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terramythos · 3 years

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TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 13 of 26

Title: The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle #2) (1972)

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult, Third-Person, Female Protagonist

Rating: 10/10

Date Began: 5/14/2021

Date Finished: 6/3/2021

Arha lives in an isolated community called The Place, the last bastion of worship for the ancient gods known as The Nameless Ones. She was taken from her family at a young age, and forced to abandon her true name, Tenar. Now she lives as The One Priestess, a title passed from one woman to another throughout the ages, believed to be an eternal reincarnation. Day in and day out, she performs complex rituals which have lost their meaning, and spends her free time navigating The Place’s vast underground Labyrinth.

Everything changes for Arha when she traps a mysterious, artifact-seeking sorcerer in the maze. She’s been taught to mistrust the strange magicians of the west for her entire life. Yet she’s fascinated by this man and his kindness. Arha soon finds herself questioning her purpose in life and her isolated, lonely existence-- but escaping it is not as easy as it seems.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Content warnings and minor spoilers below the cut.

Content warnings for the book: Animal death, child abuse, slavery, and death. Torture of prisoners. Mention of genocide. Some implied mind control.

Usually when I really like a book, I can narrow down my reasons without too much trouble. Maybe the setting was cool, or the characters fascinating, or the writing style popped. Maybe all of the above! But my affection for The Tombs of Atuan is harder to articulate. I enjoyed the book, relished it even, but I’m hard pressed to say what in particular made me love it so much. For me it was one of those books that was much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Tombs of Atuan is a stark contrast to A Wizard of Earthsea. While the previous book detailed a world-spanning adventure, this novel takes place almost entirely in a small and isolated setting. In fact, the first half seems like it’s from another series entirely. The tone is much darker. The novel is deliberate and slow-paced, which is something I usually don’t like. But Le Guin has such a way with words and character development that I was totally enraptured. There’s a heavy focus on Arha/Tenar’s upbringing and daily life in service to The Nameless Ones. This doesn’t change until Ged enters the story and (literally) brings the outside world with him -- and some much-needed context.

Even beyond all that, the setting feels claustrophobic. There’s the bleak rituals and sacrifices Arha/Tenar must perform. There’s her terse, strained relationships with the other residents of The Place. There’s the inherent desolation of a small hamlet in the middle of the desert. Most of all, there’s Arha/Tenar’s exploration of the subterranean Labyrinth, and the sense of dark forces lurking in its depths. It’s noteworthy that The Nameless Ones never show themselves physically, yet they feel real and foreboding in how they affect and manipulate the characters. This adds a palpable layer of anxiety to the whole novel.

When I read I usually can’t “feel” myself in the setting, but this book was an exception. In particular, there’s a scene near the end where Ged and Arha/Tenar are lying down in a boat, staring at the stars, and speaking to each other... and I vividly felt myself there in that moment. I have to credit Le Guin’s skill as a writer for making me feel that way; something many authors across hundreds of books have rarely accomplished.

Another big strength of this book is the character development. One of my main criticisms of A Wizard of Earthsea was the dearth of interesting female characters. Arha/Tenar is exactly what was missing from that book. As The One Priestess, she holds a place of reverence among everyone else in her life. But this leaves her isolated, lonely, and trapped. She tries throughout the novel to fulfill her role as the cold, calculating woman she’s supposed to be. She’s prone to sudden outbursts of anger or cruelty because of her upbringing (and potentially the influence of The Nameless Ones; this is kept vague). Yet her kindness peeks through as she struggles with this aspect of herself, and ultimately breaks free with Ged’s help.

I also like that Le Guin wrote this from Arha/Tenar’s point of view. The Tombs of Atuan could easily be just another Ged adventure story; he has a clear goal that’s in line with his character in the previous book. But Arha/Tenar’s perspective feels much more intimate. We see all her personal struggles and relationships, and her inherent familiarity with the setting adds a lot of nuance we’d miss through Ged’s eyes. It’s also interesting to see Ged from another character’s perspective, especially someone prone to mistrust him.

And Ged himself is a great character; I can see why people like him so much. In particular, I love that he’s this this important and powerful wizard, yet his defining traits in this story are his patience and gentleness (things he incidentally struggled with in A Wizard of Earthsea). Even when Arha/Tenar captures and imprisons him, he treats her with kindness and respect. And it’s not a ploy to manipulate her; it’s because he genuinely sees her potential as a person and how they can help each other. I’m just a huge sucker for that kind of thing.

Finally, there’s lots of interesting thematic stuff that I won’t explore in detail, but might be interesting to analyze on a reread. Imprisonment is a big one; Arha/Tenar literally imprisons Ged, but is likewise imprisoned in her role as The One Priestess (something Ged clearly picks up on). Consider the literal role of a labyrinth; to trap someone and bewilder them-- and how Arha/Tenar spends so much time memorizing the one in this story. The power of names continues to be relevant; the protagonist is Arha for most of the story, but she eventually rediscovers her true name Tenar and uses that instead, in parallel with her character arc (this definitely wasn’t intended to be a trans allegory, but damn if it didn’t hit that way). There’s also the symbolism inherent in the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, the artifact Ged came to find. When Arha/Tenar joins Ged’s half to the one they find in the Labyrinth... right as the two resolve to work together and escape... Le Guin, you turned the MacGuffin into a symbol of trust! I’m going to scream!

The Tombs of Atuan just slapped, what can I say? On the surface level it’s a fantasy novel, but it often transcends the label and provides a deeply human tale. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, and I found myself reading it slowly to savor every chapter. I’m curious how the remaining four books compare.

#if i had a penny for every 10/10 i read this year with antagonists called 'The Nameless One(s)' i'd have two pennies #which is not a lot but it's weird it happened twice #10/10 #taylor reads #2021 reading challenge

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bestworstcase · 3 years

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I loved the conversation between Catalina and Sitheach! It got me wondering about options for transitioning in your world. How does that work?

(Also how do you pronounce Sitheach’s name? I’m SURE I’m saying it wrong in my head)

ˌsiθeˈæχ if you’re an IPA person. see-thay-ACH. the th is unvoiced (like in “breath”), the a is as in “cat,” and the ch is articulated in the throat so think like a phlegmy and guttural “ack!”

it’s also the saporian word for ligament akjsdkjfl

so i definitely think there are efforts being made in certain places (ingvarr, azoth, minkar, antares, and aberdinon are kind of the hotspots for this in my head) to develop secular methods of transition that are not magic-based so essentially alchemical hrt and (esp in antares, which is a huge melting pot of cultures so i think of it as having really robust and knowledgeable medicine in general) surgeries, with the benefit being you’re not beholden to a god for your transition - which appeals both to people who aren’t religious or don’t want to mess around with magic at all and to people who are devoted to gods whose magic doesn’t lend itself well to transition and who for whatever reason don’t want to branch out to another god just for the sake of transitioning.

but then like - the way gods work here is they have a domain, which is specific and unique to them, and then they have a sphere of influence connected to that domain which can be a lot more general / varied / overlapping with other gods. which is to say that “change” in some form belongs to the spheres of a lot of different gods and any time that happens you can finagle a transition out of that god’s magic if you’re imaginative enough and determined enough. and the more strongly that god is associated with change, the more central that is to their sphere, the easier it is to use their magic that way.

so! zhan tiri, for example. her domain is hunger but her sphere is enormous because, like i said in the last post, she has a tendency of going “neat! mine now” whenever something catches her interest which - ksjdfjks to quote the blurb from the world anvil i’m putting together:

Zhan Tiri is notorious for her eclecticism. Her basic nature is to hunger, but her sphere has expanded throughout the eons in answer to her insatiable appetite. She claims dominion over the sea, storms, soil, and the sky. She is heavily associated with cyclical change, particularly with the seasons and the cycle of life, death, and rebirth; also, with beginnings, endings, liminality, doorways, thresholds, and moments or places of transition; also, with choice, freedom, wildness, and hedonism. Rot and decay are her purview, but so are recovery and renewal. Humanity itself is sometimes considered to be part of her sphere, as is the concept, pursuit, and practice of choimghē.

part of the reason she is so heavily associated with change / cycles / transformation is she herself has undergone some very extreme changes in nature; she started off as essentially a mindless cosmic parasite that crawled out of the void and created the current cosmos by accident, became hunger/a monstrous primordial god, caught ennui from humans, ate a tree and became the cosmic bridge between the profane and sublime realms and now has feelings vjkskldf. and then of course her manifestations and the way she presents herself are so varied and changeable too. so she’s like - KNOWN for this, and the rites sitheach references in 13 (the crēdathámanē) is kind of, if someone had only ever heard of one method of magical transition it would be that one.

but then like. turul’s domain is insight but he has associations with cycles and transformation generally (you know... phases of the moon...), and huma’s is hope but she also has associations with cyclical change and especially the cycle of rot/renewal (seasons!) so a lot of their cults have set rituals for transitioning as well. (*cough* trans brotherhood rights *cough*).

or char malách’s domain is wonder, but he’s so strongly associated with artistry, craftsmanship, creativity that his magic is actually incorporated into the crēdathámanē rites along with zhan tiri’s and could also fairly easily be used this way by itself, although i don’t think there’s a specific like, standard ritual because for him this would be such an individual process, like sculpting or painting but in this case the canvas is you.

and then! ferr’s domain is order and she’s associated heavily with fate and destiny as well as like, constructive things (like metallurgy, alchemy, architecture, anything where you’re taking raw materials and turning them into something more organized), and havot’s domain is wildness and she’s very heavily associated with free will and choice (and similar to char malách, creativity and self-expression as well) and both of them are often worshipped in combination and their magic tends to be very complementary - and i think they’re somewhat unique in this regard in that the transition magic associated with them is probably a pretty even blend vs all from one god or a crēdathámanē situation where you thread in a bit of magic from the local creativity god (char malách in the west, havot in the central plains) to refine the process.

etc. so there’s a lot of options and with magic there’s not really hard boundaries - you’re limited by the sphere of whatever patron you’re drawing magic from, of course, and whatever rules they impose on you in exchange for use of their magic, but within those bounds it’s all about will and want and if you can plausibly imagine a way to accomplish something - anything! - through the pathway of your patron’s sphere, then. you can.

(like - unrelated to transition - but in moonless air 8, sitheach’s whole little spiel when they’re talking lance through what they’re doing is essentially ‘i have figured out a way to apply necromancy to living people because TECHNICALLY some of your CELLS are dead’ and it works sjklfdlk. and cathay was kind of like squint ‘don’t do that again i don’t like it’ so now it’s Not Allowed lmao. but that’s kind of how things work in general - the really truly powerful sorcerers are the ones who can think outside the box and pull things off on a technicality.)

#bitter snow #Anonymous

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ghoulie-gator · 4 years

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CW: guns in image, mention of transphobic violence and the T-slur.

PSA: Dear cis friends, never out your trans friends without their explicit permission to do so. Also, ask their approval as to who you’re telling and how you’re telling them.

That’s the tl;dr, below is a bigger, more extensive explanation of what I mean and what brought on this rant.

So, the other day, a friend of mine told her boyfriend that I’m trans, despite me directly stating in the past that I am very uncomfortable with him knowing. He’s conservative, even by Russian standards, and he has something of a temper. This friend and I were very close, so I trusted that she wouldn’t do the thing she did. That said, I understand what led her to do so, though it by no means excuses her actions.

She had been hiding my existence from him, because we are best friends and she tells me literally everything, and if he found out that she had a friend like that who (in his view) is male, he would likely cause a huge fight and maybe do something rash. So yeah, the pressures of cishet jealousy led my friend to out me as trans against my will.

