who the FUCK told society that depression and awkwardness is cute and adorable
bad screenwriters
John Green
john green is not the problem john green’s fans are the problem
Reblogging SO fast.
With the added caveat that no author is or will ever be perfect.
Stop Blaming John Green for Stuff He’s Not Guilty Of 2kForever
John Green is the biggest example of “tumblr turning on people it used to love to reach for and literally invent call outs for no reason other than its apparently cool to shit on things that are popular.”
I’ll forever be bitter about what this ignorant ass site did to him after his books had so much fucking impact on my life.
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
Like… the intention is good, but I don’t know how I feel about the angle of “you shouldn’t bully someone because you may not know the whole story”. You shouldn’t bully because it’s fucked up.
That girl you called fat, maybe she’s NOT starving herself. Maybe she just likes to eat. You want to call her names because of that? Fuck you.
That girl you called a slut, maybe she’s not a virgin, maybe she’s had a lot of sex with different people, sex is fucking AWESOME! Your hang ups with women and sexuality is not her problem. You’re an asshole.
That boy you pushed down in the hall… maybe everything’s great at home for him, so the fuck what? Don’t put your hands on people you piece of shit.
That black girl you teased for her skin color… just, fuck you, period. Doesn’t matter what the fuck is going on in her life, you’re fucking garbage. Get the fuck out of here.
The old man with the scars… seriously? Like… if you’re making fun of an old man’s scars you’re too far gone, you’re some kind of amoral sociopath or something cause that’s just some fucked up shit.
That “gay boy” you made fun of? Go fuck yourself.
The man you made fun of for crying? He just watched the episode of the Office where Jim and Pam get married, so what? Who cares why he’s crying? People have emotions dipshit.
That poor boy? Oh you’re one of those assholes who makes fun of poor people? Go die in a fire.
How about just don’t bully people at all for any reason cause it’s a fucked up thing to do regardless of what you do or don’t know about them? Treat people the way you want to be treated, it’s that simple. We’re all human beings just trying to be happy, you make the world a worse place when you try to stand in the way of that.
Dr James Barry, the first doctor to perform a successful C section wherein both mother and child survived, was a huge champion of handwashing at a time when most doctors didn’t wash their hands. For this reason, many of the chilldbirths he delivered resulted in healthier babies and mothers. He was also a gay trans man, who specifically wrote that upon his death he wished for his body to be taken in its nightshirt, wrapped in his sheets as a shroud, and placed into the coffin so that nobody would see his body. His wishes were not respected, and as a result he was outed at his death.
i’ve also been informed he had a poodle. He named his poodle Psyche. I’d just like to congratulate him on being an excellent human being, who not only pioneered modern medicine but also had good taste in dogs. that is all.
If you’d like to know more there’s a delightful podcast out there called Sawbones that did an episode on him.
My least favorite fact about James Barry is that people hold him up as an example of a Powerful Woman, so dedicated to her desire to practice medicine that she spent her whole life as a man! What a pioneer!
Yes, we need to hear more about women in history, because there were thousands who made amazing contributions whose names we never learn.
But just…let us have our guy.
The fact that Barry wanted to be buried and remembered as a man, rather than taking satisfaction in going “HAHA I WAS A WOMAN THIS WHOLE TIME! SEE, WOMEN ARE JUST AS GOOD AS MEN!” Seems to strongly corroborate the fact that he was a trans man and not a “secret woman crossdressing for her career”, at least to me. It would be fantastic if those wishes could be respected in these days when trans people still face so much oppression for simply being who they truly are.
Dr James Barry should be lauded as a powerful, successful and skilled trans person and not as one of “history’s great women”.
reblog if you’re team ‘bill denbrough from the original novel by stephen king deserved to grow into a better, more honest man because i don’t know who this dude is, but he’s not my son’
But what about vampire history teachers. Vampires who read something from a text book then proceed to light the book on fire and throw it out the window because “No. that’s not even close to what really happened. Listen up nerds I’m about to teach you what really happened in France during the revolution”
I need this as a series
Vampires sharing the recipe for Greek fire.
Vampires speaking in dead languages.
Vampires being able to translate untranslatable scripts.
Vampires who react to straightwashing historical figures like “Are you kidding me everyone knew that man was queer!”
Vampires from cultures who were once antagonistic towards each other stubbornly maintaining a friendship that’s lasted longer than their civilizations.
Vampires who honour forgotten deities you won’t find in mythology books.
Also, vampires who secretly saved stuff from the Library of Alexandra.
