#trans men representation good but zero fucking not-men representation bad

[pawberri]

Do you have any recommendations for non-furry visual novels? I'm a bit overwhelmed at the options available. (I'm already aware of Stein's Gate, Umineko, Zero Escape and have put them in my to read/play list)

Absolutely!!

If you like emotional, thoughtful stuff like Umineko: DEFINITELY check out Mamiya!! It’s less well known but so so good. TW for suicide of a trans character in the first route, but said character does get really interesting nuanced good ends after the first round of mandatory bad ends. I also love love love Ciconia no Naku Koro Ni which is the least well known, most recent entry in the When They Cry franchise. It’s not only a really compelling political drama, it has amazing multiplicity representation as well as trans representation. Fata Morgana is another classic, it’s great but check trigger warnings.

For otome: You can’t go wrong with Otomate, Cafe Enchante is one of my favorite dating sims by them. Collar X Malice is another great one!! My BF also loves Bustafellows. I’m working through lots of other games slowly.

For BL: DMMD is the big, famous, high budget, beautiful BL game. Like everything by Nitrochiral it has lots of trigger warnings and problematic tropes, but it’s a very compelling fun game that doesn’t waste your time. I hear good stuff about Slow Damage. I love Hashihime of Old Book Town, but it also has major trigger warnings and the last route… sucks… to me… and is a weird grooming narrative thing… But it’s technically sort of a separate story to the rest of the routes. BL visual novels are generally insane and crazy and full of drama (there are many exceptions but y’know.) One of my favorite new BL things is Promise of Wizards/Mahoutsukai no Yakusoku which is a mobile game that lets you choose to be either a boy or a girl and has the characters flirt with you no matter what! The boy route feels so nice and satisfying. I play in Japanese, but there’s a fan translation page.

I haven’t dipped my toes into Morenatsu or other osukemo type games. I do think Echo is really, really good and Adastra is lots of fun. I’m also only slowly working through the famous hetero VNs like Steins;Gate and White Album. My one piece of advice is never ever ever ever waste your time playing fucking Muvluv. The straight men are lying to you. It fucking sucks.

[hottestthingalive]

Thoughts on horse girls?

should be more represented in media. centaurs that are women do exist, as do nonbinary and/or genderqueer ones, and the traditional image of centaur men and centaur men only is erasure of the rest of the centaur gender spectrum.

#sick and tired of seeing only boy centaurs #trans men representation good but zero fucking not-men representation bad #anyways #asks #anon

[annebaneriddle]

About the Anthony Mackie thing:

That was a really valid point. The feitisization of homosexual relationships (both wlw and mlm) is huge and really harmfull. Some people only want to use lgbt relationships for their own personal gains (industries using them to get money and people using them to masturbate or some shit like that), HOWEVER there are some lgbt people who use shipping as a form to get the representation they don't get on canon, specially when it comes to Marvel, that has a really big history of zero representation to lgbt people, queerbaited a lot on ther movies (and even used the theory of Bucky being bi because of the tigger photos he saw on the dating app as an opportunity to use lgbt people to their own profit with the "watch and see" bullshit only to on the very next week after the last episode go and say "Oh, no, it was only Bucky being clueless abiut technology" when the show itself showed he wasn't at all) and had the audacity to announce their "first gay character" only to give us fucking gay Joe Russo. There is no harm on seeking for representation on such a big fanchise as Marvel, on wanting an lgbt superhero, just like there is no harm on women and POC wanting their representation too. The thing is that sometimes they end up having to make that representation themselves, and they use fanfics and fanarts for that. Writing Peter Parker trans, writing Carol a lesbian, writing Steve as bi, writing Bucky as bi. That's totally ok.

The feiticization of lgbt peolple, as I said, is real and harmfull, but that shouldn't mean that lgbt people can't want some representation. Anthony fought to have a black man as Cap, and lgbt people have the right to fight to have one of them being portrayed as a hero too, not only as the queercoded villain.

I undertand why Anthony must be feeling umcomfortable. After all, Sam's relationship with Bucky was portrayed just like his own relationship with Sebastian, so it's undertandable that he might feel like that. HOWEVER, we have to keep in mind that someone assuming you (or the character you play, on this situation), a man, are gay only makes you uncomfortable because society teached people that being gay is shamefull, is a bad thing.

Yes, men who are friends and are caring and are caring and loving with each other are often said to be gay, BUT let's remind that it existed WAY before the shipping culture on internet. The fact that men aren't allowed to be vulnerable, caring and gentle comes from the patriarchy, not from the shipping culture or from lgbt people. It comes from the sexist idea that men have to be tough, that they aren't allowed to show physical affection to other men, that they aren't allowed to cry. THAT is from where the "a man can't show affection to other man or otherwise he is gay" idea comes from. Put the blame where it really belongs.

I saw people saying "We shouldn't be writting straigh characters as gay for representation. We already have our own characters on media" and I was like "Who, honey? The gay (either male or female) side character who is the comic releaf and extremely stereotyped? The trans- oh, yeah, neverming, trans people don't even get representation enough to creat the media stereotype. And the bi- oh, yeah, never saw any either. Oh, ok, maybe the aroaces- nyah, not them either". The only "representation" lgbt people get is 90% of the time blunt stereotyping. It's ok to "steal" some characters from the straights to make headcanons and fanfics to have some representation even if just made up. Don't let anyone shame you for wanting to see a hero like you on-screen. Women have that right, POC have that right, the lgbt community have that right, EVERYONE have that right.

I also want to say that there is NO excuse for the people being racist towards him, the same way that there is no excuse for the people defending him by using homophobic language, using the word queer when they are not lgbt themselves and harassing lgbt people who felt hurt by the way he worded it.

He had a really good point and he was totally right about what he meant to say, he just worded it bad.

And no, keyboard warriors, stop saying that every lgbt person feeling hurt by the way that he worded what he meant is because they're racist. The fact that he is black doesn't make the fact that the way he said that hurt some people (specially because it's pride month) magically go away. And no, I'm not saying that what he said was homophobic, because it wasn't at all. I just wanted to point out that there are some people acting like that and it isn't how things should work. A POC shouldn't get away with being lgbtphobic just because they're POC, the same way a lgbt person shouldn't get away with being racists just because they are lgbt (again, I DO NOT think he is homophobic. Just pointing it out here). As we say in Brazil: let's not use two weights to the same measure (the "measure" here is the prejudice, just so no one will misinterpret me).

Also, I really want to thank him for making the real homophobes and the racists on this app out themselves. It's suddenly so easy to spot them.

#anthony mackie #sebastian stan #mcu #fatws #sambucky #sambucky friendship #lgbt couple #lgbtq+

[somelazyassartist]

What's wrong with the Taako character design?

Don't get me fucking started. And there are plenty of problems with Merle and Magnus too, but since you asked about Taako specifically, I will talk about Taako specifically.

It's racist. And antisemitic. Like yeah, that's a pretty big fuckin thing. I'm not really the right person to talk about this since I am a white goy, but the #taz racism tag has a lot of really good discussion about his design.

It's frankly, in my humble opinion, fetishistic and insulting to gay men in a way. Now I'm sure other gay men have different opinions than I do, we're not a hive mind after all, but as a gay man I feel very.... Uncomfortable with it. He's the only openly gay man out of the main characters, and he's drawn as a skinny twink with long bleached blonde hair who cares about makeup and always wears a skimpy outfit or a tiddy window or at the very least heels. And that on its own isn't necessarily bad- hey, I'm a skinny twink with long hair that likes to wear more feminine clothes. But along with his design, the way they adapted his dialogue reduces him from this fully fleshed out beautiful complex character to "I'm gay!! Look at me!! Can you tell I'm gay cuz I like astrology!!! I'm wearing a dress haha isn't that so weird and quirky and obviously every gay man dresses like this isn't it so weird!! Hey I'm flirting with guys hey by the way did I mention I'm gay?!" and frankly it rubs me the wrong way.

Okay this one is just my personal thing and I 100% don't expect everyone to agree with this, but personally, as a trans man, I identified with Podcast!Taako a lot and I can't imagine him as a cisgender man. And I've seen posts from other trans guys that identify with him too. So again, seeing a character that quite a few trans men identify with being presented as this overly-stereotypical effeminate skinny might-as-well-be-white guy acting and presenting this way crosses the line from "representation of feminine gay/trans men" from the original to the "this relies so heavily on stereotypes that I can barely give you credit for the attempt, it's practically plain insulting" that the graphic novel stoops to. And besides my own headcanon of Taako bring transgender, his twin sister Lup is canonically a trans woman, and I dread the day she appears in the comics. I swear to the gods if they make Lup look "bigger and stronger" than her brother (cisgender or not- both would be huge issues for slightly different reasons) I'm going to fucking throw hands. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a big strong and/or masculine trans woman!! But with all the other stereotypes they've shoved into these characters I have absolutely zero hope that they could pull that off in a respectful way.

It just looks bad. It straight up just does not look good. Now listen, I may be only a novice teenage artist who is by far not anywhere close to having the skill level needed to create a comic book- BUT EVEN I KNOW THIS IS BAD AND COULD DO BETTER THAN THIS. He does not fit in with the other characters at all, he looks like he belongs in a whole different comic!! And aside from Magic Brian (who is a DROW by the way- regardless of the other designs he'd be purple anyways so I can't really even count him) Taako is the ONLY blue-skinned Elf. Drow are purple, Orcs are green, Dragonborn are all sorts of colors, so I get those character choices. And yes, according to D&D canon, regular Elves can have "blueish-white" skin tones. SO WHY DON'T WE SEE ANY OTHER BLUE ELVES?????? IF THERE WERE MORE THEN YEAH IT'D STILL BE PROBLEMATIC WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF HIS CHARACTER BUT AT LEAST IT'D MAKE FUCKING SENSE!!!!!! BUT NO IT SEEMS LIKE TAAKO AND PRESUMABLY LUP WILL ARE THE ONLY BLUE ELVES AND LIKE??? WHAT THE FUCK????? DID THEY NOT THINK THIS THROUGH??????? DID THEY NOT REALIZE HOW JARRING IT IS AND HOW OUT OF PLACE HE LOOKS?????

in conclusion: I love Podcast!Taako more than I could ever say but Jesus Fucking Christ did the graphic novel butcher him. How could they do this to my boy.

