I went to my first plant swap and man. It was WILD.
Keep in mind I heard about the plant swap a little over 24 hours before it was happening. I have no plants to exchange, I barely even have seedlings yet. But I do have a bunch of seeds so I decide to roll up and see what I can do.
Its from 2 to 5. I show up at 2:12 and its mostly houseplants. But the local library branch has a tent and they’re letting people check out some gardening books they brought if they have a library card on them!
So I checked out “Seedswap: The gardener’s guide to saving and swapping seeds” by Josie Jeffery!
Woohoo!
(They also told me that if I want the library to set up seed libraries I should email showing interest because a lot of librarians have suggested it but public interest is needed 👀 special reminder to email/contact your local library about adding seed libraries if you haven’t got one already!)
I considered leaving but I decide to hang around and see if anyone else comes around with stuff that’s more my fancy (no disrespect to people who like houseplants but I have a 99% killrate with them and they’re just not my vibe) and
Y’all
I obtained a Boxcar tomato, a Blackberry Lily, a variegated pepper, a hibiscus cutting, loofah seeds, okra seeds, and FOUR (4!!!!) peach tree seedlings!!!
HELLO??????
I spent like 6 bucks total (1 on a peach tree seedling, 5 on the pepper) and the rest was just seed trades (or the peach tree lady just… giving me more peach trees for being nice. Be nice to the elderly you might get peach trees out of it.) I was there for like an hour and a half TOPS.
(I had to pot up the peach tree seedlings myself but this is still a W in my book lets see if they survive)
So uh
WOOHOO
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writing my silly little fic and again im struck with how much opportunities they missed by pretending the s2 stancy breakup wasn't messy, specifically for Nancy's guilt about barb and forcing herself to grow up too fast
like s1 Nancy spends one night being a stupid teenager goofing off at her boyfriend's party and staying over to get spicy while Barb goes home. then she later realizes Barb disappeared and died that one night she was letting go and having fun. this is widely recognized trauma for her and informs a lot if not most of her actions through the rest of the show
in season 2 she's feeling the weight of it more around the first year anniversary. steve trys to help by taking her to a party to forget for a little while and 'be stupid teenagers' for a night. a perfectly set up parallel already
the way the show wants it to go, we get the bullshit argument, they fight, allegedly break up at some point, and nancy sleeps with Jonathan. later steve tells her to go with him and we're supposed to read it as Steve stepping back so jancy can happen. we're supposed to be seeing this as a happy ending.
but with the material we're given this would have been the perfect place for an emotional repeat of season 1 for nancy. she and steve go to the party and pretend to be stupid teenagers for the night. but oh no! nancy lets lose too much, lets herself relax and drink and dance, and the next day her boyfriend's pissed. hes saying she said things she never remembered saying and its hurt him and she doesn't know what to do. and kids around school are talking about them breaking up at the party, and that fits with Steve's anger she saw, so they must've broken up right? it sucks, even if she wasn't in love with him, that'd be the worst way to break up with someone (especially if she's confusing platonic and romantic feelings or convincing herself it has to be romantic when she really just values him as a friend)
and then she doesn't have time to work it out, she needs to go with Jonathan to avenge barbs 'disappearance' to give her family closure. She's got a lot of conspiracy shit to do and its stressful. so when murray starts going off about how she's not really in love with steve, how she actually likes Jonathan and he seems to like her back. they finished a lot of the hard work with the conspiracy stuff, she can let her guard down and have a quick good night.
then the next day is chaos. demodogs and labs and will being possessed. It a rough fucking day. Steve tells her to go with Jonathan while they get the mindflayer out of Will, civil like they're on good terms so she does (and thank god she did because that was rough and they needed all the help they could get)
and then everything's fine again, with the upside down. and it looks like she handled things better this time, was about to relax occasionally and still made it through.
except apparently she and steve didn't break up. he thought it was just a few fights, that they put their shit aside for the apocalypse and now they can work things out.
