always cook pancakes in your underwear

The amount of serotonin it gave me to watch this grandma react to her new galaxy light 🥺

It’s dark in here- *gasps in excitement* OHH SARAH!

OHH SARAH! *giggles like a little kid* OHhHhH!!

My ceiling is filled with blue lights… and stars and everything!!

OH Sarah! I can go to bed at night looking at this. OHHHH it’s beautiful!

It has a buncha colors but these are my faves

Purple bc insanely gorgeous 100/10 just beautiful

Then the light blue/green makes me feel like I’m underwater, 11/10 love to imagine I’m drowning

With its 13,676-kilometer coastline and an archipelago of around 6,000 islands (227 inhabited), Greece has an astonishing variety of scuba diving on offer, from big wall drop-offs and deepwater caves, to ancient wrecks and coral reefs.

It may be unsurprising to learn that before 2005, scuba diving in Greece faced severe restrictions. A seafaring nation with a long and rich maritime past, the high concentrations of antiquities and historic wrecks forced the authorities, fearing sites would be looted, to impose a near blanket ban on scuba diving at many areas around the mainland and islands.

Me: *forgives them immediately*

When an English teacher, or reader, taught or picked up 1984, it wasn’t with the intention they were going to love the protagonist. They picked it up with the intention of reading a whole story and trying to grasp the theme or catharsis from the story. If the protagonist was a *shitty* person it played into the the themes or the story, because it wasn’t about morally judging the book or *liking* or feeling attachment to the protagonist. Sometimes and often times, books were just about gaining another perspective. 

No one read Lolita expecting to endear, or like, or be inspired by Humbert. You are supposed to be upset by his behavior, you don’t read Lolita with the intention of being inspired. You read it to learn more about what the fuck is going on inside someone’s head when they behave like that. How children get sucked into abusive situations. Or read “The Great Gatsby” not because they want to fall in love with Gatsby or Nick, but to better understand and analyze the experience of the 1920s or destitution of the American Dream. 

A lot of internet and fandom culture has changed that though. When we say something like “I love the Great Gatsby” it comes with the idea or association that means you must *love* or relate to one of the characters. And maybe you do, but the first assumption is not longer about the quality of the work or themes, or cathartic impact-it’s about character admiration. And with that character admiration, in tumblr stan culture, or kin culture, or exalting characters with fanart/romance/so on you don’t just ‘admire’ or find that character ‘compelling’ it now translates to ‘you LOVE that character’ or you ‘DIRECTLY relate to that character.’ 

You can’t say “I love how Humbert is written, it’s so fascinating and dark”, without it directly translating you somehow relate to a child abuser or condone his actions. Taking in media has become an act of worship and connection. We no longer watch meant to just see the story as a whole, we watch expecting to connect to a character and if we offer them our “worship” as it’s become, as opposed to just attention or interest study as it traditionally was, it means we are condoning the character or saying we directly empathize with all their actions. 

I think that’s why there is often now so much fuss over *toxic* characters or not. Or whether that classical novel is showing good or bad things anymore. We’re treating the characters as people we should love or want to draw or write about. Sometimes a story is just about getting the the theme or catharsis or learning another perspective. We don’t NEED to like the character. Or we don’t HAVE to like a character to be impressed by how they’re written or intrigued by their behavior. 

Thst is why so many people are ready to cancel books, actors, and ideas the moment there’s the merest mention of immorality. To continue engaging with the piece is to be corrupted. To investigate the truth of the claims of immorality is to be corrupted. To even have engaged with the piece in the past when it was considered “pure” is to be retroactively corrupted. And if you’ve been corrupted, the belief is, then you must be wholly rejected by those who know you so that THEY are not corrupted.

It’s not that people are unable to perform critical analysis anymore. The critical analysis isn’t the point. The point is, “I was told 1984 contains rape apologism and if i do anything except utterly denounce the book, my community will reject me for being corrupted.”