i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and
the narrator just said
“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”
fuck
#but wow let me tell you about how the american civil war changed the whole culture of grief and death #because before that people died at home mostly #where their family saw them die and held their body and had proof they were really dead and it was a process #but during the war people left and never came home their bodies never came back there was no proof #people died in new horrific ways on the battlefield literally vaporized by cannonballs or lost in swamps and eaten by wild animals #and there were NO BODIES to send home #and people simply couldn’t grasp that their son or father or husband was really gone #there are stories about people spending months searching for their loved ones #convinced they couldn’t be dead if there were no body they were simply lost or hurt and they needed to be saved and brought home #embalming also really started during the civil war as a way for bodies to be brought home as intact as possible #wow i just wowowow the culture of death and grief and stuff during this time period is fascinating and sad #history (via souryellows)
#quietly reblogs own tags #also the civil war was when dog tags and national cemetaries became a thing #and during the war there was n real system in place to notify families of the deaths #like they’d find out maybe from letters from soldiers who were there when their loved one died nd stuff #but there was no real system #and battlefield ambulances were basically invented because so many people died on the battlefield when they could have been saved if they co #…could have been moved frm the battlefield to a hospital #like there was this one really inlfuential dude whose son died that way and he became dedicated to getting an ambulance system in place
I’m not doing this in the correct tag-style, but.
IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.
(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.
cool (ghost) story, bro.
reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*
the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance
very good stuff
Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*
Tag: oh
Exeunt pursued by man in bear suit.
I had two weird dreams last night, which I suppose were technically all part of the same dream, wherein I was visited by dead people. I mean they weren’t dead Dead in the dream, but my brain was self aware enough to be like, “you know these people don’t belong here in your house…they’re dead…also they’re Terry Pratchett and Robin Williams, this is a dream”.
I first knew something was off kilter because when I walked into my kitchen, Terry Pratchett was sitting there drinking a mug of tea. The dragon under the stove was also a give away, but famous authors, even dead ones, are not often found in my kitchen (contrary to what you’ve heard about my baking). He was reading something, and to my absolute horror I realized it was one of my manuscripts. I started to stutter and sat down in front of him, and because I am British offered him a slice of cake to go with his tea, so I might slide my work out from under his fingers. Not to be distracted by the prospect of a Victoria Sponge however, Terry looked up at me and said
“It’s a shame really, I was rather enjoying it until the words just stopped…why did you stop? Did you lose your words too?”
At which point I rocketed upright in bed and tried to rationalize why Terry Pratchett would be in my dream and giving me a mild telling off for not writing anything…and then because it was Terry and I miss him, had a bit of a cry and went back to sleep.
Which was when I “woke up” in my bed because I was being prodded in the side. Assuming it was my husband trying to wake me I rolled over and told him to go away, at which point the voice of Robin Williams bounced around the room at full volume as he yelled, “Rise and shine funny-girl, it’s time to climb the walls!”
Ah yes, thought I, I am still asleep and dreaming…or I am in a coma and someone is playing Robin Williams to try and wake me up…which was the point when I heard Terry Pratchett ask, “Is she up yet?”
“No.”
“Tip her out the bed.”
So because Terry Pratchett told him to, Robin Williams tipped me out of my dream bed, and laughed at me when I swore.
“Ach aye, there’s your accent lassie, none of that Amerrrrrican inflection, eh? Just had to get you good and mad.” said Mr Williams, in his own Scottish imitation, hauling me upright and carrying me over his shoulder out the door while I squawked and flailed at the indignity of it all.
The next few images where a blur of motion and sound, but after that we were in a castle which I recognized to be one of my own ideas. My own characters stood stock still like cutout cardboard mannequins, frozen in time, the last action I had written them into.
Terry was walking between them, pausing every now and then to peer at them through his spectacles like they were an exhibit in a wax museum and giving a little nod every so often, like he had just seen the eyelashes in the wax and was mildly impressed.
