Mr Pigeon 72 commission for LadyofaCat!

the good ending ☀️

We need happy and wholesome nice queer representation to remind us that being queer doesn't doom you to a short life of loneliness and misery and we need fucked up and toxic queer representation to remind us that queer people are human beings who are messy and complicated and are not required to be beacons of moral goodness

Hello, everyone! It's the greatest time of year again~ It's time to celebrate our favorite canon couple! Huge shouts out to @chocoluckchipz for making the most beautiful animated calendar for us again this year! I am in awe of Lucky and her talent, so please send her a kind word for volunteering her artistry for another calendar. (I literally squealed and cried the first time I watched it)

Prompts were selected by the Adrinette April discord server! If you’d like to be part of prompt selection in the future, send an ask to this blog or send @purrincess-chat a message for an invite! 

If you would like to participate in the event, just use the prompts above during the month of April and tag your submissions with #adrinetteapril2025 and/or @ mention this blog!

Different from before, submissions using prompts from previous years will be accepted, whether it be new works with old prompts you enjoy or old works you never quite finished on time. Here are links to each of those calendars: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. Just be sure to specify which year you're pulling a particular prompt(s) from.

A few ground rules:

If your submission hasn’t been reblogged within 48 hours of you posting, feel free to reach out via ask or message @purrincess-chat privately. I will do my best not to miss anyone, but sometimes things slip through. Please be patient and respectful. I will not skip anyone on purpose. 

Looking forward to all of your submissions for this year's event! Prompts are listed in order under the cut:

Because we don't teach history right.

We teach history like it's a work of fiction where the characters act the way they do because they were written that way. And not like the real world with real people who were just as human as us and had reasons to act the way they do. And that the same mistakes and foibles they had could happen to us too.

And even this history is woefully undertaught. People learn it to memorize the events of the story and then forget about it. They don't learn to comprehend it, they don't learn to learn from it.

This will be a long story, but settle in, because this is important.

I was fortunate enough to have some great teachers growing up, in a small, fairly well-funded school system (and during times when everyone still agreed that fascism was bad). In 8th grade, our school had an interdisciplinary unit for about a month focusing solely on the Holocaust. Every class taught something related to it, even math. For a month, we read horrifying stories and watched documentaries and did research assignments on the Holocaust. By the end, any one of us would have said we were experts on the subject.

And at the very end, our entire grade (about 100 kids) was broken into four groups, and we were told that as a reward for all our hard work on the Holocaust unit, we were going to compete for a trip to Disney World. Only one team could go, but the entire team would get to travel there and spend a few days in the park, all expenses paid.

The competition was simple: the group with the most team spirit would win. We were instructed to come up with a team name, a catchy slogan, and a logo (something simple and easy to draw). We were allowed to prove our team spirit however we wanted. That was it. That was all of the instructions. The competition would last a week, and short of stopping physical violence, the teachers stepped back and let us have at it.

It was terrifying.

At first, everyone just hung up posters in the halls and cheerfully recited their slogan whenever the teachers were watching. Within a few days, posters were being torn down and shredded. Verbal fights were breaking out in the hallways. It wasn't enough to say your team was the best, everyone had somehow decided. You also had to prove that everyone else's team was inferior. People started making up lies and gossip, saying that everyone in a particular group was lazy or ugly or smelly or what have you (we were 13). Slurs were thrown around. (Again, we were 13.)

By the final day, the groups were marching down the halls in formation, shouting their slogan in unison. Shouting slander against the other groups. The floor was covered in tattered paper.

I was shy and introverted and weird and unpopular and mostly stayed out of it. But those images are burned into my memory. These kids had turned into vicious monsters, all for a stupid school project.

The teachers had us march down the hallway to the auditorium to announce the results of the competition. The groups were little armies now. Most students marched in lockstep, shouting their slogans. We were seated together in our groups. The teachers dimmed the lights, quieted us down, and the teacher in charge of this whole project said that before he announced the winners, he had something to share with us about the person who was responsible for this entire competition. He turned on the projector and displayed a portrait of Hitler.

Everyone lost their minds. Kids were booing and throwing things. We knew that Hitler was a Bad Guy.

