Travels with Stormcrow into the Internet

A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)

A color (Pinky, Hazel)

A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)

A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)

A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)

Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)

A trait (Lucky, Buddy)

Something else

If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^

Victorian drag portraits, anyone?

These photos (1, 2, 3) from the James Gardiner Collection are open access and available to view on JSTOR courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Dating from the 1850s to 1890s, the hand-colored portraits come from a Victorian album of 35 cartes de visite showing private and theatrical female impersonation. While many of these performances were intended as entertainment, the images also gesture toward gender nonconformity and queer expression.

This isn’t about Israel or Palestine, this is about Pride and celebrating that. Banning Jewish Pride flags is antisemitic. The Star of David is the symbol of the Jewish religion.

We feel unwelcome in our own community and no one seems to notice. Please share this so people can understand.

I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"

The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.

So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.

That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.

And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?

Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.

So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?

It doesn’t mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: “It’s too late for me, son”.

But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesn’t kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks it’ll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because it’s the right, kind thing to do.

Vader/Anakin isn’t fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.

And at the end of his life he took the terrifying step of freeing himself from it in a desperate effort to prevent a loved one from suffering. Should he have done that before? Absolutely. Could he have? I doubt it.

Few people---thankfully---are given the necessity of enduring their own failures at such a magnitude. It is NOT always easy to be good, and sometimes someone puts real effort into making it seemingly impossible. Humans often fail in that regard. Often.

But he saved the galaxy from the NEXT twenty years of the rule of the Sith, the absence of the Jedi, the overwhelm of the Empire, the destruction of more planets by the Death Star.

The fact he didn't save the galaxy from the FIRST twenty years of it doesn't erase that.

Leia doesn't have to forgive him, or see him as her father. But the message of Star Wars is, as stated above, that you're never too late to do better. Even, or perhaps especially, if you think it can never be enough.

Hell, sometimes the previous failure is what puts you in place to be a current success at it. Just as Han Solo's departure from the battle of Yavin let him enter the battle completely unexpectedly and land the hit that saved Luke from Vader in the trench run, Vader's presence as the Emperor's second-in-command and Sith apprentice, his loyalty to the Empire unimpeachable, put him in a position to successfully kill the Emperor---and, being the other Sith himself, to end their reign.

‘Cause sometimes the stories of how OCs come to be are just as interesting as the OCs, themselves. Tell me how your virtual kids came into the world.

What was the first element of your OC that you remember considering (name, appearance, backstory, etc.)? 

Did you design them with any other characters/OCs from their universe in mind? 

How did you choose their name? 

In developing their backstory, what elements of the world they live in played the most influential parts? 

Is there any significance behind their hair color? 

Is there any significance behind their eye color? 

Is there any significance behind their height? 

What (if anything) do you relate to within their character/story? 

Are they based off of you, in some way? 

If they have an LI, how much of their character is tailored to be compatible to that person? 

Did you know what the OC’s sexuality would be at the time of their creation? 

What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)? 

How far past the canon events that take place in their world have you extended their story, if at all? 

If you had to narrow it down to 2 things that you MUST keep in mind while working with your OC, what would those things be? 

What is something about your OC can make you laugh? 

What is something about your OC can make you cry? 

Is there some element you regret adding to your OC or their story? 

What is the most recent thing you’ve discovered about your OC? 

Federico Castellón's illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe's The Mask of the Red Death, 1968-69

The figure was tall and gaunt…

stop him and strip him, I say…

the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet…

-the idea that women are less capable of abuse than men is an extension of the idea that women are weaker than men.

-the refusal to acknowledge men's mental health and emotions as valid things worthy of support comes from the idea that emotions are inherently feminine in nature and having them is, again, a sign of weakness.

-the treatment of men as generic and expendable and women as special contributes to the idea that women should have less representation because we already "have enough" and "don't need more" and we gotta "even the playing field" or some dumb shit, so any need or want for more attention, regardless of reason, is attributed to "pointless attention-seeking".

-all of this puts trans men in an even more uncomfortable position, because either they're made an exception (because they ~aren't really men~ you see) or they're viewed as self-hating misogynists because why else would you "choose" to be the Trash Gender (tm)?

-the idea that men are inherently terrible only serves to excuse men for being terrible. because, hey, they can't help it, so why bother trying, right? part of holding men accountable for their awful actions is believing they can in fact be better.

-the reason "not all men" is so frustrating to hear is because it's often used in poor faith to derail much needed conversations about toxic masculinity and how it manifests, not because the phrase itself is untrue.

-continuing from the trans men thing, misandry can and does make it harder for trans men to come out, for fear of the aforementioned responses.