This Weeks Doomed Yuri Pairing Running Around In My Brain 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

may i ask for... alina starkov?

My darling girl!!!!

furry jesus with pope yaoi

when thomas disrupts turtle time

5p yuuram bloood twww

I need to buy alcohol tomorrow i miss gojo satoru so much

wee bit late to dick’s birthday (march 20th) but here u go anyways

(also yes i’m aware he is nowhere close to 30 in canon but the idea of him still doing backflips and gymnastics in combat as a 30 year old man whose knees crack every time he stands is funny to me)

I sometimes feel like there is such an emphasis on the author's intent and reading the text "as it was mean to be read" that people genuinely don't get that you can have different readings of things and even if they aren't what the author meant, they still have value.

For instance, a few of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's possible readings.

1. Frankenstein is a tale about human hubris interfering with nature, leading to unforseen consequences.

2. Frankenstein is about the fear of parenthood. The act of creations itself, the fear of raising or not raising a child wrong, and your being responsible for their actions.

3. Frankenstein is about the fear of parental abandonment. It explores how childhood experiences can twist someone's mind and heart until they do things that would make their younger self disgusted.

4. Frankenstein is about the cycle of violence and revenge, beginning with violence towards the human body in creating The Creature and ending with The Creature's violence against himself.

5. Frankenstein is about Mary Shelley's grief at the losses in her life. The book was a way to process that grief.

6. Frankenstein is an exploration of disability and how society treats disabled people, especially when they fight back. Like the bodies of so many disabled people throughout history, The Creaure's body is toyed with when he can not consent, and he must live with the consequences of what was done to him.

7. Frankenstein is a commentary on the intersection of disability and gender. A lot of The Creature's violence comes from him feeling "owed" relationships from other people, especially women. He knows the pain his existence brings him, yet he wants Victor to create a woman for him, regardless of the consequences it will have for her. The Creature thus treats the potential companion the way he was treated before his birth. The fact that she would be a woman is not irrelevant. The Creature wants a wife and all that implies. Though loneliness is a factor, having a woman by his side is one way he can prove himself as not just a man but a human being by the standards of late 17th century European society.

8. Frankenstein is about class warfare, specifically the fear of the rich towards the poor. Victor is able to get away with much of what he does because of his class, up to and included doing nothing as Justine is murdered by the State. Victor starts the story with money, friends, and a loving family. The Creature, who was born with none of those things, systematically strips Victor of them.

10. Frankenstein is about the fear and apprehension of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

11. Frankenstein was written because Mary Shelley was stuck in Geneva with Lord Byron and there was a writing contest.

Are all these readings what Shelley meant? Probably not. Are they ways to interpret the novel that you could support with citations from the novel? For the most part, yes. Are the readings good jumping off points for a wider discussion? I think so.

And the discussion doesn't have to be academic! It can be explored through fan fics or original works inspired by the novel or what have you.

So, while what the author says and the author's opinions matter, especially if they are still alive, the feelings, thoughts, and opinions their works incite for the audience matters, too.

my obsessions rn are tolkien and conclave. guess im just into older men

for some reason people seem to think that mary somehow stumbled into writing a commentary on marriage/incest accidentally, and that the themes of frankenstein are all about her trauma due to her experiences as a victim of the patriarchy, as a woman and a mother surrounded by men - as if she wasnt the child of radical liberals who publicly renounced marriage, as if she herself as well as percy shelley had similar politics on marriage, as if she would not go on to write a novel where the central theme is explicitly that of father/daughter incest years later…

the most obvious and frequent critique of victor i see is of his attempt to create life - the creature - without female presence. it’s taught in schools, wrote about by academics, talked about in fandom spaces - mary shelley was a feminist who wrote about feminism by making victor a misogynist. he’s misogynistic because he invented a method of procreation without involving women purely out of male entitlement and masculine arrogance and superiority, and shelley demonstrates the consequences of subverting women in the creation process/and by extension the patriarchy because this method fails terribly - his son in a monster, and victor is punished for his arrogance via the murder of his entire family; thus there is no place for procreation without the presence of women, right?

while this interpretation – though far from my favorite – is not without merit, i see it thrown around as The interpretation, which i feel does a great disservice to the other themes surrounding victor, the creature, the relationship between mother and child, parenthood, marriage, etc.

this argument also, ironically, tends to undermine the agency and power of frankenstein’s female characters, because it often relies on interpreting them as being solely passive, demure archetypes to establish their distinction from the 3 male narrators, who in contrast are performing violent and/or reprehensible actions while all the woman stay home (i.e., shelley paradoxically critiques the patriarchy by making all her female characters the reductive stereotypes that were enforced during her time period, so the flaws of our male narrators arise due to this social inequality).

in doing so it completely strips elizabeth (and caroline and justine to a lesser extent) of the power of the actions that she DID take — standing up in front of a corrupt court, speaking against the injustice of the system and attempting to fight against its verdict, lamenting the state of female social status that prevented her from visiting victor at ingolstadt, subverting traditional gender roles by offering victor an out to their arranged marriage as opposed to the other way around, taking part in determining ernest’s career and education in direct opposition to alphonse, etc. it also comes off as a very “i could fix him,” vibe, that is, it suggests if women were given equal social standing to men then elizabeth would have been able to rein victor in so to speak and prevent the events of the book from happening. which is a demeaning expectation/obligation in of itself and only reinforces the reductive passive, motherly archetypes that these same people are speaking against

it is also not very well supported: most of the argument rests on ignoring female character’s actual characterization and focusing one specific quote, often taken out of context (“a new species would bless me as its creator and source…no father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as i should deserve theirs”) which “proves” victor’s sense of male superiority, and on victors treatment/perception of elizabeth, primarily from a line of thinking he had at five years old, where he objectified her by thinking of her (or rather — being told so by caroline) as a gift to him. again, the morality of victor’s character is being determined by thoughts he had at five years old.

obviously this is not at all to say i think their relationship was a healthy one - i dont think victor and elizabeth’s marriage was ever intended to be perceived as good, but more importantly, writing their relationship this way was a deliberate critique of marriage culture.

Holmes: my dear Watson :c i'm so sorry i put you through an extremely dangerous situation (again)

Watson: that was the best day of my life and I'm going to write about it in my diary with a glitter pen