Random internet dweller

A Death that need not fight against you, that will often fight for you, because why not? It will gather you home eventually. Why not enjoy you first?

A Death that treasures those who fight it most ardently. That loves healers and defenders and survivalists and necromancers and mad scientists and immortal gods. That lets them pour everything they are into fighting it, denying it, adoring every desperate scrap of strength and will and brilliance and raw determination poured out against it. That catches you when your strength is done and all your will and brilliance run out, that gathers you close beneath a warm, dark cloak, and whispers well done, oh child, you were magnificent, well done.

A Death who will not seek to hasten an inevitable end, who will chastise those who seek to hasten it for others in Death’s stead, who will slowly and patiently plot and sow and siphon away from the great monsters of the world. Because who are they to hasten Death’s domain, who are they to deny Death its time and its place, who are they to cut short these vital glories that illuminate it so? Who are they to presume upon its will, that is so much larger and so much longer than theirs?

Who are they to call, and presume that Death, of all beings, should obey?

A Death that is not a hunter but a gatherer, who is always and eternal, who loves you, and can afford to wait. A Death who will fight for you and defend you, who will place its hand upon those who would speed you to its embrace, who has no need to rush you, only to greet you when you call.

A Death who is kind.

And patient.

And, before all and above all,

Gandalf: *hurriedly glances at Thranduil. the king of Mirkwood’s eyes shine with curiosity and greed, but not recognition, nor the terrible lust that overtook Feanor and his sons. right, right, he was never in Thingol’s court while the jewel that Luthien and Beren took was there. we’re good. we’re good for now*

Gandalf: [mental image of a goddam Silmaril in hobbit hands, labelled “thisfuckingrockagain.jpg”]

Galadriel, who watched 95% of her family slaughter everyone within 100 miles for several thousand years over these things, including each other and themselves: no.

Elrond, who was very nearly one of those people slaughtered, and did watch most of his town be killed before he and his twin were kidnapped for a while: Absolutely Fucking Not.

Gandalf: Apparently fucking yes. The legendary Arkenstone-

Galadriel: You’ve got to be kidding me.

Elrond: Thorin Oakenshield has a Silmaril right now?

Gandalf: No, no.

Gandalf: Bilbo stole it.

Elrond: *wordless sputtering*

Gandalf: @Galadriel [information packet: BilboBagginsoftheShire.pdf]

Galadriel: Oh yes, Belladonna’s boy, you were telling me about him last winter. 

Galadriel: Btw, orc+warg army probably coming your way. Spotted it in the mirror last night. Thank goodness we dealt with Dol Goldur at least, huh?

Gandalf: [thisfuckingrockagain.jpg]

Gandalf: [oncomingorcwargarmy.jpg]

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

First, in order to be Nobody, Odysseus must have already left Troy, been fucking around to find out, and ended up meeting and tricking Polyphemus - and most likely being cursed by Poseidon, which is the whole inciting event for the Odyssey.

Second, since this is after the fall of Troy, Cassandra’s already been taken captive by Agamemnon, so there’s an urgent ticking clock for Odysseus to get to her before Clytemnestra and Aegisthus do (and kill her), while he’s doomed to be bad at sailing and essentially marooned.

Cassandra, having *just* been taken captive, *during* the final sack of Troy, is ranting up a storm about how profoundly they’re all going to regret this because why the fuck not at this point. 

Odysseus, who has not lived this long by ignoring important stuff like ranting seers, goes over to ask, you know, what’s up. 

Cassandra tells him that nobody ever believes her when she makes prophecies but for the record HIS FUTURE IS TERRIBLE. 

Odysseus may not have encountered Polyphemus yet, but he’s still the guy who came up with ‘Nobody’ as a workaround on the spur of the moment. A seer saying ‘Nobody believes me, there’s a curse’ is absolutely enough to give this very clever man the idea to call himself ‘Nobody’ a little ahead of schedule and ask for more details. He was smart enough to think of it in the original timeline, he can do it now!

Cassandra, who has no reason to lie at this point, gives him the low-down. 

Odysseus, reassured that Agamemnon is not going to live much longer in any case and also fuck that guy, basically shoves Cassandra into a bag and escapes with her before Agamemnon can catch him. There’s a fair bit of chaos at this point and he’s one of the sneakiest people alive, he can manage it.