The teacher calmed us back down, and then explained that there was no trip to Disney World, and the fact that not one student questioned for a moment that such a massively expensive and complicated prize would be granted for such a silly competition was honestly kind of disappointing. This entire week, he said, was our final exam. The final exam for the Holocaust unit.

We had spent a month learning about this. About how this "bad guy" inspired a whole hell of a lot of people to march in lockstep shouting slogans and plastering their symbol all over everything. That one bad guy had told them that they were special, and other groups were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs for being the best, and they ultimately got extremely violent. We had learned all about the Hitler Youth and the SS and book burnings and, of course, the concentration camps. We'd all read the Diary of Anne Frank. We'd been marinating in this information for a month, in all of our classes.

But we hadn't learned. We hadn't really understood what they were trying to teach us. Not that this happened. But that this happens. It can happen very easily, especially if people aren't watching out for it.

The kids were furious. They shouted that this wasn't fair, that we were only following instructions. The teachers had lied to us. They had told us to do this, and now they were mad at us for following directions?

He was ready for this, of course. Calming us back down again, he pointed out that all they'd done is tell us to give ourselves a name, a slogan, a symbol, and demonstrate "team spirit." That was literally it. No one told us to rip posters down. No one told us to march in the hallways. No one told us to spread rumors and shout insults. No one told us to fight each other.

They didn't have to.

All it takes to get people to behave this way is to tell them that their group is special, they deserve good things, but the good things aren't there because those other people are taking them from you.

The Nazis were not uniquely evil people. They were just encouraged to demonstrate their team spirit. And there were no teachers to stop it from getting violent. Because the person encouraging them wanted things to get violent.

The Holocaust was not the story of Hitler the Bad Guy. He was there, and he was responsible for a lot, but that wasn't the point. Germany during the Holocaust wasn't suddenly, by total accident, full of evil people.

It was just full of people like us.

This time, it just was a lie about Disney World and a week of chaos. But if we didn't watch out, the next time fascism started to rise, we would get swept up on the wrong side of it. We had just proven that we would. We'd be too swept up in making sure that our special group got the prize they deserved to notice that we were being lied to about the prize in the first place.

That could happen. If we weren't careful. If we forgot the lesson we'd just learned.

After he'd let the horror and shame and embarrassment and indignation of that week sink in properly, he reassured us that it wasn't our fault. The point wasn't for us to prove that we understood the lesson of the Holocaust. It wasn't actually a test after all, it was our final lesson. The most important lesson.

He'd known that this test would go this way, because it always did. He did this every year. He said in all his years of teaching, only one student, one student, had ever questioned it. Pulled him aside in the hallway and said straightforwardly that whatever was going on was messed up and he wanted no part of it.

And you know what? That is how you teach history. You give students the facts of what happened. And then you show them how easily it can happen again.

Sadly, most schools don't have the resources for this sort of thing, and these days they'd probably not be allowed to run this little experiment. But I'm extremely grateful to that teacher, grateful that I was part of that experience. It was harrowing, and it made me and a lot of other people vigilant for the rest of my life in a way I know I would not have been otherwise.

It was over 35 years ago now and it still makes me emotional to think about.

Most people never got to have that experience, to properly learn that lesson. But at least I can pass the story on to you. And you can pass it on to others. Because if you think you would have acted differently, that you would have seen through the ruse, think again.

I was writing up a long thing about how the left isn’t immune to this logic even though we think we are and lost it. The basic points:

A lot of leftists assume that we’re more flexible than right wingers, and there’s some evidence for this. From studies I’ve read about, we tend to be more open to new ideas and to trying new things, seeing failure as part of a process to make things better. Where people who gravitate toward conservatism tend to fear breaking things, and that failure will lead to widespread immorality and horror, so we’d better embrace tradition before we destroy ourselves.

Which is helpful! But it’s helpful in the way “some vaxxed people will still get covid and it just won’t be as bad” way, not in the “I am immune to scapegoating people because I care about marginalization, and that’s all I need to do” way.

Think of guillotine memes. Very few of us literally want to violently murder Elon, but the idea that his death would suddenly make a bunch of evil vanish is still popular.

