The Foxes Asked In The Group Chat How Neil Was Doing With The New Freshmen, This Is The Photo They Get

“Are you the witch who turned eleven princes into swans?”

The old woman stared at the figure on the front step of her cottage and considered her options. It was the kind of question usually backed up by a mob with meaningful torches, and it was the kind of question she tried to avoid.

Coming from a single dusty, tired housewife, it should’ve held no terrors.

“You a cop?”

The housewife twisted the hem of her apron. “No,” she muttered. “I’m a swan.”

A raven croaked somewhere in the woods. Wind whispered in the autumn leaves.

Then: “I think I can guess,” the old woman said slowly. “Husband stole your swan skin and forced you to marry him?”

A nod.

“And you can’t turn back into a swan until you find your skin again.”

A nod.

“But I reckon he’s hidden it, or burned it, or keeps it locked up so you can’t touch it.”

A tiny, miserable nod.

“And then you hear that old Granny Rothbart who lives out in the woods is really a batty old witch whose father taught her how to turn princes into swans,” the old woman sighed. “And you think, ‘Hey, stuff the old skin, I can just turn into a swan again this way.’

“But even if that was true – which I haven’t said if it is or if it isn’t – I’d say that I can only do it to make people miserable. I’m an awful person. I can’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have no goodness. I can’t use magic to make you feel better. I only wish I could.”

Another pause. “If I was a witch,” she added.

The housewife chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she drew herself up and, for the first time, looked the old woman in the eyes.

“Can you do it to make my husband miserable?”

The old woman considered her options. Then she pulled the wand out from the umbrella stand by the door. It was long, and silver, and a tiny glass swan with open wings stood perched on the tip.

“I can work with that,” said the witch.

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it

saw a video abt how the “toxic boy mom” thing is just emotional incest/enmeshment and i was like yeah correct. then i looked at the comments and it was all ppl blaming the sons??? mocking them, saying they should just get over it, saying no woman should ever date them, that if their mom is like that then it’s their fault for “allowing” it and like. y’all i do not know how else to explain that a parent abusing their child (bc that’s what emotional incest is) is not the child’s fault. if you realize your partner is a victim of enmeshment/emotional incest, you should handle it the same way you would with any other abuse victim, with care and tact and offers of support. not mockery and blame. jesus christ.

he is perfect to me

if i was 26 and had just woken up from a 70 year suicide-induced coma with no one in the present remembering who i am and instead conflating me with the ever changing image of the role i played in ww2 that now serves as american propaganda and 2 weeks ago i was watching guys get half of their faces blown off and a week after that the love of my life fell off of a moving train with me only being able to watch and then i had to like... deal with a billionaire nepo baby war profiteer calling me an old man and saying there's nothing special about me i would have started killing people. but unfortunately it happened to steve rogers. and he has, like, morals. so

My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency

Growing up is actually all about realizing people don’t inherently dislike you and it’s a bit odd to assume they do