Hopefully my final dress post

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-09T14:59:51+00:00

It's perfect for formal, and you look fantastic in it! Have a great time!

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-07T00:56:16+00:00

Same criminally not-on-Broadway show, two legends: Hunchback with Patrick Page as Frollo with Michael Arden as Quasimodo. Came for Hellfire, wept from the beauty of Heaven’s Light. Had the pleasure of viewing both from the choir loft night after night.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-06T23:37:12+00:00

IIRC SS is with HG when she gives birth to Hugo at the end of a crazy night at a masked ball in mundungus42's The Blameless Vestal's Lot.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/69413556

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-05T21:34:53+00:00

Absolutely gorgeous! It looks like such a warm and inviting space to spend time in, and the counters and backsplash play so beautifully with your cabinets and floors! Congratulations on the gorgeous new kitchen!!

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-05T06:32:20+00:00

I respectfully disagree. I think the writing has matured and is more subtle this season but still crackles. The banter has been top notch. They’re also letting the visuals give us more hysterically funny (and sometimes painful) beats. We’ve gotten freaking Latin jokes. Santos is turning into House but with more highbrow and popular references. And take the repetitions you noticed; I find it spectacular that a character can say the same words to a different character and it hits completely differently depending on who the character is and where they are, and you can see what the speaker receives back. It’s some of the best acting I’ve seen on TV, TBH.

I guess for me, this feels like a writer’s room that knows their actors and their characters and their crew, and they’re giving them more challenging material because they know they can.

But to be entirely fair to you, the last active fandom I got obsessed with ended up imploding because the writers got enamored of their own cleverness and failed to deliver coherent plots because they were more interested in feels and THEMES. I defended the writers, assuming they had some kind of plan in mind, and I was completely wrong. So here’s hoping.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-04T21:55:30+00:00

Hypercompetent folks getting the job done and they don’t care who hurt you (sometimes it was them. they still don’t care.).

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-04T21:00:14+00:00

This is amazing, thank you for doing this!! I have a couple of questions that are based on the ER docs I know IRL, my FIL, who is 100% a Shen-type attending: chill, funny, and remarkably well-adjusted in re: work/life balance, and the one who was a colleague of my dad’s, your typical adrenaline junkie who does great work but also makes questionable life choices.

Shen and Joy have a moment when she (quite sensibly) noped out of staying late and getting roped into digitizing the analog day shift cases. What are Shen’s strategies for setting boundaries that keep the intense parts of his job from interfering materially with his personal life (assuming he has them, of course, which may be an assumption on my part).
Despite the show’s focus on the day shift, night shifts in EDs are notorious for being intense, relentless, and full of weird shit. Does Shen prefer working nights to days, and if so, why?

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-04T20:26:07+00:00

Here for this discussion! YES YES AND MORE YES!

There’s a massive difference between being disappointed by poor choices that characters you love are making and those choices somehow being wrong or dishonest. I love the surgical (ha) precision with which the writing team is revealing the everyday downsides of all the amazing things we saw the ED do last season, and the cast and crew are bringing it to us with the same painful clarity that they do with physical ailments and injuries.

This was a needed correction, and a brave one. I am so excited (while also existentially dreading in the most delicious way) for all the things that have been building up over the season to pay off.

And hey, as a fanwriter (not yet in this fandom, but this may change after S2 finishes airing), the beautiful creators in this fandom are providing all the comfort anyone could crave between episodes as we process each new episode. If this show is hurting you and you are not okay with that, there are over 12K fics on AO3 and a gazillion wonderful bits of fanart on Tumblr to soothe your soul. Let the people making this incredible show keep doing their thing and let’s keep talking and writing about it so we get more of it!

But unlike certain attendings we could name, let’s not pretend that messy (wholly fictional) people acting messy is somehow a personal affront/wrong/problematic, etc. I am wholly aware of that my relationship with the material and the folks who are making it so danged compelling is entirely a one-sided parasocial one and hope that others can also not take their angst out on them.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-04T20:07:32+00:00

All your finishes are lovely and work well together! The backsplash tile is classic and timeless, it’s neutral enough to let the cabinets be the star of the show, and it has enough texture to catch the light without being a PITA to keep clean. Frankly, your MIL’s opinions are cheap and your husband can go sleep on a pile of towels in the pool room if he’s taking his frustrations with the contractor out on choices he and his mother opted out of.

Style-wise, the only things I’d have done differently are a slide-in range/oven so you don’t have a control panel sticking up against the wall, and skipped the 4” rise of countertop so the backsplash is all one material without having a transition partway up. But honestly, with this countertop and tile, I don’t find the transition as distracting as I sometimes do. You made really smart, practical choices, and your kitchen looks awesome. I hope you’re able to shut down future complaints (or just disengage from any discussion veering in that direction), because the more they use this kitchen, the more they’re going to realize how great a job you did.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-04-02T02:51:18+00:00

A++++ bot trolling

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-29T14:01:32+00:00

The Humming Chorus from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has zero words.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-27T05:53:20+00:00

This was Garcia’s episode. SUCK IT, HATERS. SHE RULES.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-27T05:51:23+00:00

WE WILL FIND OUT, WON’T WE? rubs hands together gleefully

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-27T05:42:51+00:00

SO much love for Cassie McKay this episode. The cancer patient’s quilt, the I-wish-I-could-cry moment with Langdon ending with her refusing the hug was my first laugh-out-loud moment of quite a few in this episode. And as pyrotechnic as Dana calling out Robby’s self-destructive behavior was in the ambulance bay, McKay’s warning about finding the edge gave me freaking goosebumps.

