Bad: aliens that insist upon referring to human women as “feeeeemales”.
Good: aliens that insist upon dividing humans into binary categories, but the binary in question is based on something we’d regard as trivial and bizarre.
pro cilantro and anti cilantro
Just to screw with us they refer to have designated half the population as “edible” and the other half is “inedible.”
No intention of eating anyone, they just like how uncomfortable it makes everyone.
Even better: the aliens all agree on who is edible and who is inedible, but the humans have no idea what the criteria is
Even better: there is no criteria, the Aliens just keep a running list of whenever one member designated a human as edible or not. People are baffled because the selection appears random yet all the aliens are up to date, so there must be SOMETHJNG
I love this because it implies the aliens possess either (1) a universal hive mind or (2) an intergalactic group chat dedicated to fucking with humanity
Hades very rarely
leaves the underworld, especially during the six months when he rules alone.
But when he and
Hecate go where none but them dare to tread, to the dark, unknown corners of
the realm to push it wider, he can’t be disturbed. Icarus doesn’t know what,
exactly, they do, but he knows it’s dangerous, delicate work. As such, neither
Hades nor Hecate can be found during these long days, no matter the cause.
Hades only ever expands
the realm when his wife is here, so that she can rule over the dead in his
absence.
Except for this
time.
“But why can’t you wait?”
Icarus asks, wringing his hands together. “You’ve always been able to wait
before.”
“The realms are
tilting on their own right now, we’ll be able to push it farther than we ever
have,” he says, scanning over the plans that only ever look like a mess of
lines whenever Icarus looks at them. “If we wait, we lose this opportunity.
You’ll be fine. You know how to do it all.”
“I’ve never done it
alone! I’m not you or Persephone – can’t Charon do it? Or Nyx? They’ve been
here longer than I have,” he protests.
Hades looks up and
reaches out a hand to pull Icarus closer. He wants to resists, to be petty
because Hades is making him do something he doesn’t want to do. But Hades asks
for so little, and he’s quite terrible at denying him. His arm curls around
Icarus’s waist, pulling him flush up against his side. Icarus looks up at him,
and one look at those soft, dark eyes has him melting, as always. “You’ll be
amazing, because you are amazing. Nyx and Charon are wonderful. But only you
can do this.”
“Fine,” he says,
giving in, as he suspected he would from the beginning.
Hades has to go
meet Hecate, but he does spend several minutes letting Icarus pin him against
his bookshelves and kiss him, which is rather nice.
~
Icarus opens the
doors to the throne room. Guards line the wall, as is customary, even though
it’s not in use. Two thrones sit there. One is simple and made of gleaming
black obsidian. The other is more elaborate, made of silver and decorated with
bones and blooming vines. Both were made by Hephaestus.
He walks forward,
and no one stops him. No has the authority to stop him, they didn’t even before
Hades left. The only ones who could challenge him are Charon and Styx, and
they’re both staying far away just in case he tries to trick one of them into
taking his place.
There’s nothing for
it. Persephone is gone, Hades is gone, and someone must rule.
He drags his feet
as he takes his final steps forward. Both the thrones are cloaked in power, and
if any but their owners sit in them without permission they would be more
than simply killed, because most people in this realm are already dead. They
would be unmade, erased completely, and nothing could bring them back.
Icarus takes a deep
breath, legs trembling. The he takes the finals step forward and sits on
Hades’s throne.
Nothing happens.
He lets out a sigh
of relief and goes boneless. For all that it looks like it’s made of hard, cold
stone, it’s actually rather comfortable.
Styx and Charon
materialize in front of him, and go into a deep bow. “My king.”
“Shut up,” he
snaps, “You’re lucky I don’t force one of you into this thing instead.”
Charon is making a
raspy sound that Icarus recognizes as laughter. They straighten, and Styx is
grinning, “It suits you, I would just look silly.”
“Flattery won’t
hide your cowardice,” he says. “You’ve been here the longest. It should be you
in this throne.”
“I’m just a kid!”
she protests, “That would be a disaster.” She vanishes without another word. He
wonders if he could use his temporary status to make her come back, but he
won’t risk it. An angry Styx isn’t something he likes dealing with on the best
of days.
Charon holds out
his skeletal hands, and a fat scroll appears. “The most recent logs, King
Thanatos.”
