I need more hufflepuff representation. Do not be afraid young hufflepuffs. Dwayne the fucking ROCK Johnson is a hufflepuff. Punch a FUCKING wall. ITS HUFFLEPUFF TIME.
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MOTHERFUCKIN’ 19TH CENTURY LADY WRITERS
The original badass mofo Jane Austen. She has a bad rap because so many people blame her for giving us every rom-com plot ever. Yeah okay, sure. You know what else she did? Wrote about real women and men, in real life situations. If you want to say that her heroines are too perfect, I say NAY. That’s the point of literally ALL her books–the heroine has this flaw that would be tragic, except she LEARNS from it because she isn’t FUCKIN HAMLET (I hate Hamlet) she’s a real person who is capable of developing and changing and growing and can also be a total bitch (LOOKIN AT U EMMA) but can also end up being a good person because real people change. Psychological realism in lady characters was practically not a thing until Jane Austen. They were figures and plot devices and, like, allegories and shit. A lot of scholars place Jane Austen on the same level as Shakespeare, because she revolutionized the modern novel–the novel as we know it now didn’t really exist until Jane Austen because HOLY PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, BATMAN. Yeah. You wanna read endless novels about flat, boring characters? Didn’t think so.
Then we have the Brontes, who were all fuckin badass and also like the most talented family ever jfc. Because they couldn’t get published because they were ladies, all three sisters decided, fuck it, let’s publish under male pseudonyms. (Full disclosure: have yet to read Anne, but am told she is actually the most badass) Okay, Wuthering Heights is kind of weird. Like, really weird. But when you get into it and start ripping it apart you realize how amazing that shit is, like the entire novel? The fuckin thing is a palindrome. And don’t even get me started on the brilliant narration oMG SO MANY LAYERS OF UNRELIABILITY. Emily Bronte ilu.
and JANE EYRE OMG JANE EYRE. Let’s just give Charlotte a round of applause. This novel legitimized first-person narration, specifically first-person female narration. Most first-person stuff was epistolary and the ladies were all like “tralala I bought a dress and flirted with a guy oh wow now we’re engaged yadda yadda” and Jane is complex and kind of broken and not romantic in the least. Also she is a total badass. She is a self-made woman, everything she has, she has because she literally built herself from the ground up. And then there’s this whole scene where Jane is like “ladies can do the same shit guys can do but nobody will let us which is stupid.” and, unlike any of the other ladies in governess plots, she actually ditched her super rich boyfriend because she respected herself too much to stay with him after shit got real. And then she becomes super rich not because she marries him, but because, well, deus ex machina kind of, but still, it has nothing to do with Rochester! Yay! Also a really big deal–Jane and Rochester are both super flawed but they love each other anyway and it doesn’t end up being a tragedy because guess what, people can have flaws and not die horrible deaths. Also also–neither of them is hot (this brings me joy).
anD FUCKIN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY. (I cry every time someone leaves out her maiden name because google her mother holy shit, so badass) She invented sci-fi. nuff said.
Elizabeth Gaskell! (She wrote North and South, the one with Richard Armitage?) SO MUCH SOCIAL COMMENTARY OMG. And Margaret will take no shit from nobody. She basically runs the house when her parents are alive and then after they’re gone she is still TOTALLY CAPABLE of taking care of herself because she’s FUCKING AWESOME. She faces down an angry mob, for fuck’s sake! (Also, for the record, though I love the miniseries, book!John is even dreamier and less of an ass than series!John)
Okay and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. I had never heard of this badass lady but DAMN IS SHE COOL. Everybody was like “ugh whatever she’s a silly lady writer writing sensational lady stories ahahaha how dumb” SHUT THE FUCK UP. If you want to read a super badass 19th century murder mystery by an awesome lady, read Lady Audley’s Secret. The main character is a lawyer who is really smart but too lazy to actually lawyer so he just sits around and smokes all day and he kind of accidentally becomes a detective (like…that’s literally what happens…)? Also, spoiler alert, the villain of the story is a lady, which I am all in for. Yeah. And!!! The bumbling lawyer-man is a feminist! He has this huge inner monologue about how women are just as capable as men but they actually get shit done because they are awesome and motivated and, well, okay this is not always a good thing because hello lady villain, but still. [edit: alas, I spoke too soon, he is not a feminist. turns out he hates women. Robert Audley, we could have had it all, why’d you have to go and fuck it up. there are, however, many interesting and varied ladies in this book and it is also beautifully written Mary Elizabeth Braddon iluuuuu] READ THIS BOOK I’M CRYING RIGHT NOW
Also cool things were happening with lady writers worldwide in the 19th century, but, uh, I specialize in Brit lit and I just tend to like it better so, sorry. My bias is showing.
