single man in possession of a good fortune: *exists*

mrs bennet (an empath) : he must be in want of a wife

You know what I realize that people underestimate with Pride & Prejudice is the strategic importance of Jane.

Because like, I recently saw Charlotte and Elizabeth contrasted as the former being pragmatic and the latter holding out for a love match, because she's younger and prettier and thinks she can afford it, and that is very much not what's happening.

The Charlotte take is correct, but the Elizabeth is all wrong. Lizzie doesn't insist on a love match. That's serendipitous and rather unexpected. She wants, exactly as Mr. Bennet says, someone she can respect. Contempt won't do. Mr. Bennet puts it in weirdly sexist terms like he's trying to avoid acknowledging what he did to himself by marrying a self-absorbed idiot, but it's still true. That's what Elizabeth is shooting for: a marriage that won't make her unhappy.

She's grown up watching how miserable her parents make one another; she's not willing to sign up for a lifetime of being bitter and lonely in her own home.

I think she is very aware, in refusing Mr. Collins, that it's reasonably unlikely that anyone she actually respects is going to want her, with her few accomplishments and her lack of property. That she is turning down security and the chance keep the house she grew up in, and all she gets in return may be spinsterhood.

But, crucially, she has absolute faith in Jane.

The bit about teaching Jane's daughters to embroider badly? That's a joke, but it's also a serious potential life plan. Jane is the best creature in the world, and a beauty; there's no chance at all she won't get married to someone worthwhile.

(Bingley mucks this up by breaking Jane's heart, but her prospects remain reasonable if their mother would lay off!)

And if Elizabeth can't replicate that feat, then there's also no doubt in her mind that Jane will let her live in her house as a dependent as long as she likes, and never let it be made shameful or awful to be that impoverished spinster aunt. It will be okay never to be married at all, because she has her sister, whom she trusts absolutely to succeed and to protect her.

And if something eventually happens to Jane's family and they can't keep her anymore, she can throw herself upon the mercy of the Gardeners, who have money and like her very much, and are likewise good people. She has a support network--not a perfect or impregnable one, but it exists. It gives her realistic options.

Spinsterhood was a very dangerous choice; there are reasons you would go to considerable lengths not to risk it.

But Elizabeth has Jane, and her pride, and an understanding of what marrying someone who will make you miserable costs.

That's part of the thesis of the book, I would say! Recurring Austen thought. How important it is not to marry someone who will make you, specifically, unhappy.

She would rather be a dependent of people she likes and trusts than of someone she doesn't, even if the latter is formally considered more secure; she would rather live in a happy, reasonable household as an extra than be the mistress of her own home, but that home is full of Mr. Collins and her mother.

This is a calculation she's making consciously! She's not counting on a better marriage coming along. She just feels the most likely bad outcome from refusing Mr. Collins is still much better than the certain outcome of accepting him. Which is being stuck with Mr. Collins forever.

Elizabeth is also being pragmatic. Austen also endorses her choice, for the person she is and the concerns she has. She's just picking different trade-offs than Charlotte.

Elizabeth's flaw is not in her own priorities; she doesn't make a reckless choice and get lucky. But in being unable to accept that Charlotte's are different, and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Charlotte.

Because realistically, when your marriage is your whole family and career forever, and you only get to pick the ones that offer themselves to you, when you are legally bound to the status of dependent, you're always going to be making some trade-offs.

😂 Even the unrealistically ideal dream scenario of wealthy handsome clever ethical Mr. Darcy still asks you to undergo personal growth, accommodate someone else's communication style, and eat a little crow.

Love Cures Anything

Beleg x human! reader

A/N: A little Beleg cures the soul and makes everything better. Enjoy!

Warnings: fluff, sick reader, vomiting, the whole shenanigans when ill, a surprise at the end

Word: 2.5k

Synopsis: When illness befalls during your anniversary with your beloved Marchwarden, you choose to avoid and evade him. However, he had plans to keep you at his side forever.

Tales of the Heart

Finarfin x mortal!reader

A/N: When I say that I enjoyed writing this, I most absolutely did! This was my first official Finarfin request and it was so fluffy and sweet! Thank you for the request. I got to write a soft and flirty Finarfin and I was squealing. Thank you for increasing Finarfin content.

