#pop art supplement

[raspberryjellybrains]

Hello person I never talked to in my life I saw your tags and. Please infodump about the songs for headphones rather than speakers thing if you feel like it bc I really want to know

HI!! it has been a ridiculous amount of time since you sent this, so I am very sorry. however, disclaimer that I have no expertise in music, but I do have a basic knowledge of music theory and lots of exposure (which I'm sure sounds silly, but simply means that I have a trained ear, if not mind).

I have noticed that with music produced before common availability of more sophisticated in-ear listening devices such as IPods or smart phones paired with earbuds or headphones lacks a lot of subtle, atmospheric sounds that mark more contemporary music produced within the last 10-15 years. These atmospheric sounds are things as directly understood as a result of a more isolated listening experience such as bird chirping or rustling leaves or as subtle and musical in nature as a soft chanting refrain or droning tone. Both of these, while different in purpose and nature, serve to fill out the sound of the music where background noise would, allowing artists to fully control the sound experience in a way previously unavailable.

this change can also be considered with the more widespread availability and usage of digital music making; when you have access to a sound effect, you don't have to count on it being there or figure out how to make the instruments you do have make those noises. there have been arguments made for decades (literally since the invention of the synthesizer) as to where or not this counts as part of the artistry as a new facet of the medium to be experimented with and added or diminishes the ultimate purpose and goal of music production. when new phases of technology are created and shared, there is always a boom of exploration coincident with a boom of... laziness, for lack of a better word. those who aim to use this new technology as a crutch rather than a tool. then, as the tide turns on this new technology and all the magic is gone, there's a turn back towards acoustic sound, now with elements of the previous era infused. think heavier guitar of grunge and punk versus 50's rock and how that infusion occurred AFTER synth wave in the 1980's, where those sounds overlap and converge (and, for a more interesting dive into music's role in culture, what that shift signifies).

there's also the issue of volume and dynamics. listening to heavier music with earbuds tends to be kind of unpleasant because that's not how it's designed to be played! the point is that it is loud and disruptive to OTHERS so it is necessarily sort of difficult to enjoy beamed into your ears with the magic of technology. on the opposite end of the spectrum, bedroom pop gets a bad reputation for sucking, especially to play on aux because that's not how THAT genre is meant to be played. it's quiet and has lots of subtle elements that are really easily lost in background noise that genres like death metal are engineered to cover, meaning that elements which serve to unite and fill out more key elements of the song get lost and leave it feeling hollow. there's a philosophy difference there.

which brings me to hyperpop as a perfect example of this change (its an excellent example of a lot things happening in music, even if it's a bit passe now. to editorialize more than I already am, I think it's gonna be one of those things we point to 10 years down the line and see as a huge shift but that remains to be seen). hyperpop uses this technology to blend older approaches to music with more contemporary approaches to sound production, which creates something that feels simultaneously nostalgic and completely alien; it translates really REALLY poorly to speakers because it's that adaption of heavyfastloud to a more isolated listening environment and can't be taken out.

SO TO SUMMARIZE I have no real point I just think it's really neat to look at shifts in cultural understandings and uses of technology through music and I really like thinking about and discussing it! apologies if my tags made it sound like anything other than that. if you have any questions or opinions to add feel free!! I'd love to discuss this more :3

#i grew up on late 80's and 90's alternative music and find it super interesting and so does my dad! #so i know a lot about a very specific timeframe in music supplemented by my own more modern tastes and the research that accompanies it #didnt get deep into music theory here because i didnt discuss chord composition and voicings but i didnt quite know how and where to fit #that in. but i kind of alluded to it with the bedroom pop. #the thing about music is that it contains many more layers than your ears are naturallt going to pick out because theyre used to filtering #things out. so missing one minor element makes a HUGE difference you dont notice until its there. #its like art in that way. with music youre not necessarily representing what people hear but hwat they expect to hear. #i just think music is sick asf!! its very neat!! #except time signatures. time signatures are a little bitch and we dont bring them up on pain of death. #anyway #thanks for the ask!! really sorry i left it for so long :( #music #raspberry responds

[neil-gaiman]

I'm sorry Neil, although I love your writing and agree with your opinions on most subjects I have to disagree with you on the writers' strike. No-one should have a more privileged life as a result of being clever and creative. I worked from the age of 15 to the age of 65 in low-paid jobs, taking 1 year off to go to drama school and 3 years off to get a fine art degree. I worked in terrible but necessary jobs, labouring, stacking boxes, unloading trucks, running errands, filing, going to work on a bicycle at all hours of the day and night on shift work in all kinds of weather. Even when I was a student I was still working in part-time cleani8ng jobs and even during periods of unemployment I worked in volunteer jobs for charities and social services.

According to Mensa I have an IQ of 160 and according to Plymouth University I have a BA hons in Fine Art but I cannot accept the idea that writers and other creative people should avoid normal jobs like driving an "Uber" or working in an office/shop/factory/construction site. To accept that idea would be to create a new aristocratic class when we should abolishing the old princes and aristocrats.

What we need, I feel sure, is a redistribution of labour so that everybody who can do so would spend some time each year in blue collar work and everybody who can would get higher education and a chance to make art of one sort or another.

The idea of doing other jobs to supplement writing or drawing shouldn't be seen as a terrible thing, a punishment or a suffering. Sharing the jobs around should be seen as normal.

I mean, I've done my half century of sweat labour and it didn't hurt me too much. I'm retired now and still making art of various kinds and I've never asked anyone to pay me for any art piece I've made. making art, writing, drawing etc. is the fun stuff which we get to do in exchange for the blue collar stuff which puts food on the table.

The worst pop song ever written was Sting/Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" which ridicules the working class from a position of educational privilege.

So what's my question? My question is: What's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet? Sounds perfectly fine to me.

Nothing's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet. Writers and artists have been doing that since the dawn of time. Actors too.

But by the same token, there's nothing right about assuming that writing isn't a blue-collar job, or that writers and other people who make art can only make it for love and that thus they need other jobs to subsidise their craft.

I like living in a world in which the people who make the things that make the world worth living in get paid for their work. For me, that includes the people who make films and TV, books, art and music and comics.

Having spent a lot of time on film and TV sets, it's a blue-collar world on set, and everyone is working long and hard to make the shows you love. I'm never going to suggest that the riggers or the gaffers or the make-up team or the focus-pullers should drive ubers in order to have the privilege of being on the set and working there.

Or to put it another way, from the most blue-collar writer I ever knew...

#wga strike #wga strong

[ohgaylor]

In 2006, the year Taylor Swift released her first single, a closeted country singer named Chely Wright, then 35, held a 9-millimeter pistol to her mouth. Queer identity was still taboo enough in mainstream America that speaking about her love for another woman would have spelled the end of a country music career. But in suppressing her identity, Ms. Wright had risked her life.

In 2010, she came out to the public, releasing a confessional memoir, “Like Me,” in which she wrote that country music was characterized by culturally enforced closeting, where queer stars would be seen as unworthy of investment unless they lied about their lives. “Country music,” she wrote, “is like the military — don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The culture in which Ms. Wright picked up that gun — the same one in which Ms. Swift first became a star — was stunningly different from today’s. It’s dizzying to think about the strides that have been made in Americans’ acceptance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the past decade: marriage equality, queer themes dominating teen entertainment, anti-discrimination laws in housing and, for now, in the workplace. But in recent years, a steady drip of now-out stars — Cara Delevingne, Colton Haynes, Elliot Page, Kristen Stewart, Raven-Symoné and Sam Smith among them — have disclosed that they had been encouraged to suppress their queerness in order to market projects or remain bankable.

The culture of country music hasn’t changed so much that homophobia is gone. Just this past summer, Adam Mac, an openly gay country artist, was shamed out of playing at a festival in his hometown because of his sexual orientation. In September, the singer Maren Morris stepped away from country music; she said she did so in part because of the industry’s lingering anti-queerness. If country music hasn’t changed enough, what’s to say that the larger entertainment industry — and, by extension, our broader culture — has?

Periodically, I return to a video, recorded by a shaky hand more than a decade ago, of Ms. Wright answering questions at a Borders bookstore about her coming out. She likens closeted stardom to a blender, an “insane” and “inhumane” heteronormative machine in which queer artists are chewed to bits.

“It’s going to keep going,” Ms. Wright says, “until someone who has something to lose stands up and just says ‘I’m gay.’ Somebody big.” She continues: “We need our heroes.”

What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her?

What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?

In the world of Taylor Swift, the start of a new “era” means the release of new art (an album and the paratexts — music videos, promotional ephemera, narratives — that supplement it) and a wholesale remaking of the aesthetics that will accompany its promotion, release and memorializing. In recent years, Ms. Swift has dominated pop culture to such a degree that these transformations often end up altering American culture in the process.

In 2019, she was set to release a new album, “Lover,” the first since she left Big Machine Records, her old Nashville-based label, which she has since said limited her creative freedom. The aesthetic of what would be known as the “Lover Era” emerged as rainbows, butterflies and pastel shades of blue, purple and pink, colors that subtly evoke the bisexual pride flag.

On April 26, Lesbian Visibility Day, Ms. Swift released the album’s lead single, “ME!,” in which she sings about self-love and self-acceptance. She co-directed a campy music video to accompany it, which she would later describe as depicting “everything that makes me, me.” It features Ms. Swift dancing at a pride parade, dripping in rainbow paint and turning down a man’s marriage proposal in exchange for a … pussy cat.

At the end of June, the L.G.B.T.Q. community would celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. On June 14, Ms. Swift released the video for her attempt at a pride anthem, “You Need to Calm Down,” in which she and an army of queer celebrities from across generations — the “Queer Eye” hosts, Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Porter, Hayley Kiyoko, to name a few — resist homophobia by living openly. Ms. Swift sings that outrage against queer visibility is a waste of time and energy: “Why are you mad, when you could be GLAAD?”

The video ends with a plea: “Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally.” Many, in the press and otherwise, saw the video as, at best, a misguided attempt at allyship and, at worst, a straight woman co-opting queer aesthetics and narratives to promote a commercial product.

Then, Ms. Swift performed “Shake It Off” as a surprise for patrons at the Stonewall Inn. Rumors — that were, perhaps, little more than fantasies — swirled in the queerer corners of her fandom, stoked by a suggestive post by the fashion designer Christian Siriano. Would Ms. Swift attend New York City’s WorldPride march on June 30? Would she wear a dress spun from a rainbow? Would she give a speech? If she did, what would she declare about herself?

The Sunday of the march, those fantasies stopped. She announced that the music executive Scooter Braun, who she described as an “incessant, manipulative” bully, had purchased her masters, the lucrative original recordings of her work.

Ms. Swift’s “Lover” was the first record that she created with nearly unchecked creative freedom. Lacking her old label’s constraints, she specifically chose to feature activism for and the aesthetics of the L.G.B.T.Q. community in her confessional, self-expressive art. Even before the sale of her masters, she appeared to be stepping into a new identity — not just an aesthetic — that was distinct from that associated with her past six albums.

When looking back on the artifacts of the months before that album’s release, any close reader of Ms. Swift has a choice. We can consider the album’s aesthetics and activism as performative allyship, as they were largely considered to be at the time. Or we can ask a question, knowing full well that we may never learn the answer: What if the “Lover Era” was merely Ms. Swift’s attempt to douse her work — and herself — in rainbows, as so many baby queers feel compelled to do as they come out to the world?

There’s no way of knowing what could have happened if Ms. Swift’s masters hadn’t been sold. All we know is what happened next. In early August, Ms. Swift posted a rainbow-glazed photo of a series of friendship bracelets, one of which says “PROUD” with beads in the color of the bisexual pride flag. Queer people recognize that this word, deployed this way, typically means that someone is proud of their own identity. But the public did not widely view this as Ms. Swift’s coming out.

Then, Vogue released an interview with Ms. Swift that had been conducted in early June. When discussing her motivations for releasing “You Need to Calm Down,” Ms. Swift said, “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male.” She continued: “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.” That statement suggests that Ms. Swift did not, in early June, consider herself part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community; it does not illuminate whether that is because she was a straight, cis ally or because she was stuck in the shadowy, solitary recesses of the closet.

On Aug. 22, Ms. Swift publicly committed herself to the as-of-then-unproven project of rerecording and rereleasing her first six albums. The next day, she finally released “Lover,” which raises more questions than it answers. Why does she have to keep secrets just to keep her muse, as all her fans still sing-scream on “Cruel Summer”? About what are the “hundred thrown-out speeches I almost said to you,” in her chronicle of self-doubt, “The Archer,” if not her identity? And what could the album’s closing words, which come at the conclusion of “Daylight,” a song about stepping out of a 20-year darkness and choosing to “let it go,” possibly signal?

I want to be defined by the things that I love,

Not the things I hate,

Not the things that I’m afraid of, I’m afraid of,

Not the things that haunt me in the middle of the night,

I just think that,

You are what you love.

The first time I viewed “Lover” through the prism of queerness, I felt delirious, almost insane. I kept wondering whether what I was perceiving in her work was truly there or if it was merely a mirage, born of earnest projection.

My longtime reading of Ms. Swift’s celebrity — like that of a majority of her fan base — had been stuck in the lingering assumptions left by a period that began more than a decade and a half ago, when a girl with an overexaggerated twang, Shirley Temple curls and Georgia stars in her eyes became famous. Then, she presented as all that was to be expected of a young starlet: attractive yet virginal, knowing yet naïve, not talented enough to be formidable, not commanding enough to be threatening, confessional, eager to please. Her songs earnestly depicted the fantasies of a girl raised in a traditional culture: high school crushes and backwoods drives, princelings and wedding rings, declarations of love that climax only in a kiss — ideally in the pouring rain.

When Ms. Swift was trying to sell albums in that late-2000s media environment, her songwriting didn’t match the image of a sex object, the usual role reserved for female celebrities in our culture. Instead, the story the public told about her was that she laundered her affection to a litter of promising grown men, in exchange for songwriting inspiration. A young Ms. Swift contributed to this narrative by hiding easy-to-decode clues in liner notes that suggested a certain someone was her songs’ inspiration (“SAM SAM SAM SAM SAM SAM,” “ADAM,” “TAY”) or calling out an ex-boyfriend on the “Ellen” show and “Saturday Night Live.” Despite the expansive storytelling in Ms. Swift’s early records, her public image often cast a man’s interest as her greatest ambition.

As Ms. Swift’s career progressed, she began to remake that image: changing her style and presentation, leaving country music for pop and moving from Nashville to New York. By 2019, her celebrity no longer reflected traditional culture; it had instead become a girlboss-y mirror for another dominant culture — that of white, cosmopolitan, neoliberal America.

But in every incarnation, the public has largely seen those songs — especially those for which she doesn’t directly state her inspiration — as cantos about her most recent heterosexual love, whether that idea is substantiated by evidence or not. A large portion of her base still relishes debating what might have happened with the gentleman caller who supposedly inspired her latest album. Feverish discussions of her escapades with the latest yassified London Boy or mustachioed Mr. Americana fuel the tabloid press — and, embarrassingly, much of traditional media — that courts fan engagement by relentlessly, unquestioningly chronicling Ms. Swift’s love life.