Where if we do kill him, there’s still the logistical issue of “now how do we divert that money into affordable housing units?” That’s still gonna take work.

Work you’d still be doing if you’d gone with taxes rather than violence, but in that case, maybe just do the tax thing? Less blood?

And there’s also a tendency you see a lot in ex conservatives, where they still have the “embrace tradition” thing in their brain, but it moves when they get progressive. “*ists are not welcome in this community! We kick those people out!”

Okay, but what happens when those are the marginalized people you’re supposed to be protecting? I work in a homeless shelter. A lot of people are too busy with their own lives to care that we’re trans inclusive even if they don’t like it, but a lot of people “keep seeing that man in the showers” and make no secret of how they dont like this and exhort us to make life so they don’t have to “see that thing.”

I guess you can progressive stack and say the poor black unhoused trans woman has more marginalizations than the poor black unhoused cis one, and not have to think past that.

But I mean, me personally, the case worker? Not as poor, white, housed. Obligated as a prog to help both, if I take seriously that I owe support and help to people worse off.

So im more inclined personally to take from that life lesson that “bigots” aren’t just well off people thumbing their noses at the working class. Sometimes they ARE marginalized people.

Which means you can’t just go “there’s us, not bigots, and them, the bigots, and we’re the good guys.”

Even though people want to. Even though I want to, especially when the trans lady is friendly and kind to me and the people who think her body is SO WEIRD are generally in bad moods.

It’s tempting to EVERYONE. (If people rant about how dare I be nice to a transphobe in the notes, point proven.)

We ALL have to fight it.

Hello, all!!

I'm working with @fandomsforpali to raise money for Wijdan's GoFundMe! For every $10 donated, if you fill out this form you can be entered in a raffle to win an illustration, or even a comic, by me! Four winners will be chosen — three illustrations and one comic. Check out the form for more information!

(Also, check out the @fandomsforpali blog and their carrd for other artists and authors you can commission via donation!)

super secret special mission!!

(want a chance to get a comic or illustration by me? I'm doing prizes for a charity raffle for @fandomsforpali, more info here!!)

I needed this.

Thank you to all the people who posted this so I ended up seeing it. I really needed this right now. Thank you!

Yeah… Not gonna lie… I cried…

We need more people like this

Goddamn it stop making me feel human

The therapist I wanna be.

Text in the image:

“I’m a therapist and keep this poster in my waiting room, apparently it’s saved a few lives.”

I don’t like the phrase “a cry for help.” I just don’t like how it sounds. When somebody says to me, “I’m thinking about suicide. I have a plan: I just need a reason not to do it,” the last thing I see is helplessness.

I think your depression has been beating you up for years. It’s called you ugly, and stupid, and pathetic, and a failure, for so long that you’ve forgotten that it’s wrong. You don’t see any good in yourself, and you don’t have any hope.

But still here you are: you’ve come over to me, banged on my door and said, “HEY! Staying alive is REALLY HARD right now! Just give me something to fight with! I don’t care if it’s a stick! Give me a stick and I can stay alive!”

How is that helpless? I think that’s incredible. You’re like a marine: trapped for years behind enemy lines. Your gun has been taken away, you’re out of ammo, you’re malnourished, and you’ve probably caught some kind of jungle virus that’s making you hallucinate giant spiders.

And you’re still just going, “GIVE ME A STICK. I’M NOT DYING OUT HERE.” “A cry for help” makes it sound like I’m supposed to take pity on you, but you don’t need my pity. This isn’t pathetic. This is the will to survive. This is how humans lived long enough to become the dominant species.

With NO hope, running on NOTHING, you’re ready to cut through a hundred miles of hostile jungle with nothing but a stick, if that’s what it takes to get to safety.

All I’m doing is handing out sticks.

You’re the one saying alive.

I legit cried at this. I’ve needed to hear it put this way. Bless this post.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this is Boggle the Owl! Used to be a blog here on Tumblr that answered questions via Boggle, mainly about mental health and depression. It is not active since 2016 but you can still see the questions and answers over at @boggletheowl , though I do recommend caution, many of the asks could be triggering.

