#rose reads

[firstofficerrose]

The fact that the centuries-old textiles in Dracula's castle are in perfect condition is so interesting to me. Does the Count turn into bats and eat all the moths?

#rose reads #dracula daily

[roseandgold137]

*chin hands* tell me about Darla Aquista!!

ok so there’s Darla in comics and then there’s Darla as I draw her, bc I think there are a few distinctions. Also bc this is Darla and not Laura I only took pictures of her pre-death for examples

This page is the first time we ever see her, with Tim instantly crashing into her. She’s very nice about it, and having read through her appearances pre-death in robin I can confirm that “kind” is probably her main character trait.

Here we learn that Bernard is like majorly crushing on her me too bear dw but he’s too afraid to approach her bc she’s always surrounded by the “giant jocks”, who turn out to be pretty chill. Unfortunately for Bernard, and because Tim is the main character, Darla develops a crush on Tim.

Darla isn’t just her looks, though - she’s very smart, and she can piece together the limited information to come up with just the right picture. I’d also like to point out how she talks to her dad - she’s used to getting what she wants from him, and the fact that she knows he’s withholding information annoys her. Luckily for her dad, she manages to derail herself, and we can also see a bit of bitterness in her last speech bubble - “I think he made her up as an excuse not to date me.” Which, to Darla, is pretty much exactly how it is. As she said, no one’s ever seen Steph. And she says it on the other page, too - everyone likes her, but none of the boys ask her out. And, as a fifteen/sixteen year old girl, who clearly would like to be asked out, that’s a very frustrating situation

now. She goes about this in very much the wrong way. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. The main thing I’m noticing from her throughout her appearances is frustration. She’s frustrated that her dad is hiding things from her. She’s frustrated that she thinks Tim’s lying to her.

She takes the rejection well, though, and seems amicable with Tim afterwards. Though, Tim, really, if you’ve just established that you’re not interested in her, please don’t ask her to sneak off with you to go to a restaurant together. It’s not a good look

And here we have them as their little trio! The dynamics here go crazy, but frankly my biggest question is where did her jocks. She doesn’t seem to be quite over tim, but she’s not kissing him out nowhere, so that’s something. 2000s comics, man. Bernard appears with his little conspiracies, and Darla indulges him to a point. She’s clearly not all that invested, but she does let him ramble on for quite a while.

She’s circled back to one of her other frustrations - her dad hiding things. Manipulates is a strong word, but she definitely sweetens Tony and Milo up so she can hear the answers she wants. Unfortunately for her, this is the issue she (and her drivers, rip) dies in, so she doesn’t get clear answers before then.

She clearly cared an awful lot about her drivers - as she said previously, they’d been with her for years - tony had just had a baby, and while it’s not on this page, she was distraught for him. This is the last page I have saved, but it happens pretty soon before she gets shot and dies.

in summary, Darla was kind, patient, and sheltered - but she also harboured a lot of frustrations and jealousy. She died at sixteen without ever really getting the truth out of anyone, she never found out if Steph was real, her dad never sat her down and told her the real reason she had bodyguards.

Comparatively, my version of Darla isn’t really as passive - that’s not an insult to canon Darla, by the way. Also, my Darla is a lesbian, so that kind of cuts out the whole jealousy plot she had around Tim and steph

She’s still kind, still frustrated, but she’s less sheltered, and she definitely knows more than she’d ever actually let on to her dad. She goads Bernard into coming up with more outlandish theories, once they get past her fake I-don’t-care persona she’s just as much of a geek as they are. Tim mentions a girl? Uh, you mean her girl. Bernard is after his stepmom, Darla is after his girlfriend, he can’t win. This time her frustration over Tim and Steph is that she can’t find her so she can mess with Tim by flirting with her.

Sorry this took a while I wasn’t really sure how to say what I wanted to say 😭 hopefully this answers your questions abt her <3 if you want to know more abt my Darla feel free to ask 💛

#asks #darla aquista #tim drake #bernard dowd #rose reads #robin #long post #character analysis #? Maybe?