When she voice messaged me about this yesterday, she seemed very happy. She had solved a problem that was stressing her out, she wouldn’t have to hide her best friend from her boyfriend anymore. She seemed very surprised when in my voice messages in response, I was crying and cursing, clearly in the middle of a full-on breakdown. She genuinely didn’t realize it was this big of a deal.

So, cis friends and allies who are wondering why outing someone is a big deal, here’s a quick list:

1) Safety. The first and foremost reason closeted queer people stay in the closet is a feeling of being in danger when you are percieved as queer in public. Depending on the country you live in and the person you’re telling, you could be putting your trans friends in real danger by outing them. Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other countries with a widespread culture of queerphobia have a great deal of literal lynchings of queer people that the police and public do not care to do anything about. Furthermore, even if someone does not face physical violence as a result of their being outed, they could be ostracized from their communities and sources of economic support. In my specific case, I feel that as long as this couple is together, I’m fine on this front, because he will not want to hurt someone she cares about. If something changed, if he had a reason to want to hurt the people around her, he could very easily doxx me and out me to my family, at which point I expect I would be kicked out or put in conversion therapy. He knows both my deadname and my preferred name, and he’s seen my profile on facebook and VK, and he knows the mutual acquaintances that I share with my friend. So to reiterate, when outing a queer person, you are giving someone the power to ruin that queer person’s life. You may trust this person immensely and think they would never do that, but that’s not for you to decide.

2) Comfort. Even if it turns out that outing someone didn’t cause them direct harm, it will still definitely be a big source of anxiety. Where I live, the vast majority of people think that trans people are degenerate, mentally ill, disgusting perverts. I imagine this is unfortunately the case for most places on earth right now. This means that I do a great deal of testing someone’s opinions on queer issues before I come out to them, because if I don’t, I will just have one more person out there who thinks of me as subhuman. “But why should you care what other people think? Just relax.” Right. Yeah. Anyone who says this doesn’t know how exhausting and grating it is to know that there are people out there who think of you in this way. Furthermore, when those are people who constantly talk to the ones you love, it’s a massive source of paranoia. Is the transphobe influencing my loved ones? Are my loved ones misgendering me and awkwardly nodding along when I’m brought up by/around that person? I can’t know. I’d like to say I know my friends are above that, but I can’t assume that anymore, because apparently things that are obvious to me can’t be obvious to my cis friends and have to be spelled out.

3) Freedom, Boundaries and Trust. When you out someone without their consent, they are going to feel betrayed. That is inevitable. Outing someone in that way is a statement. It states that you did not respect their autonomy on this issue. It states that you were willing to make this major decision for them. Whether you did it because you think you knew best, or because you didn’t think it’s a big deal, or because you were prioritizing the ways in which it would benefit you, it does not matter. Outing someone means not recognizing their autonomy and experiences. Outing someone means taking control of their life in a way that betrays and abuses the trust they placed in you. If you value someone’s trust, don’t out them without their permission. Respect their decisions. The person who did this to me matters to me alot and I love them, she was one of my two dearest friends, but I really cannot decide now whether I am comfortable staying friends with her or not. I’ll have to see what I settle on after my emotions die down, but even if we stay friends, I doubt we will be the same.

Now, all of that said, I’m not saying that if you’ve outed someone, you’re malicious and meant to hurt them. Mistakes happen. That said, it is now on you to do what you can to fix the issue. You’ve dug this hole, now lie in it.

“What do I do if I already fucked up?”

1) Apologize. Tell your friend what happened. Tell them you understand that you messed up. Tell them you understand if they want distance from you right now, whether that is temporary or permanent. Don’t make it about yourself. Don’t make excuses. Give your reasoning if they ask for it, but know that it doesn’t excuse you unless the person you hurt tells you it does.

2) Damage control. You can’t expect your trans friend to do the work of fixing the situation. Do whatever you can to prevent negative consequences for the person you hurt, and make sure that throughout the entire time you’re doing this, the person who you outed is aware of your ideas and approves of them. The things you should do depend heavily on your specific situation and on what your friend is comfortable with.

2.1)Can you pull over the person you’ve outed them to, and make that person start subscribing to progressive gender theory? DO that. Research arguments for trans and nonbinary validity, run them by your friend. Some queer people will want to help you make arguments or even have the conversation themselves, others will want to have nothing to do with this and you’ll be on your own. Either way, if you’re trying to change someone’s mind, run your arguments by as many queer people as you can reach to ensure that your arguments are effective and non-harmful. Ideally, get your arguments from queer sources in the first place.

2.2) If changing their mind is out of the question, at least make your stance known to the person you’ve outed your friend to. You are most likely not putting yourself in danger when you say you respect queer identity and will not tolerate queerphobia, but this goes a long way towards making your queer friends feel safe and comfortable around you again. If the person in question cannot bring up the queer people in your life outside of a queerphobic context, tell them to not talk about those people at all. Be stern, be clear. Don’t be wishy-washy or try to make both sides happy with you, because at best, that means awkwardly saying “ahahaha that’s funny but maybe you shouldnt say that” when people call me a ‘gross tr*nny’ in your presence.

2.3) If your actions have caused genuine danger for the person you outed, provide material support. Make sure they can find a place to stay where they feel safe and assist them in any way you can. Get them out of danger and into a situation where they can survive on their own. They may want your help, or they may reject it. If they reject it, trust their judgement, but make it clear that you will help should an emergency come up.

That’s it for that, sorry about the long and dark post y’all. Just had to get this off my chest. If you’re queer, please show this post or explain this concept to your cishet friends, it’s not as obvious to them as you might think it is. If you’re cishet but understand and respect this idea already, please don’t take this post personally or feel called out. There are genuinely good cishet allies who make our lives easier, and I appreciate those people alot. Thank you, love you all, the happier memes will resume shortly <3 </p>

#trans #PSA #queer #allies #outing #long post cw #negative cw

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lovedsammy · 3 years

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I saw your Sastiel pack and LOVED it! Why does anyone ship Castiel with Dean though, he treats him terribly? Is Dean like that with everyone AKA if I watch SPN will I be constantly wincing in empathy?

Oh wow, thank you so much for this! Suffice it to say, this could become a rather long response, so I’ll make sure to put it under a read more.

Question for you, nonnie: are the Sastiel scene packs the only exposure you’ve had to SPN? If you’re thinking of watching it, there is a whole lot more to it, believe me, but let me explain this as best as I can for you. <3

The way you see Dean treating Cas in the scene packs is admittedly only a part of their relationship, but it’s the most PREVALENT part. It’s what you’ll see happen between them the most. There are moments of friendliness, even ‘shippy’ moments if you get that vibe.

I used to ship Destiel way back in the s4-s8 era. Initially, my reasons for liking it were that I loved how Cas expressed emotion whenever he spent time around Dean, and the idea of an angel falling in love with a human appealed to me (i.e: Cas FALLING BECAUSE HE FELL IN LOVE). I liked the idea of Dean, a man who didn’t believe in Heaven and angels, finding this one angel and seeing that they can be good. Cas saved Dean from Hell, after all. They were having so many moments together that went from outright hostility on Dean’s end to something of a comradeship and a hint of something more. I definitely saw some of the appeal.

However, that appeal was short-sighted and it was heavily influenced by members of the fandom (the pro-Destiel camp that insisted on seeing it literally EVERYWHERE). I was sucked in, incorporated their views as my own, and hadn’t quite decided where I felt ‘at home’ in the fandom. Especially because when the scene in 4x07 happened and Cas and Sam met for the first time, my first thought was: “Oh shit, I could end up shipping this. I already love their dynamic.” But it was a low-key thought, because bringing up a potential for Sastiel at that time when the fandom was mostly loud Destiel shippers that outright hated Sam, much less the idea of him with DEAN’S angel? You’d get torn to shreds, lmao. So I kept those thoughts to myself, having no outlet to talk about them, until I finally came over to the Sam side of the fandom, risking losing friends and followers along the way, and I definitely did. I unfollowed some people that I initially really liked because of how they made Sam fans feel and how they felt about Sam in general.

I really do think the primary reasons for shipping Destiel are that:

A) Brother bias. A lot of the SPN fans I’ve encountered are generally more of Dean fans than Sam. Sam gets so much flack both within and outside of the fandom. So naturally, Dean fans are going to be more invested in dynamics and relationships for him than they are for Sam.

B) Dean and Cas had a lot more moments together very early on, so they had more of a ‘foundation.’ I guarantee you that if Sastiel had been given the same amount of screen time early, it likely would’ve gone a different direction.

C) Cas’s development - or expansion - of emotions occurred primarily around Dean. The show is very Dean-centered (biased) and you see the show a lot through his eyes. You need to read between the lines and look at it with a different perspective to get Sam’s, much less anyone else’s. So if you’re fixating on moments where Cas is emotional, you think it’s happening because of Dean. But there were many scenes where after talking to Sam, Cas expressed emotion, doubt, and other emotions. Plus, we hadn’t known at the time that Cas had been created with a crack in his chassis, and was already predispositioned to loving humanity and only by meeting Dean (and Sam) was that brought out.

D) The desperation for queer rep. Sadly, there are plenty of Destiel shippers who are straight girls that just want to see two hot men get it on, but there are many people of the LGBTQ+ community that are genuinely looking for good representation. I think the idea of Destiel is something that could’ve worked for rep had it been done right, but it wasn’t. I’m all for more rep, and good rep at that. I consider myself Ace, but still going through it all, so I’m not very involved in the community (although I’m definitely an ally) and I want rep that everyone can feel represents them. What most Destiel shippers don’t seem to get is that people who are LGBTQ+ are not always Destiel shippers and I have plenty of friends who are queer or bi or trans that ship Sastiel or Wincest instead. It comes down less to people who are anti-Destiel being homophobic and more of that some of us just... don’t like abusive relationships, which Destiel definitely falls under.

If you decide to watch the show:

Yes, Dean is very often abusive towards Cas. He’s abusive towards Sam, too as well as Jack. He has anger issues and outbursts that the show loves to sweep under the rug because it’s naturally biased towards him. However, early on especially, we are shown that he can still be good, be gentle, and loving at times. The last 10 or so seasons, we kind of lost some of that. I had to go episode by episode in how I felt about Dean. The most important piece of advice I can give you is watch the show for yourself, and don’t let anyone else’s views impact how you see it.

#Anonymous #anti destiel #asks

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carewyncromwell · 3 years

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I don't know if you want to talk about this (and feel free to ignore this if you don't want to answer), but I wanted to ask which side of the Ethren mess you're on? I know in the beginning you were on his side, but I've seen so much hate and so many accusations and I don't know what to believe anymore, and I trust your judgement

I have to be honest -- when I first saw that a blog had been created with the specific purpose of “calling out” someone in the HPHM fandom...I blocked it.