Warnings: none, nothing but absolute fluff and a flirty Finarfin shooting his shot

Words: 2.8k

Synopsis: As the War of Wrath came to an end, Finarfin decided to explore the beauty of Middle Earth. Instead, he discovered another form of beauty, becoming enthralled.

The sound of streams rushing vigorously echoed to his right as his foot crossed a maple vine. Animals were scurrying across the forest floor the further he wandered into the forest. Though it was creepier than what he remembered during his childhood days in Valinor, it appeared much livelier now that the war was over, and the majority of the evil had fled.

The squawking and singing of birds overhead and in the canopy and buzzing of insects filled his head with safe sounds compared to the reoccurring sound of metal clashing. The melody was sweeter than the memories of the horrors of the great war. His said reason for escaping the confinements of the camp during nightfall left him to wander until the sun raised on him.

Stardust

Beleg x mortal!reader

A/N: Ending fics are so difficult, there needs to be a way to end a fic. I also forgot how similar this fic is to the last one released with Finarfin.

Warnings: none, just fluff and softness

Words: 2.5k

Synopsis: Sometimes a storm isn't always terrible when love becomes the result.

Don’t wander too far into the forest!

Your mother’s words were a lost cause as your hands touched a shrouded object that appeared as a vine wrapped around a tree trunk. Stumbling over the fallen, mossy log, your clothes became stained with the green slime now smeared across your palms as well. With shaky legs, you swivelled around at the crowing of a bird…or some wild beast as the sun set and night rolled in. The wind in the forest was unnatural and untamed, similar to the light from the canopy. Your vision was obscured at some point, blotched of black and green appearing across your sight and leaving you frantically trekking across the mossy floor. Your wobbly legs almost caused you the slip and slide.

If only you had heeded her words, you wouldn’t have crossed the border and trailed into the unknown. Where were at the moment…approaching the borders of Doriath, but you hadn’t a clue.

Imagine: They know you can’t sleep at night

Thorin, Fíli, Kíli, Bilbo's reactions when you can't sleep well during the journey.

Used to camping or not, sleeping outside in Middle-earth was something else than sleeping in your late comfortable bed in your world. 

Thorin

Free Online Language Courses

Here is a masterpost of MOOCs (massive open online courses) that are available, archived, or starting soon. I think they will help those that like to learn with a teacher or with videos.  You can always check the audit course or no certificate option so that you can learn for free.

American Sign Language

Arabic

Catalan Sign Language

Chinese

Beginner

Intermediate

Dutch

English

Faroese

Finnish

French

Beginner

Intermediate & Advanced

Frisian

German

Beginner

Advanced

Hebrew

Hindi

Icelandic

Indonesian

Irish

Italian

Beginner

Intermediate & Advaned

Japanese

Kazakh

Korean

Beginner

Intermediate

Nepali

Norwegian

Portuguese

Russian

Beginner

Advanced

Spanish

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Swedish

Ukrainian

Welsh

Multiple Languages

Last updated: March 1, 2017

Untouchable - Five Hargreeves

You can find the 2 request here: anonymous 1, anonymous 2.

Resume: The villain falls in love with the girl.

Trope: “ Who did this to you?” “Touch her and you are dead.” “i´ll find you in every lifetime”

Continua a leggere

Not you — Five Hargreeves

Requests: “Five Hargreeves x fem!reader, Fluff prompts 9, 52 and 53, please? (You can do this whenever you feel like it) Five and Y/n are both hit by one of Hazel and Cha-Cha’s bullets in the Gimbel Brothers store and they immediately go to the academy (Five wants Y/n treated as soon as possible.) after they’re fine, the siblings start to question them on Five’s protectiveness over Y/n”

“Hii could I request 4 & 23 off the fluff prompts for Five pls ty 😌✨”

Fluff prompts:

4. “Sweetheart, you’re my entire world”

9. “So you're saying that girl is your girlfriend?!" "No, that girl is my wife!”

23. “i’ve dreamt about this.”

52. "Help her first."