#asks #the adventure zone #the adventure zone balance #the adventure zone graphic novel

[hearthandhomemagick]

Food For Thought - Steven Universe

Hello there, I would like to tell you my story and journey with the amazingly beautiful, and wonderfully written TV Show...

Steven Universe.

I started watching this show when it first came out in High School. I mean, I was so excited to watch it that I anticipated the very first episode and sat down with snacks to observe it’s premier. I had become immediately enthralled not only with the art style, but also with the genuine wholesomeness and elucidations of processing emotions and life experiences. I was astounded that a kids show could express to me how to manage my emotions as well as connect with my moral standings. It’s a show I recommended to everyone, but often didn’t talk about because of it being a kids show, and me being almost being grown. It was my secret love until someone else brought it up.

This show stuck with me through the years, and helped me through some of my hardest moments in life. 

I remember watching the episode, “Mindful Education” and melting into Garnet’s lesson of mindfulness and self-awareness. I had been going through a lot at the end of 2016, graduating and going through a rough election along with having to move states for college. My opinions were forming in the extreme area and I had a fire to protect my thoughts and opinions with no restrain or any form of control of my emotional reality. I was rambunctious as much as I was head-strong and, at times, hard-headed all together. 

When this episode aired, I didn’t know why I loved Garnet and Stevonnie’s song, “Here Comes a Thought.” But I did, and it still carries with me into my life today. 

I want to discuss a specific time, though, that this episode saved my sanity and opened my eyes to a concept I didn’t understand when I first watched it. I was on social media, and was defending my opinions against quite a few people by myself. Eventually, I was getting nasty comments from a bunch of millennials telling me, 

“You’re too fucking stupid to understand, maybe you should go back to school, child.”

“You’re so emotional, and your emotions don’t matter here. Imagine being this dumb.”

“Imagine being a dumb bitch like Carly and saying you wanted to cut your penis off to look like a woman.” *NOTE I am not transgender, there is nothing wrong with being transgender and her insinuating such did not bother me. Her rhetoric insinuating trans was wrong is what irked me, this bitch was transphobic and had issues that she needs to repair in her own time. She wrote an entire post based around this context on her personal page using my real name, and she didn’t even know who I was.*

and my personal favorite, “Here’s the suicide hotline, I know your generation is prone to killing themselves and are overly emotional.”

Now, there were over 50, under 100, messages going back and forth where these people were just bullying me and I refused to back down. I wound up in a panic attack in my bedroom, literally wanting to kill myself because they were bullying me. The hotline would have come in handy if it were the actual hotline. I ended up going to my dad and older sister (my older sisters friend was the main one I was arguing with and her posy showed up on my post), because no one on the post was on my side.

Both told me, “If you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” My sister told her friend to stop, and threatened the other girl for her nasty posts and comments. My dad tried to mediate on the post itself, but the people wouldn’t stop. I eventually had to take it down.

My family didn’t calm me down in this moment. Not even a little bit. It felt like a back-handed helping hand. Like they wanted to protect me, but also somewhat agreed with the people on the post.

The only thing that calmed my nerves in this moment, ultimately, was the song, “Here Comes a Thought.” 

I sat in my room, sobbing, hoping to myself that it would make sense as to why it was okay for these things to happen. The song soothed over my nerves, eventually releasing my muscles and giving me a sense ease. I was able to process and realized a few personal things as well. I didn’t realize it, but before long, I was meditating to the song on repeat. I kept telling myself, “I’m okay, this is a thought. A moment. I am not my thoughts. I am not this moment.”

This was simply one of the ways Steven Universe has helped me process and understand myself more. I bring this up because I came across and article today that disappointed me to the core.

The Steven Universe Fandom has toxic tendencies.

I was shook.

How could a child’s show be turned into something so negative? Something that was meant to promote self-awareness, self-love, acceptance of character, and understanding of others had been morphed into a gatekeepers safe haven.

Now I know this isn’t the majority, and before you get offended, hurt or start defending yourself, I want you to ask yourself if what you are defending is an action you would defend from anyone else. If it is, by all means defend your ground.

But the one concept that eludes me, and offers zero substance in terms of valid arguments, is that men can not watch this show. Let me explain why men NEED to watch this fucking show.

My boyfriend watched this entire show, episode for episode, and benefitted from it. This show offered him coping techniques, an understanding of why love should come before war, and mediating every situation so you see and understand every perspective. These are things children shows didn’t offer him growing up, he has often and openly verbalized his need for this show in his childhood because of certain traumas, and we often continue watching it even after seeing every single episode and movie.

This show was never meant for one or two groups of people, and if you feel that way then refer back to the writers themselves who were literally trying to teach the lesson in the show over and over again to NEVER EXCLUDE PEOPLE FROM YOUR GROUP. You exclude people, and you create a division, a war of sorts. You immediately have become the thing Steven Universe advocated against in the first place.

This also leads into the whole “art” situation in the fandom. 

This show is anti-bully. There are commercials for it and everything. It is expressed in multiple episodes why bullying is never a good thing in any situation. 

You simply cannot justify the hypocrisy in bullying someone out of self-expression that literally harms no one. You can’t justify it.

Think about it. You draw or sketch a piece of art that took you hours, or even a few minutes. It’s your favorite character, and maybe you yourself are going through some mental thoughts regarding your weight that lead you to draw the character thinner or bigger. Size shouldn’t matter in any capacity when relating a character to ones self. 

If you’re skinny, you’re beautiful. If you are thick or curvy, you are beautiful. If you are obese or overweight, you are beautiful. Weight doesn’t matter, but representation of body types in different characters does matter.

Imagine a child falls in love with a bigger character, but is experiencing body challenges where she is being picked on for being too thin or scrawny (it happens, I’ve seen it with my nieces). Who are you to say that making her favorite character look like her own body is wrong? Especially if art is a coping mechanism they use for mental health reasons.

Like Malachite, a fusion that was devastating and abusive in every way, you are taking the choice and voice of an entire being to make your actions and opinions “right” or “okay”.

There is so much more I could say on this show, and so much more I could say about the fandom. And I know it is not the majority of the fandom, but I did want to make everyone in the fandom aware that we are human.

None of us are stoic and balanced like Garnet, and even Garnet had problems in her relationship. None of us are strong and laid back like Amethyst, and even she had self-love issues. None of us are as analytical and organized as Pearl, and yet she had problems throughout the series. 

None of you are perfect, and to act as if you are is defeating the purpose of a show trying to teach you how to be responsible for yourself and your actions. I’m not perfect either, and preaching about a fandom I’m not a huge part of sounds counter-intuitive, I’m aware.

But my nieces want to watch this show. My nephew watches this show with me. My boyfriend’s niece is going to start watching the show. 

Please do not make a toxic environment for kids who need this show to grow up. Kids who experience trauma, and learn from this show deserve a safe space without people trying to justify bullying or force them to think that because they are a boy or girl, they can or can’t watch the show. Without people making people feel bad for being themselves.

Why don’t we create a new space? A space where everyone is accepted as they are, and negative behavior is addressed the same way the gems or Steven would address them. With education, perception awareness, and PATIENCE. 

I know some will say, “It’s not my job to raise your child.” and “It’s not my responsibility to make people aware of their tendencies.”

You’re right. It’s also not your responsibility to bully people into changing themselves to fit your dialogue. Simply put, you’re responsible for yourself alone. But you have no right to complain on someone's behavior, art or experiences if you are not willing to be patient with correcting said behavior in yourself first.  

Who knows, maybe I’m in the wrong here for not knowing the full story. All I’m saying is, if you see someone being a bully, being mean or even being a hypocrite, call them out in the sweetest way possible. Let them know we are facilitating a safe space for people who need a community rather than a closed off club.

Be the change you want to see in this world.

Learn, grow and prosper. 

I wish you all well and genuinely hope we can all expand our perspectives to fully understand each other in healthier and more communicative based ways. We deserve that sort of kindness from each other.

#steven #stevenuniverse #amethyst #pearl #garnet #malachite #cartoonshow #art #love #patience #understanding #herecomesathought #foodforthought

[rpbetter]

Hi Vespertine. Sorry to add to the pile, I promise I will send in some writing related things to compensate later. I also misgendered that user in a comment by accident with she/her. I blocked them, but they still looked at my blog, and they made a post that said by using the wrong pronouns, which they thought was intentional and meant to hurt them, I purposefully called them a hysterical woman stereotype. Obviously that wasn't true. I was just going off a comment someone else made on my blog where they used she/her, and I thought I had to correct myself. It was a case where good intentions, even if I was not happy with the user's behavior or expected to talk to them again, I was still going to use the right pronouns, but my intentions were warped by someone with an agenda. I'm sorry to hear you're getting the same heat. I didn't use my rp blog to interact with the user or talk about them because I was sure something like this would happen, either by them or other people like that callout blog, and I think other people had the same idea. I dodged a bullet there, but I'm still paranoid. I'm paranoid I'll hear a notif and see my rp blog in a callout for this, because someone hunted it down, or a callout for trying to talk to the person who started all the drama. Nobody should be scared to talk about someone on their own blog. Nobody should be scared to talk openly, in general. Nobody should be called out for trying to talk with someone either. This culture of fear is so disturbing to me.

Hey there, Anon!

Oh, I would love that, but you totally don't have to, of course. Don't feel bad for adding on, I'm here for anything at all, and honestly, with the job I'm doing IRL right now, it's really hard for me to concentrate well enough on finishing any of the advice posts (at least, to be the quality y'all deserve). It's a hot topic, it's included so, so, terribly many people in the RPC. It's also one that's generating some great, needed conversations. So, it isn't like you're adding to anything bad, annoying or distracting me, or contributing to the inflammatory side of this.

Hell, it's got to be really nice for some of the people in messages I've received to see proof that they weren't alone in this experience. I can keep publishing the hate anons for exactly that reason, and I can promise people they aren't the only ones (in this or in any such horrible behavior), but it's different to see it coming from a third party! So, thank you for that.

Though, I am deeply sorry that you were treated to more than a ringside seat in this debacle.

It's not very encouraging to be thoughtful and respectful of other people when literally nothing you can say or do will result in anything other than more twisting of your words, and that's a big problem I have with this shit. Things like actual transphobia, intentional misgendering, actual infantalization and shit treatment of ND people, actual harassment, etc. etc. etc. matter. It's just more trivializing of real problems for the sake of blowing nonexistent bullshit up, and that is immensely disgusting to me. The fact that you damn well know someone out there has had the reaction to this behavior of, well, fuck you then, fuck trans people is really upsetting.

Like, yeah, let's be real, if you require social rewards to do the right thing, you have some problems lol but at the same time, you know who does require social rewards to develop themselves? Young people. And the RPC is largely comprised of people in their early twenties who, for a variety of possible reasons, are still at that point

Furthermore, no, it's not anyone's job to be good representation at all times, especially when that performance comes at a cost to themselves, but maybe don't go out of your way to be the person that is the necessary push in the wrong direction of someone's formative experience with people of your community. If it's costing you nothing to not clown on serious issues, but is costing the entire world another bigot for you to clown on serious issues, the choice should be a bit obvious here. Whenever you're in a safe place - physically, emotionally - and capable of that kind of logic, exercise it, damn.

It's definitely a better course of action than playing out skewed activism by vilifying innocent people, more worthy of one's effort than losing their collective shit over a very easy mistake. One that I'd say was even less avoidable in your case. AGAIN, how, exactly is anyone supposed to know this shit when they're blocked? When they aren't subverting the blocks they, themselves, put in place? I know for a fact none of them are looking at the information of the people they choose to try to drive out of the RPC, but everyone else is supposed to make zero reasonable assumptions, check and recheck blogs they have made an effort not to visit for good reason. Sounds absolutely reasonable and sane!

So, you know what? I'm going to be even more offensive here and talk for a moment about why these mistakes are reasonable.

When we see a post and reblog it, it's not unreasonable to assume that the OP had knowledge we didn't. Since we blocked the offending party, but they're discussing them. OP uses the incorrect pronouns, we end using the incorrect pronouns as well. This is not malicious intent. It isn't intentional at all, it's just having a discussion. A discussion that wouldn't have even transpired if they hadn't taken it upon themselves to (what a coincidence) take personal issue with a RPer they repeatedly took out of context and decided to shame for it, before proceeding to get an even bigger stick and pot.

When we decide to block a blog, it's our responsibility to stay off of it. Not go looking at it for any reason. That is now off-limits. When someone blocks us, it's also our responsibility to respect that decision, no matter how outrageous it was, no matter what we might need to verify. That's the issue with blocking when we don't exploit how easy it is to get around blocking on tumblr; we've cut ourselves off from any further meaningful communication, including passive communication like rules and posts. Kind of like how you cannot expect an apology to mean a damn thing when you've blocked everyone you harassed, then made that apology in a post on your blocked blog. Don't put up walls you expect people to see through, then get upset when they can't see through them.

As a community, the RPC is primarily afab. That's never a problem to bring up when someone wants to be angry about their female muse not getting equal attention and so on, but it's a problem to discuss any other time, about any other problem. Dealing with the things that we're socially raised to ascribe to as afab people is that problem. It's reflected in our behaviors, interests, and speech. We may not want to live in a gendered world, we may eschew that, but we were raised in a gendered world and it shows. One which has a lot of complications for being that, like almost everyone feeling safer around afab people by default of the All Men Are Bad, All Women Are Harmless bullshit.

We not only know that the RPC is primarily afab, we tend to assume comfort, especially in hostile situations, by assuming those pronouns in others.

And it so does not matter how much any of us like it, some people have more masculine or feminine tones. Even in text. That means neither that someone's gender identity should be disregarded nor that this text-based presentation is correct, but like every other unfair thing that exists, it's a thing. Like you, Anon, you genuinely come across in tone as primarily neutral, slight lean toward masculine. Even if I wasn't inclined to do so, not knowing you and all, I'd use they/them for you instinctively because that's what your speech is giving me. That isn't any more unreasonable than ascribing another set of pronouns based on the same information.

Oh yeah, I know, lurkers, the difference is that they/them is the appropriate choice when one does not know. I know that logically, but people aren't always operating like robots, weirdly enough. We default to a lot of instinctive behaviors, and we aren't always operating at the top rung of cognition either. Being human works like that, it's really that simple and not malicious if you're not reading that into it.

As we're all aware, it is being read into, and your experience is exactly why; you now feel worried every time you get a notif, you've been outed as a supposed transphobe, and while it is incredibly fortunate you stopped this from transpiring on your RP blog, it still transpired somewhere and has had a negative effect. If they find they correct thing or set of things, they can get so many more people to dogpile you over it. Get enough people to do that, make someone miserable enough, especially people who are already going through a hard enough time already, they'll leave.

It is a terroristic act, and it has the effect of all terroristic acts; people are afraid to exist outside of shifting bounds (that shifting is a part of the terrorism). They can't have an opinion, write any muse/topic they wish, be honest on their own blogs, support the "wrong" topics, muns, or blogs. Attacking people for a mistake, not allowing them to address it either, just furthers all of that. It's showing the community what happens when you aren't on the "right" side, even if that isn't even the case. They certainly turn on their own quickly enough.

So, of course, it's a culture of fear and it is disturbing as hell. No one has any right to make someone feel unsafe over fiction or a hobby or a difference of opinion. Everyone has the right to say whatever they want on their own blogs, to talk openly, and yes, to try to talk to others without feeling at risk.

Even if what someone says is genuinely unpleasant. This isn't the way one handles it. By all means, have a problem with something, have a problem with someone, but grow up and talk to them openly, without bringing everyone you can dredge up to join in. I have no issue with people arguing, I have an issue with bullying. If it's your whole goal to harass people without consequences to the end result of deactivation and lockstep behavior from everyone else, that's what you're doing, folks. Bullying.

If you can't win an argument, especially one your own ass began, in any other way than this, you're not engaging in an argument.

#vespertine #answered #anonymous #callout culture #rp harassment

[howljenky]

I have a few things to say thats been circling in my mind a lot.

The reduction and watering down of the word Femme to mean Feminine woman, not even lesbian as i saw bi ppl use it as well, and straigh women use it as well, as an empowering feminine word that completly disregard the culture of the word, made me ocasionally think to myself "ugh i hate being called a femme" and made me have life crises in which i forget what Femme stands for, because i have no map for it, and noone to cling to, and teach me, and remind me, that i exist in this world to love butches. The loneliness i feel is tearing me apart. More under cut.

Feminine women saw the word femme, and decided femmes are trying to replicate heterosexuality, that femmes are selfish, and close minded, and "exclusuonists", and they took this word for themselves to preach about how good femme4femme relationships are, how ignorant and misogynistic we were for not choosing to date other feminine women, and for replicating heterosexuality, they took it and trampled over us for not being progressive, for choosing to date the ugly mean dykes. And this is it, this is the reason they did it. Their hatered for butches and masculine women.

This hatered is why terms like "soft butch" exists, this is why everyone tells butches they can be feminine if they want to, while pissing and dissing on the butches that reject every form of feminity, calling them links to toxic masculinity, calling them predatory, and mean, and cold hearted, and cheaters, and emotionally closed off, in our own lesbian community no less, which come to bite femmes in the ass as well for choosing to date such "heartless bastards", to the point you take the word femme from us to "save us" or whatever is going through their minds, while also telling everyone a characteristic of being a lesbian is to be soft masculine. They want that "soft androgyny" aesthetic, masculine women to at least have a feminine thing about them, as if butches are still obliged by the police to have 3 women garments on themselves like in our past culture, but not to be too feminine, because then u have to date other feminine lesbians, or fall into this category of lesbians that are being asked "so why dont you just date a man?" Because people just cannot get through their thick skulls that lesbians have NOTHING to do with men. Not too feminine, because feminity is men's.

So alright, they hate the butches, and they "reclaimed" femme from those who stay with the butches. And it is good for them! They can use the word femme as they please, while continuing to compare butches to men and out relationship to a straight one. But what does that mean for the butchfemme culture?

It directly harms out community. We cannot find eachother that easily anymore. I see the word femme and instead of being estatic that i am not alone in this world, I get wary and confused, to the point that I dont even search for femmes like me anymore. Im okay alone as well, as long as i have the attention of butches. The word femme made me so distant of its meaning, that only butches can pull me out of it and remind me just why i exist and what i am fighting for, just by existing in the same space as them. But they have it hard too. On top of all the hate, from straight people and from the lgbt+ community and even from the lesbian comunity, they have a hard time finding femmes to truly understand them, and love them, and be patient with them as well. The rings of this community falls so thight and it always feels like its getting smaller and smaller instead of larger. Consciously or not, the pressure and hatered we get drives us away from ourselves. The pressure of finding femmes like me, the disappointment i get often of not being understood by fellow lesbians drove me away from them. It's just butches i can rely onto. For lesbians and for other members of the lgbt community, this makes me an exclusionist, a demon, a bad person.

The lack of media representation is a problem here as well. No straight person wants to see an old mean dyke on the screen, so they don't put them. They don't put them so that they won't turn to "stereotypical lesbians". They don't put them because they hate them. The lesbian representation is few as it is, but it is all feminine women, or femme4femme as the others with no regard to the butchfem community chose to name it. This mainly is to appeal to the male gaze, so that no man would feel threatened by someone more masculine than them. In this world, not even lesbians, who exclude men, can never separate from them entirely. Butches get compared to men, femmes are put in a box of feminity for the male gaze, and both being called a heterosexual replica, a second hand straight couple, by everyone. No wonder it took so long for me to even know what i was. And who i was. Where could i have seen myself, if there were no femmes on the screen? How would i have known who i love if there arent any butches in media? If it hadnt been for my then-friend and now unapologetical butch girlfriend, i wouldn't have read stone butch blues, and then i wouldnt have read all the other books, and i wouldnt have gotten myself in that thight spot in the small community, and i would have still be lost and lonely. Now i am just lonely, but not lost.

This lack of representation also makes everyone go along with internet trends, and not getting documented on the culture. They go along with what the others say, because theres barely any place to learn about this and to fully capture its essence and meaning. We are silenced, and deemed not worthy to be heard, because of modernised times, and changes in meanings, and being regressive. But my love for butches is an act of revolution against everyone that might call me selfish, or straight, a fake persona, and its not lower than the other non-aligned lesbians.

