I have things to say

Hi, it's been a while

a (not)short list of unpopular polin opinions
+Colin saying that he ‘found/met himself’ on his travels is GOOD, actually, and Penelope should be overjoyed that her friend put that kind of work into himself. she should be happy the letters between them were genuine connection instead of him using her as 'free therapy’ as some people like to state
+Colin is not using Penelope as free therapy, ffs
+Colin’s line about not courting Penelope couldn’t have possibly 'ruined her prospects’ because she already had 0 prospects
+Colin caring about Marina even after everything went down is proof he has a good heart and nature and would make an excellent partner. (do i think he should have visited her still? no, i think she deserves her privacy, but Colin didn’t do anything wrong in the S1 situation and him coming to check on her, being nice to her husband and her children, and feeling concern about her happiness is HEAPS better than how other men in this series have treated their previous romantic partners)
+Penelope being upset he isn’t interested in her is 100000% valid. Cutting him out of her life for it however is toxic as hell (and celebrating her 'ghosting’ him is very telling)
+Penelope was SUPER out of line multiple times w/ Colin, in particular when he’s clearly heartbroken. Nearly confessing her crush on him in S1 was bad and selfish (his engagement JUST blew up very publicly by her hand) and when he comes back from traveling (aka: trying to heal after said blow up) asking about women he met is very tone deaf. reminding him she herself is a woman is ALSO very tone deaf
+Penelope has been and continues to be a bad friend to him, partly by her own admission when he complimented her on being a loyal person and she said she didn’t deserve that (good news: this means she can have a character arc becoming a better one!)
+Calling Colin 'stupid’ or an 'idiot’ simply because he doesn’t realize Penelope has a crush on him or for verbalizing things poorly is ableist and it needs to stop being so normalized in this fandom

First of all:

- Penelope is a person. A person with feelings. I’m sure she was happy Colin took good care of himself, but she’s also allowed to her own feelings. It’s okay to be disappointed when someone you love doesn’t love you back. Feelings are not black and white and you can’t always control then. Especially not when you’re reacting to something. Colin had just exchanged lots of letters with her. She was full of hope and you may argue that’s her own fault but it’s perfectly reasonable she was disappointed.

Second:

- Penelope is not obligated to continue her friendship with him, especially because she doesn’t want to be just his friend. And he doesn’t love her back. And that hurts. A lot. If she needs some distance from him to try to move on, that’s super valid. Colin can escape to heal whanever he wants, she can’t. She’s stuck in the ton. Cutting him out is the only thing she can do at the moment. It’s not toxic, it’s self-preservation. Colin might not like it, but Penelope deserves the chance to try to move on and find happiness. His feelings are not more important than hers, they are both important.

And finally:

- She isn’t hurt because his comment ruined her prospects, but because a dear friend of hers mocked the idea of her having suitors in front of group of gentlemen.

- Reminding him she’s a woman came after he disregarded her as one. Can you imagine having feelings for a straight man and he tells you that you don’t count as a woman? She was hurt. And she reacted as someone who had just been hurt by his words. He was heartbroken but she was too.

I agree with the rest but sometimes I think you guys think Penelope has just a silly crush on Colin, when she loves him. It’s as if you believed Marina when she said those extremely condescending words to Penelope. Disregarding her feelings and her intelligence. As if Penelope doesn’t know Colin doesn’t love her already.

Marina was in a dire situation, and although that explains why she tried to do what she was trying to do, it doesn’t excuse her actions. In the end, she has as many flaws as Lady Whistledown. And Colin.

Colin is not the cinnamon roll/perfect man people paint him to be sometimes. He’s just as insecure as Penelope but doesn’t have an outlet, has a hero complex that lead him to try to control Penelope’s agency once, runs whenever he has to deal with something complicated. He has flaws too. But it seems Penelope is the only one people see flaws on.

And it’s exactly for the reason he said people would celebrate Cressida for being Lady Whistledown but would hate her. People assume just because she’s the wallflower, the one bound to be a spinster, that she’s jealous - and if guys thinks it’s just that, then I’m writing this in vain.

Lady Whistledown is her only source of power in that society - and it’s fascinating she managed to hide her identity and built something for herself as a woman in the 19th century.

And btw, through her column, she’s showing the flaws of everyone in the ton. And yet, you only see hers.

hbbisenieks:

prismatic-bell:
solitarelee:
elenorasweet:
rileyjaydennis:
obaewankenope:
sanerontheinside:
willowgrovecreates:
sussexbound:
prismatic-bell:
atomicairspace:
copperbooms:
when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
ACTUALLY
This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.
Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style.
Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.
A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin.
Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.
i love this post
This is super cool!

Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection
^this.
The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just
pause in the middle of a sentence…
and let your voice
trail away
look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg
language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it
because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it
we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system
and that’s fucking awesome okay
awesome
I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language
I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:
What?
What.
what
Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild.
I’m sorry, I WHAT?!
this is why tumblr is the best “social” platform

largishcat:

i do wish people would relearn the ability to think things are dumb without making up reasons why they’re also evil actually. personal taste doesn’t always have to be a moral stance, the personal isn’t that political. i told my friend i didn’t care for selena gomez the other day and he asked me what she’d done. i don’t fucking know bro i just think her music is boring. im tired

fakehappygertyorkes:

I just find it funny that people are more than happy to give all the other runaways the same compassion and understanding but not Alex.
Bc apparently Alex is the only one who’s fucked up or done something wrong?
Alex is the only one who has to be dragged?
He’s a child just like the others and makes mistakes and has regrets.
Hop off the Alex hate bus if u come here, that shit isn’t gonna fly.