Robin at this point, had his arm around my shoulders and was giving me the grand tour of my own work, yelling out jokes about my characters and making me laugh at them.
“And here we have underdeveloped character number three! Half baked and still gooey at the center, it’s salmonella for everybody but at least it tastes good!”
When I looked round again, Terry was sitting at the foot of the dais to the empty throne, sheets of paper between his hands again as he read from the script.
“It says here “exeunt pursued by man in bear suit”…” he said.
“I thought it was funny…” I replied sheepishly…looking at the world which had sparkled mere moments before and watching the color seep away until it was turning grey and cold at the edges… “I thought…well it doesn’t matter. I scrapped it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you lose your words?”
“No…”
“Then why aren’t you writing?”
“I don’t…”—by now the world was starting to fall apart and crumble to dust, falling upwards into the pitch black sky as though it was being pulled away by a black hole.
Robin came in front of me then, placing both giant hands on my shoulders and leaning in until we were butting heads.
“I know it’s hard,” he said, smiling right into my soul, “I know it’s hard when all you want to do it stop. And sometimes you have to, sometimes you can’t chase the demons out. But what you can do, and no one ever tells you this, funny-girl, what you can do…is make ‘em laugh. You can’t burn ‘em out, you can’t chase ‘em out, and you can’t leave without them because it’s your head, but you can make ‘em laugh. You can shake hands with the devil and make him laugh. The world is your clam chowder, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll still find the pearl. Does that make sense? No? Good, nothing makes sense, nothing in this whole existence we like to pretend is reality makes sense, nothing but doing your best and trying to make yourself happy, and if you can’t do that do it for others. You can, you know you can…otherwise your mother wouldn’t be so angry when you tell jokes and there wouldn’t be a man over there dressed in a bear suit waiting to follow us out.”
Laughing and crying, I looked over to where he had pointed, and there was indeed a man in a bear suit. He waved, and I waved back.
By now the world had dissolved, the walls melting away until only the cut out people remained, illuminated by starlight where previously there had only been black. I turned round when I felt a hand on my shoulder and found Terry standing behind me, his eyes crinkling up under bushy eyebrows as he smiled, handing me back my manuscript.
“I have to go now,” he said, “we both do, because this isn’t real and you’re dreaming. But I’ll have that cake before I go.”
So the three of us turned together to walk out over the stars, pursued by a man in a bear suit.
I woke up sometime before four am, with a heavy ache in my throat, feeling rung out and completely exhausted, but ultimately feeling as though somehow everything is going to be okay. I’ve got walls to paint and chores to do, but later on I’m going to bake a cake and then I’m going to write. And I’m keeping the bear suit joke.
Some days, when things are bad, and bleak inside my head, and it feels like everything I do is garbage and has no value, I am reminded of this dream. Whether it’s by someone tagging me, or commenting on something, or sending me a message thanking me for making them laugh when things were bad.
And I am reminded that at my worst, my brain conjured up a pep talk from Robin Williams and Terry Pratchett, to make me laugh.
I used to joke I use comedy as a deflection method, but I’m 99% sure it’s a survival trait at this point.
An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.
[Imgur]
That is some fine writing.
The Imgur link is broken so:
[Series of posts on 09/16/11]
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts – acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets – was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
This makes me cry
It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.
Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five,
A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field.
Waiting.
When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”. The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace.
Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.
We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice. In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off. It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.
Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.
Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.
We find it terrifying.
I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.
About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.
The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.
It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.
Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.
They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”
“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”
It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone.
And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”
The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”
When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.
They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.
When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”
After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.
It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.
We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.
She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”
Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.
“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”
And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.
When I was growing up, I don’t think we’d have even entirely comprehended the idea that a gay couple would have a thing they’d call an “anniversary”. Like, anniversaries were a marriage-thing.
Honestly, I think the “Defense Of Marriage Act” was, in the long run, a huge win for the LGBT community, because that was the point when it suddenly seemed like calling it “marriage” might be an option.
