zeldathemes
Ever so slightly fishy.

♥ This blog is sometimes NSFW ♥

I write things sometimes
Please feel free to ask me anything you'd like
I'm shy but I love talking to people

I can communicate in English (Canadian)
&
Japanese (少しだけですけど。。。)

よろしくね!

neil-gaiman:

“My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love. When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay. Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure. It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening. ‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention. ‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already. He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him. He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence. It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist? I asked him what happened on his adventure. ‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me. ‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look. ‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see? ‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’ ‘And so I did. ‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too. ‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better. ‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me. ‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said. ‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life. ‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me. ‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’ I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter. What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye? ‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’ My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale. ‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’ But I do. I really believe in it. And it’s the best story I’ve heard all year.”

— Paul Magrs (via yourfluffiestnightmare)

  #i love this so much    #David Bowie  

nvtxl:

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  #Ugh    #being super physical with your guy friends is super normal in both South Korea and Japan    #less so in older adults but absolutely in school and college age kids and with your school and college aged friends    #i cannot stress enough how male friendship standards in western culture do not apply in so many other cultures    #source: i taught in Japanese elementary and middle schools for four years and a close friend did the same in South Korea for seven    #I have SO MANY feelings about this and how we're breaking our young men by locking physical contact behind the gate of relationships    #and not allowing them any after a certain (often very young) age unless they find a romantic partner    #like -- that's sick    #eta: i do totally think the kpop boys are playing it up a bit for fans but i also don't feel like it's too far out of their normal behavior  

only-tiktoks:

  #forest science    #this stuff is so important    #if you go to a bc park you'll see a lot more of the seconds kind of forest    #even if it was logged before becoming a park it's now being allowed to grow into itself again    #but parks aren't enough  

luminarai:

image

*david attenborough voice* truly the most dangerous predator in the animal kingdom

  #cats    #cute  

veritasrose:

Lost followers after reblogging that whole thing about JKR being radicalized over the years, and that disturbs me.

Like if you think saying that people can be radicalized and manipulated into hate is somehow justifying it, yikes. And if you think that people are somehow just good or evil and that you are not at risk of buying into propaganda, have I got some very red flag news about that!

Idk if its because I am an older Millennial maybe (most who unfollowed were younger) but I watched a ton of that generation slide from one of the most progressive to the far right before my every eyes. Hell, my dad fought alongside his black friends in the Detroit race riots and now he watches Fox News 24/7 and talks about the border wall. Yet still claims he could never be racist because of how he used to be. He doesn’t even realize what he has become.

JKR isn’t a deluded old woman or innately evil, but in fact THE prime example of how well-meaning ignorance and privilege can be weaponized and encouraged down a pipeline, until it turns into a force of hate, and should be a cautionary tale about why educating and being open about these issues are necessary. Because there are those out there who will use those divisions and ignorance to their own ends. And just digging in our heels and saying “that could never be me!” is the very thing that puts you more at risk. I’ve lost so many loved ones down that pipeline and it is more slippery than most realize.

Stay alert, stay compassionate, stay humble, and make sure you move through life guided by reason rather than reaction. I love y’all and don’t want to see your passion twisted to get used against the world.

  #this exactly    #particularly when you come from a place where you've been scared before    #and aren't anymore    #it's so easy for someone to fan those flames of fear up again  

star-anise:

thebiscuiteternal:

arcanebarrage:

hungrylikethewolfie:

No but guys, GUYS, we need to talk about how important this scene is.  Because the commonly accepted lore about unicorns is that they are so good and pure that they’ll only appear to young virginal girls.  Because Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman who has been living with bandits for most of her life and is as far from innocent and virginal as you’re likely to get.  Because she’s so angry that this creature, embodying everything that society tells her she’s lost, everything she’s thrown away through her own choices, is here now when all that The Unicorn represents is long since behind her.  Because she knows, in a way that only someone who’s been steeped in an oppressive system her entire life can ever know, that she’s missed her chance and doesn’t deserve to be seeing a unicorn now.

And you know what?  The Unicorn doesn’t give two fucks about her virginity, about her supposed loss of innocence and purity.  She’s not repelled by Molly being older, being experienced, being a full human person.  None of that has ever mattered to unicorns, only to the people telling stories about them.  Not only does she step in to physically comfort her here, but before long this bandit’s wife becomes her friend, closer to her in most ways than Schmendrick.

This story is fucking revolutionary, you guys, and I just have a lot of feelings about it.

I heard Peter S. Beagle speak about this scene at a convention once. He said he just kept writing and writing into the scene and suddenly here was this powerful, moving dialogue which came out very strong and natural, flowing directly from inspiration.

He said it was one of those moments when “the writer just gets really lucky.” 

This is one of those scenes you nebulously get when you’re ten and comes up and punches you in the face when you’re thirty.

Molly Grue is a Hero. I don’t just mean she’s heroic; I mean that The Last Unicorn in book form explicitly defines what a hero should be, and she meets that definition. Specifically, she’s  Lír’s mentor in what it means to be a hero. The book doesn’t explicitly say this about Molly, and I don’t know that this is something Beagle was conscious of as he wrote; and yet. There’s this scene in the book:

[Lír said,]  "I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and likethem it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts […] the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. […] Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. Schmendrick asked, “Why not? Who says so?”
“Heroes,“ Prince Lír replied sadly. “Heroes know about order, about happy endings – heroes know that some things are better than others. Carpenters know grains and shingles, and straight lines.”

