Ough I Started Thinking About The Inherent Tragedy Of A Spare Heir

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

I just… wanna remind people that asexuality was classed as a mental disorder by the DSM all the way up until 2013…. Because I feel like people don’t know this or like to ignore it because it doesn’t fit into their “asexual people don’t face discrimination” rhetoric.

Asexuality was only removed from the DSM in 2013. Please, know this and remember it.

Okay, so I asked my community of Aces for meme representations of what it was like to realize that you’re Ace. Imma post a bunch of the responses.

any theories/thoughts on the fairies (and maybe great fairies)? like why most games in the downfall timeline (wind waker being an exception) they seem to have human forms, but otherwise they appear as glowing balls of light with wings?

Fairies show up in various forms across the land of Hyrule—at least, that's how they look.

From the drawings we get of LoZ/AoL fairies tend to be your most basic and stereotypical; a little elf girl in a dress with sparkles.

A Link to the Past portrays them similarly, though this one has more vibrant hair and thinner wings, with a decent halo.

Wind Waker gives us a LoZ/AoL style fairy again

Which gets reused entirely for Four Swords Adventures.

But in every other game, we get these.

Interestingly enough, though, we're not actually seeing a change in biology, We're seeing the effects of magical duress.

Like you said, most fairies that show their humanoid forms occur in the Downfall Timeline. ALTTP has vibrant pink, then ALBW is more muted, until we finally get to the dull, glow-less LOZ fairies.

The glow you see at the tip of their wands is actually what little magic they can summon left, concentrated into a precise point, like a laser. As Hyrule declined, their magic faded, not letting them summon the glow they're best known for any more.

A healthy fairy doesn’t need a wand.

In Wind Waker, we also see a decline in fairy power—so much so that by Spirit Tracks, there literally aren't any left; at least, not in New Hyrule. Our big exceptions come from Phantom Hourglass.

Ciela, Leaf, and Neri all maintain their vibrancy and luminosity. But they also draw power from what's essentially a minor god in his own right, the Ocean King.

So they’re outliers, not examples.

In the child timeline, where Four Swords Adventures takes place, we also see the powered down form of a fairy. But in that era, the magic of the world has been robbed, crystalized into force gems that fairies try very hard to absorb power from.

A fairy’s glow is an indicator of its magical health. The fainter the glow, the harder the fairy has to work just to keep itself aloft, and the more stress it accumulates as it tries to use magic.

Great Fairies, however, are a much clearer indicator of the magical status of a kingdom. The larger and more humanoid the Great Fairy, the stronger the country they reside in’s magic.

Ocarina of Time is a good reference point to have. These fairies are particularly large and very human-like, and Hyrule (at least from a wildlife point of view) is thriving.

Wind Waker, however, has an unstable Great Fairy type. The magic in this land is bleeding out and spiraling away, unused and unrestrained as it depletes. These fairies rule a dead world; a sea with no fish but the fishmen, a world with scattered islands and few offerings.

A Link Between Worlds’ great fairy has enough glow for a halo, and remains humanoid, so the magic is being used and maintained. But she’s also barely bigger than a human, indicating that her power’s weakening.

And then by The Legend of Zelda, she’s indistinguishable from any other fairy out there.

But Breath of the Wild?

These Great Fairies are HUGE. They’re the healthiest Great Fairies to date, in part due to their strategic hibernation in their flowers, and they match what we see of Hyrule’s life.

Yes, Ganon has the Divine Beasts and Guardians on his side. Yes, this place has lost its king. But the country itself is alive is thriving. It’s so full of magic that you can find Koroks in literally every corner of the world.

If I had to hazard a guess, since we never encounter them, I’d say that these fairies are the closest they’ve been to Surface Great Fairies from Skyward Sword.

I get that being frozen for 100 years is a tough thing to go through but honestly Aang should have used it for comedy more

whoever the fuck i saw saying “i can’t stand english bitching because they’re so complacent” and whoever else thinks we’re not doing enough i’d like to invite you to DO SOME FUCKING RESEARCH.

a law was recently passed that deemed any kind of protesting as disruptive and able to be punished by the police, alongside giving the police more power.

we all watched the police storm the PEACEFUL VIGIL for sarah everard - a woman raped and murdered by a police officer.

PEOPLE ARE CURRENTLY BEING ARRESTED FOR OUTWARDLY EXPRESSING ANY SORT OF DISPLEASURE WITH THE MONARCHY.

A WOMAN WAS ARRESTED FOR HOLDING UP A SIGN. JUST HOLDING IT.

PEOPLE WERE ARRESTED FOR BOOING.

everything in britain has been put to a standstill. hospital appointments have been cancelled. funerals have been cancelled. we can’t do anything about it.

many of us will be unable to pay our energy bills this winter. we will freeze. we will starve.

it has been demonstrated to us time and time and time again that protests simply make people talk about how we were protesting and never why. and now the police has increased power to punish us for any public opinion that they don’t like.

we have been under tory rule for 12 years. 12 years of the same people - hey americans, can you imagine that?

we are tired, no, we are exhausted. we are struggling. we are scared. and it has been made clear to us that our government does not care.

so fucking forgive us if we’re putting our own survival over the opinions of americans (and other non-brits but americans are the worst) online who expect us to learn everything about their politics and their country and don’t put in an ounce of effort to learn about ours.

I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.

You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me (do people use kofi for that or tumblr's built in system? Let me know what you prefer) or buying a print or sticker here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.