#probably won't matter anyway because the other essay is

[mvnsvn6]

Have a mini fic about Steve annotating books and Eddie finding it really hot🖤

So obviously, Eddie's a bookworm. Before he had any friends, he spent the better parts of his childhood at Hawkins Library after school and Hawkins Middle's library during any recesses and lunches. He constantly read books, this was before Wayne got him a guitar and before he got into dnd, and being a bookworm tremendously helped him fuel both of those hobbies later on. But before then? The library was like a second home to him. 

And so, recently founding out that Steve reads, like a lot, is something of a revalation. It's not that Eddie thinks the guy is stupid, but he figured the guy spent time doing other productive hobbies at home. But the guy reads, and as previously mentioned, Eddie considers himself a literature connoisseur of sorts. Writing book reports and essays were one of the few things he actually excelled at in high school. 

So anyway, he found out that Steve is a book nerd by finding one of Steve's books open on his bed. Not really the strangest thing that Eddie's come across in Steve's room if he's being honest, and not the biggest indicator of nerdiness, until he focuses his attention and acknowledges the bright colors sprawled across the pages. 

A burst of rainbow colors underlining what Eddie guesses are his favorite parts of the story or important stuff he wanted to remember. And obviously, Eddie has to ask him about it. and Steve explains to him that he has a whole color key and it's made up of romantic lines that make him feel warm, sad stuff that makes him tear up, stuff that is word for word undoubtedly Steve Harrington sprawled on a page. Steve won't tell him which color is which, too embarrassed by it, but he lets Eddie read through them, and then he stares at Steve in unyeilding fondness. 

The look reflected on Steve's is not the same, mostly anxiety and insecurity, which Eddie immediately wants to soothe. It's so so sweet he thinks but Eddie's mouth translates the words into, "That's so fucking hot." Which, shit man, it is but he hadn't meant to say it out loud. 

"Shut up, dude, don't make fun of me right now." 

And listen, books are everything to him, this is no joking matter. They inspire his own stories, whether through a dnd campaign or writing song lyrics. It's honestly probably the most attractive thing a person could do in Eddie's opinion, he didn't know how hot until right about now, but he'll die on this hill. Annotating your books is hot. 

"Listen to me when I say this Steve, while that is the nerdiest thing I've ever heard and I'm, ya know, me. It's also about the most attractive thing that's come out of that pretty mouth of yours, like ever."

And Steve folds his arms across his fucking beautifully sculpted chest and narrows his eyes just slightly, raising a judgemental eyebrow at him. 

"You're being serious."

Oh he's never been more serious about anything in his life. 

"Uh...yeah? Yes. Oh my god."

Yeah, real eloquent Edward. 

Whatever, his heart is pounding profuesely against his rib cage because holy shit Steve is a book nerd and Eddie wants to kiss him fucking yesterday. So he gets on all fours on Steve's bed to lean forward and basically attacks his mouth before he can even think about it. 

And when he pulls back, Steve's pupils are blown wide and his breath has picked up pace, and Steve keeps bouncing between looking at Eddie's eyes and his lips. 

"You just kissed me."

It comes out disbelieving. 

"Yeah and with your permission I'd like to continue, like stat, immediately, now."

"You're insane."

And hands weave through curls and pull. 

Eddie tumbles foward, ending fully sprawled on top of Steve, and, jesus christ, body pressed impossibly close to his. 

And after they're romantic, read: nerdy horniness, little makeout session, he forces Steve to read the annotations himself, going through all the books that are important to Steve. He has to stop himself from moaning to really emphasize how hot he finds it, and to make Steve slightly embarrassed, but refrains. Just lets him continue. 

Eddie has never been so in love in his life.

#steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #stranger things #ficlet #stranger things fic #my writing

[hyunsvngs]

This is literally a whole essay y'all, I'm not sorry xD

My last Channie ask was such a simp daddy Channie ask but what about good boy Channie who just want his lovers strap-on??

He's been fidgeting all day with your strap-on on his mind. He knew you had it tucked away in your closet somewhere cuz you're pan and your previous partner (ended on good terms and are friends still) also had a vagina but who would throw away a perfectly good strap after that?

Exactly

No one would

You were hanging out with your ex and Channie in the kitchen when you asked him to go find your old baby-photo album buried in your closet so you can show your ex some funny baby pics you had. So he went to your shared room and went to the closet. he thought it was in that little black box buried under everything else.

He pulls it out of the closet and his pupils blow up the size of softballs once he sees what's inside. He got this curiosity from all the stories you'd tell him of how fun it was to use the strap with your ex but he'd just shake off the curiosity as something that would just pass because he'd never used one so of course he'd be curious.

Then he quickly hides it away again in your closet perfectly back where he found it so you wouldn't bat an eye. He quickly spots the photo album sitting up top on the shelf, covered in a layer of dust, and he runs it out to you and quickly retreats to the living room to get away from you two.

The day passes by quickly for you but it drug on for years for him.

You two are just cuddling on the couch watching Salt Burn (i haven't watched it yet LMAO whoops) and he abruptly sits up at one of the scenes. You pay no mind to it because you figured he was just getting a boner and was embarrassed for some reason (and let's be real, you're probably soaked by now too) but the movie wasn't exactly the reason why he got a boner.

He keeps subtly looking over at you occasionally, eyes darting everywhere if you catch him (which you can always see him in your peripheral, he just doesn't realize that) so you pause the movie and ask him "baby, what's going on? Are you okay? You wanna stop watching the movie and just get some sleep?" But of course he says he's fine.

15 minutes later and he's rocking back and forth trying to distract himself but he didn't realize it was also distracting you.

"Okay clearly you're not fine, tell me what's going on."

"No, it's nothing. The movie is almost over. Let's ju-"

"Chris."

And my god he looks at you with the biggest puppy dog eyes before dropping his head and saying "I.. I found your strap today.. looking through our closet.. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have looked in the box"

And you just start laughing at him. He's just so cute and embarrassed and he's just your little baby : ( your Channie : (

"Baby it's fine. But why are you so worried about it? You knew I had it, I don't mind."

"It's not that. I know you won't care if I seen it.. I was just thinking.." and he looks up at you, pupil blown out and slightly glossed over "... What if *we* used it..?"

"Baby, I can just use you anyways, you're so much better than some piece of rubber"

He looks down again with his ears turning bright red-

"I didn't mean use it on you.."

Oh.... OHHHH..... oh what a dirty boy.

A crazy smile is spread across your face from one ear to the other and you pick his head up and hold it in your hands

"Of course we can! Why don't you go pick out your favorite dildo of mine while I go grab the strap?" You say as you give him a little kiss on his pouty lips.

In a matter of seconds, his head shoots up and out of your hands and he's completely surprised at your response

"Wait.. what??? You.. you'd wanna do that?? Isn't that a little.. I don't know.. weird??" He says scratching the back of his head

You laugh at him again while shaking your head.

"Baby, I've wanted to peg your pretty ass from day one. Remember how you fucked me on my bed with my standing mirror at the end of the bed? Well I was watching your ass the whole time. Who said I don't wanna turn you into a subby mess while you're desperately fucking yourself on my cock"

And the way his cock twitches in his pants while his eyes roll back in his head 🥴

"Now are you gonna go pick out my cock to use on you or are we gonna finish the movie"

and he RUNS to the room leaving you giggling on the couch.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOD I'm a mess at work over this 🥴

SUBBY CHANNIE IS SOOOO REAL TO ME IM SERIOUS

i have nothing to add HES JUST DELICJOUS

#juno’s asks ♡ #user: ardef38 #asks: channie

[mneiai]

Are we really going to rewrite history and pretend that the Harry Potter books weren't antisemitic, racist, and fatphobic the entire time?

Cho Chang. Kingsley Shacklebolt. The Irish kid blows stuff up. Most of the Black kids don't have fathers. The fat people are either evil, creepy, or fools. The goblins. Just. The entire thing with the goblins. The baddies all said bloodlines mattered which we the readers supposedly knew was false and then...bloodlines actually did very much matter. The entire fucking US Magical School anti-Indigenous bullshit.

There's a reason from very early on, even before the books were finished, fanworks were trying to establish better takes on a lot of these things.

It's one thing to not notice as a child, but there were people back in the day talking about these things. The fandom was purposefully trying to absolve some of these things. There were a massive amount of essays about this shit, the calendar didn't turn over to 2020 and suddenly people noticed or something. HP had 80s era bigotry in 90s/00s and the way we dealt with that changed: before JKR was blatantly supporting hate campaigns "death of the author" with her wasn't just relied on by bigots to excuse their fan activity but was actually, seriously considered a thing.

"But if we say JKR was always bad then people won't think they can get radicalized." I mean, only insofar as the average person doesn't go around assuming they'll join a cult, but knows that technically it's possible they could get tricked into joining a cult.

We shouldn't hide someone's failings in the past to pretend like they only started failing later on. That JKR was so casually racist/antisemitic/etc from the beginning probably is one of the reasons she could get so deep into terfism so quickly (and it's been years, this isn't some new thing for her, even if many people have only started discussing it in the last few years).

Average people can be (often are) racist, people who consider themselves "good people" can believe antisemitic stereotypes, your friends can be casually transphobic. It's not all or nothing. We are none of us perfect saintly creatures. Acknowledging faults in one person earlier than you saw them isn't the equivalent of saying "and that's why the average person would never be radicalized" because the average person isn't actually without faults.

And if a person sees others acknowledging faults in JKR/HP early on and goes "so that's why I can't be radicalized" they're probably not the sort of person one can prevent from being radicalized by generalized tumblr posts, anyway.

#anti jkr

[leareadsheresy]

What is the Horus Heresy as a fictional construct (to me) and why is it interesting (to me)?

It's a series of ads for toy soldiers that the toy soldier manufacturer figured out how to monetize, so people will pay to be advertised to. Whew, that was easy. That sounds like a blithe dismissal but actually it's a foundational assumption we need to establish so we can move past it. Assume for the rest of this essay that no matter what else I'm typing, I never forget that the Horus Heresy is first and foremost monetized advertising for a commercial product, and that I hate myself at least a little bit for finding it stimulating.

Disclaimer over. Anyway, I'm writing this at least in part because I know there's at least one person reading this Tumblr who doesn't know anything about the Horus Heresy. I thought maybe I could expand that into something worth writing (and maybe even worth reading!). This is really long so I'm putting it behind a cut.

