#but the other two kinda want more terf and are both willing to take it from the cars by force if need be

[junk-jester]

Wild Crossover Idea

After Humanity goes extinct, three unique and wildly different species all arise from the ashes of the past to stake their claim and rule over Earth.

First is the Greater Ape Tribe, lead by Caesar the Chimpanzee.

Second are the Inklings and Octarians, led by Captain Cuttlefish and DJ Octavio.

And third are the Autosapiens (AKA Cars), lead by no one.

#wild crossover idea #caesar the chimpanzee #rise of the planet of the apes #inklings #octarians #captain cuttlefish #dj octavio #splatoon #pixar cars #cw: post-apocalypse #This is also a sort of #aj 77 #thing too??? #mostly because the term 'autosapien' is a thing i came up with to explain the cars in the first place #they're a wayward creation of dr animo that mixes cybertronian cna with scp-2086 (aka those bus-shaped bugs that eat people) #its a long story #also the inklings and octarians are mostly landlocked to around japan korea and china while caesars apes control the half the americas. #in turn the cars control everywhere else and basically the defacto rulers of the planet #but the other two kinda want more terf and are both willing to take it from the cars by force if need be #all three got a shaky truce that of course the protag AJ has to mediate so that no one kills each other #but it's not easy #but all that lore doesn't really play into this general crossover idea #i just wanted to ramble autistically lolololol

[fandom-thingies]

My Complicated Feelings Toward JK Rowling

I think everyone who’s read Harry Potter and likes to talk has written something like this by now. It makes sense, right? She wrote possibly the most influential book series to come out in the last century. For me and many others, those books are an unforgettable part of our childhoods, and it hurts for the person who took us on such a journey of magic and wonder to be so unmagical herself.

So, here’s my take.

I think the thing I hate most about JK Rowling is how close she came to greatness.

There’s a reason her books became so popular, after all. For all her faults, (and there are many) she’s an amazing writer.

Every one of her characters feel like they could walk off of the page at any time and into your life. 

Dudley Dursley with his absorption of how his parents treat Harry and how his friends treat him, with his slow growth throughout the books into a person beyond who he was raised to be.

Molly Weasley with her overbearing mother henning, sometimes harmful but oh so clearly coming from a place of love, and her complete willingness to adopt any child that stands still long enough for her to do so. (Except Fleur)

Narcissa Malfoy with her belief in the horrible things she’s doing, without that stopping her from being entirely willing to do anything for her child.

Sirius Black with his tendency to unintentionally echo the sentiments he was raised with, and the tragedy of him losing his chance to ever truly grow as a person after being thrown in Azkaban for twelve years and then dying so soon after, and his complete, unconditional love for Harry.

I could write essays on any of them, and my point is that while JK’s treatment of certain issues and characters makes me want to hate Harry Potter, her characterization itself is both consistent and magnificently human.

Her world, too, is beautiful.

I first read Harry Potter before I turned eleven, and I was one of many across the nation who awaited my letter with eager anticipation. 

Can you blame me? The world she created filled so many children with wonder, made so many of us want so badly for magic to be real, to be ours- 

It was beautiful, and I hate her for what she could have been.

She had this fully realized system of prejudice that canonically created genocidal maniacs and put them in power every two generations or so, and she had this very realistic way of writing horribly flawed people that pronounces them as people without exonerating them for the awful things she’d have them do, and I can’t help feeling like “the horrors of war”, as well as she wrote it, wasn’t the story her world deserved.

But that’s a big idea to tackle, and I think it will be tackled best if I start small. I’ve spoken now of the beauty of her world, of her characters. Now I’ll speak of what marrs it.

Like I said, I want to start small.

So, let’s talk about the house elves.

TL;DR? Hermione was right. They’re indoctrinated from birth into believing the only thing they’re good for is housework, as well as being raised to abhor any elf who chooses to do otherwise. It’s a neat little self perpetuating system that bears absolutely no similarity in ideology to the mythology JK built it off of, and as such loses the aspect of choice that’s so significant to brownies.

Add to that the socially acceptable abuse, and you’ve got something that looks far more similar to slavery than it does little fairies who come to clean your home and get mad if pay them because they’re doing it as a favor.

And that’s why it’s so concerning, when JK brushes Hermione’s campaigning off in canon so casually.

It’s honestly hard to say when I started to be leery of JK Rowling, except that it was several years before the TERF scandal occurred. I think this was probably one of the earlier areas, though.

The first time I remember wondering if Harry Potter’s greatnesses were in spite of her intentions, rather than because of them, though, wasn’t the house elves.

It was, rather, a different contentious issue in the fandom, and one I’ve always fallen quite firmly to one side of, as someone who’s been bullied myself.