This is why I am still an unapologetical Femme. I am a femme, because of the feminine women around me invalidating my identity with calling themselves femme. I am femme, because of loving butches. I am femme because i exist to love and cherish and respect butches. I am femme because when everyone hates butches, where else would they go? Where is their home? Where are they fully accepted? Unconditionally? Where are butches allowed to be masculine without getting bashed for it? Who understands how butches love? Who desires them, without sexualising them?

I am femme because i am a home to butches. I am femme because, regardless of what others say, my femininity still isnt for men, and never will be. I am femme because i want change. I am femme because until butches get accepted as they are, unconditionally and without a doubt, i am not accepted either, and i refuse to get accepted without them. I am femme, until the day i see myself on the screen, until i see my lovers on the screen, until i see our love accepted and beyond that. I am a femme because i want to leave a piece of my love for butches on earth. I am femme because i want to teach, and be heard. My femme-ness doesnt sit in my feminity alone. Femme is liberating, and secure, not restaining, and forced.

I have so much else to say, but this is getting ridiculously long, and all over the place, but these were my thoughts. I desire for a day in which i could be understood. Of course, these thoughts are coming from an easter european mindset, as of where there isnt any representation, zero knowledge on the matter, post-comminist country in which lgbt people need to still hide in certain situations. I am angry at the world's view of the word femme, and what it got to mean these days. I am angry at the hatered towards butches. I am angry and i will not shut up about it anymore.

All i am asking is. Educate yourself. Be conscious of words and what they mean. Respect us. Stop making up new words for every single thing. Futch isnt real guys. Thats all.

.

Terfs and transmysoginists and any other fucker that dares to think this post doesn't include trans women fuck off. Trans butches, studs and trans femmes are always loved and welcomed here. Racists fuck off as well, you arent needed.

#butchfemme #femme4butch #butch lesbian #femme lesbian #bee's post #feminine lesbians PLEASE just call urself lipstick lesbians or just lesbians i beg of you. femme doesnt equal to feminine it has a meaning #a meaning that goes throughout decades #its okay to just be a lesbian just respect us and stop stealing from us i beg im so tired #butch4femme #long post #sorry if i was aggresive

[incarnateirony]

I get blends of innocent beans confused with what queer coding is or isn’t, and malignant beans misappropriating points, so we’re gonna do a quick run through.

Queer coding started as a malignant thing. The truest use of the phrase “queer coding” came from stereotypes and villainizations that straight people found sCaRy. This is like, why Scar seemed classically flamboiyant, or a variety of Disney villains were long, lanky, gestured exaggeratedly, wore eyeliner, etc. There’s a million examples but I’m not going to cover them all because I think you get what I mean. At the time, straight culture was painting gays as bad so painting villains as how straights perceived gays was like, super useful, cuz it creeped the straights out oOOoooOOo.

When people talk about queer coding enforcing stereotypes, if you’re talking about the original form of queer coding, this is inherently true. However, coding reached other levels, and has adaptive forms.

For example, watching (as I’ve been mocked for saying 10,000 times, but because it’s needed) The Celluloid Closet will clear up a lot for you. Subversive queer coding is when queer creators use a great deal of things to communicate with a queer audience past censorship. The film documentary (if you can’t read the book -- which I understand, it’s difficult to find) clears a whole fuckton of this up.

There’s some things that, quite frankly, we as gays know as part of our language. It is what it is. While it’s not a stereotype, it’s quite literally a language I highly warn straights against stepping into, because then they flounder around confused on what’s our actual language and what’s a stereotype

A truly innocent bean asked of me yesterday, well why then is menthols fair subversive queer coding? How is that not a stereotype?

Well like, because it’s facts. And that’s really, really hard to wrap ones’ head around from an outsider straighty perspective or even someone who’s queer but trapped heavily in a hetnorm world outside of where this is visible and/or in the wrong demographic otherwise. A black person who hangs out with black people of all orientations is not going to blink at a media dude getting menthols generally, because it’s one of the cultures that statistically engages in it to the point of memes about Kools or whatever. That’s not my culture, I can’t comment on much beyond that, but it’s just something to take note of.

But even if you don’t want to take someone’s word on “no, seriously, white dudes smoking menthols is queer culture and literally like a great sign for a hookup to another queer white dude”, google the various intersections of gender and menthol, race and menthol, and sexuality and menthol.

This isn’t pulled out of thin air. These were populations quite literally heavily targeted by Big Tobacco and, by nature, are the ones that smoke it, whereas Big Tobacco put(s) on airs of masculinity and chick-magnetness to smoke good ol non-menthol shit. It’s literally marketing. Yes, it does literally impact who buys product and yes, it does after generations have a noticeable affect. Track the numbers I told you to google down and you’ll realize less than 3% of menthol smokers identify as straight white men (depending on the way the numbers sort out and the year of polling, often 1.x%, 3% is the liberal number).. Lemme tell you, on the street, that’s an “okay, honey :)” when you do find it. Maybe a little pat on the head. An invisible brochure for Welcome To The Gays.  Like, White Men make up more than 31% of America and they still refuse to tally more than 25% of the US as queer [some censuses as low as 6% and LOL] so like-- that should be like minimum 25% of dudes available and nope, 1-3%)

(that’s not to say all gays or even all white gays smoke menthol, but this is that rule of “not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers” in loose application.)

But understanding these things, these signals, from the outside is utterly flabbergasting to people.

No, someone making an immasculating joke is not subversive queer coding. No, a dude wearing a certain kind of shirt or eating a certain kind of food generally isn’t queer coding (Unless it’s a rainbow flag BITCH IM GAY shirt, or uh, maybe for food quiche or hummus? I mostly joke for the latter two, but that’s the kind of self ball punching queer community sometimes does to itself in awareness that yes, there ARE elements. No, eating hot dogs and burritos isn’t gay. Yes, we make make penis jokes. No, that isn’t itself queer coding.)

When a queer author codes a piece, it’s designed to communicate to the resonant audience. It also may not communicate to /all/ gays. The language of a middle aged cis gay man that lived through the AIDS crisis is a whole other fuckin adventure from the language of 17 year old trans gays squatting behind their Xbox, it’s just fact, it’s just what is. Completely different cultures and lives being lived, completely different experiences resulting. A few things here or there may connect across generations but some shit that’s written by a gen Z gay is gonna whiff by a boomer gay, sorry. Also just facts.

Explaining exactly what is and isn’t queer coding is almost impossible beyond the fact that “if you don’t get it, it’s probably not for you.” -- At the same time, that leaves the problematic room of people taking that grey area and packing in a bunch of shit and we’re back to ground zero on the original problematic queer coding.

I once read a meta of uh-- I’ll just say, [Fantasy Character]. The fantasy character had an addiction problem that gave them villain-like attributes. Someone implied the “villain coding” made it queer coding. Okay like. Fucking absolutely not. Because if the show in question WAS doing that, first off, that’s literally the kind to make mockeries of gay people so you literally shouldn’t be reaching for that and second off they’d be doing that lanky sassy bitch with eyeliner bullshit like Disney villains with it, give or take. You don’t apply this shit in reverse, “he has villain attributes and so he’s gay” is literally the worst possible angle to take a discussion while trying to slap fight in a representation arena. Like I can’t say enough DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. 

If you wanna write fic or headcanon whoever as gay or whatever have fun but like once people keep trying to talk about “coding” you’re talking about conscious elements inset by the authors. Does a character have a bunch of on the record sexual encounters that just happen to include dudes persistently even if we don’t exactly get the exact angle or Proof Of Dicking? That’s gay (also depending on the phrasing, as settled in older stuff, that’s just deadass queer text and settled long before this fandom ever had pissing matches about this shit in older cinema.) Does the character happen to be respectful and use like gender neutral pronouns on people? Sorry folks that unto itself isn’t gay, that’s gays writing allies at best, unless you can give specific and directly applicable situations relevant to the character rather than eternally vague blogging through and swearing up and down it’s just about their partners or some shit. Yelling it in general though, sorry, no. 

Does the character engage in things or events with non-het gendered partners that in the very least are heavily coded into the areas of relationships even if they’re unclear (eg, do they routinely go out with non-family people and hold deep or meaningful conversations in things that LOOK like a date, even if nobody SAYS it’s a date) -- congrats, you have coded text. Alone it could even be queerplat stuff, depending on the suprastructure of the plot, text, subtext and everything else around it (same way, gasp, a man and a woman can sit at a table and not necessarily be in a relationship, but if they’re trading courting gifts and having unique and powerful exchanges or have big like, “the heart is the thing that binds us together uwu” shit, we all figure out what the fuck is going on like grown assed adults.)

It’s easier to list things that are NOT subversive queer coding:

Insults against gay people

Immasculating commentary

Random foods short of it deadass being a gay author making fun of some gay meme shit in some gay equivalent of ‘right in front of my salad’

Favorite colors or clothing

---

We got it? Good. Rule of thumb though. Deadass unless you are involved in some thick-ass queer culture don’t try to queer code shit. I don’t even care if you’re queer yourself because that doesn’t mean you’ve actually been subject to the culture in a meaningful way. There’s 30 year old bis that grew up in white picket fence suburbias on top of trust funds with hovercraft parents guiding them through 17 degrees and keeping them out of party culture that married a het-passing relationship and settled down and started having babies and their grasp of queer culture ends at what they perceive out of memes online, if they even hover in actual queer crowds online at all as much as general ones. That person literally is not going to speak much of the language. They aren’t. At best they’ll speak the language of 30 year old trust fund het-married bisexual mothers which, I mean yeah, technically some queer language but that’s a very, very fucking niche experience path right there compared to street-dwelling club-goers that attend pride, hold D&D parties with all their coworkers they figured out are gay on the weekend, occasionally brick a window in a riot. The latter is gonna have a far more diverse queer experience. And by such, a far more diverse queer language.

That’s not even to gatekeep. 30 year old trust fund het-passing-marriage bi-mom is in fact bi. So yeah, they’re queer. But we’re talking about language and culture, which is related to but not something you inherit. It comes by lives and experiences.

