girl what happened to just creating fanwork to satisfy your needs
going directly to the developers for canonical changes to the work has gotta stop like what happened to boundaries
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the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.
three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.
two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.
their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.
one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.
i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.
i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.
and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?
you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.
a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.
someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.
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Yes we've all heard aroace people complain about the 'you haven't met the right person' line. But to the idiots citing this as the reason aroace people 'aren't oppressed’: No, micro aggressions aren't what's oppressing us.
I could talk about corrective rape, but I'm not going to because that's not what scares me the most. The worst thing about being aroace (aromantic, and asexual to a certain extent) is that society is set up for couples.
Being aromantic is a crushing economic disadvantage. As a couple, you can save more. As a legal couple, you can borrow more. This puts Mortgages out of reach for a lot of aromantics. Adopting too. Although aro people can adopt, you must have a similar income to a couple, which again, rules out a lot of aros. Don't forget Immigration, spousal visas will never be an option for us.
Being poor and aro means you're denied housing, family, international movement, basically anything that allos of a similar income would get. And anything you can get, you'll have to jump through many more hoops for. But we can't fix this by legalising aro marriage, like we did for the gays. Until our society's economic system is completely revolutionised, we'll be waiting.
It's impossible to compare oppression. You can't objectively say which minority group has it worse and I really mean that. But also I'd rather be called slurs and hated by Christians all fucking day.
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in 2024 i want to see more songs sung in t voices, more grown-out t scruff, more hairy tits and top surgery scars, more gay sex involving t dicks and pussies, more cutting each other’s hair when the hairdressers can’t get it right, more helping each other with t shots and sharing extra bottles of t gel, more passing down binders and post-surgery pillows like family heirlooms, more crackly laughs and excited voices that don’t know how loud they are now, more proudly showing off phallo scars like we show off top surgery scars, more teaching each other how to shave and tie a tie and all the other things our dads didn’t teach us, more sheer shirts over post-op chests, more skirts and short shorts on hairy legs, more moving the fuck out instead of living with transphobic parents, more breaking up with partners that wanted girlfriends not boyfriends, more pregnant dads, more twinks turned into otters and bears by t, more scars and binders on the beach, more romanticization of t dicks and meta dicks and phallo dicks, more rage and resistance against anyone who would try to rob us of our history or our ancestors, more pride in complex manhoods and queer masculinities, more getting louder every time someone tells us to shut up about the things that are important to us, more searching for transmasculinity in every piece of media and injecting it into anything that failed to consider us, more cuntboys and boygirls and transfags and butch dudes and transsexual men, more jumping headfirst into masculinizing transitions, more delighted reactions to realizing “holy shit i think i’m actually a guy”, more trans manhood and transmasculinity as force of nature and fundamental truth and fact of life that cannot under any circumstances be ignored.
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