Inspector Japp hanging out in the bunny fort and Snookums photobombing

It's hilarious how much the bunnies love having a screen porch at the front of their play fort where they can look out from behind this bit of hardware cloth. If it's there, they'll both spend 80% of their fort time in the exactly ideal spot to look out from instead of dividing their time between the different areas of the fort (the tunnel and the big cardboard box) as usual.

file this along with the other sub-basement's worth of stuff tagged as "Cool Idea, But"

So often one reads these historical fusion AUs based on well-known works of film or literature where they swap the female lead into a second male part.

But gendered power dynamics are so central to most het romances and works about heterosexual relationships (even more so in historical settings) that nearly everything that could happen to a character or that that character could do would be vastly different depending on whether the character was [presenting as] male or female.

Of course this could be an excellent foundation for a gender-focused derivative work, if the intent was to examine the gender dynamics by looking at all the changes that would come about due to the protagonist's opposite gender while also intensifying the focus on the relationship between the two characters and their affinity or attraction for each other, with the heteronormative assumptions removed. But that would require making a lot of changes, and it's not usually what happens.

It could be a provocative or exciting basis for a story, but in practice what almost always happens is that the original plot is followed too well and, because of the absent heteronormative context and the different power dynamics, it no longer makes sense. I think the fact that the created problems are left as plot holes rather than any attempt being made to alter details to make things make sense demonstrates clearly enough that a lack of historical knowledge is probably at fault.

Douglas Adams on horses (or oppression)

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

—Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency