I'm Luna and I'm just getting Bi. All my likes, randomness, and me! I do not tag so you will be spoiled and there will be nsfw thrown in here. Sometimes I write or draw đ as a treat.
Traits that I love from Alex is that how good a first president son he is and how genuinely and passionately heâs interested in politics. He didnât think his duty to his country or his position is a burden, he proactively want to participate and to contribute whatever he could, and itâs so refreshing to see that his portrayal wasnât just some ungrateful delinquent who came to power and butchered all the opportunity because heâs just too occupied with his own things, honestly surprised that he literally could be role model in this character thatâs not all focus about his love interest with Henry alone.
I love in this scene how he quickly agreed to Zahraâs suggestion to host a correspondentsâ dinner even though Zahra just said it as sarcasm but not for Alex, every opportunity is a good opportunity for him.
How thoughtful heâs with spending tax payer money? On useless stuff?
Or when he was so desperately want to help with his motherâs campaign and be taken seriously going as far as writing a 14 pages memo no one asked for because he has the vision about the future of his own generation and he want someone to implemented it. Henry was right to be jealous at Alex being so active in making a different in his own capacity while Henry was stuck with cutting ribbons and smiling and looking more like puppets than anything else.
Alex also studied the opposition party and see what they have to tell, I love all the subtle way they showed that Alexâs life is politics and even when he was thinking about Henry not replying to his chat, heâs doing it while observing their rival, this is like building up pathways in the future if they ever want to go to a sequel it wonât be surprising that the challenge in their relationship could be about Alex and his dream. Could be foreshadowing of what Henry said about trading one prison to another, even though I know that Alex will do everything in his capacity to protect Henry and their relationship from all of this. They could always have both lives as long as they support and have each otherâs back. Love and live in their own terms.
Last note because tumblr could only hold 10 gifs, I love how Alex didnât even think about using his privilege not until Nora suggested about it to him. Just from this conversation with Nora, his comment on the wedding cake at Phillipâs wedding, or his Turkey tradition opinion, itâs all good indication that Alex didnât use facilities or spending money recklessly. Heâs thinking of everything and I adore that part of him so much.
There are so many other clips where Alex just being shown as this driven young man who takes his life seriously, I love all the montages during his campaign in texas, how he helped with the community, learning his speeches on the mirror, giving speeches so eloquently.
I know itâs only in fantasy that someone could be this responsible when theyâre in position of power, but I just canât stop thinking how rich this character is actually, he is his own person even without Henry, and thatâs why his love story with Henry as a prince becomes even more compelling to watch, because we could buy his character as a president son, with his own drive and dream that just happened to be in love with a prince.
I just really love Alex Claremont-Diaz and I want to see more of him. I mean whatâs not to like about him? He is handsome, super smart, a thorough gentleman, basically the embodiment of a knight in shining armor thatâs really suitable to save Henry from his lonely castle and showed him a whole new world. They are a match, and thatâs why Henry x Alex is more realistic couple than any other âfall in love with a royalâ story to me because thereâs no power imbalance between them, not only Alexâs deserved Henry, Henry seems like the luckier one to have Alex in his life.
no tv show will ever be able to resolve a m/m/f love triangle as perfectly and as weirdly as Hannibal, in which the woman kisses one of the guys, sleeps with the other one, then decides “actually, never mind, you’re both awful!” and marries a rich lesbian instead - and, while this is all going on, the guys develop a weird homoerotic obsession with each other culminating in them going off a cliff together. truly unhinged and unmatched
So, like, the thing you have to understand is that prior to the mid-2000s, the âYoung Adultâ genre as we now know it didnât exist. The expectation was that you would graduate to the adult aisle of the book store at, like, 13-14. This worked because the only people still reading long form novels into their teens were precocious bookworms who were better read than their parents.
Harry Potter changed all this. The success of the Harry Potter books convinced the publishing industry that selling full length novels to normie children was a business model. The thing about the Harry Potter books, though, is that at least for the early books, the target audience was a bit younger than what we think of as the YA demographic; tweens, rather than teens. Now, the publishing very much wanted to keep all these normie kids buying books into their teens and beyond, but the previous model of treating teens as functionally adults for marketing purposes would not work; there was simply no way that normie parents were going to let their normie kids read fully adult novels where the characters, like, do drugs or have unprotected sex and stuff. So, in order to be allowed to market to the teen demographic, the YA genre was created.
However, teens have an inherent interest in reading about sex and violence and drugs, and so authors who are able to incorporate these kinds of themes into their YA novels in a discrete way such that it flies under the radar of the moral guardians are met with success. But this is a precarious tightrope to walk. Not enough âmatureâ themes and the teens will loose interest, to much or to blatant and the teens wonât be allowed to read it. And so, it should come as no surprise, that the first person to successfully navigate this tight rope was a Mormon housewife with a vampire fetish.
âŠThe editor who bought So You Want To Be A Wizard from me in 1981 wouldâve been interested to hear somebody claim that YA (and particularly YA fantasy) didnât then exist⊠because thatâs sure as hell what sheâand the bookâs first publisher, Dell / Delacorteâcalled it. (When they werenât also calling this subgenre âjuvenile fantasyâ, as in this Locus ad from its publication year)
And that single publisher was buying and publishing multiple such books every year⊠presumably to keep up with its competition.
âŠSo either the âprecocious bookwormsâ market was particularly strong, that decade, or else this kind of genre marketing was, well, normal⊠and in fact paved the way for the later success of broadly similar genre works. [waves vaguely in the direction of other YA fantasy that would follow a decade and a half later] And yeah, this is an oversimplification of the subject, but itâs nearly 2 AM for me and Iâm not up for a full essay on it right now. Maybe later.
However, as for the thesis âthe YA genre was created post-the 2000sâ? âŠNah.
(Meanwhile I canât just leave with nothing but that sad B&W line art sitting there. Hereâs the full cover of that hardcover first edition, by Caldecott-winning artist David Wiesner.)
As someone who was studying childrenâs lit. as a genre back in college (in the 1980s), I can definitely say âYoung Adultâ existed as a genre before then â there were multiple decades of âclassicsâ for us to study â though I will admit that the boundaries of the genre have always been fuzzy as to whether a book lands on the"Juvenile" or âadultâ side of the line.
I think at least some of it comes down to the judgement call of the librarian as to which aisle to shelve a particular book. But thereâs been that âYAâ sticker on the spines of books for as long as I can remember.
Do you like bookstores? Do you like unions? Do you like bookstores having unions?
Answer yes to any of those questions, and boy howdy, do I have a call to action for you.
Half Price Books employees at several locations across the country have organized and, after months of being dehumanized by corporate lawyers, have finally reached the financial part of their contract! Hurray!
Except not hurray, because they are refusing to even budge on giving anything more than a pathetic 1% increase. And whatâs worse, is the offer is actually a thinly veiled 6-7% pay cut, due to taking away quarterly bonuses that make up so much of the employeesâ income.
Thereâs thankfully something you can do about it though! The unionized workers are partnered with UFCW, and they have made a website that has made it super easy to tell Half Price Books that you think their employees deserve a living wage.
The company has proven that it cares a great deal about its image, so any public support can give the bargaining employees a lot more power over their contracts. It only takes a couple minutes to fill out and any and all help is greatly appreciated.