Even in 2023, public discussion about the romantic entanglements of Ms. Swift, 34, presumes that the right man will “finally” mean the end of her persistent husbandlessness and childlessness. Whatever you make of Ms. Swift’s extracurricular activities involving a certain football star (romance for the ages? strategic brand partnership? performance art for entertainment’s sake?), the public’s obsession with the relationship has been attention-grabbing, if not lucrative, for all parties, while reinforcing a story that America has long loved to tell about Ms. Swift, and by extension, itself.

Because Ms. Swift hasn’t undeniably subverted our culture’s traditional expectations, she has managed, in an increasingly fractured cultural environment, to simultaneously capture two dominant cultures — traditional and cosmopolitan. To maintain the stranglehold she has on pop culture, Ms. Swift must continue to tell a story that those audiences expect to consume; she falls in love with a man or she gets revenge. As a result, her confessional songs languish in a place of presumed stasis; even as their meaning has grown deeper and their craft more intricate, a substantial portion of her audience’s understanding of them remains wedded to the same old narratives.

But if interpretations of Ms. Swift’s art often languish in stasis, so do the millions upon millions of people who love to play with the dollhouse she has constructed for them. Her dominance in pop culture and the success of her business have given her the rare ability to influence not only her industry but also the worldview of a substantial portion of America. How might her industry, our culture and we, ourselves, change if we made space for Ms. Swift to burn that dollhouse to the ground?

Anyone considering the whole of Ms. Swift’s artistry — the way that her brilliantly calculated celebrity mixes with her soul-baring art — can find discrepancies between the story that underpins her celebrity and the one captured by her songs. One such gap can be found in her “Lover” era. Others appear alongside “dropped hairpins,” or the covert ways someone can signal queer identity to those in the know while leaving others comfortable in their ignorance. Ms. Swift dropped hairpins before “Lover” and has continued to do so since.

Sometimes, Ms. Swift communicates through explicit sartorial choices — hair the colors of the bisexual pride flag or a recurring motif of rainbow dresses. She frequently depicts herself as trapped in glass closets or, well, in regular closets. She drops hairpins on tour as well, paying tribute to the Serpentine Dance of the lesbian artist Loie Fuller during the Reputation Tour or referencing “The Ladder,” one of the earliest lesbian publications in the United States, in her Eras Tour visuals.

During the Eras Tour, Ms. Swift traps her past selves — including those from her “Lover” era — in glass closets.

Dropped hairpins also appear in Ms. Swift’s songwriting. Sometimes, the description of a muse — the subject of her song, or to whom she sings — seems to fit only a woman, as it does in “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” “Maroon” or “Hits Different.” Sometimes she suggests a female muse through unfulfilled rhyme schemes, as she does in “The Very First Night,” when she sings “didn’t read the note on the Polaroid picture / they don’t know how much I miss you” (“her,” instead of that pesky little “you,” would rhyme). Her songwriting also noticeably alludes to poets whose muses the historical record incorrectly cast as men — Emily Dickinson chief among them — as if to suggest the same fate awaits her art. Stunningly, she even explicitly refers to dropping hairpins, not once, but twice, on two separate albums.

In isolation, a single dropped hairpin is perhaps meaningless or accidental, but considered together, they’re the unfurling of a ballerina bun after a long performance. Those dropped hairpins began to appear in Ms. Swift’s artistry long before queer identity was undeniably marketable to mainstream America. They suggest to queer people that she is one of us. They also suggest that her art may be far more complex than the eclipsing nature of her celebrity may allow, even now.

Since at least her “Lover” era, Ms. Swift has explicitly encouraged her fans to read into the coded messages (which she calls “Easter eggs”) she leaves in music videos, social media posts and interviews with traditional media outlets, but a majority of those fans largely ignore or discount the dropped hairpins that might hint at queer identity. For them, acknowledging even the possibility that Ms. Swift could be queer would irrevocably alter the way they connect with her celebrity, the true product they’re consuming.

There is such public devotion to the traditional narrative Ms. Swift embodies because American culture enshrines male power. In her sweeping essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich identified the way that male power cramps, hinders or devalues women’s creativity. All of the sexist undertones with which Ms. Swift’s work can be discussed (often, even, by fans) flow from compulsory heterosexuality, or the way patriarchy draws power from the presumption that women naturally desire men. She must write about men she surely loves or be unbankable; she must marry and bear children or remain a child herself; she must look like, in her words, a “sexy baby” or be undesirable, “a monster on the hill.”

A woman who loves women is most certainly a monster to a society that prizes male power. She can fulfill none of the functions that a traditional culture imagines — wife, mother, maid, mistress, whore — so she has few places in the historical record. The Sapphic possibility of her work is ignored, censored or lost to time. If there is queerness earnestly implied in Ms. Swift’s work, then it’s no wonder that it, like that of so many other artists before her, is so often rendered invisible in the public imagination.

While Ms. Swift’s songs, largely written from her own perspective, cannot always conform to the idea of a woman our culture expects, her celebrity can. That separation, between Swift the songwriter and Swift the star, allows Ms. Swift to press against the golden birdcage in which she has found herself. She can write about women’s complexity in her confessional songs, but if ever she chooses not to publicly comply with the dominant culture’s fantasy, she will remain uncategorizable, and therefore, unsellable.

Her star — as bright as it is now — would surely dim.

Whether she is conscious of it or not, Ms. Swift signals to queer people — in the language we use to communicate with one another — that she has some affinity for queer identity. There are some queer people who would say that through this sort of signaling, she has already come out, at least to us. But what about coming out in a language the rest of the public will understand?

The difference between any person coming out and a celebrity doing so is the difference between a toy mallet and a sledgehammer. It’s reasonable for celebrities to be reticent; by coming out, they potentially invite death threats, a dogged tabloid press that will track their lovers instead of their beards, the excavation of their past lives, a torrent of public criticism and the implosion of their careers. In a culture of compulsory heterosexuality, to stop lying — by omission or otherwise — is to risk everything.

American culture still expects that stars are cis and straight until they confess themselves guilty. So, when our culture imagines a celebrity’s coming out, it expects an Ellen-style announcement that will submerge the past life in phoenix fire and rebirth the celebrity in a new image. In an ideal culture, wearing a bracelet that says “PROUD,” waving a pride flag onstage, placing a rainbow in album artwork or suggestively answering fan questions on Instagram would be enough. But our current reality expects a supernova.

Because of that expectation, stars end up trapped behind glass, which is reinforced by the tabloid press’s subtle social control. That press shapes the public’s expectations of others’ identities, even when those identities are chasms away from reality. Celebrities who master this press environment — Ms. Swift included — can bolster their business, but in doing so, they reinforce a heteronormative culture that obsesses over pregnancy, women’s bodies and their relationships with men.

That environment is at odds with the American movement for L.G.B.T.Q. equality, which still has fights to win — most pressingly, enshrining trans rights and squashing nonsensical culture wars. But lately I’ve heard many of my young queer contemporaries — and the occasional star — wonder whether the movement has come far enough to dispense with the often messy, often uncomfortable process of coming out, over and over again.

That questioning speaks to an earnest conundrum that queer people confront regularly: Do we live in this world, or the world to which we ought to aspire?

Living in aspiration means ignoring the convention of coming out in favor of just … existing. This is easier for those who can pass as cis and straight if need be, those who are so wealthy or white that the burden of hiding falls to others and those who live in accepting urban enclaves. This is a queer life without friction; coming out in a way straight people can see is no longer a prerequisite for acceptance, fulfillment and equality.

This aspiration is tremendous, but in our current culture, it is available only to a privileged few. Should such an inequality of access to aspiration become the accepted state of affairs, it would leave those who can’t hide to face society’s cruelest actors without the backing of a vocal, activated community. So every queer person who takes issue with the idea that we must come out ought to ask a simple question — what do we owe one another?

If coming out is primarily supposed to be an act of self-actualization, to form our own identities, then we owe one another nothing. This posture recognizes that the act of coming out implicitly reinforces straight and cis identities as default, which is not worth the rewards of outness.

But if coming out is supposed to be a radical act of resistance that seeks to change the way our society imagines people to be, then undeniable visibility is essential to make space for those without power. In this posture, queer people who can live in aspiration owe those who cannot a real world in which our expansive views of love and gender aren’t merely tolerated but celebrated. We have no choice but to actively, vocally press against the world we’re in, until no one is stuck in it.

And so just for a little while longer, we need our heroes.

But if queer people spend all of our time holding out for a guiding light, we might forgo a more pressing question that if answered, just might inch all of us a bit closer to aspiration. The next time heroes appear, are we ready to receive them?

It takes neither a genius nor a radical to see queerness implied by Ms. Swift’s work. But figuring out how to talk about it before the star labels herself is another matter. Right now, those who do so must inject our perceptions with caveats and doubt or pretend we cannot see it (a lie!) — implicitly acquiescing to convention’s constraints in the name of solidarity.

Lying is familiar to queer people; we teach ourselves to do it from an early age, shrouding our identities from others, and ourselves. It’s not without good reason. To maintain the safety (and sometimes the comfort) of the closet, we lie to others, and, most crucially, we allow others to believe lies about us, seeing us as something other than ourselves. Lying is doubly familiar to those of us who are women. To reduce friction, so many of us still shrink life to its barest version in the name of honor or safety, rendering our lives incomplete, our minds lobotomized and our identities unexplored.

By maintaining a culture of lying about what we, uniquely, have the knowledge and experience to see, we commit ourselves to a vow of silence. That vow may protect someone’s safety, but when it is applied to works of culture, it stymies our ability to receive art that has the potential to change or disrupt us. As those with queer identity amass the power of commonplaceness, it’s worth questioning whether the purpose of one of the last great taboos that constrains us befits its cost.

In every case, is the best form of solidarity still silence?

I know that discussing the potential of a star’s queerness before a formal declaration of identity feels, to some, too salacious and gossip-fueled to be worthy of discussion. They might point to the viciousness of the discourse around “queerbaiting” (in which I have participated); to the harm caused by the tabloid press’s dalliances with outing; and, most crucially, to the real material sacrifices that queer stars make to come out, again and again, as reasons to stay silent.

I share many of these reservations. But the stories that dominate our collective imagination shape what our culture permits artists and their audiences to say and be. Every time an artist signals queerness and that transmission falls on deaf ears, that signal dies. Recognizing the possibility of queerness — while being conscious of the difference between possibility and certainty — keeps that signal alive.

So, whatever you make of Ms. Swift’s sexual orientation or gender identity (something that is knowable, perhaps, only to her) or the exact identity of her muses (something better left a mystery), choosing to acknowledge the Sapphic possibility of her work has the potential to cut an audience that is too often constrained by history, expectation and capital loose from the burdens of our culture.

To start, consider what Ms. Swift wrote in the liner notes of her 2017 album, “reputation”: “When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test.”

Listen to her. At the very least, resist the urge to assume that when Ms. Swift calls the object of her affection “you” in a song, she’s talking about a man with whom she’s been photographed. Just that simple choice opens up a world of Swiftian wordplay. She often plays with pronouns, trading “you” and “him” so that only someone looking for a distinction between two characters might find one. Turns of phrase often contain double or even triple meanings. Her work is a feast laid specifically for the close listener.

Choosing to read closely can also train the mind to resist the image of an unmarried woman that compulsory heterosexuality expects. And even if it is only her audience who points at rainbows, reading Ms. Swift’s work as queer is still worthwhile, for it undermines the assumption that queer identity impedes pop superstardom, paving the way for an out artist to have the success Ms. Swift has.

After all, would it truly be better to wait to talk about any of this for 50, 60, 70 years, until Ms. Swift whispers her life story to a biographer? Or for a century or more, when Ms. Swift’s grandniece donates her diaries to some academic library, for scholars to pore over? To ensure that mea culpas come only when Ms. Swift’s bones have turned to dust and fragments of her songs float away on memory’s summer breeze?

I think not. And so, I must say, as loudly as I can, “I can see you,” even if I risk foolishness for doing so.

I remember the first time I knew I had seen Taylor Alison Swift break free from the trap of stardom. I wasn’t sitting in a crowded stadium in the pouring rain or cuddled up in a movie theater with a bag of popcorn. I was watching a grainy, crackling livestream of the Eras Tour, captured on a fan’s phone.

It’s late at night, the beginning of her acoustic set of surprise songs, this time performed in a yellow dress. She begins playing “Hits Different.” It’s a new song, full of puns, double entendres and wordplay, that toys with the glittering identities in which Ms. Swift indulges.

She’s rushing, as if stopping, even for a second, will cause her to lose her nerve. She stumbles at the bridge, pauses and starts again; the queen of bridges will not mess this up, not tonight.

There it is, at the bridge’s end: “Bet I could still melt your world; argumentative, antithetical dream girl.” An undeniable declaration of love to a woman. As soon as those words leave her lips, she lets out a whoop, pacing around the stage with a grin that cannot be contained.

For a moment, Ms. Swift was out of the woods she had created for herself as a teenager, floating above the trees. The future was within reach; she would, and will, soon take back the rest of her words, her reputation, her name. Maybe the world would see her, maybe it wouldn’t.

But on that stage, she found herself. I was there. Through a fuzzy fancam, I saw it.

And somehow, that was everything.

#ooooh my word this was BREATHTAKING and so well-said #because coming out is in fact a very delicate thing #full article here for the tumblr crowd! #taylor swift #articles #new york times #gaylor swift #gaylor #lover #chely wright

[non-stop-imagines]

Repeat That

From this request!💖

Pairing: Max Verstappen x Black Content Creator!Reader ( Halle Bailey face claim)

Word Count: ~8.1k words w/ smau

Warning: Smut (slight fingering, thigh riding, p in v), a little oral fixation, Soft!Dom and protective Max, reader going into a subspace, Max punches a guy, my American description of driving, mean comments, Twitter Environment, mention of food it's also pretty cute 😘 Minors DNI!!! 18+

A/N: I knew I had big plans for this fic but I didn't expect this big. I absolutely loved this request when I got it and I wanted to put as much care into writing it as they did coming up with the idea. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy, because as always I enjoyed writing it! Love you all!💖💛💖💛💖

Masterlist

maxverstappen1

Liked by landonorris and 301,872 others

maxverstappen1 Mine ❤️

babygurlyn tagged

View 3,910 comments

rbrhypetrain This was not on my 2023 bingo card, but I can use the free space ✍🏼

babygurlyn I don't even have this many good pictures of me. How???

>maxverstappen1 When your girlfriend is as beautiful as you are, you get a lot of opportunities to get good pictures

landonorris I would like everyone to know that Max posted this 3 months into dating Yn. He means business

babygurlyn

Liked by redbullracing and 90,274 others

babygurlyn Because he posted me and I think he's pretty too 😍🥰😘 No one tell about me posting the last pic 🤫

view 429 comments

redbullracing We think he's pretty too ❤️😗

>seb4ev I think Max better watch out for the Red Bull admin, I just can't figure out who they're trying to flirt with most of the time

maxverstappen1 😐 > babygurlyn Who told?!

mercgirly Okay but I think Yn is the only person that has pictures of Max that make him look really pretty and like good for her

hateruser I doubt Max actually likes how Yn acts It's just so immature

   Max has grown fond of non-race weeks since he started dating you. Your mindset was that "Weekends are for having fun, not working", something that you would pout about early in your relationship whenever he would go train or agree to meetings on non-race weekends. But now, with two weekends off, he's using one to stay at home, currently driving on his sim but the true purpose of his presence was to be at your beck and call. To be there for you to talk endlessly too, to help you with stuff, to be filmed for your YouTube channel, anything. And he was happy to be there to do it. 

