Something is very wrong ((OOC))

There are policemen in front of my school. There are armed soldiers defending its gates. Everyone is afraid that something might happen.

Something is ver wrong. Schools shouldn’t need this. Children and teachers alike should not be afraid of bombs or guns. This is a place of learning.

When did this happen? Why?

Everyone wore black today. There was a speech. And silence. A very long minute of silence. Our Maths teacher was almost crying this morning. He’s so stoic every day. And today he told us “I can’t talk about it”. Not “I don’t want to.” Or “I don’t feel like it.” He couldn’t. We think he has family in France. In Paris. Did he lose someone?

I am feeling so very detached. There’s tears and fears and whispers. “I heard that boy lost someone.” “Someone in eighth grade knew the taxi driver.” “When do you think they will come here?” “Did you see the soldiers with guns?”

The world is a mess and I want to cry. I want to cry for the people who were lost. I want to cry for the families who lost. I want to cry for the people who will be lost in the future because of misplaced blame and religious fanaticism.

I don’t know what to do. What went wrong and when? Why is it like this? Why must we fight and kill and hurt? Who did this? Turned the world into this?

Where did we go wrong?

i am not ♂ or ♀

i am  ☭

❤☮☭folloш foя мoяе soft сoммцпisм☭☮❤

Hey guys we’re going to fucking break shit again

You know the reply feature? The perfectly adequate one that nobody was complaining about?

We’re fucking getting rid of it for as long as we feel like before we drop another broken-ass untested piece of shit feature nobody asked for again on all of you. Get fucked

how to turn the signs on

Aries: summon a couple hundred demons to be their servants and you’ll be off to a decent start

Taurus: only ancient Gregorian chants can excite Tauruses

Gemini: inappropriately timed references to shows that have been off the air for years

Cancer: two words: Yugioh Cards

Leo: speak only in Latin

Virgo: only direct appeals to the Ancient Gods of old will appease a Virgo

Libra: the whispers of the void are more than enough already

Scorpio: Send them back to the dimension from which they came

Sagittarius: I dunno, advanced trigonometry?

Capricorn: you can’t turn a Capricorn on. I’m sorry, that’s just how it works.

Aquarius: science

Pisces: slap them with a fish. trust me it works. 

Hetalia AU where everything is the same except the countries are guarded at all times by personal bodyguards

Alfred makes it a game to try and hide from his bodygaurds; is constantly getting scolded by the President Francis flirting with his bodyguards Germany training his bodyguards and teaching them how to do their own job Canada providing his bodyguards with snacks whenever he goes out

No but what if Canada’s bodyguards just like him so much because he’s always so nice

And Veneziano taking his bodyguards out to fancy (real) Italian restaurants and buying them dinner

And when Romano gets flustered he just sort of uses it to his advantage and hides behind his bodyguards

And Russia always talks with his bodyguards and is nice to them because the poor bab has no one to talk to

And Norway doesn’t need bodyguards because he has his troll

And Ice gets embarrased when he has to go out in public with them because he doesn’t want to attract attention

All the bodyguards share juicy gossip during world meetings. “Hey did you know England sings French songs in the shower” “holy shit I gotta tell France”

a

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what the fuck. theres not even a fucking joke here. its just the fucking alphabet. i was expecting some kind of fucking meme like “gun” or “john cena” or something like that but no its just the fucking alphabet. here. on tumblr.com. 26 users just fucking banded together to write the alphabet. what the fuck, man.

I think the update broke them, and almost everyone else.

Pardon our dust

Hey, you know the reply feature? That little speech bubble icon at the bottom of some posts?

That’s going away for a little while. We’re making room for something bigger and better coming down the pike. Stay tuned.

oh oh what are you gonna fuck up now

can’t we fucking suffer in peace

FUCK YOU STAFF

Nononononono non não nyet ne nein no. No. Not again.

Reblog if school has ever made you;

• have an anxious/ a panic attack • cancel out basic needs to do work (showering, eating, etc) • feel depressed • feel isolated/ ignored • feel like education is a burden • stressed to the point of tears

(doesnt have to be all)

im trying to prove a point to my friend who disagrees with it all

So Cosmopolitan asked me to illustrate a series of Disney characters if they went to Hogwarts! The images you see are what happens when an artist gets to mix two of his most favorite things!!

how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?

like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking ‘VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS’ 

was caesar like ‘ET TU ODYSSEUS’ 

sometimes i wonder

oh my GOD

the answer is yes they did. there’s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print. 

here’s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn’t very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.

however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around. 

but here’s the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too became…highly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otp’s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren’t immune-there’s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can’t handle all his feels, if they don’t get together he won’t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine’s tragic state (IIRC ehh). 

conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people’s mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadn’t had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr. 

(don’t even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who hand’t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.) 

I needed to know this.

See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.

Ancient Iliad fandom is intense

Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It’s possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly that’s just as good).

And then there’s this gem from Plato:

“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus - his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)” - Symposium

That’s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.

More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do

Man I love this post.

And to add my personal favourite story: after reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in the 18th century, Elizabeth Echlin decided that she was NOT HAPPY with the ending and basically wrote her own fix-it fic. No-one dies and Lovelace (the villain) was totally reformed and became a super nice guy. It’s completely OOC and incredibly poorly written and it’s beautiful. 

