the courage of stars

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

6/14/2026

- - -

Every morning, Zelda woke with fire and malice in her throat.

 It was something strange to cough, to gasp, to choke on something that existed only within her mind. It was odd, a curiosity—but one she couldn’t care to study as she hunched over the crevice between the bed and the wall for the second week in a row, trying desperately to stifle her coughing and hide her sweaty face with her hair so that Link wouldn’t see. She coughed, and scraped her tongue with her teeth, fighting to rid her mouth of a phantom substance she tasted with every breath she took, and every morsel of food she chewed.

 She couldn’t, of course. It was impossible to rinse out something that didn’t exist. Even as she took the proffered cup of water Link had fetched the moment he noticed her stirring (knowing, she knew with shame, what was going to come next) and gulped it down her burning throat, she knew it was no use. One hundred years of saturating her lungs in Ganon’s essence with every breath she took meant she’d never really be rid of the taste.

 But even so, she drank the water, and smiled in thanks at Link as she handed the cup back to him. He smiled, too, but it didn’t mitigate the concern in his eyes any more than the water had mitigated the flavor behind her teeth.

 ———

 For one hundred years, Zelda did not eat.

 She did not sleep.

 She did not dream.

 At least, not in any real sense. There were moments, especially as the decades ticked past, that she let her consciousness wander. She thought back to days—to years long past, to faces she could scarcely remember and voices that were now nothing more than bad echoes of her own. She checked in on Link, as much as one could check in on someone in a coma, and tried not to let herself feel disappointed each time she received nothing but silence in return. She wondered how Hyrule was faring, in the wake of the calamity; wondered how they managed to rebuild, to survive, and—in moments when she allowed herself hope—thrive despite the devastation that had ravaged them. Had they left the ruins of their former lives scattered along the landscape? Were there any still alive who remembered what happened the day the kingdom was torn asunder, and so many lives along with it?

 Her consciousness always returned to her when her captive growled, guttural and menacing, and she could not say what emotion she felt when her awareness was yanked back into the castle in those moments, whether it was fury, determination, or something else altogether. But as she stared at the beast she held bound in her golden chains, and tightened her grip on them enough so that she could feel her own power burning through her palms, all she knew was that the rush of emotion she felt in those moments meant that she would never, ever let go.

 ———

 Zelda didn’t remember very much of the journey to Hateno Village, and she certainly didn’t remember the seven days she spent asleep in what had formerly been Link’s bed. (“Ninety-nine years and … a lot of days to go before you beat my record,” Link had said.)

 But it didn’t take her too long to become aware, and when she did, she wished she hadn’t.

 Every morning, she woke with smoke and malice in her throat. Every night, she was back in the castle. Her fists were taut around golden chains wrapped around her forearms again and again to give her better bracing. Those same chains wrapped endlessly around a monster, a demon of unimaginable horror who had murdered her people, her friends, her family. A demon who stared down a putrid swine snout at her, snorting and snarling in her face, thrashing and roaring like a beast aside from the moments it tried to catch her off-guard like a man.

 For one hundred years, Zelda didn’t sleep. She couldn’t. Any time she let her grip slacken, the chains loosened, and the beast took advantage of the moment to raise a bloody moon so his monsters could savage the people of Hyrule. Princesses slept; wardens of demonic beasts did not.

 The beast was gone now, and Zelda knew that. She had used her power to banish it herself the moment Link landed the ending blow. The beast was gone, and for the first time in one hundred years, Zelda was allowed to sleep.

 She wished she wasn’t.

So, Link was born and raised in Hateno Village. His father Rillian was a captain of the Hyrule Royal Guard, a job which often took him away from the village for months at a time, while his mother Lynn raised farm animals such as cuccos and cows for produce purposes. Link, as could be surmised, was named after his mother. His sister Aryll, four years his junior, was named after their father. Despite this, it was expected that Link would follow in Rillian’s footsteps, and Aryll in Lynn’s.

