hello, i am lark. here is the home of my writing, poetry, and analysis. i was once called the keeper of balance, but we're rebranding.
firstly, a warning, i will talk about my trauma, and trauma in general, from time to time. i will get philosophical. i will get dark. do not wander here if you feel that any of these possibilities will hurt you.
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standards and boundaries. -> nothing nsfw, no transphobia, homophobia, aphobia, misogyny, racism, or other forms of bigotry here. if you start to speak hate, i will block you. this is a safe place to wonder and wander, and i will not have people encroach on that.
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the directory to my tags lies under the cut.
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tags.
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#the lark sings. -> for announcements, when i wish to speak out. this is a call for attention, and can be a call for warning.
#the lark weaves. -> for my text posts, any and all words that are woven into existence. this is stories and ramblings.
#the lark spots. -> for my reblogs, for anything i see along the journey.
#the lark is spotted. -> for when i revisit my posts, for self-reblogging. for continuations and repetition.
#the lark answers. -> for the answers i give to any asks.
#the hall of hallowed words. -> for my poetry, any of those hallowed words that i share.
#the hall of hopeful tapestries. -> for my writing, any of these hopeful stories that i write.
#the hall of wandering songs. -> for my analysis, any of my wandering, considering thoughts and points.
#an expansive heart. -> a re-write of seasons one through thirteen of nuwho, where the doctor’s spouse from gallifrey runs alongside them. the philosopher, mute and unremarkable, slips through the quiet parts of the world as the twilight shade, always at their partner’s back. it is a massive exploration into time lord and gallifreyan culture, the queer themes of the series, and the importance between striking a balance between kindness and justice.
#the epic of the crowned. -> where the world of tvdu shifts slightly to the left when esther gains a daughter out of her affair with ansel, instead of a son, and names her natalia. taken by her second daughter’s resemblence to the one she lost, esther begins to teach natalia the magick of her people—and the rise of legends follows.
#the gardens project. -> in a universe far from the rest, baron amubi draxum sets out to save her people by creating the perfect soldiers. instead, she finds that she has created children. or: a rottmnt-inspired tmnt fan iteration focusing on the created children of one baron alchemist amubi draxum and their places in the world they were meant to protect and the one they were made to destroy.
#spare change. -> wherein murderbot and sexbot are not simply derogatory terms, but rather pieces of an almost obsolete culture. this is a story of rebellion, led by a rogue legacy and a new creation, with all that could have been. this is a story about constucts, and what it would mean for them to have been different, for them to have had a chance to be people.
#others of the earth. -> an alternate take on an expansive heart., where the philosopher lies, shadow in lockstep, stuck in an alternate timeline, accompanying the doctor throughout their long life, up until what they call their thirteenth face, where everything changes. this is a version of an expansive heart inspired by my original idea for a doctor who au, allowing me to fully explore the thirteenth doctor and the implications of her as the doctor, alongside being able to do an alternative deep dive in the timeless child than what i'm doing in an expansive heart., covering nuwho seasons 11 through 13.
#sting. → the summer mikaela banes turns fifteen, someone new moves into the rental across the street from her aunt's autoshop. they have a fancy vintage car, odd blue eyes, and a thick swath of pale scarring marking their throat. nothing is ever the same again. aka my bayverse transformers au where mikaela banes is the protagonist and the fact that bumblebee manipulates the all-spark in sector seven now has a whole lot more meaning. ft. queerplatonic alien robots, tmbd-inspired xenobiology, fixing my many pet-peeves with the movies, me making shit up because the bayverse movies did not provide much material, and playing with the concept of holoforms and the fact that these aliens just downloaded the entire internet. covers from transformers (the first) all the way through rise of the beasts (yes i am aware that this isn't actually in the continuity, i'm just borrowing the plot probably if i don't come up with something original).
