I always think of, like, 2nd century scriptural debates when matters of canon come up.
General rabble: accepts bits from the movies and the books and maybe cursed child and that one fanfic they read when it crossed their dash. In general, whatever supports my ship is canon.
Proto-orthodox church fathers: The 7 books, 8 movies, Cursed Child, Pottermore, and everything from Fantastic Beasts including the new information in the trailer are all canon. If the books and the movies appear to contradict each other, your understanding is unclear. Maybe Harry walked into the forest twice.
Marcion: Fantastic Beasts isn’t canon. Cursed Child isn’t canon. The movies are not canon except where they provide a texturally harmonious expansion of the books. Pottermore and Twitter and interviews aren’t canon except where they support my main thesis. Those parts in the later books I don’t like are due to the nefarious influence of Steve Kloves. I will provide detailed textual arguments for my headcanons that contradict statements in material I consider noncanonical. I am a member of one or more character’s defense squads.
I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
Growing up fat, you get made fun of for everything you do, even basic shit like eating and laughing and breathing are funny when you do it because youre fat! And its so hard to not carry that with you as you get older, like I’m still embarassed to eat or dance in front of people or smile in pictures and its ridiculous and I hate it and I wish I was treated with more humanity
Thin people can reblog this btw
they wont tho lmao
Part of learning to survive was accepting that people will be disgusted when they see me eat and deciding that I didn’t give a single fuck about that because their disgust is rooted in bigotry and their discomfort is the furthest possible thing from being my problem.
Eating is such a basic and necessary thing, the same as wearing clothes and it’s wild to me now to think about how intensely policed fat people are. Like we’re just out here trying to survive and eat and we’re dehumanized, humiliated and chastised for sport. I’m sorry my beautiful fat angels for the hell they’ve put us through. You deserve so much safety and so much freedom.
Here at the Scientific Pokedex, we like dealing with scientifically-proven facts. Here is one such fact for you: Cutiefly is flippin’ adorable.
This is one of those rare pokémon that’s straight-up ripped off from our world. Cutiefly is the “Bee Fly” pokémon, and Bee Flies are the Bombyliidae family in our world:
Bee Flies are in fact flies, not bees. They are also fuzzy and adorable. Like bees, they feed on nectar and pollen. Looking like a bee works to their advantage: bee flies will infiltrate bee nests, eating the bee’s hard-earned storage of nectar and honey. They also eat the bee’s eggs, replacing them with their own bee fly eggs for the bee mom to raise unsuspectingly.
The pokédex states that Cutiefly can “sense auras” of flowers, and because of that can they tell which flowers are about to bloom. Usually when a pokédex entry mentions the word “aura”, things start to slip scientifically. In Cutiefly’s instance, this is not the case at all: real bees (and bee flies) have special eyes that show them a lot more about flowers than we can see.
Human eyes, as you might know, can only detect a small wavelength range of light. All other kinds of light–infrared, radio, microwave, x-ray etc. – are invisible to us. This is not the case for bees (and bee flies): A bee’s eye can see a different wavelength range than us, and therefore they can see more “colors”. Specifically, they can see farther into the ultraviolet:
Flowers are colorful enough as they are to us, but it turns out flowers are even more colorful in the ultraviolet. Specifically, flowers “light up” close to the center: basically a big neon sign saying “the nectar is right here!” for creatures that can see it. Here’s a few examples of what flowers might look like to Cutiefly:
Beyond this, bees can also sense electric fields. Pollen has a slight negative charge to it which creates an electric field, so when a flower has a lot of pollen it will light up even more on a bee’s radar. A flower has a lot of pollen when it is in full bloom and hasn’t been visited by a bee yet. With this, bees can “sense” when a flower is in its prime, just as Cutiefly’s pokédex entry suggests.
Cutiefly is a Bee Fly, with special eyes that can see ultraviolet light. Because of this, Cutiefly can sense when a flower is rich in nectar and pollen.
hey so I’m not giving JKR any credit whatsoever for accidentally writing a nonbinary icon (bc if she’d meant to do it she’d never have shut up about it) but Tonks refuses to use even shortened forms of her heavily feminine given name with anyone except close family members and has The Classic Genderweird Dream Power of at-will minor shapeshifting and uses it to look punkishly androgynous with Cool Hair thank you for coming to my TED talk
Plume de Lynx 