Malec

I’m not here to bash on fans of the Shadowhunters TV show, but one thing I would ask you to stop doing is saying show Malec is better than book Malec because in the show Alec never gets upset that Magnus has had relationships in the past, and is immortal while Alec is not. 

I was so mad that Alec was upset with Magnus, and went to Camille to see if he could make Magnus mortal, but it is a huge part of Alec’s character and his development along with how Malec’s relationship grows and over comes its hurdles. 

In City of Fallen Angels Alec is constantly in distress over the number of romantic partners that Magnus has had over the years, along with the fact that Magnus will live after Alec dies. Alec does not want to be “just another Shadowhunter” in Magnus’s story. If someone brought up the fact that Magnus is immortal, Alec couldn’t handle it. 

But then we jump to Lord of Shadows, which takes place 5 years in the future, and someone (not saying who but that she can choke) says this to Alec: 

“ … Wouldn’t it be funny if he died before you? I mean, what with him being immortal, you must have thought it would go the other way.” 

Alec raised his head slowly. “What?”

“Well, I mean since Magnus is immortal and you, you know, aren’t” she clarified. 

“He’s immortal?” Alec’s voice was colder than Kit had ever heard it. “I wish you’d told me before. I would have turned back time and found myself a nice mortal husband to grow old with.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be better?” Zara said. “Then you could get old and die at the same time.”

“At the same time?” Alec echoed. He had barely moved or raised his voice, but his rage seemed to fill the room. Even Zara was starting to look uneasy. “How would you suggest we arrange that? Jump off a cliff together when one of us started feeling sickly?” 

“Maybe.” Zara looked sulky. “You have to agree the situation you’re in is a tragesty.” 

Alec rose to his feet and in that moment was the famous Alec Lightwood Kit had heard about, the hero of past battles, the archer boy with deadly aim. “This is what I’ve chosen,” he said. “How dare you tell me it’s a tragedy? Magnus never pretended, he never tried to fool me into thinking it would be easy, but choosing Magnus is one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. We all have a lifetime, Zara, and none of us know how long or how short it might be. Surely even you know that. I expect you mean to be rude and cruel, but I doubt you meant to sound stupid as well.” 

She flushed. “But if you die of old age and he lives forever-” 

“Then he’ll be there for Max, and that makes both of us happy,” said Alec. “And I will be a uniquely lucky person, because there will be someone who always remembers me. Who will always love me. Magnus won’t always mourn, but until the end of time he will remember me and love me.”

I understand that you might not like what Alec did in CoLS, and how he saw his and Magnus’s relationship, but without it, you do not get to see the wonderful and extraordinary character development. I really did not  like Alec at first, mainly because the Jace and Clary thing and I thought he was always in the way, and then when I started to warm up to him he went and did this thing with Magnus. But I have come to love him mainly because he learned from his mistakes. Because he does not go through that phase in the TV show, I think everyone that watches it is missing out on a fabulous character, relationship, and its development.   

But none the less, we are all here to love the same characters and plots. We are a part of the same fandom and this is just my own opinion :)

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk 

Malec

I’m not here to bash on fans of the Shadowhunters TV show, but one thing I would ask you to stop doing is saying show Malec is better than book Malec because in the show Alec never gets upset that Magnus has had relationships in the past, and is immortal while Alec is not. 

I was so mad that Alec was upset with Magnus, and went to Camille to see if he could make Magnus mortal, but it is a huge part of Alec’s character and his development along with how Malec’s relationship grows and over comes its hurdles. 

In City of Fallen Angels Alec is constantly in distress over the number of romantic partners that Magnus has had over the years, along with the fact that Magnus will live after Alec dies. Alec does not want to be “just another Shadowhunter” in Magnus’s story. If someone brought up the fact that Magnus is immortal, Alec couldn’t handle it. 

But then we jump to Lord of Shadows, which takes place 5 years in the future, and someone (not saying who but that she can choke) says this to Alec: 

“ … Wouldn’t it be funny if he died before you? I mean, what with him being immortal, you must have thought it would go the other way.” 

Alec raised his head slowly. “What?”

“Well, I mean since Magnus is immortal and you, you know, aren’t” she clarified. 

“He’s immortal?” Alec’s voice was colder than Kit had ever heard it. “I wish you’d told me before. I would have turned back time and found myself a nice mortal husband to grow old with.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be better?” Zara said. “Then you could get old and die at the same time.”

“At the same time?” Alec echoed. He had barely moved or raised his voice, but his rage seemed to fill the room. Even Zara was starting to look uneasy. “How would you suggest we arrange that? Jump off a cliff together when one of us started feeling sickly?” 

