Nov. 6th, 2017

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ENDLESS LIST OF MY FAVORITE CREATIVE WORKS: A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair.
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duskgifs:

My daddy says a lot of things.
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debbie-sketch:

Hogwarts Houses common rooms in Halloween season 
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gnossienne:

Scotland (x)
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ahoyspn:

top 25 supernatural dynamics (as voted by my followers)#09. jody and donna“you think i’m crazy? // not at all.”
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granpappy-winchester:

“… I put my hand down in something soft and I looked down. I saw that kid every day for the next two years. Every morning I’d wake up he’d be looking down at me. What about you, Marcus? What do you see?”
“You want to know what’s in my head? Arguing. Mum and dad barking at each other like dogs. Both of them drunk. He’s swinging at her and she’s in a ball on the floor, trying to scoop her brains back in with both her hands. I’m yelling at him to stop, but he cracks her again. And now, now there’s blood coming out of her mouth like a fountain - I’m seven years old. I. I pull his poaching rifle off the back of the door and I shoot a bullet right in the middle of his throat and even as he’s going down his big bloody hands are trying to squeeze the life out of me - that’s for starters. I see this little unwanted boy stuck half-way up an oak tree all the other orphan bastards are trying to knock him down with bricks and balls to send him back to the infirmary so he can spend another night cutting patterns into his arms to send himself to sleep. I see this little boy in Mexico City. His neck is twisted all the way around and his mom is screaming at me from the doorway. I see a housewife in Seattle mixing bleach with tap water and telling her little girl that the water is holy so it burns her when it hits her skin. That is what I see when I close my eyes.”
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marcinemiller:

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
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philomaela:

Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror, Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed, A mother’s tears in passion for her son: And if thy sons were ever dear to thee, O, think my son to be as dear to me! Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome, to beautify thy triumphs and return, captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke, But must my sons be slaughter’d in the streets, for valiant doings in their country’s cause? O, if to fight for king and commonweal were piety in thine, it is in these. Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood! Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them then in being merciful. Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge. Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son!
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space-australians:

bemusedlybespectacled:

apprenticebard:

bemusedlybespectacled:

I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that. 

THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.

I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.

Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?

On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.

It doesn’t have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think that’s the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes from–why are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying “what if women could tell MEN what to do!” is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.

This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.

(Not aliens, but goes along with some discussions on how cultures might differ.)

The best “what if women were in charge and oppressed men” story I’ve ever read is, no surprise, by Ursula le Guin—“The Matter of Seggri” in The Birthday Of The World. Highly recommended.
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mrjandpuddin:

Human Nature—S03E08

I dream, quite often, that I have two hearts.  I have…er, I have written down some of these dreams in the form of fiction. Not that it would be of any interest. Well, I’ve never actually shown it to anyone before.  It’s become quite a hobby.
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Rebecca

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