Okay, let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time, there was a prose translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was wonderfully charming and lyrical and perfect for use in a high school, and so a clever English teacher (as one did in the 70s) made a scan of the book for her students, saved it as a pdf, and printed copies off for her students every year. In true teacher tradition, she shared the file with her colleagues, and so for many years the students of the high school all studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the same (very badly scanned) version of this wonderful prose translation.
In time, a new teacher became head of the English Department, and while he agreed that the prose translation was very wonderful he felt that the quality of the scan was much less so. Also in true teacher tradition, he then spent hours typing up the scan into a word processor, with a few typos here and there and a few places where he was genuinely just guessing wildly at what the scan actually said. This completed word document was much cleaner and easier for the students to read, and so of course he shared it with his colleagues, including his very new wide-eyed faculty member who was teaching British Literature for the first time (this was me).
As teachers sometimes do, he moved on for greener (ie, better paying) pastures, leaving behind the word document, but not the original pdf scan. This of course meant that as I was attempting to verify whether a weird word was a typo or a genuine artifact of the original translation, I had no other version to compare it to. Being a good card-holding gen zillenial I of course turned to google, making good use of the super secret plagiarism-checking teacher technique “Quotation Marks”, with an astonishing result:
By which I mean literally one result.
For my purposes, this was precisely what I needed: a very clean and crisp scan that allowed me to make corrections to my typed edition: a happily ever after, amen.
But beware, for deep within my soul a terrible Monster was stirring. Bane of procrastinators everywhere, my Curiosity had found a likely looking rabbit hole. See, this wonderfully clear and crisp scan was lacking in two rather important pieces of identifying information: the title of the book from which the scan was taken, and the name of the translator. The only identifying features were the section title “Precursors” (and no, that is not the title of the book, believe me I looked) and this little leaf-like motif by the page numbers:
(Remember the leaf. This will be important later.)
We shall not dwell at length on the hours of internet research that ensued—how the sun slowly dipped behind the horizon, grading abandoned in shadows half-lit by the the blue glow of the computer screen—how google search after search racked up, until an email warning of “unusual activity on your account” flashed into momentary existence before being consigned immediately and with some prejudice to the digital void—how one third of the way through a “comprehensive but not exhaustive” list of Sir Gawain translators despair crept in until I was left in utter darkness, screen black and eyes staring dully at the wall.
Above all, let us not admit to the fact that such an afternoon occurred not once, not twice, but three times.
Suffice to say, many hours had been spent in fruitless pursuit before a new thought crept in: if this book was so mysterious, so obscure as to defeat the modern search engine, perhaps the answer lay not in the technologies of today, but the wisdom of the past. Fingers trembling, I pulled up the last blast email that had been sent to current and former faculty and staff, and began to compose an email to the timeless and indomitable woman who had taught English to me when I was a student, and who had, after nearly fifty years, retired from teaching just before I returned to my alma mater.
After staring at the email for approximately five or so minutes, I winced, pressed send, and let my plea sail out into the void. I cannot adequately describe for you the instinctive reverence I possess towards this teacher; suffice to say that Ms English was and is a woman of remarkable character, as much a legend as an institution as a woman of flesh and blood whose enduring influence inspired countless students. There is not a student taught by Ms. English who does not have a story to tell about her, and her decline in her last years of teaching and eventual retirement in the face of COVID was the end of an era. She still remembers me, and every couple months one of her contemporaries and dear friends who still works as a guidance counsellor stops me in the hall to tell me that Ms. English says hello and that she is thrilled that I am teaching here—thrilled that I am teaching honors students—thrilled that I am now teaching the AP students. “Tell her I said hello back,” I always say, and smile.
Ms. English is a legend, and one does not expect legends to respond to you immediately. Who knows when a woman of her generation would next think to check her email? Who knows if she would remember?
The day after I sent the email I got this response:
My friends, I was shaken. I was stunned. Imagine asking God a question and he turns to you and says, “Hold on one moment, let me check with my predecessor.”
The idea that even Ms. English had inherited this mysterious translation had never even occurred to me as a possibility, not when Ms. English had been a faculty member since the early days of the school. How wonderful, I thought to myself. What a great thing, that this translation is so obscure and mysterious that it defeats even Ms. English.
A few days later, Ms. English emailed me again:
(I had, in fact searched through both the English office and the Annex—a dark, weirdly shaped concrete storage area containing a great deal of dust and many aging copies of various books—a few days prior. I had no luck, sadly.)
