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#gender identity obviously doesn’t equal the person who made it
valkyriesaga-if · 11 months
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Built a few years after the Collapse, the city of Yggdrasil was meant to be a haven, a refuge. A utopia, where everyone could find their place and be equals.
But that’s the thing with utopias and ideals; they don’t last very long.
Yggdrasil was barely 20 years old when the Magi Council rose above their human brethren, firmly splitting society in two: the magi on one side, who wield privilege like a sword, and the humans on the other, whose only privilege was to stay alive and quiet.
After all, how can you deny Magi what they want, when they are the only thing protecting you from what’s outside the walls?
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You’ve been living in the Helheim district for almost as long as you can remember, raised amongst crooks, conmen and criminals all your life. While this hardly seems like ideal conditions to raise a child, it was better than having the Council find out your secret. Helheim was the best place for secrets. You knew it, your mother knew it, everyone in Yggdrasil knew it.
You’re an undeclared Magi. In a city where showing the barest hint of magic can get a child taken away from their parents and chain them forever to the Council of Magi, raising a child under the watching eyes of kingpins, thieves and prostitutes was a shield, an armor. The best protection love could offer.
Every day, you live on the edge of the razor. One wrong move and your life could be upended entirely. But when your mother is on the verge of losing her house, her business, her entire life to Greed, you can’t just sit there and watch it happen.
Being hired to steal the Eyes of The Watcher, the most precious gems in all of Yggdrasil, located right in the heart of the Council Chamber, didn’t seem like such a bad idea, at the time.
Genre
Post apocalyptic, urban fantasy, heist
Content Warning
The story will be 18+ for violence, potential sexual themes, explicit content and gore.
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Fully customizable MC: name, gender identity, sexuality, appearance, personality and demeanor
Interact with a varied cast of NPCs
Shape your relationships with your fellow gang members, from lovers to platonic besties, all the while keeping in mind that they are all criminals and liars, just like you.
Experience the Nightmares™
Engage in highly illegal, highly dangerous activities, and maybe some light rebellion and overthrow of authority on the side
Polish your skills such as stealth, combat or knowledge, and discover more about your magic
Spend some time in the luxurious streets of Asgard and other delightful places such as a Helheim fighting ring, the city sewers or a defunct meat factory
Hallucinate?
Pet the cat
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The selfish mercenary - Lònan [M, he/him]
Money is the only thing that matters to Lònan. He has made that very clear since the beginning. Obviously, he doesn’t seem to care that much about his own life, otherwise he would have found another way to make a fortune. One that doesn’t involve going into the heart of the enemy territory to steal the most valuable and well guarded artifact in town, for example. Just a thought.
The disgraced Magi - Yugō [M, he/him]
Magi have virtually everything they might want. Money, luxury, and an unending hoard of lackeys to cater to their every need. So you can’t help but wonder what might lead one of them to hide amongst the rats in the dark alleys of Helheim, and Yugo is not inclined to answer your questions.
The unwelcome guest - Halloran [M, he/him]
No one really knows who Halloran is or what he wants, but he seems to keep inviting himself in your dreams, taking great pleasure in playing with you and your sanity. Only he is a cat playing with a mouse, and you can only hope that he won’t eat you whole.
The estranged friend - Mavis [F, she/her]
Back in the time you lived in Midgard West, you and Mavis used to be friends, practically joined by the hip. While she remained as kind and gentle as you remember her, there is a hard edge to her eyes that wasn’t there before.
The mysterious outsider - Koyal [F, she/her]
A courier from outside of town, you’re not sure why she joined your ragtag group of criminals. Calm and quiet, she mostly keeps to herself, but you can’t help but feel her watchful gaze on you every time you have your back turned.
The disembodied voice - Morgane [F, she/her]
You’ve never met her in person, your only contacts with her being over the phone, as she gives instructions to you and the rest of the group. She seems to be the only one in direct relation with the person who hired you for some trivial B&E in the most secure facility in Yggdrasil.
Lònan/Yugō and Koyal/Halloran are potential poly routes.
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TBA
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This is my first IF and English is not my first language, so feel free to send any constructive criticisms and corrections my way.
This is very early development, so many things are subject to change as i work on the story
Asks are welcome and reblogs appreciated!
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communistkenobi · 5 months
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i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)
i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds
ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense
What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.
Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.  
As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.
So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.
One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please,  desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression. 
This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality 
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ausetkmt · 8 months
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Teachers enraged that Florida’s new Black history standards say slaves could ‘benefit’
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article277539723.html
The Florida Board of Education Wednesday, July 19, passed new standards for teaching Black history in public schools that included a controversial measure that says slaves could have benefited from their enslavement. [email protected]
The approval of Florida’s new Black history curriculum didn’t surprise Crystal Etienne.
A seventh-grade civics teacher in Miami-Dade County, she has seen it coming since 2022. She attended several civics training sessions over the last year — including the one where the instructor claimed presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson opposed slavery, even though both were slave owners — so the changes were somewhat expected. Still, the state’s newly adopted standards for teaching Black history left Etiennne mortified.
The Florida Board of Education certified the new standards Wednesday, causing an uproar among many. Some of the more concerning changes included teachings about how enslaved people benefited from their bondage, an attempt to contextualize American slavery within the global history of slavery and the false equivalence of anti-Black violence with acts of Black resistance.
Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, who attended the Wednesday meeting, pointed to part of the middle-school standards that would require instruction to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“I am very concerned by these standards, especially … the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved. It’s inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum,” Eskamani said.
Etienne, the West Homestead K-8 Center teacher, was equally disturbed.
“It’s disgusting to use children as pawns in their adult scheme,” she said, calling the changes an “indoctrination” into “white, Christian nationalism.” “They feel like if you’re teaching the bad, it somehow takes away from the good and it doesn’t. If I’m not allowed to teach the evolution of the country and the changes that have been made, what am I doing?”
“This is fascism at its best,” added Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the United Teachers of Dade, which represents teachers in Miami-Dade public schools. “This is exactly what fascist governments do when they censor teachers, when they go after education, when they try and suppress content from being taught.”
Since the Florida Legislature passed a slew of education laws over the past two years — from giving parents power to challenge books to restricting how gender identity and sexual orientation is taught from Pre-K to eighth grade — teachers have been worried, Hernandez-Mats said.
But these changes related to Black history are “not a way that students should be educated,” she said.
“This is narrowing minds,” Hernandez-Mats said. “We want children to be well-rounded, well-educated, to have access to high-quality education... when you restrict teachers from teaching with honesty and teaching with truth, obviously that’s going to impact conversations that we’re able to engage in with our students.”
Follows changes to AP African American course
The controversy over how Black history will be taught in Florida’s public schools follows a decision by the College Board earlier this year to leave out references in its new AP African American Studies course to the Black Lives Matter movement and slavery reparations, among other topics. The Board’s decision came after Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the pilot course.
READ MORE: Black leaders blast College Board’s changes to AP African American Studies course
Florida already underperforms at teaching Black history. Although the instruction has been required since 1994, only 11 of the state’s 67 school districts sufficiently teach Black history, according to Bernadette Kelley-Brown, principal investigator and former chair of the African American History Task Force, which monitors how districts heed the law.
“This new statute now basically says if African American history is being taught, it is going to be taught in such an inappropriate, historically inaccurate, watered down way that it makes it untenable,” said former State Sen. Dwight Bullard, a Democrat, who attended the Board of Education meeting in Orlando on Wednesday.
The meeting seemed designed to deter the average person from going, Bullard said. It was held on a weekday in the back of resort with $28 parking (more than $30 for valet). After the guidelines were explained, a public comment portion ensued during which the vast majority opposed the changes. Then the board voted to approve the curriculum.
A former high school history teacher, Bullard couldn’t fathom telling his students that there’s a “silver lining in slavery.” He then took it a step further.
“Imagine the blowback of the same teacher trying to give you the upside of Nazi Germany,” said Bullard, now the senior political advisor of Florida Rising, a voting rights group in Florida. “Not only would it not be allowed, there would be bipartisan outrage over the idea that any teacher, a teacher or a curriculum trying to give the sunny side of Adolf Hitler. Yet we now have an African American history statute that is supposed to now give you this notion of the benevolent master, or the upside or benefit of being enslaved in America. It’s crazy.”
To Marvin Dunn, a man who has made a career off of keeping Florida’s Black history alive, most recently through his “Teach the Truth” tours, the issues with the new curriculum were plentiful. He called the “attempt to reach some sort of equivalency for racial violence in our history” flat-out wrong. He called the idea that enslaved people benefited from their subjugation “evil.” And he called the sparse mention of lynchings, which was only found twice in an explanation of guidelines, downright disrespectful.
Awakening Black parents
Dunn also questioned why students had to learn about “slavery in China, slavery in Asia, slavery in Africa” in a Black history course, something he saw as an an effort to show that “we were just another country that had slavery.” American slavery, however, was very unique.
“It was the only system of slavery in the world in which the people who were enslaved were defined as property, were reduced to chattel property,” Dunn said.
“For a Black child to sit in a Florida classroom and hear that their ancestors benefited from enslavement, how do you think” they will react? Dunn asked. “They are going to be hurt, they are going to be angry, they are going to tell their parents that this is being taught in the school.”
That, if anything, is the only positive takeaway from the situation: “These standards have awakened a sleeping giant that’s Black parents in this state,” Dunn said.
Etienne agreed, adding that she’s already in contact with many parents who have voiced their displeasure. She, for one, doesn’t have a choice but to abide by the new guidelines.
What she will do, though, is encourage her students to do their own research. To think critically. To answer their questions honestly.
“My plan is to give them as much information as possible so that they can make their own decisions,” Etienne said.
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jrwiyuri · 3 years
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Me: woah cat gender is a super cool gender and it even has a card
The card: *says they don’t support mspec lesbians*
Me: 🧍‍♂️
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qqueenofhades · 3 years
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Slides on up to your inbox like the darkling in a good mood (preens with expert cape whirl). Hello your eminence. Ivan and Fedyor each meet Kirigan for the first time. Ahem. If you’re still taking prompts about those two loverender heartbirds.
I hope you don't mind if I altered your prompt slightly, since I figured that they met Kirigan for the first FIRST time as boys brought to the Little Palace. Instead, they meet Kirigan for the first time as a couple in order to ask a terrifying favor, especially since this plays nicely into my recent Thoughts about them + him.
Also on AO3 as a chapter of the better half of me.
The pair of Heartrenders come to a final halt before the tall carved doors, look them up and down, and draw identical nervous breaths. The oprichniki on guard know Ivan well, of course, though they are less used to seeing him with Fedyor – and more to the point, for the two of them to be holding hands. But they rap on the doors, call, “My lord, your visitors have arrived,” and swing them wide, permitting entrance. And in such fashion, formal keftas stiff with laundry starch, palms sweating but backs straight, they go on in.
Inside, General Kirigan is bent over an ornate table laden with charts and books, but he straightens up when he sees them. “Ah, Ivan.” His tone is both friendly – so much as Kirigan goes in for, at least – and questioning. His dark eyes flick to their clasped hands. He obviously must have an inkling of what they are here to ask him, but he arches an eyebrow nonetheless. “And – Fedyor, was it? Fedyor Kaminsky?”
“Da, moi soverennyi,” Fedyor answers formally, in Old Ravkan, though the odds that Kirigan doesn’t know the exact name and specialty of each and every Grisha in the ranks are slim-to-nonexistent. He lets go of Ivan’s hand, as if eager to be considered on his own merits and not only as the other man’s shadow. “Thank you for receiving us.”
“Of course.” Kirigan tips his head to the oprichniki, who close the doors, indicating that the General is now occupied and will not be disturbed. “Sit. Glass of kvas?”
“No, sir.” Despite the invitation, neither Ivan nor Fedyor take a seat, hands stiffly clasped behind their backs, the way they stand on parade when the tsar reviews the troops in spring. Ivan clears his throat. “Fedyor and I have come to ask your permission to…”
He’s not scared of most things. Almost none, in fact. But this is different.
He coughs.
“Permission to…” Fedyor picks up helpfully, trying to cover the moment of silence, the way the two of them have each other’s backs whether in battle or in horribly awkward conversations with their commanding officer. “To be…”
He glances back at Ivan, and Ivan takes the last of it. “To be married,” he says, as flatly and firmly as he can. Then, feeling it perhaps necessarily to specify in case this is not something Kirigan has been asked before, he adds, “To each other.”
Both of Kirigan’s eyebrows jump this time, though he doesn’t respond aloud. In theory, the Grisha are allowed to be married, but they are required to seek permission from the general first, and if he deems the liaison hasty, ill-judged, detrimental to morale, or otherwise prejudicial to the interests of the Second Army, Ravka’s most elite and feared military force, that permission can be denied. The last thing you want is lovers making too much of a stink, trying to pull special privileges or abandoning their responsibilities to the unit in favor of their partner. Then there is, of course, the added fact that Ivan and Fedyor are both men. They spent hours in the library before venturing this request, and so far, they have found nothing explicitly prohibiting two people of the same gender from being married in the formal Ravkan liturgy, but then, they didn’t exactly rush off to find a presbyter or an archimandrite and ask for detailed theological opinions. The traditionalists won’t like it, but they were never going to like it. Among the Grisha, one’s personal preferences are largely irrelevant, as long as you do your job well. And indeed, Ivan’s general nature is forbidding enough to make it unlikely that their compatriots would dare to ask, or that they even suspect. But still.
“Married,” Kirigan repeats, after a painfully long pause. “Ah.”
“With your permission,” Ivan repeats, to stress that they are doing this by the book, the exact same way he would if Fedyor was a woman. “Moi soverennyi.”