The first time I remember being suspicious of JK’s beliefs was when I realized she didn’t write Snape with the intent for him to be a villain.

Snape is not a person anyone in the fandom seems to be able to agree on. Some see him as a flat, cartoony villain, while some see him as a tortured soul who only did all those terrible things because he was hurting inside, don’t you see? 

Personally, I drew the line at him being a child’s boggart, as well as the time he attempted to kill Neville’s toad, Trevor, because seriously; what the fuck.

It had always been my belief that while him being obsessed with loving Lily motivated him to work on the side of good, it was more like Narcissa’s willingness to betray her cause for her son than anything else, being a sympathetic trait without absolving his cruelty.

Then I realized that a bunch of people (likely including JK) view Narcissa similarly to how they view Snape, seeing both as people who do bad but are good, rather than people who do good but are bad, and I honestly don’t know what to say to y’all.

You know having good traits doesn’t make a person good, right? Being capable of affection doesn’t absolve people of cruelty or make it your responsibility to forgive them and try to get them to change, it just tells them that they can do bad things without being punished for it. 

Do you guys need an abuse hotline? 

Anyway, that’s when I stopped liking JK, since I’ve been bullied myself and seeing her treat such a horrible bully as a good person kinda soured me on her. I’m not mad at her for letting her bullies grow and change- I love Draco’s and Dudley’s character arcs. I’m just mad at her because unlike those two, Snape is an adult and she kinda wrote it like forgiving him was an expectation of Harry, rather than a personal choice (and not an easy one either! Forgiving bullies is hard and it’s not always healthy!)

I’m getting off topic, but I genuinely believe that discussing this kind of thing is important, so I’m leaving that in.

Getting back to what this is actually about, I’m the kind of person who sees potential in things, often before I see the work itself, (it’s why I write fanfiction) and Harry Potter has so much potential it hurts, because so much of it is just wasted.

I said, earlier, that “the horrors of war” wasn’t the story best suited to this world, and I stand by that.

The first reason I believe that is because I don’t think that the black and white morality this kind of narrative often creates was well suited to JK’s writing style. JK has a tendency to put her characters in boxes of “good” or “bad” and as someone who doesn’t really believe in inherent goodness or evil, this will always feel unrealistic to me.

Because in the end, it’s JK’s minor villains, the ones not directly involved with Voldemort’s war, that really shine.

My favorite villains in the series were Umbridge, the Dursleys, Draco Malfoy, and Cornelius Fudge, because they were the villains who felt real, who felt like flawed people making flawed decisions because we’re all fundamentally products of our environment-

These are the villains who stuck with me, who I still want to take and shake because they were the kind of cruelty we’ve all faced.

Voldemort, as the main villain of the story, would have been more powerful if he’d been an amplified version of these people. In fact, the story would have been better in general if Fudge or Dumbledore had been the villain, because the problem with Voldemort is that unlike the good villains in this story, who feel real because we’ve all met people like them, Voldemort is and will always be larger than life.

A genocidal maniac is a villain few of us have faced societally, and one none of us have faced directly.

Also, rather than being a worse version of Umbridge or Fudge, Voldemort is more akin to a worse version of Snape. He’s a tortured soul who does bad things because bad things were done to him, rather than being cruel through his choices, his own agency.

That’s the first reason why “the horrors of war” wasn’t the best choice of a narrative for this world.

The second is that I don’t think JK sees anything wrong with her muggle hating characters.

She clearly thinks killing muggles is wrong, of course. She’s not that bad.

But, well, the muggle characters in Harry Potter are consistently kind of awful.

First there’s the Dursleys, selfish, entitled, egotistical, and cruel to anyone different from them. Then there’s Snape’s muggle father, who was horribly abusive, as well as cruel to anything different from him.

Then there’s the muggle prime minister, who despite being an important figure, is left completely out of the loop for anything concerning wizards, pretty much only used when the ministry needs the muggle news to say or do a certain thing, like when Sirius Black was declared a criminal.

There’s also the family at the quidditch world cup, of whom who only meet the patriarch, a somewhat stupid man who remarks uncomprehendingly on the oddness of wizards trying to assimilate into muggle society, a man who is canonically obliviated ten times a day.

And that’s it, that’s all the muggle characters I can remember. Aside from the Dursleys, none of them are given more than a page or so of screentime, and none of them do anything significant.

No, wait, I did actually forget two.

Hermione’s parents, who are obliviated and sent to Australia when the war starts, because the only thing they could ever do in a war is be victims.

Muggles in Harry Potter are consistently stupid, ineffectual, and cruel to anyone different from them.

Out of the entire massive cast of Harry Potter, there are few enough muggles that I can list them all off the top of my head without googling and the only muggle in the story ever given the all important chance to be kind is Dudley Dursley, who is taken out of the story the moment he stops being an awful person.