   "Maxie, are we ordering food for lunch or were we planning to go out for it?" You pop your head into the room, doe-like eyes darting between him and the screen facing him.

   "We have plenty of food here, my love." He continues the session he was in but pauses it when he doesn't hear your socked feet shuffling away and the faintest whimper come from the open door. "Yeessss…?" He turns his body to get up from his seat and walk over to the door leaning against the frame. You move your body from leaning over to only have your head in view to standing straight up, shyly peering up at him, to which he pushes some locs from in front of your shoulders then tips your head up with a finger. "What is it"

   "It's just, there's a cafe that's doing this special latte art to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the creation of Disney, 'cause they have this food printer or something that is able to do it and I was hoping we'd be able to go there today." Your rambling was accompanied by wild hand movements that supplemented your words, a trait you've subconsciously picked up from your boyfriend, and as you neared the end your voice tapered off, unsure of what the response would be from Max.

   "Well why didn't you just say so, love?" His voice was a soft, exasperated coo as he reaches to fix your hair again and then uses a hand on either side of your face to make you look at him. All you do is shrug in response, knowing of the short lecture you were about to get. "Baby, first of all, I'm not mad. But didn't we talk about you speaking up more about what you want?"

   "I just didn't think it was that important." You tug at the hem of his shirt. Even with his hands angling your face up towards his, you avoided eye contact.

   "We talked about this…" He bends down to catch your lips in a quick kiss, then opens his eyes a little wider waiting for you to comment.

   "Everything I say has at least some importance…" You receive another kiss and then feel Max's hands move to your waist, gingerly pulling you closer.

   "Good. Now, try again." He gives you a little grin to encourage you.

   "Hey, I was thinking we could go to this cafe that is doing Disney themed latte art. It looks pretty cool." Your voice fluctuated as you tried to sound more confident in your request, trying to act nonchalant in the process.

   “I think that’s a wonderful idea. Let me know when you want to leave.” He gives you one last kiss on the forehead and starts to head back to his game.

   “Okay! I’ll let you know. Thank you, baby!” Your mood turns on a dime as you skip off to some other room, a shift which Max just shakes his head at as he restarts the session. About 10 minutes later, Max can hear you mumbling to yourself, sounding like you were straining to grab something, so he stands from his seat again and starts to search for your location, eventually finding you standing on a side table trying to reach your mini tripod that was on the highest shelf of your bookshelf in your office. “Dang it. Get over here. Woah.” You wobble on the table that you forgot was already uneven prompting Max to rush over and steady you.

   “Get off the table, please. What do you need? Your tripod?” He stretches up to reach where it is, which was slightly pushed back from the edge of the shelf.

   “Yes, please.” You beam up at him as he hands it to you, and once he does your focus goes to the small camera stand, flexing the legs to make it easier to hold, but Max interrupts your focus by lifting your chin to give you a small lingering kiss, forcing you to look into his eyes once he backs up.

   “Please never do that again. Just ask if you need help with stuff like that, okay.” His face was softly stern, lifting his eyebrows for emphasis as he spoke. He keeps the same face as he waits for your answer.

   “I know, I know. I will, but you know I just start doing something and completely forget about everything else and it makes me forget to ask for help when I need it…" Your words taper off as you go to place the tripod on your desk, but you turn around to Max crossing his arm, eyebrows scrunched in mock concern.

   "Yes, I know that. But you need to try and remember to ask for help, I'm always here for you." Max's gaze followed you as you approached him, first taking his crossed arms to turn him toward the door and then moving behind him to start pushing him out. Both you and him knew that if he were really trying you wouldn't be able to move him an inch, but here you were guiding him through the exit of your office.

   "Okay, thank you. Now go." You continue to push but feel resistance all of a sudden. You peek your head around to look at Max who was smiling at you. "What?"

   "Do I get to be in your vlog?" You roll your eyes at your boyfriend's question, then get back behind him to push again, moving once more.

    "You know you're always in my vlogs. Now go. I'll be there in a sec." You finally succeed in getting him across the threshold of your office then turn back around and head back to your desk, starting to fiddle with your small vlogging camera.

    “Okay.” Max does as he is told and heads back to his gaming room, sitting down in his seat and putting his headphones, and, after stopping to answer a text or two, starts playing again. After another 20 minutes he hears the patter of your feet, but continues his game waiting to hear your voice.

   “Can I come in?” You ask your question while slowly shuffling in. What you don't see fully is how bright and wide Max’s smile is as he feels your presence grow closer.

   “Of course you can, baby girl.” He finally ends the session and turns off the game, knowing he probably won’t be able to come back to it for the rest of the day. He removes his feet from the pedals in front of him to place his feet flat on the floor, turning his head to look straight into the small camera you pointed at him.

   “Say hi to the people, Max. They love you, you’re their favorite.” You giggle, primarily at the way he waves and then flashes a semi-awkward thumbs up.

   “Hello! Now you, what’s up?” He shifts his focus to you, face attentive as he pulls you into his lap by a large hand on your waist.

   “So you know how I asked you about going to that cafe today?” You had the camera pointed at you two, viewfinder flipped up so you could make sure you guys were in frame, and once you did you turned to look at Max who only had his attention on you, watching his nod and loving the vibration when he hums his affirmation, pushing a loc out of your face. “Well I was thinking that we could couple the experience with something fun.” You wiggle your eyebrows, first at Max and then briefly at the camera before turning back to him.

   “I don’t like that look. What did you have in mind?” Max keeps his eyes trained on you, watching and internally smiling at the charisma you were giving the camera, not like it was much different than your normal personality, if anything a bit toned down.

   "Well I thought that maybe you could teach me how to drive? Or at least start teaching me how to drive. And then we could go to the cafe since we were out." You use a free hand to comb back his hair with your fingers, and something the camera is able to see is the slight head tilt upward he does to move closer to your hand and the side profile of the soft look he was giving you.

   "Oh yeah, I always forget you don't have your license. I'm so used to just driving you around." He thinks for a moment, still only looking at you, watching as your enlarged brown eyes anticipated his answer. "Fine, I guess we could do that." He smiles back at the radiant smile you gave him and the quick kiss on the cheek you give before you remove yourself from his lap.

   "Yay! Thank you baby!" You start to skip toward the door but you didn't realize that Max had snuck his hand around your wrist to pull you back to him.

   "How were you going to leave me without a proper kiss?" He had his eyebrows raised in mock surprise, to which you roll your eyes and stalk back over to him, leaning down a bit to kiss him. It was a couple of deeper kisses, making sure your lips slated together rather than just a small peck. What you also noticed was that Max had angled the camera toward you two, making sure footage was captured of the kissing.

   "You're so needy, ugh." You fake your complaint as you stop your recording and leave the room, not seeing the soft, loving look he was giving you as you walked out the door.

________

   "Okay, here we are in the car on the most empty floor of the parking garage that we could find. And here's Professor Verstappen, ready to teach me all there is to learn about the rules of the road. Take it away, Max!" You finish your spritely intro to this portion of your vlog by highlighting Max's presence with your hands, waving them towards him and then finally looking toward him for instruction. He was too busy watching you, though, so it took him a beat to realize that it was his time to talk.

   "Oh, okay. Uh, hello everyone. First, have you ever been behind the wheel before?" His arm was already resting behind him on top of his seat, so he was already in reach of a loc that you kept of your ponytail, deciding to mess with it while you gave your answer, giving his hands something to do.

   "Well, I've never paid attention to all the stuff. Really just messed with the wheel." You twist the wheel, then look back at Max, the camera now just a spectator of the interaction between you two.

   "Okay." He grins at you, eyes wandering over your innocent face before continuing. "Uh, let's start with the pedals. Touch them with your feet." He stretches his body to watch as you do. "So the wide one on the left is the brake and the narrow, long one is the gas." You nod, still playing with the pedals. "Mirrors, check them every time you get in." He reaches up and taps the long mirror in front of you guys. "This is the rearview mirror, make sure you can see out the rear windshield when you adjust it, okay?" You start adjusting as he continues explaining. "The side mirrors, uh, you want to make sure that you're able to see your blind spot and beside you. The controls to adjust it side mirrors are in the door. You just make sure you have the correct mirror selected and then use the up, down, left and right buttons to adjust the mirror.” You look at the side mirror but decide not to do anything about them. "Um, the gearshift. You have to press on the brake to be able to be able to press the button on the gear shift to move it." He was going to continue his informational dialogue, but he could hear you press down on the brake pedal. "Don't do it now! Hold on." He subtly motions for you to stop, his hand in your vicinity as he chuckles, his vibe a mixture of nervousness and adoration.

   "Hehe, sorry." You had a toothy smile on your face, an indication to Max that you are already starting to get nervous and his words would need to be more gentle with his teaching.

   "It's okay." He leans over to kiss your forehead before continuing. "Anyway, the letters on the gearshift-"

   "Yes, the PRNDL…." You said the joke with such confidence, but  you and Max stifled your laughter, staring at each other, you with that bright toothy smile and Max with a strained grin and facial expression of fake disappointment.

   "Really?" The laughter he held was laced in his words. "You're adorable, you know that?" You nod with your bright smile, giving Max slight trouble when he starts leaning in to get a quick kiss, but you quickly get the hint, letting him kiss you as you nodded your head with less vigor.

   "Hehe, yeah, I know." Your faces were still close, allowing you two to have a small moment of intimacy before finally getting back to the task at hand.

   "Um, anyway. Yes the gearshi- the PRNDL, since I know you'll repeat it until I say it, those letters all stand for something. Do you know what they are?" He cocks his head slightly, making it more obvious that he is just making sure you know.

   "Park, reverse, uh-neutral, drive, and I always forget what L stands for." You recite the meanings as you go down the panel, then look back up expectantly at Max waiting for confirmation that you were right.

   "Correct. Good job, baby. And we're not going to worry about L until we have to." He pushes that lone loc again and admires your face as he thinks. "Okay, try just going forward. To that column." He points to a concrete column about 50 feet away, and he keeps his attention ahead of you guys as you put the car in drive.

   "Okay, check mirrors, foot is on the brake right now, car in drive…" you mumble a checklist to yourself, double check everything you just listed, and then finally lift your foot off the brake and slowly, lightly press on the gas, allowing the car to finally move. Initially all was fine, it wasn't until 3 seconds later when Max felt the car gently swerving that he looked at you, seeing you twist the wheel back and forth as you tried to go forward.

   "Woah, woah! Stop!" You immediately follow directions, slamming on the brake making both of your bodies jolt forward. You start to laugh nervously as you slowly turn to look at Max, who was looking at you wide eyed. "What the fuck was that, baby? You're not trying to warm the tires."

   "I-that's what people do in the movies…and i- I don't know." An apologetic, nervous smile stays plastered on your face, a face Max knew well because it meant that you were really unsure of the situation and liable to shut down at any minute.

   "That's just bad acting. But it's okay, you're okay. Just think of it as keeping the car steady instead of trying to guide it." He uses his hand to imitate a swerving driving path and then turns back to you. "You want to try again?" His gaze was intensely trained on you as he tried to gauge your anxiety before you answered.

   "Mhm." The smile was now gone, your face was flat and eyebrows furrowed as you checked your mirrors again and then lifted your foot from the brake to gently press the gas again. This time there was a lot more focus on your part as you gently twisted the steering wheel as necessary to keep it in line until you got to the column.

   “Okay, now put it in park.” With your foot firmly on the brake, you hold down the button on the gearshift and push it to put the car in park. Once it was done and you were sure the car was stationary. You lift your foot and jerk your head toward Max to shine a, now more confident, smile his way, that he reciprocates in his own Max way with a grin and wide eyes. “You did it!”

   “I did it!” You reach your arms out and wrap them around Max’s neck, and the close proximity brought your cheek in range to receive a peck from him. 

   “How did you feel?” You still had your arms around his neck, but he was able to lean back enough to get your entire face in view. 

   “Better, but I know it's not that easy on the road so that's a little scary.” Max starts to open his mouth to calm your worries, but your next words change his planned soothing into reprimand as you continue. “And I know it’s stupid to be scared. Many people drive everyday without being scared, but I tin- '' Your words fade when your cheeks are grasped by Max’s long fingers and squished gently.

   “Shh.” Max’s attempted cooing comes off more like a frantic mitigation of your downward spiral, like trying to stop a child from crying right as they’re on the cusp of bursting out in tears. He gives a small kiss to your manually puckered lips then lets go, gently lifting the locs you had back in a ponytail. “You’re not stupid. People get scared about driving, it’s normal. You just need to practice to gain confidence, that’s all. Okay?” Your lips were still pouted, but you looked at him through your eyelashes, eyes asking for a little more reassurance, which he gives by seizing your lips in another kiss.

   "Okay." You press your lips together in a mild grin then settle back into your seat, tracing the steering wheel with your fingers.

   "Want to try reversing and a little parking? And then I'll drive us to that cafe?" He laces his fingers with yours that had settled on the gearshift, running a thumb over the back of your hand.

   "Yeah, let's do it! Really earn that latte." In your usual fashion, your demeanor changed on a dime to hyper enthusiasm, unlacing your hand from Max's and placing both hands firmly on the wheel.

   "You earned that before we even got in the car." He stretches his arm across the back of your seat, placing a sentimental gaze on you. You turn toward him in a way that required you to lean your head back slightly, and flash that big beautiful smile he adores. "I love you." His head jerks toward you a little, waiting for your answer.

   "I love you, too." You pucker after your words, receiving the kiss Max was craving to give you. It was simple, but it was lingering. He has always loved your lips, so his heart squeezed when they turned up into a grin for him as you got amped to continue driving. "Alright, let's get on with it!"

   "Alright." He takes another second to watch you, his cute, bouncy, determined and all around amazing girlfriend, before continuing his instruction.

___________

   "The fact that the latte was amazing AND had The Little Mermaid art on top makes my driving struggles worthwhile." You skip out of the cafe door that Max held open for you, thanking the employees as you leave, camera trained on your face.

   "It was good?" Max also waved a polite, silent goodbye as you two walked back to the car that was parked in a spot along a surprisingly empty road.

   "Yeah! It was a sea salt caramel latte and it didn't have too much coffee flavor but I can still feel a buzz." You grab onto his hand and swing it wildly, turning under his arm like you were tangoing as you waited for the signal to walk across the street. For it to be a Saturday, the roadway that had picturesque little shops along the side was almost clear, sans a few straggling teens and some cars driving by.

   "That's the last thing you need. I don't know why you insist on getting drinks with coffee anyway if you don't like the taste of coffee." The signal finally changed and you and Max crossed the street, vlog camera still recording, but just getting a lower angle shot of you two walking.

   "You can have so much fun with the flavors of coffee drinks. And you know energy drinks are hit and miss with me." You lift your camera once across, you gauging the short distance to the car before talking, speaking through your teeth in a mock wince. "Sorry, Red Bull." You stop the recording and turn off your camera now just wanting to take in your surroundings hand in hand with your boyfriend.

   "Yeah, I know." He feels his phone vibrate in his pocket, which he pulls out to see he received a text from Lando.

Lando

Do you and Yn want to come hang tonight?

Me and some friends decided to just go out tonight

Don't know who all is coming yet tho

What do you say?

And tell Yn I said hello and that I love her more than you do 😁

   "Why does he text like this? All these messages…" Max removes his hand from yours but sticks out his elbow so you're able to wrap your arm around his. You guys stop walking for a moment, since you were basically at the car, while Max goes to answer whatever question is hidden in his myriad texts. "Would you want to go out tonight with Lando?" He looked down to his side for your response, which was almost immediate excitement.

   "Yes! Let's go out! I love hanging out with Lando." You sway with Max's arm in tow as he types out his response.

Max

Okay, we'll come.

   "Okay, we'll go. Now please, I need this arm." His plea held fake exhaustion, causing you to laugh a laugh that was music to his ears. As you guys finally approached the car, you could hear people down the sidewalk calling to get your guys' attention.

   "Oh my God, it is him!" Two young men both looking around 25 approached you two with excitement in their demeanor. "Max, we love you, mate. That Red Bull has been crazy dominant!"

   Max could feel you trying to move behind him a bit, but for you this was just because you knew these guys were here to see Max so you didn't want to get in the way. For Max the rudeness due to their lack of acknowledgement to your presence was strike 1. "Thanks, you guys. But listen, we have to get going-"

   "Hey do you think we could get a picture with you real quick?" When the phone started to be handed to you, Max was ready to snatch your hand up and leave immediately, but seeing you reach for it, okay and eager to take a picture of the boyfriend she is immensely proud of and his fans, he simmered down, enough to take a decent picture with the two men before they excitedly walked off after thanking you.

   "They were kinda nice." Max walks you to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for you, grunting in faux agreement. "I don't think they knew who I was, though." Your words came out as a giggle because you were truly amused with the situation, but Max just closed the door, gently and hiding his stone face as he does.

   "If they did they would have acted like fucking saints." Max mumbles to himself, walking around to the driver's side. He pauses, taking a deep breath and actively working to relax his face, knowing the scowl would affect your mood too, and realizing a new annoyance that has emerged for him. There are people out there who think that you are something less than the best thing to have come into his life.

babygurlyn

Liked by lilymhe and 96,920 others

babygurlyn NEW VLOG ALERT!!! Please enjoy my favorite screenshots I got while editing 😁😁😁

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landonorris you don't want to know what happens when Yn has vodka

>mercfantasies What happens when she has vodka????

>babygurlyn No one will know what happens when Yn has vodak 😐😐😐

> landonorris The walls have ears 👀

maxandynfan Max in your new vid 😭😭 you could've warmed us about how sweet he was

> babygurlyn I told you guys Max is nothing but a big softy 🥰 (And don't listen to him when he says he's not)

 __________

You made sure you had your items, small purse on your arm, large pink chunky-knit sweater over your arm, a pink that matched the mid rise Nike Court Royales that you wore with a black tennis skirt and white blouse, phone locked in both hands as you bent under the rope in the garage separating visitors from the rest of the garage. You knew that it would have been more comfortable and easier watching from the Paddock Club area or the motorhome, but Max insisted you stay in the garage, and you didn't mind because you liked being this close to the action, and it was easier to get to parc ferme and the podium by just by exiting the garage. So you found yourself walking out of the garage, hugging people and cheering along as everyone celebrates another win for Max. No matter what anyone says, for you every win is so exciting because you know the work he has put in to achieve this. The top three cars park and you are able to reach and hug Max, making a face at him to joke about how he stunk from his sweat and then shooing him off for the post-race interview, and as you did you felt a tap on your shoulder, turning around to see a young guy and girl. The girl had her phone in her hand and the guy a small microphone, the ones that can clip onto the shirt.

   "Hi, I'm Jackson and this is my girlfriend, Catherine. Do you have time to do a quick interview with us?" The guy, Jackson, asked you close to your ear, to which you nod in agreement. You and Max have been dating just over a year, and you can count the number of people that have approached you to speak to you on one hand, maybe two if you added exceptions.

   "I would love to do an interview, Jackson." You were able to answer without having to yell in his ear, since the cheering has died down as third place is interviewed. 

   "Please, you can call me Jack." He points to Catherine and gives her a thumbs up, which you assumed was to signal for her to start recording, because after counting down to 1, Jackson begins to introduce himself and you, to which you give a spritely wave to the phone that Catherine was smiling behind. "So, Yn, you have been with Max for almost 2 seasons, seen so many of his wins, have you gotten used to them now?" Jack's eyes shifted between you and the phone as he spoke, and once he was done he brought the small microphone closer to you.

   "Oh, no. Every race is different. Even if it is the same race during a new season, the conditions are different, and I see the work Max puts in first hand, so I am always very proud of him with every win." You smile toward Jack and then the camera.

   "You know, with what can be seen as a severe lack of action due to Red Bull dominance, people have turned their focus to other news in the F1 sphere, one of which being the relationship between you and Max." Though more comment than question, the small mic is gestured toward you for input.

   "Oh, well, I'm flattered. I hope it's mostly good things." You could feel a shift in the tone of the interview, which was confirmed by the confused look being given by Catherine from behind the recording phone.

   "There has been good stuff, yes, but the most discussion and discourse has been over how different you two seem to be from each other." Again the microphone is thrusted toward you.

   "I-well, yeah, we're different from each other, but I think that helps us. We get to learn from each other." Your smile has officially started to fade as Jack continues to speak.

   "Not just the differences between you and Max, but the difference between you and his previous girlfriends." Your eyebrows were officially furrowed, confused by the implication.

   "I don't think I know what you mean." The further you got into this interview the more the outside world began to be shut out, so of course you didn't feel Max's eyes trained on you, post interview and supposed to be headed to the cool down room, but instead he watched.

   "People just don't understand how he could go from dating high class models and daughters of previous racers to you. You're so different from his previous girlfriends, what do you think it is about you that drew him in?" Your head tilted, really trying to figure out the point of the question, face softening into disappointment as you slowly start to realize the micro aggression in the comment.

   "Well, I-i don't-um-" You jump at the feeling of an arm wrapping around your waist, giving Max a sad smile when you look in the direction of the arm. 

   "What's going on here?" Max uses his grip on your waist to pull you behind him, and switches to holding your hand.

   "Max! Great race-" Jack goes to clap Max on the shoulder, be Max leans away, anger still consuming him.

   "No, don't change the subject. What is going on? Why does it look like my girlfriend is about to cry?" Max relaxed the hand that held yours so you could mess with his hand, but still had a scowl on his face.

   "I was just seeing what she had to say about-um-ha. You know what it's-" Jackson was starting to bail, motioning to Catherine to stop recording, which she does but she stays put, face enraged as she watches her boyfriend make a stupid decision. 

   "No, don't leave. Whatever you were talking to my girlfriend about you can talk to me about cause you were obviously upsetting her." You still held on to Max's hand, but the insinuation made during your conversation was already clicking, and you didn't like what you heard.

   "Fine! She just acts so childish and ditzy! No one understands why you're with her!" With that final declaration, everyone within earshot and paying attention to conversation was shocked. You, though wide eyed, were hurt, a small seed of doubt now attempting to worm its way into the mental security you had in your relationship with Max, but feeling him suddenly jerk his right hand away room your grip provided enough of a momentary distraction.

   "Fuck you." The two simple words were followed by a punch that dropped the guy. You hear gasps coming from multiple directions, making you guys realize you weren't the only one experiencing this, but this was the last thing on Max's mind. He looks up at Catherine. "Is he your boyfriend?" He was shaking out his hand, stretching his fingers and gingerly touching what will inevitably be bruised knuckles.

   "Not anymore. I knew he was an asshole sometimes, but this is a new low." She shakes her head down at Jack, who was now being tended to by a nearby marshall who saw, and luckily heard, everything, and was nodding in agreement.

   "Good for you." Max finally looks away from his hand to turn his attention to you. "Come on, let's head back." Max then reaches out for your hand with his currently painfully red right hand, which you grasp instinctively, planning to make the grip a bit softer, but having to hold on more as he whisks you back to the Red Bull crowd, putting you with Geri and Christian.

   "Where have you been?" Christian's question was frantic and directed toward Max as Geri swipes caringly at your white blouse.

   "Doesn't matter." The answer mildly shocks everyone, showing that Max is running on pure adrenaline at the moment. He looks back at you. "Are you okay?"

   You nod quickly at his answer, sad and tired doe eyes looking up at him. "Yeah, I'm fine. Well…now I'm worried you might get sued." As you spoke Max gathered you in a tight side hug and kissed your forehead.

   "I fucking dare them." He says this with a flat neutral face, and then a grin suddenly appears once he looks toward you. "Love you." He leans down to place a kiss on your lips.

   "Love you, too" You responded, tipping your head up toward you to get one last kiss before Max quickly makes his way into the cool down room for the last few minutes, joining Lewis and Charles.

   "Where have you been, man?" Lewis was stationed by the stand holding his helmet, taking a long swig of water after his inquiry. Charles sat silently in one of the chairs, uncaring of the number indicating who it's supposed to be, also looking at Max quizzically. Max puts a finger up and watches the cameras in the room, waiting for them to be shut off indicating that filming has now been directed to the podium.

    "I had to help Yn with something. Someone was being an asshole to her" He stretches his abused hand, bruising already starting.

   "You punched someone?" Charles gets up and heads to the exit so the three can head to the podium. Max doesn't answer the question verbally, just looks up from his hand at him and lets a satisfying grin replace the flat expression on his face.

__________

   "Baby, you're never this quiet. And it's been since we got back." You were sitting on the couch in his gaming room that sat behind his sim set up, hyper focused playing Mario Kart on your Nintendo Switch.

   "I- I'm fine. Nothing's wrong." You mumble your answer, only half listening to Max's concern as you play your game.

   "Yn, turn off the game and listen to me." You just press pause and look up to your left to place focus on Max, but Max wanted your undivided attention so he walked around to sit next to you, plucking the game from your hands and turning it off. When you didn't protest, he knew something was really wrong. "You have not been yourself, Yn."

   "What, I'm supposed to be "childish" and "ditzy" all the time?" You snap, crossing your arms and avoiding eye contact.

   "That's what it is." Max nods to himself and then uses the arm that he had outstretched along the back of the couch to tilt your head onto his shoulder. "You can't let the opinion of one person get to you, Love." Though meant to be comforting, Max's words just annoy you, making you lift your head from his shoulder and stand from the couch, pacing back and forth.

   "But it's not the opinion of one person, it's the opinion of multiple people, apparently. I'm not sophisticated enough. I'm not mature enough. I'm not classy. I'm an airhead." You fight tears that prick at your eyes after using your fingers to list off comments you saw online. Max gets up from the couch to stop your pacing, lifting your head with his large hands and kissing a tear that got away. "I don't want to be a bad reflection on you, Max."

   "You could never. Yn I am not exaggerating when I say that you are the best thing to ever come into my life. Okay?" You nod, but Max was not content with the lack of eye contact you've continued to maintain. "Yn?"

   "Hmm?" You finally look up at Max when he calls your name, a soft grin briefly appearing on his face before disappearing.

   "You know, I don't think just telling you will do anything." You hold the eye contact and furrow your eyebrows in confusion. "I think that I am going to have to fuck into my lovely girl's head exactly how perfect she is. What do you think?" The grin was back, but presented more like a shit-eating grin. The confusion and anger you felt moments ago was brushed away, replaced by shock and arousal, and all you could truly do in the moment was nod. "You can be quiet now, but I'm gonna need you to speak up later on, okay?" Another nod from your blank faced head makes Max chuckle before kissing you again, harder, deeper, his tongue invading your mouth and, like a good little girl, you copied the motions, and when he pulled away you had a bright smile on as your teeth took hold of your bottom lip. Max could see in your eyes that your demeanor was softening, focusing on the pleasure that was incoming for you, but he wanted to go a bit slower, really wanting to emphasize the affirmations and confidence building that is supposed to take place. "Can I take this off of you?" You nod and Max slowly lifts the oversized shirt above your head, dropping it to the floor when he sees what’s underneath. A sheer pink bra with flower detailing, your nipples visible through the fabric. “What’s this?” Max was like a kid on Christmas morning, looking at a tree full of presents from the stairwell.

   “I didn’t feel that great this morning so I put this set on because it's my favorite and makes me feel pretty.”  You rock on your feet during your explanation, hands behind your back, pushing your chest out.

   “Set?” You nod, gentle grin on your face. “Show me.” You follow directions, shimmying out of the tight shorts you had on to display the matching pink, flower detailed thong you had on. “Oh, you do look pretty, lovely girl. But you're always pretty.” Max gets an idea on the direction he want to take things. “You know what? Repeat that.” He grasped your hands, backing up to the couch and sitting down, bringing you in and wrapping your arms around his neck.

   “I’m pretty?” You twist your head to the side, lips in a small pout and face confused. Max runs his hands up your arms and brings them to your waist. 

   “Mhm. Again.” His eyes were trained on your breasts, bringing his right hand to your left breast to cup it and run his thumb over the nipple through the fabric of your bra.

   “I’m pretty.” You say it as a statement this time, but still tainted with uncertainty.

   “Yes you are. Again.” Max instructs, looking you in the eye, hand still fondling your breast.

   “I’m pretty.” You say it with a grin this, breath hitching when his hand moves up to run along your entire boob.

   “That’s my lovely girl.” You smile a little brighter at the accolade and subconsciously run your eye up and down Max’s torso. “You want me to take it off?” You nod, pussy clenching at the simple action of Max asking what you wanted from him. “You’ve gotta ask then, my love. Use your words.”

   “Can you take your shirt off, please.” You squeaked out, then inadvertently bringing him closer to your chest when you begin to mess with your nails.

   “Of course I can.” And so he leans away from you and manually removes your hands from his shoulders, which you subtly frown at, but the loss of contact didn’t matter once the solid build of your boyfriend’s torso became visible, hands magnetically drawn to his shoulder and rubbing down his back. “Happy.” You nod, the gentle grin settling on your face again. “Now, let’s see…” His hands go back to glancing over your sides. “You… are… intelligent. Repeat that.” His hands have now strayed to your ass, giving it a gentle squeeze. 

   “I’m-ah-intelligent.” You do as you’re told, shock when you feel the pads of Max’s fingers drag across your clit, exposed since he pushed the fabric soaked in your juices to the side.

   “That okay?” Max looks up at your wide eyed face and you nod, which prompts Max’s fingers to touch you, stirring up wetness that he uses to caress your clit. “Again.”

   “I’m intelligent.” You place your hands firmly on Max’s shoulders as the sensation from your clit being stimulated had your knees starting to get weak and caused you to grind into Max’s hand.

   “Yes, you are very intelligent, my eager little baby.” Max is able to stop you from rocking your hips and pulls away his hand, sucking your slick from his fingers. “You want my thigh instead? So you can rest those legs a bit.” You nod as you lower yourself onto his thigh, exposed since he was wearing shorts. You move the fabric of your panties to the side to be able to drag your clit along the muscle ridges of your boyfriend’s thigh, that sensation making you wetter which made Max harder, tenting his athletic shorts. “That’s my smart, pretty little horny girl. Get off on my leg, baby.” Max’s praise and encouragement makes you hump his leg harder, whimpering,  trying to satisfy the amplified desire that resulted from his words. “Now, what can you think of to say, lovely girl?

   “Can’t think…” You hug into the crook of his neck, still whimpering at the feeling, but Max reaches back to remove your face from his neck so you can look into his eyes.

   “Yes you can. I know you can. Think…” The face that you had, mouth hung open, brows knitted together, only made Max harder as he waited for you to speak.

   “I…am…classy.” You keep riding his thigh, moaning when Max bounces his leg once.

   “Again.” His hands were back on your body, migrating back up toward your boobs.

   “I’m classy.” Your words begin to slur and the motion of your hips more erratic and irregular. 

   “Good. Good job, lovely girl.” He looks up at your face, eyes closed and head rolling as you concentrate on the excruciatingly slow building climax. “What else?” Max had removed a hand from your body to push down the hem of his shorts and boxers down to free his dick, already dripping pre-cum on his stomach. 

   “I’m not an airhead.” You were whining your words now, hands past Max’s face and holding onto the back of the couch, pink sheer bra now taunting him.

   “You’re not, my love. Fuck. I promise you.” Max runs his thumb along his raging pink tip then begins to pump himself, watching your flustered face intently.

   “Maxie, ‘m gonna cum.” You brought your face back to his neck and continued the erratic pace of your hips, but your declaration caused Max to let go of his dick and use his hands on your hips to stop your movements. “Please…” This word was moaned from your lips, your endearing neediness making Max’s heart flutter, liking the fact that he’s the one satisfying your whiny pleas.

   “Hold on, baby. Get up.” As you do, Max watches a string of wetness stretch from his thigh to your partially covered pussy. He then frantically pushed down his shorts and underwear, kicking them who knows where, and brings his hands back home to your hips, hooking his fingers onto your underwear but then removing them, grinning up at you. “You take them off, my love.” At this point all you wanted was to feel Max, inside and out, so you wiggle out of your thong, but as you reach back to remove your bra, the feeling of Max’s hand on your thigh stops you. “Keep it on if it makes you feel pretty, baby. But let me just…” Max reaches out to your breasts, pushing the pliable fabric out of the way, leaving your exposed boobs to be outlined by the pink fabric and the covered wiring of the bra.

   “I look pretty?” There it went, your mind on the back burner as the only thing you can think of is getting on Max’s lap so you can bury his hard cock deep inside you. Max knew his words had to be careful now, as you were more sensitive in this state, but he still wanted to get it through to you that you were the only one for him.

   “Yes you do, baby. Come here.” He brings you closer by your waist, holding on tighter as you climb on the couch, straddling him and then finally lowering down on him, whimpering at how deep he was and how full you felt. You tucked your head into his neck again, this time he gives in for a moment, not moving his hips at all, but bringing his fingers down to gently circle your engorged clit. “Come on, I want to see my pretty girl’s lovely face. Can you do that for me?” You nod into his neck and then slowly pull back to be face to face, eyes glossy and lips slightly parted, drawing Max in to kiss them. It was slow yet sloppy, and when you guys pulled back from each other, your lips were shiny from the spit. “Beautiful.” Max starts to slowly drag his hips into you, enjoying the fucked out face that you had even after just riding his thigh. Praises in English and Dutch came as a whisper from his lips, heads press against each other. 

   “Wanna suck on smthn…” You request between little whimpers, to which Max obliges by bringing his right hand to your jaw so his thumb could trace your lips before you opened your mouth for it.

   “You look so pretty sucking on my thumb, bouncing on my dick.” While one hand was occupying your mouth, the other hand had a firm grip on your ass, helping you move up and down, but most of your movement was assisted by the slight bounce of the couch. As he watches the concentration you had, trying your hardest to get to that edge, he decided he wanted to give your brain something else to do. "Say you're pretty, baby." You initially go to take his thumb out of your mouth to say it, but he insists otherwise. "Say it around my thumb, love."

   "I'm pwetty." You repeated, wide eyes boring into his, bringing your hands up to wrap them around his wrist. 

   "Good. Ah, fuck." Max stopped his thrusting for a moment but you didn't stop your bouncing, rocking your hips into his waist, getting well needed friction to your clit from it rubbing his pelvis. "Say-fuck-say your smart."

   "I'm smawt." Again you repeated, this time face a bit more strained as your body gets to that familiar ledge.

   "You deserve me, baby. I'm the one that doesn't-ah- deserve you." Max starts thrusting again, taking the hand that was on your butt and pushing locs that hung in front of your face behind your ear.

   "I desewve you." You just mindlessly repeat the part of the sentence that you knew was for you, bouncing, chasing your climax.

   "Fuck, yes you do baby. I'm so happy you're mine, my love." He removes his thumb from your mouth so he is able to use both hands to grip your waist to move you, and you whimper because of the emptiness in your mouth.  "I want to hear all of the pretty noises you make when you cum."

   "Wanna cum…gonna come-ah. Ah!" A quick succession of moans and whines accompanied your climax, it eventually all becoming too much, causing you to fall forward into his chest, still whimpering. Max pulls his dick out of you slowly, trying hard not to stimulate you past your limit.

   "Shhh-shit-give me one moment and I'll help you, pretty girl. Just relax." He keeps one hand on your back, fingers running along your spine as he uses his other hand to finish himself off, letting out sharp breaths as strings of cum shoot lazily onto his hand. After he comes down from his own high, he starts to coo you back from your subspace, letting you know how well you did, reinforcing what he had you repeat earlier, asking what you wanted him to bring back from the kitchen. Once he feels you've come down enough, he fixes your bra then picks up your oversized shirt from the floor and pulls it over your head, then goes to clean himself up enough to put his clothes back on and comes back to clean you up and make sure you drink the water he brought you. The rest of the night you guys cuddled on that couch, deciding to just sleep there for the night, and Max held you tight to his body, trying to physically protect you from the words that caused you so much mental anguish. He laid there, thinking, and decided that when you wake up, he's suggesting you delete Twitter.

#black reader #request #f1 x black!reader #formula 1 #formula 1 x black!reader #max verstappen #max verstappen x reader #max verstappen x black!reader #max verstappen imagine #f1 fake text #f1 smut #f1 smau #f1 imagines

[luclovestruck]

Bumping this here because-- due to financial issues (such as being wrongfully dropped from food stamps) and family emergencies and also my phone kicking the bucket, I am short of my goals for my upcoming rent payments. This first one coming up I need a little under $400.

I would prefer to do more work than to accept donations, but I already have a pretty decent commission backlog that I have been working through. I've tried to supplement that by offering discounted headshots, which i am completing daily, but I still need to sell more slots. You can pop in for one of the remaining 8 slots at the link above, or you can tip me if you want to see my art more regularly. Here's some headshots I did this month:

tumblr is... refusing to let me structure this post on desktop so i am not going to include more examples but you get the gis

#lucdoodles #commissions #mutual aid

[jennyboom21]

In 2006, the year Taylor Swift released her first single, a closeted country singer named Chely Wright, then 35, held a 9-millimeter pistol to her mouth. Queer identity was still taboo enough in mainstream America that speaking about her love for another woman would have spelled the end of a country music career. But in suppressing her identity, Ms. Wright had risked her life.

In 2010, she came out to the public, releasing a confessional memoir, “Like Me,” in which she wrote that country music was characterized by culturally enforced closeting, where queer stars would be seen as unworthy of investment unless they lied about their lives. “Country music,” she wrote, “is like the military — don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The culture in which Ms. Wright picked up that gun — the same one in which Ms. Swift first became a star — was stunningly different from today’s. It’s dizzying to think about the strides that have been made in Americans’ acceptance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the past decade: marriage equality, queer themes dominating teen entertainment, anti-discrimination laws in housing and, for now, in the workplace. But in recent years, a steady drip of now-out stars — Cara Delevingne, Colton Haynes, Elliot Page, Kristen Stewart, Raven-Symoné and Sam Smith among them — have disclosed that they had been encouraged to suppress their queerness in order to market projects or remain bankable.

The culture of country music hasn’t changed so much that homophobia is gone. Just this past summer, Adam Mac, an openly gay country artist, was shamed out of playing at a festival in his hometown because of his sexual orientation. In September, the singer Maren Morris stepped away from country music; she said she did so in part because of the industry’s lingering anti-queerness. If country music hasn’t changed enough, what’s to say that the larger entertainment industry — and, by extension, our broader culture — has?

Periodically, I return to a video, recorded by a shaky hand more than a decade ago, of Ms. Wright answering questions at a Borders bookstore about her coming out. She likens closeted stardom to a blender, an “insane” and “inhumane” heteronormative machine in which queer artists are chewed to bits.

“It’s going to keep going,” Ms. Wright says, “until someone who has something to lose stands up and just says ‘I’m gay.’ Somebody big.” She continues: “We need our heroes.”

What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her?

What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?

In the world of Taylor Swift, the start of a new “era” means the release of new art (an album and the paratexts — music videos, promotional ephemera, narratives — that supplement it) and a wholesale remaking of the aesthetics that will accompany its promotion, release and memorializing. In recent years, Ms. Swift has dominated pop culture to such a degree that these transformations often end up altering American culture in the process.

In 2019, she was set to release a new album, “Lover,” the first since she left Big Machine Records, her old Nashville-based label, which she has since said limited her creative freedom. The aesthetic of what would be known as the “Lover Era” emerged as rainbows, butterflies and pastel shades of blue, purple and pink, colors that subtly evoke the bisexual pride flag.

On April 26, Lesbian Visibility Day, Ms. Swift released the album’s lead single, “ME!,” in which she sings about self-love and self-acceptance. She co-directed a campy music video to accompany it, which she would later describe as depicting “everything that makes me, me.” It features Ms. Swift dancing at a pride parade, dripping in rainbow paint and turning down a man’s marriage proposal in exchange for a … pussy cat.

At the end of June, the L.G.B.T.Q. community would celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. On June 14, Ms. Swift released the video for her attempt at a pride anthem, “You Need to Calm Down,” in which she and an army of queer celebrities from across generations — the “Queer Eye” hosts, Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Porter, Hayley Kiyoko, to name a few — resist homophobia by living openly. Ms. Swift sings that outrage against queer visibility is a waste of time and energy: “Why are you mad, when you could be GLAAD?”

The video ends with a plea: “Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally.” Many, in the press and otherwise, saw the video as, at best, a misguided attempt at allyship and, at worst, a straight woman co-opting queer aesthetics and narratives to promote a commercial product.

Then, Ms. Swift performed “Shake It Off” as a surprise for patrons at the Stonewall Inn. Rumors — that were, perhaps, little more than fantasies — swirled in the queerer corners of her fandom, stoked by a suggestive post by the fashion designer Christian Siriano. Would Ms. Swift attend New York City’s WorldPride march on June 30? Would she wear a dress spun from a rainbow? Would she give a speech? If she did, what would she declare about herself?

The Sunday of the march, those fantasies stopped. She announced that the music executive Scooter Braun, who she described as an “incessant, manipulative” bully, had purchased her masters, the lucrative original recordings of her work.

Ms. Swift’s “Lover” was the first record that she created with nearly unchecked creative freedom. Lacking her old label’s constraints, she specifically chose to feature activism for and the aesthetics of the L.G.B.T.Q. community in her confessional, self-expressive art. Even before the sale of her masters, she appeared to be stepping into a new identity — not just an aesthetic — that was distinct from that associated with her past six albums.

When looking back on the artifacts of the months before that album’s release, any close reader of Ms. Swift has a choice. We can consider the album’s aesthetics and activism as performative allyship, as they were largely considered to be at the time. Or we can ask a question, knowing full well that we may never learn the answer: What if the “Lover Era” was merely Ms. Swift’s attempt to douse her work — and herself — in rainbows, as so many baby queers feel compelled to do as they come out to the world?

There’s no way of knowing what could have happened if Ms. Swift’s masters hadn’t been sold. All we know is what happened next. In early August, Ms. Swift posted a rainbow-glazed photo of a series of friendship bracelets, one of which says “PROUD” with beads in the color of the bisexual pride flag. Queer people recognize that this word, deployed this way, typically means that someone is proud of their own identity. But the public did not widely view this as Ms. Swift’s coming out.

Then, Vogue released an interview with Ms. Swift that had been conducted in early June. When discussing her motivations for releasing “You Need to Calm Down,” Ms. Swift said, “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male.” She continued: “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.” That statement suggests that Ms. Swift did not, in early June, consider herself part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community; it does not illuminate whether that is because she was a straight, cis ally or because she was stuck in the shadowy, solitary recesses of the closet.

On Aug. 22, Ms. Swift publicly committed herself to the as-of-then-unproven project of rerecording and rereleasing her first six albums. The next day, she finally released “Lover,” which raises more questions than it answers. Why does she have to keep secrets just to keep her muse, as all her fans still sing-scream on “Cruel Summer”? About what are the “hundred thrown-out speeches I almost said to you,” in her chronicle of self-doubt, “The Archer,” if not her identity? And what could the album’s closing words, which come at the conclusion of “Daylight,” a song about stepping out of a 20-year darkness and choosing to “let it go,” possibly signal?

I want to be defined by the things that I love,

Not the things I hate,

Not the things that I’m afraid of, I’m afraid of,

Not the things that haunt me in the middle of the night,

I just think that,

You are what you love.

The first time I viewed “Lover” through the prism of queerness, I felt delirious, almost insane. I kept wondering whether what I was perceiving in her work was truly there or if it was merely a mirage, born of earnest projection.

My longtime reading of Ms. Swift’s celebrity — like that of a majority of her fan base — had been stuck in the lingering assumptions left by a period that began more than a decade and a half ago, when a girl with an overexaggerated twang, Shirley Temple curls and Georgia stars in her eyes became famous. Then, she presented as all that was to be expected of a young starlet: attractive yet virginal, knowing yet naïve, not talented enough to be formidable, not commanding enough to be threatening, confessional, eager to please. Her songs earnestly depicted the fantasies of a girl raised in a traditional culture: high school crushes and backwoods drives, princelings and wedding rings, declarations of love that climax only in a kiss — ideally in the pouring rain.

When Ms. Swift was trying to sell albums in that late-2000s media environment, her songwriting didn’t match the image of a sex object, the usual role reserved for female celebrities in our culture. Instead, the story the public told about her was that she laundered her affection to a litter of promising grown men, in exchange for songwriting inspiration. A young Ms. Swift contributed to this narrative by hiding easy-to-decode clues in liner notes that suggested a certain someone was her songs’ inspiration (“SAM SAM SAM SAM SAM SAM,” “ADAM,” “TAY”) or calling out an ex-boyfriend on the “Ellen” show and “Saturday Night Live.” Despite the expansive storytelling in Ms. Swift’s early records, her public image often cast a man’s interest as her greatest ambition.

As Ms. Swift’s career progressed, she began to remake that image: changing her style and presentation, leaving country music for pop and moving from Nashville to New York. By 2019, her celebrity no longer reflected traditional culture; it had instead become a girlboss-y mirror for another dominant culture — that of white, cosmopolitan, neoliberal America.

But in every incarnation, the public has largely seen those songs — especially those for which she doesn’t directly state her inspiration — as cantos about her most recent heterosexual love, whether that idea is substantiated by evidence or not. A large portion of her base still relishes debating what might have happened with the gentleman caller who supposedly inspired her latest album. Feverish discussions of her escapades with the latest yassified London Boy or mustachioed Mr. Americana fuel the tabloid press — and, embarrassingly, much of traditional media — that courts fan engagement by relentlessly, unquestioningly chronicling Ms. Swift’s love life.

Even in 2023, public discussion about the romantic entanglements of Ms. Swift, 34, presumes that the right man will “finally” mean the end of her persistent husbandlessness and childlessness. Whatever you make of Ms. Swift’s extracurricular activities involving a certain football star (romance for the ages? strategic brand partnership? performance art for entertainment’s sake?), the public’s obsession with the relationship has been attention-grabbing, if not lucrative, for all parties, while reinforcing a story that America has long loved to tell about Ms. Swift, and by extension, itself.

Because Ms. Swift hasn’t undeniably subverted our culture’s traditional expectations, she has managed, in an increasingly fractured cultural environment, to simultaneously capture two dominant cultures — traditional and cosmopolitan. To maintain the stranglehold she has on pop culture, Ms. Swift must continue to tell a story that those audiences expect to consume; she falls in love with a man or she gets revenge. As a result, her confessional songs languish in a place of presumed stasis; even as their meaning has grown deeper and their craft more intricate, a substantial portion of her audience’s understanding of them remains wedded to the same old narratives.

But if interpretations of Ms. Swift’s art often languish in stasis, so do the millions upon millions of people who love to play with the dollhouse she has constructed for them. Her dominance in pop culture and the success of her business have given her the rare ability to influence not only her industry but also the worldview of a substantial portion of America. How might her industry, our culture and we, ourselves, change if we made space for Ms. Swift to burn that dollhouse to the ground?

Anyone considering the whole of Ms. Swift’s artistry — the way that her brilliantly calculated celebrity mixes with her soul-baring art — can find discrepancies between the story that underpins her celebrity and the one captured by her songs. One such gap can be found in her “Lover” era. Others appear alongside “dropped hairpins,” or the covert ways someone can signal queer identity to those in the know while leaving others comfortable in their ignorance. Ms. Swift dropped hairpins before “Lover” and has continued to do so since.

Sometimes, Ms. Swift communicates through explicit sartorial choices — hair the colors of the bisexual pride flag or a recurring motif of rainbow dresses. She frequently depicts herself as trapped in glass closets or, well, in regular closets. She drops hairpins on tour as well, paying tribute to the Serpentine Dance of the lesbian artist Loie Fuller during the Reputation Tour or referencing “The Ladder,” one of the earliest lesbian publications in the United States, in her Eras Tour visuals.

Dropped hairpins also appear in Ms. Swift’s songwriting. Sometimes, the description of a muse — the subject of her song, or to whom she sings — seems to fit only a woman, as it does in “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” “Maroon” or “Hits Different.” Sometimes she suggests a female muse through unfulfilled rhyme schemes, as she does in “The Very First Night,” when she sings “didn’t read the note on the Polaroid picture / they don’t know how much I miss you” (“her,” instead of that pesky little “you,” would rhyme). Her songwriting also noticeably alludes to poets whose muses the historical record incorrectly cast as men — Emily Dickinson chief among them — as if to suggest the same fate awaits her art. Stunningly, she even explicitly refers to dropping hairpins, not once, but twice, on two separate albums.

In isolation, a single dropped hairpin is perhaps meaningless or accidental, but considered together, they’re the unfurling of a ballerina bun after a long performance. Those dropped hairpins began to appear in Ms. Swift’s artistry long before queer identity was undeniably marketable to mainstream America. They suggest to queer people that she is one of us. They also suggest that her art may be far more complex than the eclipsing nature of her celebrity may allow, even now.

Since at least her “Lover” era, Ms. Swift has explicitly encouraged her fans to read into the coded messages (which she calls “Easter eggs”) she leaves in music videos, social media posts and interviews with traditional media outlets, but a majority of those fans largely ignore or discount the dropped hairpins that might hint at queer identity. For them, acknowledging even the possibility that Ms. Swift could be queer would irrevocably alter the way they connect with her celebrity, the true product they’re consuming.

There is such public devotion to the traditional narrative Ms. Swift embodies because American culture enshrines male power. In her sweeping essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich identified the way that male power cramps, hinders or devalues women’s creativity. All of the sexist undertones with which Ms. Swift’s work can be discussed (often, even, by fans) flow from compulsory heterosexuality, or the way patriarchy draws power from the presumption that women naturally desire men. She must write about men she surely loves or be unbankable; she must marry and bear children or remain a child herself; she must look like, in her words, a “sexy baby” or be undesirable, “a monster on the hill.”

A woman who loves women is most certainly a monster to a society that prizes male power. She can fulfill none of the functions that a traditional culture imagines — wife, mother, maid, mistress, whore — so she has few places in the historical record. The Sapphic possibility of her work is ignored, censored or lost to time. If there is queerness earnestly implied in Ms. Swift’s work, then it’s no wonder that it, like that of so many other artists before her, is so often rendered invisible in the public imagination.

While Ms. Swift’s songs, largely written from her own perspective, cannot always conform to the idea of a woman our culture expects, her celebrity can. That separation, between Swift the songwriter and Swift the star, allows Ms. Swift to press against the golden birdcage in which she has found herself. She can write about women’s complexity in her confessional songs, but if ever she chooses not to publicly comply with the dominant culture’s fantasy, she will remain uncategorizable, and therefore, unsellable.

Her star — as bright as it is now — would surely dim.

Whether she is conscious of it or not, Ms. Swift signals to queer people — in the language we use to communicate with one another — that she has some affinity for queer identity. There are some queer people who would say that through this sort of signaling, she has already come out, at least to us. But what about coming out in a language the rest of the public will understand?

The difference between any person coming out and a celebrity doing so is the difference between a toy mallet and a sledgehammer. It’s reasonable for celebrities to be reticent; by coming out, they potentially invite death threats, a dogged tabloid press that will track their lovers instead of their beards, the excavation of their past lives, a torrent of public criticism and the implosion of their careers. In a culture of compulsory heterosexuality, to stop lying — by omission or otherwise — is to risk everything.

American culture still expects that stars are cis and straight until they confess themselves guilty. So, when our culture imagines a celebrity’s coming out, it expects an Ellen-style announcement that will submerge the past life in phoenix fire and rebirth the celebrity in a new image. In an ideal culture, wearing a bracelet that says “PROUD,” waving a pride flag onstage, placing a rainbow in album artwork or suggestively answering fan questions on Instagram would be enough. But our current reality expects a supernova.

Because of that expectation, stars end up trapped behind glass, which is reinforced by the tabloid press’s subtle social control. That press shapes the public’s expectations of others’ identities, even when those identities are chasms away from reality. Celebrities who master this press environment — Ms. Swift included — can bolster their business, but in doing so, they reinforce a heteronormative culture that obsesses over pregnancy, women’s bodies and their relationships with men.

That environment is at odds with the American movement for L.G.B.T.Q. equality, which still has fights to win — most pressingly, enshrining trans rights and squashing nonsensical culture wars. But lately I’ve heard many of my young queer contemporaries — and the occasional star — wonder whether the movement has come far enough to dispense with the often messy, often uncomfortable process of coming out, over and over again.

That questioning speaks to an earnest conundrum that queer people confront regularly: Do we live in this world, or the world to which we ought to aspire?

Living in aspiration means ignoring the convention of coming out in favor of just … existing. This is easier for those who can pass as cis and straight if need be, those who are so wealthy or white that the burden of hiding falls to others and those who live in accepting urban enclaves. This is a queer life without friction; coming out in a way straight people can see is no longer a prerequisite for acceptance, fulfillment and equality.

This aspiration is tremendous, but in our current culture, it is available only to a privileged few. Should such an inequality of access to aspiration become the accepted state of affairs, it would leave those who can’t hide to face society’s cruelest actors without the backing of a vocal, activated community. So every queer person who takes issue with the idea that we must come out ought to ask a simple question — what do we owe one another?

If coming out is primarily supposed to be an act of self-actualization, to form our own identities, then we owe one another nothing. This posture recognizes that the act of coming out implicitly reinforces straight and cis identities as default, which is not worth the rewards of outness.

But if coming out is supposed to be a radical act of resistance that seeks to change the way our society imagines people to be, then undeniable visibility is essential to make space for those without power. In this posture, queer people who can live in aspiration owe those who cannot a real world in which our expansive views of love and gender aren’t merely tolerated but celebrated. We have no choice but to actively, vocally press against the world we’re in, until no one is stuck in it.

And so just for a little while longer, we need our heroes.

But if queer people spend all of our time holding out for a guiding light, we might forgo a more pressing question that if answered, just might inch all of us a bit closer to aspiration. The next time heroes appear, are we ready to receive them?

It takes neither a genius nor a radical to see queerness implied by Ms. Swift’s work. But figuring out how to talk about it before the star labels herself is another matter. Right now, those who do so must inject our perceptions with caveats and doubt or pretend we cannot see it (a lie!) — implicitly acquiescing to convention’s constraints in the name of solidarity.

Lying is familiar to queer people; we teach ourselves to do it from an early age, shrouding our identities from others, and ourselves. It’s not without good reason. To maintain the safety (and sometimes the comfort) of the closet, we lie to others, and, most crucially, we allow others to believe lies about us, seeing us as something other than ourselves. Lying is doubly familiar to those of us who are women. To reduce friction, so many of us still shrink life to its barest version in the name of honor or safety, rendering our lives incomplete, our minds lobotomized and our identities unexplored.

By maintaining a culture of lying about what we, uniquely, have the knowledge and experience to see, we commit ourselves to a vow of silence. That vow may protect someone’s safety, but when it is applied to works of culture, it stymies our ability to receive art that has the potential to change or disrupt us. As those with queer identity amass the power of commonplaceness, it’s worth questioning whether the purpose of one of the last great taboos that constrains us befits its cost.

In every case, is the best form of solidarity still silence?

I know that discussing the potential of a star’s queerness before a formal declaration of identity feels, to some, too salacious and gossip-fueled to be worthy of discussion. They might point to the viciousness of the discourse around “queerbaiting” (in which I have participated); to the harm caused by the tabloid press’s dalliances with outing; and, most crucially, to the real material sacrifices that queer stars make to come out, again and again, as reasons to stay silent.

I share many of these reservations. But the stories that dominate our collective imagination shape what our culture permits artists and their audiences to say and be. Every time an artist signals queerness and that transmission falls on deaf ears, that signal dies. Recognizing the possibility of queerness — while being conscious of the difference between possibility and certainty — keeps that signal alive.

So, whatever you make of Ms. Swift’s sexual orientation or gender identity (something that is knowable, perhaps, only to her) or the exact identity of her muses (something better left a mystery), choosing to acknowledge the Sapphic possibility of her work has the potential to cut an audience that is too often constrained by history, expectation and capital loose from the burdens of our culture.

To start, consider what Ms. Swift wrote in the liner notes of her 2017 album, “reputation”: “When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test.”

Listen to her. At the very least, resist the urge to assume that when Ms. Swift calls the object of her affection “you” in a song, she’s talking about a man with whom she’s been photographed. Just that simple choice opens up a world of Swiftian wordplay. She often plays with pronouns, trading “you” and “him” so that only someone looking for a distinction between two characters might find one. Turns of phrase often contain double or even triple meanings. Her work is a feast laid specifically for the close listener.

Choosing to read closely can also train the mind to resist the image of an unmarried woman that compulsory heterosexuality expects. And even if it is only her audience who points at rainbows, reading Ms. Swift’s work as queer is still worthwhile, for it undermines the assumption that queer identity impedes pop superstardom, paving the way for an out artist to have the success Ms. Swift has.

After all, would it truly be better to wait to talk about any of this for 50, 60, 70 years, until Ms. Swift whispers her life story to a biographer? Or for a century or more, when Ms. Swift’s grandniece donates her diaries to some academic library, for scholars to pore over? To ensure that mea culpas come only when Ms. Swift’s bones have turned to dust and fragments of her songs float away on memory’s summer breeze?

I think not. And so, I must say, as loudly as I can, “I can see you,” even if I risk foolishness for doing so.

I remember the first time I knew I had seen Taylor Alison Swift break free from the trap of stardom. I wasn’t sitting in a crowded stadium in the pouring rain or cuddled up in a movie theater with a bag of popcorn. I was watching a grainy, crackling livestream of the Eras Tour, captured on a fan’s phone.

It’s late at night, the beginning of her acoustic set of surprise songs, this time performed in a yellow dress. She begins playing “Hits Different.” It’s a new song, full of puns, double entendres and wordplay, that toys with the glittering identities in which Ms. Swift indulges.

She’s rushing, as if stopping, even for a second, will cause her to lose her nerve. She stumbles at the bridge, pauses and starts again; the queen of bridges will not mess this up, not tonight.

There it is, at the bridge’s end: “Bet I could still melt your world; argumentative, antithetical dream girl.” An undeniable declaration of love to a woman. As soon as those words leave her lips, she lets out a whoop, pacing around the stage with a grin that cannot be contained.

For a moment, Ms. Swift was out of the woods she had created for herself as a teenager, floating above the trees. The future was within reach; she would, and will, soon take back the rest of her words, her reputation, her name. Maybe the world would see her, maybe it wouldn’t.

But on that stage, she found herself. I was there. Through a fuzzy fancam, I saw it.

And somehow, that was everything.

#nyt x Gaylor swift #Gaylor swift x the msm #mainstream media x gaylor swift #gaylor fandom #Swiftgron #Taymily #tily #the New York Times article

[hexhomos]

so do i have to play league to keep up with lore?

Not at all!!! League is the opposite of a story-based game. Champions are meant to represent an archetype in the rift and shout some cool catchphrases. MOST are self contained, a few have interwoven plotlines that can span years. Some character stories get updated over time in the form of short fiction / comics / event based visual novels but most of that content can be looked up online.

In the case of jayce/viktor, to make ref easier for all: HERE’S THE JAYVIK LEAGUE LORE CHEAT SHEET.

League of Legends

Viktor's bio v.1 | Jayce's bio v.1 | Blitzcrank's bio v.1

Viktor's bio v.2 | Jayce's bio v.2 | Blitzcrank's bio v.2

Viktor’s short story | Jayce’s short story | Blitz’ alt bio

“v.1″ refers to their original release bios, “v.2″ to post runeterra universe reboot bios. Worth noting that some of these changes were... contentious; blitzcrank’s new origin story as something viktor did not create but simply mod is mostly ignored by fans, who still refer to original events in a vague manner. The omission of stanwick in jayce / blitz’ updated bios is a big questionmark. To get in the spirit of the thing I just go all in the ‘Unreliable Narrator’ aspect of their whole shebang and cobble together my own interpretation of events.

[update nov.22]: Blitzcrank’s alt bio has been added! this 1.5 version contains a somewhat different account of events that I kind of prefer, compared to 2.0

EVEN MORE STUFF:

Read info on ALL Canon AU universes, find HD splash art, Skinline details, 3D Models & more on the Vikjayce Codex!