When you get older, you notice your sheets are dirty. Sometimes, you do something about it. And sometimes, you read the front page of the newspaper and sometimes you floss and sometimes you stop biting your nails and sometimes you meet a friend for lunch. You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, 5 years ago. You remember your umbrella, you check up on people to see if they got home, you leave places early to go home and make toast. You stand by the toaster in your underwear and a big t-shirt, wondering if you should just turn in or watch one more hour of television. You laugh at different things. You stop laughing at other things. You think about old loves almost like they are in a museum. The socks, you notice, aren’t organized into pairs and you mentally make a note of it. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, reaching for the box of tissues you bought, contains aloe.
When you get older, you try toner, you experiment with trousers, you experiment with real sexy outfits, you experiment with pin curls and darker hair and orange-toned red lipstick and you date people that look good on paper. You kiss them in public and feel only a little self-conscious. You never like them, although sometimes you really do. you think about safe sex and sometimes, kids. You think about plants, maybe succulents, or maybe even a cat?
When you get older, you try different shampoos. You find one you like. You try sleeping early and spin class and jogging again. You try a book you almost read but couldn’t finish. You wrap yourself in the blankets of: familiar t-shirts, caffe au lait, dim tv light, texts with old friends or new people you really want to like and love you. You lose contact with friends from college, and only sometimes you think about it. When you do, it feels bad and almost bitter. You lose people, and when other people bring them up, you almost pretend like you know what they are doing. You try to stop touching your face and become invested in things like expensive salads and trying parsnips and saving up for a vacation you really want. You keep a spare pen in a drawer. You look at old pictures of yourself and they feel foreign and misleading. You forget things like: purchasing stamps, buying more butter, putting lotion on your elbows, calling your mother back. You learn things like balance: checkbooks, social life, work life, time to work out and time to enjoy yourself.
When you get older, you find things like rejection hurt less and things like nostalgia hurt more. You watch people do things you want to do, and then you do some of those things too. Things start to feel like pins on a map. You watch landmarks pass and almost note them. You eat a taco from a food truck and be careful to dab the corners of your mouth with a napkin. You smooth your shirt down. You think about details, the details of how clean the beer cup is, how you need to put the dishes away, how she smells like a perfume you wore and how his teeth are perfect and aligned. You feel a little less downtrodden by things like routine and security and a little more appreciative of things like doing nothing, finding a friend, stretching on a big couch. You hear old songs and only sometimes do they gut you. You think about your future almost always, in both a thrilling way and a very very panicked way.
When you get older, you find yourself more in control. You find your convictions appealing, you find you like your body more, you learn to take things in stride. You begin to crave respect and comfort and adventure, all at the same time. You lay in your bed, fearing death, just like you did.You pull lint off your shirt. You smile less and feel content more. You think about changing and then often, you do.
When you get older, you barely notice it at all. Then, you are sitting somewhere you’ve been before, staring at the nothingness of the sky, and you feel the wind moving away from you, fast and almost impossible to catch.
When You Get Older, thefrenemy (via themindmovement)
On Fanfiction
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
This is what stories are supposed to be.
This is what stories are.
Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.
Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.
Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.
We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.
Things I never knew about depression until I finally had a doctor explain the disease to me
helly-watermelonsmellinfellon:
Depression can manifest as irrational anger.
My complete and total inability to keep anything clean or tidy for any amount of time is a symptom of my depression. I may never be able to do this. It’s important that I remember that and forgive myself when I clean something out (like my car) and it ends up trashed within a week.
Depression IS A DISABILITY. Requiring accommodations is okay.
Medications don’t make you better, they don’t cure your depression. They serve as an aid. Their purpose is to help you get to everyone else’s minimal level of functioning.
Depression can cycle through periods of inactivity. This doesn’t mean it’s gone away.
The reason I don’t feel like other people understand me is because … well … other people DON’T understand me. They can’t. They don’t have my disability.
Paranoia is par for the course.
Depression can and will interfere with your physical mobility. Forgive yourself when you can’t physically do something.
