moonshine623

My list of absolute must-read marauders fics in no particular order. I have an addiction so feel free to send me your fic recs :)

1. All the Young Dudes by MsKingBean89

526k words, wolfstar, canon compliant

2. All the Young Dudes - Sirius’s Perspective by @rollercoasterwords

628k words, wolfstar, canon compliant

3. The Cadence of Part-time Poets by @motswolo

979k words, wolfstar, band AU

4. Only the Brave by @solmussa

645k words, jegulus, wolfstar, background dorlene and rosekiller

- sixteen is such a pretty number. 16. like damn. sucks to be me right now. - I am now closer to my twenty-second birthday than my twelfth. that is simply too much for me to handle thank you - this is a very old thought but I will never be sixteen again. or fourteen. or eleven. or nine or five or two. how odd. - I’ll be the dancing queen in about 480 seconds. nice. - I feel like all teenage romcoms/adventures and shit happen when the protagonist is like sixteen/seventeen and it’s really illogical but I feel like I’ll never get that. sure I’ve had some exciting moments in my time but I’m missing out on so many chances to be the main character of my own story. it’s weird to think about. - it doesn’t feel like my birthday. it really just feels like another normal day and that scares me for some reason. like I’m missing out if I don’t make it an occasion. I know no one’s going to read this post but to me it feels like it counts for something. - age doesn’t really change anything, does it? I’m no different now than I will be in 5 minutes. but it feels so monumental, to tell people I’m seventeen not sixteen. I feel like being dramatic about this (hence this post). - you never really lose your younger selves, do you? I am an amalgamation of my fifteen, twelve, ten and six year old selves. - in a year I’ll be eighteen. an adult. god I am so not ready for this. who allowed this??

anyway it’s nearly 12:00 am now, and I’m in my last few seconds of being sixteen. cheers to almost adulthood, guys.

This year has been equal parts terrifying, exhausting, and exhilarating (ok I’m lying. It’s mostly been terrifying and exhausting). And right know I know that it will continue being terrifying and exhausting, at least for a while longer. And I know that I should probably prepare myself for a terrifying and exhausting life. Because life is hard, right?

And this makes me sound weak as hell, but also inescapably human, but I hate hard. I really do. I don’t want life to keep punching me in the face, with blood in my mouth, and having to keep getting back up and spitting on the ground and going for another round or whatever it is that people say perseverance is. I want life to be kind to me. I want mutual respect. I want challenges, I’m not saying I don’t, but I honestly don’t see the point of continuing if ‘my best years are behind me’ and it’s all grit and monotony from now on.

I know life will be hard. Life is hard for almost everyone. But why the fuck is it like that? Am I just unimaginably soft? Probably. But I still don’t think I’m being irrational for wanting a life that is as worth living as it is full of challenges. Right now I’m getting through it by squinting at the possibly miraged light at the end of the tunnel, but what if there is no end? What if after graduation, I get a few months of respite and then it’s just this for the rest of my life?

I guess I’d like to be optimistic. Adulthood comes with freedom, such a lot of freedom, and I have more privilege than most to be able to explore that freedom to a large extent. I’m grateful for being able to do that, I honestly am. And I’d like to work for that privilege in the future, because I want to use my privilege to benefit others (hello college essay material). Maybe life will be good. I have good people in my life right now, and honestly, they make it mostly worth it. I hope I continue to have good people in my life. I’ll work to make it that way.

This goes along with a very deep fear or intuition that something very very bad will happen if people do not suffer enough. It is a belief that the innately corrupt aspects of human nature will run rampant without "punishment" both in the strict sense and in a bigger, more general sense of "being taught a lesson" about how the world is harsh and cruel.

Conservatives who aren't, like, openly sadistic monsters can only resolve the cognitive dissonance by placing a very sharp dividing line between "kind/good/compassionate behavior as an individual" and "things that would improve society."

You, as a conservative individual, can donate to a charity or do something nice for someone, but this cannot be part of any responsibility you have as a member of your society. An individual can be kind, but it is either necessary to make sure the society individuals belong to is cruel, or at least necessary not to try to make it less cruel.

Conservative folks that don't consciously embrace cruelty must rely on historical illiteracy to call upon a monolithic " The Good Old Days" where the cruel and coercive aspects of society were stable and accepted enough that they were tempered by the benefits of true absolute conformity to traditional morality and gender roles+ the pleasures of a Simple Homesteading Life.

They rationalize coercive social standards through the argument that it only FEELS like coercion if you are introduced to another possibility, and if you immediately go limp in the jaws of the role predetermined for you, you will never want anything else. Women for instance were all perfectly happy being submissive housewives, back when there was no choice socially or legally. Everyone would be straight if no one was ever exposed to a happy openly gay person.

There is also a deep conviction that the human brain can only handle a small amount of pleasure or happiness above a neutral baseline, and "too much" sexual pleasure or mercy or relief from pain always either comes from or causes something grotesquely evil.

