colorguardian10

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People who think this planet was created for humans to be ours are so wild to me

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They're playing!!!!!!!!!

Ft. Nelly in her hammoc

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shoutout to flags that look like landscapes fr gotta be one of my favorite genders

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should i post this

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I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

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im going to complain for a sec about something arbitrary but as expected ppl rbing the news abt greece legalising gay marriage and adoption are being so unfunny abt it like "haha werent they always gay since ancient times" or "nice to see greece embracing tradition" straight up saw multiple people make references to aphrodite or the greek gods like can u shut up 😭 its not even funny you dont know anything abt this country

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fake screenshots of a dating simulator where it becomes extremely obvious that the romanceable characters murdered the previous protagonist and are trying to hide it from you

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Abolish the comic book industrial complex 🙂

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The thing about writing trans characters is that it is 100% guaranteed that at least a few trans people are going to be unhappy with whatever you write — not necessarily through any fault of your own, though that is certainly a possibility, but because there is such a dearth of trans representation in general.

Trans people are hungry and we’ve mostly been getting by on crumbs. I’m not saying that there are NO media with trans characters, but you have to admit that there are not a lot of really good things to read/watch/consume that have trans characters (and this is without getting into the question of whether or not those characters or the media they’re presented in cater to your particular tastes!)

^ This is usually the real problem. Certain genres and mediums have it worse, too! Think about how expensive it is to make movies or TV shows and how many people you have to get approval from and how many people need to be hired and paid to make one that makes it to cable, streaming services, or theaters, as an example.

Books and comics give us more to choose from in part because the barrier to pushing one out into the world is lower, though still not as much as I would like.

Personally, I want to make a TV show, but I can’t. So, I’m making the story into a comic that could maybe get adapted someday. This brings us close to my point:

Two of the protagonists (and many more of the side characters) in my current project are canonically trans. To some people, these two will be refreshing / the representation that they have been waiting to see for AGES. Those people will feel like they are being presented with a feast. To others, it will feel like being handed an empty plate and told to eat up. Those people are not wrong and I will not take it personally. The way that my writing makes them feel will be extremely real and undeniably valid.

What I want fellow writers to understand is that these feelings are not always going to be the fault of the individual author of the individual project that inspired these feelings (with the caveat that it does kind of suck when a new fictional trans person turns out to be exactly like all the other crumbs we’ve been forced to call a feast.) The people you make angry by breaking away from the norm could simply be mad because they’re used to feeling seen rather than because you've done something terrible.

People will be angry if a trans character is conventionally attractive or if they aren’t. They’ll be angry if you make the character pre-everything, non-op, HRT only, 10 years into a “do everything” transition, fat, thin, tall, short, etc. They’ll be angry if you make the character gay, straight, bi, pan, aro, ace -- I could keep going, but I won’t.

My point is that while you should definitely take the reasoning behind the anger your work may inspire into consideration and you should ABSOLUTELY remain critical of your own work if you want it to be the best it could possibly be...

You also have to be aware that you CANNOT please everyone, especially not with a single trans character in isolation, and you should not work yourself half to death trying to meet some imaginary guidelines of what “good” representation is, because it doesn’t exist.

"Good representation" means something different to everyone.

Also, someone already made basically what I was trying to express in this post but better and also in a single image:

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umm how to be a dog by andrew kane. btw.

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It’s important to remember that Pluto isn’t being kicked out of the cool guys club by mean astronomers and is, instead, transgender

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some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!

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They'll feel bad about this in a few years. Someone will take a photo of a National Guard pig brutalizing a student and get a Pulitzer for it. They'll make a nice little memorial commemorating it. The next EDI hire president will be sure to thank the brave students of Columbia for their radical action years ago before sending in more pigs to deal with whatever is happening on campus then. They'll golf clap as whatever NGO leech who wants to claim credit for the encampment movement gets their next grant. All will be well.

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all software should be open source wtf. u expect me to run this on my own computer without knowing what its doing???

car manufacturers dont weld the hoods shut to keep ppl from copying their engines. books arent written with a military-grade cipher to avoid plagiarism. and we dont let food have "secret formulas" anymore bc too often one of the "secret ingredients" was fucking lead

when ur distributing a product to the public u forfeit the right to hide whats inside it, u dont get to hand out a black box and expect ppl to just trust u when u totally swear it doesnt have a microphone inside