A vampire show that does not revolve all around sex and eternal cursed love.
nerd vampire whose knowledge of current events is terrible but they can always remember everything that’s considered “history” so they have a super-detailed knowledge of everything up to about thirty years ago and then ?????
vampire who couldn’t tell you what caravaggio was known for but duelled with him at least three times and slept with him at least ten. “cara-who OH YOU MEAN MICHAEL yeah he was cool”
vampire who spent 100 years in a convent and is still so bitter that in all that time they never made her mother superior “GODDAMMIT I HAD SENIORITY! I HAD SENIORITY!” “okay so first off janet, that was six hundred years ago, but more importantly, maybe if you didn’t always start those complaints off with blasphemy…”
vampire professor who just sort of showed up at oxford when it was founded and is still there (and nobody’s noticed because he still never actually shows up to his lectures)
vampire politician who lifts all their campaign speeches wholesale from speeches given 200 years ago and just waits for someone to catch them out (nobody ever does they’re prime minister and their approval ratings are through the roof)
WAIT I HAVE MORE
queer vampire who constantly talks about the fashion for straightness and you need to be really careful because if you tell them straight is default they WILL scream at you for five days straight about what a modern concept heterosexuality is
vampire hoarder who has an entire town where they just kept having to buy new houses to keep their stuff in and some of it’s probably worth tens of millions by now but you’ll never find it in among the 1950s kitschy kitten sculptures and boxes of newspaper (the newspaper is a wonderful mix of yesterday’s guardian and daily courants from 1725)
vampire sailor from manderville’s time who just has so many stories and some of them might even be true
vampire bluestocking girl who took to the internet like a fish to water and spends her whole unlife engaging reddit antifeminists about women’s rights because that’s one fight she’s determined to see through. also with the advent of cheap dyes she literally wears blue socks every day and hopes one day someone gets the joke
vampire doctor who just gets SO CONFUSED about the literature because do you know how hard it is to keep up with medicine kevin? when i got my doctorate we thought leeches were good and then they were bad and now they’re good again? i was published in issue one of the lancet kevin that is 387 lancets kevin how the hell am i meant to remember which one’s current kevin why are they saying cannabis is good for pain like this is news??? (but also lives in a state of wonderment every day in hospital because wow look at all this stuff we can do now look at it kevin!)
entire coven of vampires constantly quibbling over manners because they’re all from different periods: “HATS OFF AT TABLE” “SCREW YOU LEONARD ONLY PEASANTS EAT BAREHEADED” “TABITHA THAT HASN’T BEEN GOOD MANNERS SINCE THE 1500S NOBODY HAS LICE ANY MORE” “IT ISN’T ABOUT LICE LEONARD IT’S ABOUT GOOD MANNERS YOU NEED TO HAVE GOOD MANNERS WHEN YOU HAVE PEOPLE OVER FOR DINNER” “I SWEAR TO GOD TABITHA IF YOU MAKE THAT PUN ONE MORE TIME I WILL SHOVE YOUR STUPID HAT DOWN YOUR THROAT”
vampire musicians who might not have been child prodigies but goddammit 500 years of practicing an instrument is bound to get you somewhere (also knowing the composer and being the first person to start playing a song doesn’t hurt either)
my favorite will always be vampires who know fuck-all about the standard major historical events because they were always somewhere else whenever big shit was going down:
“yeah i heard about the hundred years war but i was in northern african at the time so…”
“the roman empire fell??? how did the fucking roman empire fall??? i spend a fucking handful of decades in india and i come back to this???”
“russia needs to stop having revolutions, i can’t keep them all straight…”
“when did france become a democracy?? and america’s now it’s own country??? i’ve spent the last century in a forest in wallachia scaring small children so––wHat dO yOU meAn we’re calling it romania now??? when the fuck did it become romania???”
“WE HAD A WORLD WAR??? WE HAD TWO WORLD WARS???? well obviously ‘world’ is an exaggeration because i heard nothing about it while i was lost in the amazon rainforest for the last fifty years…”
“listen i spent most of the fourteenth century as a pirate in the south china sea so someone’s gonna had to clue me in on all this ‘black plague’ nonsense.”
Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
Podcast idea: a D&D campaign with same characters, same story, same everything, but different comedians picking it up each week and trying to deal with what the players of the past week put their characters through
Working title: Roll Reversal
So there’s actually a really solid chance of this becoming a thing. Can you reblog this post if you’d have interest in listening to this?
How come period pieces are almost always dramas, anyway? I want to watch a sitcom about a dude in renaissance-era Tuscany trying to get rich quick by scamming the local merchant princes.
The time that Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli teamed up to steal a river would make an excellent buddy comedy, and nothing will convince me otherwise.
I’ve had a buddy comedy in my brain for years about the Spanish Match, focusing on the big wacky road trip taken by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, and Prince Charles to secure Charles’s marriage to Infanta Maria Anna of Spain
I realized immediately that I would call it “Buck and Chuck’s Excellent Adventure,” and then I had to step out of my History of England class because I almost asphyxiated from trying not to laugh in the middle of lecture
sparksoffandommagic 