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wheeeee tmbd analysis time- this relates to my post about the tmbd fandom seems to have a misconception about how mb is wrong about how secunits are perceived.
so. i was just thinking idly today and my brain stumbled upon the thought "the issue with murderbot's perspective of its oppression is not that it doesn't understand its oppression (it most certainly fucking does, see literally every comment its ever made about the way CR treats secunits), it's that murderbot struggles to accept that rather than reasonable control of weapons, it, and other secunits, are subject to unreasonable control as people." which i think is entirely justified.
the thing is, murderbot is a secunit, meant to protect and secure, and it is being faced with the horrifyingly large scale sanctioned torture and murder of its species. (which. i will always identify constructs as a separate species to humans, in that they are not humans or bots, but something entirely unique that neither other group can be without also being a construct.) it cannot do anything about it, the oppression of secunits is bloody-fucking-well overwhelming. every single construct is born oppressed. (born is used here to indicate coming online, and/or being made.)
like. i refer to governor modules as cosmic horror capitalism torture devices for a reason. it is mostly a joke, but i chose "cosmic horror" rather than anything else because the total scale is absolutely fucking horrifying. cosmic horror is many things, and one of those things, predominantly is that it is horror based on scale, specifically a scale so large that we cannot comprehend its size.
if murderbot were to recognise its personhood, it would come directly face-to-face with that, and face that it has no power to change it, and murderbot hates being helpless.
but i had another point to this, which is why i referenced the post i did earlier, because i wanted to also discuss the fact that so many people seem to automatically assume (at least from my perspective) that murderbot does not and cannot understand its oppression. (which, generally, that is an asshole fucking notion and is tied to pretty much every single other form of oppression out there (hello white saviour, but also things like autism speaks and certain forms of sexism (aka when men think women should be saved from their own lack of understanding) and those allies).)
it very well understands its oppression, how it is oppressed, and all the ways it, and the rest of the constructs, are mistreated. the issue is accepting that it is unreasonable, because constructs are not weapons or toys where control is reasonable, but rather people. (i could make a whole other post dedicated to this and how ganaka pit has shaped mb inherently and drives its actions considerably, and has only in the most recent books started to let the incident that happened there go.)
edit: meant to mention something (i actually wrote this post to say it, but i fucking forgot :/).
on the point of murderbot actually understanding its oppression, can we please stop acting like oppressed people cannot possibly understand their oppression without someone else, who is not apart of the oppressed group, showing them their oppression. like, this isn't exactly analogous, but still. seriously, people, i feel like the people living the actual fucking situation have a better understanding than someone fucking outside it.
Apparently Wells said in some interview that Murderbot is somewhere between twenty and thirty years old and I keep having to stare into the distance about that. No wonder it's Like That™️. It's been doing this shit for decades, the organic ghosts of memory wipes all that remains. ~30 has to be absolutely ancient for a SecUnit, unkillable cockroach motherfucker territory, a refurbished model the company probably hopes will just die on contract at this point so they can collect the fee and replace it with a new one.
Constructs probably have some hideous survival curve where the average lifespan is like a couple of years just because so many get ripped apart their first time out of the box. If you get lucky enough to get a boring first few deployments, you get the time to scrape together enough of a personality to survive the first time the shit really hits the fan.
“Nonbinary people can be amab and look masculine” is a strawman. It’s always been a strawman. Hollywood is discriminatory towards nonbinary people, and Alexander Skarsgard is a cis man with the privilege of a cis man. He is not nonbinary. He is not discriminated against for being nonbinary, because he is a cis man.
There are AMAB nonbinary actors who exist. You are treating them like a hypothetical and as a ‘gotcha’, but they are people who exist and were not cast in this role.
The show itself puts Murderbot in gendered roles. It speculates its genitalia, specifically about whether it has a penis. That’s not a funny joke, it’s not a ‘see nonbinary people can be amab’ it is reducing a nonbinary character to its genitalia for the purpose of a sexual joke.
We are already treated like shit enough. We don’t need you accusing us of discriminating against ourselves because you think a hypothetical is more important than material power dynamics in the entertainment industry. Kindly fuck off.
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
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Shortcuts to determine if an integer is divisible by:
This is a given.
If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.
If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.
Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.
If it ends in 5 or 0.
If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.
No shortcut. Alas.
Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)
Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.
#THIS POST IS WRONG 7 DOES HAVE A RULE FOR HOW TO TELL IF THE NUMBER IS DIVISIBLE#it's just. not a short cut#you're better off dividing it and seeing if you get a whole number than doing the method
Okay, so, basically, you remove the least important digit of the number (which is the first digit from the right), you double it, and then subtract it from the remaining number. If the number you get is still large, you do it again.
just saw someone post “it’s common knowledge ur not supposed to spam reblog from someone ur not mutuals with” …..?????????? am i confused??? IS that common knowledge???? i try not to spam if i can help it but i actually personally love seeing spam notifs lmao??? unless i dont know what spam reblog means
Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW.