And to a point, they did. Aryll had a natural affinity for animals, in particular cuccos and other birds, and loved helping out with the animals. Link had a natural affinity for swordplay and archery, and picked up the informal lessons Rillian gave him with surprising ease. But Link only went along with his father’s training because he was told to and it was expected of him and he didn’t know what else he wanted to do with his life regardless, whereas Aryll chomped at the bit to get her father to let her into the knighthood as early as possible, and often ambushed her older brother in an attempt to wrestle him to the ground and prove that she should get to join the knights, too, especially if she could beat up her big brother. (And she could, because he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, but Aryll didn’t think that was the point at all.) 

When Link and Aryll were twelve and eight, their mother fell ill. It was gradual at first, but soon her health dropped off a steep dive, right around the time their father was set to lead a platoon into the Lost Woods to try to find the Master Sword. Their maternal grandmother came in from Lurelin Village to tend to her, but with their mother bedridden and needing constant care it was decided that it would be best to not put the burden of care for Link and Aryll onto their grandmother too. So Rillian took the children with him to the Lost Woods as a way to keep an eye on them, never knowing that they would together devise a way for Link to pull the Master Sword from the pedestal, a feat neither child really thought possible at the time, but that the Great Deku Tree was impatient to have happen.

Whereas before Link went along with what his father wanted because he figured why not, once he became the Chosen Hero he went along with becoming a knight because he felt he Had To, it was his Destiny, he pulled the Sword and now he would pay the Price. He still didn’t mind, so much, about the training or the regimen or anything like that. He did mind the immense pressure put upon him, and decided that getting his act together meant talking far less and emoting not at all, even when his mother succumbed to her illness a single year later, leaving him as Aryll’s primary caretaker whenever their father was in Castletown. (When Link himself left for Castletown at age 15 to formally enter training, their grandmother moved to Hateno full time to look after Aryll. At least, that was the plan, but Aryll took one of the family horses and made it more than halfway to Castletown about four times before they decided it just wasn’t worth stopping her, and thus she lived in Castletown whenever Rillian and Link were both there, one step closer to her plan of making them make her a knight whether they wanted to or not.)

Whereas Rillian was adamant about Aryll not becoming a knight (and whereas he really wanted to shelter her after Lynn’s death, even though, as Aryll pointed out, Lynn died from illness, not combat), Link was wiser and knew that there was no stopping Aryll, and so it was better to prepare her. So during whatever downtime he had, he taught her what he could of swordplay and some archery, and how to use a shield effectively. After she stole ill-fitting armor so that she could sneak in among a platoon of knights, he poured what rupees he had into the lap of the local armorer to make her armor that would actually fit and protect her.

Link and Aryll’s relationship was generally a positive one, in that they loved each other a lot and did play together as kids, even though Aryll would gladly take as much Bratty Little Sister mileage as she could get at times and Link was never afraid to hoist Aryll up and spin her around until she felt sick whenever she annoyed him. Prior to Link pulling the Master Sword, they would play and tease and laugh with each other a lot. After Link pulled the Master Sword, Aryll would often grumble that you couldn’t spell the word boring without bro. But she was one of the very few, if not the only person who could needle under Link’s skin enough to make his mask break, and whenever she caught wind of others making unkind remarks about how stoic Link was, she would unleash a flock of cuccos upon them to ruin their day.

On the day the Calamity struck, Aryll was in Castletown with Rillian. As the Guardians rampaged, Rillian told Aryll to go find her brother to make sure he and Princess Zelda got to safety. Aryll tried to argue, wanting to stay and help in the battle, but Rillian put her on a horse and smacked the horse to make it run, and for once the horse didn’t listen to Aryll’s commands instead. With fire and death all around her, Aryll rode fast toward the Spring of Wisdom.