“Please don’t call
me that,” he says, pained. He gets up off the throne and takes the scroll,
“I’ll be in Hades’s study.”
Charon vanishes.
Icarus walks out of the throne room, and the doors slam shut behind him. He
refuses to go back there until Hades returns. Besides, if his lover has taught
him anything, it’s that a ruler that spends more time on a throne than out of
it isn’t very good at his job.
~
For the first two
days, all is well. He’s been doing this work for hundreds of years, it’s
nothing new, evn though for the first time he does it without either Hades of
Persephone to guide him. Then Hermes appears out of beside him, holding a
writhing, reedy looking man. The man’s trying to scream, but no sound is coming
out. “Our King Zeus wishes for Hades to deal with Sisyphus, traitor to the
heavens, personally,” he says, face slack with boredom.
“Hades is busy,” he
says, “Put him in the waiting area with the others. He’ll see to it when he
returns.
Hermes blinks, then
looks uncomfortable. “Zeus wanted it dealt with immediately.”
Icarus is tempted
to tell Hermes that he doesn’t particularly care what the lord of the sky
wants, but he knows that’s not very fair. Hades would never let Zeus take out
his temper on him, but he knows not everyone has that same protection. “Fine.
But I’m too busy to be creative, I’m just going to tie him to a tree in
Tartarus and leave him there to get eaten.”
“That’s
appreciated,” Hermes says, and his instant relief is almost worth the
interruptions to his paperwork. The in-between places are almost full, he has
to start moving people out otherwise – well he doesn’t know what will happen,
but it won’t be good. And for that to happen, he needs to do an awful lot of
paperwork. So he better make this quick.
~
Sisyphus is far
from the first person Icarus has dragged to the depths of the Tartarus. So he’s
not sure how, exactly, he’s the one that ends up pinned and tied to a mountain
as the mortal darts away. Which is annoying, but it’s not like there’s many
places to hide in Tartarus, and he some celestial ropes aren’t really enough to
keep him bound for long.
What is should have
been was only a mild inconvenience.
Instead, it becomes
something so much worse.
In the few hours it
takes him struggle free, great hulking figures have already drawn near, and
Icarus isn’t just the son of an inventor anymore, he’s Thanatos, the Death God,
he’s Hades’s lover and the current king of the underworld.
But in all his long
years on this plane, in all the times he’s been to Tartarus, he’s never
actually seen a titan up close before.
Three of them crowd
around him now, their rotting, pulsating power like a stench clogging his nose
and lungs. He tries to leave, to slip through the planes of this place like he
has so many times before, but nothing happens. He tries again, and again, and
again, but nothing happens.
regular size dogs, the standard by which all variant dogs are compared to, the vanilla dog, are dogs. they often produce slimes and cause ruckus. i actually find dogs in general harder to get close to than cats? dogs are weird men who cant read and crawl on the ground. dirty boys who can be troublesome. they are utilitarian animals who like to help and be good though and are very admirable in nature. they come in lots of fun customizations and you can add cosmetic items to your dog for flavor, or go au naturel. i have great respect for these fucked up men of the dirt as should all people
small dogs are a point of much contention as they are often heinously fucked on a biological level. ive never been all that affectionate towards them because in my mind one of the best parts of dogs is their bigness, however, when i spend some time with a small dog i usually wind up thinking “okay i understand why people like these so much.” some good points of small dogs is that theyre very portable and, in general, small. theyre very dumb and rowdy like all dogs but with a smallness twist and often i think that they are gremlins or perhaps a small demon like a imp. they are naughty men but they certainly have a purpose
bighuge dogs are a very special type of dog indeed. they are so so so so huge and large and big. i respect strongness and hugeness very much on a personal moral level. there are a few downsides to a dog so huge, they are a great and sacred responsibility. if this big huge man wants to cause trouble and mischief you may not be able to stop them because they are, and i cannot overstate this, so much a big boy. but their legs are so mighty and their form is so Good. this is a dog for the dedicated but in my opinion very worth it. you must earn this good dog
***BONUS*** longdogs, these strange long men are most certainly fae in nature, we all know this. they function in mysteries and riddles. this dog is built for speed and dexterity and is a good template for those who want to go the spellcaster route. ive heard tales from people who say that theyve lived in areas where most people have retired racing greyhounds and that there were just insanely fucked up jacked just totally diesel greyhounds all over the place and i think that would be scary as hell. this is a dog whose power youve got to acknowledge
in conlusion: i started typing this and just didnt stop. i cant explain my poetry often. dogs are dirty rowdy lads and id like to gain a deeper understanding of them. we have to do right by them because theyre very important and they trust us. thank you
coming this fall………. a new YA novel series about one girl……… in a post-apocalyptic dystopian setting…………….. who is different. unique. and can use her specialness….. To Save Us All
jordan…… the cunning, cool, gruff rebel leader……………… born outside the Dystopia… a Freedom Fighter…… with a heart of gold……………
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
I’d like to point out that if you instead search books.google.com for a variety of phrases like “toed out of his shoes”, “toeing out of his shoes”, “toed out of her shoes” etc, you get a total of a couple hundred results – almost all of which are romance novels published in the last decade. Of the fic writers I personally know who have gone on to publish? Pretty much all of them published romance novels, or at least started there.