Cassandra’s advice gets Odysseus home in record time because she is able to keep him away from Polyphemus and thus Poseidon’s curse, along with all the other things that go wrong. 

Odysseus thinks Cassandra is GREAT. After what happened with Apollo he is WAY too smart to try to get into her robes, but she’s smart, she’s gifted, and she’s been treated ridiculously badly by pretty much everyone. He decides to adopt her - what better gift to bring his son than a future-seeing sister with absolutely no loyalties left to anyone else, right? - and presents her to his wife as a new daughter. Penelope, being pretty sharp herself, can really see the advantage to a gifted seer nobody else can take advantage of who is also Extremely Grateful and Loyal to Odysseus and his family and is down with this plan. 

So Odysseus comes home with some hot young thang who is Extremely Grateful and Loyal to him, and is about to get her hackles up about the hypocrisy of him chasing away her suitors who had only just begun to gather when Odysseus ups and outs with, “I want to adopt her.”

Penelope reassesses the situation.

She’s a sweet if deluded dear, and it is just like her idiot husband to want to take care of the sweet and the deluded, is that not why he went to war in the first place? Bundle of idiots, the lot of them.

And aside from the nonsense about seeing the future, Cassandra is quite good about being a princess and developing a relationship with Telemachus.

“…. yeah, okay, honestly there are worse gifts you could have brought home.” 

I do like the idea that Penelope would be willing to take the crazy kid on because honestly, the poor kid seems nice and it’s reasonable that if she helped Odysseus somehow they should do something for her.

But if you think Odysseus wouldn’t do the Nobody Routine with Penelope and Telemachus so they can have their Own Private Always Correct Seer, you clearly don’t think he’s as smart as he’s supposed to be. Like I said, he’s VERY SMART, he would have figured the Nobody thing out VERY QUICKLY.

“Just introduce yourselves as Nobody, it’ll make sense in a minute.” 

“Dad, this is kind of weird - “ 

“I have had this argument with the WHOLE DAMN CREW like five times already just DO IT.” 

*ten minutes later* 

“OH WOW APOLLO IS QUITE AN ASSHOLE HUH.”

“If you’d been in the war *I* just went to, the idea that a god would completely destroy one young woman’s life just to cover up the fact that he treated her badly would not surprise you EVEN A LITTLE BIT. The Gods don’t treat people very well. Except Athena, she’s been pretty good to me.” 

Cassandra, a completely new an unknown person, is enlisted to waltz up to the front door and knock. She, being very pretty and female, is promptly harassed by every drunken asshole there.

She looks at them all trashing their King’s house, harassing his servants, and trying to bang his wife, and says, without a hint of irony:

“When he gets back, Odysseus is gonna kill you.”

They do not believe her.

Despite it not actually being a prophecy, it does come true.

…as an aside, someone should totally make a series of this. It’s just Odysseus and co. trying to rules lawyer their way out of a bunch of ancient curses. Like, Odysseus is still fated to encounter all the problems of his voyage, but instead of him going to them, he stays on land with his wife and kid by his side, and all of the curses end up washing onto his shores.

For example, I’m thinking Circe gets bored on her island without some poor Greek King around to talk to, so she decides to travel and is knocked by a storm all the way to Ithaca.

She’s naturally pissed and angry gods don’t mix well with natives.

So Odysseus and co ask Cassandra what to do, and she’s like “Sorry, chief, but Penelope’s really not gonna like how you handled this one the first time around…”

The plot twist is that apparently Circe is bisexual and seamstresses turn her on, and Penelope also loves Circe’s habit of turning annoying people into animals, so Penelope and Circe get along much better than expected.

It helps that Penelope’s tongue is just as quick and flexible as Odysseus’s. She sweet talked her way around a hundred horny assholes for ten years. She has Circe wrapped around her little finger within a day. And she has other things wrapped around her within a week.

We can always decide later that we don't need something we archived.

Like, if we archive a website that's full of THE WORST STUFF, like it turns out it's borderline illegal bot-made spam art, we can delete it. Gone.

We can also chose not to curate. You can make a list of the 100 Best Fanfic and just quietly not link to or mention the 20,000 RPFs of bigoted youtubers eating each other. No problem!

We can also make things not publicly available. This happens surprisingly often: like, sometimes there'll be a YouTube channel of alt-right bigotry that gets taken down by YouTube, but someone gives a copy to the internet archive, and they don't make it publicly available. Because it might be useful for researchers, and eventually historians, it's kept. But putting it online for everyone to see? That's just be propaganda for their bigotry. So it's hidden, for now. You can ask to see it, but you need a reason.

