Not Another ACOTAR Fandom Demographics Survey!

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”

— On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

So I have a lot of blank walls in my condo and I'm seriously thinking about trying oil painting To help decorate those blank walls. Tho I don't know what I want those paintings to be. So while brainstorming I drew this Sups (Didn't help I'm still a drift lol)

Reblog if you need this energy

source

dark academia book list

The Secret History by Donna Tart

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

A deadly Education by Naomi Novik

The Decay of Living by Oscar Wilde

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Dead Poets Society by Nancy H Kleinbaum

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

The Little Friend by Donan Tartt

Vicious by V. E. Schwab

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marissa Pessl

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Gentlemen and Players by Joan Harris

The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde

Maurice by E. M. Forster

A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde

Vita Nostra by Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko

Poems by Oscar Wilde

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson

Ace of Spades by Fradiah Àbíke-Íyímídé

If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wilder Girls by Rory Powers

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

The Bellweather Revivals by Benjamin Wood

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Truants by Kate Weinberg

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

In the Woods by Tana French

The Atlas Six by Olivia Blake

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Love and Friendship by Jane Austen

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Bunny by Mona Awad

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao

The Ivies by Alexa Donne

For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing

The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky

Emma by Jane Austen

The Watsons by Jane Austen

The Devil Makes Three by Tori Bovalino

The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter

The Tenth Girl by Sara Faring

Confessions by Kanae Minato

Truth Exercise by Susan Choi

We Wish You Luck by Caroline Zancan

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

The Basic Eight by Daniel Handle

Confessions by Kanae Minato

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

So. 10th grade English class. We all come in one morning to find a balloon and a perfectly sharpened pencil on each of our desks. No instructions, no explanation, which is strange, because our teacher is meticulous about that sort of thing. A couple of people try to ask her and she says we’ll get to it. She takes role and then announces that she needs to go to the copy room and she’ll be back in a couple of minutes

Kinda unorthodox, but no one is complaining because this is advanced English and the teacher usually goes kinda hard. So, y’know. Brief respite. We all sit and chat; one of the boys teasingly steals a girl’s balloon, but gives it back to her easily enough; it’s quiet and kind of a nice break. Then the teacher comes back, stops in the doorway, and just stares at us

After a long moment, she says, confused, “You didn’t pop the balloons.”

To which one of the guys about two rows over exclaims, “We’re allowed to pop them?” and immediately turns around and stabs his friend’s balloon with the pencil

There is a vicious revenge balloon-stabbing, and a few more people pop seatmates’ balloons or their own, and the whole time the teacher is just shaking her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t pop your balloons.”

Apparently we were starting Lord of the Flies that day and she wanted to demonstrate the basic concept of kids turning on each other when there are no authority figures present and it was basically my favorite failed social experiment ever

girl typing a very specific question into google search bar, scrunching her face as she takes time to make sure she hasn't made any spelling errors, hitting enter, shaking her head as google only presents her with unhelpful websites that don't answer her query at all, moving her cursor back to the search bar and clicking on it so she can carefully write 'reddit' at the end, hitting enter again, sighing with relief as she finds a link to a reddit post asking the exact question she needed answered posted in a subreddit for a very niche topic, finally moving her cursor to click on the link, wondering why she didn't go straight to the subreddit earlier, only to be met with a deleted comment with a reply from the OP stating 'that was very helpful, thanks', sighing with frustration as she moves her cursor back to the search bar so she can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine,

hey so i know non white percy is a pretty popular headcanon but i was wondering if it was still considered bad to hc him as a poc with green eyes as i know there has been a heap of people calling rick's depiction of other poc with coloured eyes as disrespectful (re: piper and hazel). i dont wanna hurt anyone by accidentally playing into a racist stereotype y'know? ^ Not my ask. Saw other people discussing it on a different blog. Thoughts?

I think that to answer this question one has to look at the context and intent behind the features of each character.

Hazel and Piper are young Black and indigenous women (and in this case, the fact that they are women shouldn’t be overlooked). There is a history of providing woc with otherworldly/white features in order to “exotify” them and make them more desirable/magical/etc, and this goes doubly for black women. If you consider the actual colors Riordan ascribes to their features, it’s not hard to see how their characters play into this pattern.

Piper’s eye color is literally impossible to have. I’ve seen people try to excuse Riordan by saying that she has hazel eyes (I’m not sure why they even try to excuse it since they obviously understand it’s wrong. Take note of how far people go to preserve the “unique” eye colors of nonwhite characters) but he very explicitly compares them to a “kaleidoscope”, constantly changing colors from brown to green to blue, etc.