[my-rose-tinted-glasses]

Rose Reads Love In The Big City

Part I

So as I finished reading Part I and went to look at the questions that @bengiyo provided , I felt that I couldn’t really talk about this chapter from any other place than my own experience. I usually have a hard time writing from a non personal view point which is why I don’t write that much on here. But I wanted to be part of this event and it felt disingenuous to not write from a personal place. With that said.

I moved to London when I was 24 with one of my best friends. Let’s call him P. We shared a flat for almost 4 years. And our lives were not that different from Young and Jaehee. The major difference here was that I was single for all that time and didn’t sleep with anyone. I was ace but didn’t call it that at the time.

But I saw a lot of ourselves in this chapter. When we weren’t working and he wasn’t getting laid, we would spend most of our time together. We would talk about the boy du jour, and why I hated him, except when I didn’t and in that case P was the one that didn’t like him. We would visit gay clubs after work and I was drunk by 8pm and by that time, he had a companion for the rest of the night so I would go home. Of course I would wake up at some point when he staggered back home alone or not. If alone we would talk about the night, and if not alone I would save the conversations till morning. Except for the few times when I was actually still awake and would quickly be put in charge of brewing coffee and providing food to soak up all the alcohol.

This went on for almost 4 years. He had some longer relationships, and by that I mean, maybe six months, and I abstained from all that. Although in the beginning P was relentless about my need to meet someone and get laid, eventually he got the message that that wasn’t me.

We also smoked way too much, drank way too much and I had way too much fun with his sex life. I got very familiar with the local clinic where he would get tested and got to laugh about his poor life choices when something didn’t go well.

One of the my clearest memories of that time was one time where he had a boyfriend, going on like 3 months, the one I liked and apparently he didn’t, and he brought another guy home, and after he left, I was being a judgemental bitch just has P gets a message from a former hook up saying he needs to get tested. My immediate reply was – instant karma. Obviously every time I made a joke about him being a slut I could always expect one in return asking when would I join the convent.

All this to say I saw a lot of myself and P in Part I. However, I ended up relating more to Young than to Jaehee which is interesting but makes perfect sense.

So now for the questions. I don’t think I can answer one at a time so I’ll just go through questions 1, 3 and 4 for now.

Well most things stuck out to me just because I could so clearly picture it in my head almost as a memory. The whole dynamic felt very familiar to me. Just like Young and Jaehee, we were each other’s home. The one we always returned too.

I read the fight the same way as the author did in a way. I saw it as a betrayal. But I don’t think it was about outing him, as he himself is not sure about that. It was the first time that Jaehee put someone else before Young. She told the fiancé the truth, because in that moment he was more important than Young. And that was what felt like a betrayal. Because although they shared their bodies with a number of different people, and even momentary feelings, emotionally Young had an expectation that he came first.

And now tying it with the fourth question. Me and P never had any sort of problems regarding optics. Perhaps this is a cultural nuance that I miss.

But as I was reading it, I kept waiting for the break. For when one of them was no longer happy with this arrangement. This is not to say that there needs to be a break. But in my experience, there was a break. First in the form of long distance when I returned home. We would talk everyday and have video chats more than once a week at first. Eventually the distance in geography translated into a distance in the relationship. However whenever he came back home and we were together there was still a semblance of what we shared before.

But eventually the real break came in the form of a new relationship. Eventually he met someone, and now they’ve been together for years and that person and I never really got along. There was no hostility and it’s not that I didn’t like him. We just didn’t mesh.

After they’d been together for a while, he started having a problem with our relationship. Mostly with the fact that I was an influence in his life, and for some reason he thought that meant that his influence was diminished. And apparently I was a bad influence. I will not speak to that because it really doesn’t matter.

