220 posts
Latest Posts by bluslvrlion - Page 8
you’re twelve years old and you break your father’s hand when he hi-fives you. the first thing you learn is that the smallest slip up can hurt the people you love. your (foster) father smiles and says it’s okay (it’s not).
your parents are not your parents. the idyllic farming community that raised you is not your home. you’re a You-Don’t-Know-What from You-Don’t-Know-Where. all you know for sure is that you’re not human.
so you can fly. so you can run fast. so you can lift cars. so what? why do you even have this power? what should you even do with it?
your father said do what’s right, so that’s what you do.
you stop a robbery. the man’s knife shatters against your skin and you see the same fear in his eyes that you saw in your father’s when you were twelve. you catch a falling child before it can hit the water. his mother looks at you like you’re a god.
they love you, even though they don’t know you. the most powerful man in the world hates you because they love you.
you wanted to write when you were younger. you wanted to tell stories that needed to be told. you never wanted to star in them. you never wanted super-geniuses and demi-goddesses looking to you for advice; like you have any idea how to handle threats to reality itself. you’re just a kid from smallville who’s trying to do the best he can with what he’s given.
you try and get back to the farm as much as you can. it feels normal being back among the open wheat; where everyone smiles because you’re that nice Kent boy.
when you were younger, you pretended to fly, hands out to your sides and running through the tall grass by the river. it doesn’t look as beautiful from on high; the details get lost and the colors of your hometown blur together from a mile above ground.
the problem with flying is that it puts you so far above people you care about
Avatar AU where Aang stays in the iceberg and Katara is mistakenly believed to be the Avatar after she “earthbends” a rock by moving the ice inside it.
Instead of telling the truth and letting everyone down, she and Sokka pull on an elaborate charade and go on a journey to convince the world that the Avatar is back.
Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."
""The index, Monroe said, is named in honour of Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
The Pratchett estate has authorised the use of the name, tweeting its own Pratchett quote in support of Monroe’s campaign. “Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness,” wrote the late Discworld author in Men at Arms.
Rhianna Pratchett said: “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work. One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch - a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him. Some of which he’s had a hand in perpetrating in the past.
“Vimes’s musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socio-economic unfairness. And one that’s all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy. Whilst we don’t have Vimes any more, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way.”
Alarm bells being rung by Maureen Johnson on AI and the Big Publishers
“Your son just kicked me, Miss Luthor-Danvers.”
Kara looked over to the couch, where Lena bad stopped reading her book, which now lay propped on the dome of her stomach. She looked absolutely exhausted, with dark circles beneath her eyes, marring paler than usual skin.
The pregnancy was taking its toll on Lena, but just as difficult for Lena was the order to remain on pelvic rest, as were the Herculean caloric requirements of gestating a Kryptonian child on Earth. Lena Luthor was the type of woman who grew more fatigued from orders to lay up in bed, and Kara had to practically bat her phone out of her hand to stop her from answering emails at all hours of the night.
Kara swung out from behind the kitchen island, carrying another smoothie with a carefully selected mix of fruits, vegetables, and protein powder.
“Blegh,” Lena said, as she choked down a gulp of the stuff. Does it have to be so sweet?”
Kara didn’t answer. Lena looked haggard by her own usual standards, but to Kara, she was the most gorgeous thing she’d ever seen. Yes, she was pale, but there as a rosy glow in her cheeks and though she sighed and complained and groused, rarely had there been such joy in her eyes. One of Kara’s new favorite things was catching Lena unawares, finding her smiling at nothing and cradling protective arms around the new life coming to being within her.
After she gulped down the last of the thick, gloppy shake -which Lena had given the appetizing name of ‘nutrient slurry mark one’, she turned halfway on the couch.
“There he goes again,” said Lena, sighing.
Kara reached out with a trembling hand, resting it gently on the warm curve of Lena’s skin. She went quiet for a moment, forcing back the tears. Thinking about this overwhelmed her. She’d never dreamed she’d really have this, much less with the most beautiful and kind woman she’d ever known. A soft twitch against her palm made her grin from ear to ear.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying this. I’d like to get some sleep.”
Kara chewed at her lip for a moment.
“What if I try singing to him?”
Lena raised a sharp eyebrow.
“Alex gave me an article that says that babies can hear us while they’re in the womb.”
Lena’s head fell back against the cushions.
“Do you know any lullabies?”
Kara swallowed, hard.
“Yes.”
There was a pause, as Kara worked herself up, pulling the words from the lost days of her youth, across an ocean of stars beneath a far distant sun.
She more spoke than sang at first, until her voice grew into something soft and light, like a rare flower opening its petals to greet the sun. By the time she really began to sing, Lena was smiling, listening intently.
Kara dug deep in her memory for the words to the traditional Kryptonian lullaby, a promise from a young mother to her child lost in the wilderness, an invocation to come home safe to loving arms before the reunited in the final verses.
When Kara finished she looked up and saw that Lena was fast asleep, her hand now resting atop Kara’s as it rested on Lena’s belly. Tenderly, Kara drew her hand back and, with practiced ease, raised Lena in her arms and carried her back to the bedroom, another Kryptonian verse flowing softly from old memories, and the eventually they slept, until sunrise.
Dear Tim Burton
Dear #TimBurton,
Up Yours. I just went with a friend to see Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and we’d been excited for weeks (it only just came out in Mongolia). I even rushed to finish reading it before the Mongolia release.
Mr. Burton, the protagonist in MSHfPC is #Jewish. His grandfather is a#Jew. It’s a story about Jews and the monsters who chase us. A huge part of the book is questioning whether Grandfather’s “monsters” were supernatural monsters, or the real monsters of Nazis hunting Jews, the Monsters that murdered his entire family. Did he go to the children’s home because he was a peculiar or because of the dangerous peculiarity of being a Jew in Europe in WWII?
Yet in your film, the word “Jew” was spoken exactly zero times. You wiped away the characters’ identities. And don’t you DARE claim that it was an unintentional omission, because you proved that it wasn’t. See, in the book, Grandfather Abe often calls Jake “Yakov,” the Jewish form of Jacob. Yet in the movie, you changed that into a Polish nickname. So you can’t claim this was an omission when you and your team took the time to re-write even his nickname to make it not Jewish.
So Up Yours for your white-bread characters and white-bread movies. Up Yours for making the only POC character in the entire film the bad guy. And finally, Up Yours for taking away, yet again, the chance for us to see one of our own, a Jewish Protagonist promised in the novel, on screen.