One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.
Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.
It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?
Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.
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Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :
Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources
Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)
Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women
Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women
Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)
Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)
Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community
Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS
Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough
Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media
Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards
Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories
Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")
And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue
Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)
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I remember discussing Tintin casting choices with a friend from Germany and remarked how it was odd he often has an English accent in adaptations rather than a Belgian one, and my friend just replied "that's because Tintin gives incredibly strong English boy energy (derogatory)"
Here in the UK there's a lot of weird classism tied into accents. Today accent diversity and representation in broadcasting is actively pursued but in Tintin's time there certainly was a preferred accent to have.
imagine this exchange happens between pages 28-29 in The Crab with the Golden Claws
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Oh look, it seems everyone has been opted into the unfortunate "experiment" now. For everyone who has been blissfully using the old UI up until now, welcome to hell :)
Do you not like hell? Do you want to leave and crawl back up into the sunlight of the old UI? Well, have I got a link for you! A beautiful tumblr user (who is not me) has gone and fixed things beautifully for you already: https://github.com/enchanted-sword/dashboard-unfucker
You will need to have Tampermonkey installed on your browser of choice, and once that's done, just go to the github link above, and peruse the readme to install. And voila! You have your old dash back!
The authors of XKit Rewritten said during the experiments that at the time, since this was an "experiment" they weren't going to implement anything to revert to the old UI (although who knows if they'll do it now). And the dashboard unfucker has worked beautifully enough for me to where I genuinely couldn't tell if they had ended the experiment or not.
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I don't know who needs to hear this, but as a creator -
I am fine with "the audience" -
downloading my fics
printing my fics
copy/pasting or screenshotting my fics
sharing your saved copy of my fics with anyone else who might want them in the unlikely but never impossible case that my fics are no longer available on ao3
making a book of my fic(s) and running your fingers across the pages while lovingly whispering my precioussss
doing these things with anything I create for fandom, such as meta, headcanons, au nonsense like 'texts from the brodinsons,' etc
I am not fine with "the audience"
doing any of the above with the purpose/intent of plagiarizing my work or passing it off as their own in any capacity
feeding my work into ai for any reason whatsoever
Save the fandom things. Preserve the fandom things. Respect the fandom things.
Enjoy the fandom things.
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People who see pics of like those fucked up deep sea fish and creatures and go "omg I'm never going swimming in the ocean again 😰😰😰" calm down. They're 5000 feet below where you are and also i went down there and none of them even knew you. Leave them alone bitch
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