if I cannot find the good in life, I will make it

Parent: I want my wife to take one of my infant daughters to the UK and I’ll take the other one and we will never see each other again.

there was a point in time where i found tiny depressed looking weevils under just about every oak leaf i flipped, but this Coeliodes was probably my favorite. no longer in the classic scrunched up seed pose that i tended to find them in but also not really alarmed by my presence, just gazing at nothing in particular. contemplative, even

Literacy crisis WHO? This was said in the most vocal fried Californian accent ever. I hope The Girls enjoy some Russian lit this summer.

Like, ok, a lot of SFF includes characters getting suddenly elevated to a position of power they weren’t socialized for, and every time it happens I want to see how it changes their relationships and how they deal with it when the way people treat them shifts.

And I don’t mean in like a hackneyed kid’s-cartoon “the family got rich suddenly and now the kid’s an asshole” way, I mean… well, you’re now Everyone’s Boss, or you’re the guy who just became vitally important to the rebellion because you can blow up planets with your mind. Maybe your closest friends would still be casual with you but a lot of other people won’t be, and while you can encourage people to not get overly bootlicky to you, the one thing you can’t do is demand they be casual since that is just as much an abuse of power as demanding groveling.

Which is why it’s so annoying when a story chickens out and goes with either “this character is an asshole so they demand formality and therefore groveling” or “this character is nice so they don’t demand anything and everyone treats them the same. Don’t worry about it.”

Like, formality around people in positions of power didn’t develop solely because in ye olden days we had the divine right of kings. That’s part of it sure, but formality is also protective, and I don’t mean for the monarch. If there are rules about how you interact with someone below you in a hierarchy, those rules protect both of you. It makes it easier to not accidentally fuck up an interaction in a way that gets someone stabbed by a bodyguard, or referred to HR.