Obviously, I’m not saying all of these writers wrote fic first, but I bet a lot of them did, or at least read it, and then the language probably spreads to other romance writers. Where will it spread next? 🙂
But my real question is… how do other writers describe the process of using the toe of one foot to push your shoe off the other foot? I’ve certainly seen “kicked one’s shoes off” but that has a more forceful sort of connotation, obviously.
(Also, let’s all remember that young urban women are historically at the forefront of almost all linguistic trends. The “urban” part might be changing thanks to the internet, but given that most fic is written by younger women, it should be no shock if writing trends start there.)
(Another note: I once searched for “praise kink” because I was like, this is a concept I need language to talk about in real life – and all the hits were fanfic.)
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y’all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
When I was a child I was afraid of the moon. I used to think that the sky was a giant raven and the moon changing phases was its slowly blinking eye, watching me.
Draw the giant space raven.
This one gave me a lot of inspiration.
SKY RAVEN!! HECK YEAH!! Favorite bird and an awesome concept? Heck yeah. Awesome art? Double heck yeah!! Thank you so much for sharing this with the rest of us! I love it so much!
@absoluteradman If this is not an idea for a short story, I don’t know what is
Corvids collect treasures. Shiny things, pretty things, precious things. And what could be more precious than life?
Life which learns.
Life which grows.
Life which builds.
Life needs to be coddled at first, of course. Giant space birds don’t just pop out of the vacuum, ready to take wing on the stellar winds and soar through the universe. Life needs time, and air, and a shield from solar radiation- life needs a planet. And a planet doesn’t produce a race of giant vacuum defying corvids in a millennium.
So the Raven settled in to wait. And wait a long time, it did. It didn’t mind. The Raven had always been a patient bird, a watchful bird. It stared down upon the planet, slowly blinking, always watching.
The Raven watched as the planet was settled by its ken. They moved from treetop to treetop, forest to forest, spanning all across the world. The Raven watched as the corvids learned cognizance, understanding, and communication. The Raven watched as the other animals settled into their usual roles.
But then The Raven saw something strange.
The direwolves and the direbears were not hunting their prey, the humans, as well as they should have been. And the humans were changing- they began to make their nests in places they normally wouldn’t. They began to construct farms, and villages, and towns, and cities! And the corvids, intelligent as they were, watched the humans develop and build and create- and settled into a role as scavengers!
The Raven was perplexed! The strangest chain of events unfolded as the humans began to dominate the world. They spread and spread, growing and growing, conquering and settling the world as if they were the corvids, and the corvids were left in the dust!
The Raven was confused, and concerned. Perhaps it should do something to right this scenario. Perhaps it should reach down and correct this mistake. But then, perhaps not? Mayhap the direwolves and direbears would rise up and strike down the humans after a while. Mayhap the corvids would rise up in the humans wake and take their place at the top of the food chain.
And yet, as The Raven watched, this seemed less and less likely. And then in the blink of an eye, the predators were gone. The direwolves were hunted to extinction, the direbears driven to the poles, and the lesser wolves domesticated! Domesticated by the humans, of all things!
The Raven felt outrage, disgust, and disappointment. With a sigh and a caw, it spread its wings to catch the wind and float away, in search of some new treasure, some new planet.
And then it saw.
