@throwawayasoiafaccount

@throwawayasoiafaccount

I didn’t even get a notification for being tagged in this OR on my main blog for the ask being published…????? I tried reblogging it as a test to see if it’d work but tumblr thinks I’m blocked

Screaming crying throwing up listening to Mona Lisa on a Mattress by Bishop Briggs

“It’s a biological fact that fish do indeed change their sex to keep the male/female ratio balanced in their school population.” Dramatic generalization that is extremely misleading. Unlike other vertebrate clades (aside from frogs), hermaphroditism does occur in many bony fish species! But what’s described in the quote there is called bidirectional hermaphroditism, in which an individual can go back and forth. This is uncommon. Most hermaphroditic fishes are sequential in only one direction, starting out as male and switching to female (protandry, like clownfishes) or starting out female and switching to male (protogyny, like wrasses). This is irreversible. Bidirectionality as described there happens almost exclusively amongst gobies, but also occurs in one damselfish, four dottybacks, and nine other assorted perciforms. There are less than 500 species of fish that exhibit any type of hermaphroditism (and there are over 34,000 species of fishes).

Check out inverts if you want to get a bit wilder, fungi if you want to be confused, and some unicellular eukaryotes if you want to be confused and amazed. Not that fish hermaphroditism isn’t amazing and fascinating but it isn’t ubiquitous and isn’t fluid in most cases.

Ma, they’re out there misrepresenting fish hermaphroditism again

Going thru a breakup so I shall be absent for a time but one more thought I need to eke out here is that I think a lot of disagreement comes from the difference between people analyzing what’s likely based on THEMES and ARCS and stuff from a meta perspective versus people analyzing things based strictly on lore and what is present in text. The Nettles Valyrian debate is a prime example of this. Based entirely off of lore and lore alone, sure, we don’t really have a good reason to say that Nettles has no Valyrian blood. And if you’re coming to conclusion based only on the lore, placing your point of view inside the story, of course you’re going to be confused about why people are so insistent that Nettles isn’t Valyrian. But if you consider what it would do for the THEMES for her to be Valyrian or not, place your point of view inside George’s head, conduct analyses based on speculation as to WHY George decided to remark on certain things and what he was trying to say. Then you can start to see why we think George didn’t intend for Nettles to be Valyrian. It’s like. If a character in a story has a pet bird and the bird suddenly starts making noise in its cage. You could find evidence in the story about this bird making noise and things in the environment that the author created that might have spooked the bird. Or you could consider why the author decided to have the bird vocalize. I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Just thoughts from a tired tired brain after a great deal of crying

characters who suffer the most tragic fates not because they were destined to die but because they were doomed to survive