Ducks in a row.

Item #1

I will never forgive esorlehcar for having me consider Billy and Elwood as a viable LOTRips option. Words cannot begin to explain my inherent horror in realizing that I’m actually contemplating ideas and improv words for these two.

I hope you meet a Balrog on the way home, for shame.


Item #2

I do not expect to write SV or OC for a bit. I shall, however, undertake a deathquest for someone in HP-verse, which to those of you who've been around since I started writing HP is perhaps not quite as adventurous as it might sound. As always, I’m not sure who will be my lucky punter, but I do feel the urge to kill someone, and HP-verse is always conducive to mass murder and the afterlife. Ergo, there will be dead!somebody fic here soon. Perhaps Draco, he does death so well, and he makes it snarky. How can you not love that?

If either of these is something you wish to see, I’ve heard I’m terribly easy to ply with pretty icons, just cast Jude Law as Draco.

*Thanks to jess79 for the TPB icons.!*

Is being pretty really all that?

I’m over here shifting through Jude Law photographs for Draco icons, and I remembered a conversation that I had with somebody last week (possibly in RL, possibly with serialkarma or ethrosdemon) and now I must inquire what other people think. The gist of the conversation had to do with Boys vs. Men vs. The Others, i.e. Beautiful Men and who really comes out on top.

Now, we all know what Boys are. We date ‘boys.’ We think boys are cute. We refer to them as The Boy. Ryan Gosling is a boy. Dom Monaghan is a boy. We all love boys. They are adorable. They wear Chuck Taylors and cute second-hand shirts. They belch, and we just roll our eyes. They have beer nights with *their* boys and we just smirk, because they are boys, and we expect this, because boys are not *men*. Men are another species altogether.

Men sometimes have facial hair. They generally own more than one suit, and it’s a good suit, too! A fair amount own property. They can cook more than one meal without burning it. Men have deeper voices, and they exude testosterone. “Men” tend to make your ovaries act funny. George Clooney is a man. Johnny Depp is a man. Brad Pitt in all his 40-year-old glory is a man. Men are good. Boys are good. People take them seriously to the best of their ability, but what happens when you come to those with the XY chromosomes who don’t quite fit the mould? I speak, naturally, of Beautiful Men.

I generally stick Beautiful Men in the “Other” category, because they are not quite men, but they’re not quite boys either. They are a category unto themselves. Whereas Men make your ovaries hurt, Beautiful Men give you cramps. You walk into walls. You forget how to speak. Beautiful Men tend to make women, and other men, act kind of stupid. You forgive the belching and scratching and other pet peeves. BM’s make us all a little messy, and they tend to bring down the average IQ in every room they enter. Jude Law is a beautiful man. Tom Welling may not be Einstein, but when he smiles, people do not fucking care. He is a beautiful man. And yet, in a society where everybody wants to be flawless and thin and *perfect* (whatever the hell that is), is it really better to be an “Other?”

I suspect it must be a bit harder to be taken seriously if you’re a Beautiful Man, because who really cares what you have to say? You look good; people don’t want to hear your thoughts on global warming! So, is it better to be beautiful, but not preternaturally so? Can life really be hard when you look like Jude Law? In an recent Details interview, he talked about 2003 being the worst year of his life. He split with his wife, their divorce was all over the rags, and then he had to explain it all to his children. This cannot have been easy by any account, but it makes you wonder -- people have to go through this same thing everyday, so it’s not like he’s the first person to have a messy divorce. And yet, do you think people have more sympathy for him because he’s good looking or less? Why? Do we always feel this way about people we consider to be more attractive than normal? Why? Is it jealousy? Conditioning? I understand the scientific explanations about feature placement and the way that humans tend to desire symmetry, etc, but I really do have to ask, do people think that life is better for the pretty people just because they can get in a club easier or a few free drinks?

Do you guys think being attractive all it’s cracked up to be? And who would you rather have? A Man, a Boy or an Other?

*Who knew Jude Law could make anybody think so hard!

[Poll #239134]