saxifraga-x-urbium:

systlin:

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok

theglowpt2:

if you’ve seen the breaking news that trump just signed an executive order today to end the family separation policy here’s some quick info to keep things in perspective

• this doesn’t end the “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting anyone who crosses the border “illegally” 
  
• the only thing this changes is that going forward, entire families will be detained together while awaiting prosecution 
• this offers no solution for freeing the thousands of children currently held in ICE child prisons or any path to reuniting them with their families 
• children will still be detained and treated as criminals
• this will likely lead to thousands of families being held in ICE facilities and tent cities that will face the exact same issues of overcrowding, abuse, and inhumane conditions that exist in the child prisons

this is not a victory or a solution. This is the administration trying to cover their asses and avoid any more public outrage. They want people to see this as the end of the news story and go back to their lives. They want people to forget the thousands of children they are still keeping in cages in ICE facilities across the nation. This issue is not over and we cannot stop being outraged until we are given proof that the thousands of kidnapped children are returned to their families, and that the policy of arresting and prosecuting people who cross the border is ended. 

persephone-is-here-omg:

dreadedloreenkid:

stripedwoolenjumper:

liz-squids:

sixth-light:

theauspolchronicles:

nerdtasticami:

theauspolchronicles:

Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.

…what’s going on in Australia?

Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:

1. The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
   
2. The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
   

Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”

BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!

Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.

OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”

Well Scott Morrison decided once to tell the Senate that he could release a few kids from detention centres but only if they voted for a bill that increased his powers to send refugees back to where they would suffer persecution and basically told them if they don’t vote for it the kids will continue to suffer. He held children as ransom for his own political power. Our Human Rights Commissioner slammed it as terrible to use kids as bargaining chips. You know what the government did? Personally attack her and ask her to resign over his bias. Our Prime Minister at the time complained that Australia was “sick of being lectured” by the UN over how we keep torturing refugees.

The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!

Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?

Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.

Oh and the government super doesn’t them to come here. The Abbott government spent $4.1 million on a propaganda movie to be shown overseas to deter refugees.

We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.

(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).

Papa New Guinea (Manus Island isn’t Australian, we just have a deal to pay another government to let us keep a torture prison on their land… hmm I feel like there’s a US equivalent somewhere too…) decided a while back “hang on, this is unconstitutional and horrible. You need to close down the detention centre on Manus.” So we “did.” And then made a new building on the same island to keep them in and forced them to go into it despite it not being finished. This was after guards physically beat the refugees to make them go to this new prison.

I could go on but you get the idea.

So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

Let that sink in.

And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.

The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.

Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia - including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents - and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.) 

During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve. 

And the thing about Australia – there isn’t the coverage that America has. Not even in our own country. It’s hard to find out what’s happening – visas for journalists to visit Nauru are prohibitively expensive – and … no one really cares. It’s so entrenched that it’s the status quo, and when I called my MP and senators to go, WTF guys? the response was like, “…oh yeah, thanks for your feelings, cool, bye”. 

I honestly tune out a lot of the coverage because, at this point, I don’t know what to do. Both major parties support these policies, so I vote for the Greens. I contacted my representatives. I walked in protest marches. I donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and other charities. 

So I guess, if I have advice for Americans, it’s to not let this become the status quo. Because you’ll wake up one day and it will have always been like this.

Holy shit, I knew it was bad here but I didn’t know it was that bad. Why don’t we hear about the depth of these things in Australia, how can they keep us so in the dark?

@stripedwoolenjumper

Part of the reason is because the government keeps passing legislation to silence whistleblowers and journalists (they currently have a bill to make possession of any information that might “damage Australia’s reputation” illegal), and the other part is that most of the media won’t or can’t report on it.

What you can do to help the Human Rights crisis in Australia:

If you are Australian:

• Keep up to date and informed. The only major media outlets that routinely reports on this issue is The Guardian Australia. They are free online but consider donating if you can to keep it free access.
• The Saturday Paper is another independent online news source that reports on this.
• Follow or sign up to GetUp!. GetUp! is Australia’s largest progressive grassroots activist group and has lots of campaigns and information about this issue and many others, such as climate change, economic justice, and democratic and civil rights. Donate if you can, sign their peritions, follow their campaigns.
• CONTACT YOUR MPs AND SENATORS. This is really important, especially if they are supporters of the policy. Keep public pressure on then, make them feel it. Letter templates are good, but personally written letters/emails are better. Call them if you can. And respond to them with your displeasure if they send you a cookie cutter response of their party’s policy on “stopping the boats”.
• SHOW UP TO PROTESTS. Another really important one. Even if you just show up and march, your physical presence counts. They’re not as scary as it might seem.
• DONATE. I really cannot stress this enough, if you can afford it, donate.

