official-estonia:

socially-awkward-nikki:

hardcore-tea-drinker:

regulusblxcks:

philiasperanza:

flyingmintteabag:

athenastudying:

loonydoc13:

saxifraga-x-urbium:

stammsternenstaub:

silver-millennial:

demonessryu:

oddybutgoodie:

zora-zen:

megatrcn:

pajarosdelamancha:

jamesandlilys:

digitalfare:

orriculum:

svynakee:

thirdtimecharmed:

altonzm:

french recipes: if you’re not making this in paris then what’s the point. fuck you

italian recipes: use the left leg meat of a pig from one of three farms in this specific area of tuscany, or from this day my grandmother will begin manifesting physically in your house

american recipes: buy these three cans of stuff and put them in a pan congrats you cooked

chinese recipes, as handed down from mother to child: season it with a pinch of this and some of that. you want to know the exact amount? feel it in your heart. ask the stars. yell into the void. 

English recipes: boil and salt it. Okay that’s it enjoy

Greek recipes: You followed all the right steps but this isn’t quite right. I don’t know what to tell you.

Australia recipes: chuck it on the barbie

Latinx recipes: you will never make it better than your abuela, face the facts

Filipino recipes: add rice and soy sauce and some more rice MORE RICE MORE RICE MORE

Serbian Recipes: everything is salad. Ajvar? Salad. A single whole hot pepper covered in oil? Salad. Cabbage? Salad. Kajmak? Salad.

Lebanese recipes: If you don’t have at least 3 family members cooking this dinner with you than you aren’t doing it right.

Indonesian recipes: have you added spices? Add some just in case. Eat with rice. It’s not a proper meal until there’s rice in it. You just had bread/burger/cake/pizza? Eat rice anyway or you’ll die of starvation

Bonus Javanese recipes: Have you added sugar? What do you mean it’s meant to be salty/sour/spicy/something else? ADD SUGAR.TO IT

Canadian recipes: Well part of the directions are in metric but you have imperial measuring cups. I hope you like math because we’re going to find out how many gallons in a litre and how many millimetres are in a cup.

Swedish recipes: Assemble all the beige items you have in your kitchen. Great. now add raw red onions, dill and salt and white pepper. if u prefer it blander, don’t do the last things. consider serving it with jam

Norwegian recipes: listen after three days skiing uphill you will eat anything so stop complaining.

Indian recipes: spend two weeks digging the required spices out of your cupboards. Chop onions until you cry. Fry onions with spices until evey pore in your body is open, let the fragrance seep into your skin, become one with the curry.

german recipes: this meal isn’t what you think it is. it has 164 different names in different regions. it’s either made of potatoes, served with potatoes, or it’s cake. there’s a 50% chance it’s actually austrian, but don’t tell anyone.

belarusian recipes: “cook over a slow fire until done”. how many degrees is a slow fire? when is “done”? what am i even cooking there’s no picture and the only ingredients are honey and cornflower

turkish recipes: “if you do this, there’s really -REALLY- good change that you’ll die because everything is too spicy or too sweet but here we go”

romanian recipes: if you don’t already know the ingredients and directions by heart then what are we doing here

Malay recipes: If it’s not spicy enough, it’s not worth it. You don’t have coconut milk? It’s doomed

Irish recipes: Potatoes. All potatoes. If it’s not potatoes it’s not food.

Estonian recipes: if it’s not brown, doesn’t look like turd and has no blood in it, you’ve failed

hedwig-dordt:

vampirekilmer:

bpdcecilpalmer:

the-real-seebs:

roachpatrol:

televisiontelepath:

This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol​ said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:

Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.

Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.

You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.

When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.

Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping. 

Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.

Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.

A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.

As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.

And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)

But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.

Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.

That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.

Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”

My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.

Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers. 

Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.

It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.

holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.  

Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.

Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.

“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.” 

A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.

Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.

So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?

(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)

(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)

This.
This.
A quintilian times this.

@eatingcroutons