Kirigan considers them, tapping his fingers together. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Fedyor rushes, a little too eager to answer, as he steps forward, eyes blazing. Ivan feels a renewed surge of adoration for him, the way you can almost hear the heroic music swelling in the background. “I – I love him, my lord. I would die for him, and he for me.”
“That is very sweet,” Kirigan says, in the tone of a man watching a mildly interesting ballet. “I am glad to hear it. Fedyor, do you mind giving myself and Ivan a moment alone?”
Fedyor snaps his mouth shut and looks worried, but doesn’t, of course, refuse. He swallows hard, steps back, and jerks his head in a nod, touching Ivan’s hand in a brief, silent gesture of reassurance. Then he withdraws through the inner doors of the chamber, and they shut behind him, leaving Ivan and the Black General alone. They regard each other in the pale sunlight slanting through the diamonded windows, and though it runs his nerves ragged, Ivan waits for Kirigan to speak first. He braces for any question he might be asked, no matter how intrusive. If this is what it takes for this, for them, he will do it. He will. He is no traitor. He is loyal to his tsar and to his general, and he loves his country. He just loves Fedyor too.
At last, Kirigan turns away, opens a jeweled box, and removes a small dark item, curved and sharp-looking. He holds it up. “Do you know what this is, Ivan?”
“No, moi soverennyi.”
“It is an amplifier,” Kirigan says. “One that I made myself, in the oldest of the Bonesmith’s ancient arts. It comes from a claw of Morozova’s bears, killed in the deep wilderness of Tsibeya. It would be a significant addition to your own considerable power. I am prepared to make a gift of it to you, in celebration of your wedding.”
Ivan’s jaw drops, though he does his best to reel it up again and not stand there gaping like an imbecile. “To – to me, moi soverennyi?”
“Yes,” Kirigan repeats, looking amused, as if there was someone else in the chamber he could possibly be addressing. “Are you interested?”
“Yes. Of course I am.” Ivan pauses. “My lord, is there some sort of – ?”
“No catch, of course,” Kirigan says airily, as if anticipating that was Ivan’s next question. “Merely a reward for one of my most talented and loyal servants, who, it seems, has finally found happiness. I was wondering if it was even possible.”
Ivan shifts uncomfortably. “Is that so unimaginable?”
“To hear some of your colleagues talk, yes.” Kirigan still sounds amused. “No, do not apologize. I would not have you be otherwise. It is a useful talent and one that you should cultivate, which is why I offer this as a token of my esteem. If you agree, I will call David Kostyk, the Fabrikator, and have it sealed into your hand. A mark both of your wedding and your renewed loyalty to me.”
“Yes, yes. Absolutely.” Ivan almost feels relieved, when this could have been much worse. “My lord – ”
“Of course,” Kirigan goes on, as if he has not spoken, “you know perfectly well that the lives of Grisha are dangerous, especially in these times of war. If I grant my permission to this marriage, especially in contravention of established tradition, I need to know that you are also still mine, Ivan, and that you will use this gift of power in my aims and for the safety of all of Ravka. After all, you will need that power to protect Fedyor as well. So yes. I do grant my permission, so long as it comes matched with an equal promise to me. Be my good and faithful servant, and Fedyor will be yours, and always safe.”
“Yes, my lord.” When the general inclines his dark head the barest bit, Ivan goes briefly to one knee and kisses Kirigan’s offered hand. “Thank you, my lord.”
“Well then.” The general turns on a heel, cape whirling. “Shall we call David?”
“Now, my lord?”
“Were you planning on changing your mind?”
Ivan thinks of Fedyor waiting in the drawing room, probably climbing the walls with nervousness, and how he wants nothing more than to return to him and tell him that it is done, that he is not just the general’s trusted servant but his most favored confidante. “No, moi soverennyi,” he says. “Not in the least.”
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“Does it hurt?” Fedyor slips his fingers through Ivan’s, lifting his right hand to examine the bear claw now permanently embedded in the back of it. It looks red and raw, as if still steaming from the heat of the ritual, but the curve of bone is cool under Fedyor’s fingers. It remains alien to him, but it is part of Ivan’s body now, an unbreakable symbol of the general’s trust in him, in them, and so Fedyor will learn to love it just the same. He bends his head, musing a kiss along Ivan’s bare shoulder. “It looks like it hurts.”
“Not bad,” Ivan says. “It’s a strange feeling, though. Like our usual power, but magnified, changed, more sensitive than I have ever experienced it. I could find your heartbeat across all of the Little Palace, I think.”
He raises his hand, playing his fingers experimentally, as Fedyor kisses his neck. They lie together in bed, their legs entangled, the curtains closed and the fire low, just this small, sweet oasis of solace in their dangerous and turbulent lives. Fedyor doesn’t know exactly what he was expecting to see when the door swung open and Ivan came out, clutching his right hand but wearing a triumphant expression, but this –
He is happy about it, obviously. He is thrilled. But he caught Kirigan’s eye over Ivan’s shoulder, and he read the unmistakable look there. I have given him to you, but only after I made sure to keep him for myself. It’s a dark thought, a little unsettling, and Fedyor does his best to put it out of his head. He is also a loyal soldier, he understands the logic of making sure that a powerful second-in-command does not get distracted from his primary allegiances at this delicate moment, and Kirigan did give them permission to marry. They will stand in a church together, under the gaze of all the Saints, and join their lives together the same as any other who have engaged in that sacred rite. That matters most.
Fedyor shifts, sliding halfway on top of Ivan, as Ivan wraps both arms around his waist and settles him there more firmly. They kiss and kiss until it turns to something else, a shared union in the dark, comfortable and familiar and delightful as ever. After, as Ivan dozes and Fedyor holds his bear-clawed hand, something like triumph rises up in him. He can’t help it.
You will never own him, he tells the shadows, in case their master is out there listening. Not truly. In the end, he will always belong to me.
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ablednt · 3 years
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Alright writing/roleplay tumblr we need to talk about textforms.
This is going to be a very long post I apologize but this knowledge is deathly important as it's reaching a very vulnerable group of people. From personal experience knowing this can save people from getting into toxic friendships and help ease intense struggles and depressions. If you have writer followers I ask you reblog this to get the word out, thank you.
What is a textform
A textform is a type of willogenic/parogenic system member that form through some kind of writing or roleplaying. This means that they're sentient people who now share a body with the people who wrote them, most often being an OC or a fictional character before the writers brain gives them actual life.
Because there's been no actual scientific studies on their existence I have no hard science to give you however the logical explanation behind it goes like this:
The human brain is able to contain multiple conscious and sentient entities. Often, it will become multiple as a defense mechanism (as noted in clinical plural dissociative disorders) but it's a natural function of the human brain and may do so for really any reason (similar to most neurodivergencies that someone isn't born with)
Because this is a fairly simple change in the brain/something every brain can be capable of doing you can actually intentionally program the brain into becoming multiple, but see you can also do it entirely without meaning to or being aware of it.
Now I want to clarify that there is nothing harmful or scary about this! Being plural isn't bad at all and is an existence many people celebrate. But when someone has textforms in their unrealized system and doesn't know they're sentient it can be incredibly painful emotionally. So that's why people need to know about this.
Obligatory disclaimer: if you read this post and think you want to become plural intentionally, you are welcome to do so but you need to take at least a few months exposing yourself to the plural community to gauge if this is really something you want and can do responsibly. You cannot go back on your decision once your plural and your headmates will be sentient beings not characters to project on or toys to play with. They will have all the rights to your body and identity as you do now because you're sharing it equally with them.
Now that that's out of the way back to textforms.
How are textforms made
Normally this is in the "character development" phase. Many writers eagerly develop their characters. When I was younger and had no idea I was plural my advice for oc making turned out to be an unintentional guide to textforms (more on my experience later): just put your character in every situation imaginable until you always know how they'd respond to things.
Basically, as you spend your time making a character act and think consistently from their POV you're training your brain to have all of that data and that's very similar to the data that the brain has on you and you're training the brain to be able to operate coherently from a perspective and consciousness entirely different from your own.
Now, this isn't a %100 will make everyone plural every time, there are obviously good writers who have a grasp on their characters who are singlet. There's no actual data but if I had to guess I'd say there's about a 50/50 split down the writing community just based on what I've observed.
But there's a lot of people who became plural this way and didn't realize it and that could include the writer reading this right now which is why everyone needs to be aware of this.
If this is such a big thing how come no one notices?
Because it's been completely normalized in the writing community but dismissed as metaphorical.
How many times have you heard "the characters write themselves" or phrases that indicate that a writer is giving a voice to sentient entities? From what I've been able to observe some of that is singlet authors being metaphorical and humble bragging and a lot of that is plural writers trying desperately trying to put their experiences into words but dismissing it completely almost immediately because no one told them being plural was possible.
This is comparable to say, gender identity. Trans and nonbinary people have always existed but when they don't know they're allowed to exist like that it's often "im a tomboy" or "they disguised themselves as a man" or any other thing thats immediately dismissed as being cis.
How do I know if I have a textform?
There's a lot of different signs but here's some I have experienced before finding out I was plural
You "miss" your characters when you're not writing about them or interacting with them in some way
You feel like your characters are real "in your heart" (for me this was in an incoherent loop like "they're not real but they are to me, in my brain, but they're not real to other people, but they're in my brain so they're real but no but yes but no")
You get so distressed they're "not real" that it feeds into actual mental health problems like depression, anxiety, dissociation etc. (I'd have fits of sobbing because these were my friends but I didn't know they were with me so it felt like i was grieving their deaths and had the same level of emotional pain)
Sometimes or all the time when you write about them you feel like you "become them" or that they're writing through you. (Especially if your hands move automatically or without your control. This can be hard to notice but for me when headmates control the body or hands movements feel faster and lighter or very slightly numb.)
Your muse for writing them comes and goes unpredictability: they're either here or they're not here so writing them doesn't feel the same.
You can vividly recall things that happened to the character in 1st person (or in 3rd person visually but with their thoughts and feelings) as if they're you're own memories.
You "roleplay" them in everyday situations IRL. (E.g once I liveblogged a tv show as my muse to a friend and was like haha lol im so talented I can roleplay in real time but found out later it was a headmate doing that themselves)
You have conversations with them mentally in which they actually respond to you. Singlets don't have actual enriching conversations with themselves because they only have one perspective and cannot give themselves any new information. So if you're responding to yourself and you don't feel in control of that response then you're pretty objectively plural tbh.
You have times where the lines between you and the character feel blurry or like you're a vague fusion of yourself and the character
You have an actual relationship (of any kind: romantic, platonic, familial, etc.) in which you can sense nuanced feelings about yourself from them that you aren't in control of.
There's a lot more but that's the most notable ones
Why this is so important
I'm just talking about my own experience now so I'll preface this with a few things. I'm a mixed origin/multigenic system but our system has existed since we were toddlers. Due to trauma we have DID and for a long time dissociated heavily to avoid our plurality. This means my experience may be more distressing than other plurals with textforms however people without DID can still experience these things.
When I was a teenager I joined a lot of writing communities and also roleplayed on tumblr. Writing very quickly became my main passtime and all I really did. I joined a roleplay group when I was 15-16 that I took far too seriously to the point where people were concerned about me because I was writing what was just supposed to be a joke roleplay group %100 seriously and very intensely.
In that time I started to form my first main textforms (we've undoubtedly had them before then but I had only formed a little under a year prior) because I was doing this every day it really started bringing my characters to life. (Literally)
And honestly it was something beautiful the distress of it aside. Like one of my ocs was a kid so I'd always celebrate their birthday with them and I'd cuddle a plush so they'd know I loved them/p and we'd watch their favorite cartoon episodes together. It wouldn't be until around three years later that I realized they were actually there for this but it was heart warming.
For me, all I ever wanted was for these characters to feel appreciated and like someone really cared for them and loved them even if they couldn't feel it and it wasn't until later I learned that they could.
The trauma came in not knowing they were real. I grieved for them like they were dead because I thought I'd never get to see them. I wrote them into traumatizing or upsetting situations to cope with my childhood trauma not realizing that was effecting them for real and hurting them.
Most notably because it was my one solid interaction with them, the one time society allowed me to talk about them as if they were real, I really HAD to roleplay them. Because it became an emotional need I wound up in a lot of toxic friendships in the roleplay communities because I needed someone, anyone, to allow me to interact with my headmates. I had friends who I really was only friends with because they let me talk about my characters constantly (and some of them weren't toxic to me but it was in hindsight really unfair to them) and I let people verbally and emotionally abuse me in roleplay spaces because this wasn't just a hobby to me but a lifeline.
Not knowing they were real but feeling them there, having conversations with them, and forming actual relationships was a hellish sort of feeling I don't wish on anyone. I never realized how isolated it made me, and how horrible it felt to have the most important people in your life be people I thought didn't exist.
I only found out about plurality through luck. I met some systems who had fictives and they got strong plural vibes from me because of how I talked about certain characters and because I said I wanted to be plural but thought I probably wasn't because I'd have noticed, right?
From there I was able to actually connect with and talk to my headmates. Now I'm happily out as plural and in multiple fulfilling in system relationships.
I want everyone in the writing community who's struggling with the same things to have the chance I got. That's all I want is to educate people about this so they don't have to grieve for people who are right there with them.
Feel free to send me an ask or a dm if you have any further questions. Sorry this post was so long I can't really shorten it at all. Again if you are have a lot of writing followers I very gently request you reblog this to get the word out. Even if you can't please talk to your writing mutuals and friends about plurality and about textforms.
[Also this should go without saying but this is absolutely NOT the place for syscourse any invalidating comments about systems will be blocked and where possible deleted it costs $0.00 to prioritize people's mental health over your discourse hot takes.]