So P made a choice. And he chose his boyfriend. I haven’t talked to P in almost two years. Because as much as we wanted to believe that our relationship was important, and bro’s before hoes and all that crap, the reality is that in this amatonormativity we live in, there really isn’t any space for that. Sharing your life with someone that doesn’t involve romance has an expiration date. And more often than not, eventually you will find a “real” partner and that will not leave space for anyone else.

And the thing is normally this would happen just like in the novel. I, the woman, would be the one that would “move on”, perhaps get married and have no space for any other significant relationship in my life.

Because it’s what’s expected. Eventually you will find your “actual” person and be normal. Move in together, get married and whatever you had with someone else was youth inspired and not for the long haul. Because who would be happy with that? I mean, Jaehee certainly didn’t seem like she was ready to get married any time soon, and although I can only guess at some of the pressures she was feeling in the context of her culture, it’s not like that doesn’t translate to my own.

Me and P never had anyone look at us weird because of our closeness. Not my family or his, or any of our friends. The only person that had a problem with that was his last partner. And of course P made the natural choice. Because let’s be real. At the end of the day, who would actually choose a friend over a relationship? I mean, I would but I’m not what anyone would call “normal” and that is just one of the many reasons why.

I don’t know what’s gonna happen with Young and Jaehee. I haven’t read past the first part. I hope they find their way to each other. But that ending – “that Jaehee didn’t live here anymore” hit me like a ton of bricks.

Thanks to @twig-tea for being my editor.

#litbc book club #love in the big city #korean bl #rose reads

[guarding-rose]

Just finished the atlas complex and thought I'd pop in to revel in some dark academia done good tragedy but um. Nope. Seems that is NOT the general vibes around here. Rip to my hopes of finding fanart

#the atlas complex #rose rambles #rose reads #likr damn I'm sad and like emotionally processing the endings for ghem all #but also #they hit hard and it's dark academia #dark #like #tragedy #eith PLENTY of literary allusions to signify it ain't ending happily #and isn't that the message? the theme? the vibe? #that happiness is brief and it's hard and it's a choice and it's life and it's loss and struggling and choosing and choosing and choosing #and it's inanity #it's purpose and logic #and chaos and unfair and sudden and slow so slow and everything and never nothing but a facsimile of nothing that we fall into so easily #it's tragic #it was tragic #and i loved it #with my whole heart

[ghnosis]

switching back from vampires and misogynoir to music fandom today

#rose reads

[rosesutherlandwrites]

So I promised myself I would read A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY, Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution book, as a sort of background research overview of the events that take place during the early life of a character in a project I’m starting to plan out and

Like, it was great. But also it’s the longest thing I’ve ever read. Longer than the brick. I read FAST and according to my ereader it still took me 22 hours over the course of a month and change to finish the dang thing. Feels like an accomplishment I want to brag about somehow

#rose reads #a place of greater safety #frenchrev #research #airwip #well if nothing else I have some very solid sense of place and time now

[cyber-corp]

🥳🏠

#413 #happy birthday to this piece of shit webcomic that has changed my life from the moment i started reading #homestuck #john egbert #rose lalonde #(ascend descend rise up abscond) #dave strider #jade harley #gecko boy

[fefairys]

these two gifs always entrance me.. the ways she physically picks the card like it is a leaf on a tree, and that makes it just Turn Into the item. like this is a physical thing in space she is interacting with

and then the way the cord stays attached across the two cards with the hub and the laptop like that as they both move around. so fucking cool to me i love early homestuck i love sylladex shit

#sams reading homestuck again #homestuck #rose #rose lalonde

[vriskan8or]

let her go

#homestuck #vriska serket #terezi pyrope #vriska #terezi #vrisrezi #mic_art #screencap redraw of that one utena scene woohoo #vrisrezi and utenanthy dont share many similarities but there are some interesting parallels that can be drawn #like theyre all characters who are devoted to the respective roles they think they have #utena needs to be a prince and vriska needs to be a hero #terezi needs to cast vriska as the villain so that she can be the one to bring her to justice while anthy #is resigned to her role as the rose bride and is cast as a witch by others (and herself in a way...) to justify her suffering #im too tired to put into words all the other shit rattlign around in my brain but something something vriska society violence princes utena #something interesting to note is that in the rgu stabbing scene utena is walking to the left while is hs vriskas walking to the right #which i think is mostly a cultural difference due to english being read left to right while japanese is read right to left #changing which direction is percieved as forward #which could be read further into but could also just be the natural flow of the scene or whateevr #idk i need to peruse ohtori.nu again i looooove reading utena essays