I’m sure you see the problem.

The issue with Harry Potter is that JK acts like the problem is solved when muggles are no longer being actively persecuted, when in reality that’s only the beginning of solving the prejudice that plagues her world.

Voldemort is frequently called “wizard Hitler” and I think that’s more accurate than people realize, because as with Hitler, people easily see the problem with Voldemort committing genocide, and they’re fine with working to stop that, but the moment they’re asked to examine their own biases, their own small cruelties and exclusions, the ten thousand cuts they’ve inflicted with their own hands…

The moment people are asked to examine themselves, to look close at the mirror and point to what allowed someone like Voldemort to gain a following in the first place, they turn away and go back to turning a blind eye to the fact that if you don’t address the societal issues that made him gain a following in the first place, there’ll just be another when it’s been a few years and people have forgotten.

In the end, Grindlewald is wizard Hitler. Voldemort and the death eaters are wizard neo nazis.

I’m not Jewish, though, so I’ll let them be the ones to expand further upon this, as many have.

My point here is that JK’s story would have been more powerful if it had been about addressing the issues that underpin the death eaters, rather than killing their leader and acting as if that’ll solve anything.

JK Rowling is antisemetic, racist, and a TERF, among other things, and while I’m glad it shows in her work as little as it does, it does show, and I’m not going to cover that in this because a thousand other people have covered it better than I ever could.

Suffice to say, I’m nonbinary, and I’m glad I was disillusioned with her before I knew she was prejudiced directly against me, because loving her before she said the things she said and did the things she did would have hurt.

The fact that her world shows so clearly the consequences of her beliefs, even in the context of a prejudice that doesn’t exist in our own world…

I guess she’s always been too good a writer for her own good, in the end.

#harry potter #jk rowling #harry potter meta #harry potter criticism #tl;dr i hate harry potter because it came SO CLOSE to greatness and then JK just SQUANDERED it and i'll die angry

[shamelessllamapeanutthing]

Ships and Feels about them

HUGE self-indulgent post but my brain is frozen and I need to get the juices flowing so I can start studying, because if I don’t get into the college I want I just might have to kill myself and then y’all can say bye-bye to your fav fics by your majesty. 

YoruSoi- status: worSHIPPING (geddit? XD) them like the goddesses they are

I regularly play Wicked Ones by Dorothy and just imagine these two tag-teaming against their opponents, like the crazy, badass, ninja lesbians they are. It fucking gives me goosebumps and makes me blush like I am imagining them rawing each other instead. I am a big time SUCKER for powerful, cut-throat wlw. They make me feel powerful by extension, and my devotion for these two is completely unparalleled. 

VictUuri- status: will protect them with my life  

First of all, I love how layered and interesting they are. I can think about this show and this ship for hours and hours on end ( @feastingonvicturi will vouch for that). I naturally gravitate towards angsty ships and writing (because I am a weird sado-maso cross, what can I say) except for these two fluffy bastards. I had been putting off watching YOI because of the weird things I had read about ‘yaoi’ animes (IK YOI is not yaoi, now) till someone told me how pure and deep their love for each other was and welp, here we are. 

RenRuki- status: comfort ship I’ll defend till death

It was one of my first ships and even as I multi-shipper, I always had a preference for them. Childhood-friends-to-lovers trope tugs on my heartstrings like little else and Renji’s devotion towards Rukia warms my heart. I hear them in nearly every song, imagine them in every scenario I read or write about and even though I have multiple ships I adore involving Rukia and Renji both, the two together is everything to me. (Presently obsessed with the amazing hcs and art by @recurring-polynya you might wanna check them out)

KaiRay- status: heart is taking a break, but remains firmly attached

I got into Beyblade BECAUSE of this ship, because of the moments these two shared in V-Force that I caught glimpses of when my younger siblings were watching the show. I love Kai and Ray’s dynamic and I guess what attracts me the most to this ship is the fact that as a teenager I was exactly like Kai and had my own personal Ray who got me through the worst in life. I love the sense of sweet nostalgia this couple brings me and I believe they are perfect for each other. 

MariahEmily- status: coffee shop AU, anyone? 

I was HUGE on MariahxRay but strong, stylish, kinda bitchy, dumb thot falling for the highly educated and fierce lady boss she doesn’t really know how to approach is another one of my favourite tropes, (see: PansMione, down under). I saw them interact and due to personal reasons my brain rejects petty rivalry between girls (because we’re all tired of that, children, be honest) and immediately tries to fix it in fanon. ( @trashyartz  and her beautiful drawings had a lot to do with fanning these flames.) 