I come to this fandom largely to escape from the real world. It’s been one of the few remaining sanctuaries I’ve had during this quarantine and from my own mental health problems. I’ve made a lot of friends in this community, and I feel very strongly about putting out more positive content than negative, as well as trying to digest more positive than negative. I don’t like the thought of a stranger posting stuff online about someone else who -- let’s be honest -- nobody truly knows unless they actually physically know them IRL. Unless one wants to go down an entire rabbit hole of getting to know a person uncomfortably well, there’s not much anyone can do to prove what’s true. And I know it sounds really immature and selfish of me, but...I was never that interested in learning much about this fandom’s members’ personal lives, excluding what the friends I’ve made have been willing to confide in me on a case by case basis. I have plenty of my own drama happening over here on my side, and I just want to have fun roleplaying with people’s characters and making content for both mine and theirs. It’s been one of the few things that helped me fight back my untreated and severe chronic depression after being furloughed from my job thanks to the COVID-19 shutdown. My job had been my escape, and without it, I was drowning -- one of my only life preservers was making content for this blog. So for my own mental health, I shut out the negativity, because I wasn’t emotionally or mentally able to deal with it. And admittedly, it felt to me as though this sort of thing really shouldn’t be handled online when -- again -- this sort of thing seems like it’d be better handled in the real world and the legal system, rather than in the court of mostly anonymous public opinion. And it also feels kind of nasty to reblog content from people online who simply liked the character Ethren Whitecross and made fan content for him, just to harangue them for it. It’s like attacking all Harry Potter fans for being transphobic just because they enjoyed something created by a trans-exclusionary radical feminist -- particularly when in the case of Ethren, the vast majority of us don’t know Ren personally. One could’ve related to Ethren’s story without knowing anything about his creator, and people did, often not because of any kind of malevolent reasons.

After receiving this message, though, I unblocked the blog in question and read some more of their posts. When I’d first blocked it, the only post of theirs I saw in the HPHM tag came across as rather hostile, and combined with Ren’s blog saying that an ex was stalking him, I don’t think it’s unsurprising that some people were initially warded off by it. But reading some of the other stuff written on that blog since...I must acknowledge there’s a lot of troubling stuff there. It made me very upset, and made me kind of regret that I’d initially jumped into making a stance without hearing both sides. But at the same time, considering that someone from outside the fandom had arrived specifically to target someone in the fandom, supposedly on behalf of someone else who also had no ties to the fandom, it looked a lot like cyberbullying to me at the time. Now it’s very clear there’s more to the story, and for that initial leap to judgment, I am sorry. I wasn’t in a place where I understood fully what the discussion was about before I took a side, and that’s something I should know better than to do.

But I think this comes down to, in the end, my answer to your question, regarding sides.

I don’t want to take a side -- because I didn’t come to the HPHM fandom to fight people. I came here to be happy.

I know someone could read this as cowardly and ignorant, but please, understand that I thought long and hard about this. This place has been a safe space for me, and I understand it has been for others as well -- a place where we can go to enjoy art and fanfiction for something we enjoy and roleplay as new, interesting characters with other people who have similar interests and creative leanings. I thoroughly understand that it can’t truly be a safe space if we allow people who would threaten other people’s safety into it, and I also thoroughly understand that people can include problematic aspects of themselves into their characters along with good things (just look at how J.K.’s apparent subliminal views on the LGBT+ community influenced how she’s handled Dumbledore). Both things are definitely things to be aware of, and it’ll be an ongoing struggle to try to propagate a truly welcoming and positive, and yet safe and supportive community. There will always be shadows and dark spots that aren’t easy to see, just like with all fandoms, and it’s good to now and again take the time to examine them.

But to quote a line from one of my favorite songs, “it’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead.” I cannot log onto my computer and into this fandom every day and think about openly attacking someone else, regardless of whether they deserve it or not. This feels like something that the victim should handle herself in the real world, and I truly hope that she finds peace in whatever path she takes. But that is her story to tell, to write, and to play out -- it’s not mine. Mine is a story I have written and am still writing, where I’ve tried to find a way to be happy and be a good person despite everything in my life that has made that so difficult. And so I truly feel the only way I can approach this situation is to not let the things that hurt and drain me have power over my life, and put my energy toward things that build me up instead. I try not to visit tags or places online that could be triggering, and simply enjoy the things I do like. I’ve stopped spending money on things Harry Potter-related because of Jo’s stance on transgender rights, but still engage in the HP fandom and celebrate what is good in the original material and especially what its fandom has made out of it. In this case, I will simply do the same, particularly since from the look of things, Ren’s blog is no longer around for anyone to interact with anyway, positively or not. I’ll engage with blogs whose work I can still enjoy and give me some light when I most need it, and try my best to keep creating more light of my own for others. I will light candles, and little by little, I’d like to think the room will be bright enough that the dark will be significantly smaller and less scary than it was.

I understand if any of you disagree with or are angry about anything I’ve said. I know “playing both sides” is not a great thing to do, and I truly don’t mean to. But I’m afraid I do have to take my own side here, for my own mental and emotional well-being. I responded to this Ask because I felt like saying nothing would’ve truly been the cowardly thing to do, by pretending the issue isn’t there at all. I’m not pretending it isn’t there -- but I do think it’s a battle I’m ill-equipped to engage in, not because of my personal morals, but because I don’t feel emotionally able to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner in this court of public opinion.

#ask me #personal #fandom issues #opinion #*heavy sigh*#hphm #hogwarts mystery

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offtopicoverload · 3 years

Note

how would your ideal LI season go?

oooh thank you anon this was really fun and definitely too long and entirely unrealistic because of all the variables but oh well i had fun lmao

Okay I’m just going to start by talking about LIs

I think one of Season 3’s biggest successes was making AJ available from the start, I think that definitely kept those who play for the girls interested

HOWEVER i also think we need one of each: an AJ, a Talia, and a Marisol

Someone you can couple up with right off the bat, someone that takes a bit of time to warm up, maybe around the halfway mark, and someone that isn’t available til the last or second to last recoupling, maybe because they’re only bicurious or its just in their character to take a while to warm up in general, they spent the season in friendship couples or blowing their shot because they didn’t want to move too quick

I know the amount of LIs in Season 2 is a huge attraction, but it obviously wasn’t maintainable, since so many LIs lost their personality after CA

Again, I think Season 3 did great on ideas, but bad execution on drama and actual plot

So I’d probably keep it about 9, maybe 10

And ideally one of them would be trans, probably a trans guy with top surgery scars. Someone makes a joke on the first day and he explains no problem, is open about it and his experiences, maybe he was kicked out as a teenager and is all about positivity and loving people for who they are because of it

I’m all on board for a enby or gnc character or MC, but I honestly think Love Island’s too binary for someone like that to thrive

OH! And an ace LI that’s probably sex neutral and really comfortable with it. They’re up front with their sexuality but have no problem with how sex-focused Love Island is, like they’re fine with the flirting and intimate stuff, they’re just not attracted at the end of the day

Or have this season’s slowburn female LI be demi? I’m not demi, only ace, so I can’t speak on that experience, but I think that might work pretty well, maybe she goes in knowing she’s demisexual and comes out of it knowing she’s demiromantic too? Id love that but idk

I want to touch on customization too, since there’s nowhere near enough

Definitely body types

I forget who said it, but have the typical thin type, a muscular type, and a plus sized

And don’t get me wrong, I know it’s extra work for the artists, but I personally think it’d be worth, but who knows

Make fantasy hair colours possible - blue, green, purple, pink, silver - with the type of variety S3 had, in a style closer to S2

Also tats! And piercings! Just like a septum or some ear piercing, maybe a lip, nothing too difficult

And allow for actually different personalities and careers

I get that most people who apply are going to be outgoing and influencers, but this is all fake anyway so who cares

Have your personality impact LIs, certain LIs are easier to get hearts with with a certain personality, while others have more negative reactions to that personality

Lot of coding but this is just my make believe, what’s the harm

Okay into each day

Id have 20 days, since I agree that that’s a pretty good sweet spot

And Im definitely on board with MC being a bombshell, but instead of introing her on the first day, Id do the second

First half of the episode is spent as a recap of the first day, 5 couples like usual, let’s call the Islanders Bobby, Harry, Camilo, Bill, Rohan, AJ, Talia, Elladine, Miki, and Erikah, I’ll explain later, it’s pretty much for one single reason each

So MC’s first day is the Islander’s second, she shows up like Lucas & Henrik, before all the Islanders are up, and she has an option to say hi to someone early, add a gem to be upfront about being interested or something, during the second half of the first episode

Second episode starts with all the Islanders finding MC and saying hi, whoever you chose to have a chat with’s partner is kinda salty, if you chose a guy

MC ends the day choosing between any of the guys and two of the girls, AJ and Talia

For the guys, like Season 3, three are endgame, ones a red herring like Rohan in Season 1, and one’s up front about it being a friendship couple from the start, since I definitely think we need actual friendship couples - this friendship couple guy is Bobby, but without the pushy crush

Rohan is initially interested, but like in Season 1, he gives it up after a while

AJ is super into it and happy if you pick her and has no problem with it, while Talia has a “no thanks” thing and makes you pick again

Basically, youre not supposed to pick Talia because she’s not open to that yet, and that tosses you off her route or makes it really difficult to fix, maybe only a few dialogue options over the next few days or a specific personality gets her to forgive you. If you don’t pick her, you can couple up later as normal

Day 2 is like it usually is, you’re LIs original partner starts grafting on your LI if you have a male LI, Bobby doesn’t care if you steal AJ, you just have to have a talk with him and he’s fine

You can attempt to reconcile with their original partner, and if you succeed they’ll stop, if not your LI will step in and tell her he’s not interested

Day 3 finds a whole Villa recouping with a dumping. If you have a female LI, then girls are choosing, and AJ will pick you, however there is no dumping for future numbers sake, I know it doesn’t make much sense for the guys to be safe but whatever

If you have a male LI, the boys are choosing. If youre with Bobby, you get stolen and have to help Bobby decide who to dump.

He’ll always choose to dump Miki, regardless of who your LIs ex was or what you say. His reasoning is that she hasn’t made a connection and she was accidentally mean to him once and this Bobby’s hella sensitive

Bobby kinda struggles with it and has a rough few days - You have the option to be sympathetic and keep him available as a friendship couple option, or be a jerk and lose the option to be in a friendship couple

Day 4 is a bit of a filler day, with a fun challenge and some actual conversations.

You learn about your LI and someone else of your choosing, whether that’s a friend, like Ell or Erikah, or another LI youre romancing, like Talia or another of the guys

This is the first time Talia starts to be honest with MC about maybe fancying her and being open to seeing what happens

Day 5 has bombshells: a guy and a girl. The girl is our Marisol of this season, which can also explain away why she’s so slow to open up, she feels like an outcast since she came late and MC can empathise better than anyone which is how they initially bond

The guy is also a LI, but far more bold than Marisol, he has no trouble grafting in front of MC’s LI and trying to steal her or win her over - I’m just going to call him Lucas

Day 6 has another boys’ choice disaster recouping, but with the threat of a dumping on an AJ route

No matter how you reacted to Lucas’ flirting, he picks MC, whether you were going to couple up with him or not, he still steals you from your LI just like Season 2, for simplicity’s sake

The other couples get mixed up, a Nope-adjacent couple are split up, let’s say Erikah and Camilo, but they don’t make it all about them. One of the girls had been pining after a guy but he chooses someone else even though she’s available (Elladine, but Bobby’s oblivious), the girl Bobby was planning to couple up with gets stolen (Talia, but regardless of your route, she doesn’t fancy him), so he couples with Marisol

On a male LI route there is no dumping because the couples are already even

On an AJ route, Rohan is the deciding factor between AJ and Miki. Miki is always dumped because she was barely involved the past few days and Bill isn’t that interested in her even though they were coupled up

Day 7 is the start of Casa Amor, but much shorter this time. Two of the guys are endgame - let’s say Arjun and Carl, two are interested in other girls - let’s say Graham and Nicky, and there’s one you CAN get with, but cheats and gets dumped later on, essentially a Rocco, and one just isn’t interested, another friendship couple opportunity if you don’t want to share with one of the LIs - let’s say Seb

Day 8 is still Casa, you get to know the boys or can crack on with any of the female LIs, though this is still applicable to Day 7

You get a chance to either commit to AJ further or say you want a break to crack on with someone else

