Arum-Lily: What’s the farthest you’d go for a stranger?
Aster: What’s one of your favorite quotes?
Aubrieta: Favorite drink?
Baby’s Breath: Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?
Balsam Fir: Have you ever been in love?
Baneberries: Favorite song?
Basket of Gold: Describe your family.
Beebalm: Do you have a best friend? Who is it?
Begonia: Favorite color?
Bellflower: Favorite animal?
Bergenia: Are you a morning or night person?
Black-Eyed Susan: If you could be any animal for a day, what would it be?
Bloodroots: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Bluemink: What are your thoughts on children?
Blazing Stars: What are you afraid of? Is there a reason why?
Borage: Give a random fact about your childhood.
Bugleherb: How would you spend your last day on Earth?
Buttercup: Relationship Status?
Camelia: If you could visit anywhere, where would you want to go?
Candytufts: When do you feel most loved?
Canna: Do you have any tattoos?
Canterbury Bells: Do you have any piercings?
California Poppy: Height?
Cardinal Flower: Do you believe in ghosts?
Carnation: What are you currently wearing?
Catnip: Have you ever slept with a nightlight?
Chives: Who was the last person you hugged?
Chrysanthemum: Who’s the last person you kissed?
Cock’s Comb: Favorite font?
Columbine:Are you tired?
Common Boneset: What are you looking forward to?
Coneflower: Dream job?
Crane’s-Bill: Introvert or extrovert?
Crocus: Have you ever been in love?
Crown Imperial: What’s the farthest you would go for someone you care about?
Cyclamen: Did you have a favorite stuffed animal as a child? What was it?
Daffodil: What’s your zodiac sign?
Dahlia: Have you done anything worth remembering?
Daisy: What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment?
Daylily: What would you do if your parents didn’t like your partner(s)?
Dendrobium: Who is the last person that you said “I love you” to?
False Goat’s Beard: What is something you are good at?
Foxgloves: What’s something you’re bad at?
Freesia: What are three good things that have happened in the past month?
Garden Cosmos: How was your day today?
Gardenia: Are you happy with where you’re at in your life?
Gladiolus: What is something you hope to do in the next year or two?
Glory-of-the-Snow: What are ten things that make you happy/you’re grateful to have in your life?
Heliotropium: What helps you calm down when you feel stressed?
Hellebore: How do you show affection?
Hoary Stock: What are you proudest of?
Hollyhock: Describe your ideal day.
Hyacinth: What do you like to do in your free time?
Hydrangea: How long have you known your best friend? How did you meet them?
Irises: Who can you talk to about (almost) everything?
Laceleaf: How many friends do you have?
Lantanas: What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?
Larkspur: What do you think of yourself?
Lavender: What’s your favorite thing about yourself?
Leather Flower: What’s your least favorite thing about yourself?
Lilac: What’s something you liked to do as a child?
Lily: Who was your best friend when you were a kid?
Lily of the Incas: What is something you still feel guilty for?
Lily of the Nile: What is something you feel guilty for that you shouldn’t feel guilty about?
Lupine: What does your name mean? Why is that your name?
Marigold: Where did you grow up? Tell us about it.
Morning Glory: What was your bedroom like growing up?
Mugworts: What was it like for you as a teenager? Did you enjoy your teenage years?
Norwegian Angelica: Tell us about your mom.
Onions: Tell about your dad.
Orchid: Tell about your grandparents.
Pansy: What was your most memorable birthday? What made it be so memorable?
Peony: What was your first job?
Petunia: If you’re in a relationship, how did you meet your partner(s)? If you’re not in a relationship, how did you meet your crush/how do you hope to meet your future partner(s), if you want any?
Pincushion: How do you deal with pain?
Pink: Where is home?
Plantain Lilies: If you could go back in time, what is one thing you would stop/change?
Prairie Gentian: Who is someone you look up to? Describe them.
Primrose: Describe your ideal life.
Rhodendron: What is something you used to believe in as a child?
Ricinus: Who’s the most important in your life?
Rose: What’s your favorite sound?
Rosemallows: What’s your favorite memory?
Sage: What’s your least favorite memory?
Snapdragon: At this moment, what do you want?
St. John’s Wort: Is it easy or difficult for you to express how you feel about things?
Sunflower: What is something you don’t want to imagine life without?
Sweet Pea: How much sleep did you get last night?
Tickseed: What’s your main reason to get up every morning?
Touch-Me-Not: How do you feel about your current job?
Transvaal Daisy: What’s your favorite item of clothing?
Tropical White Morning Glory: Describe your aesthetic.
Tulip: What would be the best present to get you?
Vervain: What’s stressing you out most right now?
Wisteria: How many books have you read in the past few months? What were they called?
Wolf’s Bane: Where do you want to be in life this time next year?