WHO SHOULD I DONATE TO?

• Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) provides financial and legal support, as well as counseling and community services, to refugees already in Australia.
• Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) are a group of state-based advocacy groups that support refugees in Australia and advocate for those trapped in Australia’s offshore detention regime (link is for the Sydney group but contains links to other states).
• GetUp! is one of the best to donate to for political action. They have options to donate to the organisation as a whole, or to specific campaigns.

If you are a member of the Australian Labor Party, please do what you can to bring up this issue and pressure the party leadership to change its policy.

If you are NOT Australian

• Do what you can to contact your government and representatives to bring up this issue and pressure Australia to change their policy.
• SPREAD THIS POST AND OTHERS LIKE IT. Australians do not have the numbers and influence on his site that Americans and British have. Please spread this information and resources so that other Australians might see it and feel like they have some power to change it or even know about it.

If you are a New Zealander: please continue to keep the pressure on your government to call out Australia and offer to take refugees.

#CloseTheCamps #BringThemHere

Nice to know white people are trash everywhere!

Rant about fanfiction writing

celiaequus:

tara-l-blackmore:

the-flowergirl:

thelightningstreak:

greenappleeyes:

I was just informed by my brother (who thinks he’s a better writer than anyone else because he has some fancy degree in writing) that fanfiction “doesn’t count” as “real writing” because you aren’t using your own “ideas.”

He doesn’t know that I write fanfiction. He probably wouldn’t have admitted his opinion if her did. But it has pretty much solidified that I will never tell anyone I know in person what I write.

I’ve already been told by several family members that my obsession with a “stupid tv show” is ridiculous and that I’m “too old” to fangirl.

Sigh. /rant

In Defense of Fanfiction

I am a professional writer and editor in real life. I have a double degree in English and writing and am currently in school once more to obtain a master’s degree. If your brother’s fancy writing degree was worth anything at all, he should be able to admit that the vast majority of all literature is in fact fanfiction of someone else’s story and its elements. In other words, no one’s idea is, by definition, original.

Let’s take a look at just a few examples to support my theory that some of the most important or well-known pieces of literature ever created qualify as fanfiction:

Ancient/Old Literature

·        Around 2000 BCE: The Epic of Gilgamesh was inspired as a fanfiction of a historical King of Uruk, mixed with Mesopotamian mythology. The story includes the character Utnapishtim, who lives through a world-wide flood by building a ship per the instructions of the god Enki and ultimately landing on a mountain in the Middle East, similar to Noah’s story from the Bible (dates for the book of Genesis vary anywhere from 1400 BCE to 800 BCE). Many historians suggest that the story of Noah was directly inspired by Gilgamesh’s story of Utnapishtim. Other historians suggest the two were simply inspired by a similar source. Either way, there’s too many startling overlaps to classify Utnapishtim and Noah as only a coincidence.

·        20-ish BCE: The Roman author Virgil wrote The Aeneid, which is a direct sequel to the previously created epic The Iliad attributed to Greek bard Homer. Virgil was also known for writing pastoral poems based off and inspired by the work of the great poet Theocritus (280 BCE). As a fun addition, Theocritus himself was known for rewriting the cyclops villain (Polyphemus) of Homer’s Odyssey into a love-sick idiot in his work, Idyll XI.

Medieval Era (500-1500-ish CE)

·        700-1000: The Alphabet of ben Sirach was an anonymous Hebrew collection of satires that included a parody of the biblical Genesis story of Adam and Eve. The story gave Adam a totally different wife by the name of Lilith, the character of which was inspired by Babylonian mythology. The whole of the collection is additionally wrapped in a fictional account of telling the stories to the historical figure of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar—another real person fanfiction of a celebrity from that time.

·        Around 1000: The world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, inspired the massive outpouring of Japanese Noh theater plays involving characters from the novel, such as Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), which has been attributed to a few people (Zeami Motokiyo and Inuo). This play appropriates the Lady Aoi from Shikibu’s psychological novel to explore her death and is only one example of the available fanfictions of the novel.

·        1308-1320: Dante’s Divine Comedy (known most famously for the Inferno) is a literal OC self-insertion of the Italian Dante Alighieri himself into the hell, purgatory and heaven from Catholic / biblical texts. Its format is in an epic, in an attempt to outdo the Aeneid and Iliad before it. It also includes an insertion of a ghostly Virgil, who copied the Iliad to write the Aeneid. Furthermore, Dante’s work includes insertions of real historical people that Dante didn’t like. It’s possibly the most self-indulgent fanfiction ever created while also being named one of the greatest poems in literature.