But anyways, BADASS MOTHERFUCKIN 19TH CENTURY LADY WRITERS FOR THE WIN
Okay you know what I want for the Deadpool sequel, even more than Wade getting a boyfriend?
Wade getting an ex-boyfriend.
Somebody with whom Wade has History with a Captial H. The boyfriend he dated on and off for four years, who then vanished with no explanation. Maybe he left for Wade’s protection, but Wade doesn’t know that and thinks he was just a fucking asshole.
Vanessa knows about this guy. Not any real details, just that they were serious before he broke Wade’s heart. Vanessa doesn’t know the ex-boyfriend’s real name because Wade only refers to him via expletives, so she mentally refers to him as The Touchy Subject.
The ex-boyfriend’s name should probably be Logan, since there are already so many references within the movie canon (and Wolverine is bi in the comics) but I’m not picky.
.
See, now here’s what I don’t want.
I don’t want the franchise saying, “Well Wade was joking before with the gay stuff. But now it’s different. He’s journeyed down a path of self discovery and come out the other side open to new sexual horizons.”
I don’t want a ~coming out~ story.
I want a 8===D~~~Wade has obviously been out this whole entire time weren’t you paying attention?!~~~Ⴇ===8 story.
.
I mean think about it.
With a movie franchise this big, it could be a gamechanger.
If Deadpool does it, other franchises will no longer be able to justify not doing it.
If the Deadpool tells audiences once and for all, definitively, “We were never joking, and we don’t understand why you would even assume we were joking, unless you were some kind of homophobic asshole who thinks being pansexual is a joke” than every single popular queerbait fuckboy id fantasy franchise is gonna have to fucking put up or shut up.
Gotta admit, this sounds REALLY appealing.
I know it’s fashionable to hate shakespeare for being a white cis male shitlord but calling his work trashy just displays your ignorance. there are reasons he still gets studied in school hundreds of years later. the man basically invented the english language as we speak it today.
I don’t hate Shakespeare.
I love Shakespeare.
In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason he’s studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and the reason his plays endured is because they were popular, and the reason his plays were popular is because he crammed them full of stuff that people wanted; i.e., lots of jokes focusing on the less refined features of the human anatomy and the things they get up to.
Perhaps you’ve had it explained to you that Hamlet’s talk of “country matters” was an uncouth pun, and his reply in the same conversation of “nothing” was a similar reference. Did you think that was a one-off thing?
If you’re aware that “nothing” was a euphemism for the vulva in Shakespeare’s England, have you ever stopped to marvel at the sheer audacity, the sheer brass somethings that a man would have to have to name a play Much Ado About Nothing?
Translate that into modern-modern English, and you’d get something like Everybody’s Up In Arms About Pussy. Though you’d lose the pun on “nothing/noting” in doing so… yes, that’s how far from highbrow Shakespeare is. He made the title of his play a triple pun.
And yes, Much Ado is not one of the Bard’s more serious works to begin with… but then, what is? We divide Shakespeare’s plays up into tragedies and comedies based on the dramatic convention of which ones have a happy ending versus a sad one, but they are all comedies in the modern sense of “things you go to expecting to laugh”. The country/nothing lines come from Hamlet. Heck, Hamlet is hilarious throughout. Any scene with Polonius in it is guaranteed to be comedy gold.