and it could ruin nancy. a year later and she's still hasn't learned her lesson, that letting her guard down hurts the people she cares about, that relaxing and having fun makes her lose people. its her fault for the messy breakup with Steve and its her fault that barb is gone. she's the reason she's lost friends close to her, 2 for 2, and now she only has Jonathan left (and what do you know, season 3 has her conflict with Jonathan and in season 4 she's not let anyone else get truly close to her and fred still dies)
you see what i mean?? by having conflict magical resolve itself in the background we loose so much powerful, painful character drama for her. our girl who thinks she has to keep the world around her up solely on her shoulders because she can't handle the loss of her best friend in season 1. Nancy who desperately wants to be normal and have people she loves but keeps losing them, through factors both in and out of her control, but feels like everything has to be her fault just because some things were.
and to be fair, that story is still present in the show. its there and definitely compelling, but it could've been even more so. i feel like if maybe there was less 'nancy has to be a strong independent girlboss' in there (abd it's definitely there, they want to make a point of making her a Strong Woman Character so bad) and she was allowed to have mistakes acknowledged by the narrative, this is the direction it would've gone. She could've been an excellent example of well written women who are strong and awesome through their own right instead of the narrative trying to make us like her
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[Image ID: A digitally painted portrait of Glow from Shining Nikki in profile, from the neck up. She is painted simplistically and has a few stars on her cheeks, as well as rainbow-colored highlights in her hair. Behind her head is a black halo. The background is a solid light gray. /.End ID.]
glow of hope my best friend glow of hope
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i would really appreciate prayers right now for my sister and i… we just had a difficult conversation about my faith and her view of her name and gender. i can’t tell if it has put a serious rift in our relationship yet, but i do think it will be different from this point forward.
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I've been thinking a little bit today, re: Avita, morality and love. Namely, how she makes a clean separation between the two and how she operates and makes her choices based on that.
To start with she's a woman with completely neutral moral innerworkings. It has nothing to do with alignment charts or what have you, I'm talking about the general basis of the morality of judgement and action, which ideally functions on neutrality and which posits all are born deserving of the same treatment. In any verse Avita is a firm believer in this. She approaches everyone with the same consideration, believing they are owed it. Yet she's capable of loving the morally reprehensible who act in opposition to that worldview. One would think this clashes with or even entirely negates her fundamental ethics but it doesn't. She maintains a complete mental separation between love and morality. They're two different, independently operational compasses that she follows on a case by case basis.
It's why she does not need love or even partiality to act morally and does not heed morality when she loves. Her type of easy kindness, acceptance and borderline heroism might get confused for deep empathy or compassion and suggest that she feels, relates to or even cares about everyone around her but at its core it's simply the unbreakable belief in equal merit by birth. That all creatures come into existence equally entitled to life, survival, freedom, respect, honesty and basic kindnesses. None above the other. Love itself, the concept of it, comes into direct conflict with those ethics - its very nature suggests partiality. So it is kept entirely separate. She does not need to love or even particularly like someone to treat them morally. Her kindness isn't only reserved to a select few. It's a much stronger sentiment and far more consistent an altruism than one borne of her emotional compulsions would have been.
((The other edge of the sword: She doesn't need to hate someone to harm them either. She could feel bad or remorseful for them and still choose to not let that move her. Yes, she's empathetic, there is an emotional compulsion there, but she allows it to play little part in her opinions and decision-making. Empathy is NOT morally charged and never will be.))
And then there's love.
And though love is separate from her moral views, it always reigns far above them.
The brightest example of this: In all verses Avita loves her fathers unconditionally regardless of their amorality, ruthlessness and infamous renown. They are her family, come hell or high water, and that is an immutable fact of her person that all who befriend or come to love her must accept in some capacity.
She experienced the best of them, yes, but was never spared their true nature either, nor lied to. Therefore her love for them is full, sincere, genuine and not exclusive of their darker sides. She spent her upbringing lovingly surrounded by the morbid and macabre and moralities and ideologies she did not end up growing into. In fact, her natural traits were nurtured fearlessly in such an independent household, even though her fathers did not possess them. That's the love she was surrounded by and the love she gives. She's capable of looking past differences, vast though they may be, and places no moral conditions on those she cares for.
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