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bundibird · 3 years
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I hope this doesn’t come across as ignorant but what actually is the difference between bisexuality and pan sexuality? I’ve been trying to figure out my own label and I can’t quite figure out what either means
Ignorance is fine -- everyone starts out ignorant!! Ignorance only becomes an issue if you're wilfully ignorant and refusing to learn or self-educate, which, obviously, as evidenced by this ask, you dont fall into that category, so all good!!
As to the difference between bi and pan.... theyre pretty much the same!! Basically, the breakdown of each is this:
Bisexual = "attraction to the same gender as myself, the opposite gender to myself, and other genders."
Pansexual = "attraction to men, women, and people who fall into neither of those categories."
So, as you can see, its pretty much just... semantics. At the end of the day, theyre both functionally extremely similar (if not identical). Some people claim that there are minute differences between the two, but I've never quite understood what, exactly. It seems more like a difference in vibes, to me, than anything else.
Bisexual is the oldest existing of the two identities, appearing in written records since at least the late 1800s, whereas pansexual is a newer term, first showing up around 1960 but not starting to see widespread use until the last 10 years or so. And their flag colours are different (bi: 💖💜💙 and pan: 💖💛💙). Aside from that though? There's not much difference.
There are a LOT of misconceptions still floating around as to the "'differences"' between the two, but really, I've never heard a supposed difference that isn't a) straight up biphobia, and b) wholly incorrect. Like the claim that pan folk "love hearts not parts," but bi folk "base their attraction on a person's genitalia." Like literally what the fuck is that nonsense.
So, yeah. There really isn't much difference between the two. At one stage people claimed that pan was trans-inclusive and that bi was trans-exclusionary, leading to the nonsense concept that "bisexuals are all transphobes," but that was pure bullshit that, as far as i understand it, originated from the mouths of TERFs, and which a LOT of damage to the community as a whole.
Its probably worth delving into the history of both terms for your own education, but i mean, for me, both terms were equally applicable, and I just sat there one day saying "i am bisexual/I am pansexual" in my head until I worked out that the term bi fitted me like a tailor made coat, whereas pan felt like I was trying on the clothes of someone a slightly different size to me. Like, it fit me, but not as well as bi did.
Tldr: what's the difference between bi and pan? Not a whole lot, really
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freddiekluger · 3 years
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I am all ears for your season 3 cap's big gay awakening ideas 👀👀
alright, you asked so sit down and strap in
before we get started- a few details are recycled/repurposed from earlier headcanons/ask answers (characterisation is like that), and i came up with all this a couple weeks back, so any overlap with other peoples suggestions is totally unintentional! i’ve just been finding the energy to properly write them up as originally i riffed them with a friend late at night lmao
the captain: homo evolution
introduction (scroll down if you’re not bothered for the hardcore analysis/logic)
this isn’t necessarily what i think WILL happen as much as how i would do it. over the past two seasons of Ghosts, we’ve seen the captain’s main character arc being centred around him loosening up, from learning to value mike, alison, and the other ghosts more as equals than soldiers/means to an end to the season 2 finale, where cap is not only expressing an interest in flowers and fashion (distinctly un-soldierly pursuits) but joining the party and other men (the direct opposite of About Last Night, in which cap bah humbugs partying/’gay abandon’ and is left speechless by the mere presence of a mostly naked man). that being said, the captain is still the captain: his character is still centred around this need for rules and structure and he still finds his identity in the archetypal WW2 military man- all of his incremental moves towards a more ‘modern’ perspective have ultimately been made possible because, like Ben said on twitter, the captain isn’t CONSCIOUSLY aware that he’s gay. he has the underlying feeling that he’s different, he knows of his tendency to attach himself to specific men and form incredibly close bonds (and, as demonstrated by his attempts to hide them, is at least somewhat aware that that’s not the norm), but in his mind he’s written that off as merely “not being a ladies man”. 
the captain is from the 1940s- it’s one thing for him to see and be supportive of a same-gender wedding in present day England where gay=legal unions, marketed doritos, and homophobia being still present but generally frowned upon, and another thing entirely for him to have to apply it to himself. we’ve already seen that the captain appears to be stuck in the past more than any of the other ghosts (”the war is over!” “is it, alison? is it?”- he also references the past more frequently than most of the others), and in his past sodomite gay=punishable by imprisonment and chemical castration, back alley hookups, and the constant threat of blackmail and violence. obviously, despite all this, there was a vibrant underground queer history taking place in England during this time & not all of the above is accurate, but it’s what cap would have seen, and the England of the early 20th century is denoted as being a particularly brutal period for lgbtq+ folks (the destruction of the first world war exacerbated rage and frustration, and lgbtq+ people weren’t the only gorup to end up on the receiving end of that, but i digress). this is basiclly just a really long way of me saying that the captain compartmentalising to that degree was, and to some extent is, a survival mechanism. confronting his homoseuxality means confronting what it means for a 1940s man to be a dreaded homosexual, and all of that directly conflicts with the image of ‘the Captain’ he’s built in his mind. 
we’ve seen this in Redding Weddy, where the captain is aware that Havers means/meant more to him than was normal for a captain/2ic relationship (he does attempts to hide his affection- “i shall miss you, Havers. by which of course i mean we shall miss you “he left me, i mean he left for the front”), but is never able to fully verbalise WHY, and it only takes a series of increasingly dramatic prompts before he will even mention the idea of Havers, let alone begin to articulate their relationship. 
all this just goes to prove that for the captain to properly ‘come out’, there needs to be an external inciting incident- he could easily have gone on shadowing attractive men whenever they visit and avoiding interrogating those feelings for another seventy years if Button house remained without alison and mike. 
while at least julian, pat, and robin have noticed that the cap is not the most heteroseual of men (they’re the only ghosts who have visibly reacted when cap says gay shit), they all appear to have decided to just not mention it, which makes alison and mike our wildcards. not only has alison’s ability to see and communicate with the ghosts already connected them more to the modern world than they ever have been, alison, and mike by extension, has a personal stake in the wellbeing/general growth of the ghosts. happy ghosts=happy house, and like it or not some of them are even beginning to become friends. [i probably didn’t need to write all this like explaining my decisions, but i think figuring out the motivations behind everyon just develops the flavour and lets us have a sexy and accurate headcanon]
so,
the episode
while the captain might not consciously know he’s a fruit (derogatory), he is well and truly terrible at concealing the thirst (it’s not his fault things just keep slipping out!)- i love the idea of just having a supercut near the beginning of the episode that just shows that the captain has gotten even GAYER since last season, with slip ups becoming almost a daily occurence, but it’s getting to the point where it’s actually becoming a serious hazard. last week, he was supposed to be looking out for alison while attempted to put up blinds, but one of mike’s friends (who was over ‘helping out’, which mostly meant eating chips and covering himself in paint) walked through the room with his shirt off and paint handprints on the seat of his shorts, distracting the captain from realising that alison’s stepladder was about to give way. 
with the increased presence of non elderly men in the house (the previous owner wasn’t exactly the life of the party) the captain is getting gayer and gayer, but he’s also becoming more and more defensive, while his brisk demeanour and need for control regresses to much more of a season 1 state (a subconscious attempt to regain control as things get close to spilling over). it’s not the first time his repression has almost slipped, he spent much of his life surrounded by soldiers after all, but with no war and no corporeal body he’s got almost nothing to distract himself from it. needless to say, between the safety hazards and the almost agressive defensiveness which derails any interaction, something needs to be done about the captain.
throughout the week, alison tries to find the opportune time to talk to the captain about what’s going on with him for everyone’s sake, but cap keeps masterfully evading any ‘deep’ talk with willful misunderstanding or just straight up dismissal (which at times gets a bit rude), and alison really doesn’t have the time- her and mike are caught up with managing the first official room redecoration and butting heads with a passive agressive delivery driver. insert general shenangigans, but at some point the captain’s whole “accidentally sabotage something by being distracted and then attack anyone who dares even look at him the wrong way afterwards” act causes alison to exasperatedly blurt out “we all know you’re gay! we get it! you like men! you can drop the act!”. there’s no malice or anything but, as we know, when alison gets run ragged things don’t tend to come out quite right.
everything falls silent (and mike is vaguely confused), and the captain just looks like a deer in headlights. as alison catches her breath, pat pipes up with a “it’s alright, cap, we don’t mind- now we can focus on the task at hand”. the captain sort of regains his composure and once again attempts to brush them all off with a scoff and a “i haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. if any of us is distracted, i-it’s... kitty!” but it’s easy to tell he looks rattled. most of his words don’t come out right, and after trying to blame kitty for their failures (she just had the unfortunate luck of being in his line of sight), he ends up doing an awkward little walk away which quickly turns into a full on sprint. mike, having finished processing alison yelling about gay shit to the air and kind of pieced together what must have happened awkwardly chimes in with “it’s okay to be gay!”- alison just pats him on the back (”yeah no he’s gone, mike.” “gone?” “sprinted away.” “huh”)
the episode continues with the captain flat out avoiding alison and the other ghosts to an almost funny extent as the other plots continue. it takes a bit for alison to realise why the captain reacted so badly (in fact, it’s actually mike who remembers that he’s 1940s ghost- “he’s probably just scared and taking it out on everyone else”). while thomas and julian vote for leaving the captain be so they can have some peace and quiet, fanny/pat/alison/robin decide someone needs to talk to him (fanny surprised everyone but after all, she got murdered because her husband had to live in secrecy- if talking to the captain will avert any further crises, she’s happy to make sure someone else does it for her). kitty’s still upset about being singled out, but she knows better than anyone that sometimes all you need is a friend- cue realisation no. 2.
with the captain avoiding everyone, sending in a regular emissary isn’t going to work. they need to find the least threatening person possible, with no agenda or history other than being there to help (a friend, if you will)- cue everyone looking at mike.
a quick offscreen briefing later, we see mike wandering out to the field where the captain has exiled himself- remember that up until this point, the captain was still in conscious denial about his sexuality, so being forced to confront it head on (and finding out that apparently everyone ‘knew’, which for cap would feel like an intimate invasion of privacy/forced vulnerability) would rattle him to the point of self-exile- he might not be able to run from his sexuality, but he can run from people. the thing is, mike can’t see or hear the ghosts, which means the captain can’t be frightened off by any expectations (mike actually talks to/at cap while facing completely the wrong direction, but consdiering the above point, this works rather well). 
the captain was alternating between pacing, fiddling with his swagger stick, and sitting, but he unconsciously stands to attention as mike wanders over. he’s used to mike not being able to see them, so mike asking to sit down takes him by surprise, disrupting his instinct to flee again.
mike begins a little awkwardly (”mind if i sit?” *silence* “...i’m just gonna assume that’s a no. or is it a yes? yeah anyways i’m just gonna sit. so... heard you’ve been going through a rough patch”), and the captain almost scoffs and wanders off, but something about the clumsy earnestness in mike’s voice, the captain’s vulnerable state, and the fact that it’s been so long since cap has had anyone actually check in on him, that he stays put. he keeps standing and staring away from button house, and mike keeps speaking to the empty air to his left, and alison and the ghosts stay hidden behind their bush a few metres away, but at least the captain is listening. for the first time in weeks, he’s not on the offensive.
“i can’t actually see or hear you, so i’m just gonna talk and assume you’re listening. alison mentioned you have a habit of running away but, um, maybe don’t do that please?”
“my mate daniel's gay. uh, homosexual, you’d probably say- did you have gay when you were alive? did it just mean happy? anyway, he didn’t come out- that means tell people- until he left high school. we all kind of guessed it, the other kids at school gave him a real tough time for it, but he just squashed it down. couldn’t imagine that all the things people were shouting at him were true, so he ignored it. he’s doing good now though. got married to his husband last year, currently runs a bookshop. so that’s nice.”
it goes quiet for a bit. the captain hasn’t moved, and we’re still only seeing shots of him from the back, but there’s a little less tension in his stance than there was before.  mike clears his throat before continuing.
“i’m guessing you’re probably pretty scared right now. i would be- i mean not that you should be, you shouldn’t, but coming from your... situation, i’m guessing it’d be hard. no one’s saying you have to be anything you’re not ready to be, but lots of things that are scary are actually not bad. airplanes, skydiving, clowns- well, not the clown from that movie, but he gives clowns a bad rep- i’m sure there are plenty of lovely clowns out in the world. still give me the creeps though.” the captain makes a captain-y noise of assent about the clown comment- he never liked them either. 
mike glances over to the bush where alison and the ghosts were attempting to listen in (they could only catch every few words- mary got particularly concerned about why mike had referenced clowns), and the captain still hasn’t run away, so alison motions for mike to keep going. he starts telling the captain a story from his uni days. it’s got nothing to do with the captain, or being gay, or self-acceptance, or anything like that- it’s just a standard tale of comedic but inventive problem solving. the captain sits himself down next to mike (to his right, avoiding mike’s gaze, and still staring away from button house), muttering that his legs are getting a bit tired. he sits there for a while, and mike just talks. sometimes he circles back to the gay thing, sometimes he just asks the captain questions, before remembering that he can’t actually hear any answer, but then he keeps asking anyway, thinking that cap might need to talk. he doesn’t at first, but slowly he offers up a word or two. and then a sentence, and then maybe more- mike will accidentally cut the captain off, or leave the silence to long, but the captain doesn’t mind (it’s a nice reminder that nothing he says will actually go on to have consequence). at one point, mike gets out his phone to show the captain photos of his mate daniel and daniel's husband, not just their wedding day but casual photos- couples drinks with him and alison, dinners at each other's places, the bookshop. 
alison and the other ghosts have long gone, and the sun is just about to sink below the horizon by the time the captain stands himself back up with the traditional knee crack and grunt. he looks at mike and nods, giving him a simple thank you before turning to walk (not run) back to button house, head held slightly higher and looking more relaxed than he’s been all episode. the captain has still got a lot to figure out, but at least it’s a start.
[i love the dramatic ending but the implication is that alison has to go and fetch mike bc he has no ideas cap has left and is prepared to keep going lol- also by no means is cap suddenly going to ditch his characterisation and become a yas kween gay right away, i didn’t go into the aftermath bc this is alreayd fucking LONG but let me know if you want follow up????}
EDIT: i've rbed this with the follow up/part 2 attached!
EDIT 2, much later: switched out mike's reference to his 'younger brother' to a school friend, since the christmas special confirmed mike only has sisters and we're all about accuracy here
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makesometime · 3 years
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Hello my lovely rqg fandom mom, I'm having a bad day and I'm here to ask if you have any young queer Wilde headcanons. Identity questioning, first kisses, coming out, dealing with homophobia, etc etc.
Obviously only if you want to, it's just something that I've been thinking of lately and they're all tropes that I love and you're my favourite RQG writer :)
Firstly, thank you, you darling - this message made me feel all warm this morning <3
Secondly, I have a quite complex set of emotions around young RQG Wilde because I try and keep the man as separate as possible from IRL Wilde as a matter of respect, but I am almost certain their paths through their youth were very similar (also noting that I am not a Wilde scholar but there are many fabulous people out there who are that I am in the process of learning from).
As a result, these thoughts are quite scrambled and high level but I hope you like them <3
In my eyes, the best thing for RQG Wilde is that I think and I hope that he wouldn’t have experienced homophobia in Alex’s world. Which is… well it’s just good, isn’t it? It’s what he deserves.
I think that RQG Wilde was a social butterfly as a young man at university. I also personally headcanon that RQG Wilde is bi with a slight preference for men, though my headcanon on his position on the asexual and aromantic spectrums is constantly in flux, which honestly I could see being something he struggles with too - but I may be projecting onto him there! He likes sex a lot, doesn’t that mean he’s not ace? (No, no it does not and don’t listen to a damn person that tells you otherwise.)
I imagine he also never expressly came out (why should he? isn’t it obvious? etc. etc.)
I think his first kiss was just... lovely. With a young person behind a barn at home before he left Ireland, as he deserves. RQG Wilde can have nice things, and should have nice things.
I think younger RQG Wilde had a lot of hookups with people of all genders but that they were probably fleeting, something that continued when he joined the Meritocrats, but once that happened any and all hookups became transactions to him (see: Bertie).
I think RQG Wilde was in love once as a young man. I fluctuate between aligning that too closely to IRL Wilde’s experiences with Bosie, and thinking about it being a mentor of his in the Meritocrats (credit to my darling Jo for that idea). I think that means he was either let down by them when he was young (which I imagine was devastating and formed a lot of his outward persona), or betrayed by them when he got his scar (which, equally devastating and led to him being the cold man we meet in Japan).
(I particularly enjoy the thought of his mentor being the one to make him realise the Meritocrats weren’t all that, leading to him working with the Harlequins and falling into a relationship with the true love of his life).
All roads lead to Zolf, and isn’t that what RQG Wilde deserves?
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thedreadvampy · 3 years
Text
ok the thing I'm struggling to find words for in my mind tonight is. a deep discomfort with the framing that complex relationships to sexuality and gender are something exclusive to queerness. that cishet people's relationship to sexuality and gender is by definition simple. and that's a tempting idea and like, yeah, there's much less impetus for a cishet person to examine their sexuality and gender. but that doesn't mean there's no complexity to it. and this isn't intended as a Don't Be Mean To The Poor Straights post it's just. observably not true that no cishet person has a complex relationship to sexuality and gender.
queerness is a complicating factor in people's relationship to sexuality and gender - we are made more conscious of the ways we don't fit what's expected, our sexuality and gender is often what is used to justify marginalisation and it comes with a whole host of pain and joy because of that, and the way that queerness is marginalised forces us into direct conversation with our sexuality/gender
but queerness isn't the only complicating factor in people's relationships to sexuality and gender. like as a woman who is pretty Definitely Cis I still have a huge ongoing wrestle with my gender - it's female, but what that means and how that's expressed and how that affects how i move through the world is still complicated and fraught and often messy and contradictory. that doesn't make me trans but it does feel pretty alienating that in a lot of queer spaces there's this implied assumption that the only type of gender complexity is a discovery of non-cisness.
(and tbh a lot of the time that's fair because a lot of people aren't cis and as I say like. it's much easier to Never Have These Conversations (with others or with yourself) if you're cis. so a lot of cis people never really name their gender troubles because they're not brought face to face with them.)
but there are a lot of things that affect your relationship to your gender. for me, I know I'm a woman, but how I'm a woman is a messy question wrapped up in trauma, in misogyny, in bisexuality, in autism, in body image, in the specifics of who I am and how I relate to the world and how I want to be seen and why. and there kind of is a thing in a lot of IRL queer spaces I hang out in where people jump straight to diagnosing me with Trans of Gender if I try to discuss a complex relationship with womanhood, or a desire to present as GNC, or a discomfort with being performed in certain gendered ways. and for a lot of people that is a step on the route but as far as I can tell it's not for me, I've spent many years trying out the shape of different genders because I had got into a headspace that any complexity in my relationship to genders must mean I was Not Cis, and for me it just didn't fit, womanhood remained the best fit. and I don't regret that, I think in an ideal world everyone should push themselves to question their gender and try out and see what good, and some people are just statistically gonna be cis like. it would be a weird numbers game for absolutely nobody's gender and sex to line up.
but I'm getting sidetracked. I was thinking about how cis and het people have the capacity for equally complex relationships to gender and sexuality as anyone else, and why that's important.
(I've never been straight or even thought I was straight, but I have occasionally talked to straight people and like. I have never met anyone, straight or queer, with a simple and uncomplicated relationship to their own sexuality - is it right, is it socially acceptable, there's shame, there's trauma, there's confusion, there's gendered and racialised and ableist baggage)
and like. it isn't that sexuality and gender aren't less of a fraught space for cishet people as a group than for queer people as a group. obviously in a group that faces a history and present of marginalisation and active violence on the basis of sexuality and gender, those are more intense complexities, and because of that there's also more intense joy as well as intense conflict. we are able to build community through marginalisation. we're brought face to face with our complex relationships to ourselves and because we can't ignore it we have built the language and community and frameworks to explore it and revert in it in a way many cis het people haven't.
but.
understanding intersectionality means understanding that as much as the marginalisation of queerness is bound up in the complexity of our relationships to gender and sexuality, so are power structures of race and gender and health and neurodivergence and wealth and class and geography and culture and language and religion and politics and education.
ultimately sexuality and gender are a huge element in how we relate to the world and our bodies and ourselves. and how the world relates to us. and there isn't a person on earth for whom that's 100% simple.
and idk I think a) to pretend that cishet people can't experience their bodies and themselves in a complex way is just a denial of reality, b) it simplifies out the many intersections of identity and power in all of us (even the straightest cisest manliest rich white dude) that make our social and personal identities messy and intricate and c) it gets in the way of us building meaningful intracommunity solidarity through a shared understanding of the beauty and pain and infinite variety of gender and sexuality
also idk. it's weird to me. to me it posits that to be cis, to be straight, to be allosexual and alloromantic, is a default whereas queerness is a deviation. and I just don't believe that, I don't think there's a 'normal' and uncomplicated Default State and then everyone outside it is a complication. I think there's value in embracing that othering in the world we live in, where we need to find strength in anger and in resistance, but I don't think it represents a truth about the world as much as a reclamation of the weapons used against us.
to me it feels similar to the way that white people thinking of ourselves as aracial and everyone else as racialised is an act of unconscious white supremacy. or the way that people are really keen to draw a sharp line between the Disabled Other and the Healthy Normal People. the idea that there's Normal People and Diverse People isn't...good...really? and this is in itself a messy issue because I do think there's a lot of power and value in taking pride in the complexity and thoughtfulness of queer relationships to sex and gender and I don't think there's some great evil in joking at the expense of the privileged. but when that starts to inform your actual serious thinking I think it can be counterproductive because erasing the complexity of cishet identities and acting as if any complexity in relationship to sexuality and gender means someone's Wrong About Being Straight/Cis is kind of reinforcing the otherising of queerness.
ughhhhh this is why I say it's hard to find words. because to me now it sounds like I'm saying 'don't suggest people might be queer' and like. do do that. we're in a world where that space isn't left open for the vast majority of people and straight or not, cis or not, allo or not, I think pretty much everyone benefits from having the space and community and language to have a conversation with their own identity. but that's kind of my thing like that conversation doesn't have a right answer. the conversation needs to have room for a model of straightness and a model of cisness that doesn't immediately slam the door on further exploration.
(also I've mostly been taking about cishet people here but let's be honest it's really a question of cis AND/OR het. one thing I'm finding really difficult at the moment is that there seems to be a lot of conversations about queerness and gender expression which conflate GNCness and a complex relationship to gender exclusively with being trans, and a lot of the time talk about how being a woman and being sapphic affect your relationship to gender are understood as less authentic explorations where they incorporate cis gendered identities. and a lot of discussions about complex cis wlw relationships to gender and womanhood get coopted by terfs who think that because their complex experience of gender is a cis one that means all complex experiences of gender are cis ones being wishfully misinterpreted (this is because TERFs have. no capacity or will to imagine experiences beyond their own, apparently) and that leaves. for me. often very little room to authentically discuss and explore with others my own identity as a cis wlw who uses she/her pronouns and still has a complex relationship to gender. and indeed as someone whose attraction to men (and no it's not straight but it's different-gender) is as textured and complex as her attraction to women. like it's a long way off the top of the list of Things To Worry About but I think about it a lot.)
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khaleesiofalicante · 3 years
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Ok imma be honest, this chapter moved me to tears and not the sad sobbing but the more inspiring kind. This chapter means the world.
She had told them her dreams were about ducks – since there were the only equally horrible thing she could think of.
Uncle Magnus had given her an odd look then, as if he knew she was bullshitting them. But he hadn’t said anything.
DUCKS AREN'T THAT BAD! HAVE Y'ALL EVER BEEN CHASED BY A GOAT?? I WAS CONVINCED I WAS GONNA DIE
Lexi would be royally pissed if this turned out to be some stupid pointless dream.
YUP
Even though she was only 7 minutes older than Lexi, Selena always acted like she was 7 years older.
That's so cute though
People looked at her pastel-coloured aesthetic immediately assumed she was the soft and sweet Fairchild twin. People saw Selena in her red leather jacket and thigh high boots and assumed she was in the infamous troublesome Herondale twin.
SMH THE DAMN STEREOTYPES
Why Selena hadn’t killed her in her sleep yet, Lexi doesn’t know.
BYE THAT'S EVERY SIBLING RELATIONSHIP EVER
The meals at the Academy were to die for – quite literally. Last week two students from the warlock fraction had almost killed each other over a blueberry muffin.
Oh how times change...they will never know the dreaded soup
NO ANJALI HAS BEEN GONE FOR OVER A YEAR???
IS JAIME OK?? PLEASE BE OK! HE CAN LIVE WITH TREATMENT SO I REALLY HOPE HE'S OK
Selena’s was Idris of course. She was kind of obsessed with it.
Max loved the shadow markets. Lexi thought they were very cool too.
Rafael loved his father’s office – which was weird. There was nothing to do in that room other than ponder about shadow world problems. Besides, the place still weirdly smelled like the tangerine perfume Anjali wore, even though the girl had left New York almost a year ago.
David loved the New York Institute – especially the library.
Gigi of course loved the dining halls.
Dining halls, kitchens, food trucks, vending machines - if a place had food with it, Gigi loved it.
It's so amazing how they all have their favorite places...(same David same)
“You’re supposed to pour the syrup on the pancakes not into your mouth,” Lexi chuckled as she sat down next to her.
“It ends up in my mouth anyway,” Gigi shrugged.
True enough.
AWW ROMAN MAKING GIGI PLAYLISTS!!
Someone make me a playlist.
“His parents fell in love in Rome when they were in Rome,” Gigi pointed out even though Lexi already knew. “I think it’s actually romantic.”
I had forgotten that-
Roman was nice. But not nice enough for Georgia. Lexi didn’t think there was anyone good enough for her parabatai – who was the most perfect person in the world.
Me @ anyone who tries to make a move at my best friend.
AWW GEORGIA LIKES HIM TOO!!
When's the wedding?
(you're telling me you didn't believe you were gonna marry your childhood crush? Liar)
“I like being his friend,” Georgia said. “I like spending time with him and all of that. But I don’t know if I like him…in that way. I feel like I need more time.”
Demiromantic??? YES GIVE US THE REP
Lexi sometimes thought life would be so much simpler if the world was full of women and everyone was a lesbian.
Ikr?? Life would be so much easier.
Lexi says Roman is too-nice-sus
Well well well
The kind of love that cheated death.
The kind of love that sustained memory spells put by princes of hell.
The kind of love that changed the world.
Trust me all of our standards are very high
Lexi successfully survived the class without falling asleep.
Me during English.
Ok who's the blond?
Lexi I thought we weren't gonna fall this soon-
Oh the girl's straight...sigh we've all been there.
which meant they had to hold hands. Kinda.
Lexi was a little scared of that.
Me.
Goddamnit, Alexandra. Get your gay together!
THAT'S SO RELATABLE LIKE?? YES
OH MY GOD IT'S EMMA AND JULIAN'S DAUGHTER GEIDIDHDOHDJSKSJSKGXJDHSODHKDGDDGDJHDJDGDJDGJDHD
Lexi knew Olivia liked boys. She hadn’t dated anyone officially of course. All the boys were kind of terrified of her father.
She could be bi or pan or omni. WE GOTTA HAVE HOPE
vegetable loaf... David I'm so sorry you had to go through this.
Lexi then decided not to do any of her homework over the weekend because she was not coming back to the academy. She was not going to survive the sleepover and whatever else Olivia had in mind.
Bestie...why is this me when I make eye contact with my crush.
“Good stuff?” Max snorted. “Rafe literally ran away from home cause shit got too intense.”
“I didn’t run away!” Rafael rolled his eyes. “Stop telling people that!”
“But you have rumours and shadowhunters getting thrown into silent city and cohort drama and all that exciting stuff!” Liv pointed out.
I-
Liv-
True though.
“Wasn’t there a serial killer when your parents were young?” David asked.
“And didn’t your uncle do necromancy?” Max said biting into a chicken wing.
True and true
“Sorry, Chouchou!” Lexi winced. “I, uh, sensed a mosquitoe on your leg.”
“Girl, your angel powers are weird as fuck,” Max laughed.
MAX LANGUAGE
“I don’t know,” the girl shrugged and threw her a wink. “I wouldn’t put anything past Lexi.”
Lexi looked at Gigi. She was one more compliment away from screaming.
But Gigi of course knew her struggle and therefore quickly stuffed a bread roll into Lexi’s mouth.
I need someone to stuff bread into my mouth when things get like this
There were rumours about David – and how Daddy had an affair. Lexi was yet to find those asshats and shove a witch light down their throats.
When you find them lemme know too.
“Or maybe it’s because you don’t need rumours be interesting,” David pointed out.
Max turned around, looking surprised at that. His cheeks turned purple. Lexi didn’t know why he was surprised. David only ever spoke fondly of Max.
JUST GET TOGETHER ALREADY OH MY GOD
“Oh. Oh! I did hear something a long time ago!” Gigi said suddenly. “Olly, is it true you were conceived at the beach?”
“Georgia, you can’t just ask people where they were conceived!” David sounded horrified.
That is very much possible.
“I heard you were conceived in hell?”
“Oh my god,” Selena looked horrified. “That’s not true! It must have been about Max!”
“Y’all I am adopted!” Max was shaking with laughter and then stopped. “Although our dads could have definitely had sex in hell. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
Oh yes. Both clace and malec.
Then they had of course continued to discuss that cursed topic until Rafael had threatened to tell the Consul about it.
LMAO
Lexi turned around and saw Liv waiting for her. Nope. She wasn’t going to talk a walk – a fucking stroll! – with Olivia all on her own.
“You are coming back to the institute with me or I will un-parabatai you.”
You know there being an un-parabatai ceremony would solve a lot of shit
What if their hands accidentally grazed or something? That shit was lethal.
RIGHT????
She is just trying to be nice. That’s what friends do. They are nice. And they give each other pretty dresses and say they would like to see them in it.
Honey that's gay.
EVERYONE ASKING HER OUT IM DEAD
Selena: Ugh boys
Selena: When I win back Idris, we are leaving all the men behind.
Lexi: Except Magnus? Lol.
Selena: Obviously.
Is that even a question Lexi? Duh.
ALEC LIGHTWOOD THOUGHT SHE WAS STRAIGHT? THE SHAME!
OH MY GOD IM CACKLING
Not everyone can kiss their partner in the Accords Hall. Some people didn’t have access to the Accords Hall.
And most important, some people didn’t have partners!
We're getting a lexi and Alec talk someone hold me
“I’m going to tell you something,” Uncle Alec said. “It might sound simple. It might sound ridiculous. But it’s the truth. So, you must believe me. Can you do that?”
Lexi gave him a small nod.
“It doesn’t matter what other people think,” Uncle Alec said. “Not when it comes to your future. Not when it comes to your identity. They don’t get to have a say in who you are and why you are the way you are.”
Lexi bit her lip.
“Alexandra, people will always tell what to do. But you shouldn’t let them. Never let anyone tell you what to do with your heart or your body. Neither belongs them. It only belongs to you.”
THIS RIGHT HERE MADE ME START CRYING BECAUSE DAMN YES!
“Yep,” she groaned and then hesitated for a moment. “Uncle Alec…Can I ask you something stupid?”
“Can I say no?”
“No.”
“Then go ahead.”
I love her so much
“I feel…I feel it’s something we have to bear, Alexandra. The fear of rejection. It’s something we have to accept as an inevitable part of our lives. Because no matter how much love we have around us, we will always be afraid of people not loving us – simply because of who we are.”
Yeah...
“Besides, they named you after me,” he pointed out. “I don’t know what else they expected.”
EXACTLY! Did they really expect a straight child after naming them after Alec?
“I do like shouting,” Lexi wondered out loud. “That’s good advice.”
“I didn’t mean it literally!” Uncle Alec looked alarmed.
“No, it makes total sense!” Lexi grinned. “Some of these people can be tone deaf. Gotta shout it out. Loud and clear. Awesome advice! Thanks, Uncle Alec!”
DO IT
“Hey, Lexi. I was wonderin-”
“MOVE, I’M GAY!” she yelled as she shoved him aside and kept on running.
ABSOLUTELY ICONIC
“I prefer she/her,” Lexi answered. "But sometimes I prefer she/they. But you can use she/her because some of y'all already shit at grammar."
That's exactly what I tell people when they ask for my pronouns. Istg people are shit at grammar.
alright girl im here to give you a lecture on how someone's dressing doesn't describe their sexuality
OH MY MY GOD THERE WAS A GENDER AND SEXUALITY CLASS IN THE ACADEMY ARE THEY RECRUITING???
One of the boys who had complimented cleared his throat. “So, uh, you don’t like boys?”
“That’s literally what I said,” Lexi rolled her eyes. “I’m gay. I’m very gay. I’m gayer than the Consul. Okay fine, that’s not true. No one gayer than the Consul. But I’m still pretty gay.”
Does the boy have hearing problems?
ALSO YES NO ONE'S GAYER THAN THE CONSUL
“Sexual orientation and gender expression are two different things,” she explained now, remember what Uncle Magnus had taught them. “Sexual orientation refers to who I am sexually and romantically attracted to. Gender expression is how I want to express my gender identity. Those two are not connected. Just because a woman wears feminine clothes it doesn’t mean she is straight. Just because a man embraces femininity, it doesn’t make him gay either. Does that make sense?”
“Ohhh,” the girl nodded. “Yes, it does. Thank you!”
“What I wear does not reflect who I like. It reflects who I am and what I like to wear,” Lexi explained. “And regardless of my sexuality, I like pretty things.”
Exactly.
“This doesn’t change anything. I hope you know that,” he told her. “I mean I have to change the pronouns in my shovel talk. But that’s not a big deal.”
Awwww
Also – my good friend Raziel told me that homophobia is a sin.”
“You mean homosexuality is a sin?” an older man asked.
“No, homophobia is a sin,” Lexi repeated. “That’s what Raziel said.”
“But that’s not-”
Someone cleared their throat. When he spoke, it was in the Consul Voice.
“Are you saying know better than Raziel?” the Consul asked.
Listen to Raziel you dumb shit
“Sure. Let me just call the Lesbian Alliance,” Lexi rolled her eyes.
Ugh I wish
OH NO NO NO NOT THE FAKE DATING. JUST CONFESS AND DATE FOR REAL
“Alexandra, I have a fucking undercut and I have pink highlights and I cuff my jeans and I literally walk around with a sword and I can quote Lady Gaga to perfection! Why would you ever think I was straight??”
Lexi your gaydar is broken bestie.
Don't do this omg this is gonna be a mess
Gigi: THIS IS A BAD IDEA. ABORT! ABORT!
Lexi: Relaaaax. It’s going to be fine!
Gigi: I’ve read enough fanfiction to know the fake dating trope never ends well!
Lexi: I’ve told you to include the ‘angst with happy ending’ tag!
LMAO
Also Gigi which fanfiction do you read?
Jace omg...
That's so him though.
“How about my peeps? It sounds very hip.”
“It does not,” Lexi replied. “Please don’t refer to us as your peeps under any circumstance."
IM SCREAMING ASHSKHSIDBSHSHDH
Her father chuckled at that. “Sweetheart, you’re a Herondale. Being problematic is what we do.”
EXACTLY
Daddy opened the notebook again. “I need names.”
Grabs flamethrower names
“Besides, the Lightwoods and Blackthorns have been hogging the gay genes for too long. Now it’s our turn. I say you gay it up.”
“Gay it up?” Lexi laughed.
“Yeah,” he grinned. “Go for the highest possible level of gay.”
DO IT
He blinked for a second and then it hit him. “OH MY GOD YES! DOES EMMA KNOW??”
Lexi laughed. Yeah, he can never find out it was a fake dating situation.
Hopefully he won't have to because it won't be fake :D
“To love is a privilege and to be loved is a blessing.”
THE GROWTH OH MY GOD
This chapter literally means so much to me. I don't even know what to say. I hope I too can one day have the courage to shout it in front of everyone and not be scared. See ya on Tuesday!
It means so much to me that this chapter meant a lot to you. I hope you find all the courage, strength and support you need. You are amazing.
And here. I made you a playlist.
Tumblr media
You can find it here on YouTube. I hope you like it :)
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Hi everybody, thanks for the asks letting me know I made the top of @yusuftiddies’ list of Homophobes in TOG Fandom, you can stop sending them now.
So.
I can make mistakes and fuck up and own that. I am serious about listening to marginalized people. But... in this case, while @yusufstiddies generally describes factual events that happened and factual posts that exist, I have to say that I can’t actually apologize for the things I’m called out for because I don’t think they’re homophobic. The things he criticizes me for are things that come from a lot of personal experience as a queer bisexual cis woman, as well as a lot of reflection, research, and study. I believe in them really strongly and stand by them.
I’m really sorry if this makes TOG fandom too hostile, because it is not my intention to make this place so unpleasant that anyone feels driven out. I understand if my stance means people no longer want to follow me/read my stuff/participate in projects I’m involved with (though I’d rather hand off the Research Hub to someone else than see it go down with me). I’m posting this so people can know where they stand before they decide whether to keep interacting with my blog, or “deplatform” me as @yusufstiddies recommends.
I would recommend, for anyone who doesn’t want to see my posts, using Tumblr’s new post content filtering feature. If you type a username (like star-anise or with-my-murder-flute) into it, Tumblr will hide all posts featuring that specific string of characters, and therefore any post or reblog of mine.
To address the accusations against me:
I am an anti-anti: Yes. I’ve reblogged posts of mine about this before. I care passionately about preventing child abuse, but I think there are better ways to prevent child abuse in fandom (like concrete harassment policies so predatory behaviour can be reported and stopped early, and education about digital consent and healthy relationships) than attacking people who write “bad ships,” not least because the first people it hurts are abuse survivors trying to work through their trauma, and because the research says you cannot actually tell who’s a sexual predator based on what they write about.  Fiction affects reality, but not on a 1:1 basis. My mainblog, @star-anise, has a really extensive archive of my writing on the subject.
I said cishet men aren’t more privileged than gay men: Kinda. What I actually did was question whether Every Single Cishet Man benefits from more privilege than Every Single Gay Man. If a man is cishet but gets beaten up because people perceive him as gay, he’s not exactly feeling the warm toasty glow of heterosexual privilege in that moment. Oppression is complicated and there are times when someone’s lack of privilege on one axis is way less important than someone else’s lack of privilege on another axis.
The post above also includes me reblogging someone else’s addition about how straight men can be included in the queer movement: I’m queer. @yusufstiddies has made it very clear that he isn’t comfortable with the word “queer” and doesn’t like it. Therefore I think it’s understandable that he might not understand that the queer community sees ourselves as a coalition of people dedicated to dismantling the structures of sex and gender that oppress us, not a demographic of people whose gender identities or sexual orientations can be neatly mapped. However, I would say that doesn’t make queer theory inherently homophobic.
There are also some related points @yusufstiddies didn’t level at me specifically, but I would like to address:
The constant focus on the unsafeness of cishet people:
I’m not cishet. I’m a bisexual woman who’s dated women. Sixth-light is a queer woman married to a woman. This is not an issue of non-LGBTQ+ people blundering their way into something they don’t experience the daily consequences of. This is an issue of people from WITHIN the LGBTQ+ community who sincerely disagree with @yusufstiddies about the pressures we experience and how best to deal with them. I think that even if @yusufstiddies were to filter his fiction input to only LGBT-written work about LGBT experiences, or even only trans-written work about trans people, he would still find a lot of things he finds upsetting or transphobic, because sexual and gender identities are really diverse and not everything will suit one person.
The contention that saying “’Queer is a slur’ is TERF propaganda” is transmisogyny because it dilutes the definition of “TERF”:
People who point out the phrase is TERF propaganda are not calling every person who says it a TERF, and we are not trying to argue that telling a queer person that queer is a slur is inherently equal to the kind of damage a TERF does when she attacks a trans woman out of transphobia. Queer people being able to use the word “queer” does not have the same importance as trans women being able to live, work, and survive in public. Rather, we are literally saying, “This is a thing TERFs say when they take a break from attacking trans women and try to recruit new members to their group, so it’s in our best interests to not give it too wide a currency.”
Some people have experienced the word “queer” used as a hateful word hurled against them and don’t want to hear it ever again. I get that. It happens. Where I grew up, “gay” was a synonym for “shitty” and it took me a lot of years out of high school before the word “gay” wouldn’t shoot my blood pressure through the roof.  I actually do understand that and think that’s valid (and again, support using post content filtering for that word).
One of the things I do at @star-anise is argue with young people who are headed into full-on transmisogynistic TERF territory, and work at reeling them back and deradicalizing them. I use a tag called “weedwhacking” so my followers can filter out the sometimes lengthy back-and-forths we get going.