"The Horus Heresy" is a fictional period of history in the setting of the Games Workshop tabletop-war-game-slash-multimedia-empire Warhammer 40,000, taking place about ten thousand years prior to the "present" of the setting, during the founding of the Imperium, the human faction and arguable protagonists (or at least best-seller) of the property. The Heresy is therefore sometimes referred to as Warhammer 30k. (It's also occasionally called HH, but I won't be using that abbreviation; you can probably guess why.) It is the story of a nine year civil war that occurred when Horus, then the favored "son" of the Emperor of Mankind, recently appointed Warmaster of the (at the time) eighteen Space Marine Legions, turned traitor and lead half of the Imperium's armies against the other half, trashing the nascent Imperium and dooming it to a ten thousand year slide into stagnation and decay that resulted in the current 40k setting. Before the Heresy there was a two century period in the setting called the Great Crusade, in which the Emperor of Mankind (who'd recently conquered and unified Earth just in time for hyperspace storms to clear up, enabling large-scale FTL travel in the Milky Way for the first time in five thousand years) struck out into space with a unified Earth's armies to conquer the galaxy for humanity (before anybody else could take advantage of the suddenly-available-again FTL and do it first), and after the Heresy is an undefined period called the Scouring in which the "victorious" loyalist clean up the remains of the traitors and chase them into exile. So it's a bounded period, nine years between the Great Crusade and the Scouring, with a known narrative and timeline of events and battles, beginning just before the Istvaan III Atrocity and ending with the duel between the Emperor and Horus at the end of the Siege of Terra that left Horus dead and the Emperor an invalid.

As "the founding myth of Warhammer 40,000," Games Workshop has been talking about the Horus Heresy since pretty much 40k has been around, and it has its shape because that shape is useful to a company whose business model is spending huge amounts of money on very durable stainless steel injection moulds it can then operate pretty much indefinitely to sell small amounts of cheap plastic at tremendous markup. Specifically, Warhammer 40,000 is a game about science fiction versions of knights, soldiers, orks, elves, skeletons, demons, and monsters all fighting each other, and each of those armies has different model kits and needs a different set of expensive moulds, but in a civil war game, both sides can use the same models manufactured with the same moulds. In 1988, just a year after publishing the first edition of 40k, GW launched the first edition of Adeptus Titanicus, a game set during the Heresy in which both sides fought with the same giant robots, because GW wanted to do a giant robot game but it would have been expensive to do a 40k-era game where they'd have needed to sculpt and manufacture a different set of giant robots for each faction. In Adeptus Titanicus, both sides played with the same robots and players would differentiate faction with color schemes.

More recently than that, the Heresy as a fictional construct acquired an aesthetic distinct from normal 40k. Games Workshop has, in the past, been structured oddly, with the main studio being treated separately from a secondary studio called ForgeWorld who manufactured more niche models, mainly from resin, a modeling material that can (in theory and when everything is working) hold more and crisper detail than plastic. ForgeWorld has now been folded into Games Workshop proper, but in the past it was, though still profit-driven, headed by artists and sculptors more so than the main studio, and was strongly influenced by military modelers. I've seen it jokingly described as "That group of Games Workshop sculptors who split off because they wanted to do a bunch of historically inspired sci-fi tanks." When ForgeWorld spun the Horus Heresy off into its own variant of (at the time) 40k 6th edition in 2012, with its own dedicated sets of expensive resin models, those models were sculpted (and painted, in promotional materials) in styles inspired by World War I and World War II historical wargaming, in contrast to the more gonzo heavy-metal-airbrushed-on-the-side-of-a-van style of 40k.

In short, the Horus Heresy is a pseudo-history, a nine-year conflict in which the broad course of events was largely known from the start, presented with the aesthetics of historical recreation. Tonally, it's "more serious" than 40k, less gonzo and more elegiac. It is a fictional construct that attempts to evoke the momentousness of "real" war, presented by fictional historians. The Horus Heresy 1st edition game books are written as pastiches of Osprey Publishing military history books, complete with color plates of the uniforms and heraldry of the various forces who participated in it, written in the style of historical documentaries walking the reader through various specific military campaigns during the nine years of the larger war.

The Horus Heresy is also an attempt at Milton's Paradise Lost; I don't really engage with it on that level but I want to mention it. Space Marines are sometimes called the Emperor's Angels in 40k and it's the story of how Lucifer fell and took a third of the host of angels with him. In fact, it's been Paradise Lost for a lot longer than it's been Osprey military history; it arguably started as Milton in 1987 and only became Osprey pastiche in 2012. But I engage with it as Osprey pastiche first.

So why is a po-faced pseudo-historical spinoff of gonzo space fantasy, presented in muted colors with everyone playing variations on the same two or three armies, interesting?

For that, first I'm going to have to talk about superheroes and pirates.

Superhero comics go on forever. There are stories where Spider-Man gets old, but in mainline Spider-Man comics, he does not (unless the issue is about a mad scientist hitting him with an aging ray or something). He's aged a bit between his introduction in 1962 from a highschooler to his current vaguely twentysomething-to-thirtysomething incarnation, but from here on out he's doomed to vascillate between twentysomething to thirtysomething and back again according to the needs of the current arc, like Green Lantern Hal Jordan gaining grey hair at his temples to indicate that he's getting old, only for it to later be revealed that he was going grey early because of an alien parasite, which, once it was expelled, caused all his hair to turn brown again. Until the death of Marvel and DC as comic book publishers, these characters will proceed through an eternal adulthood that never approaches old age. Because Spider-Man stories shy away from openly acknowledging that Peter Parker has aged only ten to twenty years during the 62 year period between 1962 to 2024, stories about him tend to be set in an indefinite now designed to last forever, and even if a particular story did something to set itself in a specific time and place, we understand when it gets referenced thirty years later in real time as something that only happened five years ago in comics time, we the reader are supposed to interpret it through a filter of "Okay something like that happened, but not literally tied to the historical events of thirty years ago, because Peter's not that old." He did not meet John Belushi on the set of Saturday Night Live, because now, John Belushi died before Peter Parker was born, never mind the cover of the comic literally having Spider-Man and John Belushi on it. In the flashbacks to the events of that issue decades later, it'll be some other, more recent SNL performer that he met instead. (They used Chris Farley, although that would have to be changed again if they ever did more flashbacks now.)

The Golden Age of Piracy was a seventy year period, shaped by material circumstances that incentivized plunder of naval trade, circumstances that arose, changed, and ultimately ended. Stories about pirates are implicitly or explicitly dependent on those historical circumstances, and have trouble existing without them. Unlike the indefinite adulthood of a superhero, the Golden Age of Piracy is not an indefinite now that can last forever. I first noticed this while working in tabletop roleplaying setting design, while learning from some of the many, many failures of the first edition of a tabletop roleplaying game called 7th Sea. 7th Sea was supposed to be a game about playing pirates having adventures on the high seas, but the setting and history had not been written to highlight any of the factors that incentivized real piracy during the real Golden Age of Piracy. There was only one continent, and there was nothing like the triangle trade or mass quantities of colonial plunder being shipped back to imperial seats of power, or a recent major naval war that left huge quantities of trained sailors unemployed, or a geopolitical system that left nations plausibly and currently ill-equipped to effectively police their sea-lanes. Looking at the setting it was difficult to understand what all these pirates were plundering, or who they were plundering it from, or why. And you can certainly say "The pirates are plundering treasure and they're doing it because that's the premise of the game," but a well-written setting in an interactive medium like tabletop roleplaying games or fictional war games is deliberately constructed to support and make compelling the conflicts it pitches.

So for starters, mostly because of my own examination of the failures of 7th Sea, I find a limited-duration, bounded-context setting like the Horus Heresy, with a beginning, middle, and end interesting. And it's not that I dislike "eternal now" contexts (I'm enough of a nerd to know about both the Hal Jordan grey hair thing and Spider-Man and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players), but eternal nows have so much become the standard in pop fiction that I find a bounded context refreshing, especially if it makes use of the advantages it affords. To keep audiences interested in an eternal now, every new twist and turn of the plot has to be presented on some level as the most important thing that has happened yet, with the previous twists and turns -- regardless of having been presented in their time as the most important things that had happened yet when they were new -- fading into an eternal plot churn, and this becomes difficult to maintain as a property continues over the decades. In a bounded context like a pseudo-historical war or the biography of a character whose birth and death are known from the start, the eternal plot churn is less inevitable.

Second, I like to watch artists play with compatible variations on a theme, and I like to navigate fictional semantic systems where a story imbues novel symbols with meaning, and for that reason I fuckin' love Heresy-era Space Marine armor. (You may want to skip the next paragraph.)

Okay so check this out. During the early years of the Great Crusade, Space Marines mostly used what's called Mark II "Crusade" armor, an early armor characterized by banded segments around the legs, visible power cabling, and a grilled helmet with a single visor instead of separate eye slits. Over the course of the Great Crusade, a specific field modification of Crusade armor that incorporated heavier armor along the front plates of the chest and legs and a heavier grill on the helmet became so popular that it became standardized as Mark III "Iron" armor -- Iron armor was a side-grade rather than an upgrade, less maneuverable but more effective in heavy fighting in confined spaces like boarding assaults. Later, the Imperial suppliers developed and began distributing the more high-tech-looking Mark IV "Maximus" armor and continued development and field testing of what was, at the time, meant to be designated Mark V armor (as yet nameless). Horus as the Warmaster during the buildup to the Heresy diverted most shipments of new, better Maximus armor to the Legions he expected to side with him, giving them a slight technological and logistical advantage. After the fighting of the Heresy broke out, supply lines were fractured and the Space Marine legions were all forced to cobble together makeshift armor from spare parts and whatever they could reliably manufacture with limited resources, resulting in the creation of what would later be designated Mark V "Heresy" armor in non-production (ad hoc designs using any spare parts that were available) and production (a standardized design using plentiful spare parts and locally manufactured replacements that had been found easy to produce under most circumstances) models, while the armor originally intended to be released as Mark V was re-numbered to Mark VI and named "Corvus" armor after the accomplishments of a specific loyalist general, and also because its helmet looks like a beak. (But even before its distribution to the loyalists, the traitors had stolen the designs and were manufacturing them to distribute among their own side.) Finally, during the Siege of Terra, loyalists on Terra were issued a brand new Mark VII "Aquilla" armor design. That's six armor designs -- Crusade, Iron, Maximus, Heresy, Corvus, and Aquilla (that's a different set of links, BTW) -- all visually distinct but compatible with each other, and all imbued with meaning by the circumstances of their manufacture and distribution (to say nothing of variations like Mantilla-pattern facial grills or Anvilus backpacks). So, for example, Crusade-era Raven Guard would mostly have stuck to Crusade armor instead of switching to Iron because they're all about stealth and maneuvers instead of close-quarters brutality, meaning once the Heresy broke out they'd mostly have old Crusade armor in reserve, and they were the first Legion to be given Corvus armor when that was available… so if I model a Raven Guard character in Iron armor with Heresy gauntlets, that's imbued with meaning, because it's a soldier from the stealthy chapter wearing the most brutal and least stealthy armor mark with armored gauntlets that are makeshift and easy to repair, i.e. he is probably big and angry and likes to punch things above and beyond other space marines, and in contrast to the culture of his Legion.