Their view of pleasure and happiness is very cynical and economic Law of Equivalent Exchange type stuff. Often, lots of sexual things are evil in the eyes of these people basically because they offer a suspicious amount of pleasure with no obvious "cost." They will SAY that sexual deviance is all these terrible things, but they believe that "deviant" sex feels good—too good, in fact, that's why it's that much more evil.

A lot of "trad" losers believe masturbation is from Satan because their schema for understanding the world can't accommodate the idea of something that gives you pleasure for "free," without hurting someone else or hurting you. For that pleasure to be "given" to you, it has to be "taken" from somewhere else (your soul or whatever)

It also works in reverse: the more you suffer in the present, through Hard Work or whatever, the more Good you will reap. It's a big reason why war and dying in combat are so romanticized by these people: that kind of Extreme Bad unlocks a level of Good not accessible otherwise (Freedom🎆🇺🇸)

The Secret History // TW: blood.

AERUH I tell thee, rosemary is like a pine but with a spicy taste.

MALUS                         Art thou to claim that needles base of pine have not a spice?

AERUH A needle base of pine is merely base.

MALUS ‘Tis not when held, comparing, to anthos.

AERUH My dearest Malus, needles thou'st eaten?

MALUS How many moons have we as friends seen rise? How many suns have we as friends seen set? Thou sixteen seasons in my heart I’ve held, and hope that I in thine hast been the same. With brotherhood as rich and old as this, thou needst not ask me such frivolities.

AERUH I know thou likely has, to tell the truth, but I would not assume.

MALUS                       Well, yes, I have. A multitude of types I’ve eaten too. I’ll tell thee now: the best (though it is strange) is single-leaf pinyon.

AERUH                     And it has spice?

MALUS I truly wish that I could tell thee this, but now, i'faith, I cannot fully tell, the difference in classifying thus: to say “has spice” or merely “herbal strength”.

AERUH To tell this tale most clearly it would seem that eating needles from a pine’s required.

MALUS Aye, it would seem that that’s the task at hand, but caution tells that this is what’s to do: eat only needles of the honest pine, and none of lying leaf with pinelike shape.

AERUH I’ll eat them all.

MALUS                   I prithee, stay thyself.

AERUH Roulette with leaves.

MALUS                     At least restrain from yew.

AERUH I’ll do my best.

MALUS                That is all can we do. The scholars tell that needles true of pine can be distinguished from the lying yew by sheathlike clothing all along the base; the yew has no such guard.

AERUH                          With this new truth I now will venture out into the wood and seek the pines and pinelike fakes alike to stare them down and learn their secret truths.

MALUS With this thou canst at long and weary last Discover for thyself my life’s own path.

Exeunt.

Enter MACDUFF.

Prouvaire dies second because there is no place for romanticism in war; on a battlefield, there is only blood and smoke and pain.

Éponine dies third because there should be no place for love in war. There should not be. And yet.

Gavroche dies fourth because war has no mercy. She cares not for the lives she takes.

Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly, and Courfeyrac die fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth because one cannot fight against war for she walks hand in hand with death.

Combeferre dies ninth because there is no place for gentleness in war; it is every man for himself.

Someone: Yeah, I agree.

Today on the almost-anniversary of the rebellion featured in Les Mis, the official Les Mis musical twitter account decided to celebrate by…….tweeting an enthusiastic endorsement of the Queen. This is despite the fact that the primary goal of the rebellion in Les Mis was to eliminate monarchy. Despite the fact that all the rebels in Les mis despise monarchy as an institution and consider it inherently evil/useless/tyrannical.

It feels like satire! The fact that they used an illustration of a poor starving child who in the novel symbolizes the Suffering of the French People under tyrants and tried to turn it into a piece of unironic pro-monarchy art is just? (???)

There’s something to say here about how everything political in Les Mis gets stripped away when it becomes a product for mass consumption, including the now relatively popular political belief that monarchy is a Bad form of government. Like the original novel DOES have issues with being overly middle-class/moderate at points— but there many aspects of the book that are radical and anti-authoritarian, and those aspects are always the first things to get sanded away. (See also: the way Les mis adaptations often portray police as Good Heroes fighting for Justice, which is the exact opposite of the ACAB point the book was going for )

But even putting aside all the political stuff—— the reason this fails is also because it’s Bad Branding? XD. If we’re gonna treat Les mis as a brand (ugh), then that brand is not about licking the monarchy’s boots. Les Mis’s brand is about the exact opposite of that. The kind of Jubilee joke I’d expect from a big corporate Les mis twitter account that understood its brand would be something like “Looks as if we haven’t got around to overthrowing that monarchy yet! But there’s still time!. ^_^ come see our next performance in {touring location}”. You know— a lighthearted toothless Revolution joke.

But we don’t even gET lighthearted toothless corporate Revolution jokes!

Instead we get this bafflingly sincere “I want to buy a queen plate with a picture of a starving child suffering under a tyrannical government on it.”

But YEAH my favorite thing about this tweet is the way everyone unanimously mocked it: