If you’re going to try and make your medieval fantasy world full of Gritty Realism, then by definition you have to show the positive parts of the time period you’re trying to emulate.

People are very happy to fill their books with bloodshed, homophobia, misogyny, and a nauseating, weirdly voyeuristic (and inaccurate) amount of sexual assault, but are hesitant to touch on the artistic and philosophical legacy of the Middle Ages. Where are the musicians? Where are the frequent church-sanctioned holidays? Where are the innovators and the humourists? Where is your Gritty Realism for the good things?

There are a couple of problems with this whole approach to writing.

1) If you’re apparently going for realism in the first place, why pick fantasy?

2) Given that this is fantasy, why lean on the same prejudices as in our world? You have invented your setting, it’s entirely in your power to change the social dynamics. If you do choose a world with the same social issues that we dealt with (and still do), to what end are you showing those? So your fantasy society is, say, xenophobic…why? If you’re making a point and challenging that view to some sort of conclusion, that makes sense. If it’s there, but not explored, why have it? This is a story, and the rules are different than life. Themes that carry that much weight can’t just be laid on and left there. The issue doesn’t have to be solved, but it can’t be static.

Seconded. If there’s no joy in your “medieval” world, I’m not interested.

Copying and pasting your tags because they’re perfect:

Gardens! Colourful food! Everyone eating bacon! Apprentices going on strike because they are SICK OF EATING FISH! Books! Guilds! Festivals plays market-days and fairs and mummers and lawyers and religious arguments and dancing (and none of that TV/movie takes on the volta and all of that, oh no, gimme the peasants’ version where big hefty farmer boys tossed their big hefty gfs up into the air and caught them again) COLOURFUL CASTLES WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS DREARY AND DARK MY GOD has no one heard of tapestries. Or PAINT.

And. Let. Them. Wear. Gaudy AF. Colours.

Tangential pet peeve: why does every rebellious young woman seethe at the thought of doing needlework and long to be out doing something “important?”  Dealing with cloth was a vital part of life.  Think you can survive a northern European winter without a good coat?  How about blankets?

Now, it’s true that weaving and sewing and so forth have been entwined with femininity since at least the ancient Greeks.  But if your protagonist is rejecting weaving because she doesn’t want femininity, that’s an important character thing that needs to be examined.  Definitely not something that gets casually attached to the character because rejecting the feminine is how you Do Strength.

I’m so with this. One of the things I loved about Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books was the human warmth and kindness and everyday life that infused each one alongside the mysteries and Bad Deeds. 

And I’d love to see contemporary fiction and other media embrace that idea. If you’re going to call something ‘realistic’ it can’t just be dark, grim, awful, wretched all. the. time. That’s not reality in its honest form. There’s always something that makes it worth getting up in the morning, otherwise most of us would have given up the ship by now (or at least I would have). 

You guys are delivering such sweet cheddar in the comments.

“Realism! The dome of St Peter’s is as real as the gasometer of East London… the passion flower is as real as the potato! … I do not object to realism in fiction; what I object to is the limitation of realism in fiction to what is commonplace, tedious, and bald - is the habit, in a word, of insisting that the potato is real and that the passion flower is not.”

–Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramee) 19th Century novelist. Romance and Realism, 1883.

An artist : Aw man! I saw my arts were reposted on Instagram. I’ve asked them to take my arts down but they ignored me.

Me : Say no more! Click this link, then click ‘fill out this form’. Fill the form and wait for about 1-2 days, the staffs will remove the image you were reporting from the reposter’s account :^)

hope you don’t mind me adding some more info :’D

Many websites have those complaint forms you need to fill out to submit DMCA notice. Here are some of them:

Usually links to those forms can be found on website’s Terms of Service pages. (search for copyright or DMCA)

Any content you’ve created, is copyrighted by you. You have full right to ask staff to delete repost. Your works deserve to be protected. ♥

Yo. This better be my most reblogged post. I want to see all my artists friends reblogging this for their artists friends.

^^^^^ for all the artists with uncredited work on pinterest and insta

Yes please share this! This is all control and isolation. It’s not “out of love” or anything like that. This is straight up abuse.