I typed that awful paragraph nearly off the top of my head; I didn't need to look up any of it except for what Anvilus backpacks are called. I find it semantically satisfying to engage with Horus Heresy model design. Also physically satisfying, because all of these armor marks are little toys I can stick together like Legos and then paint up to look cool. (Or will be, once GW puts out more upgraded kits; currently Crusade is unavailable, Maximus and Aquilla are older kits and too short, and Heresy is older and a bit too short and also only available in expensive resin; they seem to be doing one updated armor mark per year.) Current 40k models are much more varied across all the different 40k armies, but nothing there is as artistically or semantically as interesting to me within a single army as 30k space marines are.

Third… I don't want to say I love trash. I'm honestly not the sort of person to watch and laugh at bad movies because they're bad. But I am interested in observing the success or failure of execution on a promising concept. 7th Sea is, at least, instructive, and its failings informed my work on Exalted. I feel like I have made a good case here for why the Horus Heresy has the potential to be very cool. A lot of visual artists have put a lot of work into appealing art for it, illustrations and modeling and painting; and its bounded pseudo-historical context is unusual and has specific strengths that can make it an interesting change of pace from the forever-now context of most pop storytelling. And yet, in discussion of the Horus Heresy novel series, what often comes up is how nobody, under any circumstances, should read all of the books, because there are 64+ of them and a lot of them are awful. And to some extent this is because some of them are extruded ad copy barely disguised as prose but in other cases they're bad because specific authors with more enthusiasm than skill staked out specific bits of the Heresy as their territory and really enjoyed writing the hell out those corners without being, you know, good at it. I find looking at that sort of thing interesting like a pirate game with a setting where there's no reason for pirates to pirate. The gap between potential and execution is a learning tool.

I don't really have a conclusion paragraph here. These are my current thoughts on what the Horus Heresy is to me and why it interests me. (Currently reading Flight of the Eisenstein, and by "reading Flight of the Eisenstein" I mean "I've gotten back into Elden Ring.")

#horus heresy #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy

[jyndor]

you get me, cassian andor gets us both, we are all vibing with each other it’s beautiful

honestly truly <3333 it's such a great example of diego's insane talent lol like you see the absolute vitriol and disgust cassian feels towards cops, he's like 'bitch what are you looking at?' at first, it's giving jyn 'brawl first think second' erso energy lol. not to make it about ~~~them~~ but i truly have imagined her giving those exact first few looks a number of times. except in her case, i see her doing what cassian can't really afford to do in this scene, which is popping the fuck off and starting a bar fight lol.

because he knows it won't end well if he gets into it with these pigs, he makes himself sort of settles to a quieter loathing, and then a shift to fear for himself and also probably for this woman showing attraction (feigned or not) to him in front of them INSTEAD of them first. (also interesting that we see her later being brought in to identify him).

and what we see is that because cassian is an immigrant from an indigenous diaspora it really doesn't matter how he reacts to the cops who represent settler-colonialism/imperialism despite not being agents literally of the empire (acknowledging that the depiction of kenari is... problematic to say the least lmao - diego is a white latino man and while that makes him subject to lots of xenophobia and racialization in the states, the show is trying to represent kenari as indigenous latines which... sigh justice for fest - fest works so well as a colonized planet full of rebels smdh ANYWAY). in the same way that he gets targeted on space miami for literally just walking around, it doesn't matter what he DOES - his existence is a middle finger to the empire and before it to the republic's colonialism (i think supposedly the separatists are the ones who fucked up kenari but given that pre andor!cassian was a separatist on fest i'm just gonna disregard this like so much else i don't like about new canon lmao. but even so, it's not like the separatists didn't do their own colonial bullshit too).

we're all fodder for capitalist white supremacist colonial patriarchy, but there's people who generally get the brunt of the brutality. we see this in the narkina arc, and also in wobani because it's not a coincidence that jyn (a coreworld-coded white woman) is roommates with a non-human. while I do think that there was probably more intentionality with casting the narkina folks than the wobani folks because we see like two minutes of wobani, not to mention that there's a lot less empathy shown to the prisoners in wobani in rogue one. lol draven literally telling jyn he'll put her ass right back in prison if she doesn't help, the other prisoner who speaks on the transport is literally comic relief, and obviously the prison break is for ONE woman, the rest can stay ig because abolition is not what the alliance is about.

it's actually something I was just thinking about recently because of this video essay by fd signifier on youtube, it's called fuck the police and it is excellent. in it, he talks about the history of prison abolitionism and how the movement really started within prisons. these guys had nothing but time because their freedoms were stolen from them and started educating themselves on leftism. it's like they had their lived experience which radicalized them like nothing else can - as fd says, they saw first hand the brutality of the system like most of us who have the time and resources to even search for youtube long form video essays ever will. so much of the base of leftist radical movements begin with people in prisons. they are the minds behind abolition. i wouldn't have become an abolitionist without hearing from them about their experiences, no matter how much empathy I may have. how could i? i didn't become anti-capitalist until I worked myself into a broken mess in retail, no matter how much i cared about workers.

we see throughout the show that cassian has a moral code, he has a set of principles and beliefs that he largely tries to suppress in order to stay safe and relatively comfortable. andor!cassian isn't my favorite interpretation of his character but anyone who takes him at face value when he says he doesn't give a fuck about revolution is missing the point imo, same way they miss it with jyn erso. cassian gets this idea in his head as a teen that actively, violently resisting will result in him being denied freedom (first as a child on kenari, then after clem is murdered and he goes after the troopers). what he learns on narkina is that it actually has very little to do with him actively resisting, although of course that will probably result in him being harmed. it has to do with who he is, what he looks like and how he sounds. and most of all, that he is not safe from oppression and fascism no matter what he does to keep his head down (which is clearly not in his nature to do lol). it's why jyn saying "it's not a problem if you don't look up" is such obvious bullshit (even though she is saying it to hurt saw and not because she actually believes it).

it's important that while cassian is personally innocent of the crime he was convicted of, that undoubtedly many other prisoners were also innocent, we have no idea if any of the others actually did commit crimes. prison abolitionism as a movement is built on the work done by people in prison - and some of them absolutely committed crimes in their lives (and many were in gangs, like George Jackson), and many others were political prisoners. but it's not about what they did - like with the point the narkina arc makes, it's about what they experience inside prison.

and speaking of abolition because i can't HELP myself, I've gotta bring up the show's treatment of its Black characters.

like ??? the writers know what point they're making throughout the show. and that point is about how it doesn't matter that cassian ultimately doesn't go off on the cops in the brothel, that he tried to remain quiet and keep his head down on niamos and everywhere else he went, he was target number one of the morlana cops because the sex worker is (is she named? LOL i feel bad just calling her that but i don't remember) a pretty white (and an additional factor in SW: human) woman who shows more attention to this guy who is an immigrant and has what she even fetishizes as "dark" features.

the prisoners we are most familiar with - the ones we empathize with most because they work closest with cassian - are almost all white and their actors mostly from the global north (honestly the uk which... LOL okayyy). meanwhile the shots of the revolution show us how much of the prison population is NOT white. cassian is working with a Black prisoner to fuck up the pipes but we don't really see him interacting with that guy ever lol. the older man whose death pushes kino loy over the edge is a white man.

it's just... W H Y. i get it, melshi is from rogue one, but even the fact that he ended up sort of more important in rogue one than sefla (a Black man who outranks melshi lol) just because gilroy liked duncan pow a lot, and then sefla just kind of dies unceremoniously, like many of the Black characters in andor. gorn dies very similarly, but at least his character has a fair amount of screen time and is treated pretty well otherwise (although i'm tired of the diversifying the empire thing. lol it's the empire, they're all white men with the occasional rare white woman who girlbossed her way in).

it's not that you can't have andy serkis doing the damn thing, or introduce melshi to cassian in prison because now they're brothers in arms and ugh my heart <3 because I know that narkina also represents nazi concentration camps as well as us prisons, and none of these things are one-to-one perfect representations because it's fiction.

i hope the next season does better by its Black characters since this show is making points that have been made by Black people for ages.

um anyway that got away from me lmao

#cassian andor #rogue one #star wars andor #star wars #anti-blackness #racism #xenophobia #fascism #white supremacy #meta #colonialism #imperialism #hmm is there anything i've missed in the tags? idk #indigenous rights #thats one

[callipraxia]

(The prodigal blogger returns! The good news, my writer's block broke. The...news-that-I-hope-is-no-worse-than-indifferent, anyway, is that it was to write...this thing. Well, gotta start somewhere, right?

I attempted to post the whole thing under a cut here, but unfortunately, I...may have found the character limit. It doesn't make much sense to me to think that I found the character limit, because I'm fairly sure the Ford essay was significantly longer than this, but it's the only reason I can think of why the button won't work properly when I put in all the text. Therefore, have the first two paragraphs followed by a link to the full thing over on dreamwidth, where you can also find my other essays and the incomplete fictions I've also posted over here.)

I was chatting Gravity Falls with a few other authors recently and at some point, the subject of least-favorite characters came up. In the course of this conversation, I expressed mild surprise over hearing that Robbie Valentino is someone who fans would care enough about to even bother hating properly and was told that this is typically because of Robbie's bullying of Dipper. I found this interesting, as although I’m certainly no fan of his – I find his personality irritating, his behavior generally repellent, and his presence in the story kind of a waste of time that could have been used for more interesting things  – it had never occurred to me to think of him as a proper bully. As a jerk? Of course. As a kid who clearly wanted to be a bully? Definitely. But to me, at least, he was always so very bad at it that I remained largely indifferent to him after he stopped being annoying, despite having been bullied rather a lot myself in my younger days. A discrepancy has appeared! You all know what that means - time for the latest installment of Calli Overthinking Things In Walls ‘o Text Yet Again.