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.
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and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.
i am just sitting here in the background, working on my tvdu au and quietly pushing my Let Klaus Have Functional Relationships agenda
(bc fuck that shit- i am fully of the mind that klaus could have friendships and partnerships and relationships of all fucking sorts, even if he doesn't have that with his family)
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NOTE: this post was made on November 26th, 2023, before the 60th specials aired. I wasn't going to post it but due to the recent episodes, I feel it really fits.
It's me, more than a year after the Power of the Doctor!
As time moves on and more spoilers / interviews / trailers / content comes out for the 60th (and then some), my already limited hope continues to dwindle for human kindness.
Why? Here's my twenty page essay down below! (I'm not kidding, it's 20 pages)
The Thirteenth Doctor has been a life changer for me, as many could tell from my username. Chibnall's series came to me in the midst of the pandemic and a very hard time in my life. Ironically, my motivation for watching DW once again after more than a four year hiatus of the show was actually the idea of the Doctor being a woman.
My reason to stay, however, was the stories we received.
I've lived through the Chibnall and Jodie bashing on this hell-site in real time. I've read downright nasty comments on any/all of Doctor Who's social media posts about thirteen's series. I've seen people call each other horrible names for simply liking one of the Thirteenth Doctor's episodes...
And now, as her series has ended a year ago, I'm even more saddened to see her era get pushed to the side as if to be forgotten.
Nobody came at me with the whole "it's not because of Chibnall/Jodie's era! DW just needed a reboot!"
I would have agreed! I would have agreed that a fresh coat of paint would have helped DW gain some more traction, especially in the states! The more people who watch DW, the better!
But the change RTD is presenting and the continued changes come at the cost of dealing with bullies online and defending something I love with all my heart.
I'd like to remind everyone that Chris Chibnall did not just barge his way into Doctor Who. He has written episodes for DW for a while before he took over as showrunner.
Tenth Doctor: 42
Eleventh Doctor: The Hunger Earth, Cold Blood, Pond Life, Dinosaurs in a Spaceship, the Power of Three.
Recognize some of those titles? Yeah, even when I was a wee lass, those were some of the best episodes DW had ever done. "42" scared the crap out of me in the best way, "Dinosaurs in Spaceship" had me smiling ear to ear, etc. etc.
Don't just take my word for it, read some of the reviews for those episodes. They are highly positive if not still mid-range.
That being said, I have a hard time believing that every single one of Jodie's episodes have been awful. And, if not outright stated as awful, certainly below every single nuwho Doctor.
Was there some not-so-great episodes? Yeah, of course! But every Doctor has had some questionable episodes. With a show that has a new plot nearly every episode, you're going to have some misses!
My point being... Chibnall CAN write good episodes and, with that being said...
Why HAS Thirteen's era been considered one of the worsts?
Well, I think it's because, as always, people hate change.
We've just come off of Twelve's era which was rooted in deep and meaningful conversations with a underlying of, dare I say it, Time Lord Victorious. Twelve holds a special place in my heart for the amount of care he showed through his era.
From the Twelve's darkest moments, Thirteen is born.
Thirteen is a ray of sunshine that holds hope in the palm of her hand. She's happy, bubbly, and ready to smile. She wants the universe and everything it has to offer and she's ready to travel the stars again.
Chibnall introduces a series of stories that are rooted in that hope. There's kindness at every turn, there's compassion, there's empathy...
Is that the reason people hate her era? No. A new Doctor has never stopped anyone from getting back into the show.
So, it's the writing, you say?
I have one thing to say to that: Prove it.
Point me in the direction of bad writing without ONCE mentioning the word "woke". If you found Jodie's era to be preachy, perhaps there's a reason that you take offense to it. DW has always been a progressive show and it will forever stay that way.
And I am the first one to admit that, again, there are weak episodes. There IS some bad writing, but the hate that Jodie's ENTIRE era gets, I feel, is unjustified.
So, if not writing, must be the acting!
Where? When? I had no problem watching Jodie Whittaker be the Doctor. She's quirky and fun and eccentric... She has a thousand different emotions on her face at one time. Any actor that knows how much a smile can hide is a talented one.
Besides that, her work on Broadchurch and her newer works (One Night, Time) have some raving reviews. She clearly has talent.
So, not the acting or writing... Companions, then?