I was diagnosed with ADD today which explains positively everything since I was a baby and now in a couple months I try a medication.

I literally thought all the symptoms were the default way a brain works, so you’re telling me some of you can “choose” what to pay attention to? Like, if you know you absolutely have to listen to and remember something you just “can” even if you don’t like it?

And if you’re at a restaurant and three other tables are having conversations you don’t just automatically absorb everything they’re saying?

And if you know you have to do something within the next hour it won’t just remind you of a different subject entirely which reminds you of another different subject entirely and you don’t just take you three days to remember the original thing you were doing????

Oh yeah and I was never once fucking told in my entire life until TODAY that ADD is an UNDER-active brain. It feels to you and looks to others like your brain is “over” active because the brain is desperately seeking stimulation but deficient in its ability to maintain it. You’re not distracted by every little thing because it’s all actually interesting or your brain goes “too fast” but because no single thing is ever exciting enough to satisfy your reward processes.

AND THE FUCKING THING ABOUT -THAT- WHICH I NEVER HEARD ABOUT BEFORE is that ADD symptoms can resemble or be misdiagnosed as pure anxiety or depression because negative stimulation is stimulation all the same so an ADD brain looooooves to contemplate the mortality of your loved ones and everything wrong with you and wrong with the world and hypothetical future disasters and what people “really” think of you and even that one embarrassing thing you said to a cashier twelve years ago.

Some other things I hadn’t necessarily thought of as ADD-related and I have all day, every day include severe procrastination, executive dysfunction, fearfulness or self-consciousness in social situations, being “smart” in some ways but seemingly “stupid” in other areas, and even hyperfocus on a narrow set of subjects, which of course can all also be symptoms of autism, another thing that may sometimes be misdiagnosed ADD or just kind of the bonus prize you got with it. Some things I DON’T personally suffer from, but maybe you do, and was even more shocked to learn are often ADD symptoms include a disregard for your own safety, harsher standards for yourself than you hold anyone else to, poor impulse control, risk-taking, thrill-seeking, sabotaging yourself and even sabotaging interpersonal relationships or “dropping” them too easily (”that last conversation rubbed me the wrong way…I better just cut ties with them before it gets worse”) All of these things can be either the ADD brain trying to get its next “fix,” bad habits unfortunately instilled in you from how ADD strained everything else in your life, or a mix of both.

“i am a monument to all your sins” is such a fucking raw line for a villain it’s amazing that it came from halo, a modernish video game, and not some classical text or mythos

classic texts have nothing on the crazy people come up with in modern times tbh

– Joshua Graham, Who Is A Fallout New Vegas NPC, Something Most People Throwing This Quote Around Don’t Realize

– Shadow the Hedgehog in what is widely considered one of if not the single worst game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise

this is the source for this text and it haunts me on a regular basis

Huh, it’s almost like art isn’t just fine art…

this is my addition to this ever growing list of raw quotes originating from unexpected sources

#discovering that the profound is lurking behind the absurd#just waiting for the chance to peek through like sunlight through the clouds#is one of the best things in life once you start to notice it

this is a beautiful way to put it and i’m gonna cry abt it

hey @ goyim could y'all reblog this if you're actually willing to listen to Jewish people and protect us?

we really need allies right now, and I know seeing this on people’s blogs could be comforting to other Jewish people.

why should we when you just called every non jew a derogatory term

“Hey so we know that people literally want you dead but u hurt my feelings so :(((”

not to mention liky ‘goy’ is literally just the way we refer to a non-jew just like ‘cis’ is the word for a non-trans person

if you looked down literally two centimeters in google search you would have seen the beginning of this page

and of this page

but i guess our lives are worthless to you because we called you a debatable-at-best word we use all the time for non-jews so we don’t have to keep saying “non-jews” all the g-ddamn time

^^ yeah p much lmao

This goy loves his Jewish friends

“Their word for us is secretly an insult” is such a tired old racist rumour, brought to you by the type of dipshit who gets angry when they hear people speaking another language in public because they assume the speakers are saying something bad about them.

Personally, I don’t like the word Goy.

Not because it feels insulting, but because it define me depending on what I am not instead of what I am.

