Y'all need to be fucking nicer to men/masc queers
I was talking to an old friend/short lived boyfriend from highschool and the topic of sexualities came up. He identified as bisexual throughout highschool but told me that recently he doesn't know what he was and just preferred to remain 'unlabeled' until he figured it out. I told him to his face "thats valid man and being unlabeled doesn't make you any less queer than when you were labeled"
God you should've seen his fucking face, he looked so happy and also like he was about to goddamn cry. He told me that no one ever told him that. That he tried to join queer spaces but they said he didn't fit in cause he wasn't 'gay' enough. Told me that I was the first person to ever confidently tell him he was queer and that he didn't need to change himself to 'fit in'.
I gave my friend one of my mini pride flags I had lying around and the dopey grin he had on his face while waving that thing around for the rest of the night made me smile too. When he finally went home he thanked me for the flag and for reassuring him when he felt insecure for 'not being gay enough'.
I want y'all to know that whole time he telling me about people not accepting him for "not looking queer" made me fucking pissed. Oh, because he's not petite, feminine, and white he can't be queer? Because he doesn't look like a fashionable and conventionally pretty gay on you'd find on your TikTok homepage he can't be queer?
THIS ISN'T EVEN THE FIRST TIME I'VE HAD THIS CONVERSATION WITH A FRIEND BEFORE
In highschool I had ANOTHER friend who had this same problem but in a different font. He liked cute things, he liked flowing fabrics and skirts, he even liked being called princess! But because he was fat and not conventionally attractive he felt like he couldn't be queer. Because from what he saw, queer people don't look like him.
If you're one of those people who would gatekeep ANYONE who doesn't fit into your Pinterest board ideal version of queer from the LGBTQ+ community, you can fuck right off because anyone who would just shut of someone out of our community for something so petty and dumb and ignorant doesn't deserve the keys to the fucking door in the first place.
Start treating people who don't fit into your saturated and commercialized view of queer with more respect and kindness before I start biting off your fucking arms
4K notes
·
View notes
I once heard someone say that because Arknights' disability representation is mostly tied to their fantasy turbo-cancer, then it doesn't feel like real disabled representation, and I've been unable to get it out of my head, like a piece of popcorn stuck in my teeth. So, rather than doing my homework like I'm supposed to be, I want to talk about why I disagree and why I love Arknights' approach to disability.
So, for those who are unaware, Arknights has a shockingly high amount of disabled characters, and characters who are disabled in a lot of different ways, both caused by being Infected and just being disabled in the way that normal people are. Nightingale has chronic pain, Lemuen is the best sniper in Laterano while being in a wheelchair, Akafuyu is mostly blind, Eyja has severe hearing loss, Rosmontis has severe memory loss, Amiya has very severe PTSD, I could go on and on.
And of course there'd be a lot of operators with disabilities! Rhodes Island is a medical organization dedicated towards long-term care of terminally ill patients. Of course many of them would develop disabilities, and of course Rhodes would have the resources and facilities to help them. They even make notes of how to treat them in their medical files, like how Ejyafjalla's has a little guide on how to best have a conversation with her. It makes perfect sense, but I can't say a lot of games would think about it on that level.
And that why I like this game's approach to disability so much. A lot of video games just treat disability as "someone missing an arm" or "someone in a wheelchair because of Their Injuries From Combat. It's usually treated as an individual thing, just someone who got hurt, or who maybe has a frail constitution or whatever. But in Arknights, disability isn't simply treated as a character trait for individuals, but as part of the worldbuilding itself. The world is largely defined by Oripathy, this fatal degenerative disease with no cure. And the Infected are treated as second-class citizens, considered free labor that they don't have to treat ethically because they're dying anyway. The writers realized that this would cause severe disability, both real and fantastical, and worked it into the story and world.
This runs the other way, too! Arknights' worldbuilding follows a sort of social model of disability, in a way. There's a lot of fantasy stories that treat the inability to use magic as a sort of disability, but to Arknights, it's... not. Because Arts require specialized training, and so a lot of people just don't know how to use them, and might not even know they can't use Arts. So it's not treated as such, even though it is still a physical inability to perform things other people can.
But on the other end, Laterano's culture is based around the Sankta having empathic communication between each other. Mostima, as a fallen angel, can't use this telepathy anymore, and she speaks about how othering it feels sometimes, to be physically unable to engage with an important part of her culture. While it's not explicitly stated as a disability to the Lateran culture, I certainly feel like it's treated as one to some degree. Namely that it's explicitly contrasted with Fiametta's PTSD rendering her unwilling to empathize with the people around her, as opposed to Mostima's physical inability. It's the fantasy disability treated with the same weight as real world disability, because within the world of Terra, they're the same thing.
And of course there's just some of the more fucked up fantasy stuff like "On top of her existing narcolepsy, Ptilopsis was forced to become plural after she had to have part of her brain replaced with a computer that forces her to speak and think like a computer or else it causes her severe mental stress to the point of physical pain." Which uh. I don't know where that fits in the conversation but jesus christ someone hug that owl
Of course, its representation isn't always perfect. Just off the top of my head, Nightmare is a pretty rough stereotype, with the whole "Oripathy gave her multiple personality disorder with a violent personality trying to take control of her body!!" trope. And, of course, I'm sure other people have complaints with the representation of their disability in ways that I'm not aware of because I only have the perspective I have.
But... what I remember about this game's treatment of disability isn't when it fails. What I remember is reading Glaucus' module for the first time, the story of the first time she ever put on the mechanical exo-suit legs that allowed her to walk for the first time in her life. And I started bawling my fucking eyes out. I cried because, even though I don't know the specific feeling of walking for the first time in years, I know well what she felt. That feeling of liberation from something you secretly feared was just who you are now. Even though you know it won't be a perfect solution, the physically choking emotion that you're able to get a little closer to a normalcy you've always wanted. The feeling that right now, the only thing you can do is run like the wind.
2K notes
·
View notes