Latest Posts by jane-of-almost-all-trades - Page 3

Discworld is an interesting beast in the age of ACAB. Like, the city watch books are a story about police and the way in which a good police force can help and protect people. Which would make it copoganda. And I'm not going to say that the City Watch books are completely free of copoganda, but they also do something interesting that fairly few stories about heroic police officers do, and I think it has a lot to do with Samuel Vimes. A lot of copoganda stories like, say, Brooklyn 99, are perfectly capable of portraying cops as cruel, bigoted, and greedy, but our central cast of characters are portrayed as good people who want to help their communities. The result is that the bad cops are portrayed as an aberration, while most cops can be assumed to be good people doing a tough job because they want to help protect people from the nebulous evil forces of "Crime". The police are considered to be naturally heroic. Pratchett does something very interesting, which is provide us with Vimes' perspective, and present us with an Unnaturally heroic police force. In Ahnk-Morpork, the natural state of the watch is a gang with extra paperwork. It's the place for people who, at best, just want a steady paycheck and at worst want an excuse to hit people with a truncheon. Rather than be an army defending people from the forces of Crime, the Watch is described as a sort of sleight-of-hand, big burly watchmen in shiny uniforms don't stand around in-case a Crime happens in their vicinity, they stand around to remind people that The Law exists and has teeth. The Watchmen are people, when danger rears it's head, their instinct is to hide and get out of the way. When faced with authority, their instinct is to bow to it out of fear of what it might do to them if they don't. Carrot is a genuine Hero, but his natural heroism is presented as an aberration. Normal Cops don't act like Carrot does. The fact that the Watch ends up acting like a Heroic Police Force is largely due to the leadership of Sam Vimes, but Vimes himself is a microcosm of the Watch. The base state of Sam Vimes would be an alchoholic bully of an officer, one who beats people until they confess to anything because that makes his job easier. Vimes The Hero is a homunculous, an artificial being created by Sam Vimes fighting back all those instincts and FORCING himself to behave as his conscience dictates. Vimes doesn't take bribes or let his officers do the same because, damnit, that sort of thing shouldn't happen, even if doing so would make things a lot easier. Vimes doesn't run towards sounds of screaming because he WANTS to, he forces himself to do so because somebody needs to. It's best summed up in Thud “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Your Grace.” “I know that one,” said Vimes. “Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal.” “Ah, but who watches you, Your Grace?” said the inspector with a brief little smile. “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”

In the hands of another writer, or another series, this exchange would be weirdly dismissive. To whom should the police be accountable to? Themselves, shut up and trust us. But from Vimes, it's a different story. Vimes DOES constantly watch himself, and he doesn't trust that bastard, he's known him his entire life. The Heroic Police are not a natural state, they're an ideal, and ahnk-morpork only gets anywhere close. Vimes is constantly struggling against his own instincts to take shortcuts, to let things slide, but he forces himself to live up to that ideal and the Watch follows his example. Discworld doesn't propose any solutions to the problems with policing in the real world. We don't have a Sam Vimes to run the NYPD and force them to behave. We don't have a Carrot Ironfounderson. But it's at least a story about detectives and police that I can read without feeling like I'm being sold propaganda about the Thin Blue Line.

My favourite thing about Éowyn and Faramir is that when Éowyn tells Faramir she’s in love with Aragorn, his response is basically “well duh, who isn’t.” He truly gets Éowyn, not only because he has similar experiences with despair and grief, but also because the two of them feel the exact same way about Aragorn.

Strictly, canonically speaking, Faramir isn’t in love with Aragorn, but his old-school Medieval fealty has the level of passion and intensity that a modern reader tends to associate with romantic love. (Though of course he isn’t an outlier in a series about passionate friendship and fealty.) The first time Faramir ever saw Aragorn, in the Houses of Healing, “a light of knowledge and love was kindled in his eyes” and he immediately volunteered to do anything his king asked of him, even though he had just woken up from life-threatening illness and probably didn’t have the strength to get out of bed under his own power. And what he offers to Éowyn, among other things, is this: you can continue to love Aragorn as your king and captain, we can both love him that way, and love each other with a quieter peacetime love.

