For the Closet Romantic

"stress" by yoan capote - made of bronze and concrete

few things more humbling than the realization that you really do write the same fic(s) over and over again

Someone mentioned on another tumblr post about how nobody complained that Agatha Christie wrote ANOTHER book about murder.

Write your story. Write it again. And again.

Okay but do you understand the TREASURE TROVE of reading a fic you enjoy and then looking at the author's page and discovering they have written multiple just like it?! That is the ultimate score!

Dean Winchester every day -- 282/326

Supernatural 13x18//Bring 'em Back Alive

It’s their love language 💕

Available as stickers in my store

OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

2.04 Fun and Games

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

It wasn't just the hoity-toity ritual magic stuff, either. Popular media often frames a fundamental opposition between the Church and practitioners of the Old Ways™, but on the ground, any given medieval European community's foremost practitioner of traditional folk magic was likely to be the village priest. And again, they very much were not supposed to be doing this. There were some very pointed letters going around reminding people to cut that shit out, not that we're naming any names, Jeremy, and no, "if you invoke the saints first it's fine" is not going to fly with the bishop.

I feel like a lot of folks in the notes are missing a critical piece of context here because they're not clear on what the Church's official position toward magic actually was during the Medieval period.

In brief, the idea that magic is a. real and b. Satanic was not the party line for the greater part of the Middle Ages. Obviously the particulars varied both regionally and over time, but for the most part, the official position of the Church was that there is no power but God's and magic is fake. The Church's principal objection to the practices of divination, spirit-binding, etc. was that they were fraudulent, not that they imperilled one's soul. Sometimes this was even carried to the point that accusations of witchcraft would result in the accuser getting in trouble rather than the accused; after all, if your neighbour is pretending to do wizard shit, that's fraud, but if you actually believe your neighbour is capable of wizard shit, that's heresy!

The hardline "magic is the work of Satan" stance that most folks are thinking of when they think of magic and the Church wasn't particularly widespread until very late in the Medieval period, and is really more characteristic of the post-Reformation era – which adds an extra layer of hilarity to the aforementioned local clergy doing wizard shit, because from the perspective of their superiors, the problem was less "oh no, our priests are consorting with Satan" and more "god fucking damn it, our priests keep scamming people with this wizard shit".

The Catholic Church, desperately penning their 500th letter to local clergy:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TELLING PEOPLE MAGIC IS REAL

The really funny part is that, by all accounts, some of the priests involved didn't even want to be doing wizard shit. Allegedly, they more or less got pressured into it by their congregations, who expected wizard shit of them and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

SCREAM VI (2023) dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett YOUR MONSTER (2024) dir. Caroline Lindy

Danny Motta's reaction to the final fifteen 👌 :)

Cold weather enjoyer FREAKS when they’re shivering and tensed up and can’t feel their toes and their face hurts and

Naomi Watanabe, art direction by Yuni Yoshida

Trying not to feel sick every time I remember that Stede genuinely spent half a day thinking the love of his life was dead

One of the major ways Elementary stands out from other Holmes adaptations to me is how they wrote Watson. Like it would've been so easy to write her like any other Watson, brilliant, yes, undoubtedly, but forever attached to Sherlock. Watson is there because Sherlock wills it so, because Sherlock needs a rock and because Sherlock Holmes is a man forever in need of a partner. Usually.

But they broke that. They said this is Dr Joan Watson, and she is incandescent and ruthless. She's a surgeon and there's an episode where Sherlock says surgeons have a healthy dose of god complex and you think sure buddy and then Joan threatens Moriarty in the middle of a restaurant and you go, huh. She learns to pick pockets and watches out of boredom. She changed careers over and over again till she found the one that fit. She became a detective and could and would absolutely kill a man and vouch for someone killing a man because it's Sherlock and she loves him very much. She's a partner, in the very literal sense. She kept track of murders as a teenager. She enchanted the most dangerous woman on the planet and EARNED her protection. She's a cancer survivor. She threatens gangs and online hacker conglomerates in free time. She's a mother. She's half of two people who love each other very much. She moved across oceans for him and she would do it again.

Clarification; Joan did not track murders as a teenager.

Its so much better than that.

She had a GRADE SCHOOL HOBBY (roughly ages 6-13) of tracking the exploits of new york mobsters, likening it to a soap opera.

Its heavily implied she never actually gave up this hobby.

This is totally what happened with them in the movie, right?

title of this is just ‘lesbian sex’