There are so many more great posts like this one on the blog. I actually also saw this very same post first through a repost on 9gag in 2014, years before I even joined Tumblr, and I saved it. I always share it whenever someone comes to me feeling down, Boggle brings people hope and strength.

I wish I could contact the creator and thank them for all they did when drawing Boggle. It certainly has helped me in the past. And I hope if you are holding on and asking for a stick, you have to know you are strong, please don’t ever doubt that. Seek professional help if you can, lean on your loved ones, and if nothing else, remember Boggle’s words here.

this is all i got

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Be fast! There’s only a limited amount of slots available. 🍉

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

(via)

they’re? just? sitting there ???

it makes it 100% better that i can’t understand her, i feel like i’m hearing what cats hear

Heh, she’s speaking Portuguese! Here’s what she’s saying:

*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”

Luis Roberto and Jurandir are people names (Jurandir is especially a name associated with older men) so it’s extra funny that the cats are named that, heh.

Why is this a line of thinking for her. She's dating him and presumably knows of all the people he regularly talks to. Especially since he didn't have many friends before going to school. Like

It’s Chat Blanc. When Adrien was the one that knew her identity, Chat Noir was the one who knew. And the world fucking ended. Girl is SCARED!

Why wouldn’t the reverse be true? If Chat Noir knows something Adrien might too.

I took a peek at the tag after watching the new episode and I feel like some aren't getting what the theme this season seems to be, so I feel like wording this out

We haven't seen much but the theme is secrets, lies and truths.

(spoilers for revelator below)

“This is why, when they needed the gays to be feared and hunted, they labeled them 'pedophiles'. This is why they're now doing this to trans people. This is why dehumanization is a tool of oppression, not justice”

this part really stuck on to me

god keep ur fucking kink meme shit out of ao3 tag y'all make this fandom even more insufferable than it already is and thats saying something!!! The kind of shit y'all post require a fucking trigger warning it doesnt belong in a safe space

Hello! I see there’s been some confusion! Allow me to clear something up: AO3 is not a safe space.

Let me repeat that. Archive Of Our Own is not a safe space, not in the way you mean it.

From the AO3 Terms of Service:

Why does the Archive have a goal of maximum inclusiveness?

What kind of content do you allow?

The ratings/warnings policy is really minimal. Why is this?

The stated desires/goals when AO3 was conceived and initially developed can be found here, on a livejournal post from @astolat (founder of VidCon, Yuletide, and AO3, and all around fannish legend). In short, the goal was “allowing ANYTHING – het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult.” 

And that, in fact, is precisely what AO3 hosts. You see, AO3 is a safe space for fanfiction. It’s a safe space for people to explore all kinds of fannish content without fear of banning, deletion, or legal reprisal. It was founded, designed, and developed to be a safe space for fandom and fannish works.

There also seems to be some confusion about the nature of safe spaces vs. trigger warnings. A fannish work that merits a trigger warning isn’t something that doesn’t belong in a safe space. The trigger warning is what MAKES something a safe space despite the presence of fannish works that merit warnings.

Something else to consider: there are many other things that include het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, and highly adult material, in addition to incest, pedophilia, infanticide, necrophilia, rape, bestiality, sadism and violence, adultery, and all manner of other things. 

So holding individual women (because that’s what fandom primarily is, women exploring their sexuality in a safe forum filled with other women doing the same) accountable for their fictional exploration of things that a) exist in real life in genuinely damaging forms, b) have significant impact on women themselves, thus leading in some part to the urge to explore those things safely, and c) have existing in movies, television, popular culture, the Bible, and in all of literature since literature began? Well, that’s just an extension of the same culture that polices women’s sexuality in the first place and drives them to find safe ways to explore it.

Ding ding ding we have a winner 🙌🏼

AO3 was pretty much meant to be a safe space …  FOR WRITERS.

FOR WRITERS TO POST PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING AS LONG AS IT IS ADEQUATELY WARNED FOR AND MEETS THEIR CLEARLY POSTED CRITERIA.

IT LITERALLY EXISTS TO PROTECT FANWORKS FROM BEING CENSORED, THREATENED BY LAWYERS, OR TAKEN DOWN OR ALTERED AGAINST THE WRITER’S WILL. THIS APPLIES TO ALL WORKS THAT MEET ITS TOS. ALL OF THEM. YES, INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY THAT REALLY ICKY ONE.

THAT IS LITERALLY ITS PURPOSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. IT WILL NOT CHANGE ITS PURPOSE AND SUDDENLY DECIDE SOME KINDS OF CENSORSHIP ARE OKAY NOW BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE YELL.

If this makes anyone personally uncomfortable, there’s a very easy way to avoid that. Just don’t use AO3. Problem solved.

I guess I should be glad that we have built a world where young fans can be so deeply ignorant of fannish history that they think that the mechanism of repression they’re invoking wasn’t originally built and used to silence them, and so easily could be again.  Their assumption is that they are entitled to have fandom feel comfortable and safe for them; it literally does not occur to them that within their own short lifespans you had to have separate and sometimes secret lists and archives for slash because “nobody wants to see that” and “it’s gross/against God’s will” and “what if the children see it!!!”  (I remember a man knitter having to quit the freaking knitlist because he took such shit just for referring to his partner as “DH/DB” (dear husband/boyfriend) the way the women knitters did theirs.)  And even within the slash community…the very first Smallville slash mailing list tried to ban strong language and graphic content.  A rebel splinter had to break off and found ClarkLex to publish all kinds of stories.  That was only in 2001!  

I know it’s a good thing that we’re now in a world where indignant young people have no idea how vulnerable they historically have been and still are in this particular context.  The time before: that was worse, for many people.  But it’s still very tiring to see.

Please, indignant young people, do start up your own archives where the Problematic Content is banned.  You’ll be setting each other on fire within the year over just where the line is to be drawn.  And advancing your actual cause not at all. 

AO3 is big and easy to use and I have seen some fucked up shit there.

Fandom is becoming mainstream. We need to reconsider if “because you CAN write it, no other reason necessary” is a good philosophy these days. It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.

Excuse me? What’s wrong with writing something “because I can”? What other philosophy do you want us to adopt? Let’s see if this fits mainstream criteria of normalcy, of “good” and “moral”?  And the answer to that is: NO. A huge big NO. This is why AO3 was created after LJ strikethrough in 2007 - because we wanted a space where it didn’t matter how weird or kinky or fucked up a story is. Where it didn’t matter that it’s not mainstream. Where we wouldn’t be judged, nobody could delete our stuff and nobody could try holding us legally accountable simply for writing something that’s not to their tastes (as long as there is no actually illegal material). 

Why would they “need” to do that? For what reason? AO3 is precisely what we need - apparently now not only to ward off attacks from outside fandom as it used to be, but from inside fandom as well.

“It may be that AO3 needs to reconsider its philosophy and possibly change.”

NO. Ao3 doesn’t *need* to do a damn thing. If you (and plenty of other people, evidently) think that fandom needs a more mainstream, sanitized space/archive go ahead and make it happen, the source codes are out there (and good luck deciding about how clean is clean enough).

I have seen this exact response given over and over again -make your own space, go on and do it yourselves- and it’s always ignored or treated like a dismissal. It’s NOT a dismissal, this is how everything in fandom gets created. This is how ao3 was created: a bunch of people wanted it enough to make it happen. We donated money, time and workto make it happen. And the folks at ao3 did such a good job that the result is now the biggest and most well known fandom archive. But it was born from a bunch of people who wanted to give fanfics a safe space and were willing to work for it.

Every time I see people huffing and ignoring the perfectly logical suggestion to “get together and create the fandom space that you want” I can’t help but think that they just don’t care enough about their ideas to be willing to put in the work (and if so, why should we care enough to do their work for them?) or worse, are just in it for the joy of policing and shaming others

THIS.

We didn’t like how it was done elsewhere, so we built AO3. You don’t like how AO3 does it? WELL GO BUILD YOUR OWN SPACE INSTEAD OF DEMANDIG AO3 TO DO AS YOU PLEASE! DAMN IT!

This entitlement is so disgusting.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

As we say in Danish, “if you don’t like the smell of the bakery, you can eat somewhere else.”