All the gods of myth and legend are real, but having your prayers answered depends on discovering which god can hear you. You figured out which god is listening to your prayers, but they’re not what you expected.
Suzy
was dissapointed. Most people her age had discovered their deity so
far, and she was starting to think she was godless. She turned the
next page of McBayers’ Little Book of Deities,
and tried reading their names aloud to see if she’d get a reaction.
It had taken her weeks just to get through Chinese spirits and
deities, and had finally reached the first page of Egyptian
Gods and you.
“Ammit?
Amun? Anhur?” Nothing. Her heart slowly sank again.Three
more tries, and she’d stop for now.
“Anubis?”
The
ground shook. The lights in Suzy’s room flickered and went out. A
single flame hovered in the middle of the room, and as it grew to a
blaze it changed form. Within the blink of an eye, there was a tall
figure standing in Suzy’s room. The body of a man, and the head of a
jackal. His eyes shone bright as he peered at her.
WHAT
IS IT, SUZY OF THE HOUSE MILLER?
“You’re
the deity that answers my prayers?”
INDEED.
I, ANUBIS, WHO RULES OVER THE LAND OF THE DEAD, IS HERE TO ANSWER
YOUR REQUESTS.
Suzy
thought for a moment. “O great and mighty Anubis who rules over the
afterlife, can I please have a puppy?”
Anubis
seemed taken aback.
IN
THE CENTURIES THAT I HAVE BEEN PRAYED TO, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I
HAVE BEEN REQUESTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CHILD, HOW OLD ARE YOU?
“I’m
eight and a half. My mommy says that if I can take care of a puppy, I
can keep it.”
ARE
YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT WISH FOR ME TO BRING PLAGUES UPON YOUR ENEMIES
OR WEIGH A SOUL FOR YOU?
Suzy
shook her head. “I want a puppy.”
CHILD,
IN TRUTH THIS WISH I CANNOT GRANT. MY JOB HAS BEEN TO BRING PEACE AND
LEAD SOULS INTO THE AFTERLIFE, NOTHING MORE. IF I WERE TO CREATE A
HOUND FOR YOU, IT WOULD BE FORMED OF BONE AND SOUL ALONE.
Suzy
thought for a second. She would have liked to have a nice fluffy
puppy, but then she remembered how Aunt Marge’s Sphinx cat was still
nice, even without fur.
“No
fur is fine, as long as they don’t bite and make a mess.”
Anubis
nodded, and raised a hand. Underneath his palm an intricate symbol
appeared on the floor. It glowed bright, and the floorboards burst
apart. Up sprang a massive skeletal dog, bigger than suzy herself.
Its eye sockets held blue flame, and its jaw hang partly open in a
perpetual grin. It slowly walked over to Suzy and nuzzled her.
“What
does it eat?”
IT
WILL NOT NEED SUSTENANCE, AND WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SERVE ITS
NEW MASTER. I HOPE THIS WILL SUFFICE.”
“I
love it. Thank you, Anubis.”
Anubis
looked slightly taken aback, but nodded peacefully.
FAREWELL
FOR NOW, SUZY OF THE MILLERS. IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE
BUT TO ASK ME.
Suzy
nodded, and ran over to her parents’ room to show them her new dog.
She was pretty sure they couldn’t object to this pet.
my favorite /FAVORITE/ thing abt pokemon blogs is that some people just get specifically attached to one pokemon and rave about them in their tags and like even though ive never been particularly impressed by that pokemon i love seeing other people so passionate about them like okay i see it now yes yes onix is now my rock son as well
reblog this and tag the one pokemon you are specifically attached to
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise – female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship – and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom – and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. 🙂
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
Easter babies! The PDMT pearlescent nova dropped 5 days earlier than expected. It was a really nice first litter for her, I estimated 28 and she gave me 29 live, 1 still, 2 slugs, and mom is doing great. Unfortunately, this looks to be the second pearlescent I’ve bred that has not produced any pearlescents for me (or at the very least, any reverse striping, though dad did pass on his high white sides to a couple offspring). Furthermore, I’m not sure I see much in the way of nova, although I need clarification from folks that work with the gene. There are a few nice tails in there and some good looking babies but, I admit I’m a tad salty about this project right now.
I wanna get my hands all over those babies augh so cute
He wasn’t as flagrantly bad as Trump, but let’s not completely rehabilitate George W. Bush into a nice old man who likes to paint and can’t handle his raincoat, okay?
-signed, someone over thirty
dubya looks cutesy-pie now, but plz know he was the trump prequel, an utter buffoon and public embarrassment who lost the popular vote and stoked the ugliest brand of patriotism to bring us to a war with no purpose but personal and crony profit. he was a trump test run and worked magnificently
plz also know he is test running how we are expected to treat trump in retirement, as a delightful buffoon who wasn’t responsible
he is absolutely a buffoon
but he also created a war of no purpose (thus opening the way for future presidents to declare war personally, needing no congressional approval or oversight)
make fun of him because he is evil and deserves mockery, not because he’s just an adorbs old man who seems cutely befuddled
And don’t forget how he let a shit ton of Black people die or lose everything when Hurricane Katrina happened
That global gag rule that Trump just signed in? Yeah, W reinstated it after Clinton scrapped it, and killed thousands of women worldwide because of ir.
Tried to pass a constitutional amendment to “protect marriage” from same sex couples.
I was a senior in college for the 2000 election clusterfuck. That was a corrupt election. Everybody knew it. It was the first time I saw and heard suspicion that our democracy was inevitably failing.