Preliminary house-keeping matters: we're talking about bullying and abuse of power, so TW for that. I also want to formally note for the record that this isn't an argumentative essay - I'm in no way trying to say my point of view is more correct than any other. If anything, I'm probably less correct than average, if there's such a thing as a correct way to interpret a character. I'll call this an essay for lack of a better term, but it doesn't aim to prove a thesis. It's just examining the reasons - some personal, some somewhat due to literary conventions - why it didn't occur to me, personally, to think of him as a proper antagonist (or, indeed, to really think of him at all) until I saw others do so. So, this might actually be the first proper personal essay I've ever written....Read more by clicking the link below.

callipraxia | Bullies, Rivals, Comparisons, and the Narrative: Part One (dreamwidth.org)

#gravity falls #gravity falls characters #robbie valentino #dipper pines #gideon gleeful #dolores umbridge #bullying tw #bullies in fiction #essay #my essays #gravity falls essays

[will-o-wips]

It is 4 am. I'm staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, coincidentally having my phone right in my line of sight, and write this with the exasperation and intense focus that I probably won't ever have again. I'm about to attempt to make any sort of sense of the latest Hayao Miyazaki movie, The Boy and the Heron (or rather, How do you live? in Japanese), that I watched for the first time in theatres a day ago.

I cannot claim to be right, or to know everything about this movie. Actually acclaimed critics and people with obviously more braincells than me have probably better takes than I do. But I must speak, lest the insanity truly take over my brain, lest I really end up combusting because of how much I want to talk about this.

Prepare yourselves for the most incoherent train of thought and line of consciousness you will ever experience.

FILLED WITH SPOILERS READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. YOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE.

Before I start with my actual thoughts, however, I'll state my personal feelings about the movie, because I feel that matters too, and this is my post anyway so! But I personally left the cinema feeling somewhat mellow. I was not insane about it yet. It was,,, "meh". The impression of the ride was great; I was giggling along with the funny and even sometimes not purposefully funny moments, I enjoyed the animation to the point I would genuinely flap my hands in excitement at how good it was, I understood the story in great lines by noticing small details and going "oh so does this mean x?". But I did not cry. Not a single tear during or after or before the movie. I did not waver with my opinion on it as I rambled about it to my friends online and irl, much to their annoyance. I did not hesitate when I put it in my silly little Studio Ghibli movie tierlist maker that I update whenever I watch another one of these films together with my friends, categorized (in)discreetly under "all vibes no plot but there's a witch/wizard". I still don't, in fact.

So, given all of this, you'd probably say that I disliked the movie. That I would not have so much to say about it, after doing my mandatory ramble and update. Wrong. I still have more to say, somehow.

Despite that, I didn't rewatch the movie itself. I read an entirety of one (1) review of it, together with one (1) random video essay of 8 or so minutes, covering the basics of it. I reblogged one (1) post about its protagonist on tumblr and otherwise kinda read through the rest of the posts on here. I did not re-experience or re-examine this movie again. I cannot (again) accurately reference anything besides that what I vaguely remember from watching it a day or two ago. It's not playing anywhere near me anymore/not out anywhere else yet, so really, I don't even know what possessed me to write about this, or even say anything. The most fascinating thing (to probably all of us here) is; what made me change my mind about it?

It might've been the review on IndieWire. David Ehrlich and his well-written review, bringing things into much needed context as to why this movie was created. It could've been the fact that I've actively processed the movie better, now a little bit of time has passed. [Honestly it deserves a second watch/view for something more concrete, but I'm repeating myself with this, you get it.]

But I don't even really understand it myself. I felt and still feel so detached from this movie in a sense. I appreciate the artistry that went into it, and I adore the way it simply tells the story and leaves it up to interpretation. It references every single film Hayao Miyazaki has ever made before, and elements of other Ghibli films can probably be found in there too, if you looked hard enough. The vibes were similar to those of Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle, given how inexplicably fantastical the world was. It just existed and breathed, and we as the audience jumped straight into it. We never got more exposition than what was needed; honestly I have a feeling that the second half of the movie was the vaguest piece of media I have ever consumed in my life. But it also had this perfect balance of the more drama-focused Ghibli films. The Boy and the Heron, in my opinion, is like the golden middle between reality and fantasy, both in terms of its narrative as well as comparison between other Ghibli movies.

This might also be the reason why I felt confused. The lines between reality and fantasy were so effortlessly blurred, that you could only process a singular picture. And when things are vague to me, I constantly need to pick them apart and analyse them, simply to satisfy my own curiosity.

The moment before I stepped into the movie theatre, my friend who watched along with me told me they heard it was a film about grief. I nodded along and said "yeah, okay, that just means it's another one of many Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli films. Most of them are about some kind of loss, and dealing with it, either way." I sat down together with them; row 9, chairs 17 and 18, with my two bottles of water (one carbonated, one stilled) and the bag of terribly sour packaged chocolate pretzels I bought at the theatre itself. Horribly overpriced for the quality, I must say. My friend held onto the popcorn, and we sat through the ads, talking and laughing, anticipating something that was supposed to blow us away.

I cannot speak for my friend, but I think they really liked the movie regardless. They didn't cry at it either, even though we both know of each other that we always cry at such things. Somehow this movie evoked a certain stillness in us both; a stalemate between emotions and confusion. Maybe delayed processing. Maybe something else entirely. We both, or at least I, hid it until later.

It was midnight, and right before we stepped on our train home, I was excitedly going on about the references and animation, the things I did appreciate. I bragged a bit about how I recognized Kenshi Yonezu's voice in the final credit song that we didn't get to listen to entirely, because it was so late and we had to rush to get home. They laughed at me and told me to take some time to actively formulate any coherent thoughts on it. I disagreed (lovingly and jokingly of course), and we left it at that.

In the train itself, the same high dimmed into a simmer, the excitement replaced with contemplation, and I kept talking.

I told them: "I believe that this truly is his last film. This felt like a goodbye." And in return, they replied: "It's crazy how this is the last time we'll ever get to live in such a moment. The release of the final Ghibli movie in theatres.

"I'm glad we got to go."

I was too.

I got home, rambled about the intrinsic way The Boy and the Heron referenced other Ghibli movies to my online friends who had yet to see it. Followed by a heated tangent about how When Marnie Was There truly could have had better direction in regards to the narrative, as well as how Only Yesterday was the most boring out of all Ghibli movies. It was a nice night. I didn't think about the movie again.

The following morning, I contacted other friends, who told me about how Robert Pattison voiced the Heron in the English dub, which I hadn't seen or heard at all. He did a great job, judging by the trailer. This led me to another opinion, namely the video essay (I will try to find it and put it in the notes later if you are curious), which claimed something similar to this (of course, paraphrased):

"This is a farewell. The one true movie to tie such an expansive career. It is another movie where you are allowed to explore the magical together with the main character, while sticking close to the processing of it all."

The review I read said it was a swan-song, that it was the question and title of the movie in Japanese, posed at us, after The Wind Rises left it open to interpretation at the end of its run. That this was a story about the legacy that Miyazaki is leaving behind, how reality and fantasy coexist together, possibly influencing each other (not explicitly said but what I interpreted that review saying, so no this is also not completely like this).

Other tumblr posts I've seen on here say it was a film most likely dedicated to his son, Goro Miyazaki. That it was a gentle "I'm sorry, the shadow I leave behind is huge. I know that you will try and fail to fill it. It's okay; you don't have to. You can leave it behind. It's alright if this legacy dies with me."

Some other sources I've seen compare the main protagonist to Miyazaki himself, trying to grapple with the ending.

Yet somehow, all of these interpretations seem to fail to explain the entirety of this movie. The bigger picture if you will. These themes and moments and interpretations are not wrong, but to me, they're not satisfying enough.

Because maybe I am the only one who actually was insane about this moment, but I will never forget the delivery room scene between Mahito and Natsuko. How Himi addresses the magic stone, pleading to let the two go, saying "Natsuko and the boy who is to be her son". (Again, paraphrased, I cannot remember the exact line.) Maybe I am the only one who witnessed the whimsical fire witch and the going back in time plots and the fact that a younger Kiriko and Himi were there, already part of an ecosystem. How we already know from the other grannies in the house that Mahito's mother disappeared once for a whole year into the tower, and then came back the same as before. How the pelicans were BROUGHT there, that they did not belong there, and yet were forgetting how to fly. How they ate the Warawara, these creatures that were rising above to be born in the upper world. How the Heron's weakness was his 7th tail feather (or something along those lines), and how the fish and the frogs chanted for Mahito to join them in the tower. That the great-great-uncle was hoping for Mahito to succeed him and build a new tower, yet the king of the parakeets butted in and haphazardly did the job, resulting in it immediately toppling over, as well as the stones getting cut.

I think about the final scene where the Heron says "It's best to forget. Do you have any keepsakes?" And Mahito shows not only older Kiriko's figure, but also a piece of the stone paths they walked upon in order to get to the centre, the beating heart, the magic stone and his great-great-uncle.

How this is taking place during a war, that the timeline goes from his mothers death that Mahito cannot get over, to the welcoming of his stepmother and his new younger sibling. Them moving back to Tokyo. The way the tower completely collapsed. Completely and utterly collapsed and perished; not even a trace of it left behind. The way that older Kiriko keeps yelling it is a trap to Mahito in the beginning, but that both he and the Heron know. That it is inevitable to tread this specific path. That he must see for himself, whether his mother is truly alive. The way she both was and wasn't; first a mirage of her older self disappearing into a puddle of water, and second a firey spirit of her younger self coming to help Mahito. The way that he reads and cries at the book she left him, the way he hits himself with a rock after his big fight with his classmates; the way Mahito in general drowns consistently in the beginning of the film. He drowns in the fire that he lost his mother in. He drowns in the mud and the dust when he tries to enter the tower at first. He drowns in his dreams, in his tears, drowns right into his quest to find Natsuko (straight through the floor, by behest of his great-great-uncle), drowns in pelicans trying to eat him, nearly drowns in the actual sea until younger Kiriko fishes him out.

Now these things may seem like me just randomly naming shit that happens in the movie. Hopefully in a slightly poetic way, possibly. I could go on and on about the imagery, truly. But my point is, this movie may have been Miyazaki's last movie, his way of closure, his way of speaking to his son about his legacy, his way of describing the grief of losing his mother (idk if this is autobiographical or not. It very well may have been), yet...

Even so, it doesn't really fit the entire picture. It feels incomplete. The analyses always focus on the true meaning behind this movie, what happens behind the scenes, this one key climactic moment between Mahito and his great-great-uncle. But that's as if you would ignore the rest of the movie in general. As if the fantastical aspects weren't there to abstractly tell a story besides just being a symbol of closure for the person that directed it.