ShunUki- status: want them to adopt me

Need I say more? No, but I wanna. I love the steady, secure vibes of this ship. This is the one ship I physically can’t write angsty shit about because of the level of understanding and sense of comfort these two share. They give me kind and strong dad vibes and I have emotionally been an orphan since I was in my early teens so. 

WolfStar- status: they’re canon, JKR can suck my toes

Fucking TERF 

Listen, listen, have you been listening? I mentioned I am a sucker for angst, right? Are you looking at the angst potential here, cause wow. What originally attracted me to this ship was the Chemistry between the two, cause it’s undeniable. You can NOT imagine Maurauders’ Era without imaging these two pining over each other. It’s impossible. 

PansMione- status: toxic and problematic, but oh so hot

I got on this ship because I was craving some quality wlw ships. You guys’ I can not explain to you how often female characters in shows and books do not pass the Bechdel test and I stumbled on some gorgeous PansMione art and just fell in love. IK this ship is hella problematic, but I am firm on my stance that the baby Slytherins deserve a redemption arc. 

Can you imagine these two after Pansy realises everything she did wrong and vows to be better? I imagine Hermione stumbling on a hurt and confused Pansy in year 8, who can’t stop her tears from flowing and is so ashamed of herself for that. She is feeling guilty and resisting the emotion with everything she possesses because the world she’d always known has crumbled down around her and everything she believed in has now been proven to be wrong. 

She lashes out at Hermione because how dare that smart, gorgeous, courageous girl also be everything Pansy once thought she was? How dare she, a muggleborn, unravel the complicated threads of the wizard world so quickly, so efficiently, and clearly see what Pansy never could? Pansy is hurt and guilty and angry and she hates the fact that fucking Granger of all people has now witnessed her crying. 

She feels lost and her anger only rages louder when Hermione doesn’t gloat or belittle her, she doesn’t say anything. 

(Why is this turning into a ficlet, WHAT) 

Anyways, Pansy gets over herself and she and Hermione get together and oh my god, imagine them then. Smart, powerful, righteous Hermione taking the fucking Wizarding World by a storm every single day with her sexy, vivacious, clever Pansy by her side. They’d be unstoppable and they’d love each other something fierce. It would show in the way they look at each other, with a sense of victory, not only over Voldemort but over the entire Wizarding society that had done everything it could to tear them apart, and ultimately failed. 

(BONUS: Imagine Ron and Harry being utter dorks when they go to Pride parades with Hermione and let the image cleanse your skin and soul. @feastingonvicturi @trashyartz one of you (or both?) needs to collab with me so I can write a fix it fic for these two, please. I will pledge my soul to the devil to be used and abused as per Trashy’s whims in exchange. Taura will do it cause she’s my best friend and loves me more than I deserve to be loved.)

(In conclusion, I adore every single one of these ships and am willing to slice a bitch’s throat to protect their honour. Except for YoruSoi, they are fictional characters IK but I am convinced they do not need anybody’s protection, least of all this dumb fuck’s and just might laugh at the very idea.) 

Also, feel free to reblog or comment with rants about your own ships even if they go directly against mine. More love to you if you expand on the ships I mentioned here myself. Tell me about your poison of choice, go ahead. 

But if any one of you dares to send hate to any of my ships, please know that I am something of a God in my own capacity and will smite you with my preferred weapon of choice i.e. blindness in the face of adorable puppies or kittens (in pictures, videos, art, real life or otherwise). Beware. Let people love what they love.

#my ships #Bleach #Yuri!!! on Ice #Harry Potter #beyblade #YoruSoi #victuuri #renruki #kairay #mariahxemily #shunuki #wolfstar #pansmione

[freedom-of-fanfic]

hey um just a request, but you seem to use dfab and dmab often in weird contexts when you could just say women and men. e.g.: "any mlm that is shipped by more dfab people than dmab people." as a nonbinary trans person, a sex assigned at birth is not relevant most of the time, so could you maybe use it less when it isn't necessary?

thanks for letting me know your thoughts, anon. I’m pretty sure that particular example comes from the ‘my objections to anti-shipping’ post, which is pretty old now (though I reblogged it from myself today). I remember re-reading that recently and thinking ‘ah, I don’t think this is the best use of these phrases’ but I forgot to edit the original post anyway (classic adhd move, tbh). But still, it’s not the only example of me using descriptors that are kinda ‘eh’. 

I’m sorry that my word choice here was inappropriate and may have made you feel uncomfortable.

my use of descriptors like afab, amab, intersex*, genderqueer, cis, nb, trans, male, female, woman, man, etc is constantly evolving as I try to be precise but also inclusive when I talk about experiences that are affected by gender (which, let’s be real, is a huge number of experiences).

under the cut I’ll go into more detail about why I think picking the right combination of gender descriptors is both really important to me and also difficult to get right without causing anyone harm.