The Raven blinked. It paused, midflight, to be certain. And there it was. A point, no smaller than a pin-prick, of light.
Real, genuine light. Not from the stars, but from the planet itself. From the humans.
They had discovered electricity.
The Raven watched, perplexed and amazed, as the planet spun. When a part of the planet drifted from the light to the dark, the lights would come on. And when that part faced the sun again, the lights would go back out.
The Raven folded its wings. It let the flow of gravity take it, spinning around the planet, always watching, slowly blinking. And as it spun, the world began to glow. The planet, when darkened, would shine. The humans made it shine.
The Raven let out a joyous cry! What greater treasure could there be than life which was shiny? And with contentment, The Raven still floats, watching us. And though we are not corvids, we are still precious.
It’s really important to remember that Diana Wynne Jones was dyslexic and that when she was a little girl and said she wanted to be a writer, people told her that she couldn’t be a writer because of her dyslexia. She became an incredibly popular author.
She actually became the greatest writer in the English language of the 20th century. It’ll take a couple of hundred years for academia to recognize this because she was female, she was funny, and she wrote for children, but – seriously. Try it. Read the best Jones alongside the best Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nobokov, anybody whose life overlapped hers who is canonized in literature courses, she will win handily on any criterion you care to use; style, theme, structure, characterization, sheer reading pleasure. Hell, the worst Jones will stand up against the best of some of them! (I leave you to name your own names, but I bet someone’s already occurred to you.)
I love her books so much. Every single one I’ve read is so vibrant and colorful and whimsical and memorable. She created such beautiful worlds that children and adults alike could find an escape in. She was brilliant.
She really was. I attended a talk/lecture of hers entirely on accident and it was one of the best days of my life.
When I was in second grade we had to practice writing letters by writing to our favorite authors. Everyone else wrote to RL Stein or the like, while I wrote to DWJ. Everyone else got a form letter. I got a typewriter’ed note from her responding to my letter and adding her own thoughts.
Honestly I have this suspicion that DWJ doesn’t get recognized for how brilliant her writing is cause it’s TOO brilliant. Like, she’s just too good at making it too easy. And her work can be read at a deep or shallow level and all sorts between, so you can read Howl’s as a generic fantasy without realizing it’s an absolute send-up, or a social commentary, or a feminist manifesto, or a fucking razor sharp psychological character study. And you’d be having a marvelous good time reading it.
Good Literature got this Rule that it needs to be unpleasureable to be Good, that it must be Difficult or Uncomfortable or Ugly. I could go off on why but I’ll leave it at gatekeeping. Make Good Literature so nasty and not fun that finishing a book becomes some sort of litmus test of Who’s In. If Good Literature was something just anybody could get through how would we know who was important? /ugh
The thing about DWJ is that you can read her in any way: as genre or even as mainstream literature, as a children’s book or an adult’s book. And she doesn’t rely on tropes to make her point. So many of her characters seem real. Especially the teenagers.
I suspect DWJ would have very much agreed with this accurate assessment of “Good Litearture.”
I agree with all this, but also, I wanted to add that I got a letter back from her too when I wrote a fan letter; she wrote back and apologised for taking so long because she’d been laid up with an illness like in Hexwood, and said that all her books had a way of coming true for her eventually but it was very inconvenient that this one had.
I recently picked up Howl’s Moving Castle on reread and I realized something I never had before, which certainly isn’t in the Ghibli movie, so I hate to spoil people who haven’t read it, but I just have to mention it. As a young American child I simply accepted the bit where they RANDOMLY visit Howl’s home. But as an adult I just started laughing my ass off because I SUDDENLY GOT IT. what a fucking hilarious swerve in a High Fantasyland story.
Basically, Howl is an adventure-comedy set in a sort of medieval-ish High Fantasyland, like a generic Disney story. At one point the characters make a brief visit to Howl’s home. Howl is…. NOT from High Fictional Fantasyland. He is FAR more exotic than that.
He is… in fact… Welsh. And worse: modern. He is, in fact, a grad student. He is a flippant Welsh fuckup with a PhD, who keeps his car at his sister’s house because he’s incapable of adulting properly. Reading between the lines, he may be maintaining an ENTIRE life in the magical medieval land of Ingary simply in order to escape the bother of finding a job in academia. Fuckin relatable, am I right?
sparksoffandommagic 