[firstofficerrose]

I'm slowly going back through the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and I am reminded once again of how very much I love Watson. He's the best. He's my kind of weirdo. He does not want drugs, thank you very much, he wants to follow his roommate around while he does weird detective stuff. He's a smart man reveling in never having to be the smartest person in the room. He writes accounts of his roommate's investigations that are somewhere between biography, melodrama, and rpf. He falls in love exceedingly quickly. Holmes says Watson's the closest thing he's ever found to a totally average person, and that's the wildest statement anywhere in the books. I want to put him in a jar for study.

#rose reads #sherlock holmes #dr. watson #a c doyle

[roseandgold137]

who is this narrator and why are they coming for him like that 😭

#impulse #bart allen #rose reads

[my-rose-tinted-glasses]

Rose Reads Love In The Big City

Part II

For now I'm only focusing of question 3.

The narrator has an emotionally difficult relationship with his mother. Why do you think the narrator intercut the relationship with his mother with the relationship with this boyfriend?

My brain is all over the place so I apologize if this doesn't make as much sense as it should.

I think there are a lot of parallels between these 2 relationships in the mind of the narrator. The biggest thing I found in common in these two relationships are the conflicting feelings the narrator seems to have.

I think the passage “was old enough to know that my mother did not exist solely to hinder my existence, but was a person in her own right who had fought hard making her way through life” is a good representation of this dichotomy. He resents her in many ways and yet he chooses to also represent both sides of her. This is his story, and so many times I wonder if I, as a reader, am getting an accurate representation of events. And yet, with his Umma and also his boyfriend he feels the need to at times, defend them right after he attacks them with his words.

With Hyung this internal conflict seems even less nuanced, as he insults him in the middle of grandiose love declarations. The way he immediately put Hyung on a pedestal and himself several steps below ground, was a big neon sign for me. And as the love obsession grew, so did the internal conflict. Because after the physical attraction, the more he knew about Hyung the harsher his words to describe him became. My own thoughts about Hyung were definitely put into a different perspective when I read @doyou000me post giving me the historical context that he talked about. But honestly I could relate to the author whenever Hyung said something really “deep” about the universe or, you know, fish, because I found myself rolling my eyes. And yet, as much as the author seems to detest him at times, calling him a bastard he was also, in his own words “ready to change my entire belief system for him”.

I kept thinking, why are you so obsessed with this guy? He seems like a dick honestly and granted I can’t see him, but is he really that pretty? That it’s worth all this? But given how this relationship started, I don’t think it was so much about Hyung’s looks, as it was about the narrator’s lack of self esteem and his loneliness. Like the cliché, he’s not in love with him, he’s in love with love. He’s in love with the idea of belonging to someone else. Of being in a relationship. This becomes even more obvious just before the break up when he writes “I was enamored by this image of myself cooking for him”.

I could argue that both the relationships are about being wanted/needed, more than about his feelings towards either person.

There’s another parallel that I found that’s been rattling in my brain but I still can’t articulate well enough to write about it. Maybe someone else can give it a go. Or maybe I'll came back to it later.

Something something about Hyungs obssession with American Imperialism and being watched, and something about his mother’s religious beliefs. The contempt he feels about both of these things is similar.

I mean, he calls her church “ the source of all evil rumour in this world” and mocks Hyung’s fear of being monitored. Even before all this talk about his past, just the way Hyung speaks makes the narrator think cult at one point. And then with the discovery of his browser history relating homosexuality with disease, there’s a parallel to the Leviticus passage that his mum passes to him in a note.