If you reassure her, she’ll pie off all the guys and you can stay on the daybed together, essentially ignoring the disaster recoupling and pretending youre still together. But if you dump her, she’ll crack on with Seb if you’re not paired with him, and Arjun if you are, just as a sort of revenge

During CA you can get closer with Talia, cheeky winks in public and getting kinda nasty during a challenge

You get sneaky scenes with Marisol where you learn where her head is at and how she has a hard time opening up and letting people in. You can reassure her and say you’ll be patient or pie her off and she’ll get with the season’s Graham, though they’ll have a different dynamic and ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE AS A COUPLE

Im sorry but boaty mcboat face and MARISOL?? i just dont get it, im sorry

You can graft on Arjun & Carl, tell them where your head is at, and they’re far less pushy

They try to impress but they’re not like poking you until you tell them you’ll take them back to the Villa like in S2

Day 9 is the final day of Casa, with a stick or switch

You can take back Arjun, Carl, Seb, or Rocco, although Seb is a platonic option but you can pair with him the rest of the season as aromantic representation

AJ never switches to save Rohan, and to be loyal if youre on her route

Talia doesn’t switch no matter the route, she spent Casa just hanging out which honestly isn’t the best idea outside of her route

Erikah switches, because like Season 1 Erikah, her head turns quickly, it’s just a matter of time. She switches to Rocco if you’re not on his route, and Arjun if you are. This is going to absolutely blow up in her face

Elladine switches because she gets worried Bobby will, picks Nicky and they actually get on really well

Marisol switches to Graham if youre not on her route to stay safe again, though they dont last anyway, and sticks if you are because she spent Casa with MC instead of the guys

Bobby sticks cuz Bobby

Harry always switches to someone, let’s call her Cherry cuz why not

Camilo sticks to get back with MC or Erikah - Erikah switched, effectively dumping him and really upsetting him

Rohan switches to someone, lets call her Shannon, no matter the route

Bill always sticks

Lucas switches to someone, lets call her Blake, no matter what, just for simplicity’s sake and because I’m already ripping from S2 so who cares

Day 10 is aftermath, much like Season 2

You can talk with your previous LI,

Day 11 has a massive dumping where you vote to save a few people

One of the original Villa boys stays, Camilo is the default but if youre on Harry or Bill’s route, they’ll fill his place

Rohan and Bobby survive

If you brought back a Casa boy, you pick between him and Lucas to be dumped

If you didn’t, Lucas is safe automatically

Rocco/Arjun survive, they’re coupled with Erikah

Either Nicky survives to stay with Elladine or Graham is saved for Marisol if she brought him back, Nicky automatically survives if not

For the girls, Erikah, Elladine, Marisol, and MC are safe

You vote between Cherry, Blake, Shannon on who to save, Shannon is the encouraged option because her and Rohan are actually really cute, but he’ll be nice to any of the girls for the rest of the season

You have to vote between AJ and Talia, sorry queers, i hate it too

Day 12 has a recouping where Talia is finally available if you saved her after everything from Casa Amor

You can reunite with your LI from pre-CA or simply stick to youre CA pick, it’s girls choice, MC is somewhere in the middle

Day 13 has two bombshells - both guys, let’s call them Levi and Tai

Levi grafts hard on MC whereas Tai takes a backseat and MC has to go to him instead if shes interested

Day 14 is a grafting day, you can graft and bond with your LI, Levi, Tai, or Marisol

Day 15 is the second to last recoupling, where you can get with every LI

If youre romancing Marisol, you have a fight in the morning because she still won’t commit and she hasn’t really had an drama on her route yet

Day 16 is an explosion of drama

It’s another Roccogate but on an even bigger scale

If you’re on Rocco’s route, you suffer the backlash, and if you’re not, Erikah does but it still blows back to MC in order to keep her involved

Rocco makes a move on Erikah when MC’s with him, and MC when Erikah is. If he makes a move on MC, she can reciprocate or blatantly shut him down and Erikah will always reciprocate it when he’s coupled with MC because whaddaya know her head can turn at the littlest thing

If he made a move on MC, she can tell her LI who will chew him out privately, or keep it to herself

They basically get caught in the act by Levi, who doesn’t say anything until the afternoon - a lie detector that reveals a bunch of stuff, ill discuss later

He’s asked if he has any drama and he lies, saying no but eventually spills that Rocco made a move on MC/Erikah, and regardless of whether MC reciprocated or not, he says she did

If MC’s with Rocco, she can attack Erikah until someone steps in, maybe Bobby? Or Arjun? and reasons with her. She can get most of the Villa on her side about Rocco being a prick - except for Levi, no matter what, he’ll always side with Rocco and say it’s part of the show

If MC’s not with Rocco and denied him, her LI will accuse her of lying and she’ll have to essentially win them back by the next day or try and get Rocco to clear her name, which she can if they have a high relationship

And if MC didn’t deny him, her LI will dump her on the spot if they have a low relationship, or still win them back if they have a high relationship - but it will still be remembered

Back to the lie detector

There’s the typical S1 questions, cheating is revealed, you can commit to your LI

BUT

If youre on a Marisol route, your LI asks you about her and MC has to confess, which drives a rift between her and Marisol because yeah

y i k e s

Day 17 is the final recoupling

Marisol basically storms into the kitchen when MCs making breakfast and says they’re coupling up and just leaves again. MC has the option to be like “yeah okay, chill” and go back to her breakfast or “what the fuck? no” and chase after her and pie her off

If you don’t pie her off, she chooses MC herself, because that scene in S2 is just really cute and I want another

There’s a double dumping of two boys - Levi and Rocco, and you have no say in it

Erikah, MC, or her LI will essentially turn the Villa against Rocco, while a few of the Islanders resent Levi for his take, mainly the girls

It’s a couple vote, and even if you vote for someone else, they still get dumped because they have the most votes

Day 18 is filler and fluff, meet the parents and final dates, with a surprise dumping where you can get a say and can help them pack, but its a strictly platonic goodbye

There’s so many possibilities and I don’t feel like listing them out right now, but it’s a single couple between three at-risk ones

Day 19 another surprise dumping, why not stick with prom? I just really dig the art, and but maybe make it closer to Season 2? And more personalized speeches!!!

And have a Lottie/Hannah moment!

Idk who all would be here, I don’t feel like listing it out, but I think I have all the dumpings listed below the cut

You can pick between both people dumped who you want to help pack, and can have a moment with either of them, opening a “runaway” option after the finale or reunion

Day 20 is the finale, with the Islanders gossiping and stressing in the morning as some filler content

The afternoon is the announcement, and your placement depends on your couple - If you were loyal the entire time you were with them and have a max relationship you get 1st, if you were loyal but dont have max hearts, you get 2nd, if you weren’t loyal but still have max hearts, you get 3rd, and if you have neither you get 4th

If you win, your LI gets the money no matter what and it’s not based on relationship, it’s based on where in the relationship you are - if MC agreed to be their girlfriend on Day 18, they split the money, and if MC didn’t, then they don’t see a future and keep it

The last episode is the finale party with options to dump your LI for good, make plans to move in, reconcile and explain why MC didn’t say yes on Day 18, or get with someone else entirely

Oh and I want two of the dumped guys to show up together and have started dating outside of the Villa

Cuz I can’t think of another opportunity for mlm in this chaos

This is really messy so I’m going to list out couplings under the cut to try and make sense of this, I think I got everything but probably not its a disaster

LIs

Day 1 - MC or Bobby or Single

Day 3 - MC or Bobby or Bill

Day 6 - Rohan

Day 9 - Rohan

Day 12 - MC or Bobby or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Bobby or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Bobby Dumped

Talia

Day 1 - Rohan or Single

Day 3 - Rohan or Bill

Day 6 - Camilo

Day 9 - Camilo

Day 12 - MC or Bobby or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Bobby or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Bobby Dumped

Marisol

Day 6 - Bobby

Day 9 - Single or Graham

Day 12 - Graham or Harry/Bill/Camilo

Day 14 - Graham or Harry/Bill/Camilo

Day 17 - MC or Graham or Harry/Bill/Camilo

Harry

Day 1 - MC or Elladine

Day 3 - MC or Elladine

Day 6 - Elladine

Day 9 - Cherry

Day 12 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Camilo

Day 1 - MC or Erikah

Day 3 - MC or Erikah

Day 6 - Talia

Day 9 - Talia

Day 12 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Bill

Day 1 - MC or Miki

Day 3 - MC or Miki or Elladine/Erikah

Day 6 - Erikah

Day 9 - Single

Day 12 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Lucas

Day 6 - MC or Erikah

Day 9 - MC or Blake

Day 12 - Blake

Day 14 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Erikah or Dumped

Arjun

Day 9 - MC or Erikah or Dumped

Day 12 - MC or Erikah or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Erikah or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Erikah or Dumped

Carl

Day 9 - MC or Dumped

Day 12 - MC or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Erikah or Dumped

Tai

Day 14 - MC or Single or Elladine

Day 17 - MC or Erikah

Rocco

Day 9 - MC or Erikah

Day 12 - MC or Erikah

Day 14 - MC or Erikah

Day 17 - Dumped

Levi

Day 14 - MC or Single

Day 17 - Dumped

Other Islanders

Elladine

Day 1 - Harry or Single

Day 3 - Harry or Bill

Day 6 - Harry

Day 9 - Nicky or Harry/Camilo/Bill

Day 12 - Nicky or Harry/Camilo/Bill

Day 14 - Nicky or

Day 17 - Nicky or Tai

Erikah

Day 1 - Camilo* or Single

Day 3 - Camilo* or Bill

Day 6 - Camilo or

Day 9 - Rocco or Arjun

Day 12 - Rocco or Arjun

Day 14 - Rocco or Arjun

Day 17 - Tai or Lucas/Casa

Miki

Day 1 - Bill or Single

Day 3 - Bill or Dumped

Day 6 - Bill or Dumped

Day 9 - Dumped

Day 12 - Dumped

Day 14 - Dumped

Day 17 - Dumped

Shannon

Day 9 - Rohan

Day 12 - Rohan or Dumped

Day 14 - Rohan or Dumped

Day 17 - Rohan or Dumped

Blake

Day 9 - Lucas

Day 12 - Rohan or Dumped

Day 14 - Rohan or Dumped

Day 17 - Rohan or Dumped

Cherry

Day 9 - Harry

Day 12 - Rohan or Dumped

Day 14 - Rohan or Dumped

Day 17 - Rohan Dumped

Bobby

Day 1 - AJ or MC or Single

Day 3 - AJ or MC or

Day 6 - Marisol

Day 9 - Marisol or Single

Day 12 - AJ/Talia or Elladine/Marisol

Day 14 - AJ/Talia or Elladine/Marisol or Single

Day 17 - AJ/Talia or Elladine/Marisol

Rohan

Day 1 - Talia or MC

Day 3 - Talia or MC

Day 6 - AJ

Day 9 - Shannon/Cherry/Blake

Day 12 - Shannon/Cherry/Blake

Day 14 - Shannon/Cherry/Blake

Day 17 - Shannon/Cherry/Blake

Graham

Day 9 - Marisol or Dumped

Day 12 - Marisol or Dumped

Day 14 - Marisol or Dumped

Day 17 - Marisol or Dumped

Seb

Day 9 - MC or Dumped

Day 12 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 14 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Day 17 - MC or Elladine/Marisol or Dumped

Nicky

Day 9 - Elladine

Day 12 - Elladine or Dumped

Day 14 - Elladine or Dumped

Day 17 - Elladine or Dumped

#asks #can it kc #also definitely stole this format from bubblybabynailpolish cuz they're hcs are iconic but shush #thank you anon and sorry for whatever this is #litg