·        1392: Geoffrey Chaucer (known as the father of English literature) wrote a  famous collection called The Canterbury Tales. The collection takes its basic format and inspiration from Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (written in 1351). It’s suggested that some of the tales Chaucer uses actually originated from Boccaccio’s work.

Renaissance Era (1550-1660-ish CE)

·        1590: English poet Edmund Spenser borrowed the legend of Arthur of the Round Table in his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. In it, Arthur is pretty love-sick over the fairy queen.

·        1597: English playwright Shakespeare borrowed various mythologies and historical figures and mixed them together. Not even his most popular play, Romeo and Juliet, was original. He took the idea from a poem written by Arthur Brooke in 1562, called, “The Tragicall Hystorye of Romeus and Iuliet.” Even more interesting, Brooke had taken his idea from the 1554 Giulietta e Romeo by Italian author Matteo Bandello. (Shakespeare repeatedly sourced other people’s ideas or historical existence for his plays.)

Enlightenment Era (1660-1789)

·        1667: English poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, a fanfiction epic of the biblical story in the book of Genesis about the fall of creation and humankind into imperfection.

·        1712: English poet Alexander Pope wrote a mock-heroic epic called the Rape of the Lock to make fun of all the serious epic writers before him, borrowing such images as the way epic warriors put on armor and connecting it to the way rich people put on rich clothing and jewelry. He used other standard epic elements as repeated throughout The Iliad, Aeneid, and so forth.

·        1759: French writer and inventor, Voltaire, wrote a satire Candide. It borrowed various elements from Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folktales from the Islamic Golden Age.

Romantic Era (1789-1850)

·        1819: In Don Juan, English poet Lord Byron took the pre-dated legend of Don Juan, which was about a man who seduced a lot of women, and reversed the original plot so that Don Juan ended up seduced by a lot of women.

·        1820: English poet John Keats wrote a poem as a retelling of the Greek mythological creature called Lamia, which was a half-woman and half-monster (description varies depending on the Greek source). A lot of his works borrowed heavily from Greek mythology and literature, and he idolized the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser, to a point where his first work was called, “Imitation of Spenser” (1814). In it, he borrowed various images from Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene.

·        1843: English writer Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, based off the various stories compiled in the 1841 and 1842 The Lowell Offering, a publication magazine written by a group of intellectual but mostly anonymous women. He borrowed the certain pieces of plot, language, and descriptions for Scrooge’s ghostly encounters from the stories “A Visit from Hope” (anonymous), “Happiness” (anonymous), and “Memory and Hope” (by someone named Ellen). A Christmas Carol is additionally littered with biblical allusions all over the place.

·        1844: French writer Alexander Dumas borrowed The Three Musketeers, as well as many of the story’s side-characters, from The Memoirs of Monsieur d'Artagnan by French author Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. He didn’t even change the names or who the villain, the Cardinal, was.

·        1845: American author Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, in which he has the mythical Scheherazade from the Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights telling another story about the legendary Sinbad the Sailor.  

·        1861: Hungarian author Imre Madach wrote The Tragedy of Man, which reverses the biblical moral principles of God and Satan: In this story, God is the violent and evil ruler, and Satan is the jaded/trickster victim just trying to open humanity’s eyes to the truth.  

Modern Era (1900ish-1950s)

·        1922: Irish novelist James Joyce wrote his stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses, which was based off of Homer’s Odyssey, to a point where he took the characters and simply renamed them, as well as aligned the structure of his book to the various episodes in Homer’s work.

·        1930: The Nancy Drew series was created under the penname Carolyn Keene, who did not exist. Instead, an American man named Edward Stratemeyer would write three pages of a story, then send it to one of several ghostwriters who wanted to write Nancy Drew. The ghostwriter would take the story and expand it. The anonymous group of ghostwriters all writing about the same character still exists today. Each individual ghostwriter has made changes to Nancy’s personality, looks, and age, as well as the type of plots said character engages in.

·        1937: English writer JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings in the 1950s. He borrowed the names of characters and places after those seen in the Icelandic sagas Poetic Edda and Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. Tolkien admitted he based the physical appearance of Gandalf off of the Norse god Odin. He modeled the character of Aragorn directly after Beowulf, from the old English epic (700-1000 BCE) Beowulf. Aragorn himself even paraphrases the Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Wanderer,” as an example of a verse created by his people of Rohan. Another fun fact is that Tolkien specifically borrowed the phrase “my precious,” from a Middle English poem called Pearl. Additionally, Tolkien was a big fan of romantic prose/poetry writer William Morris and wanted to write like him, so he borrowed a lot of phrases, aesthetics, and even names from such works like the 1888 The House of the Wolfings by Morris, including the place called “Mirkwood.” Of curious note is that Morris’s work was massively influenced by Virgil’s Aeneid.