Also, so many women fell in love with the villain, Lovelace, and wrote to Richardson about it, that he kept adding new bits with each edition to highlight what a hideous person Lovelace was. So it’s almost unsurprising that reading novels in this period was actually considered dangerous because it gave women unrealistic ideas about men and made them easier prey for rakes. 

Basically, “I want my own Christian Grey” has been a thing for hundreds of years. 

Also a thing with fix-it/everyone lives AUs: at various points in time but especially in the mid 1800s-early 1900s (aka roughly Victorian though there were periods of this earlier as well) a huge thing was to “fix” Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished – but not, you know, grusomely, because what would the ladies think? So you have like, productions of King Lear where Cordelia lives and so do Regan and Goneril, but they’re VERY SORRY.

Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.

Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I don’t know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (红楼梦), but it is, arguably, the most famous Chinese novel ever written (There are four Chinese novel classics and A Dream of Red Mansions is considered the top of that list). It was written during the Qing dynasty by 曹雪芹, but became a banned book due to its critique of societal institutions and pro-democracy themes. As a result, the original ending of the book was lost and only the first 80 chapters remained. There are quite a few versions of how the current ending of the book came to be, but one of them is basically about how He Shen, one of Emperor Qian Long’s most powerful advisers, was such a super-fan of the book, he hired two writers to archive and reform the novel from the few remaining manuscripts there were. In order to convince the Emperor to remove the ban on the book, he had the writers essentially write a fanfiction ending to the book that would mitigate the anti-establishment themes. However, He Shen thought that the first version of the ending was too tragic (even though the whole book is basically a tragedy) so he had the writers go back and write a happier ending for him (the current final 40 chapters). He then presented the book to the Emperor and successfully convinced him to remove the ban on the book.

According to incomplete estimates, A Dream of Red Mansions spawned over 20 spin offs, retellings, and alternate versions (in the form of operas, plays, etc.) during the Qing Dynasty alone. 

In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novel’s fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of study (beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called 红学. Think of it as Shakespearean studies, but only on one play. This field of study has schools of thought and specific specializations (as in: Psych analyses, Economics analyses, Historical analyses, etc.) that span pretty much every academic field anyone can think of. 

(That being said, I’ve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that I’ve never read its peer in either English or Chinese. If for nothing else, read it because you would never otherwise believe that a man from the Qing dynasty could write such a heart-breakingly feminist novel with such a diverse cast of female characters given all the bitching and moaning we hear from male content-creators nowadays)

the beauty of archival research *sigh*

Not a really interesting addition to this post compared to the above comments, but Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey has the effect of reading overly dramatic Gothic literature on an impressionable young girl’s state of mind as a major theme. And there was a lot of concern in the regency period about the suitability of these novels for young women, because there was a concern that they reacted to the stories too strongly. (Subtext here being that there was a certain amount of anxiety that some of the available works of fiction were FAR too salacious for ladies)

((Face and Scars))

This is Aaron, and who I’m going to call in this post, Dark Aaron. Also, this only applies to the Stargate universe and it’s dark counterpart.

(I apologize in advance for the shitty drawings.)

On the faces:

Does Aaron look like he doesn’t get enough sleep? Yeah. Notice how Dark Aaron looks much less like that? Past failures and mistakes bother him much less. Aaron, is generally always frowning or with no discernible expression. Dark Aaron is constantly grinning. 

Dark Aaron’s pupils are always that contracted, and I still haven’t found a reason for it.

On the backs:

I can’t say enough how excited I am to tell you about this. Scars and injuries allow one to explore so much the past and personality of a character.

1: One of the most traumatic events of their lives. The doctors decided to play with their spines, while they were awake, and worst of all, for no apparent reason besides for shits and giggles. I think this was where Aaron and Dark Aaron became two different people. See how Aaron’s scar looks much more healthy and well-healed? He became borderline apathetic after the surgery, barely reacting to anything. Dark Aaron, on the other hand, became unstable: fighting, thrashing around, not cooperating with anything or anyone, and that’s why his scar looks so dark and twisted. The stitches broke, and no one could get close enough to fix it.

2: This is also an interesting scar, when you want to understand the differences between the two of them. It’s a burn scar from a bout of torture when they were captured by the Genii with Lorne’s team. While Aaron’s in relatively small and healed nicely, because he was so quiet, Dark Aaron kept insulting the torturer’s mother. His is much bigger and ugly for obvious reasons.

3,4,9 and 10: Bullet scars, which haven’t a story yet, and no explanation besides they get shot at a lot.

5: This scar makes me so giddy and is the reason I love describing scars and telling their stories. Aaron got that burn saving a scientist from a fire. Dark Aaron doesn’t have a scar. Think about that.

6: Those are exactly what you think they are.

7: Dark Lorne is not exactly… gentle, and Dark Aaron loves it. (Those are bruises not scars.)

8: That bruise is almost a permanent mark by now. It’s due to Dark Sheppard gripping Dark Aaron’s arm when he’s pissed at him, which is often.

That’s everything I wanted to tell you. I hope you have now a better understanding of these characters. If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask them, to either of them. Aaron doesn’t bite. Dark Aaron… well, it’s worth the risk isn’t it?

Yesterday I borrowed this from my roommate for drawing.

With that I can draw a sexy sniper(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)