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thespacenico · 3 years

Note

Hi! I just saw your post about asexuality and wanted to share for a sec!! I'm a trans queer guy who happens to be ace as well. I've not thought about it much actively, but I've never really considered myself as part of the lgbt community for my asexuality mainly because it's something I could keep to myself. Being trans was obvious for a while and will always impact me visibly. If I'm in a queer relationship, that's visible. Both have brought me far more strife than my asexuality (although with what you mentioned in your post, I'm sure my situation factors into that). I guess I've always separated my identities; if I want to talk about ace stuff (which is rare, to be fair) I'd go to aspec specific spaces. Otherwise, I go to more generally queer spaces. I mean this in a fully respectful way because I'm interested, but why do you group your "aceness" with your lesbian identity? I have interacted with other ace people outside of the internet and their perspectives wildly vary. I will say anecdotally that the "het" aces I know that consider themselves lgbt for their asexuality often speak over me on queer and trans issues. Personally, I feel there exists a deeper systemic issue regarding trans and queer discrimination than ace discrimination which is part of why I don't immediately consider my asexuality as lgbt or those heteroromantic people as lgbt. In another regard, asexuality obviously is a sexuality (as you mentioned), but I've found with the way my identity blends together, it just makes more sense to talk about that specific part of it with other ace people. I think I see the ace spectrum as a separate thing to measures of the types of people I'm attracted to and the type of person I am. Levels of attraction vs. identity and types of attraction in terms of identity, ya know?? I hope this doesn't sound aggressive!! I really want to hear more about your perspective as a fellow ace person. Most ace people I do regularly speak with who see themselves as lgbt choose that community because that's where they first learned about the label. Feel free to disregard all of this because I know it's long!!!

hi! thanks for sharing! you brought up a lot of good points so i’m gonna try to acknowledge/respond to all of them best i can! for the record, i think it’s worth pointing out that we’re both ace, but since it’s a spectrum there’s a really good chance that even we don’t experience it the same way, which is why discussion amongst the actual asexual community is super meaningful compared to discussion amongst allo people who have a very limited knowledge of asexuality to start with. all that being said, here’s my perspective on things!

I've not thought about it much actively, but I've never really considered myself as part of the lgbt community for my asexuality mainly because it's something I could keep to myself. Being trans was obvious for a while and will always impact me visibly. If I'm in a queer relationship, that's visible.

that’s fair! i agree that it’s something we can keep to ourself, but why do we have to (or choose to) keep it to ourself? the why probably differs for most aspec people. in my case, i’m pretty vocal about my asexuality (on twitter at least), but in real life where i’m surrounded by straight cishet allo people, i keep it to myself because they wouldn’t understand it in the slightest, many of them would think i’m just trying to be special, etc. not only am i assumed to be straight (i’m not), but i’m also assumed to be allosexual (i’m not).

visibility is an interesting topic too because i think that’s when we veer into conversations about things like “straight-passing,” “cis-passing,” etc. at home i’m mostly still in the closet, but my identity is still very much real. it may not always be visible, but it’s definitely there! a visibly queer relationship is just one way our identities are put on display. but even then, sometimes two lgbtq+ individuals can be in a relationship and it’s not visibly queer — for example, two (or even one) bi people in a m/f relationship. to people outside of the community especially, it doesn’t look like a queer relationship, but it very much is.

all that to say, asexuality often isn’t visible per se, but there are many other identities that also lack visibility under certain circumstances, in a sense. that’s why i don’t personally consider visibility very much!

Both have brought me far more strife than my asexuality (although with what you mentioned in your post, I'm sure my situation factors into that). I guess I've always separated my identities; if I want to talk about ace stuff (which is rare, to be fair) I'd go to aspec specific spaces. Otherwise, I go to more generally queer spaces.

i can’t speak on your trans/queer experience specifically (and i’m sorry for the trouble people have given you for them), but this is also where i would personally say that just because asexuality doesn’t cause you as much strife as your being trans/queer, doesn’t mean that it’s not important or any less valid as part of your overall identity. asexuality aside for a moment, the lgbtq+ community has been historically oppressed and discriminated against, basically even before its official inception. this may not be realistic, but let’s say that 100 years from now, we're finally free of that oppression/discrimination. we don’t suddenly lose our place in the lgbtq+ community, do we? oppression doesn’t have anything to do with the validity of our respective identities, if that makes sense. other identities aren’t more or less valid depending on how oppressed they are. that’s my opinion on that! and like you mentioned, i think our personal situations definitely do affect our experiences in general.

when it comes to talking about ace stuff, i think the point is that lots of us within the lgbtq+ community sometimes separate our identities in different ways, even those that aren’t ace, because there are often specific spaces within the community itself. sometimes lesbians need lesbian specific spaces, sometimes bi people need bi specific spaces, sometimes trans people need trans specific spaces, etc. it’s always much easier and more validating to talk to people who share your experiences. like you said, there are also aspec specific spaces! and yet, everyone within one of those specific spaces can have very different identities. as an ace lesbian, i might engage in a lesbian specific space without ever needing to talk about my asexuality, or engage in an aspec specific space without ever needing to talk about my lesbian identity. i’m not necessarily talking about every part of my identity all the time, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

I mean this in a fully respectful way because I'm interested, but why do you group your "aceness" with your lesbian identity? I have interacted with other ace people outside of the internet and their perspectives wildly vary.

i think that for me specifically, i feel like my asexuality plays a veeery big part in how i experience attraction in general. i used to id as bisexual, but after a while i realized i wasn’t attracted to men at all and so began to id as lesbian. it wasn’t until then that i realized i was also ace, and that honestly threw me for a loop because for a while it made me wonder if i was bi after all (i’m not, but i thought about it for a while!). technically speaking, there are other labels i could use to describe my attraction, such as sapphic asexual or homoromantic asexual, although i think for the latter sometimes it depends on how a person feels about the split attraction model and how it can be applied.

either way! it’s my experience that asexuality significantly influences how a person experiences attraction compared to allosexuals. i’d say that’s the main reason i “group” my aceness with my lesbian identity, because to me they’re intertwined.

you’re right though about how the perspectives of ace people wildly vary! it’s super interesting to hear from other ace people what their thoughts are. i think for me it comes down to the fact that some ace people may not need a space specifically for their asexuality, and that’s okay! like you’ve mentioned, they typically don’t experience the same level of discrimination, at least not in the same ways, and sometimes it wholly depends on the kind of people you’re around and whether or not you’re out. many ace people do experience discrimination though and desperately do need that space, and i don’t see why the lgbtq+ community shouldn’t be for them as well, considering. there are certainly differences between issues involving asexuality and other identities like gay, lesbian, trans, etc. but there are differences between issues involving specifically those identities as well, and certain similarities between all of them.

I will say anecdotally that the "het" aces I know that consider themselves lgbt for their asexuality often speak over me on queer and trans issues. Personally, I feel there exists a deeper systemic issue regarding trans and queer discrimination than ace discrimination which is part of why I don't immediately consider my asexuality as lgbt or those heteroromantic people as lgbt. In another regard, asexuality obviously is a sexuality (as you mentioned), but I've found with the way my identity blends together, it just makes more sense to talk about that specific part of it with other ace people.

i know how frustrating it is to have people talk over you about issues that directly impact you and not them, and i’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that. i do think however that this sort of thing happens even within the lgbtq+ community all the time. this is in no way a justification or excuse for the people who have spoken over you, but just a comparison. i’ve seen tons of conversations (usually on social media) where lesbians will speak over bi women on bi issues, non-lesbians will speak over lesbians on lesbian issues, cis people will speak over trans people on trans issues, etc. it’s frustrating in any case, and it typically has to do with the fact that there’s a certain level of ignorance for almost everyone when it comes to an identity that’s not theirs. (am i making sense??) i even see allo people speak over aspec people on ace issues all the time as well. tldr - i’m not saying there’s not a specific underlying issue with the “het” aces who have spoken over you on those issues, but you can definitely draw comparisons to certain circumstances elsewhere within the community.

i 100% agree with your point that there is a much deeper systemic issue regarding trans and queer discrimination than ace discrimination. i think my view on that pretty much goes back to what i said earlier about how i don’t think discrimination or oppression determines the validity of an identity as an lgbtq+ identity. regardless, like you said about how you feel that it makes more sense to talk about your own asexuality with other ace people, i think sometimes it just comes down to how we perceive/experience our own identities! i often feel more isolated due to my asexuality more than i feel isolated due to my being a lesbian. that may not be the case for all aspec people, but it really impacts me personally.

I think I see the ace spectrum as a separate thing to measures of the types of people I'm attracted to and the type of person I am. Levels of attraction vs. identity and types of attraction in terms of identity, ya know??

that’s also fair! i think in my mind it’s just that aceness is part of my identity/is its own independent identity regardless of who i’m romantically attracted to. my asexuality would still exist whether i’m also a lesbian or not. i just happen to personally combine my identities (aka ace lesbian) because they’re both there and they influence each other.

Most ace people I do regularly speak with who see themselves as lgbt choose that community because that's where they first learned about the label.

i’m glad you brought this up at the very end too!! i first learned about the label from the lgbtq+ community as well, but it took forever for me to realize that it described me. in my experience, asexuality is crazy misunderstood both in and out of the community. it took me weeks to months of doing my own research on asexuality to understand what it really is, and even then that there’s a spectrum. in regards to everything about this post, i think where an ace person falls on the spectrum might be a big factor that plays into what their experience is like and whether they feel they need a space like the lgbtq+ community. either way, the fact that most people first hear about asexuality from the community and the fact that we have our own flag and everything really speaks to all this. why not choose the lgbtq+ community since it’s already here, that’s where asexuality is often talked about, and that’s where people understand what it’s like to experience attraction that differs from the norm?

anyway those are my thoughts!! it’s nice to be talking to someone else who’s actually ace rather than feeling like i’m having to preach to allosexuals who don’t think my asexuality matters period :’)

#asexuality #aphobia #aphobia mention #lgbtq #biphobia mention

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pinkysfaultorbrainsfault · 4 years

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animaniacs - s1e44: the world can wait

episode summary: brain puts off his plan of taking over the world so he can try to pick up a girl mouse he met and instantly fell in love with for some reason.

there’s no plan in this episode, but it’s funny, so it goes here anyway.

the rundown:

we open with pinky bothering brain about how they’re going to take over the world tonight. his initial plan is to “trap them in super sticky chewing gum”, which i’m not entirely convinced by, but as we learn later pinky kind of has a knack for this sort of thing, so i’m willing to go with it if they are.

but no! apparently not. pinky’s next suggestion is “how about we wrestle the president?” before suplexing himself. shame this episode was made in the 90s, huh. keep that energy for the 2020 reboot please, pinky.

zort.

yet another refusal has pinky worried. as he questions “but gee, brain, we are going to take over the world, aren’t we?” brain replies with the unthinkable.

“not tonight, pinky. the world can wait.”

“egad, brain. are you feeling alright?”

turns out that brain is putting off his plans for world conquest for more noble, heterosexual persuits - namely, a girl mouse who lives in a cage on the opposite shelf. pinky finds the prospect of brain being into anyone completely fucking hilarious, apparently, and makes fun of him in the background as brain witters on about his new waifu.

“she is of simple folk, fair and true.” “you mean she’s stupid?” “a bit.” mean. pinky keeps negging brain about it until he gets bonked on the head for his troubles, and then brain puts on a fancy jacket and drags pinky off to be his wingman.

isn’t he cute?

but anyway, here comes billie. apparently she lives in this sparse, empty cage by herself, which you’re really not supposed to do with female mice. they need companions otherwise they get lonely and actually you’re not supposed to keep male mice together either.....

