Crown of Oleander

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN

yeah they’re my gf now. kinda wild.

we’ve been together almost 2 years now- all thanks to this goofy lil game (rip fer.al).

i love her so fucking much<3

And then Scott. Scott poking fun at her but also actually being really helpful in his own way? Him asking if he can curse her to test out a spell he hasn’t used before because he wants to have a bit of a laugh, only for him to remove it the second she says it’s too much for her and then promising to teach it to her as well. Him watching her trial, whispering pointers to her as she’s getting ready for the final fight. Bertha inviting Scott to their special school of magic, stating that it was only for the strongest witches on the server, and Scott immediately listing Eloise alongside himself, Shelby, and Cleo as the strongest members of the server, and when Bertha laughs he IMMEDIATELY defends her like “Eloise is stronger now.” And when Bertha just keeps laughing he goes “she just won her tournament, don’t laugh about that.”

The little outfit montage in the middle where Cleo and Scott help her pick out some armour.

El winning the retrial and Bertha congratulating her, trying to give her a speech about how proud they are of her and how much she deserved it, and El just straight up ignoring them, running away mid speech to check on her last opponent, asking if they were ok and going “I’m sorry, I didn’t give you a chance to breathe, but I really wanted to do Scott and Cleo proud.”

going to visit relatives tonight so wish on the afternoon

My MIL is not an awful person. She’s a loving mother who carries emotional scars from having been in an abusive relationship with her minister husband for a long time, which has left her with a disabling preoccupation with “What might the neighbours say” in her life, and that often means she makes poor choices without realising it. She loves my husband no less; she didn’t withdraw love and affection from him, didn’t cut him off.

But she chose to pretend it wasn’t happening, and that sent him into a hefty shame spiral we had to work through. A few months later, a stand up routine he did about being bisexual was doing the rounds on Facebook, and despite normally sharing every single routine of his, she rang him to tell him she wouldn’t be sharing that one because “Your brother’s wedding is coming up, and I don’t want it overshadowed by people talking about you and your news.”

And again, this is not because she rejects him. That’s an easy narrative, and certainly the one you’d assume from the outside. But that, in her own way, was her attempt to protect both her children from negative scrutiny - she truly thought that people would care, and would care enough to make a scene at the wedding, and that would hurt the two of them.

Everyone already knew. He’s a celebrity in his culture. No one cared. But, that was my MIL’s fear.

And the message it sent, intentionally or not, was “This is something shameful.”

I could write a whole essay, a whole book about this experience in my family, but I won’t. It feels ungrateful to criticize the actions of people who still say they love you, and have never hurt you and will never hurt you in the big dramatic ways we see in the media. But in my case, and I think in many, it isn’t a clean, decisive cut. 

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.