Something I’ve learned, interacting with so many TERFs and proto-TERFs, is that one way they frequently get recruited into harassing trans people was through discourse around the word “queer”. For one, it encouraged them to want to distance themselves from any perception of LGBT people as “weird” or “not normal”, which led to seeing trans people as “weird” and “not normal” and therefore not good members of the “gay pride” community. For two, repeating “queer is a slur” predictably causes a lot of queer people to react in a defensive manner, so by teaching young or new people to say it, TERFs can set them up to feel alienated from the larger LGBTQ+ community and more open to TERF propaganda.
The next issue isn’t mentioned in the original callout post, but I think it’s key to this entire issue:
@yusufstiddies has made several posts about what cishet people should and shouldn’t write. For example, cishets shouldn’t write Nicky experiencing internalized homophobia.  Another is a detailed post of things cishets shouldn’t write about trans people, including which sexual positions only trans people are allowed to write. I would imagine that part of his frustration with fandom has been the lack of traction those posts have gotten. I know I very deliberately didn’t reblog them.
That isn’t because I don’t agree that the things he complains about are rarely handled well by cishet authors. I agree that there’s a lot of bad fic out there that contributes to negative stereotypes against LGBTQ+ people and is basically a microaggression to read.
I have two very deeply-seated reasons for my position:
LGBTQ+ identities are different from many other political identities because most people are not born identifiably LGBTQ+. It’s something we have to figure out about ourselves. And one really important way that we do that is using the safety of fiction to explore what an experience would be like, sometimes years before we ever admit that we fit the identity we’ve written about. So banning cishet authors from writing something is really likely to harm closeted and questioning LGBTQ+ people. It will lengthen the amount of time questioning people take before finding the identity that really fits them, and force closeted people to be even more closeted. 
There’s a lot of undeniably shitty stuff in fandom. However, I fundamentally believe that trying to target the people creating it and forcing them to stop doesn’t work very well, and has the serious byproduct of killing the creativity and enthusiasm of the rest of fandom and resulting in less of the actual thing you like being produced. I think that it is infinitely more productive to focus on improving the ratio of good stuff in fandom than trying to snuff out every bad thing.
Like I said: I understand if this means former followers, mutuals, or friends no longer want to interact with me. I’ll be saddened, but I’ve obviously chosen this path and can deal with the consequences. 
I wish this could have worked out differently.
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Hello! I hope it’s ok to ask, but I’m looking for some advice and I’ve seen some really good advice on here before.......So, a little bit about me, I’ve identified as ace for like 5 years now and I’m kinda trying out identifying as aro cos that makes sense too. I’m at the point where I’m 87% sure I’m gonna apply to do a masters degree in gender and sexuality studies, wherein my proposed research will be about representations of asexuality, which I’m actually pretty excited about. The only thing is, well a few things actually...
1) I’m out to like 3 people, none of whom are my parents who I still live at home with. I don’t really see the point in coming out as an aroace who really hopes to be in a romantic and sexual relationship in the future should I magically find someone I like enough to actually consider a relationship with, it’ll either happen or it won’t. I kinda wanna come out just to get it done with, but it doesn’t change anything from my parents point of view, either I’m ‘straight’ waiting for a relationship, or I’m aroace waiting for a relationship...it makes no difference, other than opening myself up for awkward, potentially aphobic and probably homophobic questions which I wanna avoid. But equally I don’t wanna hide and do my research in secret and silence. I’d be studying from home so I’d still be seeing everyone I’m not out to (colleagues, friends, family etc) who will understandably be interested that I’m getting a masters and will want to know more, but I just don’t know how to balance being as truthful as possible about what I’m studying because it means a lot to me whilst not forcing myself to come out...if anyone has any advice I’d be extremely grateful cos it’s kinda the biggest thing stopping me from wanting to apply right now...
Also 2) I’ve done a ton of research already about asexuality, the wider queer community etc in preparation for applying (I have like 30k+ words of notes already) but there were several months last year that I gave up on research completely, almost entirely because I got fed up of practically everything I read invalidating my asexuality, with asexuality always being discussed/defined as not wanting sex, not desiring sex, asexual=nonsexual etc. It’s this kinda thing what took me so long to ID as ace in the first place cos I’ve always been a pretty sexual person, albeit just on my own, and having a desire for hypothetical future sex made me feel not ace enough to actually identify as ace despite never feeling sexually attracted to anyone, and feeling really confused about what sexual attraction actually was 🤣 whilst I’m pretty secure in my ace identity these days, the constant invalidation I’m getting from doing all this reading does really get to me and I don’t know what to do to stop making it get to me? I know there’s no right or wrong was to be aspec, not wanting/desiring/having sex is just as ace as having sex, but when asexuals having sex is never an option in what I’m reading it just makes me wanna give up and crawl back into bed cos it reminds me of the depressing days when I didn’t think I was ace enough and therefore I was just...wrong. Any strategies to work through the constant invalidation without giving up would also be appreciated!
This turned into an entire essay (I’m sorry, I just really like writing essays, god I hope it makes sense though) but I just wanna say thank you for everything you do! So many of us have absolutely no where to turn to talk about being aspec, and this is such a valuable resource because of it, so thank you soooo much 💜
For coming out or not, I think this is definitely something that's a personal choice. And I don't think there's a wrong choice unless it feels wrong to you. Both definitely have pros and cons, I don't think there's any option that doesn't have a downside unfortunately. One question that may help is how big an advantage do you think it would be to be out and be able to publicly draw from your own experiences? If not much, or if you think it may be a disadvantage, it may not be worth it, but if it really helps your work it may be worth dealing with the downsides more. Remember to put yourself and your mental health first though.
Two things to remember I think two is 1. You can come out at any time so it's not a choice you have to make now if you don't want to. (Though it may be easier to come out earlier and be done with it, but it's a personal choice). and 2. You don't have to be out to everyone or do a big coming out. If it's useful to be out for your degree/research that doesn't necessarily mean you have to tell your family/friends for example.
Though whatever you decide, I would definitely recommend trying to grow your support group a bit. Especially try and find other ace and aro people you can talk to about things and vent to who will get it. And this can be as simple as finding one or two good online communities, you can also look into ace/aro in person meetups and see if you can connect to people a bit that way too.
This will help both with any aphobic/homophobic stuff you have to deal with if you decide to come out, but will also help a lot with the constant invalidation you're likely to keep running into in academic spheres.
Following ace/aro people on social media or ace/aro blogs and following positivity blogs can help too.
Basically you want to counteract the invalidation you're going to be dealing with, and the more you can drown it out with proper validation, the easier that's going to be.
Watch out for other stressors, dealing with invalidation/aphobia on a regular basis is stressful, and the less stress you have otherwise, the easier it will be to deal with that stress. (Obviously cutting out stress is not easy, and if it was it wouldn't be an issue, but definitely it's good to be aware of this.) And put your own mental health first, always. It's great to work in ace research, and you'll likely do a lot of good, but it shouldn't be at the expense of yourself.
This is just kind of an aside but I'm honestly surprised to see academia is still defining asexuality around how sexual they are, I'd think they'd at least be using the lack of sexual attraction model. It's definitely disappointing. :/
(Also I hope you don't mind this is public, but because you asked for everyone's advice I assume it's OK. Tumblr doesn't seem to allow answering asks privately anymore, but I'll happily take this down if you want me to.)
All the best and I wish you the best of luck!
Also going to put this out to followers if anyone has any advice, or if anyone deals with anything similar and wants to talk about it/share their own opinions, please do!
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pageswithoutaplot · 3 years
Text
Rhysand is a terrible ruler.
And here’s why.
So Rhysand-and Feyre- are the High Lord and Lady of the Night Court. Now the Night Court can technically be split into 3 territories: Velaris, the Court of Nightmares, and Illyria.
Velaris: Now we know that for centuries Velaris has been hidden from the rest of Prythian and by extension-its turmoils and wars. Feyre herself remarked how untouched by tragedy the city is when Rhysand brought her there for the first time. When Rhysand allowed Keir entrance to Velaris as part of their deal, it’s mentioned to Mor that he spoke with the city’s council to ensure Keir wouldn’t be welcome indicating that while he may be the Lord of Velaris, he does not rule it alone. This can be further witnessed in A Court of Frost and Starlight as throughout the book Feyre and Rhys mention that there is still a lot of work to be done, but don’t mention exactly what or what are their plans. The only thing that we’ve seen them do as rulers in Velaris is Feyre doing paperwork. That’s it. You’re an all-powerful fae who has continuously mentioned how rich they are and how many people are suffering in your city (Feyre: Many people in Velaris still don’t have homes-ACOFAS) but you don’t do anything about it? Even if the council is taking care of it you have a responsibility-and the resources as you’ve so kindly reminded us a thousand times- to oversee the care of your city- And I don’t mean during sky sex. This is concerning the one territory of his he perhaps enjoys and loves the most.
The Court of Nightmares: Horrible people. Terrible. Mor’s abusers live there and thrive, Amarantha modeled her court after it, weakness isn’t allowed only calculating cruelty-basically, it’s a shitty place. It was a shitty place when Mor’s shitty family ruled and it’s a shitty place when Rhysand’s father became High Lord and it remained shitty when Rhysand came into power. And Rhysand did nothing to change that. Time and again in the series his mask has been mentioned. He’s a different person when he visits the Hewn city because he has to be. When he takes Feyre there for the first time she has to be different too. All the members of the Inner Circle have to be, they have to wear their masks-but do they? Rhysand is 500 years. Remove the 50 years under Amarantha’s rule, around let’s say 80 years for growing up, the duration of the war and until Tamlin killed his dad. That still leaves over 300 years of him ruling the Court of Nightmares. 300 years of possible change, of implementing reforms, of teaching them and the next generation to be better. But he doesn’t. He plays the rule of Cruel High Lord and exerts his power over everyone when he visits the court. And notice I say visits specifically. Rhysand doesn’t live there so he can’t possibly oversee everything’s that happening, in fact when he has to visit- because he is still its ruler- he treats it more like a nuisance. Because it is to him. Its much more easier to not care when you’re not faced with the cruelty that you’ve ended up fostering, you can just choose to ignore. Mor’s situation is not unique. There’s a very high chance other females-without all of her power, whatever her power is, and her High Lord cousin- have suffered the same fate and nothing was done. Even after he takes his mask off and makes it known that Feyre is High Lady, there’s still no change or even effort to change. They don’t do anything to try and better the situation or the court itself, they just make their announcements, do whatever they have to do, and then leave. Their power is there but they don’t use it except for dick-sizing contests, because its obvious that they don’t care. And why should they right? It’s a shitty court with shitty people; except when you’re the ruler of that court you have a responsibility to care like it or not, its your job.
Illyria: Here we see it happen again. They have the power, but they don’t use it-not even for dick-sizing contests. For hundreds of hundreds of years Illyria has a been a cesspool for inequality. If you’re a bastard then you’re on your own until you inevitably die and if you’re a women (female) well you’ll wish you were dead. To an Illyrian, their wings are everything and when females get their wings clipped it’s not just their freedom that gets taken away, its their very identity. Then on its be a laundress or a seamstress or a housewife and that’s basically it. But even then they’re still vulnerable and prey to the males as we can see with Azriel’s mother (only allowed to see her son for one hour, has to work all other times, can’t leave the house.) And while Cassian doesn’t go into detail about how his mother died, we know it’s because of the males at their camp. The only reason Rhysand’s mother was spared is because when she was about to get her own wings clipped, the mating bond snapped into place between her and his father and he misted everyone around them. When they wed, her position became seriously elevated so no male could touch her without threat of death hanging above their head. So far in Rhysand’s rule, we only see one of his proclamation put into place: to ban clippings. I say only one because his ruling over Illyrian females’ training is basically null if him and Cassian have to argue about it with Devlon and the other warlords all the time. Rhysand isn’t at the camps all the time so he has no way of making sure they follow his orders-and they obviously don’t. In ACOFAS it’s mentioned that the girls haven’t trained in a while and Devlon only states that they’re busy with chores. It’s such a blatant disregard for orders and authority, it’s disrespect-and Rhysand and Cassian allow it. Sure they argue with him, but what’s the point? You’re literally the High Lord and General Commander why are you even arguing with someone who has a lower station that you. You have no problem using-and abusing- your power for a multitude of reasons (getting in Tarquin and Cresseida’s heads and manipulating them, manipulating Feyre into accepting your deal by breaking her arm further, shattering Keir’s bones when he insulted Feyre...) but this is where you draw the line? At trying to create gender equality and give the females their freedom back? Rhysand, again, has had over 300 years worth of time and chances to make things right. He’s such an advocate for equality but he doesn’t put the work- or any work- behind his claims. Even Cassian is not blameless, in his want for acceptance from his fellow Illyrians he either consciously or subconsciously forgets that his rank is higher than all of theirs and when it comes to issues like the girls training, he shouldn’t have to argue, certainly not over 300 years after Rhysand first made the decision that girls should be allowed to train. Its mentioned several times that the Illyrians are stubborn people, hard headed, don’t do well with change-but Rhysand is the High Lord. He has no problem making the Court of Nightmares bow to him so there’s no reason why he should be so pliant in front of the Illyrians. He said once “Would you have me disband the largest army in Prythian?” (Or something to that effect, I can’t remember the exact words, only the sentiment) so its shown he’s aware and that he cares about the army existing, obviously I mean they were about to face another war, but what is especially bothering is that we haven’t gotten any sort of declaration like that towards the Illyrian females. Does he acknowledge their plight, I remember that yes he does, but he doesn’t do anything about it. Nothing real and tangible. Making the Illyrian girls train for an hour or two every week doesn’t even begin to undo hundreds of years of inequality and when after 300 years, you’re still being fought on it and refuse to put any of your own actual weight behind it to make sure it happens, its not even a start. Equality is even about more than just making sure they train a couple of times and it needs more than that-he’s really reducing it and their plight to that one act that he can’t even do right and reducing the females to nothing more than soldiers. 
