other it is because

THERE’S AN UNSPECIFIED WORLD WAR HAPPENING

AND A PILOT’S CORPSE CRASH LANDS ON THE ISLAND POST-DOGFIGHT AND THE CHILDREN MISTAKE THE PARACHUTE FOR A MONSTER AND SPIRAL INTO PARANOIA

BECAUSE CHILDREN INHERIT THE LEGACY AND TRAUMA OF VIOLENCE FROM THE ADULTS WAGING WAR AROUND THEM

HURR DURR IN THE REAL WORLD IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN LIKE IN LORD OF THE FLIES -

yes. yes he did. i’m also gonna direct you to the real life ‘lord of the flies’ which occured in the 1960s, when six tongan schoolboys got stranded on a desert island for over a year before being rescued by an australian fisherman (who, it should be noted, later took on all six as crewmembers because the reason they were out in the first place was because they wanted to see the world, and named his ship the Ata after the island they were stranded on). nobody died. the only injuries that occurred were accidental, and when one of the boys broke his leg falling down a cliff, the others braced it and looked after him so well that it healed perfectly. if they argued, then they would literally go to opposite sides of the island until they’d cooled off. after leaving the island, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. here’s a photo of them as adults, with their rescuer (who is third from the left) and other members of his crew.

> looks inside

Short story: under 7,500

Novelette: between 7,500 and 17,500

Novella: between 17,500 and 40,000

Novel: over 40,000

Novels around 40k words, or less:

CS Lewis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 38k

F Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. 47k

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 46k

George Orwell. Animal Farm. 29k

John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. 28k

It just shows that a story can be told well with 30-40 thousand words….