CONVERGENCE: A LEAGUE OF LEGENDS STORY

'CONVERGENCE' is an Ekko-led platformer game that released in 2023. An accompanying free-to-download comic miniseries was made to supplement the game's story, and it focuses on Jayce, Viktor, Ekko himself & his family -- and how they are all interwoven as the 'struggling genius' archetype in a very flawed system.

[Read here!!]

This series features a retelling of J/V's backstories through the lens of an outsider, and a bit of an update on where they are now. Surprising absolutely no one: they are still very attached to each other. (This comic is standalone, and not part of the Arcane universe.)

Legends of Runeterra vikjayce content:

[ Jayce’s Deck / related cards ]  |  [ Viktor’s Deck / related cards ]

Jayce's Path of Champions Comic (Voiced/Viktor is in it)

Jayce voice interactions | Viktor voice interactions (he shares this vid w other champions, pops back from time to time)

*They both keep extensive research/life notes addressing themselves. It’s very undying highschool girl cute. LoR is sometimes referred to as its own continuity; their cards are both a progression of their story and a what-if scenario.

Arcane universe limited content:

[ Jayce Talis’ journal ] was available to read in the league client while the show was airing. “Far From Home” “Progress Day” “A Powerful Partnership” are all diary entries; the layout is a bit finicky but click on chapter numbers to progress, the image on the side changes to match!

Wild Rift limited content:

[ Jayce got a champion release webtoon ] that never made it to NA servers. It quickly summarizes his deal and vaguely hints Viktor is in the update horizon.

There is a tentative translation offered by blessed twitter user crossedfires, highlight being the jayce/viktor panel wherein he remarks: 

“Genius is always lonely, I know this truth very well. Until Viktor appeared – I admit it – he is the only gear comparable to me.” (uses the verb xiāngdāng (comparable) that means match, balance, correspond to). One of my mandarin-speaking friends has also pointed out the wordplay lends itself to double meaning; “He is the only gear to match/that matches mine.”

MISC / OFF CANON:

Jayce & Viktor animated stickers

Punches&Plants 2 - Altcanon comedy, various champs living in an urbanized fantasy version of runeterra. Jayce and Viktor retire from a life of rivalry to dedicate themselves to new hobbies. Viktor is a dollmaker, Jayce is a weeb. Blitzcrank has an unfortunate job.

League’s Germany twitter promo - Viktor gets his ‘man of progress’ mug.

Wild Rift holidays promo - Jayce leaves a gift for ‘V’ under the tree.

Jayce and Viktor also have plenty of AU ingame skins with their own micro bios. Not linking these here since itd be too much info/ u can easily google; they share the Battlecast universe (ppl like this one) and the Heavy Metal universe (ppl dislike this one for various reasons, namely retconning Viktor’s full machine skin from ‘his last stage of mechanization’ into a very unfortunate stereotype.) They were meant to be an annoying player and an annoyed dungeon master in the Riftquest universe but riot scrapped Viktor’s skin. RIP

if anything else cool happens or I remember a missed spot I’ll update this!

#jayvik #vikjayce #League of Legends #legends of runeterra #Jayce giopara #jayce league of legends #viktor league of legends #viktor lol #jayce lol #hexposts #blitzcrank #blitzcrank league of legends #I dont think blitzcranks color story adds much at all to the picture so its not here sorry #resources #meta tag #hextxt

[onlymingyus]

Hello, my name is Mars! I am a writer and creator on here Tumblr. I have been writing on Tumblr for the past 3 years where I have written over 374 imagines, drabbles, and fics.

I also enjoy creating graphics, gifs, and recoloring photos. I create my own graphics for my blogs and fics. Being creative has always been a huge part of my life and I love to share what I am able to make with others.

I live in a small town and work as a 911 dispatcher full-time. It is an incredibly stressful and sometimes thankless job but I still love what I do knowing that almost every day I am able to help someone in some way. I like living my life finding little ways to do that either with my job or my art so writing and creating was a way for me to do that at home.

During the pandemic, I fell in love with K-Pop and found a sense of community that I was truly missing. It gave me my best friend and has led to some of the most amazing adventures I have ever gotten to experience. I have met such amazing people in this community and especially among Carats. I am honored to call so many people I have met online, who live so far away, my friends.

K-Pop truly gave me back my inspiration and led me back to writing and creating. That is when my best friend and I started a writing blog together and have since made separate ones for personal writing.

Now to the reason why I am telling you this and why I created my Patreon. I wanted a way to have a closer sense of community with my followers. Sometimes the ask box can get overwhelming and demanding. Here I can offer more exclusive things for those who want to be here to support me a bit more closely.

Also, I mentioned my job as a 911 Dispatcher, and as much as I do love my job it is difficult to be a single woman with one job. I live in a rural area and drive 30 minutes to work in my own county. If I were to get a job outside of my county dispatching I would have to give up writing and creating. The thought of that is one that I am hoping to not dwell on for long. I am hoping to make the most of my creativity and writing here, to supplement my time off and make up the difference of not looking for that second job.

I appreciate any and all support and hope that you enjoy my content.

I know we all enjoy free content on Tumblr, and there will still be plenty of that given to you here. Patreon will be a place to get exclusive works and bonus content.

If you cannot subscribe and pay a monthly fee, I understand but please consider visiting my Ko-fi and making donation. If you are unable to make a donation please reblog so that others can find me.

#mars.rambles #about me #how to support me #seventeen writer

[iodotsys]

Have my Newgrounds everyone. I'll be posting there instead of Instagram for basically forever. I encourage you guys to make one as well if you do any type of art. They ban the use of AI art. Obviously if anything pops up I find strange with them, I'll inform you. They're an oldie but goodie if you're looking for something to supplement tumblr.

#invader zim #i hate ai art #newgrounds

[meowthefluffy]

AU EXPLANATION MASTERPOST 

Hello hello my darling followers, I’ve noticed there’s a lot of new folks here so I thought id explain all my au’s in one post and where to read them so all of you can understand what the hell I’m talking about 90% of the time! 

I’m Madeline, the world’s number one producer of hyper specific prinxiety au’s and I hope you’ll enjoy what’s I’ve got in store for you!

I’ve ordered these in descending order of most content to least amount of content. Each story has a brief plot description and where to find them! All of my au’s are ongoing so even if it’s a bit old if you pop me an ask or want more content of an au I am happy to provide :)

(Explanations are under the cut)

Lust!Roman au:

First and foremost the au that started it all, the lust Roman saga! Don’t let the title fool you this is a 100% pg13 story I just named it before I thought through the consequences. 

Format: This au unlike all my others is a full scale comic (that ranges in quality art wise as I’ve spent over three years on this comic and I’ve improved a lot as an artist)

It also is the au with the most amount of supplementary material ( animatics, a side ask blog illustrations ect.) As well as the only one I have that takes place in the normal universe

Summary.

Something is horribly wrong with Roman. Some thing or someone has replaced the Roman the sides know and Virgil is determined to get to the bottom of it, but he’s far closer to the center of the issue than he could have ever predicted.

TLDR: Roman goes evil mode to get Virgil to love him

Rating: Solidly pg13 , a few jokes here and there but mostly a serious emotional drama 

Link to master post :

Evil king au

One of my more recent au’s but definitely a favorite of mine! 

Format: Sketched Comics, illustrations and a series of asks explaining the au in bite sized chunks 

Summary:

Virgil is a morally bankrupt evil king and Roman is his diligent personal guard. When Virgil eventually falls for his guard he’s convinced Roman is too good for him,  Virgil is evil after all, but his guard is happy to prove him wrong. Underneath his sweet exterior Roman is just as twisted and is more than happy to serve his king.

TLDR :

Omg they are so messed up and evil but they’re gonna kiss about it

Rating: Definitely dark but has clear spots of happiness. Overall a tragedy 

This au is all under the tag #evil king au so you can find everything there!

Sleeping beauty au:

A very recent au, A modern fairytale retelling, now with bonus tragedy!

Format:

Colored and sketched Comics, illustrations and asks 

Summary:

Once upon a time like in many other stories a prince fell into a deep slumber, but unlike those other stories true loves kiss doesn’t come to save him. Instead the prince is awoken again in the present, hundreds of years after he was put to sleep and is has lost everything. Now he’s nothing but a footnote in history and everyone he has ever known is long gone.

And to make matters worse a man identical to the one he loved in his time is here as well, with no recollection of him at all.

But as he grows accustomed to modern life he begins to question, was any of it even real?

TLDR:

Man out of time, fairytale tragedy edition 

Rating:

Overall quite sad but with a hopeful ending.

All of this au can be found under the tag #sleeping beauty au

Zombie au:

An older series but a fun one nonetheless! Also my au with the highest number of sketches comics !

Format : 

Mostly sketched comics, with sketch sheets, illustrations and an animatic to supplement 

Summary : 

Virgil and Roman are best friends (and maybe something more) but when the zombie apocalypse breaks out the two are separated and Roman parishes.

Virgil feels extreme guilt over this, so when he suddenly finds Roman again, now fully zombified and questionably sentient he’s determined not to let him go again.

Now they must try and face off against the wasteland they’re in and survive together, hopefully…

TLDR : It takes the literal Zombie apocalypse for Virgil and Roman to get together 

Rating: It has quite a bit of violence and a little bit of gore (Roman is rotting after all) with an overall melancholy tone at best 

This au sadly has a very inconsistent tagging system, (I kept forgetting what the tag was when I made new posts) but check my archive tags for any variation of the tag #zombie au! 

Cupid au

Format: Comics, illustrations, and asks

Summary : 

Virgil is a grim reaper that works in the misfortune department of the heavenly council. Roman is the first cupid to ever be transferred to the misfortune department, and Virgil is assigned to him to keep him in check. The two get along wonderfully despite their differences, or at least right up until Virgil accidentally proposes to Roman. And Roman says yes.

By the time Virgil realizes what he’s done it’s too late, Roman is already half way through planning the wedding and Virgil would rather die than break his heart like that. Roman’s just so happy and he keeps looking at Virgil likes he’s hung the moon every time they’re in the same room, and he can’t take that joy from him. There are worse people to accidentally marry, this won’t be too bad.

Right?

TLDR

 LOCAL EMO ACCIDENTALLY MARRYS CO WORKER AND THEN FALLS IN LOVE WITH SAID COWORKER 

(This one is one of my favorites)

Rating E for everyone, all rom-com gags and sweet moments 

Found under the #cupid!au or #cupidau! Tags 

Eldridge abomination au

Format Gag comics , illustrations,bullet fics and asks

Summary 

Virgil moves into a new neighborhood and is obsessed with his very reclusive neighbors. He’s convinced there’s something horribly wrong with him(and he’s right but no one knows that just yet) 

Now he’s determined to figure out what, so of course he has to observe his neighbor! 

And if those “observation sessions” happen to be in the format of dates that is nobody’s business.

TLDR LOCAL CRYPTOZOOLOGIST OBSESSES OVER HIS MONSTER NEIGHBOR BUT HE PROMISES ITS NOT CAUSE HE’S GAY

Rating Very family friendly (it’s all gags) not including Romans whole horrible abomination monster thing which might be a bit spooky for some

Found under the tag #Eldridge abomination au

Superhero au

Format: very unfinished at the moment, it’s an older au I am currently reworking, mostly illustrations and explanation posts

Summary 

Virgil is a superhero and Roman is his supervillain, but when they aren’t fighting each-other the two are best friends at school . (and also crushing on each-other HARD) shenanigans ensue!

TLDR what if the miraculous love square was good

Rating  Very chill au , angsty in regards to Roman’s backstory but it’s mostly cartoon fun :)

Found under the tag #superhero au (Altho the tagging is a bit inconsistent)

Bonus au’s with not a ton of content but can still be fun to check out :

Mermaid au: I only made a few posts about this au but it can be found under the tag #mermaid au

Ghost au: This au never really took shape but it’s still a cool concept so check it out under the tag #ghost au! 

Let me know what you think of my au’s if you do end up looking at any of them ! :)

#prinxiety #roman sanders #virgil sanders #sanders sides #zombie au #superhero au #cupid! au #cupid au #lust!roman

[tomyo]

Maka Supplementals

Hey welcome to my "Maka Supplementals" post aka when you become so obsessed with an anime character, you start to treat any other character that looks like them as that character. I've been in this fandom and ancient amount of time and for some reason, I'll just notice a very Maka like quality in them.

Neiro from Kaiba

I'm probably ruining myself by starting with the best. Kaiba (2008) is really a series you can easily project not just Maka AND Soul but the rest main cast onto. I stg I thought Bstar and Popo had the same VA (they definitely have the same god complex). Naturally the pigtails and droopy eyes were a huge connector and the orange/green color scheme is frequently used to represent our fav duo. As for the story, it's mostly around Kaiba and Neiro being just out of reach of each other and a new technology that allows people to store and transfer memories to new bodies. Neiro also makes a good Kaiba type as a stern person in the present but soft and kind in the past/later on. She also has family trauma which may be a theme. On its own it's a masterpiece but I actually made my first SE friend in part due to us both separately coming into SExKaiba au art.

Mikan from Gakuen Alice

I only ever read the series but I figured anime art would pop more. Mikan, the mc, our classic lightish hair color in pigtails and you could possibly call her eyes droopy shaped. Tbh I can hardly remember this series since it's been 11+ years since I last read it but I do remember Mikan having mother issues. If I remember right it's a magic academy shoujo and I probably wouldn't have included it but I wanted to show off that cute angel outfit she's wearing.

Shizuku from Tonari no Kaibutsu

When I watched this series in 2014, this was the first time I said "Oh, this character is just Maka" and thus this list was born. Did you ever want to experience Maka in a Shoujo where her love interest looks like DtK but acts like Bstar? Here you are, the most frustrating romance ever. Shizuku Mizutani is a pretty perfect Maka type, she's quiet, serious, extremely studious, and constantly annoyed by everyone else's shenanigans. One day she's sent to deliver socially maladjusted Haru Yoshida his homework and naturally a classic nightmare romance starts. I'm not kidding when I say every episode one of the two confesses to the other who then turns them down. Honestly, that's the plot. The first confession is right at the end of episode one and it doesn't stop. Can't lie though, I love high school tropes and aesthetics so it's a fun way to reimagine the crew's life going.

Kirin from Gakuen Babysitters

Absolute baby. If you want to imagine was toddler Maka was like then Kirin is pretty good for that. She's not really a main focus of the story but Gakuen Babysitters is still surprisingly good. Kirin really feels like the tiny Maka we saw in Chrona's soul, very outgoing and friendly to those who aren't as confident. She often fights with a Black Star like nursery mate and has an aggressively doting dad that aligns perfectly with Spirit. One small story arc with her is wanting to be a witch. Not really a lot of anything but a cute detail to point out.

Marnie from Pokemon

She has pigtails and 2011 me drew Maka in the exact same outfit. Ngl, this is a real head empty one but I'm still not over that happening.

Nino from Fukumenki Noise

Sorry this is actually just another kind of annoying shoujo. Outside of the hair, Nino is pretty much nothing like Maka. Unlike most series where the story is a string of misunderstandings, Nino's naivety is often a major problem where she cheerily sings over listening to her best friend/crush's home problems and doesn't reflect on the ways her actions could be affecting others. So why is she on here? The music segments. There's this raw and unpolished nature to the singing that really just brings something special to it. Honestly just watch the singing proportions, ignore the bad cgi (in 2017 no less) and pretend its Maka "I don't get music" Albarn singing it.