And I think this is where a LOT of the fucked up early Queer Coding fuckery comes from in discourse. Yes we have a language. Hell, to some extent a few things might even kinda BE stereotypes but there’s a certain amount of living and being where you know the difference between “this is a stereotype made by straight people villainizing us that has no idea what we’re fucking like” or “this is a stereotype born out of mass marketing that targeted and victimized then imprinted on an entire population that we’ve come to recognize among ourselves.” Or even “this is a stereotype but FUCK YES it’s one we embrace, go get fucked, straights.” And it’s not NEARLY as ambiguous as fandom circle jerks try to make these things out to be in the interest of wanting every interpretation to be valid or every character to be gay or not wanting to admit some person may know what the fuck they’re talking about more than they do. 

Huge point on that last one though, because like. I’ve seen some angry straights that are pissy about the show try to throw wrenches in the gears by concern trolling as if in defense of the gays about “offensive queer coding” and most of the time they’re basically that “how do you do fellow kids gays” meme. “How do you do gays I am very concerned about *checks notes* the twitters talking about gay men walking fast” and half the time turn around like two tweets later like “besides the character doesn’t even have a lisp anyway” or some bullshit that is outright offensive ass stereotyping while they’re out here trolling over the fact that a gay man admits to diva worship as a cultural trait.

General rule of thumb: ask a queer culture immersed gay about queer coding.

Shipping culture in the blue hellsite is not queer culture, for the record. Even if a bunch of queerfolk are in it.

Thanks.

Sincerely,

A very tired gay

#supernatural #spn #fandom #queer coding

[wormmomma]

tyler, the creator: the very queer discography review!!!

Im bored of writing overly long threads on twitter so i wrote a look at tyler the creators discography and why hes gay and im gay and deserved to have his dick immortalized in gold when he dies. So tyler gregory okanma is a black man born in ladera heights california. He’s also my third favorite rapper and since he discovered my favorite rapper earl sweatshirt I guess he deserves goat status for that shit too. Tyler started his career around 17 years old as the ace the creator. He did features at the time with casey veggies and the inspirations in his flow to mf doom where already apparent even back then. From ace the creator mixtape you can already hear the very digital and jazz inspired pharrell production. Funny story if you look up any of his ace stuff now you'll mostly find some really old production that in the age of tyler the creator type beats doesn't really hold u all that great. From there Tyler went on to create odd futures and his first album bastard. He quite quickly followed up bastard with godlin. Goblin, bastard, and the OF tape vol.1 all feel pretty interconnected so im gonna speed round from worst to best. So odd future tape volume one is fun and punk and really crass, it's also completely eclipsed by odd futures other releases. I love odd future and the collective's ability too be both edgy teen skate rap garbage, and a risky artistic rap collective all at the same time. In odd future's first tape it seems pretty clear that tylers description of the groups early work as a bunch of niggas joking around in a studio is very apparent for better or worse. If you wanna get high with some friends can listen to some funny edgy and downright grimey tracks over left brains booking production skip this and listen to odd future's next mixtape but come back here to listen to some funny skits and a few proto mellowhype track with domo genesis. Goblin is Tyler's attempt to do a bigger darker more sprawling version of bastard but misses the mark. I like the album and I love singles on the album. Goblin the opening track is amazing and is a great look at tylers mental state attempting to live up to his newfound fame and anxiety about his infamy. I love yonkers and tron cat. Tyler says alot at this time that he doesn't make horrorcore and he's correct but the lack of emotional honesty and his immature deflections is really going off on all cylinders. If you dont wanna hear skits like “my bitch suck dick” and lines like “im not homophobic faggot” i would probably call it his worst album. Before i talk about bastard id like to go over his use of slurs and rape in his work. Tylers consistent lyrics about violence towards women and use of the lgbtq community really don't insult me. I feel like his lyrical content is filled with a clear look of how angry and insecure tyler was about not having a father or any way of processing his angst. Did he have to sound like a incel threatening to stalk and murder women who refuse to love him for over 3 albums? No, but i really enjoy looking at his early music. He doesn't shy away from how angry, sad and desperate he was at the time. That synthesis of need for fatherly love, anger from a lack of it and deteriorating mental state honestly makes the content more palatable. Also as a black trans women id rather hear tranny an faggot bars from a male rapper making intreeating music. Tyler at the time was being honest, angry and vulnerable not like eminem and action bronson who spit these bars with all the same rap bravado and violent anger toward women with zero pathos. Bastard is amazing, it's an intimate dark album. At the time it felt like it was tapping right into where I was at the time. The amount of mental anguish on bastards opening track really hit me. I was an angry kid with a lot of angst and bipolar disease so hearing a rapper yell about that same dysfunction really meant alot to me. The flows are amazing and it was a really good look at tylers ability to build a narrative. Wolf was tyler's next album. For a while wolf was my favorite album by tyler. His look at relationships and breakups on bimmer and ifhy are amazing and are expanded on his future releases. Find your wings and treehome are also a good look at his more melodic influence. It was such a good album I actually bought the mrech for and went to see Tyler at afropunk. Also hearing an entire song about the death of his grandma really hit me, my grandfather died around the same time. Cherry bomb was bad, now moving one. Ok im  joking i've listened to it two or three times but its really not worth going back to even though tyler put his all into it. The soul features and amazing production is worth listening to but even Tyler admits he rushed the album a little and that he needed to blow people away next time. Flower boy, is one of the most important albums in hip hop. That's it. Bar none. It was my favorite release of 2018. Flower boy is about tylers newfound isolation with his fame, and how he drives cars by himself in beautiful la vistas. Its also about how he’s gay (or bisexual). There are ALOT of stupid takes on this album. There is a contingency of tyler stans that think tyler has been “playing a character” since bastard. Now I'll admit that wolf haley and dr.teecee are clearly characters; they are also artists' representations of tyler's mental state. If wolf haley has adhd and no father that means tyler also has those issues. So whether or not Tyler is playing a character he has in fact “been kissing white boys since 2004”. I also have seen an insipid article that asks if “tyler the creator should be accepted into the lgbtq community” due to his homophobia? Much more controversial and actually homophobic and transphobic people are in this community hes tyler the creator, not milo yinnaoplous. I also dont think that it occurs to the reviewer that alot of gay men are very hmophobic before they come out and that self hate is very common. Lyrics like “im not gay i just wanna dance to some marvin” also has a much deeper context now. Listening to older releases you can see how in your face tyler was about his queerness. He even said he filmed himself kissing his friend Lucas to prove he wasn't a homophobe. I'm happy Tyler grew enough to make an album not only about being attracted to men but how lonely he felt in and out of the closet. As someone who came out as bisexual at the time it came at a perfect time. Being  gay is isolating and confusing and when you do you lose alot of friends and family. Garden shed, who dat boy, and 911 are real standouts. His collaboration with kali uchis was also so fucking smooth and she a born r&b star. Tyler gained a grammy nomination off the album and said he loved the feeling of finally making popular catchy music people wanna sing the lyrics too, so he followed it with igor. Igor opens with this addendum on the back of the physical album: 

This might be fiction, this might be about igor but it is fully about tyler okanga. The album is very hard to parse and barely has any rapping. It's more of a pop experimental album with a lot of lofi synth production. Tylers production chops are full force here. Igor is melodic, sad and full of the same anger and obsession from his previous albums. Its just more mature and really gay, and i fucking love it. Tyler was dealing with a tumultuous relationship with a guy and his refusal to be with tyler exclusively. Its about a breakup. A love tragedy that only becomes more depressing after the argument on a boy is a gun, the breakup in my love is gone, and the sad slump back into needing closure in can we be friends. The album is fun to sing to, and fucking devestating. I've dealt with a lot of similar issues with love and obsession so to hear it so clearly illustrated on igor really hit me. I think the album becomes even more depressing with the unreleased track best interest, about tyler being a side nigga. This is the kind of music that's sometimes made in r&b and pop but never in rap. There was an interview where Tyler says he hated his voice which is why he edits it so evident on igor. Tyler also said he wanted to send these songs to rihanna and Justin Beiber but they didn't want them, as cool as it sounds. I'm happy tyler was able to tell his own story. I would also recommend magic wand since it's my favorite track on the album and kicks you in the face with how angry and heartbroken Tyler was at the time. 

Tyler is an artist that talks and speaks about how he feels all the time, he's also a person who feels enigmatic and mysterious somehow. I think it has to do with how constantly he's put to the side of his other hip hop contemporaries. He always seems to be making music Tom weird, controversial and experimental to be treated like asap rocky, vince staples, or the late mac miller. A fact that feels ironic since he worked with all of those artists, lil wayne, and even kanye west. I'm as big a stan for tyler as he is for Pharrell, if it wherent forever I'd never take rap seriously and would never have chosen to make my own music. As a black trans woman I find a lot of tylers work really relatable. I've been in alot of the angry hopeless situations Tyler talks about in his music. I think he's the artist who hits me the most on a personal level and yeah when i was depressed i sat in my bedroom and listened to bastard in my low moments. I like riding in the car and listening to all of flowerboy. Igor is amazing as well for almost half a decade it's been amazing growing up and hitting the same emotional beats Tyler went through5 in his work. Hearing about him coming out as gay ajd dealing with very similar backlash mad me feel less alone if im being honest. Tyler has said he wants to take a more production heavy role in the industry moving forward but he says that a lot, i think as long as he has a story to tell he's always going to make music. His music feels like a diary and I'm happy to read it and sonnet to it in all its beauty and ugliness. 

Hi my name is lua o'reilly i make music on soundcloud.com/wormmother

If you liked this review let me know and I'll do a look into earl sweatshirt.

#Tyler The Creator #wolf #bastard #rap #music #punk #reveiw #discography #queer art #queer #black art

[rabbitindisguise]

I'm so glad that tumblr has been an impromptu place for people with microidentities to explore and find new terms and make stuff if there isn't anything they like and it's so comforting to see lesser known identities like GNC trans men and women get visible representation when I didn't know about anything but lesbians and gay men before I joined this website

Visibility of marginalized groups is something, I think, that Tumblr has played a huge role in and I don't know what comes next but I hope people keep getting access to this kind of information long into the future because like

Sometimes I forget that history is happening right as we speak but it's never more obvious than right at this moment in between social media transitions and the presidential election . . . I remember this website when Obama was elected the first time. Now gay marriage is legal in the United States, and so many things have happened- both good and bad- that it's hard to really predict where things are gonna go from here. But I hope since I had zero clue that it would be legal to marry someone of the same gender in the entirety of the United States that means good things can happen too because why the fuck not? We deserve them, universe

#personal #identity #activism #queer history #real gay sappy hours

[dillydedalus]

september reading

i read some things i guess! open for the last (almost) of robin hobb, more mountaineering disasters, and …. dungeons & dragons?? (i completely forgot i had this in my drafts lol)

the nickel boys, colson whitehead idk man this is really well-written, well-paced, an important story based very much on real history, the characters serve their purpose very well, the violence and abuse is written in a way that is chilling without ever being gratuitous and with the exception of a twist that i thought was a little too predictable, there’s nothing i can really criticise. it just really lacked some spark for me, and maybe it’s just that after underground railroad (which is also didn’t particularly like, but damn that had spark) it feels a lil conventional. still good tho! 3/5

the adventure zone #1: here there be gerblins, various mcelroys & cary pietsch my brain Does Not Do podcasts but obvi i’ve been hearing A LOT about the mcelroy boys & i’m like. vaguely interested in d&d* so when this was made available on overdrive i was like okay why the hell not. it’s a fun, quick read, and while i don’t really know anything about d&d the trappings of the game were included in a fun way. nothing mindblowing, but a good time. 2.5/5

assassin’s fate (fitz & the fool #3), robin hobb y’all this is it… it’s been over a year & now i’m done with the realm of the elderlings (actually i still have the piebald prince novella & the short stories). i have some criticisms of this one (the timeline & the main climax seemed a lil muddled to me) but to be honest??? loved this, had all the feelings, was superhappy to see my cursed shores kids again, fitzy & bee were heartbreaking all the time, the paragon conflict was great, when fitz got to the quarry i literally immediately started uglycrying & pretty much didn’t stop until the end, so: 4.5/5 (series rating 4/5 i guess bc fool’s assassin was a drag & a half)

die nebelkrähe, alexander pechmann this is a speculative fictionalisation of a little episode in the spiritualist movement where medium hester dowden claimed she had communicated with/been briefly possessed by oscar wilde, which is pretty fun. unfortunately, pechmann chose to focus on his version of mr v., a pretty boring mathematician and skeptic, rather than the absolutely wild shit going on with dowden, which includes oscar wilde’s ghost dunking on james joyce (who responded by making fun of the whole thing in finnegans wake) and claiming he’s like totally straight. 2/5

oval, elvia wilk a neoliberal corporate hell/psychotropics/eco-punk gone wrong dystopia in berlin so you know i’m here (i.e. in berlin lol) for it. this is about a berlin in the not too distant future where finster corp (real subtle) is buying up everything, driving up rents through ecological redevelopment, artists mainly work as consultants for corporations, and our protags anja and louis live in a finster-sponsored zero-waste eco-commune on an artificial mountain in the middle of berlin. everyone’s jobs are nda-clad bullshit, everyone parties all the time without ever enjoying themselves, homelessness and income inequality are ignored with the barest twinge of guilt, and louis is developing a party drug that chemically makes you generous. oh and the nature on the mountain (the berg -.-) seems to be eating itself. the concepts are great, the writing is pretty good even tho it tries a bit too hard sometimes, wilk, while also suffering a lil from Expat Gaze, really knows berlin. the execution isn’t perfect, the pacing is a bit off, too much time is devoted to anja and louis’ boring relationship, and look, some of the dystopian elements are a bit obvious. neoliberalism bad. okay, we know. but there’s a lot of good here, and the ending is pretty great, if a bit underdeveloped. 3.5/5

travelers, helon habila a novel about the african diaspora in europe, told thru 6 inter-connected stories, all focusing on one story of migration. these are important stories well told, and i liked how they all linked up in the end. while berlin is the central hub these stories revolve around, not all are set in berlin and the setting really isn’t as central as i’d hoped (this is obvi very personal to me & my research interests so it’s not really criticism). i’d recommend this if you’re interested in the representation of african migrants and refugees. 3/5

the uninhabitable earth: life after warming, david wallace-wells shit’s fucked: the book. starts with ‘it is worse, much worse, than you think’ and doesn’t really get much more cheery from there. good if you want an idea of what the effects of global warming might be (a pretty pessimistic one, which is the point - when does pessimism become realism?), and how we (& how we might) respond to them. 3/5

the girl from the other side, nagabe (#1-5) spooky-yet-wholesome manga series about a snazzy demon who’s adopted a little human girl who has been abandoned/cast out by her human community, which is like 100% my jam. the central relationship is super cute & wholesome, the demon designs are amazing, the worldbuilding is really spooky & intriguing (if you touch a demon you’ll be cursed & also turn into a demon & tbh who doesn’t want to turn into a weird tall slightly monster with cool horns), and a lot of it is just the demon like. badly baking pie to cheer the girl up. 

girl woman other, bernardine evaristo somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories written in a somewhat unconventional but highly readable style. the 12 stories each focus on one woman (and one nonbinary person), most of them black, examing black womanhood in britain throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. i enjoyed many of these stories, but the observational style and the way we quickly cover whole lives left me a bit detached. there’s also a lil corniness throughout, which comes out in full force in the epilogue, and while it’s cool to have trans rep, it honestly came across as a bit clueless. 3/5

dark summit: everest’s most controversial season, nick heil did someone say high-altitude mountaineering disasters? because i’m always here for some high-altitude mountaineering disasters. this is about the 2006 season which was p disastrous in terms of deaths even tho it didn’t even have a storm (cf the 1996 season aka please just read into thin air), just people walking past dudes who were dying bc rescues are extremely difficult & dangerous. anyway this ain’t into thin air, but it’s a good one & pretty wild bc all mountain climbers are fucking nuts. 3.5/5

sense & sensibility, jane austen really enjoyed this! the pacing is a lil weird & none of the men really is all that, but it’s all very charming & witty & i love sisterhood narratives (poor margaret!). as in (tho not as much as in) mansfield park, there’s a lot of attitudes that just don’t really track but in contrast to mp i found them interesting rather than frustrating, mostly - brandon/marianne is very uncomfortable especially when you realise that he’s projecting his tragic dead first love/sis-in-law onto marianne and that we don’t really see their courtship at all, but w/e. i especially enjoyed the ferrars family drama and the hilarious resolution to it, and i gotta say: lucy steele really did that & good for her. 4/5 

anyway, i’m about halfway thru alasdair gray’s lanark, which is a great big pomo brick, half portrait of the artist as a young glaswegian, half weird visions of hell in the city of unthank & i’m into it but it’s not a quick read. in october uni reading is also going to start, perhaps for the last semester ever :(

#the only podcast i ever semi-successfully followed was welcome to nightvale #and only because it was the kind of story where it didn't matter if you spaced out several times in between #and even then i kinda had to stop once they started having an overarching plot #*lmao rereading my lil review for adventure zone where i say i'm vaguely interested in dnd is a trip #after i spent the whole last month mainlining critical role and most of my dreams now involve dice stuff i barely understand #like i really had three separate dreams about dnd last night & i've never played it & know nothing about it that isn't in critical role #really just want to be a tiefling that bad huh #the books i read

[janiedean]

www(.)slate(.)com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/02/how_sensitivity_readers_from_minority_groups_are_changing_the_book_publishing(.)html This seriously worries me. Tumblr mentality spilling over real life

... yey.

okay, no rewind. first thing, I’m sad to say but tumblr mentality has spilled over irl a long time ago and at this point the only thing we can do is hoping this historical moment passes a long time ago (it had already spilled over the moment I had to read actual articles about people actually asking to remove Ovid from a ***classic literature*** curricula because there are rape scenes in the metamorphoses). whatever.

now about this, the problem is: I do think that if someone writes about X character that belongs to a minority they should do their research before touching the topic if they care to write a good book (if they don’t then it’s another problem entirely but let’s just assume they do), but it has to be a thing you do before you actually write that shit. I absolutely don’t agree with write what you know only because otherwise we wouldn’t be publishing a damned thing and honestly some people also write so that they don’t have to always rehash what they know, but if you’re doing a socially sensitive theme you have to try and do it right - if I decide I write a book with a trans character I can’t do it before I talk to a sizable amount of trans people and I don’t read more than a bit on the subject, same as if I decide to write a book set during idk the vietnam war where the protagonist is a ptsd vietnam veteran I can’t do it if I haven’t read a ton of lit/history books about the vietnam war and talked with a few psychologists or psych students or read something about ptsd. but that’s a thing that’s your duty as the author, if you want to do a serious book about a serious thing. if you just want to dick around it’s another problem entirely but let’s just say that I want to do that, it’s on me to do it, not on my **sensitivity readers**, and anyway a sensitivity reader (which once upon a time should have been called editor but never mind) shouldn’t have that much power, ie: once I read a tumblr post which basically said ‘white writers couldn’t ever write poc characters because they possibly can’t understand [now what POC meant in that sense is an entire other question that was left unanswered of course, bc poc doesn’t mean just black but nvm] but they have a moral obligation to because poc writers aren’t as popular/are hired less than white writers, and even at their best they will never get it right and they’ll fuck the poc characters up but who cares, they have to do it and take the criticism so they realize how it feels to be discriminated’.

now, I personally would never hear any advice from THAT above person if they were my sensitivity reader, because the concept that if I’m white then I can’t possibly get it right means that they already decided my work is going to suck ass even if it’s a masterpiece, and then... fuck that? I mean, I have no moral obligation to write anything I don’t want and with that attitude you basically make sure that someone is never gonna try to branch out. and where were the sensitivity readers when fifty shades came out, and all the subsequent YA porn books where it looks like your ideal man should be a stalker? we just don’t know, but no one cares to have sensitivity readers on ***that*** shit because guess what, it sells.

like, the problem shouldn’t be that you as a writer might offend someone with your writing because that can be because you’re actually offensive or because you’re nabokov and you wrote lolita and people who don’t get the point of it think it’s offensive and that it should be burned. you can’t start writing shit thinking of whether you’re going to offend someone or not with it because otherwise you’ll never get anywhere and you couldn’t touch one single sensitive topic (and on this, I’d appreciate sensitivity readers when it comes to atheist characters but NEVER MIND THAT XDDD /joking). what people should do is encourage potential writers who want to write socially sensitive stuff to talk to other people first and research their topic if it requires it.