(built in tw: descriptions of transphobia/transmisogyny and mentions of the harm it causes.)

because my blog deals almost entirely in fandom experiences and how they are influenced by negative outside factors, I believe it’s very important to address both personal gender identity and how gender identity is perceived/treated by others (especially bigots/ignorant people) both currently and over the course of their lives. but that gets very complicated, very fast.

For example, every gender experience will be different from one another even if they share aspects of their gender identity:

- even though all cis and trans women are women, cis women and trans women will have very different experiences of womanhood. 

- to dissect this down even further, a trans person who realizes they are trans very early in life and is able to live as their true gender will have a different gender experience from a trans person who doesn’t realize they are trans until later in life, or who realizes they are trans early in life but is forcibly misgendered by people around them, or a person who changes from a non-transgender identity to a transgender identity as an adult, etc etc.

Relatedly, a person’s life experiences are also deeply affected by what gender other people assign them regardless of their consent:

 - If someone of any gender is raised under the assumption they are a particular gender because of their agab, they will share certain experiences with other people who are assigned the same gender at birth. otoh, how it affects them will depend in part on what their actual gender is, or if their gender identity changes down the line.

- obviously, non-cis people have to contend with a variety of nastiness that cis people don’t have to deal with. I won’t go into detail b/c nobody needs that grossness, but suffice to say: TERFs, right-wing activist groups like FRC, and transphobes in general make non-cis lives particularly difficult, up to and including getting non-cis people killed. in particular transgender people (but this also affects other non-cis identities).

- other forms of misgendering also cause harm, whether deliberate or not. from outright bigotry to people who think there are only two genders out of ignorance to people who use misgendering as a weapon to accidental assumptions of the wrong gender, it’s shit, and everyone will have a different experience with these issues based on a shitton of variables.

- and if all of the above wasn’t enough, gender experiences are heavily influenced by cultural background, the political climate, racism, sexual orientation, and on and on and on.

(and regarding my * on intersex above the cut: i am not intersex, and while I have read/heard a variety of experiences from personal anecdotal accounts by intersex people I generally try to avoid commenting on it from lack of knowledge (particularly because some intersex people have expressed they do not view ‘intersex’ as a gender descriptor but rather as a medical state.))

These are all things I try to bear in mind when making a post on tumblr that references gender. here’s an example of the kind of internal debates that come up:

the Japanese word ‘fujoshi’ is gendered, referring specifically to women who enjoy/create BL & queer-eye fictional m/m relationships. It carries this gendered connotation both when referring to a particular fan experience* and when it’s used as an insult in English-speaking fandom. What gender descriptors do I use to refer to people who are affected by this?

(*in this case I’m referring to using ‘fujoshi’ to describe a specific fan experience in English-speaking fandom/primarily US experience. By virtue of being a different culture than Japan, the experience described by ‘fujoshi’ will necessarily be different.)

as a fan experience, I’d say ‘fujoshi’ can encompass the experiences of women and/or afab people (particularly afab people who were raised under the assumption they were a woman whether or not this was true) who choose to describe themselves as fujoshi.

women: encompassing trans and cis women. (trans women may or may not share the experience of being recognized as a woman/identifying as a woman while being raised, but they are still just as affected all their lives by messages aimed at women.)

and/or afab people, particularly if they were raised under the assumption of being a female whether they were or not: afab people who are raised as women are also affected all their lives by messages aimed at women, though that experience is likely quite different from gender identity to gender identity.

who choose to describe themselves as fujoshi: a person who was raised under the assumption they are a woman may share certain experiences with other afab people, but even if they experienced the same messages/similar experiences as other afab people who chose to identify as ‘fujoshi’, that doesn’t mean they fall under the descriptor of ‘fujoshi’. I’m particularly thinking of trans men and nb people here - unless any one individual says differently about themselves, I think calling a trans man or person off the gender binary a ‘fujoshi’ would be misgendering them - but there may be many examples of people who don’t relate to the gendered aspect of ‘fujoshi’ for many reasons.

as an insult, I’d say ‘fujoshi’ is almost always a mess of gender essentialism and misgendering. It refers to those that are perceived as women by the person slinging the insult. ‘Perceived women’ often include cis women and/or afab people of any gender, frequently including trans men, and occasionally encompasses trans women who the insulter sees as ‘passing’ as a cis woman.

perceived women: people that the insulter and/or ignorant portions of society would categorize as a woman without the person’s consent and regardless of accuracy.

cis women and/or afab people of any gender: a gender essentialist views gender as being synonymous with genitals (intersex people frequently either being categorized by the insulter separately or by whatever HRT/surgery was chosen for them). (in practice radfem ideology has the same effect, but they argue that gender doesn’t exist at all (only biological sex does).)