She ran into Link and Zelda about halfway. She told them that Rillian and the King were most likely dead. She told them that Rillian told her to make sure Link got the princess to safety. And that was when the Guardians found them. Link wanted to stay and fight, but Aryll told him no, she would stay, he would take the princess. They argued, with Zelda on Link’s side, but in the end Aryll won, because Link felt the weight of the Sword on his back.

for DC, if you read the comics you’ll actually find that women are included a lot in the source material and even play pivotal roles in fan favorite storylines, and then strangely get left out more in fanon than canon. as sexist as DC is in canon, what with the frequent hyper sexualization and demonization of the women in this series …….. for the love of god at least women exist there. to many batfam writers it’s like the worlds population flipped from being a 50:50 gender ratio to being 99:1 and women are an endangered species being preserved in some conservatory somewhere.

women play a WAY bigger role in batman comics than most of you care to learn. huntress is pivotal in several arcs, so is catwoman, so is oracle. some fics will even specifically go out of their way to reference some of these arcs — and then leave out the women like they were never there! and it’s impolite to ask writers or artist where the missing women are so i just click out and move on, but like, seriously? every time? that’s not even counting the amount of AUs where by the writer’s full control, women who had been critically important to these men just straight up don’t exist.

you guys expect women to just be cool with being in fandoms that go out of their way to write us out of the narrative? you think we’re just going to have a fun time?

this was also about Zelda. the zelda series proper has countless pivotal, important, plot relevant, iconic women, and their presence and choices, particularly zelda, often genuinely impact the storyline of the game. sometimes in huge ways like, the story wouldn’t have happened at all without her. women were actually so central that a way bigger portion of all major NPCs tended to be women; 4 out of 5 of the sages you save in Ocarina of Time are women, and even Sheik is actually Zelda in disguise!

but fandom sexism has been around a long time in zelda too. an old popular theory had fans pretending sheik was a separate character to zelda entirely — to the point we had people in the fandom with this headcanon literally saying “ugh oot zelda was so boring she didn’t do anything” when she was literally sheik and had one of the MOST central, active zelda roles to not only the story but even the combat! people let a sexist headcanon make them forget what women actually did!!!!

but this criticism is more lobbied at a particular fan circle who have, truly a genuinely creative idea — what if all the links met? though they also weren’t the first to have the idea (in my earlier zelda fandom experience there was a similar AU), but this group has majorly popularized it. but this has led to a shocking amount of erasure of the women depicted in fan creations. in what was once a fandom that would reliably depict women in a meaningful and story central way…. now a huge portion of fan works are just …dudes. now the portion of fanworks about women are way smaller. and to see zelda play a meaningful role in a narrative it’s mostly some flavor of shippy. zelda fanworks have tilted from once being a pretty woman positive and woman centric fandom … to overwhelmingly ‘zelda & related works’ being about dudes and their relationship to other dudes, both platonic and romantic. and i can’t stress this enough, 90% of these guys never met in canon. writers are going out of their way to bolster relationships between fictional guys instead of exploring link’s relationship to the many women he’s known, or depicting the relationships between these women. thank god though this is still a better fandom than batman because at least there’s still an exceptional handful of writers still writing zelda epics where she’s the main character. whereas in DC, there is an extremely noteworthy absence of ANYTHING where women are the main character. i genuinely can’t remember the last time a girl was the central character of a narrative, let alone for a work that got extremely popular the way fics about men can. and at least in zelda, we can filter out most works relating to this AU (though it’s pretty tough to content filter as it’s only 2 letters long (LU) and there’s a whole lot of words that get filtered with it. &many on Ao3 don’t tag it properly)

anyway. all this to say.

this isn’t me saying “don’t make what inspires you” or me trying to force writers at gunpoint to write more women. it’s me saying like… make what speaks to you — but why does ‘what speaks to people’ usually mean large groups of men and no women? why is this dynamic invented even when women are there and important in canon? why is ‘what speaks to people’ the idea to diminish the roles of women in media specifically to prop up men instead?

tl;dr:

in my experience, the source materials’ original authors DO usually include women.

We're going to lose our house unless we can pay the taxes on it, they built up the past 2 years when my gma was going thru chemo. She paid half of 2024, but still owe the other half and the full bill of 2025.

They called her this morning to say they were starting Forclosure on our house, I don't have a lot of time to get at least $600 to pay the full 2025 bill. It's $625.06 and 2024 is $394.40

I'm so sorry I have to put this here, but it's the biggest reach I have and my last resort. Please if you can donate or at least share it, I don't want to lose our home.