Molly spent a long time thinking her role in life was the Hero’s Lady. She shacked up with Captain Cully because she thought he was a hero and that was her role, but over time as she came to understand how un-heroic he was, she became bitter and derisive, pointing out what the true order of things was. Like, let’s go back to her first scene where Cully is explaining to Schmendrick how he and his men all hate King Haggard, and one day Haggard will have to pay “such a reckoning”:

A score of shaggy shadows hissed assent, but Molly Grue’s laughter fell like hail, rattling and stinging. “Mayhap he will,” she mocked, “but it won’t be to such chattering cravens he’ll pay it. His castle rots and totters more each day, and his men are too old to stand up in armor, but he’ll rule forever, for all Captain Cully dares.”

Schmendrick raised an eyebrow, and Cully flushed radish-red. “You must understand,” he mumbled. “King Haggard has this Bull –”

“Ah, the Red Bull, the Red Bull!” Molly hooted. “I tell you what, Cully, after all these years in the wood with you I’ve come to think the Bull’s nought but the pet name you give your cowardice.If I hear that fable once more, I’ll go and down old Haggard myself, and know you for a –”

“Enough!” Cully roared. “Not before strangers!” He tugged at his sword and Molly opened her arms to it, still laughing. 

And within a day Molly Grue has met the Unicorn, set out on a quest with her (and doesn’t bat an eyelash when she learns they’re going directly to Haggard’s castle), and becomes a pivotal player in destroying King Haggard and the Red Bull.

Molly understands “the order of things” when Schmendrick doesn’t. When the Red Bull is about to beat the Unicorn, Schmendrick’s all, “Welp, shit happens, so long,” and it’s Molly who yells and screams at him that this must not happen, how he might have been an inadequate charlatan all his life before this, but this is the moment when he HAS to draw deep on his true power and save her. So he does. And when he does, Molly understands how absolutely terrible becoming human is for the Unicorn, which Schmendrick doesn’t–even though he heard the Unicorn say that Nikos would have done better to let a unicorn die than make it into a man, and she didn’t.

Molly’s work in Haggard’s castle is fairy-tale like in nature, somewhere between Cinderella (”My father sets you to the weariest work there is to do, and still you sing”) and the labours of Hercules or the Biblical Israelites. According to the novel, “Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”

In reward for her work, several unprecedented things happen. Lír comments that “There has never been singing in this castle, or cats, or the smell of good cooking,” but now that Molly Grue has come, all these things have come to pass. And in the end, this work is pivotal–if Molly weren’t there, the cat wouldn’t have come; and without the cat, they never would have known how to find the Red Bull.

The point of fact is, Molly is able to do what she does for the Unicorn because she’s older, she’s more experienced, she’s weathered hardship and seen dreams broken, and knows what to hold on to and what to give up on. She knows that love is a very fine thing, but unicorns are something else.

And in the end, her reward is that her meeting with the Unicorn wasn’t the end of her story, when she had reached the end of her suitability for fairytales; The Last Unicorn is Molly and Schmendrick, who have lived for some time already, coming to their beginnings, and setting them on the path for their next story, for the real work of their adult lives.

  #oh i love this book and this movie so deeply    #i just got the new Two Hearts novella and devoured it and    #and it's also wonderful and painful  

no-terfs-no-swerfs-no-fascists:

doublism:

my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss

Okay, let’s try and break this down.

Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn’t cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.

And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.

But here’s the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.

Being into dubcon or noncon doesn’t mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn’t make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn’t mean you wouldn’t run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.

If you’re really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women’s sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.

And, for most of them, even when they don’t actively realize it, it’s about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It’s about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it’s gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don’t really matter, they’re just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you’re dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.

For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it’s very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It’s a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.

And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don’t actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they’re actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe… just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let’s not mince words, there’s also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.

Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you’re feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.

Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn’t simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!

So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone’s kink truly offends you this much.

  #this is so true    #this is why romance sells so well and is so casually despised    #let women have some fun and comfort    #ykinmkato  

sinksanksockie2:

secondlina:

tattooedzombigirl:

theman:

beardedmrbean:

image

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

Reblogging because it’s a damn potato and I want to encourage people to assume potatoes are magical.

w-what if potato is actually lucky

  #i would like some good news  

digitaldiscipline:

bakwaaas:

godlevel:

You gotta walk in rooms like God sent you

as a punishment.

to the people already there

  #hahaha    #yes  
hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx

word-for-today:

nentuaby:

hosekisama:

michaelblume:

molly-ren:

stevita:

molly-ren:

molly-ren:

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

Word for today: bang path

The use of exclamation points to distinguish between variations of a character or name

  #fandom history    #bang path    #this is so interesting  
Just a heads up that although I love talking to people I immediately delete all hateful anon asks and block their senders. From the moment I hit that ignore button you will no longer be able to send me questions/asks/requests from your current account ever again regardless of whether you are on anon or not. If you're cool with that then hate on. If not, and you're just feeling upset/angry/unhappy/whatever and need somewhere to vent those emotions, why don't you send me an ask (on anon or off) telling me you want to tell me/chat about/discuss ___ and we can talk? I don't know much but I can listen.