It’s entirely possible that I may never be able to live by myself. I can’t take care of myself. I need help to do it. And that’s okay.
As someone who suffers from depression and who experiences all these things as well I think this is important and needs to be reblogged.
Depression is a very difficult thing, not only for people who suffer from it, but for everyone who knows a depressed person. My family doesn’t know how to deal with it, my friends try their very best to support me and I have tried to pretend I was fine until I was in ninth grade.Everything makes so much more sense
Depression is a disease of the brain. The brain is an organ. When organs are not functioning properly, you are advised to see a doctor and get help. So why is it so hard to understand that the brain can suffer as well, and that we need help for it?
The brain controls the body. A sick brain means a sick body.
….
Shit.Don’t disregard it as just sadness. Depression is life threatening.
be proud of how you’ve carried yourself through everything in life so far. it takes real strength to be able to do that.
if you ever feel left out just remember that you weren’t the fifth gryffindor guy in the marauders’ dormitory
I don’t know if the timeline works even a little bit but my headcanon was always that that fifth dude was Kingsley Shacklebolt and that he immediately made a conscious decision to stay the hell away from whatever those four idiots were up to and everyone was like “Yeah, good kid, studies hard, probably gonna be Minister one day if he manages to last his entire school career without committing four murders”.
Kingley Shacklebolt is probably the best roommate ever. The reason he never gets mentioned as the fifth is because he doesn’t ask questions. The other five start disappearing all night every full moon during fifth year? He doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know. Walked in to find Sirius talking to a fucking deer in the dorm like it was James? Just keep moving and don’t make eye contact. James, Sirius and Peter leaving shit all over the floor? Combine forces with Remus to politely yet firmly remind them that we’re not living in a goddamn barn and your dirty underwear shouldn’t spend three weeks straight on the floor James.
Kingsley was, naturally, invited to the Potter-Evans wedding. The invitation was accompanied with a formal apology for the Everything, signed by the Marauders. Enclosed was a little trophy, with the plaque reading ‘best roomie ever’
It may or may not permanently live on his mantle. Kingsley Shacklebolt does not inform Harry Potter of any of this. He has enough people that knew his parents, Kingsley’s not going to make it weird. Keep moving and don’t make eye contact. Besides, he already gave copies of all his pictures of them to Hagrid to go into a photo album for Harry back in first year.
So my therapist said something awhile back and it’s really stuck with me.
I was talking about the stupid things I had done in high school. How the stories I wrote were stupid and how all I ever wanted to draw was anime shit (which was stupid) and how immature I could be, etc etc etc.
and she was like “Why are you so determined to beat up on Little Maggie?”
It took me off guard, I was like “what do you mean?”
“Why do you keep saying Little Maggie is stupid? You say she was stupid and immature but wasn’t she just a teenager? Do you not like who you were as a teenager?”
I shrugged and was like “I think teenage me was very creative and was probably just having fun and being a teenager…”
“So why beat up on her and call her stupid and embarrassing?”
“I dunno, because I guess now I’ve learned a lot.”
“But she was young. She didn’t know. I’m just telling you this because if you keep beating up on Little Maggie, you have to remember that she grows up to be you. When you put bruises and scars on Little Maggie, you’re leaving all the healing for Big Maggie. Your insecurity about who you were as a child is going to come through into your adulthood. Be nice to Little Maggie.”
And I’d never really thought of that before? It seems status quo to just… hate who you used to be for not knowing enough, but that’s totally illogical. Of course a younger version of you doesn’t know what you know and can’t act with the wisdom that you act.
And even if Little Maggie was writing silly stories about her friends while ripping off anime and drawing her own “manga” and being immature and goofy, she was having fun, she was being creative, she was enjoying the things she liked and she wasn’t hurting anyone.
She’s part of my past and hating her is hating the foundation of who I eventually became.
Just food for thought.
I almost recently have reblogged this before but please friggin read it
i named my inner child henry because it’s easier to be nice to little henry than little jesse
now i find i’m rather proud of him
just moving along like everyone else 