.............................................................................................

everyone in this show is trans.

ok that was half a joke. undeterred, brain goes off to harass his Fair Damsel.

“i, my lady, am the brain,” he says, introducing himself without his fedora, for a change. “we met together in the maze.”

“oh yeah. i remember you. egghead.” what the fuck is her accent?? new york?? i’m genuinely lost. this is not a voice normal people have.

pinky thinks this is hilarious, and agrees enthustically that brain is, in fact, Egg Head, so brain bonks him over the head with a baseball bat he found somewhere. undeterred, he moves onto presenting billie with a “precious, simple gift.”

“it’s an actual working mockup of the betatron particle accelerator.”

that’s... cute, brain. not entirely sure what she’s going to do with a particle accelerator in her otherwise totally empty cage, but he’s trying! and that’s what matters.

“it kinda looks like a--”

“BIG METAL DONUT.”

HAHAHEHEHAHAHA.

“yeah, like a big metal donut. say, egghead? who’s your friend? he’s funny.”

oh dear.

oh dear. this date has been going for like two minutes and already, brain is getting cucked. still, he introduces pinky, out of politeness.

and then he decides “fuck that” and puts him in the particle accelerator and spins him away.

which is just kind of mean, honestly.

“aw, i like him.” “pinky? but he’s barely verbal.”

“well pardon me, mr egghead, but i happen to like that. goodnight.”

ouch. brain tries to change her mind, and has all of two seconds to do that before pinky bonks him off the shelf.

if you love me let me go, etc.

cut to back in the cage, where pinky is bandaging brain’s head. he must have bonked it on his fall, which is very sad. pinky seems otherwise unharmed, and is bullying brain over how the previous three minutes or so of the short went. “i think she likes you!” he chortles, amidst brain’s protests. haha, narf.

“no, pinky, the fact of the matter is, she likes you.” “but brain, i’ve already got a girlfriend.”

“pinky. you are a mouse. that is a horse.”

still, unconventional taste in partners aside (and how cute it is that he has a little picture of fignewton by their bed!) brain eventually figures out that in order to win billie’s heart, he should ask pinky what he would say to woo her. this obviously goes about as well as one would expect.

ok i wasn’t going to talk about this but when he gets there billie is like “who’s there? pinky? is that you pinky?” and brain makes this face.

“no.”

which i thought was very funny.

billie is less enthused by this particular mouse, until he starts saying some completely nonsensical shit, to which she is instantly on board.

“please, call me eggy. n. narf.”

“now, tell her-- poit-- i like your toenails.”

thanks! i got them from the president.

brain goes above and beyond, also mentioning that her head looks like a “really clean carrot”-- yknow what, i really don’t think these were serious suggestions from pinky. i think he was just being a dick. but it works! billie is swayed.

“i guess i got you pegged all wrong. why don’t you come up here? i like you.”

hee hee.

conclusion:

alas, unfortunately, brain never gets the opportunity to get pegged correctly, this time. hoo hoo. at that exact moment a bunch of scientists show up. despite complaining that they’re “going to be late for bowling”, homeboy needs to electrocute a mouse right now, immediately, so he goes ahead and does that.

the boys do their best! unfortunately, they don’t quite get there in time to stop this from happening.

(at this point brain gives off the most unconvincing “oh no, we’re too late” that i have perhaps ever heard, but i don’t blame maurice for that, because i understand it must be hard to make drunk orson welles sound sympathetic. hrrraaarrrgh. french excellence.)

still, he does seem genuinely concerned. “billie, are you alright?”

“eggy?” she asks, on the verge of death. “is that you, eggy?” brain confirms that he is, in fact, Eggy, and she goes in for a hug.

“oh, eggy. i thought the electro-polarity had altered the reticular formation in my medulla oblongata.”

oh no.

“egad, brain,” says pinky, who is bad at helping. “she’s probably even smarter than you.”

oh no indeed.

so.... yeah. turns out she is. she even makes a habit of correcting brain’s formula. as brain has a small breakdown over the fact that he’s been obsessing over that for the past five months... um. actually, that’s like... ~17 years to a mouse, give or take. how old are these guys??? what did acme do to them?

brain makes this face.

and then leaves.

“but brain! oh, so you don’t love her any more just because she’s smarter than you?” you can’t really see it in this screencap, but pinky does look genuinely concerned. good on him for calling out this fuckboy behaviour! absolutely appalling. you’re definitely not getting pegged with that attitude, brain. work on yourself.

“oh, i do love her, pinky. i do. but i must quickly go develop a plan so that we can take over the world.”

“why.”

“because if i don’t, she may beat us to it.”

so, theoretically, the tally stays the same. nothing happened in this episode. there was no plan. it was just brain being straight for seven minutes or so.

brain: 3 pinky: 3 outside influence: 5

but billie also gets a fair few points for not pegging brain while she had the chance, so there’s that.

billie: however many points that is

this has been another

useless review.

#patb #pinky and the brain #a!#animaniacs #i have the next review in the works bc i started it earlier lol #i won't be able to get it out before the stream but! hopefully tomorrow...

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sage-nebula · 3 years

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Game Review — Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town

In the past, I was never really one for farming sims. In fact, I used to pass on every single Harvest Moon game because the idea of farming just didn’t seem fun to me. Then I heard you could have same-sex romance options in Stardew Valley, so I played that, fell in love, and thus got very excited for the newest Story of Seasons game, since I knew that Story of Seasons was Harvest Moon previously, and Harvest Moon inspired Stardew Valley.

And all I have to say is . . .

Overall Score: 5.5/10

. . . oh boy.

Well, I actually have a lot more to say than just that, but that should give you a general idea of what the rest of this review is going to be like. I do want to say up front that I have played through the entire first in-game year to give the game a fair shake, so please trust me when I say I did my due diligence to give this game a real chance before I reviewed it. If you’re ready, jump under the cut (best read on my blog for formatting reasons) and let’s get into it.

The Pros:

The character customization, while not perfect, is definitely several leaps in the right direction. None of the clothing or hairstyle options are gender locked, which is amazing. There is a variety of skin tones to choose from. You pick your pronouns independently of everything else, voice included, so you can 100% have a trans character if you want to (or a nonbinary character if you don’t mind using gendered pronouns for your nonbinary character). I do wish the clothing selection was better (especially at the start, when you only have two outfits to choose from) and having different body types would be cool as well, but the fact that you have so much freedom with regards to gender presentation is a definite plus.

Likewise, being able to have same-sex relationships is a huge plus as well. Honestly, it was what convinced me to pick up the game; I might not have gotten it if it didn’t have that option in there, but that pushed me over the edge. I mean, the fact that it’s 2021 means this sort of thing should be expected, but with Japanese games on Nintendo systems it’s really not always guaranteed, so the fact that it was included still does deserve to get a mention as a plus.

It’s easy to raise affection with the villagers by just talking to them, which is an improvement over Stardew where you pretty much had to give gifts to raise affection (because I don’t think talking did it, or if it did, it was abysmally slow). I was able to unlock heart events pretty quickly just by running around the town and talking quickly with the villagers each day, which is particularly nice since the preferred gifts can be pretty expensive at first.

I enjoy that not all of the heart events necessarily involve the farmer, especially for characters that aren’t romanceable. It’s nice to see the villagers interacting with each other more, to see that they have lives and relationships outside of the farmer’s sphere of influence. It also gives you unique insight into the characters, because how they act around or with each other isn’t always how they interact around or with the farmer.

Being able to sow seeds in multiple patches of dirt at once is nice, especially since otherwise it takes much longer than it does in, say, Stardew. I mean, in Stardew you can hold the A button and sow everything at once, whereas in Olive Town you have to do it one press at a time. So to be able to do a multi-plant is very nice.

The pet and mount selection is pretty great, too. I love how many different types of breeds of dog there are, how many different cats and different types of horses, and of course the unique mounts like the unicorn or the wolf.

The farm has a lot of space once you unlock the different areas, and is divided into neat sections to make organizing easier.

Having not played a Story of Seasons game before this one, and knowing that Stardew Valley’s developer was inspired by Harvest Moon, I can’t say entirely which features were unique to Stardew and borrowed and which ones Stardew borrowed first. However, I have seen others claim that the tool bar at the bottom of the screen (which is nearly identical to the one in Stardew) was unique to Stardew, so I can say that this is one area in which they copped something from Stardew and did it well. The fact that you can put your tools into a separate tool bag to make some emergency room in your bag is nice too.

The Neutrals:

While there are a lot of villagers and they all have their own heart events and interactions, the day-to-day dialogue can get very repetitive. I can’t tell you the amount of times Laura has told me about losing track of time during Laura Things, or how many times Jack has told me about how his mom told him about planting different crops and he thinks that’s just too much work. The dialogue only really seems to change around festivals / after plot changes, and it can really make characters that might otherwise feel fleshed out feel more like . . . well, NPCs. Which they are, but you don’t really want them to feel like that in a sim game. So while the characters are (mostly) unique, sometimes they can feel a bit repetitive.

The plot is a bit weird. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s weird that the plot focuses on wanting to turn the local town into a tourist hotspot. I get that the idea is that they want to bring commerce into the town (I guess), but that everyone is on board with it and the fact that it’s essentially gentrification just feels a bit . . . weird, for a game that’s supposed to focus more on nature. The tasks associated with it also get very repetitive, and that’s not even talking about how you literally have to improve the roads and lamps twice to make a difference.

The holiday festivals are also pretty average. It’s either a cutscene, or a tiny minigame (or sometimes not even a minigame, but I’ll get to that). The minigames are charming, but they’re not something that I’d want to do the following year. You’ve done it once, you’ve done it a million times. It’s also strange that there’s not a festival to celebrate your farm at all, whereas at least in Stardew we had the Stardew Valley Fair and I hear that in past Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games they had farm celebration festivals, too. It’s just a bit strange.

The music is hit or miss, and mostly miss if I’m being honest, but I’ll still put it here. The songs are too short; they loop far too fast, and often sound no better than you’d expect a game on the GBA to sound (especially that first cave theme, ugh). There are some nice melodies, but again, when I compare it to Stardew (which I know isn’t exactly fair, but also Stardew is made by a grand total of one person when this game had an entire team so I feel it’s at least a little fair), it’s a pretty big letdown in the music department.

The bachelorettes are not very unique. Like, they are different, you can tell them apart, but . . . the primary difference between Bridgette and Linh, for instance, is that Linh is Korean (and also looks like a child which I don’t like at all if we’re being honest) while Bridgette is white. Otherwise they’re both sweet and shy and have basically the same personality. Reina and Blaire are also pretty similar, in that they’re both outgoing party types. The main difference between them besides their hair color (brunette and blonde respectively) is the fact that one works at the museum while the other is a waitress. The only one who really stands out is Laura, and while Laura is great (and the one I chose to marry), it’s still disappointing when you see how varied the bachelors are. It feels like not a lot of effort was put into designing the bachelorettes, which is sad when you consider they’re kind of major characters since they’re part of the dating pool.

The Cons:

This game is AWFUL to play. How, you may ask? Well, let me count the ways:

To start with, the loading screens are atrocious. There are loading screens between everything that you do. You go to town? Loading screen. You leave town? Loading screen. Start your day? Loading screen. Go in and out of barns or coops? Loading screens. And they take ages, or at least in this day and age it feels like they take ages. Particularly when you go into town, immediately realize you forgot a resource you needed for an upgrade, and go back so you get back to back cutscenes, they’re fricking awful. I cannot believe that loading screens this annoying were necessary for this game. I refuse to accept that as truth. They absolutely could have cut out the time it takes to load had they spent more time on development instead of rushing this title out for the anniversary, and speaking of things they could have ironed out in development . . .

