lrthreads: multi-fandom side blog

So one of the things I love about watching Star Wars: A New Hope after having watched all the other Star Wars movies is how… well… how normal Luke’s upbringing appears to have been.

It’s not just that he was loved. It’s clear that Breha and Bail Organa loved Leia immensely. But she was a princess functionally from birth, and then became a senator at–what? eighteen, nineteen, twenty? Something like that. She was much loved and much trusted, obviously, but her upbringing must have been… “unusual” would be putting it mildly. As a teenager she was learning statecraft and politics–and deception.

And their mother must have been the same way, queen from such a young age, raised and trained to rule. And their father–loved, yes, deeply, and I have no doubt that his mother did her best to protect Anakin from the worst parts of slavery–but he was still a slave, as was she, and there was only so much they could do.

But Luke! Luke got the gift of a perfectly normal childhood. All the jokes about Luke, the whining about wanting to go to TOSCHE station to pick up some POWER CONVERTERS–the snippy teenagery conversation he has with his uncle about waiting “a whole nother year????”–the shooting womp rats in his T-16 back home–the fact that left to his own devices, at the same age that Leia is deciding THE FATE OF HER PLANET, he’s still playing with model spaceships…..

…they’re all signs that he had a normal childhood. That he’s a normal eighteen, nineteen, twenty, whatever year old. 

I mean, he grew up in a situation where it was completely safe for him to whine to his parent figures. He knew that Lars and Beru wouldn’t make him pay for his “but I wanted to go to TOSCHE STATION” or for his “I want to go to the academy THIS year” or whatever. Unlike basically every other Skywalker ever he grew up without a ton of extra pressure, without a “oh by the way you’re going to be king of [planet]” stuff, without “also you’re the Destined Future of the Jedi.” They didn’t raise a legacy, or a scion–they just raised a child. (In point of fact, that’s why Yoda almost rejects him: he’s too old, and he was raised too normal.)  And since Owen and Beru obviously knew perfectly well who and what he was, that’s actually an astonishing accomplishment. They were delivered an infant who they knew had the approximate destructive power of a nuclear device, and they still raised him as… a kid, a child, a boy who they loved with the same mixture of exasperation and devotion as any parent-figures.

He grew up as a kid, with a gruff but loving uncle and a sweet-tempered aunt, he grew up skeet-shooting womp rats and hanging out with his friends in Anchorhead when he had an excuse to go into town–and it’s clear how safe he feels with them because he does whine and moan and have fits without any apparent worry that he’s going to pay for it later. He whines and moans in the way I did at that age: in perfect confidence that while my parents might temporarily snap at me, they would never hurt me, and they would always love me. And that all they really wanted for me was to grow up safe and happy.

tl;dr: Luke Skywalker: the last of the Jedi(?) but also maybe the first of the Jedi to grow up in a normally functional childhood.

(I also really, really want to see the story in which he grieves his aunt and uncle for more than ten seconds. Perhaps I will write it.)

This.

Thank you. I needed this. 

Owen and Beru are the most goddamn underrated characters in the whole Star Wars universe I swear

(possibly because they are, quite literally, dirt poor.)

Beru and Owen are the Martha and Jonathan Kent of the Star Wars universe but they don’t get half the credit or attention.

                         Mulder, back in the day, I used to do stairs and in three-inch heels.                                          Back in the day. Scully, back in the day is now.

be careful not to choke on your discourse, tumblr

IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF THE APOCALYPSE

(Natalie Wee)

I will drop everything I am holding. I will steal the first car I see &

chase the kite string down to your hand. Perhaps by then I will have forgotten your face.

We will not recall events beginning with a curled eyelash & ending in grocery lists of what we could have done

differently. You may go by a different name in a new city wear a life carved out in the shape of my absence

or make a bed with someone else. But when the alarm sounds I will cross every border,

skip every checkpoint & dodge all bullets in memory of what we would once have done to discern

the exact form of desire. I will come to you, gasping & dry-mouthed as before, wearing the future around

my neck. & nothing else. I will not care if you bring your new bedfellow or a dog hell-bent

on alerting treasure hunters to signs of life. It does not even matter where we are headed.

There is no pain like the pain of a gulf blooming between two sides of the same hand. There is no grief

like praying to a ghost that refuses to stay buried. The earth fissuring each time I put you back

in it: splitting image of how the planet shuddered when our first escape routes converged. The same way

it surrenders, now, to the unfathomable. These crevices are nothing like the graves we built

for each other. These fires cannot touch us when we have perfected the art of immolation. How even

death is a shadow of forgetting. We have worn it like skin, offered the fresh peel

at our first meeting. At our last. & now the afterworld as we know it: beyond our invention. As it has always

been. You’re not forgiven, but neither am I. The world is ending

& we have been here before.

I think my biggest “huh” moment with respect to gender roles is when it was pointed out to me that your typical “geek” is just as hypermasculine as your typical “jock” when you look at it from the right angle.

As male geeks, a great deal of our identity is built on the notion that male geeks are, in some sense, gender-nonconformant, insofar as we’re unwilling or unable to live up to certain physical ideals about what a man “should” be. Indeed, many of us take pride in how putatively unmanly we are.

Viewed from an historical perspective, however, the virtues of the ideal geek are essentially those of the ideal aristocrat: a cultured polymath with expertise in a vast array of subjects; rarefied or eccentric taste in food, clothing, music, etc.; identity politics that revolve around one’s hobbies or pastimes; open disdain for physical labour and those who perform it; a sense of natural entitlement to positions of authority (“you should be flipping my burgers!”); and so forth.