Sana from Kodomo no Omocha

Probably the only series I've watched before Soul Eater on this list. I recently rewatched and kept feeling weird about the Maka vibes I was getting off of it. Sana does start the series pretty annoyed her schooling is being interrupted and her middle school uniform looks like the Sparoi uniform but her more core characteristics is being a child star and is extremely hyperactive because of it. So what was it? She's voiced by Laura Bailey. It's very interesting to hear her distinctive wobble in Sana's voice. Of course that isn't all, Sana has family issues and her genki personality is related to people pleasing so it's interesting to see when that facade drops. While the manga leaves a stronger impression, the end of 17- start of 18 has a few particularly beautifully scenes of animation.

Also something I want to point out is Sana's amazing wardrobe. Despite being 90s, the bright colors work great for Y2K looks that feel right for Mala's style sense. I wish I could use more than 10 photos to show them off. The anime uses a lot of long sleeves and skirts and the manga has some more trendy fashions like the fur trim cardigans that are popular right now so I'd look there for some outfit Y2K revival references.

#draft post #draft posting #soul eater #maka albarn

[dailycharacteroption]

Corrupting Influences: Vampirism part 5

(art by Defexx on DeviantArt)

 Conclusions

 And so it is that we’ve reach an end to this special about the vampirism corruption in Pathfinder, and to our specials on corruptions in general. Truly it is an end to an era, but hopefully a start of new beginnings as well.

 Before we share our final thoughts about the corruption itself, however, let’s take a moment to re-examine what vampires were throughout history. Certainly today’s corruption mostly takes it’s cues from the Dracula novel, but vampires have existed well before that.

Indeed, looking back on the oldest stories where the word “vampire” was used, it’s pretty clear that the concept of vampires, like almost every undead in pop culture, was born out of the idea of someone who is dead deciding not to act like it and wander around being a menace. In fact, the oldest stories of vampires make them seem more akin to what we think of now as a “zombie”, far from the glamourous unearthly beautiful immortals we typically think of today.

Over time, so many folk remedies to these undead horrors and stories of their abilities congealed into a vague grab-bag of otherworldly traits and rules, may of which survive to this day, such as the garlic weakness, fear of the holy, and so on, though others like the running water thing or the even more obscure rose on the coffin thing are typically forgotten.

In fact, such an eclectic collection of traits have lead to many audiences, (particularly western ones) conflating other similarly storied shamblers from across the globe such as jiang-shi or vrylokas as also being vampires or vampire-adjascent, or perhaps different strains of the same singular unholy malice (Looking at you, Vampire the Masquerade).

It is perhaps because of this combination of history and variability which has likely helped their survivability as a concept. Well, that, and Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, which you should read if you get the chance. I hear there might be an electronic mailing list that might help with that.

Regardless, Dracula was instrumental in putting vampires on the map, and perhaps most importantly, was a rare exception in that it was a gothic horror story where the horror in question is not limited to some dreary manor of a declining family, but in fact follows the protagonist home and really gets to show what happens when you unleash an intelligent undead horror on an unsuspecting populace.

Since then, vampires have evolved a lot since then, ranging from monsters to, well… attractive partners. Like all monsters, however, people tend to use them as symbolism, and not all of them were kind symbols, such as Carmilla, a story about a young woman who finds herself attracting the attention of an older woman who later turns out to be a creature of the night. Of course, folks have a tendency to reclaim symbols used to demonize them, so you’ll find plenty of LGBT+ immortals that are straight-up heroic in nature.

 In any case, however, the vampirism corruption I find is that perfect blend of fun powers fitting the theme, while also establishing a certain level of urgency that some corruptions lack. For the victim it’s a nice bit of body and psychological horror rolled into one as their victimization weakens and then changes them, while those who don’t understand what is going on can only look on in powerless horror.

On the subject of the corruption subsystem, I suppose I ought to give my final thoughts on it as well. Horror Adventures the supplement had it’s flaws, but the corruptions were definitely a good idea, creating a way that a character can get a taste of the powers of “contagious” monsters, but giving them drawbacks not just in the direct penalties of each ability, but also in the lingering knowledge that things might go too far. It forces would-be powergamers that might deliberately try to gain a monstrous transformation to rethink doing so, or at least properly roleplay the challenges associated with it.

Overall I consider it a good subsystem, one that is both flavorful and mechanically fun.

 And with that I don’t have much to add, so I’ll conclude. It’s a bit sad saying goodbye to a subsystem and special like this, but I’m always coming up with new things to do here, so it’s fine. Have a good weekend, folks, and look forward to more archetypes next week!

#pathfinder #corruption #vampirism #Horror Adventures

[spicykaraage]

Tenipuri Complete Profile - Kazuya Tokugawa

[PROFILE]

Birthday: July 27th (Leo)

Blood Type: AB

Birthplace: Ehime

Relatives: Grandfather, Grandmother, Father, Mother, Older Sister

Father’s Occupation: Diplomat

High School: Unknown

Grade: Second Year

Committee: Student Council - President

Strong Subjects: Physics, Geology

Weak Subjects: Art

U-17 Training Camp Position & Rank: Second String | Court 1

World Cup Team: U-17 World Cup Japanese Representatives

Favorite Motto: “To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.”

Hobbies: Snowboarding, yachting, watching dolphins [TP]

Favorite Color: Ultramarine

Favorite Book: The Analects of Confucius

Favorite Food: Japanese food (especially natto), protein, tomatoes [TP], chicken breast [TP]

Favorite Anniversary: The day he won his first trophy

Preferred Type: He doesn’t think about it

Ideal Date Spot: Yachting in Auckland Harbour

His Gift for a Special Person: “I would like to discuss and decide it with you.”

Where He Wants to Travel: Marina del Rey

Thing He Wants Most Right Now: A new snowboard ➜ A wetsuit [23.5]

Dislikes: Carbonated drinks, popping candy ice cream [TP]

Skills Outside of Tennis: Waking up early, fingertip handstands

Routine During the World Cup: Early morning running

[DATA]

Height: 189cm

Weight: 79kg ➜ 71kg [23.5]

Dominant Arm: Left

Vision: 1.2 Left & Right

Play Style: All-Rounder

Signature Moves: 10 Ball Strike, Black Hole, Premonition (not a technique), Howling, Sixth Sense, Divine Path of the Asura

Favorite Brands:

Racquet: BRIDGESTONE X-BLADE FORCE 3.15MID PLUS

Shoes: Prince PRO HOLD TOUR IV CG

Overall Rating: Speed: 4.5 / Power: 4.5 / Stamina: 4.5 / Mental: 4.5 / Technique: 4.5 / Total: 22.5

Kurobe Memo: “After suffering a major setback, he rapidly improved to the point where he’s able to hit his 10 Ball Strike with ease. The biggest concern right now is if he’s severely injured after taking a blow in the abdomen from Byoudouin…”

[POSSESSIONS]

What’s in His Locker at the U-17 Training Camp:

Wristband // He has a white and black one

Snowboarding magazine // He is so skilled at snowboarding that he will spend winters just in the mountains. He buys a magazine every month during the season

Sports drink // He made it himself

Supplements // They change each day depending on his condition

What’s in His Travel Bag:

Laundry detergent // He washes everyone’s clothes and will neatly fold them

[TRIVIA]

The Prince of Tennis II Official Character Guide: PairPuri Vol. 8

He plays practice matches with Oni during his free time

He has a large motorcycle license and his own motorcycle

The Prince of Tennis II 10.5 Fanbook

He is on bad terms with Byoudouin

He has taken a liking to Ryoma since he’s always wanted a younger brother. He’s lately been feeling a sense of rivalry with Ryoga since he feels as if he’s taking Ryoma, a favorite person of his, away from him

He was not aware of Ryoma or Atobe while he was abroad

The Prince of Tennis II 23.5 Fanbook

The girl he had picked up on the beach is still in touch with him. He was forced to give his contact info and she messages him often. He messages her back every once in a while

He was in Paris before being invited to the training camp

The Prince of Tennis 20th Anniversary Book: Tenipuri Party

His ideal relationship is one where he and his partner are practically married

When he tries thinking of his ideal type, he gives up and states it’s too much of a bother

He, Oni and Irie spend their vacations together. The previous summer, they had went camping together and discussed their thoughts and feelings about the World Cup around a campfire

He is the only person who will go along with Irie’s performances due to him being so serious that he cannot tell it’s an act

One of His Off Days at the Training Camp:

5:00am - Wakes up, stretches, then goes on a run

6:00am - Laundry, cleans his and Irie’s room and tries not to wake Irie up

7:30am - Breakfast (a Japanese meal with natto and grilled fish)

8:30am - Voluntary strength training

12:00pm - Lunch (including a large quantity of bread that Irie baked)

1:00pm - Voluntary stamina training

2:30pm - Rests, puts a towel over a sleeping Ryoma

4:00pm - Bathes, looks after an overheated Inui

6:00pm - Dinner (sautéed chicken breast and tomato salad)

8:30pm - Gets a massage

9:00pm - Relaxes while reading yacht magazines

10:30pm - Prepares for tomorrow, then goes to bed

#tenipuri #tenirabi #profile #my post

[trashlie]

What do you think about GL4SS's faceless member?

You saw Quimchee"s last Patreon?

Hey! I don't typically talk openly about Patreon posts on here, just because I don't want to go around and repost things that we pay to see (since this is supplemental income for quimchee and I do want everyone who has the means and is interested to support her if possible) but I give some thoughts here that won't fully hinge on giving away an image to understand (and unfortunately those who aren't patrons, you'll probably want to skip this post as a result).

I have never been on board with the Aeri = Shinhye theme because it just didn't pan out in my opinion, but I understand why it was so tightly held on to! But in my opinion, the biggest hurdle was that NO idol has the time Shinhye does to stalk Shinae and follow her around the way she does - especially because Sumin was making digs at Alyssa missing dance practice. But the other thing was that I cannot buy that any amount of make up would make Shinhye look so different from Shinae that NOL wouldn't see Shinae in her. Nol, who was missing his friends so much he went and got himself white girl wasted and admitted that he'd much rather be there with them than here. Nol, who checked his spam messages KNOWING what he'd find in there. You're gonna tell me Nol looked at anyone who looks REMOTELY like Shinae and didn't see her in her? I don't buy it, that one is way too big of a stretch for me. Dieter recognized her. Minhyuk even struggled in his encounter with her because of how much she reminded him of Shinae.

So why hide her face from us? Why play up her identity? Honestly? idk LMAO but I do feel like.... it's possible MAAAYYBEEEEE that one of the members is Amy, the girl that Shinae stood up for in middle school when she was being bullied.

Quimchee's art style tends to change a lot, but something we can count on is how she draws eyes and eyelid folds. It's part of how she manages to show family resemblance in characters and how she doesn't fall into same-face syndrome; their eyes can define them.

What's harder for me to tell is if she's Aeri or if she's the third member whose face we've seen. There's also the girl we saw at the end of 110 - I've always assumed she's another member. I think just because we ARE playing with different styles through the eras, I'd want to see them all properly. The girl who reminds me of Amy in the patreon post has the similar eyelids, but when they're all in the back room at the Christmas party, I'm not sure - it might just be the angles.

It might not be her at all!

And yes, there's also the speculation that one girl resembles Yujing in her expression and overall body language, she just has some kind of Yujing attitude to her, doesn't she?

I'm really, really interested to see more about her groupmates but I wonder if they'll actually be revealed more any time soon. If only quimchee had a little more free time and could make them their own kpop profiles like we have for real groups lmao but alas I think quimchee is definitely hiding some secrets, otherwise why was Aeri's face withheld all this time until now?! Would Amy being one of the members be big enough to hide? I don't particularly think so, but I couldn't help but feel her face reminded me so much of the girl on the album cover. The fact that Amy was actually given a name always makes me wonder where she'll pop back up. This feels like.... a curious place which is why I'm not 100% sold on it, but I WILL stay seated on this theory until further notice lol

#I Love Yoo #ILY Brianrot #ILY Anon #Alyssa Cho #GL4SS #might as well give them a tag right lol #Sumin #Aeri #???????? #my third mantra when it comes to ILY besides you know 'THE PARALLELS THE PARALLELS' and 'NOTHING IS TAKEN AT FACE VALUE' is #ALWAYS LOOK AT THE EYES AND EYELIDS #ALWAYS!!!!!!!!!! #This is one I have some HMMMMM thoughts about and i'm not totally sold on my own speculation but I like to see where things go! #and if you feel comfortable nonny you can message me off anon and i'd be happy to talk more with you!!!!! #i just try my best not to leak things from patreon - i think quimchee is fine with us talking about things but when it comes to images #keep those on patreon because that's the incentive to support her you know? #but i love talking about patreon stuff because it feels like extra layers that eventually make their way into the story so yeah #feel free to message me if you're comfortable with it and have some thoughts!

[goetzjpvis]

2/12/24 "Rose of Versailles" JPT3702

I absolutely did not expect to be reading this in class for next week! But it was much more a treat than I initially thought it'd be.

Right off the bat, we can make notes about the manga's art style. Frequent usage of dreamlike imagery, such as roses, sparkles, clouds, and stars illuminate each and every page in order to give the reader a phantasmagorical view of what it was like to be Marie Antoinette. I believe this type of art style really encapsulates the beginning of the Shoujou genre, because it stylistically exudes an aura of femininity and beauty. It should also be noted that it's kind of hard to make women look traditionally "beautiful" in black in white! You can't really make gems or outfits pop, so I think that this style may have relied on such elements in order to supplement the lack of IRL color and sparkles. I like to equate it to the Shonen genre's heavy usage of speed lines and onomatopoeia such as "BOOM", "CRASH", etc. which are there simply because... how else would you show dynamic fighting scenes and illustrate the movement on paper?

Aside from that, I also made note of the fact that both men and women were drawn kind of dreamily. All characters tend to have large shiny eyes (although the most shiny of eyes were reserved for the most "innocent" or prominent characters). Madam Du Barry for example, has small black eyes, likely to indicate her "dark personality", which gave the male characters kind of an uncanny look - I think they were odd in comparison because we were not used to it, though. Yet simultaneously, both female and male characters were illustrated with an air of realisticness - they had double chins, moles, etc. which are not common at all in most of the manga we see today. It felt like we were seeing real people... kawaiified (lol).

I enjoyed reading up on small amounts of French history as well - the class struggle, the behaviors of the upper and lower class (as well as their perceptions of each other), etc. This manga showed a rose-colored (get it) insight into the lives and struggles of French people, regardless of heir status. I believe this piece was primarily used as entertainment, so there was not much that Japanese readers could apply to their own life except for the common morals of "be nice to others", "you must treat the poor well", "never marry a prostitute or else you will get smallpox", yadda yadda.

Lastly, I want to touch up on Oscar's gender. I'm not well-versed in gener discussion, so I can only put my two cents in- It seems that although Oscar is a female, he behaves masculinely, dresses masculinely, and generally carry himself as if he were a man. This, I really liked, because despite all of these traditionally masculine behaviors, Oscar still calls himself a "woman". Maybe this was to teach readers that its okay to be gender nonconforming? And maybe even to express yourself the way you want, regardless of what others say, as long as it makes you happy and feel comfortable.