THE LAG. THE FREEZING. THE CRASHING. THE POP-IN DISTANCING. If I didn’t know that an entire development team worked on this game, I wouldn’t believe it. This game is, put simply, a mess. Even when my farm was brand new and had pretty much nothing on it, I was noticing framerate drops both in docked and handheld mode. I’m talking, I had maybe one coop and two planted areas for crops, and the framerate was noticeably dropping. And now that I do have more stuff on my farm? Not only is the lag atrocious, but the game can’t load everything on the screen at once and so things have to pop into view after a few seconds. You can see video footage of this here, which also features one of the delightful loading screens. And this doesn’t even get into how the game will randomly freeze, or how I’ve had it crash once already. And from what I hear, I’m not unique in this. The fact they had the nerve to release this game as finished when it performs like this just boggles the mind.

Despite the fact that the Switch has two control sticks, this game plays only with one. This means that you can’t, you know, aim your tools with anything but the main control stick. And when you’re both controlling your character and aiming with the same control stick, the latter gets pretty hard. This leads to me missing things with my axe or hammer even when they’re right in front of me, as well as taking a lot of damage from the cave enemies simply because I couldn’t get in the sweet spot to both hit them with the hammer and also not get hit myself, particularly before they escape. It adds a lot of unnecessary frustration because the controls are so flawed and imprecise.

Similarly, there is a sweet spot when it comes to harvesting or picking up items off the ground, and it’s impossible to determine what that sweet spot is because you don’t get a little aiming box for that. So you can be right on top of an item and unable to pick it up because you’re not in that sweet spot.

Apart from the framerate drops, there is input lag as well. This is most noticeable when swinging axes or hammers, or trying to pet cows and other animals after milking them. And yes, I know it’s the game and not my Switch, because it’s not consistent (and also doesn’t happen with other games). Again, this is something polish and more time in the oven probably could have handled, but now it’s too late and just makes the game frustrating to play.

Technical, mechanical gameplay issues aside, though, there are still a ton of other issues. For instance: makers. Again, I can’t say if previous Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games had these, or if they were invented by Stardew and copped by this dev team, but what I can say is that while makers also exist in Stardew, they are handled way better there than the absolute nightmare they are here. Again, to count the ways:

In Stardew, the makers can sit flush against each other and buildings, as well as flush against paths, making everything nice and not taking up too much space. Here, not only are the makers gigantic, but they can’t be flush with anything. They can’t sit up against each other, against buildings, or against paths. This means that not only do they look ugly, but they also take up a tremendous amount of space that therefore can’t go toward anything else.

In Stardew there are a handful of makers that do things. You’ve got furnaces for making bars, mayonnaise makers, cheese makers, fabric spinners, etc. There’s a variety, but it’s not so much that your farm becomes nothing but makers. By contrast, Olive Town is drowning in makers. You have all the above, but also more that contribute to those because . . . okay, let’s take the fabric spinners for example. In Stardew, you can put any type of wool onto the fabric spinning wheel, which will make one kind of fabric. In Olive Town, you first have to have a thread maker to make thread out of grass, AS WELL AS a yarn maker to make yarn out of wool. THEN you have to have a thread fabric maker to make fabric out of thread (and the thread differs depending on the grass used, which means you can make many different types of fabrics, but only one at a time), AS WELL AS a yarn fabric maker to make fabric out of yarn. So whereas in Stardew you have one maker if you need cloth, in Olive Town you need at bare minimum two, at max four, and that’s not even getting into how slow the process will be if you only have one of each kind. Because each maker only makes one of an item, and then you usually need multiples of that one item to make the next item in the series. So for instance, your thread maker makes one spool of thread, but it takes THREE spools to make one piece of fabric. Then you might need TEN pieces of fabric for a recipe. And the makers all take literal in-game hours to make. When you consider that the costs for some things are very high (the house upgrade I’m on right now requires 80 ingots and 120 pieces of lumber), you pretty much have to have at least four of each type of maker to get things done at any kind of reasonable pace, hence the factory hell my farm is currently in as seen in the above linked video. It’s a fucking nightmare. And yes, maybe it’s more realistic that you can’t go immediately from wool to fabric, but this is a farming sim where you interact with spirits, ride unicorns, and befriend wolves. This is not a game where you need to push realism.

The mining is also just . . . not fun. At all. Not only do you have the “it’s really hard to aim properly, especially when you’re trying not to take damage” issue mentioned above, but there’s also the fact that there’s just no variation. In the first mine there are no enemies at all, you’re just breaking rocks. The second mine introduces enemies, but only one type of enemy (basically little moles that you have to whack with the hammer). The third mine has the same enemies, but they’re stronger and appear in multiples. And that’s it. Unlike in Stardew, where there were tons of different monsters that did different things that made the mines exciting, here it’s pretty boring because the enemies are easy to avoid (and it’s best to avoid them because of how much of a pain in the ass to hit them without taking damage from running into them is) and the levels all pretty much look the same. Whereas I loved dungeon crawling in Stardew, here it’s something I purely do to get ore to make ingots in the stupid fucking makers because there’s literally no entertainment value to it otherwise, especially since the music is subpar at best.

Related to the mining, when you defeat enemies or drain lakes you can find bags of items that need to be identified at the museum. You can only have Reina identify these bags one at a time. So it’s a bunch of spamming the A button and hearing her go “oh!” over and over and over again because they, for some reason, couldn’t implement identifying items more than one at a time. And the best part? Identifying items comes with a LOADING SCREEN between you selecting the item to be identified and Reina identifying the item! How fun!!

You can really tell that they cut corners in this game, content-wise. For instance, the first festival in spring is an egg hunt. You would think that it would be a minigame where you look for eggs (again, like Stardew). You would think that, but you would be wrong. Instead, you get to watch an extended cutscene of your character finding eggs. That’s it. That’s the “egg hunt.” I skipped the mushroom hunt in fall because I assumed it would be the same, but apparently that one actually was a minigame, so joke’s on me, I guess. But either way, the fact that the egg hunt wasn’t an egg hunt at all speaks to cut corners and rushed dev time, just like the myriad of other problems that plague this game. It’s pretty bad when you can’t even include an egg hunting minigame for whatever reason (or at leas come up with unique events for spring and fall).

There is a ton of furniture with which to decorate your house, which is great! Or it would be, if you were actually given freedom to decorate, but you’re not. You can buy whatever furniture you want, but there are very specific places where you’re allowed to place it, and nowhere else. For instance, furniture and rugs can only go in the little space in front of your counter in your house in the first two house upgrades (Log Cabin and Small House). This space is very small. Despite there being a GIANT ASS FLOOR with which to cover a rug, I wasn’t able to use it until I got the third house upgrade. You have a huge empty table that you’re not allowed to put anything on. You can’t move any of the furniture around, nor can you rotate furniture that you buy when you place it. You also can’t place furniture on rugs either. Seeing so much furniture in the game is pretty exciting until you realize that you can do basically fuck all with it. Apparently they didn’t have enough time to implement real decoration into the game either. (Then again, imagine the lag in your house if they did.) As a final complaint, you can buy picture frames that claim to let you place framed memories in your house. You have a camera as an in-game tool, so you’d think that you could place pictures of your pets or your love interest in your house. You would think that, but you would be wrong. There’s no way to change the pictures in the picture frames, or at least none that I’ve been able to find just yet.

Just like Stardew, when you first arrive at the farm in Olive Town you find that it has been completely overrun with nature, and you have to spend time clearing away the debris so that you have a place to build your farm. Unlike in Stardew, the debris comes back at a ridiculously fast rate. Several in-game hours, if not more, of each day are spent cleaning up puddles (even if it didn’t rain), breaking rocks, clearing weeds, and chopping trees. Your farm can easily become overrun with nature again in just a few days’ time, meaning that a lot of your time that you would spend doing things like scavenging the mines or talking with villagers is instead spent doing basic, boring chores around the farm so that you still have livable land. And while farming sims like this one are games that are basically built around doing chores at least in part, the extent of the damage in this one (given that it happens all day every day, instead of just at the start of each season like in Stardew) really kills any fun or enjoyment you’d otherwise have as a player.

Farm upgrades come as entirely separate buildings, rather than expanding on the current building you have. So while in Stardew you could turn your existing Barns into Big Barns (and then Deluxe Barns), in Olive Town you have to buy an entirely separate building, and then painstakingly move all your animals to the new building one by one. Similarly, you can buy a silage to upgrade from your silo, but you’ll still have the silo on the farm. It doesn’t upgrade your existing development at all, despite being an upgraded form of that existing development.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Pioneers of Olive Town has some good ideas, but ultimately the terrible gameplay and lackluster execution of those ideas leaves so, so much to be desired. I will say that a patch was released recently which improved the loading screens a little, and for that I added the .5 to the score. (I took notes on things I liked / disliked / was neutral on as I played, so that I wouldn’t forget anything.) But a slight improvement to the loading screens doesn’t do much to help it when the lag is still terrible, the game still has freezes, and overall the gameplay itself just isn’t very fun. I probably will keep playing it for a bit longer to get to the marriage scenes at least, since I’ve almost maxed out Laura’s hearts. But honestly, there are so many better life sim games out there (the oft-mentioned in this review Stardew Valley being one of them) that if someone asked me if I recommended this game to them, I would have to say no.

Let’s hope the dev team does better with the next game. Maybe not feeling the pressure of it being the series’ anniversary will take some pressure off of them while they make it.

#story of seasons: pioneers of olive town #2021 game reviews

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demi-shoggoth · 4 years

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COVID-19 Reading Log

No idea if there’s any interest in this, but putting this out here.

With my vastly increased amount of time stuck at home (that is to say, all of it), it’s given me the opportunity to read more. And although I’m probably never going to catch up completely on my “To Read” pile, I have put a decent dent in it. So I will be periodically chronicling the books I have read. So far, in the last two and a half weeks, I have read...

1. Moths: A complete Guide to Biology and Behavior by David C. Lees and Alberto Zilli. Published by the Smithsonian, this book is lavishly illustrated with color photos depicting moth structures and behaviors. A good overview of the biology of Lepidoptera that aren’t butterflies (which are most of them). The copy came from the library with a neat little insert of errata, mostly for image captions and missing citations. Which suggests that the editorial process wasn’t as tidy as it could have been. The writing style is fluid and light for some decent technical detail. Some types of moths serve as possible inspiration for future monster—moths with tusks, caterpillars that stack their severed head capsules on their heads and use them as bludgeons, giant puss moth caterpillars with venomous hairs.

2. Hackmaster: Hacklopedia: Rustlers of the Night by Jolly R. Blackburn, et. al. A Hackmaster monster book I didn’t know existed until I found it used in a Half Price Books. It is a print on demand product only, and is a compilation of monsters from the back matter of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic book and a few modules. Size more like a trade paperback for a comic than it is for an RPG supplement. Creatures are the usual mix for Hackmaster—some conversions from AD&D, some gag monsters, some original creatures. Some toxic misogyny (the “gargirls”, or female gargoyles, are particularly bad). Lots of fire themed monsters—apparently from a City of Brass themed adventure. High concentration of good critters, especially in the back half. I will be converting plenty of these to Pathfinder.

3. When the Earth Had Two Moons by Erik Asphang. This one was a bit of a chore to get through. It’s about the early history of the solar system and how we know what we know. Some cool concepts and science are here. There are models of collisions between massive (planet sized) objects showing how they can warp, fuse or shear apart. The ideas of what conditions are like on the surface and below the surface of planets (both in our own solar system and outside of it) are captivating and weird. But the writing style is disorganized. Concepts are jumped back and forth between, and there’s no logical flow of ideas from one to the next. There are better books about astrophysics for lay readers out there, but it wasn’t exactly bad. Just not great.