— Slytherin’s reputation as the evil house is being fixed in-universe

— There are Discworld references

— Harry is a Star Wars fan

— Various aspects of magic & magical society that seem weird, illogical and/or unreasonably underused in canon are treated reasonably (though in some cases by Harry only)

— Voldemort’s plotline will make you sad while still despising him

— Harry is constantly comparing his story to LotR

— everything and everyone is crazy but will make sense in the end (probably)

— the author is so smart but sometimes shows his Crazy Fan side

Recently I got recommended a lot of videos criticizing Harry Potter and no videos talking about how great Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is instead. Like, if you want a better version of the story, just read this fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In his AU:

-Harry gets adopted by Petunia and an Oxford professor and is homeschooled in science

-When he gets into the wizarding world he is irritated by the society’s bigotry and backwardness and wants to change the world by fusing magic and science

-He is accepted into Ravenclaw and so is Hermione

-He befriends Draco instead of Ron and slowly makes him question his beliefs and actually become a better person

-Hermione has a lot of screen time and her own arcs including the one where she fights against misogyny in heroism

-there’s a homestuck reference

-there’s a death note reference

-at some point Harry bullies the sorting hat

-Voldemort (or rather his actual identity) is a well-written character with interesting backstory and goals

- the plot point where Harry is Voldemort’s horcrux plays a big role in this

-at some point Voldemort uses a gun

-there’s a scientific explanation to how spirits and patronus work

-there’s an mlp reference

-one of the hocruxes is in space

-the Philosopher’s stone is canonically created by two lesbians and one of them is baba yaga

people will be like “don’t worry it’s all in your head!” like babe… yes… that’s the problem… how do i get it out of there…

Only right now am I discovering plenty of shows of different degrees of “old”. I may not be making a lot of fan content, but be sure I need it.

I don't wanna @ anyone because I understand how fast things seem to move in today's landscape of streaming shows dropping entire seasons in one day, and networks pumping out new series constantly to try to attract more subscribers with no intent to actually maintain those shows over time but I just saw someone self-deprecatingly lament that they are still thinking about a show that ended almost a year ago, making fan art and playlists for it, and I want to be very clear:

you can still create fanworks when it comes to old media!! PLEASE do!! there are always going to be new fans who will appreciate it, and veteran fans who are dying for new content and new perspectives. also, less than a year is NOTHING. the original Star Trek series was on TV six decades ago and there are still people losing their minds over it, writing stories and reblogging gifsets daily, and that's only one example.

a fandom lasts as long as there are people who love a thing, even if it's only a handful of people. love what you love and write and draw and make gifs and playlists about it!

anon hate

Witty response

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett ❤️‍🩹

Show cancelled.

Castle spoilers ahead, in case anyone cares hasn’t watched it all yet

Senator Bracken telling Kate that she should be grateful to him for killing her mom giving her The Tragic BackstoryTM that motivated her & led to all of her current achievements is so Tumblr-writing-prompt-esque… I can’t

I once dreamt of several detective stories. Like, saw them in my dreams at night. I don’t know if they were good or bad, but there were actual detective plots and plot twists. And I don’t remember them entirely. Only some details.

While dreaming, I was watching them like a movie, but thinking that I was reading them in some book. I wondered how I had gotten through it so fast, and only then I realised that it was no book, but something my brain had made up. Then I thought that I should write them down, and maybe after some work they’ll make sense as actual detective stories. But I woke up, and I didn’t remember practically anything. Not even the key plot points.

Reblog if you're black tumblr.

You don’t have to be black, it just means you support us, you stand by us and your for us.

Oh, look who finally changed her profile pic from the heavily-associated-with-bots-default Random Shape with a Bad Colour Scheme to something (a Random Little Doodle of a Togruta) that works better as a placeholder until I find The Perfect Profile Picture.

A customer contacted our team with questions, and then finished their email with: "I am daunted by the complexities and unknowns." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

Do you embody any stereotypes?

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

It’s back again, help me😭

oh, the irresistible feminine urge to read six totally different books at the same time

Pros and cons of being in the Discworld fandom

Pros:

Discworld is amazing

It’s like Tolkien but modern

You will chuckle so hard you’ll have to have to have little breaks to breathe

Small fandom so it’s easy to make friends & discuss things

Really awesome if you like series because there are 40 books

But there are actually 5+ series within that & several stand alone books so you don’t have to read all of them (although by the time you finish one series you might want to read all the rest)

The world is flat & sits on four elephants who are for some reason standing on a giant turtle and I don’t think anyone is really sure why

Easy to find a cool Discworld-related url

Range of female characters (so you know the Joss Whedon Marvel/Steven Moffat syndrome of all the main females being kickass, skinny, kickass, perfect in everyway, kickass & pretty much the same character? that syndrome is stomped into the ground, cut up into tiny pieces & mocked)

Canon lesbian characters

Some super cute tv adaptions with cameos from sir pterry himself

Deep shit reflecting on life the universe and everything, the rise and fall of political systems, the power of words, the prevalence of evil, the nature of humankind, human relationships and beliefs, and so, so much more

Super silly bits where you’re like ye gods pratchett did you really just make that pun

Ships ranging from teenage fluff to middle-aged fluff to damn hot af

Characters who oppose their society’s gender binary & nice friendly badass werewolf woman lends them dresses

Badass moments which make your insides do hoola hoops

The fucking puns

Really awesome large characters who either just don’t give a flying fuck or have to deal with fat shaming and prove that they are infinitely better, kinder, cleverer people than the fat shamers and often use their size to help them as they save lives/fight evil etc.