At last, though, I had a title and a description! I returned to my internet search, only to find to my dismay that there was no book that exactly matched the title. I found THE BRITISH TRADITION: POETRY, PROSE, AND DRAMA (which was not black and the table of contents I found did not include Sir Gawain) and THE ENGLISH TRADITION, a super early edition of the Prentice Hall textbooks we use today, which did have a black cover but there were absolutely zero images I could find of the table of contents or the interior and so I had no way of determining if it was the correct book short of laying out an unfortunate amount of cold hard cash for a potential dead end.
So I sighed, and relinquished my dreams of solving the mystery. Perhaps someday 30 years from now, I thought, I’ll be wandering through one of those mysterious bookshops filled with out of print books and I’ll pick up a book and there will be the translation, found out last!
So I sighed, and told the whole story to my colleagues for a laugh. I sent screenshots of Ms. English’s emails to my siblings who were also taught by her. I told the story to my Dad over dinner as my Great Adventure of the Week.
…my friends. I come by my rabbit-hole curiosity honestly, but my Dad is of a different generation of computer literacy and knows a few Deep Secrets that I have never learned. He asked me the title that Ms. English gave me, pulled up some mysterious catalogue site, and within ten minutes found a title card. There are apparently two copies available in libraries worldwide, one in Philadelphia and the other in British Columbia. I said, “sure, Dad,” and went upstairs. He texted me a link. Rolling my eyes, I opened it and looked at the description.
Huh, I thought. Four volumes, just like Ms. English said. I wonder…
Armed with a slightly different title and a publisher, I looked up “The English Tradition: Fiction macmillan” and the first entry is an eBay sale that had picture of the interior and LO AND BEHOLD:
THE LEAF. LOOK AT THE LEAF.
My dad found it! He found the book!!
Except for one teensy tiny problem which is that the cover of the book is uh a very bright green and not at all black like Ms. English said. Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity, because The English Tradition: Poetry does have a black cover, although it is the fiction volume which contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And so having found the book at last, I have decided to purchase it for the sum of $8, that ever after the origins of this translation may once more be known.
In this year of 2022 this adventure took place, as this post bears witness, the end, amen.
(Edit: See here for part 2!)
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Grogu supposed that his dad just wanted to keep him safe. He understood that. He also understood that he wanted that knob from the flight control stick. His wants and the Mandalorian’s wants came into conflict and his dad got a little short with him. But just a little. A tiny bit really. Grogu understood. He understood that Din Djarin didn’t understand what Grogu was saying when he was asking for the knob. Sigh.
He wondered what sort of dad he would be one day. Would be concerned about the safety of his offspring? Would he play lots of games with them? Would he teach them everything that he had learned from his dad? Would he teach them everything he had learned from the Jedi? He didn’t know. He supposed he had time to work that out, but he didn’t want to take the same amount of time that his dad did. Training Din Djarin to be a good dad wasn’t easy, but it was worthy.
Like that time on Corvus, Din had scolded him mildly about going back to his seat because he wanted him to be safe as they landed. It made sense. But… he could have said it differently. ‘Grogu, I don’t want you to get hurt. Please return to your seat. I’ll be happy to hand you the flight control knob once we’ve landed’ would have been fine. In fact, that would have been pretty nice.
But the Mandalorian opted for the slightly shorter ‘I’m gonna start the landing cycle. You better get back in your seat’. It depended on Grogu having a full understanding of the potential problems and pitfalls that landing the Razor Crest on a new, potentially hostile planet, could entail. Since Corvus wasn’t an ice cube of a planet and it also wasn’t an ocean with landing pads, like Trask, Grogu really didn’t think that landing on it would be that bad.
But again, the Mandalorian was pretty sure that something awful was going to happen and when Grogu didn’t just summersault backwards into his seat and click on his safety belt, his dad got a bit short with him. ‘Hey, what did I tell you?”. Well, dad, you told me I better get back in my seat. You didn’t say, ‘Get back to your seat right now because there is a non-zero chance that I might crash this thing. I’ve done it before and you know that. You were there.’
Grogu had only been pausing because he thought if there really was a non-zero chance of another hard landing in the Razor Crest that he should be prepared and have the silver knob from the flight control stick because it would be good to have handy. He liked it. It was smooth and silver and mostly round like a tiny replica of the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station. Of course this one was too tiny to house a Sith and their apprentice, for which Grogu was endlessly grateful.
“Back in your seat.”
Fine, fine. He’d go back to the seat. Sheesh.
Of course from his seat he’d been able to take the knob and that had made him happy, but as he recalled it now, Din Djarin hadn’t been exactly happy about it. It meant that Grogu could do things that his dad didn’t understand. Grogu thought that made sense. He wasn’t always happy about things he didn’t understand.