What I mean is, let’s do a practical example: let’s take the basic lady chatterley plot (woman has a husband that neglects her both sexually and as a person and finds happiness with another guy who lives just under the husband’s nose). the original lady chatterly is already socially sensible because it has class issues and whatnot, but if you just want to write your torrid romance novel about the white suburban mom falling in love with the new white hot neighbor while her white husband doesn’t notice her existence and they have all the a+ sex in the world you’re perfectly entitled to and like, just get yourself an editor that will tell you if your porn sucks or not. there, this one’s easy.

but, let’s say that you want to have the white suburban mom being a victim of domestic violence instead of having the husband being just neglectful then you should research something about domestic violence and the effect it has on people. it has already become way more socially sensible, because you can’t just shrug it away and the sex she’ll have with her new guy won’t be the same as the sex she used to have with her husband, or alternatively, if the husband’s neglectful only you can have a difference between quick missionary and hot steamy long fucks with the new guy, if he’s abusive and he abuses her sexually you have to have nonconsensual vs consensual which is already a whole new heap of problems.

or, let’s flip it around: the domestic violence victim is a man, the wife is the one abusing him, he falls in love with the new female neighbor next door. this implies that you have to look into female on male domestic violence and research how frequently men aren’t taken seriously especially if the perpetrator is a woman, so you have the above plus this.

or, the victim is a man, the perpetrator is a woman, he falls in love with the male neighbor next door. in this case you have to make sure you know how to write a guy who has to get out of an abusive relationship and have a sexuality crisis if he didn’t know he was also into dudes.

or, all three are male, or all three are women: you have to look into statistics to see how male on male or female on female abuse works, on top of all of the above, on top of you have to know how to write an abuse victim. and, if there’s children involved? you have to deal with that too and you have to make sure the abuser isn’t a complete stereotype or some kind of boogeyman because that kind of story is effective if the perpetrator is someone who doesn’t look out of a twilight fanfic *cough*. if you make any of those characters trans then you have to look into it, too, if you make any of them not white or not your ethnicity you might wanna look into that too, and so on. and if you wanna throw in the lady chatterley class thing then you have to also think about what it means if some of the characters are rich, if others are poor, if they’re all middle class, if they’re all poor, all rich and so on.

what I mean is that the same plot, with some changes, can require zero research beyond what metaphors to not use while writing porn (example one) to a whole fucking lot of research and it’s on you to find people to discuss it with before and then to possibly proofread it before you send it to any publisher so you at least are sure you have a thing in your hands that doesn’t suck or has glaring inaccuracies. at that point your sensitivity reader should be able to give it a look and maybe give you advice which you should be able to reject if you don’t think it sound - for example, let’s say I write the above book in its most socially sensitive approach. like, dunno, let’s say the abuser is a cishet white man, the protagonist is a white ftm trans person who also can’t/won’t transition because of their abusive husband and the neighbor is, dunno, a black cishet woman. this would require a shitload of research should I try to write it. but then let’s say I do it and then I decide to write it from the pov of the abusive husband. which is a legitimate literary choice and I’m taking it with the entire intent of making him an abusive asshole without trying to justify his actions and to pull a less skilled humbert humbert in the world (because I’m not nabokov and no one is, but one could and should be able to write villains as a POV if they want to) and that I made sure to depict him as The Worst. if my sensitivity reader says that it’s offensive that I would write it from that guy’s POV in the first place and nothing else matters, it wouldn’t matter if I wrote the best book of the last ten years, it would still be deemed offensive. and that is a thing that shouldn’t fly - meaning, that if this is just a background check to make sure you don’t do bad representation (which you should have already done yourself anyway) it could have its usefulness, if it becomes a way to say that you can’t write what you want or problematic characters/villains shouldn’t be a POV choice even if you show them to be terrible then we’re straight into censorship land and that... shouldn’t be a thing.

tldr, you didn’t even ask for this entire rant but tbh I’m worried about that possible outcome (especially since that article mentioned roth which on this website is already hated as the champion of the white old man protagonist who wants to bang his students by people who don’t understand shit about either roth or writing in general) more than about checks on whether a thing is offensive or not, which anyway seems to me like is thoroughly ignored if the book sells (see: every other stalker seen as an ideal dude in YAs post-50 shades *sigh*).

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #abuse cw #rape cw #domestic violence cw #possibly #literature for ts #Anonymous #ask post

[takaraphoenix]

Sense8?

Okay, let me start with the flaws and then move on to the good stuff.

This show suffers in its first season from having too many characters at once. I understand that for the sake of the pun you need 8 main characters and by the time season 2 rolls around, you’re very familiar with them all and I wouldn’t want to cut any out.

But it’s so hard to digest in the beginning.

This show was recommended to me by both of my best friends separately. And both came with the warning that I need to watch at least until episode three before I can make a proper decision on whether or not I’ll continue watching it.

The thing is. They were right. I wanted to turn it off after one episode. But I trusted them and pushed and by episode four, I was totally addicted.

I recommended the show to my parents and they started watching it. My mom walked out of it after one episode, my father kept watching episode two and told my mother that “it got better” so she gave it another chance too. And by episode four, they were both hooked. Now they’re complaining to me about the lack of season three, shesh.

That’s a problem. A problem. Because me and my mother are certainly not the only ones who don’t give a show half a season time to grow on them. My rule of thumb is one episode and if it can’t hook me, I move on to the next show.

Since, as mentioned above, with season 2 I really wouldn’t want to cut any of the characters, I think it would have benefitted from… a different kind of split.

Tell the stories of less characters, but tell more of their stories per episode. Have the first episode only focus on four of the characters and give us a better chance to get to know them right away. Have then the second episode focus on the other four with the same. But throwing people right into just a tiny little bit of eight different characters is, certainly for many, overwhelming and confusing. Later on, when you know the characters, you can switch easily between them, but especially for the start when you 1.) don’t know any of them and 2.) have no idea what is even going on, it’s just too much at once.

That’s actually kind of my only complaint about it, because this show is fucking brilliant. And it deserves to be watched and not to be tuned out because its beginning is so confusing and overwhelming.

I mean, the idea behind it is a bit bogus, but I like bogus so there’s that.

This show… I don’t even know where to start.

The story telling is brilliant, once you’re actually used to who’s who and who’s where. The way their stories intertwine, how they interact.

I mean, personally I’d have wished for a couple more bonding moments between the individuals who don’t have that much screen-time together because it… is mainly certain pairs between the group that meet up and help each other and have more of a connection whereas I’d… I’d have loved for the seasons to have 15 episodes to stretch the plot and give them all more time to also just interact with each other. Because they’re amazing and their relationships are amazing and I’d like to see more interactions.

I have one very personal problem with the show and that’s Kala’s character and her relationship with Wolfgang, because I despise cheats. They’re the scum of the Earth and come for me riiight after rapists/child molesters and abusers, because that’s just how my moral compass is tuned. And the fact that she has multiple outs of the wedding with the really cute and sweet guy who adores her and she still pulls through with it and she still decides to cheat on him makes me hate her the most. If she had been set up into an arranged marriage, she’d at least get some leeway, but her parents never pushed - honestly, her dad is such a sweetheart - and it was all her idea. So really absolutely nothing gives her an excuse to act or feel like a victim when she decides to get married and then decides to cheat on him. It just makes her a bad person. I mean, if you got nothing against cheating and if you sail the ship, you go, but… it’s just not within the parameters of my moral and thus, I personally disapprove.

On that note, let’s move on to the good stuff!

Amanita Caplan is a treasure. I swear, Neets fast became my favorite character and the favorite character of my parents.

The supporting cast in this show is brilliant. You’d think that with eight main characters, it’d be so busy working with them that the supporting cast would fall flat in their development and design, but they’re amazing.

Kala’s dad is a pearl, Amanita is a treasure, Bug is so adorable I just wanna give him a hug, Daniella is literally me, Sun’s former teacher is such a calm sweet mentor and just… Every secondary character, they all have their own personality, they all have their well-defined relationship to their Sensate and they’re all memorable.

This show is character design and development on point.

What’s very important about this show and obviously needs to be addressed is its representation.

It blows my mind in what way they managed that. I genuinely can’t remember ever having seen representation for trans people in such a heartfelt way. It allowed me as a CIS woman to relate to her in a way TV has never done before, because they mostly just… put it in the sidelines. I’ve never seen a show that went into the struggle like that. That also managed to convey this… utter frustration over being misgendered in a way that had my mom nearly throw a shoe at the screen when Nomi’s mother just opened her fucking mouth.

I’ve seen trans story-arcs in Glee, Shameless and The Fosters. They all either only scratched the surface or only showed the trans character as agressively defensive without showing the struggle that led to that attitude (looking at you there, Shameless… though also The Fosters, until like over a season later when we got into his background story). This was the first time a trans story-arc clicked for me in the sense that it wasn’t just “another character and their background-story”, it was more than just a story-line or just a plot-device. It was very, very heart-felt, it was very, very relateable and it gave me, personally, more of an insight than anything I’ve ever seen before on TV.

Continuing on the note of representation. I, as a lesbian, felt very proudly represented by Neets - maybe another reason why I love her so much. TV lesbians are so badly done most the time. They’re just… plot-devices when the straight female lead has gone stale and they need to mix it up so the normally as straight portrayed female lead meets a lesbian and they have a relationship for a season or less before the lesbian is written out of the story and the other one goes back to her straight relationship, most of the time with the male lead (Mistresses, Gotham, I know there are more but I might have deleted them from my brain out of sheer frustration at this point). It’s never really clarified if the female lead identifies as pan or bisexual or if it was really just “the plot grew stale, we needed to mix it up so we had hot woman on woman action” - because that’s what it mainly is when there is a female/female relationship on TV. Two really hot chicks, kissing, making out and having sex as often as possible. Rarely do they involve the romantic sub-plot or feelings. It’s just about… jerk-off material for the men.

Amanita is so much more. Her love for Nomi is amazing. Her character is amazing. She is so much more than just The Love Interest, she saves Nomi’s ass so often, she is 120% behind her girlfriend and the cluster, she’s supportive, strong, witty. I love her. I love for what she stands, I love what she does, I love how she’s used in the show. She makes me, as a lesbian who has grown very frustrated with TV shows, have a little more hope in humanity.

Same goes for Lito, because it wasn’t just “He came out and everyone adored him and there were no problems” like TV sometimes does or “He came out and everyone hated him and there were all the problems” which is TV’s other route of action.