frequently including trans men: depending on how far the insulter is willing to go with their misgendering & often influenced by whether or not the insulter perceives a trans man as ‘passing’ as a cis man. (this may be affected by whether or not a trans man has undergone HRT/surgery depending on the opinion of the insulter.)

occasionally encompasses trans women who the insulter sees as ‘passing’ as a cis woman: because if they ‘pass’ they may be perceived as a ‘real woman’ (ugh ugh ugh). (this may also be affected by HRT/surgery depending on the opinion of the insulter.)

and now that I’ve settled on these descriptions, how do I condense them to something easy to read without distracting from the points I’m trying to make?

as an experience: “women and/or afab people”, maybe? perhaps “women and/or some afab people”?as an insult: “perceived women”, maybe?

(and I’m happy to take constructive criticism on this. I’d prefer it be sent not on anon so we can privately discuss it rather than doing it in posts on this blog (and if you don’t want to discuss your thoughts, just want to share and go, feel free to let me know - I won’t demand your time.))

in short: I think about a lot of stuff every time I pick gender descriptors on this blog. This doesn’t mean I always make the right choices - far from it - and there may not even be a truly ‘right’ choice. But I’m always seeking to be as inclusive and honest as I can be.

(PS: I don’t talk about my gender status here much other than to say ‘i’m afab’ because while I don’t presently identify as cis, I’m murky on it myself still & I don’t want my gender identity to affect whether or not ppl speak up about their opinions about my use of gender descriptors.)

#gender stuff #long post #gender descriptors #transphobia mention #transmisogyny mention #misgendering is a big problem #i really need a faq #Anonymous

[findafight]

hey!! I saw someone made a moodboard for nb gert + some headcanons and I thought you'd be interested!!

nb gert hoooollly doodle mate I screamed and hit that search bar so fast omg thank you for informing me of this I love non-binary headcanons it makes my life tbh That sweet sweet taste of almost representation Have some nb gert headcanons because I guess I’m at that point and I love them. it got too long but I wanted all of it so it’s under the readmore Wouldn’t it be rad to have more than one gender non-conforming character in anything holy shoot I can’t decide if they come out to themselves before the series or after they runaway…. here are ones for before and maybe I’ll do one for coming out post runaway later??

So..they’re out but out in the sense that they’ve told they’re family and close friends but Gert doesn’t have a lot of those

it’s a point of stress for them because they know, objectively, that coming out is a process and no one should feel obligated to, but they also want to scream from the rooftops because it’d make a pint and also they’re here they exist they want people to stop assuming shit but know that they don’t feel particularly safe coming out at school and it’s a hard go because they want to not give any fucks but at the same time…high school.

came out to Dale and Stacey when they were like…14/15? basically as soon as they figured it out because holy shit no more closet for you. everything makes so much sense now how did I not realize this earlier was their thought process and such a big mood bless. Told Molly a few months later. (They have to explain it to her but Molly is nothing if not accepting and willing to learn)

They were going to come out to the rest of the group but then Amy died, and the group disintegrated and they never got a chance to tell them…

Their school? languishes in being progressive but wheres the damn GSA?? Gert deserves an LGBTQ+ squad. Anyways they get suspended when someone in like a social justice club says something horribly TERF-y and Gert? GOES OFF. They have an entire speech about gender and how it’s a social construct and how you have no right to police anyone’s gender and ends with something like “but you have your head so far up your ass I doubt any of that got through your to your fucking brain” and that’s basically when they went from “kinda weird kid” to “angry sjw” at school

evil parents take precedent over pronouns and feelin’ gross in your skin sometimes, they reason, so. They just don’t mention it. and then the team runs away and they don’t have their anxiety meds or a binder and they can’t bring up how those aren’t my pronouns please don’t. 

Eventually, Molly pulls them aside and is like…I know you said when we were at school to use she/her pronouns but like. We aren't at school anymore and these guys are our family they’ll be ok with it. And Gert is like…yeaaaahhh…probably should. but also it’s hard and they procrastinate as you do with coming out when you have anxiety and aren’t sure how the people you have to live with will react and can’t conveniently come out in the groupchat

tbh idk who they would come out to first? I want to say Alex (yall know I’m a ho for gert/karo bffs but hear me out) because he and gert both, to themselves, feel on the outside of the group a bit, for self-isolation reasons mostly, but the two of them get along fine and they’re good at bouncing ideas off each other so Gert just plonks down by Alex and blurts, “Hey, I’m non-binary and use they/them pronouns I was going to tell you guys sooner but shit went down.” and Alex kinda blinks trying to process and nods like “ok. cool. sorry for, you know, misgendering you this whole time” and holy shit that feels GOOD bless Alex and they say “No. you didn’t know. just. Try your best?” and Alex is nodding going “yeah. Gert, you said we were a family and you were right. We’ll do our best to make everyone comfortable and that includes using your pronouns” and they are LIVING for this validation.

