Crying over fictional characters

When you are unemployed, mysterious voices will tell you to "become a youtuber" but you must remind yourself that it's probably the amulet talking. The amulet you found last week, near the park. It has given you good advice so far, but there is always a line that you shouldn't cross.

some of my current favorite responses to weird/confusing sentences:

If you Google "India rape news" these are the top articles that show up (they're all from today btw). And these are just the reported cases.

According to a report, 99% of sexual assault cases against Indian women go unreported.

Indian women are subjected to the worst kind of abuse by men. Misogyny is so deeply rooted here that honestly, I don’t think there’s any hope for us.

And the truth is, nothing we do matters. I could read all the feminist literature in the world, I could make endless lists of everything that’s wrong with this country, I could create space for women online and offline - but men would still continue to hurt us.

And my main issue is with men. Especially with the ones who understand exactly what’s wrong and still choose silence. The ones who laugh off their friends' remarks towards women, ignore how their fathers treat their mothers, and think they’re somehow better just because they’ve “never abused a woman.”

Their silence is our abuse. Their refusal to speak is our abuse.

And then there are women who’ve internalised misogyny so deeply, they defend and uphold the very systems that destroy us. That’s our abuse too.

And as a woman who doesn’t have the privilege to leave this country, I will continue to bear this abuse because I have no choice.

India is a hellhole, a living hell for us. It’s funny how they love spewing shit about how men are victims of false rape cases and how it’s ruining their lives mind you not even the real cases are ruining their lives. They’re the first one to say “our culture respects and worships women” but then go around calling women misogynistic slurs, their first instinct is to either rape you or kill you when you speak up or go against the standards they have set up for us. What sad is that not even the law is backing us up, Indian judiciary is an active example of how much the country hates women.

As long as Indian women are alive, they can fight back. There are ways to subvert oppressive regimes. One of which is educating women, second is building solidarity and unity amongst women, third is organizing and mobilizing the masses of women, etc.

these are ideas by Waseem Belushi.

unless they specifically asked, you don’t get to tell a fanfic writer you think they mischaracterized the character by the way. because the second someone writes a fanfic about a character, that character becomes the writer’s own version of the character. canon is only a suggestion, but whether or not an author will follow it / how much of canon an author will take is entirely up to them. you don’t get to stick your nose in their world and tell them “hey this is not to my liking therefore I think you’re doing it wrong” when you can simply leave quietly and move on to something else you may enjoy

Care for a drink?

These new Penguin First Impressions collection covers were shared on Reddit:

They are just... inexplicable. Especially the Mansfield Park one, but like, all of them.

Edit: also, to the racial diversity, isn't it just false advertising here? If you pick up that copy of P&P expecting a black couple that is not what you will receive.

Circling back to this because, apparently,

that's exactly what happening???

I'm a bit shell-shocked.

See, but that's not literature imitating fanfic. That's the publishing industry collapsing Austen into Romance, choosing to give her books modern romance covers and get blurbs from romance writers to sell them to romance readers.

(Romance is actually the source of a lot of things in the publishing industry that are supposedly "from fic", like marketing with tropes.)

and once again I'm left wondering: if you don't want something to be Regency (in this case visually, with those stupid covers), WHY are you reading a REGENCY NOVEL in the first place?! on a historical clothing level, the ones like Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice that have juuuuust enough Ye Olde Timey elements to make people maybe think "oh yeah that must be what Regency looks like!" irritate me more than the fully modern ones, ngl

also yeah the racial diversity element is something I broadly support in new independent fiction or film adaptations, but it just feels like false advertising here as that comment says. sure, there's no reason you CAN'T imagine Lizzie and Darcy being Black in a Regency world where racism doesn't exist, but like...that's not how Austen wrote it, and if someone picks it up hoping for references inside that confirm the notion or an examination of racism in Regency society, they're going to be disappointed

If you want these stories to be modern, there's nice reimagined versions with coloured people. Bride and Prejudice was a fun adaption.

Hot tip: if your Jedi character says “I have a bad feeling about this” something bad needs to happen.

When anakin says this in the arena in AOTC, like 200 Jedi get killed in the next ten minutes, and a war begins. If the situation looks bad, but is going to resolve itself just fine, your Jedi will have a good feeling about it. You the author, presumably know what is going to happen, and your Jedi’s vague premonitions should act accordingly

Nothing is funnier than writing from a non-Jedi perspective, have the Jedi say "I have a good feeling about this" and seconds later all alarms are blaring and the ship is falling apart.

They need to invent more fake celebrities like Hatsune Miku and Gorillaz and the Muppets because it's genuinely the most sustainable way to maintain a parasocial relationship with the entertainer class.

Kermit the Frog can never get canceled because Kermit the Frog has no agency or personhood beyond what he is imbued with by the collective labor of puppeteers, voice actors, singers, and writers. He is, along with these other examples, effectively a celebrity by gestalt. He has transcended the inherit instability of the celebrity class through diffusion of responsibility for his personhood. He is a god.

I know a bunch of people are into this as a kink thing, but as a person who is really into survivalism, this is so cool.

Strap them on like backpack

writers take note if you have a scene where a character needs to move someone

“I’m having my son in 2 months and I’m jealous of how cute baby girl clothes are” you can put your newborn son in a little strawberry print romper, I swear. he won’t mind. he won’t develop a complex over it, I promise.

It’s so interesting how heavily gendered baby clothes are an extremely modern phenomenon like even in the midcentury period baby clothes were often the same cut and color for baby boys and baby girls but now you can’t put your son in a pink romper and you have to use baby glue to affix a flower to your daughter’s head so everyone knows she’s a little girl.

Navy seal in action

Dude looked at her like

whenever you take too much time to write something know it is because stephen king has been stealing your life force