And we can say all these things, we can chose to delete it later, we can not curate it, we can hide it from public view... But we only have these options BECAUSE we archived it.

If we didn't archive it, we have no options. It is gone. I'm focusing on the negative here, but think about the positive side:

What if it turns out something we thought was junk turns out to be amazing new art?

What if something we thought of as pointless and not worth curating turns out to be influential?

What if something turns out to be of vital historical importance, the key that is used to solve a great mystery, the Rosetta stone for an era?

All of those things are great... If we archived it when we could.

Because this is an asymmetric problem:

If we archived it and it turns out it's not useful, we can delete.

If we didn't archive it and it turns out it is useful, OOPS!

You can't unlose something that's been lost. It's gone. This is a one way trip, it's already fallen off the cliff. Your only hope is that you're wrong about it being lost, and there is actually still a copy somewhere. If it's truly lost, your only option is to build a time machine.

And this has happened! There are things lost, so many of them that we know of, and many more we don't know of. There are BOOKS OF THE BIBLE referenced in the canon that simply do not exist anymore. Like, Paul says to go read his letter to the Laodiceans, and what did that letter say? We don't know. It's gone.

The most celebrated playwright in the English tradition has plays that are just gone. You want to perform or watch Love's Labours Won? TOO FUCKING BAD.

Want to watch Lon Cheyney's London After Midnight, a mystery-horror silent film from 1927? TOO BAD. The MGM vault burnt down in 1965 and the last known copy went up in smoke.

If something still exists, if it still is kept somewhere, there is always an opportunity to decide if it's worthy of being remembered. It can still be recognized for its merits, for its impact, for its importance, or just what it says about the time and culture and people who made it, and what they believed and thought and did. It can still be a useful part of history, even if we decide it's a horrible thing, a bigoted mess, a terrible piece of art. We have the opportunity to do all that.

If it's lost... We are out of options. All we can do is research it from how it affected other things. There's a lot of great books and plays and films and shows that we only know of because other contemporary sources talked about them so much. We're trying to figure out what it was and what it did, from tracing the shadow it cast on the rest of culture.

This is why archivists get anxious whenever people say "this thing is bad and should not be preserved". Because, yeah, maybe they're right. Maybe we'll look back and decide "yeah, that is worthless and we shouldn't waste the hard drive or warehouse space on it".

But if they're wrong, and we listen to them, and don't archive... We don't get a second chance at this. And archivists have been bitten too many times by talk of "we don't need copies, the original studio has the masters!" (it burnt down), or "this isn't worth preserving, it's just some damn silly fad" (the fad turned out to be the first steps of a cultural revolution), or "this media is degenerate/illegal/immoral" (it turns out those saying that were bigots and history doesn't agree with their assessment).

So we archive what we can. We can always decide later if it doesn't need preserving. And being a responsible archivist often means preserving things but not making them publicly available, or being selective in what you archive (I back up a lot of old computer hard drives. Often they have personal photos and emails and banking information! That doesn't get saved).

But it's not really a good idea to be making quality or moral judgements of what you archive. Because maybe you're right, maybe a decade or two later you'll decide this didn't need to be saved. And you'll have the freedom to make that choice. But if you didn't archive it, and decide a decade later you were wrong... It's just gone now. You failed.

Because at the end of the day I'd rather look at an archive and see it includes 10,000 things I think are worthless trash, than look at an archive of on the "best things" and know that there are some things that simply cannot be included. Maybe they were better, but can't be considered as one of the best... Because they're just gone. No one has read them, no one has been able to read them.

We have a long history of losing things. The least we can do going forward is to try and avoid losing more. And leave it up to history to decide if what we saved was worth it.

My dream is for a future where critics can look at stuff made in the present and go "all of this was shit. Useless, badly made, bigoted, horrible. Don't waste your time on it!"

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

The current bright and terrible-on-purpose disaster, A, is aware of the ADHD diagnosis but has apparently been told nothing about the disability. So a lot of our conversations go like this:

Me: Well, I'd ask you why you decided to start making richly detailed but extremely inappropriate jokes during class, but I'm pretty sure the answer is that someone started yelling at you for doing it before you realized that you were.

A, leaning backward, looking concerned: Are you following me?