Personally, this is a tale of rebirth. Of losing yourself, and then rediscovering yourself in a way. I associate it with my own personal loss of my grandfather; the family member I felt closest to out of everyone.

The way you look back at such a traumatic stage in your life, something that irrevocably changed you for good, something that you probably don't ever want to relive again, but also mustn't forget. The way you instinctively are afraid to learn about who the person you love and grieve was, before you were in their life.

To this day, I still cannot speak to my mother about whether my grandfather had a favourite song before me forcing him to sing along with my favourites. A favourite book before he read out bedtime stories to me tirelessly. Who the boy in him was, and what wisdom and life lessons he carried on, into his grave, into the hearts of his children.

This movie depicts so much more than just grief, it's so much more than just legacy, even. It directly reflects the way I know I would have felt had I dared to actually see things for myself. If I actually dared to go through my grandfather's old things; the books he wrote and dedicated to me, the books he read when he was young. This movie depicts not how to live, but how to live on.

And the only way to live on is to move forward. To look at the foundations upon which it was built, to evaluate whether you truly want to have this be your burden to carry for the rest of your life. Mahito's abstract grief in regards to his mother, and the solace he finds in the fact that he at least knew who she was; that he at least had her in his life as both his mother and the girl that his stepmother knew, that at the very least he knows his mother would do it all over again, if she could. That despite everything, she did not regret a thing, and that she was not afraid. That somewhere, in the past, she lives on, happily marching toward this fate, because she knows that Mahito will be there to meet her again in the future.

And Natsuko, god, she worries relentlessly about whether Mahito will accept her. She worries to the point she yells at him, telling him that she hates him and his existence, because he rejects her so coldly and yet still bothers to show up in front of her during her most vulnerable moments. That he only takes and takes and takes; he steals her cigarettes in order to learn how to sharpen a knife from one of the servants. He uses those techniques to create a bow and arrow, a weapon. He gets into fights at school, he gets gravely injured on the side of his head, leaving a lasting scar.

If I were in her shoes, I would be furious at him too. Especially if he walked straight into the delivery room, trying to drag me out of bed while I was doing my damn best to keep the other child in my belly alive.

That scene, that sheer rage, and the way it ALL FUCKING SUBSIDES the MOMENT Mahito accepts her and calls her mother. The moment Mahito understands that through the literal whirlwind of plasters, things used to tend to wounds, none of those pleasantries/guards will truly allow him to reach her. The way he tries to nurse his own wounds, as well as try to nurse hers, over the loss of their shared connection (Natsuko's older sister, Mahito's biological mother), will NEVER allow him to make a connection with her. By being careful, by being polite, he will never get to be her son.

And he realizes, in that moment, that he wants to.

The magic stone tries to stop this. The magic stone dislikes disruption; dislikes things changing, dislikes breaking traditions (the taboo of entering the delivery room). The parakeets in the tower flourish because they follow the magic stone's whims more or less. They agree to follow its rules, even if it means they are prone to its abuse, because it gives them an advantage, a place to stay. The pelicans have to eat the Warawara, because there is no other food available to them.

The way younger Kiriko says "you reek of death", and how they establish this place is mostly made up of death and dead people. Dead people, or dying people, creatures that are begging to survive another day. Creatures that are begging to be reborn. That want to change, that wish to fly once more.

My mother once gave me a poem dearest to her heart. We have always been a family filled with literature and stories, but my mother was always the best at both writing them and reciting them. She used to read them out to me, back when I was in a particularly bad spot mentally, to the point I could not get out of bed for weeks on end, to try and reach me. She read with the sincerest passion in her voice, a small plea to get me back to the girl I was before.

I cannot explain or remember the poem by heart, but once I was at my true rock bottom, she told me to look it up. A Serbian poem, written by Miroslav Antić (I will add the name of it later), that was about growing up and growing into your own person. It made me weep, for it had a phrase I think I can only translate to this:

"Run and don't look back."

Somehow, whenever I look at all of these birds and creatures in this fantasy world, trying to fly desperately, trying to get to the skies, trying to get to even live, and think about the fact that the only way they can is by leaving this place. That the only way they can fly and survive as themselves is by leaving this tower, this stone, this foundation. By leaving and being born, by leaving and being reborn.

And, after all of this. Somehow I'm not even done yet. I haven't talked about the great-great-uncle in depth, nor the king of the parakeets, nor the heron whatsoever. I have not yet even touched upon what I might think the magic stone is, and the sheer amount of like symbolism I picked apart in my brain because of my insanity.

I'm probably not the only one who noticed these things. But so far I haven't seen anyone actively share these things, so, I will do my best to continue and genuinely wrap it up as best as I can. So that this can also bring the same amount of closure as the movie does.

The magic stone is like a shooting star that came onto the earth. It realizes dreams and worlds of whoever dares to walk into it and claim to own it; like how Mahito's great-great-uncle got obsessed and built a tower around it, caging it, taming it. And yet he still had to play to its whims, consistently making sure his own tower of blocks did not fall, that all of his work did not amount to nothing. Personally, I do believe the great-great-uncle could represent Miyazaki himself. That Miyazaki is trying to express how he built Ghibli and that now it has been going on for so long, and it has become unmanageable to continue upholding it. That it is time to retire.

A thing I find interesting and remember pretty well is the conversation between the parakeet king and the great-great-uncle. How they talked about Mahito's transgression, breaking into the delivery room (side note: he broke in and broke through to Natsuko with his mother's spirit. Mahito became Natsuko's son with the blessing of his mother; with the sheer love she had for him being carried on and through), and how the great-great-uncle says something akin to this:

"It is why I wish for him [Mahito] to succeed me."

"I cannot overlook such a transgression."

I feel this is important. It is key to how the great-great-uncle views Mahito in this. Because Mahito was not sent out on this quest to find Natsuko out of pure selfishness. Sure, his uncle would have wanted him to succeed him, but the entire reason WHY he believed in Mahito to begin with, is the fact that this boy was able to break the foundation and the traditions in the first place. Mahito inherently disobeys from the chosen path. Mahito inherently does not believe the Heron when he says that all herons lie. Mahito doesn't waver when the heron flies straight at him, he doesn't sway when the frogs or the pelicans overwhelm him. Mahito stands firm in who he is, even if he is trying to deal with new circumstances. Mahito inherently goes to places he should not be in (his curiosity for the tower). Mahito has enough power on his own to create a new tower, but only by rebuilding it from scratch.

This ready acceptance that the great-great-uncle has towards Mahito's decision NOT to inherit his legacy, is what makes me believe this is what this movie is supposed to represent. Break away from the old, off into the new. Closure. Moving on.

This is also reflected in the sentiment that Mahito truly DOES move on. He goes back to his family, his father, school, he goes back with Natsuko as his mother and a new younger sibling to Tokyo. He returns there where he came from, but he is not the same anymore. He is reborn into a new Mahito.

And god I feel like I'm repeating myself to death here; I really should have thought about the structure of this, but give me some slack okay. It's like 6:30 am already and I'm still not done, despite continuously writing and labouring at this.

So, the tower that immediately falls apart by someone who always follows the whims of a dream (the parakeet king and the stone respectively). God it is just such a momentTM. Because in the end even this shows that the parakeets, too, even though they by far had it the best in that goddamn tower, had to leave. For they could not build something on their own without learning who they were outside of the already established. Outside of just following the rules and all.

They had to leave, my GODDDDD.

As I'm getting progressively more unhinged, we shall move onto the most unhinged character in this entire fucking movie. The Heron himself. God there's too much to unpack here, really, but the truth is, the Heron was supposed to be the guide to Mahito. The Heron was supposed to be Mahito's biggest, most aggressive enemy, the direct antagonist to Mahito's protagonist. The Heron doesn't want change. The Heron tries to bribe Mahito with the fact that his mother is still alive, that he need only enter the tower, and lose himself to illusions and dreams. That fantasizing about his mother being alive won't only drown him more, that it won't just let Mahito sink into the deepest pits of his despair and anguish about such a death, that losing yourself to the belief that something is there when it is not wouldn't only be counterproductive. The Heron masks himself consistently; he says that all herons lie. He says that he only has one weakness, his own feather, that allows the arrow to automatically target him. In essence, the Heron shot himself in the foot beak. He himself slipped up in his mirage world, and came out to be who he truly was, this weird little man with a huge nose and a conniving demeanour. He adamantly cannot disobey the dream, for then his true nature comes peaking out (a small detail I absolutely love is the fact that the Heron's feathers also disappear out of Mahito's hands when Mahito is called back to reality by the grannies. The grannies protect him in the dream world too, by being his tether and support system while he gets over himself and starts trusting Natsuko). The Heron doesn't WANT to be a guide, for in order to be a guide, you must tell the truth. You'd need to know some facts about the world around you and share this information with the ones seeking guidance. This is how I believe Mahito understood the Heron before we did.

It's not that all herons lie; it's just that this particular one does not want to face the truth/reality.

Another interesting detail: the whole reason why only Mahito was able to cover up the hole in the Heron's beak was reminiscent about how only those that called you out can really patch up your old image. Only those that have poked holes in your false narrative are able to fill them back up again, and even then it is not the same, and even then it will not always be comfortable/reliable.

Either way, the Heron, after this wings partially turn into hands, his true nature, is unable to fly all that well for a while. He relies on Mahito's corkscrew thing in order to relish in his comfort zone of lies again. But throughout the movie, the Heron slowly starts to ignore the corkscrew completely; simply opting to stay in his (frankly, freakish) half gremlin man half heron costume form. The Heron changes because Mahito inspired him to change. Even though his image used to be spotless before, and he tried to deceive Mahito, after a while, he stopped doing that. The mutual trust both Mahito and the Heron had grew. The Heron became a person, although his heron-ness would never go away.

The Heron thus warns Mahito that he should want to forget. That he will forget, either way. That this struggle of his to grapple with the reality of his situation, and the fantasy that he was delving into, will become a far-off memory that Mahito should not revisit. The Heron, I believe, is genuinely trying to look out for Mahito.

"Don't dwell in what you have already overcome. Don't revisit the things you have already outgrown."

And this is where the movie more or less ends. Mahito still keeps that stone, and his mother's book, and he goes back to Tokyo; the only crucial difference is that he has overcome his own grief.

Now, I've said this like a billion times now, but this is the rebirth. This is what I think this movie stands for. What it means, at its core. This is what it means to live; to move on and to cut ties with that what has no place in your life anymore. Miyazaki, I think, is trying to give us closure, a final farewell to Ghibli altogether.