There’s this book called Monstrous Regiment and it’s basically 400 pages of fucking up sexism, xenophobia and gender binary

There’s a character named Adora Belle Dearheart and her partner (to clarify: she’s not his wife, he’s her husband) is called Moist what more do you want

A Christmas/winter festival book which will leave you warm and happy and philosophically questioning

Do you like funny footnotes?? So many funny footnotes

Characters getting over & challenging internalised prejudices & beliefs

Destruction of racial stereotypes 

Characters call even the protagonist out on their assumption of roles which fit a white supremic system 

Really good model of police/civilian relationship where the commander of police force fundamentally does not agree with the police/civilian model because “what was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? once policemen stopped being civilians, the only other thing they could be was soldiers.” - or put more simply “a watchman is a civilian, you inbred streak of piss”

young teenage witches coming to terms with their own strength & power, middle-aged witches who write cooking sex books and are as kind as can be, old witches who are canonically ace/aro spectrum and never regret that for a moment and just so fucking smart

so many witches

and there are wizards, and female wizards too

Death is a character and he’s adorable and he really really likes cats and he has a granddaughter who looks after children and hits monsters with pokers and has amazing hair

Super talented fandom who do art and fics which break your heart

Very good realistic characters and protagonists which are far from perfect aka recovering alcoholic picked up out the gutter by a (6 foot) dwarf and a woman who is large and kind but perfectly capable of looking after herself and the recovering alcoholic and a garden full of swamp dragons - and the old witch? she is only a goodie because everyone else is too busy being bad - and there’s an ex con artist who spent his life ruining others’ bc he found it fun and is only now a ‘goodie’ because he’s being blackmailed - and the person in charge is a tyrant but he’s really a very reasonable one - and there’s a guy who literally just runs away from things the entire time I’m not even exaggerating that’s like the entire plot of his books he just runs away from things

Have I mentioned the puns

Cons:

There are no cons

Discworld is amazing

I will lend you the books

And everyone who reads this, too

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

SAY NICE THINGS TO PPL

Damn, that’s so me

i like to think that i'm someone who has a fairly good working knowledge of lord of the rings and assorted texts but then i encounter people on here who casually use the quenya name of characters from the silmarillion and then i'm like oh no i am a little baby still learning to read compared to all you full grown tolkien professors

Sharing to fight misinformation

found this today

Please use these terms correctly. Not doing so will deeply harm the people who actually have experienced trauma, gaslighting, triggers, and people who have NPD.

Damn, this is such cool analysis, I don’t know what to say… I’m jealous. I want to study this. I wanna be able to do this. I wanna be able to use this on myself. I want to design character costumes like this. I don’t need more skill envy in my life, help

idle Jaskier-related notion:

Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier's costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he's trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.

On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it's hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.

On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.

Cheery and Nobby! I wonder what they’re talking about

Jimmy, to Lalo: You’re a monster!

Lalo: And you are a lawyer. Nobody’s perfect.

The outfit looks like it’s her version from Soul Music, pretty cool

Susan Sto Helit

It's Death favourite daughter and interleaver! Got around to thinking about Discworld again recently. GNU Sir Terry Pratchett!

If you like my art, give me a pat on the back by liking, and consider reblogging to bring joy to others!

My commissions are open. If you would like me to draw you something like this, feel free to contact me here on pm, via e-mail sonjavart(at)gmail.com, or on my Ko-Fi. Price listings are on my Ko-Fi, and if you don’t see what you like, feel free to inquire for a quote or other details. Relevant info and links in my pinned post.

“People are inherently terrible” no!!! Have you ever seen a child wait for their friend while they tie their shoelaces? Have you ever known someone who would bring hurt squirrels and rabbits and mice to the nearest vet just so it doesn’t suffer? Have you seen someone grieve? Have you ever read something that hit your heart like a freight train? Have you looked at the stars and felt an unexplainable joy? Have you ever baked bread? Have you shared a meal with a friend? Have you not seen it? All the love? All the good? I know it’s hard to see sometimes, I know there’s pain everywhere. But look, there’s a child helping another up after a hard fall. Look, there’s someone giving their umbrella to a stranger. Look, there’s someone admiring the spring flowers. Look, there’s good, there’s good, there’s good. Look!!!!

Everyone is fighting a tough battle so reblog to give previous a sword 🗡️