“Maybe.” Zara looked sulky. “You have to agree the situation you’re in is a tragesty.” 

Alec rose to his feet and in that moment was the famous Alec Lightwood Kit had heard about, the hero of past battles, the archer boy with deadly aim. “This is what I’ve chosen,” he said. “How dare you tell me it’s a tragedy? Magnus never pretended, he never tried to fool me into thinking it would be easy, but choosing Magnus is one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. We all have a lifetime, Zara, and none of us know how long or how short it might be. Surely even you know that. I expect you mean to be rude and cruel, but I doubt you meant to sound stupid as well.” 

She flushed. “But if you die of old age and he lives forever-” 

“Then he’ll be there for Max, and that makes both of us happy,” said Alec. “And I will be a uniquely lucky person, because there will be someone who always remembers me. Who will always love me. Magnus won’t always mourn, but until the end of time he will remember me and love me.”

I understand that you might not like what Alec did in CoLS, and how he saw his and Magnus’s relationship, but without it, you do not get to see the wonderful and extraordinary character development. I really did not  like Alec at first, mainly because the Jace and Clary thing and I thought he was always in the way, and then when I started to warm up to him he went and did this thing with Magnus. But I have come to love him mainly because he learned from his mistakes. Because he does not go through that phase in the TV show, I think everyone that watches it is missing out on a fabulous character, relationship, and its development.   

But none the less, we are all here to love the same characters and plots. We are a part of the same fandom and this is just my own opinion :)

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk 

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

please elaborate

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

Saint Joan of Arc 🔥 

Y'know, whenever people want to talk about why aspec people ‘count’ as an oppressed identity, they tend to go for the big stuff like corrective rape and conversion therapy. And like, we should absolutely talk about that stuff. Obviously those things are terrible and important and we need to raise awareness and deal with them.

But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn’t conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn’t know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.

You’re not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it’s not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You’re not going to get a 'normal’ relationship, because you are not 'normal’, and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that’s bad.

You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete’.

You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren’t comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects’.

You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it’s totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you’re attracted to because they can’t imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.

And then you get older and realise that one day you’re going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down’ with a primary partner and you don’t know what you’re going to do after that because you straight up don’t have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending’ looks like for someone like you.

(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you’re not oppressed at all. That you’re like this because you don’t want to have sex, and/or you don’t want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)

Even if you’re grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you’re not experiencing them the 'normal’ way and that that’s going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.

If you’re aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you’ve chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed’ at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.

This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we’ve all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it’s big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.

I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you’re going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn’t we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don’t have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?

So you know what? If you’re aspec and you relate to anything I’ve said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven’t mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it’s enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we’re unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over’ because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay’ and something we should just be expected to 'put up with’.

No matter what anybody tells you, we have the right to demand more from life than this.

OP, I hope it’s okay to expand on this, but I just wanna add how it’s nearly impossible to be self sustaining while being single.

The fact that you get tax benefits for being married and having children as well as the dual-income household is something aspecs are barred from on an inherent basis because of our identities. Not to mention intersections like other queer identities, neurodivergency, disability, mental illness, chronic illness, and a host of other things I can’t think of right now.

Your breakdown of the social impact of what we face and how deeply we’ve internalized all that was spot on, and everyone who still doesn’t understand what aspecs experience needs to read it. I feel that it’s also important to talk about how this system either guarantees we’ll be working poor or that we force ourselves into unhappy normative relationships to avoid it.

And like. I wish aphobes would shut the fuck up about how our suffering and discrimination starts and ends with “someone was mean to me online uwu” because I’m tired of people suggesting aspecs need to have their identities raped out of them, and then turn right around and call us toxic perverts.

I’m in my 30s, and sometimes I still panic about being single. Not because I actually WANT someone in my home, sharing my space and touching my things, and not because there’s anyone in particular I’m attracted to in that way. And DEFINITELY not because I ever, ever want children. But it’s frightening to keep getting older without finding that safety net of a spouse and a family.

My mom’s cried on the phone a few times about how she thinks about how lonely I must be. I’ve never talked to her about being ace because I have no idea how to. I nearly told one of my college/post-college best friends a year or two ago, but I ultimately couldn’t find the words. I’ve never told two of my (gay and bi) very closest friends because a part of me still thinks they’ll judge me for it.