Me: Yes, that's what I do with the spare time I don't have during the day, follow aggravating children around. We have so few of them here.

A, put out either because I've called him aggravating or because he's not special and aggravating: Sarcasm isn't very nice, Ms. T.

Me, sarcastically: I'm so sorry. Maybe you looked at the work first, thought boring, and then decided to be an enormous brat.

A: You can read minds?!

--

Me: Clearly we need executive dysfunction strategies for you, because if we don't get in front of it you'll be an adult who sits on their sofa for forty minutes yelling at herself to do the dishes and never does them.

A, trying to politely muffle laughter: Are you doing all right, Ms. T?

Me: Out of dishes, but fine. What's working in your classes? Your Literature grade is good, why are you doing the reading?

A looks left. Right. Up. At his phone.

Me: ... You aren't doing the reading, are you? The other kids ask questions because they don't understand it, and you figure out what it has to be about from the answers and never read.

A: Are you in my Lit class??

--

Me: Okay, look, ADHD brains are weird, and we tend to get them from our families, so these -

A, immediately: My dad.

Me, derailed from my drug interaction speech: Yeah, okay. When your dad has coffee, does he get calmer?

The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under "Mysterious circumstances".

But he leaves in his will that his fortune won't be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.

The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can't go through until the Duke's fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.

Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.

The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that "Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*" AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway. (They all know she's going to kill the girl, but they're getting a cut.) The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.

There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.

BLACK MAGIC

(Come on, it's Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)

[Yes, I had to do it. Yes, all the voices are me. Lyrics under the cut.]

Kermit: it’s the muppets show!

Female Chorus:

It’s time to burn the incense,

It’s time to slay the sheep,

It’s time to wake the muppets from a thousand years of sleep!

Male Chorus:

It’s time to raze existence,

It’s time to banish light,

It’s time to call the void in on the muppets show tonight!

Statlor: So tell us, where’s your god now?

Waldorf: I guess you’ll never know

Statlor: your life becomes a torture

Both: when we begin the show!

Chorus: And now let’s get things started!

Audience: Why don’t you get things started?

Kermit: It’s time to get things started,

All:

On the aberrational, no-salvational, incantational, muppetational,

Maleficent is certainly someone you wouldn’t want at a party, but she’s also someone powerful enough that only a fool would ever dare treat her with such blatant disrespect. The only way the King and Queen could possibly have gotten away with not inviting Maleficent was to not invite any of the fairies at all; inviting the other fairies and excluding her is explicitly taking sides in the conflict between the fairy factions.

Which means they made themselves her sworn enemies, and she responded by treating them as such from then on. If you actually get into analyzing the social dynamics of the scene, it’s very clear that Maleficent was willing to show mercy at first by giving the King and Queen a chance to apologize for their disrespect to her. She doesn’t curse Aurora until after she gives them that chance and they throw it back in her face with further disrespect.

From the medieval perspective, those four fairies were all exactly alike - the blue or pink ones would’ve cursed the baby just the same if they hadn’t been invited.

But yeah, sign me up for the AU where they did invite Maleficent and she not only gives Aurora an awesome present but becomes a mentor and they end up ruling all the land with an iron fist.

please pay attention to me.

reblog i beg you?

I'm actually curious about that, I've never been in any fandom long term. What was 2012-2015 Tumblr up to, and why was it erased?

Porn, queer theory, sex positivity, and beginners’ attempts at racial justice.

Most of it either disappeared, deleted, or died after the 2018 porn ban and the subsequent antisexual crush of SESTA/FOSTA.

Followed in rapid succession by all the US fascism.

There’s this notion that fandom is separate from the greater culture but it’s really, really not.

The same political forces that led a bunch of basically normal but newly impoverished people to join Qanon and become screeching bigots also led fandoms to rephrase ‘I don’t like this ship’ as ‘this is pedophilia.’

Nothing new, to be clear. People have been doing that for centuries.

The difference is a matter of centralization and scale. Tumblr WAS fandom, it was where fandom occurred, for about 6 years. Multifandom and crossover content in particular is just GONE. There weren’t places for that to move to as everyone dissipated into separate, semipublic, and even MORE ephemeral spaces like discord.

It’s hard for me to describe, especially unmedicated, but the elimination of huge swathes of fandom in late 2018 just.

clear. People have been doing

that for centuries.

HAIKU BOT CAME IN TO PICK

APART THAT LONG RANT