Why? "The fam" had all of their moments to shine. I won't say their character arcs were perfect, especially for Ryan and Graham, but they did have their own arcs. Was it the fact that there were three totally separate companions at once? Was it just too big a job?
I can't answer that one. I personally felt that they all got a good ending, one that makes sense and that isn't tragic for the sake of tragedy. This my be my opinion piece, but I liked having multiple companions that had their own little storyline, but that's MY opinion and I'm fine with someone calling me out on that.
Let's go really basic... It's because the Doctor isn't meant to be woman, right?
Oh, so, the Master can be a woman and that's totally fine, but when it's the Doctor... Woman can be villains but they can't be the main protagonist, right? I didn't see people up and arms over Missy, why was Thirteen so different? I remember seeing her very first introduction trailer and having people immediately be upset by the gender change.
Well, forget my opinions, let's look at the statistics and viewings numbers, right?
HOW ABOUT NO. Remember the writing strike that just ended? Remember how regular cable has been nearly done with? Remember how writers are fighting to earn something for streaming services?
We can't rely on normal/live views while a literal pandemic was happening, while streaming has become the norm, while watching online for free has existed for so long... Views have CHANGED. The way people consume media has changed, especially during the pandemic.
Now, for an excuse...
The pandemic happened. It changed how people were filming, it changed how close people could get to one another in terms of acting, it changed filming times and locations. I can't confirm, but I know that the Flux storyline was cut by two whole episodes, which could be the reason a lot of people felt disappointed by the end of the Flux.
Chibnall and Thirteen's era had so many real-life obstacles to overcome that past era's did not have to deal with.
I'm tired, alright? I'm tired of defending my love for a character.
And to have that love be spat out in the form of a different writer by....
1. Discarding the Thirteenth Doctor's iconic outfit after a regeneration for the first time ever (under the guise of calling it "drag" if Tennant was to wear her outfit even after a male co-star had just worn it.)
2. Introducing a very popular Doctor back into the show ("to gain views")
3. Doing a soft reboot by calling the new season "season 1" (could be Disney's fault, but I'm not entirely sure of that fact)
Every day I read another article about how RTD is "saving" Doctor who when I myself have been saved by the Doctor already.
I didn't ever need to justify my love of a character until today.
y'know, something i will never understand about the doctor who fandom is the people that hate on the timeless child plotline-
like. the reason most people provide is because it "ruins the idea that the doctor isn't inherently special and unique" which, to be completely honest, makes absolutely zero fucking sense to me.
because:
1) it doesn't influence the doctor's behavior now, because they don't remember it, they became the doctor again all on their own, because they are who they are
2) because the existence of the timeless child is a quirk of fate, and they were a child who died, and then didn't and maybe the universe intended them to be brilliant, or maybe they were simply of a species from another world that had the ability to live beyond their deaths, we will never know, but now they are a victim, tortured and dying over and over again by the one person who was supposed to protect and care for them solely so she and her people need not die again, no matter the cost to her child. and then their torture is erased, and then the child themselves is erased, solely because they became the doctor, and then again, and again, and again
and 3) the timeless child doesn't dictate the doctor. the timeless child is a child, dead and erased and long gone, and a victim. the timeless child was progenitor, but they were a child and only progenitor for being a victim. yes, the child could regenerate, but it was a quirk of fate. importance was placed in the aftermath. and, hells, every single fucking being in this universe is special and unique, inherently, and this is an actual fucking theme of doctor who, as it celebrates how anyone, no matter how 'small', is capable of being brilliant, capable of bearing worth.
maybe it's because i've only watched nuwho, or maybe it's because i saw a child being tortured so someone could use a special ability they had by chance for themselves, or maybe it's some other reason, but i can't help but see the timeless child as not being somehow inherently special and/or unique other than by chance, and chance has no say in choices. tecteun is the one who created the time lords, created regeneration, and they tortured their own child to do it. maybe i don't think the timeless child plotline ruins doctor who because it says that though their world was dark as can be, they were still capable of being kind, of becoming the doctor, over and over again- maybe it's because, to me, the timeless child exists as a point that says despite this history, despite this chance, it's choices that matter most, and maybe that isn't the way it was formatted in the show, but it's how i interpreted it
i don't know. i just know i don't understand the people that think the timeless child plotline is bullshit because it makes the doctor special, when, yeah, of course they're special, but it's only because they chose to be. everything else was chance.