Cis does not mean “not trans”, it means “who identify with it’s gender of birth”.

Goy means “not jew”

To be called as such makes me feel uncomfortable, as if I was lacking something instead of being different but valid.

Well, first of all, it actually means "Nation” in biblical Hebrew (for example, the song “Lo yisa goy el goy cherev v'yilmadu od milchama" means “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”). Hence, when we use the words, we are literally calling you “The people of the other nations” (as Judaism centres around peoplehood in a tribal sense). So, what you have an issue with is being called “a person who belongs to another Nation, rather than of Am Yisrael,” which…is exactly what you are? You do belong to another Nation/Tribe/Identity?

Secondly, lots of groups have words for people who aren’t of their ethnicity? Gadje, Haole, Pākehā, Padakoot, Gaijin, etc. It’s pretty common for groups of small people, especially in a tribal sense, to differentiate from themselves and the greater world—especially when they’re a vulnerable population, which brings me to my last point…

Our right as a persecuted people to describe our experiences as such entirely outweigh your discomfort with being called “not Jewish.” Your bio says your French. Mazel tov, you come from a country that has a long and storied history of ant-Semitism, and you have no fucking right to police how we relate to the persecution you inflicted on us. If you hadn’t segregated and oppressed for 2,000 years, maybe we wouldn’t have such a strong sense of otherness now, but you did, so I guess we’ll never know. Grow up and deal with it. 

hey @ goyim could y'all reblog this if you’re actually willing to listen to Jewish people and protect us?

A thought that arises from the idea of tiefling babies often ending up being abandoned: A rich tiefling adventurer retiring and starting up a tiefling orphanage that takes care of rejected tiefling babies and children.

A thought that arises from the idea of a tiefling orphanage: the rich tiefling adventurer regretting his initiative of filling a mansion with dozens of little devils that all can cast Thaumaturgy. At will.

Oh Boy. :’D

Personally I headcanon that tiefling magic starts to manifest around puberty, but if that wasn’t the case, they’d just have to suck it up and tiefling baby-proof the hell out of the place. B) Have no vases and stuff that might fall over and break during tremors. Have sturdy furniture. Lock doors and windows. Avoid having open flames around. Shove cotton or something into your ears.

Oh yeah, and some of the babies might in that case be able to cast friends, minor illusion, ray of frost, or mage hand. Could result in chaos…

My next one shot is definitely going to be “A party of tiefling babies escape from the orphanage (to go to the candy shop)”

every mother who’s critiqued her daughter’s appearance based on ~what men do or do not like~ owes that child an apology

straight dude: what if my d&d character was like really violently homophobic. not because i am but like it would be dark and edgy

me: (internally) oscar wilde was right

in reference to this quote (tho he was also just right in general)

This made me laugh this morning, had to doodle it

me when i get a New Interest™️ that i’m excited to share with everyone:

my long-suffering friends and followers:

i love this and feel very called out at the same time

Did anyone else’s undiagnosed depression when they were young manifest in terrible dental hygiene that haunts you to this day or was that just a me thing

I am shocked and relieved by how relatable this is

Same, but executive dysfunction. I’m just now getting back on the horse.

Maybe all the twentysomethings are obsessed with cartoons because all the “adult” shows show the same traumas, frustrations, and anxieties we already have to deal with 24/7.

Sometimes you just wanna watch a princess of power or a magical alien child do fancy magic stuff in a lower-stakes world where you can be reasonably sure you won’t be subjected to depictions of extreme violence, gore, assault, and sex without warning, ya dig?

It’s true and you should say it

so much adult media likes to pretend hopelessness and pessimism and cynicism are something profound instead of the same depressing nonsense that you can find self-righteous assholes spouting on any given corner of the internet

society acts like we’re supposed to outgrow hope somewhere between sixteen and twenty-two and it’s absolute bullshit

being an adult isn’t about giving up

hold on, let me repeat that

just in case y'all didn’t hear me in the back

being an adult isn’t about giving up

given that people are already noticing how tumblr dorks are turning top and bottom into basically gendered stereotypes my prediction is that the next bastard thing this dying website will do is finally reach the peak of its obsession with the western zodiac and turn it into a legitimate system of social hierarchy