Shrek makes infinitely more sense if you ascribe to the theory that everyone is a PC in an RPG, and Donkey’s player managed to avoid a boss battle by rolling a nat 20 to seduce the fucking dragon
“I want to be a half-ogre.”
“What? You can’t. They’ve seen your picture, and you’re a human.”
“The ogre half is at night.”
“Ok, now it’s time for the boss fight against Farquaad.”
“I have my dragon girlfriend eat Farquaad.”
“…you what?”
“I have my dragon girlfriend-”
“No, no, I heard you the first time. Look, I’m gonna roll a d20 and if it’s a 20 then the dragon will eat Farquaad.” -dice sounds-
*pinches the bridge of his nose* “Ok, so the boss is fucking dead now.”
“So i decided to fight robin and his merry men with my fists and kungfu” “Just like that? Well its your funeral.” Rolls dice for damage"the enemy mob is defeated instently because the pc focused most of their stats in strenght and agility"
this is amazing but it’s gonna go over yt people heads anyway
This is how slaves brought over the peanut plant!
Last year, I took a class called History of the African-American Spirit. One of the things I learned about is black people’s hairstyles (especially cornrows) during slavery. They were more than just hairstyles and creative ways to store food. They were also used to create maps. Black slaves would use these maps to escape plantations and their captors.
Okay I never knew this! 🙌🏾
I’d read about certain crops being potentially brought over from Africa to the Americans via seeds in captured slaves’ hair, but I hadn’t known how simple and subtle the hairstyle could be.
What I’m saying is that JKR, like so many average people, very likely started off in a place of well-meaning ignorance. Then she started exploring new and different ideas being shared online. Some ideas resonated deeply with her experiences as an abuse survivor, so she began exploring them deeper. Then, wham, public backlash. Her trauma is triggered - but so is her curiosity. After all, if something she did or said set people off, maybe she’s onto something. So she starts exploring more. Starts asking more questions. And when she does this in public, there is always backlash. Meanwhile, however, in private, her new friends are telling her “See? This is proof we’re right. This is proof that the world wants us silenced, because they’re scared of the truth, and they really hate women that much.” And what do you know, what they’re telling her starts sounding more and more reasonable, especially since the outside world is becoming more and more hostile.
People keep searching for ways to argue that JK Rowling has always been a horrible person deep down as a way of explaining her recent behaviour.
But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.
Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.
It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.
Nobody is immune.
So you’re saying that The Clown wasn’t always… outright evil?
No one is born evil
Good point, but prejudice is best installed at a young age. Why is why I assumed the said Clown was just evil since some early part of their life.
And round and round it goes, until you have a radical.
This is absolutely how radicalization works. I started out “I could never be a feminist, they hate kinksters” (yes, this was a massive oversimplification) and within, oh, i think two years? i was saying “well, i don’t like the overtones of ‘radical feminist’ but what’s so wrong with saying you’re a radical AND a feminist? we need to make sure there’s space for traumatized women who really do legitimately hate and fear men.”
When you become an extremist, you become UNRECOGNIZABLE even to YOURSELF.
This isn’t to apologise for her behaviour or rehabilitate her into some former activist who is still worthy of saving; it’s to contextualise her recent descent into TERFdom compared to her previous political stances she’s openly held. She was probably never going to be a staunch ally for equality and diversity, and yes, a lot of the HP series were very problematic in retrospect, but she could very easily have gone the other way and at the very least turned out to be less of a bigoted shitbag she is now. The fact that her politics in late 2000′s/early 2010′s were similar to so many people who are now activists and organisers for queer, BIPOC and vulnerable communities should tell us to be all the more careful about radfem ideology and transphobia in progressive spaces.
It’s comforting to say “we should have known in hindsight that she was always going to become a TERF, the early signs were all there!” but that’s also not true. We have to recognise that the toxic ideology, the active harm she chooses to participate in, was a deliberate choice; this was a path she chose to go down, not one that was pre-determined for her. It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from being critical of radfem influence; “JKR was always a right-wing bigot and that’s why she became indoctrinated with radfem bullshit. I’m not a right-wing bigot, therefore unlike her, I will never fall for radfem bullshit.”
People who become radicalised, including those to become radfems, were not always irredeemable right-winger proto-Conservatives doomed for extremism and hatred, and that’s the point. The revisionist idea that she was always beyond salvaging erases how TERFs recruit people (especially vulnerable, impressionable people) in queer, progressive and liberal circles and how easily their dogwhistles can go undetected. The idea that JKR was already a closet right-winger from the get-go and therefore could never have been a good person is ultimately unhelpful because all it does it separate from the reality of how radfem doctrine spreads. TERFs sell their own toxic, harmful views packaged as progressive ideas as part of their strategy and that’s why their ideology is dangerous and requires constant vigilance to drive out.