So they figure. Better tell Chase. who. they have been kissing. for a while. because they sorted their couple dramas out. sort of. because they haven’t come out to him yet. oops.

it’s sort of an accident because Chase says something like “you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen” and the huff, and he’s like “it’s true!!” and they respond with “it’s not that I-well ok I may not believe you but also I’m not a girl.” which leads to them telling Chasse about how they feel about their gender and everything and he nods along, listening and it’s clear they’re anxious so he holds they’re hands and says, when they pause, “well, then, you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen” and tucks their hair behind their ear. “thank you for telling me, Gert.”

And Gert is a little awestruck by how the look on his face hasn’t changed at all, with his soft eyes and warm smile and oh, he really, really likes them.

They tell Karo and Nico together when theyre doing laundry like “oh yeah I’m nonbinary, they/them pronouns please” leave it at that. until that night when the two ask for some clarification. (karo is a baby gay…she needs an LGBTQ+ squad too.)

Anyways they still have the same style (which now consists of wering the others’ clothes too. especially Chase’s) and give even less fucks about what people think of them now they have their family by their side.

#gert yorkes #runaways #hulu runaways #gertchase #because im a ho for it #nb gert #finda writes stuff #Anonasaurus #findaanswers #can y’all tell I came out to my friends via gc message?? #nb gert club

[lynxshrinks]