So I just never talk about an extremely important part of who I am, and all the fears and anxieties that come along with that. Because it’s only News if I’m dating someone, or if I have feelings for someone I would like to date. How do you talk about the absence of that, with people who’ve never felt that way? Who weren’t born that way?

Every day I’m faced with a barrage of information about how it’s not “normal” to have zero interest in finding someone to spend the rest of my life with. I panic not because I want that, but because there aren’t any support systems built into our society for people like me, people who will get old alone and retire alone and die alone. 

So yes, it is a Coming Out conversation, and yes, many of us keep our identity hidden, and yes, it is complicated and difficult, and I’m tired of people cutting the A out of LGBTQA+. We belong, we matter, and our identities are real.

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish followers. May the next several days bring you light and blessings.

James Lloyd Cole | @jameslloydcole 

JUSTICE FOR CASEY GOODSON

On December 4th, 2020, Casey Christian Goodson Jr. (23 years old) was shot three times in the back and murdered by a Sheriff’s Deputy as he was entering his home in Columbus, Ohio. Goodson’s family stated that he was returning home from a dentist appointment, holding a Subway sandwich, his face mask, and his keys, when he was shot.

Two days later, the Columbus Police Department made a statement alleging that James Meade, the deputy responsible for Goodson’s death, saw a man believed to be Goodson with a gun while driving. Meade then approached Goodson after he exited his car and walked home, where he was shot.

Hours after the shooting, the US Marshal for the Southern District of Ohio, Peter Tobin, confirmed that Goodson was not the fugitive they were searching for. However, Tobin also added that he believed that the shooting was justified, claiming that Goodson was shot after he refused to drop his “weapon.”

Yet another Black man murdered by the police.

DEMAND JUSTICE.

art credit: @alex.albadree on instagram

graphics credit: @worldawarenessassociation on instagram

What It Was

Remember when Fandom was a tight knit group of people all freaking out about book releases and headcannons online? Remember when there were people known in the fandom by name? When you could mention one text post and everyone knew what you were talking about? book tags? book hauls? just being a bunch of nerds together on our computers? yeah. I miss that too

We have always been here.

Vintage LGBT love photography post

Vintage MLM love photography post

Please add more if you have them <3 

Can we talk about Barty Crouch Jnr?

This tweaked bastard has been living in my head, rent free, since I read the Goblet of Fire - in 2005.

Think how much rent that is! 

You see, this malevolent set of cheekbones is not only a brilliant portrayal of a true psychopath, but he’s also somewhat responsible for Voldemort’s death. And it all comes down to one, beautiful, sweet, doe-eyed glow-up baby - 

Let me lay out fifteen years of thoughts here for you.

1. Is he a psychopath? 

Well first let’s define psychopath. I’ve spent much time toiling over this conundrum for my Masters (not as long as Barty Crouch Jnr but enough). Hollywood has made the image of a psychopath synonymous with Hannibal or Patrick Bateman, but let me assure you - that is a very, very small percentage of what would actually be considered a psychopath. According to the DSM - V, there is no such thing diagnostically as a “psychopath”. This is for two reasons: law and philosophy. Philosophically speaking, the MindBody Problem is still at the forefront of conversations about the conscious, and so when faced with the paradox of a psychopath, the MindBody problem freaks the fuck out. Briefly, this problem is that we as neuroscientists and psychologists can map most - if not all - the ‘hardware’ of the brain. So the mechanical actions like moving your arm or drinking some tea. The hard problem - the actual problem - is we haven’t got a fucking clue what the Mind is. It’s all a bit… ineffable (that is legitimately how we academically put it, Neil Gaiman = God). Religion says that the Mind is the soul. Science says - we haven’t got a fucking clue what it is; it’s qualia, its unquantifiable experience that effects your entire worldview and make you wholey unique from everyone else on the planet. 

And we can’t fucking find it on a map - hence its a problem. 

Now this ineffable, unquantifiable mind, soul, conscious whatever you want to call it, is the thing that directs your moral compass. Psychopaths seem to present behaviour that does not prescribe to the moral code that we, in our relative societies have agreed upon. There is evidence to suggest that they do not feel guilt, which is a key ingredient in Moral psychology (I direct you to the research of Jonathon Haidt). Within the law, internationally, individuals with psychopathic traits are perceived as being predicated to criminal behaviour - therefore, exempt from taking any insanity defence. Now within psychology, because of the law and philosophy, and the mindbody problem - IT’S VERY FUCKING HARD TO DIAGNOSE A PSYCHOPATH BECAUSE WE CAN’T DECIDE WHAT ONE IS, because of all of the above. It’s all very… grey.