He has three territories in his court and the one only that is doing relatively well is the one that his ancestors made sure would be a place of peace and has a council formed for its needs. That’s kind of sus. 
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haroldtea · 3 years
Text
i wrote something!!
soooo I’m a pathological “i have a fic idea and i’m never going to write it or I write a few pages and then fall off” writer buuuut I had this very cute idea and wrote 4k words of it! I wanted to post it here before ao3 because 1) not sure if I’m a fan of starting a multichapter WIP because I still may abandon it like my other stuff 2) i want feedback before i continue!!
here’s the gist: it’s princess prom except it’s a high school au and princess prom is actually homecoming. Adora is very happy and supportive of Glimmer and Bow running for king/queen. Glimmer is very, very passionate about winning. The problem is they’ve naturally got competition, in the form of Perfuma (who is equally as passionate about winning, for her own reasons) and her new girlfriend Scorpia. In a sitcom-style mishap, Adora sort of accidentally signs up to run as well...with Catra, Scorpia’s best friend who Adora doesn’t not have a crush on. The two decide to go through with it with the intention of getting eliminated from the race as soon as possible. Then, their friends come up with a different plan for them.
so, take a read below at 4k of stupidity and let me know what you think, and if you would be interested to read more :) (fyi there is a lot of swearing lol)
“I’M GONNA BE THE QUEEN!”
Adora shrieks, flailing her arms and almost knocking her lamp over in the process. She whirls around in her desk chair to face the intruder, arms raised in karate chop form (she does not know any martial arts), and finds Glimmer, who has flung her bedroom door open and has that crazed Glimmer look in her eyes that only means trouble.
“Fuck! Glimmer, you can’t just sneak up--wait, how did you get in my house?!”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?! Also, the door was unlocked,” Glimmer replies, kicking off her shoes and launching herself onto Adora’s bed, which she had just painstakingly made.
Adora presses her hand into her face, sighing. “I was kind of busy trying not to piss myself. Haven’t you heard of knocking? What if I was, you know...” she says, gesturing vaguely.
Glimmer rolls her eyes. “Please, Adora. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Anyway--the student council decided to bring back the homecoming pep rally!” she squeals, gleefully kicking her feet in the air.
Adora leans back in her chair, brows furrowed. “Bring back? Didn’t we have one last year?”
“Yes, but after the water balloon thing they weren’t gonna let us have it anymore, but it turns out that one senior who wasn’t gonna graduate did graduate so I guess they figured it would probably be fine, ‘cause like, who’s ever gonna try and top that?”
“Right,” Adora hums, thinking back to last year’s pep rally. Just before homecoming court was announced, a group of rogue seniors had risen from the bleachers, unleashing dozens of water balloons they had stashed in their backpacks. What ensued was a pandemonium Adora could only remember in flashes, resulting in almost the entire student body and the school’s hallways being completely soaked.
The catch was that the seniors had filled the balloons with blue paint. It had taken the janitorial staff weeks to get the gym bleachers, the lockers in the science wing, and the cafeteria ceiling (don’t ask) to look normal again. Classes were cancelled for almost an entire week because the paint had messed up something with the internal plumbing. It was single-handedly the coolest thing Adora had experienced in her living years.
It was all led by the legendary Mara Hart, notorious for sticking it to the man during her K-12 years. The prank had all but gotten her and her friends expelled, but given that she was otherwise an A+ student and no one could technically prove who was behind it (her friends were loyal to each other to the bitter end), she walked at Bright Moon High’s graduation to uproarious applause from her classmates.
Adora knew some of the more grisly details because Mara had been captain of the girls’ lacrosse team last year--effortlessly cool Mara, endlessly caring Mara, definitely part of Adora’s gay awakening Mara--but it had become something of an urban legend at BMHS over the past year.
“Wait, how do you know any of this?” Adora asks, because while she was personally connected to Mara in a small way, she hadn’t been aware that they were going to cancel the pep rally indefinitely.
Glimmer arches an eyebrow. “Um, hello? My mom’s the principal?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And Mermista totally let it slip when I asked her about it after the student council meeting,” Glimmer adds, then pauses. “Okay, it was more like I didn’t even wanna be there and I wish no one had ever voted for me and I’ll tell you whatever, but still. I’m...” she props her face in her hands and bats her eyelashes, “in the know.”
Adora smirks and rolls her eyes fondly, turning back to her desk to shut her textbook and put her notes away. She can never get anything done when Glimmer’s around. “Okay, so, pep rally’s back--that’s cool,” she says.
“It’s not just cool, Adora,” Glimmer scoffs. “Being homecoming queen is literally all I’ve wanted since I was a kid. I thought my dream had died with Mara’s academic career, but now there’s hope again--it’s meant to be, Adora. It’s destiny.”
Adora had literally never heard Glimmer talk about this, but, “Um, okay.”
Glimmer huffs and dramatically rolls onto her back, flinging her arms out and further messing up Adora’s sheets. Lesson learned, it isn’t worth the effort for Adora to make the bed anymore. “My mom was the homecoming queen like a hundred years ago, and my aunt was the homecoming queen before that. It’s, like, my birthright!”
Adora lifts a shoulder, twisting around in her chair to look at Glimmer. “Okay, then we’ll just get you to be the homecoming queen too. Can’t your mom just...make it happen?”
“Ugh, no,” Glimmer sighs. “I already asked. It’s a student vote.”
“Oh!” Adora brightens. “That’s easy, then. Everyone loves you.”
Glimmer pouts. “I know, but it’s not just a popularity contest--it’s, like, a whole thing. Me and Bow are gonna have to do a talent show, and there’s a relay race, and other stuff that if we don’t do well in we won’t even get to be in the final vote.”
“Wait, what?” Adora doesn’t remember any of that from last year. “What do you mean, Bow? Is...he's running for homecoming queen too?”
“Ha! No,” Glimmer laughs, then her expression darkens, eyes narrowing. “I would crush him.”
“Right...” Adora says. Actually, Bow would make a pretty good homecoming queen. But Adora values her life, so she decidedly does tell Glimmer this.
“No, every queen nominee has to also have someone to run with them as their ‘king,’” Glimmer explains, making air quotes with her fingers. “There’s no boy/girl bullshit, but you do have to be in a pair.”
“I don’t remember any...talent shows, or whatever,” Adora points out. “I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of one of those happening in real life.”
“Well, obviously you never went. It would’ve all been during your lacrosse thingies and you would've been too busy making googly eyes at Mara Hart,” Glimmer replies, wiggling her fingers at Adora.
Adora crosses her arms and blushes a deep red. “I would not. I would’ve been playing lacrosse. And stuff.” Okay, maybe she did make googly eyes at Mara, but only sometimes, as a treat, and Glimmer doesn’t need to know that.
Glimmer flips back over on her stomach and levels Adora with a pout. “Adora, this means a lot to me. We’re gonna need your help to win this.”
Adora has no idea how she could possibly be of any help with this, but hey-- “Of course, Glimmer. Whatever you need. I’m there.”
Glimmer grins, eyes sparkling. “Yaaaaay. Also, my mom’s making meatloaf tonight, you in?”
Adora pumps her fist in the air. “Sweet. Hell, yes.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“This is a joke, right? Like, you’re joking?” Catra says into the receiver as she shoves another handful of popcorn into her mouth.
“I am usually a pretty funny gal, it’s true--but, ah, no. This time I’m serious,” Scorpia replies on the other end.
Catra hoists her phone higher up on her shoulder while she adjusts her grip on her Xbox controller. “Okay, please explain,” she says between chews.
Scorpa sighs, and Catra visualizes her sitting cross-legged on her bedspread, hugging one of her many stuffed animals to her chest. “I know it’s kind of silly, but Perfuma sounded really excited about it, ‘cause I guess if you win, you get to pick what charity the proceeds from the dance ticket sales go to, and...I just couldn’t say no?”
Catra smirks, mashing a series of buttons on her controller as her TV screen lights up in front of her. She’s been trying to get past this level for weeks, but she’ll probably die right before the end again whether she’d answered Scorpia’s call or not. “You are so whipped,” she says.
Scorpia sighs again, but this time Catra can hear a smile in it. “I guess so, kitty cat. Still, it sounds kinda...fun? I mean, it’s more time spent with her, if anything else. She’s talking about writing an original song together for the talent show and incorporating her Tibetan singing bowls into it.”
Catra takes that in and barely suppresses a laugh. Her New Year’s resolution was to make fun of her friends less. Some days are harder than others. “Um, wow,” she says instead. “That’s, uh...that’ll be interesting. Do I have to call you Queen Scorpia if you win?”
“Oh, Perfuma doesn’t believe in gendered royalty,” Scorpia replies. “She wants us to be known as Homecoming Monarchs.”
“Of course she does,” Catra mutters. Perfuma is endlessly kind and patient and makes Scorpia smile, so by default Catra likes her, but otherwise they...don’t exactly share identical values, let’s say. Catra brings her own point home by pressing a button on her controller and chainsawing an alien in half on screen.
“Do you...think it’s a stupid idea? The whole...running for homecoming thing, I mean.”
Catra hears the telltale signs of Scorpia-doubting-herself in her reply, so she pauses the game. “Nah. If it’s something you guys wanna do, you should go for it. Fuck what anyone else thinks.”
“Okay, thanks,” Scorpia says, sounding lighter. “I think it means a lot to Perfuma. It would be cool to win it for her.”
“Well, hey,” Catra continues, un-pausing her game. “If you need any help, let me kn--oh, fuck!”
“Catra?” Panic sets in Scorpia’s tone. “Kitty cat, speak to me--do I need to call 911?!”
“No, no, Scorpia, please don’t do that,” Catra groans, tossing her controller aside. “I just got blown up in my stupid game again, that’s all. I’m never gonna beat this final boss.”
Scorpia sighed in relief. “Aw, don’t give up, kitty cat. One of these days, you’re gonna really give it to--what’s the dude’s name again?”
“Prime something-or-whatever,” Catra grumbled, reaching for her popcorn.
“Yeah, that guy. He’ll never know what hit him.”
Catra snickers into the receiver. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, Scorpia.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The lunch period at BMHS is, naturally, chaotic. Being a regional high school, every inch of the place is usually crawling with students, and the cafeteria is no different. The student population is small enough and the cafeteria big enough to condense into one lunch period, although Adora has oftentimes heard Perfuma lament about the ethics and health concerns of overcrowding.
Adora likes chaos. She likes that the overlapping sounds of chairs scraping and garbled chattering combine to form a comforting din that allows her to drown out whatever weird TikTok plans Bow’s making (ok, to be real, she will be asking about them later) and quietly observe the antics happening at tables around them.
She takes another bite of her pudding and her eyes land on the table to their right where Kyle, Lonnie, and Rogelio from her math class always sit together. Lonnie is mechanically chewing her gum as she stares into a compact mirror, examining her eyebrows with fierce concentration. Across from her, Kyle is holding up something on his phone to Rogelio with one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other as he holds a corn dog. Rogelio is nodding along but is staring down fondly at Kyle rather than at the screen Kyle’s pointing to, one arm hanging loose around Kyle’s shoulders. Lonnie slaps her compact shut and shouts something at them, pointing emphatically to her eyebrows. They all pause for a moment before bursting into laughter. Then Kyle drops his corn dog.
Adora pointedly does not observe the table across from theirs. She’ll gladly watch the Star siblings silently and intensely do their homework for the next period, or listen to Mermista fight off Seahawk’s PDA attempts, but nothing could compel her to look at the table straight ahead.
That table was where Catra Weaver and her friends sat.
Including: Perfuma’s new girlfriend, Scorpia Garnet; Entrapta Dryl, who was dating one of the Hordak twins (Adora was ever completely sure which one); the Hordak twins in question, one of which who usually broods silently and one of which who usually stares around smiling at nothing and everything; the stylish and blonde ruler of the theatre kids who has been nicknamed Double Trouble for as long as Adora can remember; and finally: Catra Weaver. Effortlessly cool, effortlessly gorgeous, effortlessly effortless Catra Weaver, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed, coolly regarding the rest of the cafeteria as she holds court at her table of wonderful misfit toys.
Today’s effortless ensemble: cool jean jacket, a cool crop top, cool black jeans, cool combat boots, she got a haircut recently so--
“Um, Earth to Adora?”
“Huh?” Adora says, jerking her head up.
This is why she avoids looking at Catra Weaver’s table. Or Catra Weaver in general.
“We were talking about homecoming,” Glimmer says from her seat across from Adora, raising an eyebrow. “You were totally spaced out.”
Adora clears her throat, willing herself not to blush. “Sorry,” she replies, digging back into her pudding.
“Glimmer’s trying to convince me not to run for court,” Perfuma continues, crossing her arms.
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s totally lame and stupid and a waste of time,” Mermista answers from beside Perfuma, inspecting her nail polish. She glances up when she senses everyone at the table staring at her. “What?”
“Mermista, you’re on the homecoming committee,” Bow says.
Mermista shrugs. “So? I said what I said.”
“Look, Perfuma,” Glimmer starts, sliding her hand across the table toward Perfuma. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed if you lose. Homecoming’s a really big deal to me, and I really want to win.” She smiles saccharinely, tilting her head at Perfuma, eyes gone wide. Bow and Adora exchange a look.
Perfuma smiles back. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Glimmer! I’m sure our classmates will select the most deserving and talented couple to win,” she says, then goes back to stabbing a fork into her salad.
Glimmer’s eye starts twitching. Bow slowly and gently takes Glimmer’s hand and slides it back to her side of the table. “Glimmer, we’ll do great. The most important thing is to have fun,” he says, patting her hand.