W treated 9/11 as an opportunity to continue his daddy’s failed project of gaining a foothold in the middle east for the purpose of controlling oil exports. Note that after 9/11 the US went to war in Afghanistan, yes, and went after the Taliban, but W’s legacy was the war in IRAQ and the absolute catastrophe that created afterSaddam Hussein was killed (cue: power vacuum because the cowboy – though an evil shit cowboy – had left town. In roll more radical groups). Ppl older than 30 might remember the theatrics of the UNSC presentation in 2003 where Colin Powell held up a little clear vial of OMG WHITE POWDER as evidence that Iraq had enormous stockpiles of WMDs (that bullshit was fake, and Powell later regretted that he made the case to the UNSC that turned out to be wrong about WMDs in Iraq. Powell insisted that the whole cabinet had no idea they were so gravely mistaken over the presence of WMDs. Riiiiiight.)
Also W’s legacy: the Patriot Act, passed a month or so after 9/11. It legalized gross violations of citizens’ privacy and included shit like allowing the FBI free rein to search phone and electronic and financial records, and allows federal agents to search and seize if they had any suspicion of terroristic activities or connections to such. It also allowed for the indefinite detention of any non-citizen suspected of terrorism or anyone who seemed like they might commit terrorism IN THE FUTURE. We are going to see this again. I repeat: WE ARE GOING TO SEE THIS AGAIN. Suspension of basic civil liberties has already happened in the US and for good reasons, the Trump admin will say. There’s precedent now for that shit.
Also W’s legacy: instantiating and legalizing systematic TORTURE as a practice in interrogating prisoners. Think “alt-right” is an evil euphemism for Nazis? My generation actually got used to the term created by the GWB admin – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – to the point that honestly? It was easy to pretend it just. Wasn’t. Fucking. Happening. And it wasn’t – not on US soil. Because the W admin also decided to torture detainees at black sites overseas in countries where torture was legal (black sites that Trump has already moved to reopen). Detainees were – and will continue to be – beaten, starved, waterboarded, subjected to electric shock, sexually assaulted, et al. W backed away from treaties with the Hague international criminal court that could have tried these fucks for war crimes. OH AND DON’Tforget that time that W signed off on an act that allowed the US to INVADE THE GODDAMN HAGUE if ANY American citizens ended up there on trial for said crimes. He made us non-accountable for war crimes. I repeat: he made us non-accountable for war crimes.
The team of W, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Rice? Evil. Mother. Fuckers.
Also never forget that time that a massive hurricane rolled in from the Gulf of Mexico and wrecked New Orleans and surrounding areas to the point that ppl were huddled on the roofs of their houses while actual bodies floated by in the Katrina floodwater. FEMA wasted a fuck ton of time and money and oversaw the essential displacement of a massive number of poor black residents of New Orleans who never recovered.
Hurricane Katrina wrecked thousands of lives on August 29, 2005. What was W doing that day? EATING BIRTHDAY CAKE WITH JOHN “I LOOK LIKE A GOOD REPUB NOW COMPARED TO ALL THESE NAZIS” MCCAIN. The photo was on the WH web page and other photos were time-stamped to show that these assholes were laughing and making silly faces over birthday cake AFTER they were already briefed on the Katrina devastation.
There would be no Donald Trump if there hadn’t been a W. W was not a dumbass, he was not a goofy, befuddled bumbler. He was smart in that pedestrian kind of way where he knew exactly when and how to play dumb, to roll out that Texas accent and plaster that revolting “I feel the pain and fear all of you are feeling, I’m sad too” wrinkle-browed look on his face. Most people fell for it. I know there were times – especially in my early 20s – that I did. He manipulated people into fear and complacency by faking empathy and humility and meanwhile developing and signing off on some really truly evil legislation.
The almost manic euphoria that swept so much of the US when Obama was elected? Part of it was relief: W, the monster of the west, was gone and we knew he wasn’t going to replaced by another version of himself in McCain.
Call me melodramatic if you want but honestly NONE of the terrifying stuff that’s happening right now could ever have happened were it not for the path cut (slashed, burned, bulldozed) by George W. Bush.
Stop romanticizing this fuckhead!!!!
Also it bothers me when people want to blame Cheney for everything, like W was just a puppet with no clue what was happening who just wanted to play golf.
He was COMPLICIT, he KNEW, it was his JOB to know, he is CULPABLE for everything. No free passes, he was president, it’s all his responsibility.
Ding ding ding. don’t do this to trump either, in the far future, if we’re still alive.
PETA: They’d rather spend their money on publicity campaigns than on the animals in their care. PETA killed 73.8% of the animals in their care in 2015 (x)
FCKH8: Is a for-profit company that exploits oppressed groups for money. They’re also wildly uninformed, and spread misogyny, cissexism and bi/panphobia, as well as stealing their posts/designs (x)
Autism Speaks: They spend most of their money on researching a way to eliminate autism, heighten the stigma against autism and don’t have a single autistic person on their board (x)
Please support other, better charities, and feel free to add any others you can think of to this.
Susan G. Komen for the Cure: CEO makes insane amounts of money, they deny a lot of requests for wigs/help with treatment/etc., and have attempted to sue other charities that use the color pink as part of their anti-breast cancer campaign. ( xxx )
The Salvation Army: They promote the hatred of LGBT+ people, work with fundamentalist Christian groups to support conservative politics and rip off and exploit workers. ( xxx )
Wounded Warrior: They take money that should be spent on veterans and blow it on huge opulent parties for the company bigwigs. 26 million in 2014 alone wasted! ( xxx )
^ Important reminder to NOT waste any money donating to these groups
Reblogging because of the added info about Wounded Warrior.
A good way to know if a nonprofit you’re donating to is allocating their money in the right way is to check out their Charity Navigator rating: http://www.charitynavigator.org
backup blogging platform 