But what we can agree on, is there is a list of qualities that you would usually find in a psychopath, these are measured on the PCL-R  (Hare 2003) and the PPI-R (Lilienfield and Widows 2005):  

As you can see, Voldemort was a psychopath, but I digress. Barty, not so sure, and this is earmarked with the fact that we don’t know the entirety of his character. By the time he’s outed the first time, he has a seat on the Wizengamot and Crouch Snr is all shocked - like he never saw this behaviour coming. It can be inferred that a) Crouch Jnr is a excellent liar, capable of manipulation those closest to him with machiavellian behaviour; b) probably quite a well behaved young boy. So I would disregard the idea of juvenile delinquency and early behavioural problems. 

And this scene stands as evidence that Crouch Jnr is capable of Rebellious Nonconformity as well as Blame Externalisation. We know that he was a politician prior and well liked, so I will again infer that he had Social Influence. I will also infer that he had a predilection for Stress Immunity given he was outed infront of the entire court room and his reaction was this: 

Not screaming and running for the high hills. I’ll raise you the fact that he was undercover as Moody for an entire year, rubbing shoulders with Dumbledore, and seemed pretty chill about the whole thing given that he was acting in, what I can imagine to be, was a very stressful situation. 

So as you can see, a fair argument could be made for Crouch Jnr to be diagnosed as a genuine psychopath. 

And yet we come to the reason why this has bothered me for fifteen years. 

2. The Character Development of Neville Longbottom

It’s a well loved narrative that Neville goes from the bumbling bucktooth first year, to the Gryffindor God slaying Nagini in the Battle of Hogwarts. 

…deceased. 

Anyway, years 1,2,3 Neville is still treated as the weakling: he’s forgetting books, he’s leaving Common Room passwords lying around so that they’re stolen by nefarious Kneezles who let in escaped convicts etc etc. Come forth year, we open with Neville stepping in the trick-step that everyone knows to miss and yet bumbling Neville, still doping along. At this point, you’re like, ‘na this kid is gonna die because he trips over his own shoelaces or something.’ 

And then that fateful Unforgiveable Curses lesson happens. 

For those who need reminding, here Neville offers up the Cruciatus curse to which Professor Moody - aka Barty Crouch Jnr, tortures a spider using it as a demonstration. Neville is stricken by the whole event because of his parents. After the lesson, Hermione hurries Ron and Harry (who haven’t really realised that Neville was that effected) to find Neville who staring at a wall in a side corridor or stairwell - I can’t remember which. Neville’s shellshocked, saying he’s fine but keeps talking about dinner. He’s in full trauma. 

Then Moody Crouch comes along.

3. The paradox

Moody Crouch then takes a traumatised Neville to his office, gently reassuring him, offering him tea and calling him ‘laddy’. Here, he tells Neville that Professor Sprout was singing his praises in Herbology and gifts him the book on African plants, I think it was. This book is what Harry and Ron see him avidly reading later. This is the start of his love of herbology, which then leads to him being the one to get Harry through the second challenge, which then allows Harry to go on and touch the portkey Triwizard cup. Whilst also setting Neville on the path of having confidence in himself. By book 5, Neville’s braver, he’s no longer forgetting things, and this only improves by the time we get to the Battle of Hogwarts where he becomes a literal Hero from a Greek Myth. 

So, Psychopathic Machiavellian behaviour would say, he needs to get Harry on side. You do that by showing that you care. So you go over-board punishing the known bullies and enemies:

Whilst being nice to Harry’s friends (Neville with the book). He could have deliberately orchestrated the Unforgiveable curses lesson, in the attempt to traumatise Neville so that he could then be the Hero and be seen looking after him by Harry. Then you use the friend as a means to ensure that Harry is able to get through the second challenge, by setting him on the path of plants. Ergo, you complete you mission and your year long con. You got Potter to the graveyard, to the Dark Lord - you’re the best little psychopath and nobody suspected you the entire time. 

BUT. He was nice. He was caring. He was tender with Neville. 

And if you remember, psychopaths also have a tendency to have a Lack of realistic long term goals, and have behaviours that display Carefree Nonplanfulness and Coldheartedness. Getting Harry to the cup had to be a sure-fire thing. The plan had to be solid. It is my belief that Moody Crouch had a plan in place for every trial, but I do not believe he was the puppeteer pulling the strings. The aforementioned plan has too many if’s and but’s. Too much causality. Too much left up to circumstance. I think if Neville hadn’t done something, then Moody Crouch would have, but it was never the intention for Neville to be his tool - just a happy accident. 

While he can be ascribed to portray some true psychopathic behaviours, I don’t believe that Barty Crouch Jnr was a psychopath. I think he was just rebelling in a really hard way from his Stiff, Loveless Father. Because this moment of caring, was a product of guilt. This was where Moody Crouch’s moral compass kicked in and he began to mentor Neville throughout fourth year (like a father) thus inadvertently setting Neville on a path to defeat Voldy-bollocks. 

Thus the paradox: the best teacher Neville Longbottom ever had was a Death Eater. 

And that just fucks me up. 

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

the one where someone doesn’t know who kevin day is

part two three four five

extra content directory

all posts/updates relating to this au can be found in the “OC: dalton miller” tag!

when jorge luis borges wrote in a copy of beowulf that he was working on translating, “beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”

here’s the full poem! it’s so. something so transcendent something so inevitable and real and conceptually like looking into the abyss and hearing a choir sing your humanity back to you

P.S. Richard Wagner to Eliza Wille, re: Ludwig II–1864 (Remember when you played Wagner for me? He’s an asshole, but this is something.)

What It Was

Remember when Fandom was a tight knit group of people all freaking out about book releases and headcannons online? Remember when there were people known in the fandom by name? When you could mention one text post and everyone knew what you were talking about? book tags? book hauls? just being a bunch of nerds together on our computers? yeah. I miss that too

Malec

I’m not here to bash on fans of the Shadowhunters TV show, but one thing I would ask you to stop doing is saying show Malec is better than book Malec because in the show Alec never gets upset that Magnus has had relationships in the past, and is immortal while Alec is not. 

I was so mad that Alec was upset with Magnus, and went to Camille to see if he could make Magnus mortal, but it is a huge part of Alec’s character and his development along with how Malec’s relationship grows and over comes its hurdles. 

In City of Fallen Angels Alec is constantly in distress over the number of romantic partners that Magnus has had over the years, along with the fact that Magnus will live after Alec dies. Alec does not want to be “just another Shadowhunter” in Magnus’s story. If someone brought up the fact that Magnus is immortal, Alec couldn’t handle it. 

But then we jump to Lord of Shadows, which takes place 5 years in the future, and someone (not saying who but that she can choke) says this to Alec: 

“ … Wouldn’t it be funny if he died before you? I mean, what with him being immortal, you must have thought it would go the other way.” 

Alec raised his head slowly. “What?”

“Well, I mean since Magnus is immortal and you, you know, aren’t” she clarified. 

“He’s immortal?” Alec’s voice was colder than Kit had ever heard it. “I wish you’d told me before. I would have turned back time and found myself a nice mortal husband to grow old with.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be better?” Zara said. “Then you could get old and die at the same time.”

“At the same time?” Alec echoed. He had barely moved or raised his voice, but his rage seemed to fill the room. Even Zara was starting to look uneasy. “How would you suggest we arrange that? Jump off a cliff together when one of us started feeling sickly?” 

“Maybe.” Zara looked sulky. “You have to agree the situation you’re in is a tragesty.” 

Alec rose to his feet and in that moment was the famous Alec Lightwood Kit had heard about, the hero of past battles, the archer boy with deadly aim. “This is what I’ve chosen,” he said. “How dare you tell me it’s a tragedy? Magnus never pretended, he never tried to fool me into thinking it would be easy, but choosing Magnus is one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. We all have a lifetime, Zara, and none of us know how long or how short it might be. Surely even you know that. I expect you mean to be rude and cruel, but I doubt you meant to sound stupid as well.” 

She flushed. “But if you die of old age and he lives forever-” 

“Then he’ll be there for Max, and that makes both of us happy,” said Alec. “And I will be a uniquely lucky person, because there will be someone who always remembers me. Who will always love me. Magnus won’t always mourn, but until the end of time he will remember me and love me.”

I understand that you might not like what Alec did in CoLS, and how he saw his and Magnus’s relationship, but without it, you do not get to see the wonderful and extraordinary character development. I really did not  like Alec at first, mainly because the Jace and Clary thing and I thought he was always in the way, and then when I started to warm up to him he went and did this thing with Magnus. But I have come to love him mainly because he learned from his mistakes. Because he does not go through that phase in the TV show, I think everyone that watches it is missing out on a fabulous character, relationship, and its development.   

But none the less, we are all here to love the same characters and plots. We are a part of the same fandom and this is just my own opinion :)

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk 

long has paled that sunny sky

echoes fade and memories die

autumn frosts have slain july