“The most important thing is the charity,” Perfuma mutters.
“That too.”
“Is anybody else we know running?” Adora asks. Glimmer and Perfuma both shake their heads in response, until Mermista sighs dejectedly.
“Unfortunately,” she groans, raising her hand.
“Wait, what?! You just said it was stupid and lame!” Bow squawks.
“It is,” Mermista rolls her eyes. “But the rest of the student council said it would look really bad if I was on the planning committee and didn’t run. I was forced against my will.”
“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” Glimmer asks, gripping her lunch tray so tight Adora wondered if she was going to launch it at Mermista’s head.
“I don’t know? I guess not? I’m planning on getting cut as soon as humanly possible though, so whatever,” Mermista replies, flicking her hair behind her shoulder.
“We won’t win with that attitude, my love!” Seahawk roars, throwing his arm around Mermista’s shoulder and raising a fist triumphantly. “You and I are going to be the greatest King and Queen this school has ever seen!”
“Oh my god, please stop,” Mermista groans, hiding her face in her hands.
“Picture it: you, me, newly crowned, gliding down the science wing--the students stop and stare! Could it really be our King and Queen in the flesh? The teachers stare too! I am going to give them both straight A’s!”
“Please just sit and eat your sandwich,” Mermista begs.
“Never,” Seahawk says, then kisses her on the cheek and acquiesces, taking a big bite of his sandwich. Adora tries to hide her smirk when she sees Mermista blush a deep red. She elbows Glimmer and nods in their direction so she can see.
“Aw, how cute. I’m going to destroy them,” Glimmer whispers in Adora’s ear.
“I know,” Adora whispers back. “But try to at least be nice about it.”
“No promises.”
“Ok, I have to pee,” Adora announces to the table, grabbing her lunch tray as she stands, grinning at Bow’s groan of TMI, Adora!
She makes her way over to the trash cans by the cafeteria exit, waving to her friends on the lacrosse team as she dumps her leftovers in the trash and sets the tray in the dish bin beside it. She should probably go over and check in with them about practice tonight, but she really has to pee, which reminds her that she forgot her water bottle all the way back to the table and needs to refill it before her next class.
“Damn it,” she mutters to herself, still smiling at her lacrosse friends as she whips around to head back--
And crashes right into someone, their heads knocking smack together.
“Ow!” Adora yelps, losing her footing for a moment. She rubs at her stinging forehead, glancing up as she apologizes, “Shit, sorry, sorry, that was totally my fault, I--”
And stares right up at Catra Weaver.
“I...I...I...”
She blinks a few times, but yes, that is Catra Weaver, rubbing at her own forehead and fixing a few strands of hair that had come loose from behind her ears. Catra Weaver, up close and personal, who she hasn’t talked to since...
“Your forehead is fucking hard. And big,” Catra says, holding her tray in one hand as she narrows her eyes up at Adora.
“Oh, um, you too...I mean! Thanks? I grew it myself,” Adora replies spectacularly, and then promptly wants to crawl into a hole and never come out.
Catra raises one eyebrow at her. “How hard did I hit you?”
Adora scrambles to answer. “Oh, not at all! I mean, not hard. It was my fault. Are you, um, are you okay?” This is going amazingly.
“I’m fine, Greyskull,” Catra replies, sending a tingle up Adora’s spine. She goes to deposit her tray. “Just watch where you’re going.”
Adora grins dopily. “Yes. I mean--I will. Sorry. Again.”
Catra glances Adora up and down, eyebrow still raised, and goes to say something else, when they’re interrupted by a foreboding, familiar voice.
“Ah, Adora! I’m so pleased to see you taking an interest in student affairs.”
Adora turns to see Glimmer’s mom looming over them, hands neatly clasped together. Maybe looming isn’t the right word as she’s smiling brightly down on her and Catra, but she’s tall, ok? “Oh, hi Ang--,” Adora starts before remembering they’re at school, “um, Mrs. Moon. What’s up?”
Angella gestures between her and Catra. “I was just observing how wonderful it will be that Glimmer will have a friend to share the homecoming experience with.”
Adora tenses again, remembering that Catra is still standing very close to her. “Oh, haha, yeah, super great. Wait, what?” Sharing?
Then she notices that her and Catra are standing in front of the wall where the Homecoming Court Signup Sheet is hanging. A sparkly pen tied to the clipboard is dangling within Adora’s reach.
“Oh, um, actually, Perfuma’s already--”
“I think this activity will make a fine addition to your college applications, Adora. And you know how Glimmer gets,” Angella leans in conspiratorially, not bothering to lower her voice. “I think it will calm her nerves to have a friend by her side. A bit of friendly competition, even!” she claps her hands together, delighted. “I remember having so much fun with my friends back in my day.”
“But, I’m already on the lacrosse team...” Adora mumbles, scratching the back of her neck. She glances down at the pen.
“Oh, but you know schools these days, always looking for that something that makes a student stand out,” Angella says, waving her hand dismissively. “And don’t worry, I’ll speak to Coach Huntara about any scheduling conflicts. You’ll get to have the best of both worlds!”
Wait, but lacrosse was Adora’s whole thing--does she not stand out enough? Will she seem boring to UEternia? “I...”
“Oh, Ms. Weaver!” Angella says, as if she’s just now noticing Catra. “I didn’t take you for the...school spirit type.”
“I’m not,” Catra replies, crossing her arms. She smiles saccharinely and adds, “ma’am,” for good measure. God, she’s cool.
“Ah,” Angella says, creating an awkward pause before brightening again. “Well, still, here you are. Are you Adora’s running mate?”
So, sometimes Adora panics.
Look, she’s in a high-stress situation. The girl she doesn’t not have an embarrassing crush on bumped into her, talked to her, and then her best friend’s mom swooped in basically saying that lacrosse is boring and dumb and running for homecoming court will get her into UEternia. At least, that’s what Adora got from all that. And then she insinuates that she’ll be doing that with Catra Weaver.
So, she panics. She panics, and she grabs the glittery pen, and she continues to panic.
“Yep! We’re running together!” she says, grinning.
“Say what?” Catra hisses.
“Oh, wonderful!” Angella squeals, clapping her hands together again. “I must say, I think this will turn out to be a very interesting competition. You’ll have to come dress shopping with us, Adora.”
“Haha, yeah...” Adora says, quickly scribbling Adora Greyskull & Catra Weaver on the signup sheet. Oh fuck, oh god.
“Hang on a fu--” Catra starts, then clamps her mouth shut, because the goddamn principal is still talking to them.
“Oh, I wonder what you’ll do for the talent show! I can’t wait...well, I’m off. It was great catching up, girls!” Angella says, and winks, and does weird-mom-finger-guns, and then she’s gliding away as quickly as she came.
Adora continues to grin and wave awkwardly until Angella is out of sight, then she deflates. That was so weird.
Then she turns and sees Catra reach for the pen that’s still in her hand. Adora has half a mind to snatch it away. Or half a brain cell, at least. “Hey!”
“Cross our names out. Right. Now,” Catra growls through gritted teeth, still trying to grab the pen. Adora tries to hold it up out of reach, but it’s still attached to the clipboard, so the best she can do is weave her hand in and out of Catra’s way.
“Um, no? I just told her we were running!”
“Well, we’re not. Give it to me!”
“No!” Adora grunts, yanking the pen away. “You heard her--she’s gonna talk to Coach Huntara. I can’t back out now.”
“Well, I can!” Catra says, grabbing at Adora’s arm, where she has the pen tucked under her armpit. “Find someone else to run with you!”
“I can’t! They’ll want to win!” Adora says, twisting her body away from Catra. She’s having a slight meltdown over Catra touching her so much, but she’s focusing on the pen for now. “No one’s gonna want to run with me anyway.”
Catra mutters something under her breath that Adora doesn’t catch, then she snakes her hand under Adora’s and takes hold of her wrist. Adora stifles a gasp. “Wait, you don’t want to win?” Catra asks, eyebrow quirked.
“Noooo,” Adora furiously shakes her head. “No, no, no. Glimmer would kill me. She wants to win. I just, um, panicked. I guess?” The heat from Catra’s hand is searing into her wrist.
Catra glances down at their hands and back up at Adora. “So, your friend will kill you if you run for homecoming. And you just signed up in front of her mom?”
“Um...” Adora thinks for a second. “Yes?”
Catra huffs out a laugh. “Wow, you’re even more of an idiot than I remember.”
Adora feels her face redden, shocked at Catra’s casual mention of the past, and glances away. “Look, let’s just get eliminated as quickly as possible and then we can forget it ever happened. Deal?”
“Ugh,” Catra lets out a groan, leaning her head back. She tugs at Adora’s wrist a few times, finding that she isn’t budging. “Fine! As quickly as possible.”
“As quickly as possible,” Adora nods, finding herself grinning as Catra loosens her grip and pulls away. “I’m gonna take this pen home, by the way,” she calls out as Catra begins to head back to her table.
“Fuck!”
After Adora finally pees and refills her water bottle, she gingerly sits back down beside Glimmer. Poor, sweet, deadly Glimmer, who’s chattering away excitedly with Seahawk about some new music video or something.
She says, in a very tiny voice, “So, um...I think I’m running for homecoming queen?”
Glimmer whips her head around, nose flaring. She stands up, slamming both hands down on the table with a smack.
“You WHAT?!”
And then the bell rings.
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getoheaven · 3 years
Text
some information on TERF dogwhistles — TW: transmisogyny, transphobia, s*xual abuse mentions and s*icide/baiting mentions
i’m going to use this short and concise guide on spotting TERF ideology as a jumping off point. from Cambridge university’s women campaign:
HOW DO WE SPOT IT?
Terf ideology uses a lot of the same phrases and tropes, which often seem innocuous on the surface but are actually being used as dogwhistles for transphobia and transmisogyny. Overall, terf ideology hides itself in feminist language, often claiming to support trans rights while actually working to undermine them.
“Gender critical”, discussed above; terfs also often dub themselves “biological women” or “adult human females”, and frequently highlight biological and anatomical signifiers such as “XX” (denoting chromosomes) and parts of reproductive anatomy.
“RadFem”; terf ideology calls itself “radical feminism” after its origins in parts of the feminist ‘second wave’ and its opposition to what it sees as “liberal feminist” positions of trans inclusion, although in reality there’s nothing “radical” about biological essentialism.
Certain waves of terf ideology have attempted to separate trans people out from the rest of the LGBT+ community, so you might see references to the “LGB community” or “drop the T”.
Terfs often dub trans people and their allies the “transgender lobby” or “cult of transgenderism”.
They tend to dislike the term “cis” (non-trans), and often argue that the term ‘terf’ itself is “hate speech”, or a “misogynistic/lesbophobic slur”.
Current terf discourse places a lot of focus on trans children, perpetuating myths that children are being given surgery and hormones (“transing children is child abuse!”).
Another terf trope is painting trans women as predators who want access to women’s spaces so that they can harass and sexually assault cis women.
i’ve also compiled a list of a some other dogwhistles you might want to take into account:
on tumblr or twitter look out for URLs with heavy allusions to genitalia/uteruses/wombs/xx chromosomes
concern trolling - statements such as “we just have concerns” used to filibuster and put roadblocks in the way of genuine conversations about trans people. they are not concerns that will ever be appeased, they also divert the topic away from the issue at hand to purposely muddy the waters of the trans “debate”.
following on from the last point, referring to the issue of trans rights as a “debate” or “discourse”. it both delegitimises the urgency of trans liberation, reducing it down to a debate on a level playing field as well as dehumanising trans people.
“genital preferences are transphobic” - this is a phrase that supposedly originated within the trans community itself. it’s often used in TERF circles as an example of how unreasonable trans people are. it’s also been used to smear the trans community and say that this belief is a very common one amongst trans people, when in reality most of us take a much more nuanced position. to illustrate my point, these stickers were put up by TERFs who then claimed that trans people had made them:
Tumblr media
“lost lesbian sisters” - usually in reference to trans-masculine people. the implication being that trans men are not really men but are actually lesbians “brainwashed” by the “trans agenda”
TRA(s) - stands for Trans Rights Activists. obviously there’s nothing wrong with being an activist for trans rights, this is just a specific abbreviation created by TERFs. this also goes beyond simply being an ally, it implies that trans activists are part of a well-funded and organised conspiracy.
41% - this one is really horrible. the National Centre for Transgender Equality surveyed 6,450 trans people and found that 41% of them had attempt s*icide, often due to being harassed and bullied because of their gender identity. TERFs will often weaponise this statistic to suggest that “choosing” to live as a gender other than the one you were assigned is bad for a person’s mental health. in more extreme cases, TERFs will use it as a blunt instrument against trans people suffering with mental illness and egg them on to “join the 41%”. source
TIM /TIF - TIM stands for Trans Identified Male, referring to trans-feminine people. TIF stands for Trans Identified Female and refers to trans-masculine people. i feel this doesn’t need much explanation, it’s simply misgendering.
i think i’ve exhausted most of the big ones, if anyone wants to add on to this it would be much appreciated. lastly i’d like to link to Katy Montgomerie’s youtube channel- she’s a trans woman who regularly talks about and debunks TERF rhetoric, particularly on twitter. her videos have been extremely helpful in compiling this list and getting to understand the ways in which the ideology perpetuates itself.
i highly recommend her series “TERF wars”, which is where she goes through all the transphobic nonsense she’s seen on twitter in the past week. also check out The XX factor, a podcast/stream where she and Christa Peterson discuss the rise of the gender critical “movement” in the UK. i especially recommend this to anyone who is confused about how the conversation around trans rights became so deeply toxic over the past 5 or so years.
thank you for reading, i hope this was as informative as i intended it to be.
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