Now I don't know about any speculation that he might come back again, and personally, I don't think it really matters. If he does come back, good for him. I just don't know enough to say anything for sure, so I'll just say I cannot say.

Either way, I think, even though Miyazaki conveyed the need for a new start/a rebirth, he didn't really end on the complete abolishment of all that used to be. You are allowed to keep mementos of it; even though the Heron advises not to. Mahito is allowed to reflect upon this experience, to see it as another stone in his foundation/formation, to say that, yes, the spirit of this change will always stay with me, although it has passed.

Just like how Mahito's mom was someone who returned to the past without regrets. She never came back. She was a spirit that pushed Mahito forward, and he will always remember her, but it's better that she stay a memory than become a fantasy.

This is why I'm so impressed by this movie in general. I'm so thankful that I was able to witness this with a friend of mine. I'm glad that I was able to see this, even though my insanity knows no bounds, and the fact that I didn't even think about any of this until I really sat down to look through the options of interpretations.

I'm so glad I got to go. Now it's time to run towards the future, and never look back.

#the boy and the heron #genuinely what was I on actually #I can't believe I am writing this/have written this #Disclaimer: I am really just saying shit please do not take this as the end all be all or whatever; I just need to say it just in case. #oh btw this is DEFINITELY not meant to critique or dismiss any of the people that have other opinions than I do #I just needed to put my own interpretation out there #together with my few flourishes of storytelling here and there even though I'm not even sure if it makes any sense whatsoever #the boy and the heron spoilers #spoilers #I think like. there is so much more to be said about this. there is so much more that can be touched upon #without the repetitive stuff of unstructured “just wing it” (ha ha get it. because there's so many birds and flying metaphors in this.) #essays and shit like this #like I haven't even touched upon Mahito's father and the entire airplane thing that could just be a reference but also- #it could be a metaphor in how his father is trying to overcompensate and how he just wants Mahito to fly again so he creates and works so- #hard that he eventually just ends up being absent in Mahito's life. #which is sickening. (positive/bittersweet) #anyway I am still just saying shit. enjoy the??? idk essay upon essay upon essay of late night insanity.

[fujoshiwarrior]

i dont really write posts like these because usually i figure no one cares, and because it's pride month i wanted to keep things mostly controversy free, but every now and then i find myself thinking a lot about specific things about this site's culture

a lot of people attribute the (relative) peace on this site (compared to how it was some 6ish years ago) to the Great Porn Exodus and while i do agree that was a turning point in tumblr culture, i feel like a lot of the mellowing out can be attributed to the fact that people on here literally just grew up. most of us were teens or preteens in 2014-2016, now most of us are early 20s-early 30s

still though, there are some things i've noticed in the way people here act that haven't really changed since then that's kind of...disturbing? for example, there's this pervasive lack of interest in other people's experiences besides your own---if you can't relate it to yourself somehow, it doesn't matter. people will pretend to care about other groups, because that's what a Good Person does, but they won't do any outside reading or research into other cultures, or issues, outside of what's dropped into their lap on tumblr

i remember some time ago when people were discussing the possibility of anne frank being bisexual, someone said that the possibility of her being lgbt made it easier for them to empathize with her. but shouldn't you be able to feel compassion for her anyway, because she was a teenage girl who was hunted down and murdered by a fascist regime in one of the worst atrocities in human history?

i occasionally see this article spread around, and for good reason, i genuinely think everyone on the planet should read it at least once and then maybe a couple dozen more times for good measure. and then every time you remember it, you should drop whatever it is you're doing and read it again. when i see people talk about this, they talk about how this is essentially required reading in understanding trans people. in spite of that, i constantly see people parroting the same exact sentiments the author calls out as bioessentialist and transphobic. this makes me think most of you just reblog the article without reading it because someone told you it was the Good Person thing to do.

i think a lot of the politics on here, and on places like twitter, are predicated on being a Good Person. you want to be a Good Person desperately, and of course being a Good Person means that you care about other people, especially people who aren't like you. so you reblog, you retweet, you share posts about the life experiences of people who aren't like you. this is the most you do. you don't read books, or essays, or articles written by people about their lives and their experiences, you don't look at studies about issues affecting these populations, you don't read literature written by these people.

this sort of thinking results in a menagerie of different behaviors, one of which is something i call "fandom as praxis" which probably deserves its own post at some point. but above all, predicating your beliefs on being a Good Person leaves you wide open to indoctrination, and ultimately, radicalization. this can happen to you literally no matter who you are as long as this is your mentality. the reason why this can happen is because:

there isn't a single person on earth who truly believes they're a bad person or what they believe is wrong. even the most vile of people, whether they be nazis, a terf, otherwise fascist, or any other strain of evil, believe wholeheartedly that they are good people and what they are doing is right. the only people who truly, genuinely believe they are bad people have probably killed themselves.

you don't have any actual understanding or conviction in your beliefs, so you're just going along with what other people have deemed are the beliefs and behaviors of a Good Person. when what determines a Good Person is changed, you change your behavior accordingly.

when put together, you have someone who is especially susceptible to brainwashing.

some time ago, i had a mutual who seemed like she became a terf overnight. it probably wasn't literally overnight, but it was very sudden. this was in spite of the fact that one of her close friends was transfeminine, and that many others in her circle were trans as well, people i assume would consider her a friend and were probably in close and frequent contact with her. i think the reason for this sudden shift is because of both the reasons i listed, in addition to the fact that the person who indoctrinated her was apparently her girlfriend.

i think i should mention that i don't think just anyone can become a nazi or terf; even with the two reasons i listed, what happens usually is that people start spreading harmful beliefs without thinking too hard about what those beliefs actually imply---this happens on tumblr/twitter literally daily---and the people spreading these beliefs are decidedly not reactionary fascists. i think in order to become a True Believer in genocidal fascism of any kind you have to be a very particular kind of evil, but discussing that sort of thing isn't the point, the point is that average, otherwise "good" people can still adopt these beliefs and patterns of thinking without becoming a fullblown fascist.

as i said in the beginning of this post, i wanted to avoid posting something like this during pride because i think we could all really use some moments of levity in times like these, and so i wanted to keep things lighthearted on my blog for the most part.

but i've also had this sitting in my drafts for some time now, and in a time where fascist and reactionary thinking gets more and more inflamed on the daily, i thought it would be appropriate to post this because i think in our fight against fascism, as leftists and marginalized people we shouldn't start thinking that we're immune to this kind of thinking by virtue of being leftist and/or marginalized, and we can't do anyone or anything justice if we refuse to expand our breadth of knowledge.

(please feel free to reblog and comment on this post if you want, or in the tags, i would love to hear what other people have to say on this)

#psi post!

[mermaidsirennikita]

Thank you so much of the recs, I was also recommended Romancing Mr Bridgerton for carriage scenes and guest what? It was bad too 🤣 I won't trust anyone who recommends me Bridgerton books

I think that was a scene with some mild titty sucking, right?

.... Yeah I'll stick with what Joanna Shupe and Grace Callaway are doing with that shit lol. (I think? Indigo has a solid 90s-era carriage bang too, but I'm not sure, I need to reread.)

I think JQ can write some cute, funny moments, but I really don't get the hype, and I tend to feel like a lot of people who recommend her for HR are only recommending her because she's the ONLY one they've read (because of Bton). The only books I'd recommend from that series are The Viscount Who Loved Me and When He Was Wicked and even those aren't like... INCREDIBLE. The others fall into mid (The Duke and I, Romancing Mr. Bridgerton) to forgettable (It's In His Kiss, On the Way to the Wedding) to .... really bad (To Sir Phillip with Love, An Offer from a Gentleman). And I'm constantly told "try the other things she does!" and I will, because I have one with a really good title on my shelf!

... But I've read 8 (technically 9 because for some reason I grabbed that epilogue book at a used bookstore) and only 2 have actually worked for me. It doesn't really matter if they're from the same series--when your series is that long I'm ideally looking for a 4/8 "solidly good to great" score min.

Her sex scenes, though, are some of my least favorites. I actually don't NEED sex scenes to be incredibly explicit. That's my preferred route, lol. But Lorraine Heath is one of my favorite authors, and though her scenes are explicit (to me, anything open door suggests a level of explicitness--if it's telling you something is going inside something and something is flicking something and so on, I think we're getting into the explicit realm even if it remains flowery) they use pretty euphemistic language and don't spell everything out. But dude, Julia just... I don't know. I think it's probably because I'm so unconvinced of the relationships in a lot of those books that I can't fill in the blanks and be convinced that everyone is having good sex. Like, I remember in TSPWL when he goes down on her (something I literally forgot he did because it's so forgettable lol) there's this cut to Eloise like "screaming" and I was all "LOL REALLY. AFTER ONE LICK. REALLY."

And the thing is that there are others that I'll let get away with that. Lorraine can get away with that, lol. But first off, I don't actually think she does that that often (most Bton heroines don't get their pussies eaten, sadly, but they do respond to practically zero stimulation like they're getting it from the back with a vibe in play) secondly, she's written such great chemistry and such hot heroes that I'm like "fine, I can believe that THAT guy has IT". But like... for example, in Waking Up with the Duke she writes this scene where Ainsley, who's known to be one of the greatest lovers in London (IT'S IN THE SERIES TITLE) goes down on Jayne for the first time, and like... she's hesitant to enjoy it initially. She's like, back bowing immediately, because this is a pretty conflicted, clinical moment for them. As good as he IS at it, she's not immediately into it.

Because Lorraine makes choices like that, I think her sex scenes tend to feel fuller than they are, and a lot fuller (and hotter) than anything JQ writes.

Anyway, here have an essay lol

#romance novel blogging #also anthony and michael were the only 2 bton heroes i bought as knowing what sex was #i still wanna vom from benedict's total lack of sex appeal #the description of him like... hiding sophie's hymen bloodstain on that couch cushion.... #and that's another thing lmao I WOULD'VE ACCEPTED THAT FROM ANOTHER ROMANCE HERO #but the authors i read also typically don't write heroes who come off as 'hey--smile!' guys so....