4. What’s Eating You? by Eugene H. Kaplan. I honestly am not sure if I’ve already read this book and just forgotten about it, or if this is the first time. Books about parasites do tend to repeat the same anecdotes (Jewish grandmothers contracting fish tapeworm while preparing gefilte fish, the cycle of infection for Guinea worm, a personal connection to the ubiquitous pinworm). The most striking thing about the book are the illustrations—they are stippled and depict parasites, life history stages, and people infected with parasites. Many of the people are in homage to or parodies of classical art. The author’s attitude towards people living in developing countries seems paternalistic, which is an unpleasant running theme in the background of this book. Maybe skip this one—seek out Parasite Rex or People, Parasites and Plowshares for similar, better books.

5. The Wonders by John Woolf. The topic of the book is on the Victorian era and freak show performers. The main focus on the book is Charles Stratton, who performed under the name General Tom Thumb with PT Barnum. I suspect that the project started as a biography of Stratton, and then changed focus when the author realized he couldn’t find enough verifiable material for a full length book. Other performers who receive biographical information are Chang and Eng Bunker, who are the reason conjoined twins are still referred to as “Siamese Twins” to this day; Daniel Lambert, who influenced the depiction of John Bull as fat; Joice Heth, who was advertised by Barnum as the world’s oldest woman (and cruelly exploited—her chapters are difficult reading); and Julia Pastrana (whose manager was even crueler, and weirder, than Barnum). The writing flows well, and is highly empathetic to the performers. Parts of these stories are ones I’ve read before in other books, but Woolf has a good eye for detail and for connecting the people he writes about to the events of the era. The sexualization of non-normal bodies is covered extensively in the book. The sexualization of “Tom Thumb” when he was a child performer was especially alarming and troubling. Highly recommended—best book I’ve read so far in quarantine.

6. Life in the Dark by Danté Fenolio. This was a pleasant surprise. Specifically, that the book didn’t focus solely on abyssal life, which is what I expected going in. Other creatures adapted to low light environments, such as cave dwelling species, burrowers and even parasites are covered as well. It’s mostly a photo book, with captions describing the animals and their adaptations, but each chapter has a few pages of text introducing it. The photography is uniformly excellent, and the book sent me down a few rabbit holes looking up the interrelatedness of different groups of fish. My only complaint is the final chapter—chapters on the need for conservation work are de rigueur in books about the natural world these days, but the text in this one is somewhat overwrought (and the last photograph, of a sunset over the ocean, doesn’t help matters).

7. Skeleton Keys by Riley Black, writing as Brian Switek. This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for some time. The book is about skeletons—the evolution of the vertebrate skeleton, the structure of the human skeleton and the cultural significance of it. It is heavily informed by the real world events surrounding it. As the header implies, Black came out as trans shortly after writing the book (the second, paperback edition calls Brian Switek her “pen name”). The idea of “osteological sex” correlated with pelvis shape is strongly stressed in the text as not the same thing as either sex or gender, and references exist to gender identity and personal perception when referring to people both ancient and modern. Black is a good writer—I’ve enjoyed all of her books. I would have preferred the book be illustrated, though. The only illustrations in the book are chapter plates borrowed from public domain osteology texts. I understand the practical considerations, but it’s slightly disappointing. Still, definitely recommended.

8. Monster, She Wrote by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson. This is not exactly the book I was expecting. The subtitle is “the women who pioneered horror and speculative fiction”. I was expecting a series of short biographical sketches of a dozen or so earlier writers in those genres; something more like the approach to the various performers in The Wonders. Instead, it covers a few dozen women, from Margaret Cavendish to the modern day. And while it does give some biographical information, it is much more a recommended reading list than anything else. Fun, but I was hoping for something more substantive.

9. Invasive Plants by Sylvan Ramsey Kaufman and Wallace Kaufman. It’s a field guide. The photographs are nice, but it’s a field guide, so not exactly gripping reading. What struck me the most was how many of the plants covered I recognized from my backyard growing up. The authors are on the East Coast (in Maryland), and the East and South get a bit more attention than other parts of the country. As someone who is intimately familiar with some of the invasive plants of California, some that weren’t in the book (Sahara mustard and ice plant especially) struck me as notable omissions. It was cool to see references to plants I’ve worked on and scientists I’ve worked with in the sources.

10. Life through the Ages II by Mark Witton. This is a loose sequel to Charles Knight’s Life through the Ages; it’s designed to be a look at the state of paleoart and paleontology in the early 21th century, the way Knight’s book was a look at the ideas of the mid-20th century. The paintings in the book are gorgeous and well-informed, as Witton’s work generally is. About half of them have appeared on his blog in various forms previously, but some of the best are debuting here. Some of the paintings that stand out the most to me are a very grand stromatolite; an Atropodenatus howling at a suggestively shaped rock that strikes me as being influenced by Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” and Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms; an Opthamalosaurus swimming by a coastline studded with dead trees that look much like the decaying columns of an ancient civilization; a Georgiacetus mother watching over her calf rolling around on a rocky shore; and a Neanderthal family protecting their curious child from getting too close to a wooly mammoth.

#long post #reading log #books

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thisiskatsblog · 3 years

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Hi Kat, I'm feeling sad and sort of mad here so I might rant, I'd like to know what you think I don't know if you're gonna post it or answer it to avoid controversy and negativity in your blog but I appreciate you got to read it bc I needed to vent, tysm in advance...

I see so many people hating on Harry because he said "clothes are fun" without "making any social statement about it and that he doesn't recognize his privilege of wearing what he wants cause he's rich and famous" and can I just say that it's because of that same privilege he's so influential and has helped so many queer fans to be who they want to be, he's using his privilege for good and also, I hate when people try to force activism out of everyone...

I understand being critical but activism should be genuine and intentional. It just seems to me that they're people from the q community who had an agenda against him before this interview got released, sometimes it doesn't even seen this is about social justice. I've seen the most cruel and hateful comments wishing for him to be miserable and unsuccessful (that's not happening anytime sooner, honey, go off)...

And they don't really know him, they don't know he does more than waving flags and putting stickers on his guitar, he has donated to non-profits, spent money on queer artists, he protested and signed petitions for BLM, he has helped fans to come out, he does have talked on social issues, they're just looking for a reason to be mad tbh...

He might not get too deeply political because he has stated that politics divide people and that is 100% true. He has INDEED recognized he is privileged on a RS interview and that he just wants to show people he sees them and he's here for them. Everybody does activism in different ways, and Harry's certainly isn't performative, he's not obnoxious about it but he's not tone deaf either, he's self-aware.Honestly, I don't understand what this people want?...

If they see this cis boy speaking on gender issues and gender expression on a Vogue interview and talking about trans/nb/gnc people who are opressed then they may fill Twitter with comments like "he doesn't do anything for us, why is he talking about it? he's not our icon" but if he doesn't do it then he's pandering? Do they want an ally who leads a movement and speaks on issues or an ally who does acts of service for the movement and doesn't speak for it? I don't understand, idk if I will..

Finally, no one should be a certain sexuality to be allowed to break gender roles, yes, straight people do have privilege even when they dress androgynous but they shouldn't be cancelled for that...

Now, entering hypothetical (basically confirmed) field, can we talk about how problematic is accusing a closeted person of pandering? If someone have ever told artists like Bowie or Mercury to "stop profiting of queer people" while they weren't out in the public eye, then no one would have paved the way for other men to express themselves, break toxic masculinity and help other gender non-conforming kids. Kids like Janelle Monaé, Billy Porter, Lil Nas, P!nk, Sam Smith and yes, Harry Styles.

(that was the end of my rant btw, it was like 8 asks, I think, hope nothing got lost, sorry for the length but this people literally want Harry to fail because of freaking wearing a skirt and not getting too political about it and I was certainly not having it)

----------------------- Hi anon,

They all arrived!

I’m glad it helps you just to be able to vent, without expecting to be published, so anyone who needs a vent: do feel free to use the service of my inbox 😊

I will publish because I think you are making a few interesting points.

It’s true that Harry can do the things he does because he is privileged – and I completely agree with you that it’s a good thing he is using that privilege to the fullest and thereby changes things for the better for other queer people.

On the other hand, I do understand the frustration of queer people who are less privileged when they wish he would recognize that privilege. It isn’t true that in this day and age anyone can dress the way Harry does on the cover of Vogue, and it could make his “statement”, which in itself is positive for queer people, all the more powerful if he recognized it and expressed his wish for that to change. To me, it’s a question of gradation. Wearing a ruffled dress is really good and changes lives; saying that you wish everyone had the freedom to wear that dress in the way you now have that freedom is even better and raises awareness of intersectionality (when you are LGBTQ and poor, being LGBTQ is more difficult than when you are LGBTQ and rich).

I don’t think Harry is the kind of person you’d need to force activism out of, I do see him as someone who has been activist as well as political on many occasions. Maybe not as political and activist as I’d like him to be, maybe not in the way I would be in his position, but definitely committed to the same causes that I find important, and not afraid of using the position he has to influence when he feels comfortable to do so. I wish he’d been more vocal on a great number of occasions, but I agree with you in that you cannot look at your idols in music and simply expect them to be fervent and perfect political activists. Art can be activist, but it doesn’t have to be, you cannot expect it to be.

Furthermore, I think Harry definitely has some privilege that he’s shown to be unaware of, and I’ve also seen him take things in, learn, change his position (see the RS interview you also mention), and become more vocal politically. In other words: Harry is human.

I have not seen the criticism you are talking about, and it seems there have been various different ones, so I won’t be going into them, some seem more valid, others are not. In any case I would be very hesitant to put it all aside as “queer people who had an agenda against him” or “they’re just looking for a reason to get mad”. That thinking may put you at ease, and stay on your side of things, but it won’t help the conversation. I think it’s important when you’re on two sides of an argument, to try and understand where the unmet need is on the “other” side.

Since I haven’t seen the original arguments, I am not completely clear on this – but it seems that the common thread in your understanding of the criticism he receives is that Harry’s ambiguous identity (while having amply suggested he may be not cis/straight, he hasn’t been straightforward about it) makes it possible for people to criticize him both ways.

I agree with you that you do not need to be queer to be allowed to break gender norms, and that closeted people should not be criticized for breaking gender norms and paving the way, to come out themselves, and for others. But I do see where the frustration on the other side comes from – I don’t think it’s necessarily evil willed towards Harry. What I see, a strong wish and urgent need to have out and proud role models who do these things; and – guessing that a lot of the people criticizing him suspect he is indeed closeted – an enormous frustration that closeting still happens, and about the mixed messages Harry, as a role model, may implicitly gives to queer kids in this way. It’s okay to dress outrageously and challenge norms but it’s not okay to be explicit about your identity and orientation, do keep that vague. I personally feel extremely frustrated about that, even if I also believe this is outside Harry’s will.

“We don’t talk enough, we should open up, before it’s all too much…”

Anyway, long story short anon: I get you. And I think I get the other side too. In the end we all choose whether we want to see the glass as half full or half empty. And I’m siding with you that it’s half full, and with the critics that I wish it were completely full, but then again with you that you cannot really fault Harry for that not (yet) being the case... But it’s okay for it to be said: I wish the glass were full.

#i hope that addresses it all #this was a long ask #ask #anonymous #coming out #gender #vogue #harry #Anonymous

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heeres-suffering · 4 years

Text

Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?”

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life...

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long.

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t.

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with.

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat.

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad.

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake.

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature)

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