53. “There are no limits when it comes to you. I’ll do anything to keep you safe.”

A/N: We not tolerate any pedophilia here !!

I write about Five with their 20s. I write the same about the characters of Harry Potter.

The thing that gets to me the most about OceanGate (and there’s many), but… the fact that it’s the fucking Titanic. Like, this could’ve been just a generic failure. This could’ve been about allowing people with more money than sense to go explore the sea floor, see coral reefs from a new perspective, view icebergs from below, whatever.

But no. It’s specifically the Titanic. The ship declared to be unsinkable. The ship whose builders refused to bring enough lifeboats, because it would compromise their aesthetics, and make their rich customers uncomfortable to see them. Which famously sank on its maiden voyage.

And here comes the OceanGate CEO and without a hint of irony, has gone on record saying shit like this:

And just… if you were writing a story to explore the hubris of rich people, how much more on the nose than that could you get?

idk i just can't stop thinking about the hundreds of people who die at sea trying to escape war torn countries and how no one really ever affords them this much attention so i'm sorry if i don't really care about a handful of rich ppl who went to disrupt a gravesite for a quarter of a million dollars for their own amusement. like i don't wish them death, but i don't particularly care about their lives either.

since theres a lot of discussions about shipwrecks and deep sea submersibles happening right now, im just gonna quickly recommend this video which details how caladan oceanic found the samuel b roberts.

the samuel b roberts was a destroyer escort sank during the battle off samar during ww2. the wreck was found last year and is 22,621 feet/6885 metres deep which is almost 10,000 feet or 3000 metres deeper than the titanic and is currently the deepest wreck ever found.

in the video, you see a deep sea submersible (which can go down to 36,000 feet/10,973 metres) that isnt a tin can finished up with duct tape, super glue and glittery gel pens. it is piloted by an expert and they swap out pilots every day to avoid exertion or fatigue, and they have a very complex sonar system for finding wrecks. the longest they can go down is 16 hours and they keep in contact with their ship above and have to get clearance just for half an hour more.

when they find the wreck, they look around it to ensure they can identify it and map it out as well as they can, and then head back up to shore. they then hold a funeral service for those who died and leave a wreath on the ocean surface above where the wreck lays.

while im somewhat sketched out by the founder victor vescovo, the company does important work in terms of furthering our understanding of the ocean and finding wrecks which are the gravesites of those who passed. and they are not disrespectful to those whose graves lay 22,000 feet/6700 metres down on the seabed.

and what i would like to point out is how the samuel b roberts is protected against unauthorised disturbance by the sunken military craft act. you would need a permit from the naval history and heritage command (and a submarine that can withstand all the pressure) to go see it.

which, as ive said many times in the last two days, is something that the titanic should also have protection against. there should be laws in place that do not allow people to treat a mass fucking gravesite as a tourist spot.

it's so fucking telling, how this oceangate thing is all that's being talked about these past three days.

meanwhile, boats carrying dozens, hundreds of people sink every week on the Mediterranean and nobody even spares a thought. the far right all throughout Europe not-so-secretly spewing "we should sink them all" and "if we could just bomb them back to where they came from" rhetoric, like these people aren't fleeing from countries whose instability is a direct result of colonialism and neo-imperialism and on top of that, Europe jailing people and ngo's who try to do something

meanwhile, how much is the coordinated effort to save a handful of billionaires going to cost?

I do hope, against hope, that they find them, alive and well, but jesus fucking christ, the glaring disregard for human life when it's not a white wealthy westerner drives me up the fucking wall.

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

Imagine: Another man kisses you

Thorin, Fíli, Kíli, Bilbo's reactions when another man kisses you.

Thorin 

This really had me swooning 😍❤

*cough* especially Bilbo's and Fili's *cough*

y'know say what you want about tumblr (and I have), but this is still probably the simplest and most powerful distillation of the heart of the Lord of the Rings I’ve ever read. I think back to it all the time

Thorin: Whenever Bilbo is mad at me, I go and tighten the lids on all of our jars so he has to get help from me.

*sound of glass breaking in the background*

Thorin: It hasn't worked yet, but it will happen