Of course, the people who want to call Shakespeare highbrow are probably the people who quote him in all blustering sincerity when he says “to thine own self be true”… or funnier still, when they paraphrase him as saying that “brevity is the soul of wit”.
Of course, hands down, my favorite bit in Hamlet is when he’s giving instructions to the players that basically amount to William Shakespeare pre-emptively bringing up every stereotype of Serious Shakespearean Acting we have today and saying, “This. This thing. Do not do this thing.”
Anyway, let’s talk about the idea that he “invented the English language”; e.g., he created so many hundreds of new words. Okay, well, first of all, we don’t know how many he invented. We just know there are words and usages of words for which the texts of his plays are the earliest surviving example. The thing is, all those words evidently made sense to his audience.
There’s a post that goes around Tumblr listing some of the words credited to Shakespeare, and one of them is “elbow”. The commentary attached to this post basically boggles over the idea that nobody in the English world had a name for “the bendy part of an arm” until an actor gets up on stage and says “elbow”, and everybody’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it is.”
Except it didn’t happen like that. The noun elbow isn’t what is attributed to Shakespeare; the verb to elbow (as in “elbowing someone aside”) is. His character took a noun and used it to describe an action. That’s not a highbrow creation of language as some sort of received wisdom handed down from authority. That’s naturalistic language use.
Even if he was the first person to describe the act of “elbowing someone”, it caught on because it worked, because it made sense to vernacular speakers of English.
So many of his words fit this model: they are butchered foreign words, they are slangy applications of English words, they are colorful metaphors or synecdoches. In short, he was writing in what we call “Buffyspeak”. If he had an unusual talent for doing it memorably, it still ultimately worked because it reflected the language of the time.
This is your daily reminder that ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’ is a dick joke.
i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and
the narrator just said
“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”
fuck
#but wow let me tell you about how the american civil war changed the whole culture of grief and death #because before that people died at home mostly #where their family saw them die and held their body and had proof they were really dead and it was a process #but during the war people left and never came home their bodies never came back there was no proof #people died in new horrific ways on the battlefield literally vaporized by cannonballs or lost in swamps and eaten by wild animals #and there were NO BODIES to send home #and people simply couldn’t grasp that their son or father or husband was really gone #there are stories about people spending months searching for their loved ones #convinced they couldn’t be dead if there were no body they were simply lost or hurt and they needed to be saved and brought home #embalming also really started during the civil war as a way for bodies to be brought home as intact as possible #wow i just wowowow the culture of death and grief and stuff during this time period is fascinating and sad #history (via souryellows)
#quietly reblogs own tags #also the civil war was when dog tags and national cemetaries became a thing #and during the war there was n real system in place to notify families of the deaths #like they’d find out maybe from letters from soldiers who were there when their loved one died nd stuff #but there was no real system #and battlefield ambulances were basically invented because so many people died on the battlefield when they could have been saved if they co #…could have been moved frm the battlefield to a hospital #like there was this one really inlfuential dude whose son died that way and he became dedicated to getting an ambulance system in place
I’m not doing this in the correct tag-style, but.
IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.
(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.
cool (ghost) story, bro.
reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*
the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance
very good stuff
Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*
Also, look for David Blights recordings of his Yale lecture series on The Civil War. 21 hours of class lectures, and its FASCINATING. He barely touches on the battles other than to use them as timestamps as to what was going on. Most of it focuses on what the mindset of everyone was going into the war, and what happened on the way out. It’s an amazing series that will change your entire perception of the war – how it happened, and how it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid it, because of the inherent evil of slavery and how it was destroying damn near *everyone* except rich white people.
I love Hamilton, but something about the way white fans engage with the musical really bothers me: a lot of them are posting in the tag about the actual, historical revolutionaries and founding fathers in a way that makes them seem like funny, sweet, good people. They weren’t. I don’t just mean “Jefferson was a piece of shit”: none of them were good. Every one of their asses saw black people as inferior, even if not all of them supported slavery. All of them participated in genocidal policy against indigenous peoples. If you’re watching/listening to Hamilton and then going out and romanticizing the real founding fathers/American revolutionaries, you’re missing the entire point.
Hamilton is not really about the founding fathers. It’s not really about the American Revolution. The revolution, and Hamilton’s life are the narrative subject, but its purpose is not to romanticize real American history: rather, it is to reclaim the narrative of America for people of colour.
Don’t romanticize the founding fathers and the revolution. They’re already romanticized. It’s been done. Your history books have already propagated those lies. The revolution is romanticized as an American narrative because it was a revolution lead by and for white men. Their story is the narrative of the nation and it is a narrative from which people of colour are utterly obliterated.
Do you understand what it’s like to live in a nation where you are made marginal and inconsequential in the historical narrative that you are taught from your first day of school? In the Americas, to be a person of colour is to be made utterly inconsequential to the nation’s history. If you are black, your history begins with slavery, and your agency is denied; they don’t teach about slave rebellions or black revolutionaries. You learn about yourself as entirely shaped by outside forces: white people owned you, then some white people decided to free you and wasn’t that nice of them? and then you’re gone until the civil rights movement. That is the narrative they teach; in which you had no consequence, no value, no impact until less than a century ago. If you are indigenous, you are represented as disappeared, dead, already gone: you do not get to exist, you are already swallowed by history. If you are any other race, you are likely not present at all. To live in a land whose history is not your own, to live in a story in which you are not a character, is a soul-destroying experience.
In Hamilton, Eliza talks, in turn, of “taking herself out of the narrative” and “putting herself back in the narrative.” That’s what Hamilton is about: it’s about putting ourselves in the narrative. It puts people of colour in the centre of the damn narrative of the nation that subjugates them; it takes a story that by all accounts has been constructed to valourize the deeds of white men, and redefines it all.
Why was the American Revolution a revolution? Why were slave revolts revolts? Why do we consider the founding fathers revolutionaries and not the Black Panthers or the Brown Berets or any number of other anti-racist revolutionary organizations? Whose rebellion is valued? Who is allowed to be heroic through defiance? By making the founding fathers people of colour, Hamilton puts people of colour into the American narrative, while simultaneously applying that narrative to the present. Right now, across the United States, across the damn world, people are chanting “black lives matter.” Black people are shutting down malls and highways, demanding justice for the lives stolen by police, by white supremacy. And all across the world, indigenous people are saying “Idle No More,” blockading pipelines, demanding their sovereignty. And “No One is Illegal” is chanting loud enough to shake down the walls at the border; people are demanding the end of refugee detention centres, demanding an end to the violence perpetuated by anti-immigration policies. People of colour are rising up.
…And white people are angry about it. White people are saying “if blacks don’t want to get shot by the police they shouldn’t sag their pants”; saying “get over it” about anti-indigenous policies of assimilation and cultural genocide and land theft; Jennicet Gutiérrez was heckled by white gay men for demanding that president Obama end the detention of undocumented trans women of colour. White people see people of colour rising up and they tell us to sit down. Shut up. Stop making things difficult. The American Revolution was a bunch of white men who didn’t want to be taxed, so white history sees their revolutionary efforts as just; they killed for their emancipation from England; they were militant. That, to white people is acceptable. But those same white people talk shit about Malcolm X for being too violent–a man who never started an uprising against the government leading to bloodshed. Violence is only acceptable in the hands of white people; revolution is only okay when the people leading the charge are white.
Hamilton makes those people brown and black; Hamilton depicts the revolution of which America is proud as one led by people of colour against a white ruling body; there’s a reason King George is the only character who is depicted by a white man. The function of the visual in Hamilton is to challenge a present in which people of colour standing up against oppression are seen as violent and dangerous by the same people who proudly declare allegiance to the flag. It forces white people to see themselves not as the American Revolutionaries, but as the British oppressors. History is happening, and they’re on its bad side.
So don’t listen to or watch Hamilton and then come out of that to romanticize the founding fathers. Don’t let that be what you take away from this show. They’re the vehicle for the narrative, and a tool for conveying the ideologies of the show, but they are not the point. Don’t romanticize the past; fight for the future.