[fiercestpurpose]

thoughts on citing tumblr posts in academic essays

specifically this post is not about fan studies or a sociological/anthropological approach to posts or any of those approaches. this post is a collection of my thoughts on citing posts that say [claim] when i also want to say [claim] in my paper. (as opposed to using the post to say that "people on tumblr say [claim]")

why cite the post? well, because, academic dishonesty is bad. citing sources is about recognizing a genealogy of knowledge. american academic citation practice encourages you to cite everything that influences your thinking. (i say american bc other countries have different citation practices and different ways of thinking about plagiarism.) citing the post brings up a lot of issues, but, for me, those don't outweigh the consideration of academic and intellectual honesty.

how to cite the post? nonissue. mla is pretty flexible. look at how tweets are cited. citing a conversation where multiple users are included might be a little trickier, but probably just do it as multiple authors?

proof: when you cite an academic essay making [claim], that is proof of [claim]. the idea is that the other essay has done the work to prove it. however, when you cite a tumblr post saying [claim], you still have to prove [claim] from the ground up, either by recounting the logic from the post, making your own argument, or both.

footnotes: so, if you have to prove the thing from scratch anyway and if your approach is different from the tumblr op's, you can probably just leave a footnote and say "this issue is also brought up by [x]" and cite the source, no need to like namedrop tumblr users in the body of your academic essay

accessibility of the post: back it up on webarchive, download a copy of the webpage for your own records, make sure it won't totally disappear if op deletes their blog

the question of closed spaces: in fan studies, fandoms are considered closed spaces. when you publish a news article or an academic article, you're expecting that to get shared and circulated. when you publish a tumblr post, you're not. this matters less since we're not doing anthropology or whatever, but it's still probably polite to say (from an empty sideblog created for the purpose, obviously) "hey i'm going to use this in an academic article." probably only necessary if you're going to publish it.

what to do if op has a really obscene name???????

your prof and/or editor (especially if it's an editor?????) will have some objections to you citing a tumblr post probably, so make double triple extra sure that you have proved your point and that the tumblr post usage does not degrade the quality of the argument + the tone of the paper.

these are pretty raw thoughts, if anyone has experience citing tumblr posts in this manner or has thoughts on the subject, please do share!

#m.txt #grad blogging #thinking about how many of my thoughts on sci fi books especially can be traced to specific tumblr posts

[horce-divorce]

Something very intriguing about the intersection of individualism and personal responsibility vs learned helplessness vs the complete and utter lack of care for anyone else in this culture.... Like I have literally seen someone walking around coughing like gollum decrying how RSV is going around and "someone should DO something!!!" and then never wearing a fucking mask. Like??? IF ONLY WE COULD TAKE MATTERS INTO OUR OWN HANDS! the cdc said i didnt have to, though, so im not gonna. But somebody else definitely should, for sure. 🙄

it's entitlement, IMHO, that much seems clear, but like... how lmao. Where does it come from? The "I have to worry about mine so you worry about yours" thing? Like, I'm only personally responsible for myself bc of individualism, so that's true of everyone else, too? Is it the learned helplessness of western capitalism and Christian fundamentalism that has everyone convinced we have to wait for our savior to come, because this world is doomed and fucked and worthless and we can't change anything at all on our own?

Idk if this is making sense, I'm sure someone much smarter than me has already anlaysed this and laid it out much better, like there's probably some well-known essay on this somewhere that I just haven't read yet.

But idk I see this combination often, of "I'm an individual so I don't have to care about anyone else, that's THEIR job," and "help! daddy come save me I can't do anything, I'm not allowed :(" like. Entitlement to do whatever you want but also entitlement to someone else cleaning it up? What???

This may be a weird example to pair with covid safety, but I see this kind of a lot in national parks and on beaches and stuff too. People feel entitled to not follow rules, not educate themselves about where they're fucking about, not to stop and think ONCE that their presence may have an impact on others somehow. they'll like. climb on some ice shelves or get sucked into a rip current or wander off the trail somewhere or feed a bear or something and then be SHOCKED that no one can help them/clean up after their mistakes/fix the situation immediately. Its honestly like they expect customer service? Do they think customer service comes from nature lmao??? like buddy we are in a remote, wild area with very few resources, yes, if you get in trouble it's GONNA take the coast guard a while to get down there, IF they can even find you by then. Where's your sense of personal responsibility and rugged individualism now? It didn't lead you to want to learn, idk, ANYTHING about the place you're visiting/living in????

Idk maybe I'm not connecting these 2 thoughts that well but idk it's like people walk around in literally their own fucking world. Or they act like caring only goes one way, like I get to be an Individualist™️ and only worry about me, but also, everyone else has to worry about themselves AND care about me, also, as well.

Again, it's the entitlement! They're connected, idk, I'm just having a hard time saying it well I think.

Anyway I'm just pissed because I know so many people who claim to be progressive and to give a fuck about disabled and marginalized voices and who claim to be critical of the government, but the SECOND they get the ok to do something HARMFUL, they will JUMP at the chance as long as it's convenient. They won't even stop to think twice about why they're doing it, or the impact their actions could have.

I guess covid is a bit different bc right now the OFFICIAL RULES are to not give a fuck and do whatever you want, I guess. Idk just wild how either the rules are fine, and we should totally follow them! Or otherwise they're stupid rules, and we don't have to follow them! Depends on my mood! Personal responsibility and individualism means I get to decide what's fine for everyone!

I dunno I have Swiss cheese for a brain, because I had a fucking post viral chronic illness for a decade before covid even hit, but somebody back me up here. there's gotta be actual literature about this somewhere.

It's like the idea of individualism and "personal responsibility" abdicates anyone of consequence. Ppl really act like that. Never questioning anything they ever do because mind your own business. But also, everything is terrible, somebody should DO something! Not me, but somebody. But also, everyone should be an individual and only worry about themselves????? Make it make sense

#me #long post

[aeviare]

{personal hc about aether's behavior at the end of act one. this really turned into a five page essay adsfasd also, i haven't played act 2 yet so if this is all confirmed anyway then please just ignore me lmaoooooo}

aether seeing lyney and lynette and severely missing lumine like a phantom limb. a pain that's so deep inset into his chest that no matter how many times he physically rubs at the spot, the pain just won't go away. it makes little to no sense to me aether turning his back to the twins when he's literally holding childe's vision in his inventory and renamed the freaking balladeer, okay.

like, baby boy, you have sussier friends other than two actual sweet beans that were adopted by a harbinger. zoom eyeing childe (a fucking harbinger who has tried to kill aether in the past) and wanderer (oh look another harbinger who has tried to kill aether in the past).

it is the only thing i can reasonably think of outside of hyv just saying 'ha ha fuck traveler's actual personality we've given them.' it just makes sense to me. and with lyney telling us that he fought tooth and nail to save lynette and to keep them off the streets. it sincerely is reminiscent of his relationship with lumine before they were parted.

my aether likes the twins. he loves the twins, even. if he didn't like them, then he wouldn't have continued to represent them after furina announced their ties to the fatui. perhaps he was blindsided by that information, but again. he is friends with sussier people.

i think for my muse, just looking at them too long reminds him of what he's missing. and what's he's searching for... and what he's lost. (and his worst fear being that he will never get it back, but this post is already long enough without me being unhinged again)

it isn't that he isn't sympathetic to their story or even that he cares all that much about their fatui ties. and after some thought, he realizes they didn't ask to be taken in by the fatui, and it shouldn't matter anyway.

because the twins have been nothing but kind to him and paimon. and besides omitting some of the truth of their past. he literally just met them! why would they tell him they're part of the sussy snez organization. they're new friends and technically still strangers.

it just makes more sense to me that he walks away because he's missing lumine and dealing with inner turmoil, rather than actually walking away because of their ties with the fatui.

again, please see, we are literally holding childe's vision (and hand probably) in our hands.

#remember when i said when i woke up i would post this #wellp i've been awake for like 12 hours oops #❥ 🇹‌🇭‌🇪‌ 🇰‌🇪‌🇪‌🇵‌🇪‌🇷‌ 🇮‌🇸‌ 🇫‌🇦‌🇩‌🇮‌🇳‌🇬‌ 🇦‌🇼‌🇦‌🇾‌ {ooc} #❥ 🇫‌🇱‌🇾‌🇮‌🇳‌🇬‌ 🇼‌🇮‌🇹‌🇭‌ 🇾‌🇴‌🇺‌ 🇮‌🇳‌ 🇲‌🇾‌ 🇭‌🇪‌🇦‌🇷‌🇹‌ {hc}

[andromede-ayne]

was listening to some folk music and.

this reminds me SO much of Garak especially in relation to how Tain treated him

Here is the song on Spotify so you can listen to it to get better context for the little character study I'm going to do now

This first lyric talks about a "falcon" (Garak) who starts out innocent, being corrupted by "men with guns" (Tain). Garak starts out as just a kid, but from a very young age Tain puts him through hell to turn him into a weapon that he can use. he is trained to become an expert in killing. As an Obsidian Order agent, Garak is merely a tool for Tain to use against his enemies.

The first line of this phrase talks about sparrows and doves, which are common prey animals for falcons. This can be interpreted as Garak's targets/victims. He keeps his mind and body sharp and focuses on the missions he is given. He is one of the best agents in the order. Despite this it is not enough to earn Tain's love. Garak shows immense loyalty to Tain, but Tain does not return any of this loyalty, and does not show any kind of love for Garak. ("You've always been a weakness I can't afford" and "I should have killed your mother before you were born")

once again we have another lyric referring to how dangerous the falcon is. Garak is precise, quick, intelligent, and deadly. He is very dangerous, and Tain knows this. He knows that someone as dangerous as Garak could eventually become a danger to the Obsidian Order or Tain himself. To keep Garak from posing a threat, Tain keeps him in the dark about a lot of things. We see this throughout the series, where Tain hides information from Garak. He can't pose a threat to the Obsidian Order or Tain if he doesn't have adequate information on them. Tain also ensures that Garak won't become a threat to him by making him extremely loyal. He teaches him that his personal feelings don't matter, and that he has to make sacrifices. He teaches Garak not to feel anything ("sentiment is the greatest weakness") so that even if he does have objections to his missions or the way he is treated, he will push those feelings aside for the sake of Tain or Cardassia.

Because of the way he was raised, Garak thinks that the only way he can be of value to someone is if he is doing something that benefits them. Tain only cared about Garak because he was useful to him, and now Garak feels that the only way that he can be loved is if he is of use to that person. This can be seen throughout the show. Even as an exile, he is constantly doing things in service of Cardassia, and later on in service of the Federation. Even his job as a tailor is a reflection of this, since he does customer service. (There could probably be a lot more study on this topic especially in relation to class dynamics, but I'm trying not to make an entire essay here and I think other people would probably have better insights than me anyways.)