·        1938: African-American author Richard Wright wrote a collection of stories called Uncle Tom’s Children, with an obvious borrowing of the title from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852.

·        1930s-present: DC and Marvel comics mostly just updated the mythological gods and goddesses for a modern era, appropriating their names, special relics, and abilities for their heroes, and then mixing them with some modern-day cover identifies. As an example, Wonder Woman was originally a nod to the Greek goddess Diana, a nod to the female Amazon warriors, and a redesigned image of Rosie the Riveter. As another example, the Flash is a reproduction of the Greek god Hermes, his winged helmet further clarifying the connection. Even the name Superman was not entirely original. 1938 Illustrator of Superman, Joe Shuster, took the name “Superman” from the German “Ubermensh,” a term coined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. As a final example, sometimes the appropriation from mythology is incredibly obvious, as in the case of Thor.

·        1949: English author George Orwell reviewed a book called We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. He wrote a rave review on it and declared that he would try to write something similar, which ultimately became 1984, sharing many similar plot points and concepts while bringing the story of We into a more realistic environment. The novel We also inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, for which Vonnegut admitted he also borrowed concepts from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

·        1950s:The Chronicles of Narnia by British author C.S. Lewis was based on biblical stories conveyed through various mythological elements as well.

Postmodern Era (1950s-Present, debatably)

·        1977: African-American author, Toni Morrison, wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Song of Solomon, which took its title name, as well as the names of several characters and plot points, from the Bible.

·        1988: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammed. Its title is a direct reference to controversial verses once placed in the Quran but then removed. These highly controversial and sensitive connections to Islamic and Old Testament personalities of Gabriel and Satan resulted in the banning of Rushdie’s book from several regions.  

·        1997-2007: The Harry Potter series by British author JK Rowling borrows heavily from historical alchemy, including the age-old legend of the philosopher’s stone and the 1652 book Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, which was about the medicinal and occult properties of plants, which helped her build how magic was used in her stories. Rowling also admits the 1652 book inspired many of the character’s names. She appropriates several historical figures as well for her own purposes (as a sort of real-person fanfiction), including references to alchemists Nicolas Flammel and Paracelsus. She even admits to, while writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, dreaming about Flammel showing her how to make a philosopher’s stone.

·        2003: American author Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its twisting conspiracies are based almost entirely on the books of Margaret Starbird, most of which were written between 1993 and 2003.

·        2009:  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by American author Seth Grahame-Smith, is a rehashing of Jane Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice. But with zombies.

·        2015: American writer of critically acclaimed The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, claims that she has posted anonymous fanfictions of her own novel, as well as at least four Supernatural fanfics, being a huge fan of the show and of the paranormal.

As a professionally educated and trained writer and editor myself, I had to study the intertextualities of several of the pieces I mentioned above. But this is not an exhaustive world list by any means and is missing some other fantastic and influential writers—I’ve included only what has come to my mind in a short time. Plots and characters and ideas have been largely passed around throughout the history of literature. Without fanfiction, a solid portion of well-known literature would not exist.   

In fact, many authors and even inventors will say that there is no such thing as an original idea. Certain pieces get touted as creative because they combine previously suggested elements in a different or thought-provoking way. (Don’t even get me started on how science fiction is a driving force behind many scientific advancements today!)

If you’re writing fanfiction, then you’re participating in a tradition that spans millennia. There is no piece of literature created in some “original” vacuum. That is precisely why literary critics, and those who have professionally studied fiction in an academic setting, use the word “intertextuality” to describe how works of fiction are ultimately interrelated in some way or another.

Therefore, fanfiction is the legacy of literature. If Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Keats, Poe, Dickens, Tolkien, and Brown can write fanfiction about and expand other people’s works, you can too. So the next time someone tells you to stop writing fanfiction, or tells you that it’s not a valid form of art, tell them that they obviously have never read the most important historical works of fiction, or even many popular modern stories, which are all rehashed fanfiction stories, borrowing characters and names and setting and even syntax. 

Rant written for @greenappleeyes and everyone else unfairly shamed for writing fanfiction. Content was retrieved from my own class notes, as well as publically available online interviews and articles. 

@tara-l-blackmore

Thank you.

I was writing and posting 1000s of words of fan fiction a day while I studied for and completed my bachelor’s degree in creative writing.  (A degree, incidentally, which my father said would be as useful as getting a degree in making fairy floss.  Hence why I never forgave him, even after he died, because f*** him.)

zerocalpal:

mylifebeyondlogic:

d0nn0:

Just a reminder to check if you are accidentally using your data and not your wifi so you can swap back over

For the love of god reblog this to be a decent member of society

Reblog to save a life❤

(Fuente: d0nn0)