Anyway these are my first thoughts about this chapter.

#litbc book club #love in the big city #korean bl #rose reads

[junotter]

in-between moments

#tenrose #timepetals #rose tyler #tenth doctor #10th doctor #doctor who #doctor who fanart #dw fanart #my art #shes texting jackie whos currently having a hair EMERGENCY #i just wanted to draw rose in some of my own outfits tbh.... #holy shit hes reading AN EMPTY BOOK(/j) #rn my daily routine is study for 9 hours while watching doctor who and then drawing tenrose fanart for 3 hours after

[ghnosis]

finished Fic! moving on to Horror Noire, which I’m very excited for.

#rose reads #not ghost

[arataka-reigen]

I'm trying to start a movement here

[ID: The first 3 images are edited versions of the "Let's take ibuprofen together" meme. The captions now say "Let's read shoujo together". They each show a person holding their hand out to the viewer; a character from the series Benigyokuzui, Mob from Mob Psycho 100, and Jerma. / end ID]

ID provided by @siroofington thank you so much

#and don't even think shoujo is just romance. you cant even begin to understand the rich world of shoujo. join me in this beautiful journey. #let's read shoujo together #<my tags from that other shoujo post #i was definitely referencing the let's take ibuprofen together meme #gi talks #shoujo #anime #shounen #my happy marriage #natsume yuujinchou #akatsuki no yona #requiem of the rose king #colette decides to die #basara #just tagging a few off the top of my head that don't include only romance so more people can check them out #i haven't read all of them but i heard great thinga #josei #josei is also a dying art form and i'll just lump josei and shoujo together tbh #kimi ni todoke #1k #gi talks animanga #1 #b

[roses-n-toast]

❀ book talk ❀

Out of all the books I’ve read over my lifetime, which is a fairly large number, there is one trend that unites them all. Romance. It doesn’t matter what the genre is, if there is a strong and romantic storyline then I will read it. I read all genres as long as there is something cutesy happening between two people at some point. Now, of course, this is not necessarily the case for every single book I’ve ever read. Take nonfiction, as an example, there is no guarantee that romance will always be present in memoirs or essay anthologies. Still, romance tends to be a theme that I do not stray far from.

Recently, as I discussed previously, I have been struggling with reading and enjoying any book. It’s been a solid few months since I have truly enjoyed a book and this dry spell is beyond frustrating. I have tried every genre to try and bring myself back into the reading lifestyle. I read contemporary romance, sports romance, fantasy romance, dystopian romance, middle-grade romance, adult romance, literally any and everything I could get my hands on.

Then, yesterday, I decided that maybe the issue isn’t the genre but instead the romance. Do I really want to read about someone else finding their happily ever after? Especially when my love life is currently more than a little confusing and tumultuous, I doubted that I wanted to read about other people's explicit happiness and contentment in their romantic relationships. As a result of this conclusion, I went book shopping.

Thankfully for my bank account, I have a stack of gift cards to the bookstore. I was browsing the shelves for two full hours. That’s 120 minutes of pure bliss. Well, okay, maybe bliss is overstating my excitement a little bit. I was also a little frustrated with how inexperienced I am with basic non-romantic fiction. What was I supposed to be looking for?

I ended up purchasing three books.

Binge by: Douglas Coupland

Daddy by: Emma Cline

My Life as a Villainess by: Laura Lippman

I have already started reading Binge and am so far enjoying it immensely. I am already 32% into the novel and am consuming it at speeds that rival the travel of light. I plan to review and post my thoughts on the novel once I am finished with it, so stay tuned for that post.

If I continue reading at this speed I plan to be finished with it by Monday (January 30, 2023).

It seems as though the purchase of gritty, non-romantic fiction has cured my reading slump. I am shocked by how quickly I seem to have jumped back into the true joy of reading, but am not going to complain about it at all. I am beyond pleased to be reading again. It feels like coming home at last.

m.

#rose life #rose talks #rose reads