He was the perfect mixture, he showed the complexity. You got to see his struggle with coming out, the social problems it entailed, but also the support of those who loved him, the way his career seemed to be driven into a wall just to emerge even stronger.

And talking about Lito brings me to Danielle. I love Dani. She’s, after Neets, my favorite character, because she’s just… every fangirl ever. The way she reacted to finding two hot gay guys in bed was just “Hey! That’s the same face I just made!”. But, again, she is so much more than just a shallow “I like gay guys!” stereotype. With her abusive boyfriend, the way that it becomes obvious that she is so hung up on Lito and Hernando because she’s never been loved before, not by her parents who turn blind eyes on her abuse and rather have her stay with a man who beats her than with two gays, certainly not by said abusive ex. She just wants platonic love and Lito and Hernando are the first time she’s allowed to experience that without pain and it’s beautiful.

Something that I admire about Sun too. At first, she came off as very… flat and unemotional and just also unengaged and I thought that she might just be the one that slipped through the cracks when they did the character design, but season 2 beautifully unveiled her struggles and showed that she is indeed so much more and she too, just like Dani, just really needs and deserves love. And that she finds that for the first time in the cluster, but that she also really struggles with it. She’s always right there to help them whenever one of them needs her, but she is so reluctant to ask anything of them. But they’re there and they help her.

Jeez, I didn’t want to go through all the characters…

So let’s throw them together a little bit. Kala and Van Damn. Because they stand for something that amazed me too about this show. It didn’t just focus on this character’s personal struggle. It’s also getting political about countries I have zero idea about how things work and what’s going on there. Like, you as a Western person are aware of the lack of fresh water and the struggles, but the way Van Damn’s plotline just dove right into it and gave this insight into the situation, into how he handles life, it was… amazing. His family, his still carefree attitude about anything and I really liked when he actually got a love-interest in season 2 because that was its own version of two worlds clashing and he was just so cute about everything. He came so far and it’s amazing.

Same goes for Kala’s sub-plot about religion in India, showing a side that... hasn’t been shown often in TV (which is the only thing I want to say about her, because I think I made my opinion on her character clear up above already).

I have to admit that Riley and Will are coming a little short in my opinion. They didn’t start out that way, they started out with the same potential as all others, but while the others got to stay in their lives and tell their stories, those two just merged into not just their relationship but also the front representing their struggle against the bad guys. They sacrificed their own stories for the sake of being on the forefront of their fight, which yeah, someone had to, and I’m not too sorry it was them because I really don’t like their relationship and having the two of them just… do something useful while being together, that pleased me.

Now. Lastly. Wölfchen. Sorry, been calling him that since episode one. I just can’t with Wolfy. No. I dunno which German would call him that but I kinda doubt many. Wolf or, well, to tease, Wölfchen. But yeah, totally beside the point, It’s just that I always crack up when they call him Wolfy.

I LOVE THAT THE GERMAN’S THE CRIMINAL AND THE ONE WITH THE PAST ABUSE. It totally bothers my dad that the German is the criminal, but I just love myself a good criminal and thief. I mean, it took me… like… way too long to figure out that his plotline takes place in Germany but I instantly liked him from his first scene when they stole the gems. Like “Yees. I like a good thief”. It’s a thing, I blame Kaitou KID.

And, well, the child abuse. If you know me, you know I have a weakness for the characters who were abused as kids and keep fighting on. Just look at Percy Jackson and Jace Wayland, my little precious darlings.

But I also loved that it was just so… German.

When they had the flashback to Wolfgang and Felix in school, I just sat there in awe because… yeah, that’s a German classroom. That is a German classroom. It’s kind of… so different from the ones you get used to seeing on TV because it’s all American and just this little detail already really made me happy because yeah, I recognize “home” in it.

When they went to the Holocaust Memorial, I just sat there in awe at how well they filmed that. Because it is... very borign when you’re there, actually. But the way they filmed it perfectly conveyed the claustrophobic feeling you’re supposed to get there.

When they had the epic battle-scene on New Year’s Eve, I squealed because “Oh my gosh, that’s where I spent New Year’s six years ago when I was in Berlin! EXACTLY THERE!”. It’s kind of stupid but also not, but… Everything is New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chicago, all the bigger American cities, but to see your own home on TV, to see something you actually recognize because you’ve been there before, it’s a weird kind of happiness. You won’t believe the squealing I did when my favorite character on Grimm said that his uncle was born in my home-town.

So, I think it’s really time to wrap this up now.

This show is absolutely worth the watch, even if you’re struggling through the first two episodes with confusion and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Its character design, its character development, its story-telling, its representation, its relatablitiy - they’re all so on point and beautifully done.

Story-telling wise this is an absolute masterpiece, in desperate need of others of its kind and I will be so sad to see it go but I’m also happy that at the very least we get a special to wrap it all up and not leave us high and dry.

#TV Rants #Fandom Rants #Sense8 #Ask me a show and I shall rant #I really NEED a third season for this show though #Amanita is the best #and so is Dani #nix-daughterofmagic

[incarnate-death]

(trigger warning) "Media Respresentation of Fish Bowls" by alex

when I’m empty the silence is big enough to fill me. even though I am hungry the last bites are tough; i throw the chunks back with water like a pill or with wine despite being able to swallow a pill as big as a flaccid dick without a drop of liquid. Every morning when I wake up there are stalactites hanging from the blinds so I say good morning to Freud and suck a dick, for good, measure the molly before the silence plugs it into my asshole--no blue tooth allowed; just a direct connection with my boss Lucifer’s penis envy, which is sad and small, but I have a calling to make the soundscape of hotel rooms with cries for more for more for more. It went something like this: live for more for more for more then kill myself. "I’m transgender and all the media representation trans prostitutes get made me wanna try it too! Maybe I’ll have my own film or tv show!" I needed more or i'd be on the streets. I need Bread on Bread. Rolls. Paper on Paper. Leaves. Bills on Bills. Duck$. I turned my face away to cry while he fucked me. It hurt so bad, but. Running through my head the whole time: fuck you (everyone and anything) too for the lies the equivalencies the contingencies the similitudes and the abstractions There is a break and I call my partner and promise to suck the next one off and try and get him to come before he can fuck me to spare my raw vagina. we can have good sex when I come home; like the kind of sex that doesn’t require a fistful of lube and a fat line of coke to get through. The kind where we fuck for hours until neither of us can physically go on so we just rest inside each other. This client doesn’t go quite that way. He’s is flaccid but still somehow manages to get it in after enough lube and spit on spit. Afterward he mentions something about liking our second fuck better than the first and promise to schedule again. I hadn’t recognized him at all. He hands me an extra bill and walks out the door. Tips on tips. Dicks. This is the only thing keeping you going, I tell myself as I clean up the room for the next worker and client. And I write. I photograph what i cannot write and write everything. I’m bitter like premium french espresso served to a pig dying of thirst, which would be a great photo-poem. Pigs on pigs. Fuck 12. They raped me. If your speakers can’t handle me put on something else. The doctors tried to diagnose me. No one knows where what happened to them. Truth is, the doctors would say I have the paraphilia autoeroticism or autoandrophilia, others would asexual and all would say I’m bipolar and borderline and major depressive and gender dysphoric and eating disordered, which seem like contradictions to me. how can someone who’s turned on by themselves also have a hobby of sawing into their own legs with a meat-knife? I’ve never been to the doctor, but i might as well be one. You can call me doctor. The doctor takes house calls only in dire cases and when Lucifer says so. Lucifer is the pimp. Lucifer is also an autoerotic, and a magician, and I am his apprentice magician. The most convincing thing he ever said to me about mysticism was that the God of the bible is also autoerotic and that’s how He made Jesus. For a second I felt like a doppelganger Jesus that could save the earth from the Anthropocene by killing everyone, but then the wood in between my thighs brings me back to 200 dollars an hour and debt for a degree that we all know could be worthless. The academy is obsolete; the streets are paved with gold; i’m still going back to school; after a year of writing and rewriting, saying and resaying the trauma of my horrifically violent childhood, i proved that i was in enough pain for the college to consider me independent of my parents and therefore eligible for increased financial aid. When is pain ever taken for granted, not questioned when someone says ouch?? Do i have pay to get a parking permit for my ouch so it can take up temporary residence in your fishbowl?? Fuck you. I used to hold it in and I’m a good learner and good learners are good at learning to believe that holding it in works. So they don’t even realize they’re doing it until they’re screaming “FUCK YOU GOD” on enough DXM to make me stupid for days. for days I felt like I had zero gravity eyes, or a bobble head, or was being posessed by some spirit of the eye.I’m just a pair of eyes, tits,  and ass lost in a sea of opposable thumbs. that’s how I feel in spring. or sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to my malaise. Should someone call 911 and put me in the hospital??? Only if there’s an overdose, or if i quit drinking water. Starting-not-eating-food usually isn’t reason enough for those three hellish digits. There must be some line in the moral universe I occasionally cross from killing myself to killing myself quicker that makes people call. I remember being at the nasty end of police heavy armored vehicles, mounted by snipers. it was North Dakota, Standing Rock women’s protest, but i went anyway to the front line, Thanksgiving 2016. But just thinking about Standing Rock softens me a little, even thought the nodapl movement feels like broken senseless commitment to plan and move after the trump election. How long before we make the emergency call?? One very underrated fact of life is that, everything has a double. Society is in opposition with life and therefore collapsing. Morality in a globalized world is genocide. Genocide is progress. Progress is suicide. suicide. s u i c i d e .suicide sounds better than what these old men get out of me. some of them are really quite nice, except…. burnt stake of dick torn off and rammed into its owner. the viscosity of blood is lovely. Secret: once I told a client that if we did knife play - cut each other in bed - I’d cut my rate. I could think of no better way to, in the same moment, destroy myself and make myself stronger-godlike, even. I made him bleed for my pleasure; carved lines where I imagined the ribs would be if they weren’t covered in fat like mine. and then when it was their turn to cut me…. i called my boss and said the client was some patrick bateman freak with knives, get him out; less than a minute later his already bloody body is dragged out the room by security and he is blacklisted by the escorting agency. he had raped me several times. trust me; i remember his face--i’m not a sadist, I just believe in justice. and I like to play with my food more than i like to eat it.

#spilled ink #writing #creative writing #fiction #spilled ink writing #story #flash fiction #queer #transgender