"what are you going to do with a degree in english?" dO YOU BITE YOUR THUMB AT ME SIR

Thorin Oakenshield

Thorin Oakenshield goes up to the counter and orders a venti coffee black with whipped cream. It’s been a long time since he’s had this drink. He’s not entirely sure what’s inside. All he knows is that he wants it with every fiber of his being. The barista makes the drink quickly but fears what will happen to Thorin when he drinks it.  The barista sneaks out from behind the counter and gives the drink to the tall blonde man in the corner. It’s better this way. Right?

Costume designed by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre for Annie Ducaux in the 1959 production of Jean Racine’s Phaedra

From the Centre National du Costume de Scene

all i’m saying is if an all-girls school crashed on the island in lord of the flies then they would’ve been off the island in a week

lord of the flies doesnt show the base human condition, it shows the base privileged straight white male condition, incredibly when i point this out people get kind of annoyed

Even more specifically ‘group of British boy children inculcated into the hyper-competative environment of a boarding school DURING THE COLD WAR. I mean, you couldn’t find a more perfect group of ‘underdeveloped moral compass, think that conquest and empire are the bees knees, believe wholeheartedly and Hobbsian philosophy and original sin, and are just waiting to step on eachother’s necks’ humans.

But I was totally presented this in 8th grade as ‘THIS IS HOW YOU ARE, AND IF YOU DENY IT YOU’RE WRONG. YOU WOULD NOT DO ANY BETTER, YOU FILTHY AMORAL ANIMAL.’

You’re not a REAL Gatsby fan unless you’ve read the book. Unless you’ve read every Fitzgerald book. Unless you’ve read their early drafts, mailed to you by Fitzgerald himself. Unless you first read Gatsby when Scott handed it to you in a Parisian bar in 1925, apologising for the cover when he saw you disapproved. Unless you embarked on an intense friendship with him that culminated in rumours that you two were having a clandestine homosexual affair. Unless you once took him to the Louvre so you could prove to him that his penis wasn’t any smaller than those on the statues there. Unless Scott turned up, drunk and uninvited, at your house so many times that you had to move more than once. Unless you continued to exchange increasingly infrequent and terse letters with him for the rest of his life, then missed his funeral because you were in Cuba. Unless you called his literary talent “as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings” and won a Nobel prize and wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. That’s right, you poser, if you’re not Ernest Hemingway you can fuck straight off right now. We’re on to you.