What this is - a Q and A

Q: Who are you? A: You can call my Sparkle or Lynx. I’m 29. White. In the US. Queer (bisexual and bigendered). He and She pronouns are both equally valid for me - just don’t be an ass about it. Q: So what’s the deal with this blog? A: My an my partner have the right genital configurations to make a human baby. We’ve been trying for two years. Right now we’re having the exact causes of our infertility checked out - but it looks very likely that our only option will be a medical procedure we can’t access until I specifically lose weight. About 80 lbs. I’m not interested in bariatric surgery, so, I’m going to try dieting. It sucks. I hate it. I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t have to. I need a fat-positive, dieting critical space to talk about what I’m doing as safely and carefully as possible. Q: Geeze - why don’t you just adopt instead? A: Adoption is way, way more expensive than most people realize. The only remotely affordable option of it is to foster first - which reduces the price by about 90%. Only problem is with fostering you aren’t guaranteed that the kid you take care of will be one you get to keep - the goal of the fostering services are, after all, to try and get the child back with their family of origin. In my state only 60% of parents who foster end up keeping the child. This is not something my partner and I feel comfortable with doing for a first child - there’s too much tied up with the pressure of Being Our Chance At Parenthood that I don’t want to put on a kid. Pregnancy is a little different - there’s limited ways you can interact with the fetus and once it’s uh... out its yours. Reproductive technologies are expensive but far less expensive than non-fostering adoption options.  Additionally fostering and adoption involves our lives being looked at through a lens that massively favors white, thin, cishet, rich, Christian people. Our family is multi-ethnic (my partner is Jewish), “interfaith” (atheist and Jewish), queer (my partner is bi and I’m as I detailed above), and middle class. I know people in better circumstances than us who got shot down just for being an atheist home. It blows. Q: Why aren’t you gung-ho for weight loss, fatty? A: I’ve spent most of my life at this point battling awful body image and self-loathing. It isn’t productive. It’s taken me a long time but... I’m mostly fine with how my body looks.  Additionally I was pushed into dieting at a young age - my early teens, largely for aesthetic reasons. Before that I was chubby but at a weight most people would consider ‘healthy’. After that my metabolism went haywire. I was probably predisposed to a haywire metabolism - I have multiple hormonal disorders - and it may have been correlation... but I A) firmly believe that outside of extreme circumstances depriving a growing body of a child of calories in such that they’d be at a calorie deficit is not great for that body and B) doing that damaged my relationship to food and my body image in such a way that it helped nothing for me in the long run. My strongest memory is being at a weight that would basically universally be considered healthy - within even the bullshit BMI standards of a ‘good’ weight and being told how much better everything would be after I lost ‘five more pounds’. Then I lost the five pounds and I was still being told how much better I’d look if I lost ‘five more pounds’. Q: But won’t this make you healthier? A: IDK - it might. But my largest health problems are genetic in origin - even skinny people have them, even if there is some correlation with exacerbation of the condition and high weight. But getting thin isn’t going to magically make my anxiety clear up or my psoriasis go away. I get migraines but so does everyone genetically related to me regardless of their weight. I’ll likely just be about the same as I am now - maybe with a little less muscle cramping. My blood pressure is good (I’ve actually had issues with it going too low), there’s no immediate family history of diabetes, and no family history of cholesterol issues.  There’s a chance losing weight might impact my end of the fertility issues - but, my end is not where the main problem lies, it lies with my partner. Q: Then why isn’t your partner losing the weight? A: Okay, up until now I’ve avoided talking about our specific genital configurations because it invites gender essentialists, terfs, NBphobes, and all of that ilk to crawl out of the woodwork. But for this part I have to go into the equipment each of us have and what’s going on. - I have a uterus and have PCOS. Losing weight will not resolve the PCOS, though, it might help balance my hormones some. Maybe. People of all weights can have PCOS but PCOS can put one at a predisposition to gain weight. Whether or not I’m ovulating is a popular topic for discussion among my various doctors. The answer? I probably am. Some. It can be irregular. However, getting someone to ovulate is something science can do. We’ve got drugs for it. Losing weight and balancing out my hormones some might even get my body ovulating on its own. Maybe. PCOS is kinda unpredictable. - My partner has a penis and testes. Getting him checked out to see if he has any fertility issues has been like pulling teeth. It feels like many doctors think male-factor infertility is basically bigfoot - especially in a person who is pretty healthy. The thing is, we’ve had a semen analysis done and the results STRONGLY pointed to male factor being an overwhelming contributor to this. Even after seeing his semen analysis results his primary care doctor seemed in disbelief and told us to come back in 3 months for another semen analysis. Didn’t even begin the referral process to a urologist. We finally ended up going through a referral chain of two gynecologists who, while concerned about my fertility, took one look at my partner’s results and went ‘oh boy’. We find out in about 10 days if there will be any way to improve my partner’s fertility. If there is we might have some reproductive options immediately available to us - IUI (artificial insemination) and/or fertility drugs. If there is no way to improve his fertility basically our only option is IVF. IVF requires sedation. The anesthesiologist who does it with the clinic I’m working with won’t sedate patients over a certain BMI. And so, here we are. Q: Oh man that blows. A: I know. Q: So your end goal is to lose weight and then get pregnant - what are you going to do if you get pregnant along the way? A: Talk to a doctor about what’s best for the pregnancy. I know even for significantly obese patients weight loss during pregnancy isn’t recommended. If I get pregnant at a high weight I will likely not GAIN weight and nursing afterward might even make me lose weight. If I get pregnant at a lower weight I will probably gain some weight. Q: So that makes the ‘maintenance’ part of weight loss kinda moot for you, huh? A: Yup. After I’ve produced human life I’ll reevaluate what I want to do with my body. Pregnancy will probably change it some. Q: So how are you losing weight? A: I have mild non alcoholic fatty liver (diagnosed by a liver doc) so it’s recommended I lose weight slowly - no more than 1-2 lbs a week. This is going to be a long process. Which, I know, waiting even more time to have a kid will have an impact on fertility. But I don’t have much of a choice - if I lose more quickly I could develop gall stones and possibly even damage my liver. the docs have been very clear. So, it’s basically a modified CICO. I know there are additional factors that impact CICO so I’m willing to adjust based on results. So far I’ve done it for about 2 weeks and have lost ~6lbs... which is faster than I should be going but, y’know, water weight or whatever Q: I’ve decided this blog is inspiring or should I say... thinspiring? A: Uh, please don’t consider me your “thinspiration”. I’m someone who has to lose weight in order to be a parent, not someone losing it for an ambiguous canopy of ‘health’ (since this likely won’t make me that much more healthy), or for aesthetic reasons. Fat me is largely content with how I look, and I’m happily married. I’d much rather be looked at as inspiration for how one might get through a troubling and awful medical procedure (which is what dieting is for me). If I can pull through this without destroying my sense of self worth, giving in to diet culture or fatphobia, and access the medical care I need in order to have a kid then this is a battle other fat people struggling with infertility can win too.  Q: So... how do you feel about the knowledge that most diets ultimately fail and people gain the weight back and then more? A: Well, i mean, I could care less if it ‘fails’ in the long run as long as I get these ~80 lbs off and can access the medical procedure I want.  I mean, as I talked about above my goal is to get pregnant as soon as I can - which will likely leave me at a different weights and body composition anyway. s Q: Kind of off topic - but what is your icon? A: It’s a lynx from a medieval bestiary.  Q: Why lynx - for the URL, nickname, or icon? A: I’ve got a special affinity for lynx as animals. They’re bulky, furry, and kind of perennially grumpy looking which are all traits I have. Plus ‘lynx shrinks’ is a fun thing to say.