And the thing about that aristocratic ideal? It’s intensely masculine. It may seem more welcoming to women on the surface, but - as recent events will readily illustrate - this is a facade: we pretend to be egalitarian because it suits our refined self-image, but that affectation falls away in a heartbeat when challenged.

Basically, the whole “geeks versus jocks” thing that gets drilled into us by media and the educational system isn’t about degrees of masculinity at all. It’s just two different flavours of the same toxic bullshit: the ideal geek is the alpha-male-as-philosopher-king, as opposed to the ideal jock’s alpha-male-as-warrior-king. It’s still a big dick-measuring contest - we’re just using different rulers.

I saw this yesterday, and had a ‘fridge epiphany’ about it this morning: this explains why male 'alpha geeks’ are so threatened by women and put so much effort into trying to push women out of their spaces. Given a level playing field, a woman can be every bit the 'philosopher-king’ a man can, which means their standard of masculinity is only a standard of masculinity if they can keep the space free of women. 'Alpha jocks’ don’t have to put quite as much effort into keeping women off their literal or figurative playing field because it’s inherently (figuratively) not level - but watch the freakout begin when a woman makes a serious attempt at it. Women firefighters and construction workers, yikes! Women in the military, eek! Women in the military in non-support roles, double eek! also note that the attempt to shame these women starts with declaring that they must be lesbians i.e. not properly feminine.

(…will we ever have a standard of masculinity that doesn’t begin with 'untainted by femininity’? in my dreams, I guess.)

Sir Ian McKellen attended the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in London, Nov 13.   

Reblog Fairy Godmother Ian for all your dreams to come true.

space girl

I still have faith than #TheXfiles s11 will be! We have just to be patient!! ^^

© ChimerArt / © Catherine Nodet

Be the hero this year took from you

i really hate how fanfic is viewed as less valuable than other writings because people assume it’s easy to write when you’re using the basis of another work… honestly, writing within the frame of someone else’s creation can be even more challenging than writing something original and even plotless smut takes a lot of effort and practice to get right !! idk i’m just sick of hearing fanfic trashed and fanart praised to the heavens because apparently it’s so much harder to create art than it is to write :):))

People who trash “fanfic” don’t know anything about literature and are assuming that very recent notions about “originality” are in fact a universal judge of quality in literature. In fact, the modern obsession with “originality” has economic–not aesthetic–motives tied in with needing to “own” a creative work in order to profit from it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to make a living on one’s art, but creating something “original” does not mean it is necessarily good quality, and creating something transformative or derivative does not make it inherently poor quality. It boggles me that otherwise intelligent people manage to confuse these two very different things.

Much of the Western literary canon would be “fanfic” by today’s standards. Until fairly recently, most literature used casts of characters–gods, saints, heroes–familiar to the author’s audience and constantly remixed the same stories over and over again. It’s impossible to discuss ancient, medieval, or Renaissance literature without discussing sources, and this is why humanities students spend so much time studying classical mythology and Biblical scripture. And none of this should be surprising–writing itself is a fairly new technology, and the oral tradition that forms the vast foundation of written literature relied on stock stories, scenes, characters, and themes that the audience was as intimately familiar with as the singer, poet, or storyteller. The art wasn’t building something from scratch, from the ground up, every time a singer started a song but how that singer worked with traditional materials to make them appeal to the audience.

What’s interesting to me is how technologizing writing even further by sharing literature via the Internet has in many ways brought the creation of story back around to something similar (in some ways) to “oral literature.” Once again, we are keenly aware of and often producing art for our audience. Readers are no longer faceless abstractions on the business end of the cash register (or more often, the Amazon shopping cart) but people who react and respond–and therefore often shape–the writer’s art. We can talk to and know these people. We share a common stock of stories with them, and those stories define various fannish cultures the way that myths, legends, and folktales always have for their respective peoples. There is room for originality in fan fiction, but our art is just as often successful for its ability to depict a familiar (even stale) character, scene, trope, or idea in a way that stirs the reader to see or experience it in a new way. Again, this form of art presumes that stories aren’t little fenced-in entities that begin and end where their creator’s imagination does but are a sprawling “cauldron of story” (to borrow from Tolkien) connected with not only the writer’s own experiences but the vast web of story that gives shape to the human experience.

So I just started playing Pokémon Go this week…

Guys.. consider widowtracily

Idk what the ship name is for lena x emily but imma use @mizuaoi ‘s lenily

Current sexual orientation: Idris Elba decorating a Christmas tree in space

I think I reblogged this already, but it must be done again.

happy holidays you bastards

Artist: Sarah Elise Abramson 

Tumblr: http://sarahelisephotography.tumblr.com/

Imagine a world where world class athletes can’t stop promoting a gay sports anime.

dude we don’t have to imagine bc we live in that world!!

X-Files fans! My print from @galleries1988’s Idiot Box show is 30% OFF with code HOLIDAY! 12x16 giclee on fine art paper, limited edition of 20 👽 #xfiles #thexfiles #mulder #scully #mulderandscully #90sTV #idiotbox #gallery1988 #popculture #posterart #poster #posterdesign #foxmulder #danascully #gilliananderson #davidduchovny #scifi #holidaygift #artgift #xfilesfan #xfilesart #xfilesposter #illustration #drawing #portrait #likeness #entertainmentillustration #erinillustrates