Supernatural S9 Unaired Scene: 9.18 Meta Fiction [x]
#im crying so much#/this/ is what his entire human arc should have been#small somber moments#small happy moments#the little things cas grew to both embrace and abhor about his new state#FUCK YOU SUPERNATURAL#all u did was fuck it up beyond imagination#he probably learned how to do this as emmanuel :(((#/flips the show off and walks into the distance (tags from bittercasgirl)
i can only speak for what i’ve encountered as a classicist/historian but
and my personal favorite:
sorry i found even more that i like
and finally, a summary of all of history:
nya haha, this is accurate!
#ways to improve jstor
oh my god
i don’t even want to think about the tags on catullus. or cicero. MY UNDERGRADUATE LIFE, PEOPLE.
(if this all interests you maybe you will also like my very loose translation of excerpts from the iliad that involve patroclus and achilleus banging: http://hilobrow.com/2011/05/25/epic-wins-2/)
It’s kind of amazing to me that Terry Pratchett started out writing novels that don’t even pass the Bechdel test and ended up at books like Equal Rites and Monstrous Regiment. I truly believe that the best writers end up being the ones who pay attention, educate themselves, notice flaws and patterns, not because someone yelled at them for not being social justice-y enough, but because they want their writing to really connect with people. Part of me is glad I’m only just beginning to get into the discworld novels, because I feel like Terry Pratchett had a lot to say about the world, and that I could spend MY entire life listening to him and what he said with his.
If you’ve read any of his biographical essays, he talks about that a bit, and not having the knowledge or the language (which we might scoff at but look how rapidly language and terminology changes today then try to remember the earlier books came out in the 80s when some tropes and words in use are now regarded as straight up slurs) to really deconstruct the things he wanted to go into. He even mentions at one point how his wife going to feminist empowerment meetings helped him to understand the things he knew to be an injustice, but just wasn’t a part of his dialogue so he tried to deconstruct it through tropes instead. So you have the fat wizards and their fancy magic who are basically incompetent and bumbling but tolerated by society because they are men, but the women who use practical magics and are good at it, are always living on the verge of poverty and exile, not because their magic is less powerful or to be feared, but because they are women.
By no means is his work perfect when it comes to issues of gender or sexuality, but it’s really, really, interesting to watch his style evolve to reflect his changing thought processes over the years.
Can we talk about Nation for a sec? Pratchett said it was the best book he had ever written or would ever write, so it’s definitely worth talking about, and it feels like nobody ever does.
I’m going to have to spoil it a little bit, sorry, I’ll try to make it vague. Nation is set in an alternate history and it’s about the aftermath of a tsunami in the South Pacific. Mau, an indigenous South Pacific islander, is the only survivor of the wave that wipes out his people. Daphne, a young British girl, is the only survivor of a shipwreck. They meet, and as refugees begin to come to them for help, they build a new Nation. Much of the book is a deconstruction of colonialism and an argument for humanism. It deliberately inverts a lot of “Lord of the Flies” (especially with the pigs) and Swiss Family Robinson / Robinson Crusoe tropes.
There is a powerful scene where Mau and Daphne have made an incredibly important archaeological discovery on Mau’s island, a piece of evidence shows that far from being “primitive” or “savages” they have always had a deeply rooted culture. (this is obvious, of course, but this discovery is something that, say, Europeans will appreciate as evidence of their scientific advancement.)
Now, although the book has been deconstructing Daphne’s colonialist heritage and viewpoints, when she first sees the discovery she unthinking blurts out that it must be evidence of European influence on Mau’s people.
Mau says no. White people have never seen this before. How does he know? “Because it is still there.”
And when Daphne says that it has to be shared with the world, Mau says that the world is welcome to come and look at it, in its context, on his island…
He shoved everything he had at it – everything he knew – every scrap of
science and folklore and language and culture and power he had. It took decades of living and remembering and thinking and navigating his culture to make this book happen.
Maybe the best character development he did was his own.
[pokes head out from javascript country] i’ve been coding for too long, here have some userscripts for ao3, to be installed through greasemonkey (firefox) / tampermonkey (chrome) / ninjakit (safari) / natively (opera)
good for: people whose favorite characters/pairings get tagged a lot in works where they’re only in the background
what the script does: you tell the code the characters/pairings you want to see. if the tags you want aren’t among the first few tags of a work (default is five for characters and three for pairings; you can change those) the script hides the work.
may save you some scrolling. possibly also might cause despair at the state of your tag, but i can’t help you with that one.
good for: people in silmarillion fandom, pro wrestling fandom, generally fandoms where characters have multiple names or secret identities indicated with a | in the tag
what the script does: you tell the code the specific part of a piped tag you want to see, e.g. “maedhros”; the script will then replace all the instances of e.g. “maedhros | maitimo” with “maedhros” in both character and pairing tags.
also linking general word replacers here because it occurred to me – kind of obviously in retrospect – that sticking “maedhros | maitimo” –> “maedhros” into a word replacer might also be a good option.
trends in writing that existed in the mid 1700s and have come back into style
– randomly capitalizing words without regard to Importance – saying ‘tho’ instead of ‘though’ – excessive metaphors, analogies, and personification for/of/whatever inanimate objects and incorporeal concepts
me, facedown on the floor: make me write
you, unimpressed: literally nothing is stopping you, inspiration is a fickle bitch and should not be relied upon, and if you don’t structure your time, self-motivate, avoid distractions, and do the work anyway, no external force can compel you
me, still facedown on the floor, now on tumblr: …make me write
kototyph 