No one asked but my least favorite toy when I was a kid (besides the evil china doll) was bathtime Elmo. Now what could be so bad about Elmo? You might ask. Elmo’s a nice, friendly, pure muppet. Well this Elmo was a bath toy, which meant he didn’t have fur, he just had this saggy, sort of loose red puffy skin which was meant to make him look like a muppet, which it sort of did when he was completely underwater or completely dry, but when he was wet and pulled out of the water, he just looked like a wrinkly drowned rat or a plucked chicken. His plastic eyes bulged out of his head like grapes and they were always looking at you. And he was heavy, too, when he was wet, and it took hours for him to dry. He had a little string loop on the back of his neck, and my mom used to hang him up from the showerhead.
Now imagine you have to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and there’s Elmo, turning slowly on the gallows with his black muppet mouth lolling open and his eyes wide and his wrinkly skin dripping into the bathtub. Gosh I hated elmo
Y’all, I’m over here DYING cuz Google suggested me this article about the crisis of backyard chicken keepers– which is that they love having chickens so much that they keep getting more, and then don’t know what to do with all the eggs.
Which I can see how this would be a problem, but it’s just so funny to me because they had interviewed this one guy who started off with 3 chickens, and then kept adding more and more, and eventually started donating the eggs to a local food bank, and at the end of the year when they wrote him a tax receipt, he discovered he’d donated over 400 dozen eggs.
Seriously, it was a whole article talking very seriously about how people are so into chickens that they just keep collecting them like pokemon and then have to “scramble” (their words not mine) to get rid of the eggs, because they weren’t even thinking of egg production, they just loved having chickens.
And while I may be over here laughing a bit too hard, honestly? Big Mood.
People are really out here judging historical figures liketheywouldn’thave held all the same views if they lived the 18th century. Sure, Jan, good luck being the only gay marriage supporter in the 13 colonies.
Seriously tho, pick up a lot of modern historical fiction (especially the YA stuff holy shit) and you’ll find this everywhere.
Good luck finding any historical fiction with a female protagonist that was anti-Suffragette (they existed!) who doesn’t change their mind by the end of the book. Or a story set prior to the 1900s where the best and nicest characters are grossed out and uncomfortable by their friend being gay.
Seriously, good luck. Not a lot of authors have the balls to write a historical fiction story where the relevant character(s) express views that go against our modern ideals of equality.
I personally blame it on this modern trend of “anyone who holds even vaguely problematic views is Literally Hitler and therefore cannot be sympathized with in ANY capacity“. Authors and creators are so scared of being attacked by the Woke Mob that they refuse to even try to create a character that thought and felt the way a lot of people felt in a particular time-period.
(Or, alternatively, they themselves are part of the Woke Mob usually and cannot conceive of writing a sympathetic character that does not share every single one of their views.)