This lyric talks about how the falcon turns against the people who care for it. Garak has never been shown what a healthy relationship looks like, and he is a very dangerous individual. As a result he can be a very dangerous person to love, since he doesn't really have a concept of what's healthy and what isn't. Throughout the series we see that he is willing to turn his back on his friend if he deems it necessary, even going as far as to risk their lives (the whole romulan ordeal with Tain and Odo, and then the attempted changeling genocide thing). He also lashes out when Julian is trying to help him with the implant. He is even self-aware: whenever people show any kind of distrust towards him he applauds them for it.

Here the lyrics begin addressing the audience, directing them to break the falcon of its chains. Because of Tain's manipulation, Garak is a captive in a metaphorical sense. Since childhood, Garak has been taught that he is only worth loving if he is useful, and this way of thinking has kept him down. He is trapped by the web of lies and manipulation that Tain created, and his childhood follows him around in the form of trauma. (This also can be interpreted in a more literal sense, because of the implant in his brain.) In any case, Garak is a captive to his past and to Tain and the Obsidian Order He needs someone to free him of this, and this can only be done if someone shows him that he does not need to be useful in order to deserve love.

This final set of lyrics is the only one that I'm having trouble interpreting, because this is the only one where the perspective switches to first person. It talks about telling lies to the falcon, I feel like that doesn't work very well with the way I interpreted Garak as the falcon, since Garak is usually the one who is telling lies. I hope you guys enjoyed my little character study, and feel free to tell me in the notes how you interpret this last line!

#star trek #ds9 #star trek ds9 #garak #elim garak #Spotify

[bi-sapphics]

I just wanna say thank you so much for openly talking about bisexual history with the terms butch and femme. I’ve been struggling for a while about using the term butch for myself and even if I’m not in a place right now where I feel safe or valid enough to use it, seeing other bisexual butches wearing the label proudly makes my heart warm. Your work on here is very appreciated and you are an wonderful person <3

As a question, how did you grow comfortable with calling yourself butch in the face of erasure and biphobia?

thank you for the kind ask and you're welcome!! i feel like it's my duty as a butch to protect and serve my community as best as i possibly can ─ after all, what's the point of participating in the culture if you won't play your designated part (regarding sapphic roles & relationships at least, since there are other options/reasons for identifying)?? leading and helping others is what being butch and femme is all about!! historically, back when queer life was extremely dangerous an unaccepted in the united states, butches would always protect femmes and femmes would always (emotionally or otherwise) support butches. of course, the culture isn't limited to that and never was, having strict rules/roles would defeat the point, but it is a widely honored tradition even today. i do post for myself, but i’m also really glad you like my content and excited that i get to educate you a little more, as bi + B/F history and culture is a special interest of mine. :)

i really hope one day soon you can feel safe and open about your butch identity, as i'm sure that's when you'll feel the most free and happy you possibly ever could, but what matters right now is that you have the pride in knowing you connect with other butches and wish to be one of us/them. i would say in a different way i can relate to you ─ i'm not closeted by any means, both online and irl, but i certainly don't "look butch" yet and still have to work on physically getting there, such as shopping for more masc clothes while waiting for my haircut and whatnot. i only feel comfortable considering myself butch for the moment because socially i've already got a masc name & pronouns, and my sense of gender qualifies for the term. it's the best i can do, especially considering i'm still single and not dating a femme right now lmao. point is, nothing's stopping you from knowing who you are and where you want to be, even if there are currently obstacles directly in the way. i hope maybe that's even slightly more comforting to you??

anyway, all of this text and i still haven't answered your question in full. for that, i'd love to mention and lead you over to @femmebis if you aren't already familiar with them!! her historical essay advocating for bisexual usage of butch & femme, as well as all the positivity for us on her blog, is what familiarized me to ballroom culture in a way i could effectively understand and allowed me to feel like it was for me and i wasn't taking anything that wasn't mine. they gave me a sense of belonging and gradually helped me feel comfortable with myself and my own sense of masculinity. honestly, i would say it's this sort of cycle that calls for awakenings like that one i had. we learn from other (and probably older) butches & femmes what it's like to be one of them, and they inspire us to continue the legacy as we see fit. it's part of the tradition across generations and it's what keeps our history alive and well. for that reason, it makes me feel really good that i've inspired you myself and lets me believe that i've already done my part, if only on a miniscule level. 🫶💛

#chase answers #butch/femme #butch/femme history #butch tag #bi tag #butch bi #butch bisexual #femme bi #femme bisexual #bi history #femmebis

[dallas-ghostbusters]

Tobin's. Nothing.

Spates. Nothing.

Kemp's. Nothing.

Not a single book, article, or essay held any answers to dispelling Tiamat from her vessel, and Cassidy was just about out of hope. The gravity of the situation was finally crashing down on her. She was supposed to be the one with all the lore knowledge. She was supposed to know everything about the world of the supernatural and occult. She was supposed to find Tiamat's weakness.

"I failed. The universe is going to end and it's all my fault."

Keith looked up from the portal control panel. "If it's any consolation, the rest of us feel just as guilty if not more. I guess it's everyone's fault."

Cassidy held her head in her hands. "Surprisingly enough, Keith, that doesn't make me feel better."

He shrugged. "Was worth a shot. Well anyway, I wouldn't beat yourself up too bad about it. Really it was only a matter of time before we had a Class VII event. I mean, when Emily was possessed, that Class III pushed their own soul out of their body. If that wasn't an indication of increasing PK activity, I don't know what is."

Cassidy huffed. "Why do you have to be so smart?"

"Hey, you're smart too."

"Yeah, but I'm not good at being smart outside of ghosts and monsters." She picked up a small cylindrical device and rotated it around in her hands. "Like this. I could never make this! I mean such a little thing that allows us to talk throughout the nexus! It's incredible!"

"The NCN? That old thing? You are aware that Tiamat 'helped' me make it. It probably doesn't even work. Ever since she cut us off from Rocket's dimension, I've been thinking about when we were cut off from most of the nexus. Before I made the IDTS with Dr. Stantz, we were communicating fine with everyone else. It doesn't make sense that just because that blew up we wouldn't be able to talk to anyone else outside our dimension other than Rocket. Tiamat's just been in control the whole time."

Cassidy looked over the NCN once more. On the top of the cylinder, there was a familliar symbol. "𒀭" Cassidy traced over the grooves in the plastic shell where the symbol was engraved. "Been in control the whole time... Keith what made you choose this symbol?"

He shrugged. "Dunno. I was probably influenced to pick it by Tiamat. No idea what it means. Maybe an explosion? Is that how we'll all go out?"

"Keith, this is the first letter of her name in Akkadian cuneiform."

"Well that checks out."

Cassidy nodded and pulled out her phone. "Didn't you send a schematic of that to Dr. Stantz in dimension 1?"

"Yeah... Why?"

"What if it's not a communication router? What if it was some kind of way for Tiamat to focus her energy better? Think about it, after you made this, her activity here increased. She got powerful enough to control the weather, manipulate the astral plane, and jump to a new dimension and claim a vessel."

Keith hit his forehead with his palm. "Of course! She's only able to stay in dimension 1 because the router is an anchor point for her energy! If we can get in contact with Dr. Stantz, he'll know where the anchor is and he can destroy it. That should leave Tiamat vulnerable and make it easier to exorcize her from Elon."

Cassidy stood up and beamed. "And she won't have anywhere else to run to but here! Unless she somehow has her energy focused somewhere else, this dimension will have the only anchor point!"

Keith matched Cassidy's expression and threw his hands on her shoulders. "She'll be more powerful, sure, but we can take her! We just have to destroy our anchor point once she's back here, and then she'll be ripe for banishing! Cassidy, you're a genius!"

She swatted the air. "Oh come on, you would've come to the same conclusion eventually."

"Yeah but you got there first."

Cassidy sheepishly rubbed the back of her neck. "Aw jee. I uh. I guess I should go notify Dr. Stantz and Dr. Spengler huh."

"Yeah I think that would be wise. Godspeed, Cass," he said with a salute.

She saluted back. "Same to you, Keith."

#📚 #☢

[hard-core-super-star]

poor rubix's brain.... I'm starting to think this is a cry for help

but then you won't get a star either, or else your ego will go through the roof! OKAY, WAIT A MINUTE. we are definitely not talking about them and this is a really long article, an article that by the way I didn't start reading and didn't get my jaw dropped by the quotes from some poems, and obviously didn't give me any ideas or inspiration to write something. Okay, since you wouldn't like to point that out, I wouldn't like to say that this makes a lot of sense and that now I liked some of the poems mentioned even more-

your Insta page is actually your worst enemy and makes a point of throwing information and things in your face, forcing you to see just like the birdbox guy opening the woman's eyes so she can see the “invisible” things making everyone want to die. OH- your insta page IS your birdbox guy-

not all men... coff coff but always a man coff coff. and my god yes???? there are so many disgusting comments, there's no way anyone can look at this and think it's OK for people to say things like that or think that hailee isn't uncomfortable with this shit.

It's just funny that we both agreed to leave it out but kept adding a few things, consequently coming back to the topic lmao. the closet is glass but it's the kind of glass that only mimes can see fr. I already said I'm not good with words and it came out a mess, do you still want me to talk about my thoughts on Kate? 😭

– 🌟

we are going to pretend like my mind totally didn't go blank when i read that first part 😶 ANYWAY, you could argue my entire blog IS a cry for help and you probably wouldn't be wrong.

unfortunately, my ego will go through the roof no matter what but i admire your efforts. i’m so glad you didn’t read it because it definitely doesn't do a great job of explaining things that took me like three months to research. and i definitely don't think about the “armed cavalier” poem every day and become awe-struck all over again. and i’m extra glad we're not bringing emily dickinson into it because they definitely don't have a bunch of poems about death, immortality, and the idea of heaven that hurt a lot because they were both most definitely queer.

that's a perfect way to describe it, ngl. i hate using Instagram now because every time, there's that sense of dread about what it's going to show me. like i’m just trying to find pretty pictures of olivia rodrigo, i do not care about football!!

yeah, it's absolutely awful and it maybe wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if i didn't have a feeling JA actively encourages those kinds of comments. maybe not from his fans but i bet he's not policing his teammates if they want to say shit like that about hailee.

i know, we have to stop encouraging each other to keep ranting about it but there's just SO much to say. i need someone to just get it over with and smash that damn glass closet before i lose my mind. you say this as if i didn't admit to rereading everything you send like four messages ago. if your thoughts on kate are anything like those essays you sent, i am 119% on board. like, my blog is practically dedicated to all my thoughts on kate, so it's not like anyone’s dying to hear what i think ‘cause i’m pretty consistent in my depictions of her. in conclusion, YES, i want to hear your thoughts!

#rubix replies #🌟