This has given people the excuse to draw her with bright pink eyes. Before people became more vocal about how harmful her features are, you’d be hard-pressed to find a dark-eyed drawing of Piper. However, take one peek into her tag and you’d find droves of blue, green, and even pink-eyed Pipers. I’m not here to unfold the entire history of how brown eyes are viewed, but I trust you to use common sense and make your own conclusions about what might influence people to be so subconsciously averse to drawing her with brown eyes, especially when they are one of her canonical eye colors.

To my knowledge, none of the other children of Aphrodite are described this way. One could argue Silena, but we all know that Riordan just didn’t keep her character’s appearance consistent. Ask yourself why he would go out of his way to give an Indigenous woman those eyes. He does it to prove she’s the daughter of Aphrodite, the daughter of beauty. Ask yourself why her brown eyes aren’t enough for him, especially since he has never given any other character this feature.

Hazel, the daughter of a Black woman with no explicitly “exotic” features, is given orange hair and eyes. For Hazel, even the excuse of “she got them from her godly parent” (which is fundamentally flawed) doesn’t work as Hades is literally described as having dark eyes. Add this on to the fact that none of the other children of Hades have any of these features (the di Angelo’s have regular Italian features) and it makes you question why Hazel was specifically chosen to be the one to be described with coloring that is literally inhuman (when was the last time you saw someone with bright orange hair and eyes?). At best, her description is inconsistent with the rest of his writing. At worst, it is dehumanizing and plays into the fetishization of black women.

Now I ask you to look at the situation with a wider lens and realize that the only characters given these inhuman “magical” features are Piper and Hazel. The closest thing I can think of for comparison is Annabeth’s grey eyes, which are both realistic AND given to most (if not all) children of Athena, rather than singling out one child to show how “special” they are.

Now, take all of this and try to see if it applies to Percy. The biggest difference is that green eyes are a completely normal feature for humans to have. They may not be common for white people and POC, but they certainly aren’t unheard of. I can name 10 POC with green eyes that I know off the top of my head right now.

Also, we can’t overlook the role gender plays in this. The history behind the exotification of WOC is infinitely more damning than that of men. While this does often apply to male characters, it’s the unfortunate truth that it’s much more common with female characters.

Most importantly, I think we can’t look past the reason why we are so vehemently against giving Piper and Hazel these features. Intent plays a huge factor in this. As mentioned before, it’s clear both through Riordan’s writing and literary history that the intent behind features such as Hazel’s and Piper’s are to exotify them and show how “magical” they are. By doing so, there is a heavy implication that their natural features are not enough. There is no such intent with Percy. Since his race is never explicitly mentioned, we can conclude that Rick originally viewed Percy as white (who are unfortunately seen as the default). Add that onto the fact that green eyes aren’t unheard of in POC and you see that the implications behind Hazel’s and Piper’s features don’t apply to Percy’s. Also, his eyes don’t come out of nowhere (and they aren’t explained away with a cop-out “it comes from his godly parent”) as Sally herself is described as having sea-blue eyes.

While I see where the concern comes from, I personally think it’s unfounded. Of course, one could argue against me and their view could be just as valid as mine, but when I look at the history behind each character’s features (both Riordan’s personal history and the history of nonwhite characters in general), I find myself concluding that the two situations really aren’t that similar.

good things will happen 🧿

things that are meant to be will fall into place 🧿

I do love the idea of Ma and Pa Kent seeming like a nice traditional Kansas farm couple and then like

Clark goes for a visit

Ma has her wrist in a support brace because she sprained it punching some asshole at the school board meeting for being a Nazi and Pa is banned from the local big box store for taking a 'horrible goose' approach to wheelchair accessibility

Clark is torn between pride and concern

Ftr: the horrible goose approach to wheelchair accessibility is what my dad uses when he goes out. He just decides the place can accommodate his large power chair and behaves as such, causing chaos and property damage as he goes. I'm very proud but also like, concerned he will get hurt or have to be rescued by off-duty firemen again.

it's sorrowverse canon that ma kent ripped the school a new asshole when she found out that they were trying to teach abstinence with weird 'licked candy' metaphors

(clark got sent to detention for taking everyone's licked lollipops and shoving as many of them as he could fit into his mouth at once, only for the guy at every high school who turns everything into a competition to decide this was a competition and start shoving a bunch of already-licked lollipops into his mouth in a desperate bid to fit more than clark, and anyway, it was a fiasco and lana had a blast)