What if his children couldn’t use the Force? What if they could, only they couldn’t use it to do the same things he did? That happened. At the Jedi Temple the students often had different abilities and were better at somethings than others. What if his child was really good at reading the far future? Grogu couldn’t do that at all. Master Yoda had tried to instruct him on that, but Grogu just used it as an opportunity to catch up on his sleep. If he’d been good at it, he might have known that the Mandalorian was going to find him and eventually adopt him. That would have reduced his stress levels by a large amount. But no.
So if his child couldn’t heal someone with the Force would he be disappointed? Would he just celebrate what they could achieve? Or would he just worry that he was a bad dad?
Grogu was pretty sure that the Mandalorian did a lot of that last one. He was so used to just taking care of himself that once he had another person depending on him, well, that was a lot of responsibility. Mandalorians were good at a lot of things, but just moving seamlessly from single bounty hunter to head of a tiny family didn’t really seem to be one of them.
Peli had scolded Din Djarin more than once for leaving Grogu all by himself. Not feeding him. Not getting him better clothes. Not giving him a better name. That all happened the last time they saw her. Grogu thought it was hilarious. She could watch him tame the rancor and keep everyone, especially his dad, safe and Peli thought that was great. But if he even glanced at dung worms she was yelling at his dad about not treating him well enough.
Grogu hoped that someone like Peli would be around when he had children. Someone who could help him raise them and learn the lessons that Din Djarin hadn’t managed to teach him. He actually just wanted his dad to last forever. In that distant future, Grogu would have the controls for the Mandalorian’s pram on his own vambrace and he’d be scolding Din Djarin for storing snacks in it, taking too long in the privy, and not using his seat belt.
At that thought he giggled.
“Hey, what’s up, buddy?”
The Mandalorian looked at him as they both sat on the porch. Grogu jumped onto his dad’s lap and used his bandolier to climb higher and kiss his dad’s visor.
Din Djarin began to laugh.
“Kid, you’re adorable. Now, back to your seat. We still need to decide what to have for dinner.”
Grogu giggled again and bumped his head against his dad’s. Maybe he’d understand it better if Grogu did it the Mandalorian way.
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Scenes/Things in Supernatural that genuinely don't make sense to me if Dean was straight:
The confession booth scene.
Sam just rolling with the fact that Dean's siren is a guy while still thinking sirens infect people through sex.
Dean being flustered by several men: Gunner Lawless, Aaron, Doctor Sexy, etc.
All the parallels between Destiel and other couples. (A big one being "last night on Earth" bc how do you do that accidentally.)
Having all the gay jokes be on Dean instead of Sam.
Paralleling Sam meeting his childhood celebrity crush with Dean meeting Gunner Lawless.
The boner Dean got when Cas cleaned up.
Dean gulping after Cas does an impression from a Western movie.
Charlie, a lesbian, calling Castiel "dreamy."
The way Mary looks at Dean and Cas when they hug.
Dean wondering why everyone assumes he's gay, while Sam not caring.
The logic that Charlie can't flirt with guys because she's only attracted to women, but then having Dean flirt with the guy for her.
Dean seeming disappointed when learning that Aaron's flirting was fake.
The amount of time Dean and Cas spend staring at each other.
Dean canonically having an orgy with Crowley.
A woman saying that she knows when someone's pining for someone else to Dean, just for us to learn that Dean was never in love with Amara.
The set design and script choices that lead to a cross in the background while Dean said "I do." to Cas after he came back to life.
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dbf!simon who loves the size difference between the two of you. the constant burning stare that lingers after you hug him hello, he can't get over how his arms are as big as your waist.
"it's so good to finally see you again, y/n" he says against the top of your head, his arms wrapped around your waist as the two of you sway side to side in the doorway. after he pulls away his gaze lingers on your body as you walk away to speak with your father. he can't stop thinking about how his entire hand could engulf that little wrist of yours. or how your fingers would barely connect once wrapped around his cock.
── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──
dbf!simon who loves to tease you whenever you sit next to him at the dinner table, his tatted hands gripping the flesh of your thigh, kneading and caressing your skin just enough to make you squirm.
"you gotta keep quiet for me babydoll, can't have anyone gettin' suspicious.." he whispers into your ear while no one is looking, his fingers slowly sliding north as his hand makes its way to your panties under your skirt.
── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──
dbf!simon who would fuck you hard and fast, whispering and babbling dirty little praise phrases as he watches his cock bully in and out of your little cunt.
"so fuckin' perfect for me lovie..fuck..taking this cock so well, yeah?" his fist full of your hair as your face in pressed into the pillow, his other hand gripping your hip with such a force there will definitely be bruises left in its wake.
"taking your dads best friends cock? yeah? you like your men a little older huh? fuck baby..like your men with some experience under their belt? yeah i know you do.."
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