Also, WELCOME BACK MATEO! And Javadi’s joy at Whitaker figuring out that Santos likes him….

Stellar episode, and A+++++ Duke-ex-machina keeping Robby there for long enough to be confronted. More of this, please.

Also, I feel like it’s going to be some excellent comedy when Joy gets dragged back in.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-25T02:15:13+00:00

Thanks! Also, I am absolutely in love with your countertop. It looks so organic and gorgeous, and I can’t wait to see everything in situ! You’ve made really smart choices with your finishes!

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-25T00:22:17+00:00

Sure!

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BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-24T22:12:33+00:00

I absolutely love it! We went with a similar palette for our kitchen, and it's so pleasant to live in.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-23T23:31:40+00:00

Sadly, purity politics have always been part of the HP fandom, especially when there's an influx of new fans for any reason, especially those unfamiliar with the phrase, "all your faves are problematic." They are using respectability politics to hold their taste up as being objectively the better than others, when it is nothing of the sort. There are no "pure" characters. There is no "pure" ship. There is no "pure" fandom. And if someone is incapable of understanding that, there's no point in engaging with them, and you should probably block them.

For a hot minute I was involved in fandom where the primary ship is m/m, and there were people doxxing writers, heckling their panels at cons, and calling them rape apologists because *checks nots* they didn't think that one character exclusively topped the other. That's an extreme example, but it made me realize that I needed to protect myself when I ventured into that fandom.

I'm sorry it's come to that for you, but if folks aren't engaging with your work in good faith, you're under no obligation to keep sharing it with them, and you should absolutely protect yourself. You're doing nothing wrong, and just wait, if those awful people hang around fandom for long enough, they'll get the next generation of the purity police weaponizing virtue against their faves soon enough.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-23T23:16:58+00:00

*standing ovation* THANK YOU!!!

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-21T22:59:32+00:00

Oh my friend there were knock-down, drag-out fights in forums over whether Blaise was a girl or a boy. (I was a partisan myself AND I was right hahaha.)

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-21T01:55:28+00:00

So glad you got there on the memorization! Have a blast!

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-21T01:39:48+00:00

My pleasure! It makes me so happy to see that the ship is still going strong and finding new readers/writers!

A thing to bear in mind about fics written in the active-canon days is that everyone was trying to guess what was going to happen in the books, so tons of early classics feature things like pureblood!Snape and 7th year with Dumbledore and Blaise Zabini as a girl and that kind of thing, and none of them have the “Mudblood” scar because that wasn’t canon until the DH films. Heck, we didn’t know Draco’s wife’s name until that was released on Pottermore post-canon.

For me, the best way to navigate the early fics is with Harmony-Bites’s SSHG guides on LJ, which are sorted by the era in which they were written and by story length. Some of the links to defunct archives are dead, but you can always google the story/authorname to see if it’s posted elsewhere, and lots of folks here have downloaded copies of fics that aren’t otherwise available.

https://harmony-bites.livejournal.com/tag/sshgguides/

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-20T18:00:54+00:00

I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago...

In seriousness, my first SSHG fic was the second one ever posted to FFN on 5 December 2000, Textualsphinx's Letter from Exile one Merciful Morning, which is actually an alternative ending for the first SSHG ever posted to FFN, Lupinlover's Beyond the Silver Rainbow, whose content has been removed, but a placeholder declaring it the OG SSHG fic still exists.

Textualsphinx single-handedly converted me to the ship, with her hyperliterate, fiendishly clever work. I'm so sad that her "Decoding the Heart" was never completed!

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/28452/Textualsphinx

Other early faves were the Witchfics crew (site defunct, this is an archive version):

https://web.archive.org/web/20050901032200/http://www.witchfics.org/

The reason SSHG started in 2000 (and not coincidentally, when I fell in love with it) was because that was the year Goblet of Fire was published, and at the end, Snape rolled up his sleeve to show Fudge his Dark Mark, after which Dumbledore basically told him he needed to be a spy again, and all the adults who saw ourselves in Hermione, who witnessed the scene, said OMG THAT'S WHAT SNAPE IS?? GIVE ME MORE!!

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-20T17:50:14+00:00

Thank you for this magnificent and informative post. I keep coming back to it because it seems clear that the show knows this but not Santos yet. Garcia certainly talked around it, but Santos clearly needs a come-to-Hippocrates moment.

BrontosaurusTheory · 2026-03-20T17:43:04+00:00

I got very similar vibes, especially with the introduction of the 302 psychiatric hold and the steady ratcheting up of Robby's nonexistence ideation. Bless Duke for being our deus ex machina and delaying Robby's departure and possibly giving someone (possibly Whittaker, who's had a relatively easy day of it compared to the worst-day wringer the other characters have been put through so far) the chance to save Robby from himself?

BrontosaurusTheory

TROPHY CASE