#and i dont think she works That well in the setting conceptually

[witchblade]

like having your sequel villain be the functional opposite of the first game (both of them) is like. i won't say a no brainer but it works for obvious reasons. but sofia lamb specifically always came off to me as sooooo character-first like someone had something very personal they wanted to get off their chest

#and i dont think she works That well in the setting conceptually #but i think tjats the big difference between 1 & 2 #where bs1 is very big broad concept and the story until ryan is mostly About The City #and captured in set pieces and atmosphere and little freaks like cohen #and andrew is more an avatar of the city with fontlas being its shadow self. rapture is The Character being explored #whereas from what i remember of 2 rapture is very much The Setting. and the actual people take the front seat #its specifically about lamb eleanor delta sinclair and the sad audio log dad whose name i forgot #and then obviously minervas den seals it perfectly but you know

[wouldyoudoanythingforme]

i am starting to gather my thought about barbie (2023) and I have A LOT of thoughts about Barbieland in particular. spoilers below

first of all, before the movie came out greta gave an interview where she said that the film has a reverse genesis where woman was created first and man came after.

after seeing the film, I'd say Barbieland was created from the male perspective quite literally. There is a scene with the mattel ceo where he kind of boasts about how barbie cured sexism, basically. this is the lie upon which Barbieland is created but here is the thing... because Barbieland is controlled by an all-male perspective from the "real world" by men who have over 40 decades of sexist brainwashing in their heads, they cannot actually conceptualize a world where men and women are truly equal.

that is why Barbieland is set up the way that it is because men in the real world are the ones who are controlling the narrative from start to finish and they cannot imagine a world where both genders exist in harmony. they come into feminism thinking that men have to be disadvantaged in some way because that's what it means to be a "good" ally to women. however, this line of thinking literally breeds resentment in men and I am not fucking surprised someone like Ryan Gosling resonated so deeply with Ken's character arc because I'm sure he felt quite seen by the film as well.

Barbieland is set up from Ken's perspective from the beginning because Barbieland is controlled by Mattel and the board of that company is male, like the board of most companies in america are male. and Barbieland represents what MEN* think feminism is and has done for women, not what women think for themselves.

that much is obvious because even the way the characters are set up in the beginning are very shallow representations. All the Barbies have jobs but they are *defined* by their jobs because to men, once you're a woman scientist, that's all you are to them. They don't have thoughts, feelings, ideas, and opinions beyond "everything is great all the time!" because to men, Barbie is the solution.

OKAY, im getting excited now, when Barbie talks to Ken at the end of the film and she says "stop putting your value in your job, your car, your girlfriend" she is critiquing the very existence of Barbieland itself in that moment. because that is what Barbieland's value is. Barbieland is perfect because to men, all that matters is having the dream job, the dream house, the dream partner and the dream looks. they think that's all there is to being human!!!!!!!!!!

and so when Barbie is played with by a woman who has decades of experience under patriachy, she can finally wake up in her "utopia" and realize that hey, wait a minute! this is not what I think will bring me happiness. I don't care about having these materialistic things nor do I care about being an "alpha female" so why am I pretending like all this shallow shit is making me happy????

and that is why Barbieland changes to Kendom to begin with because the narrative was ALWAYS controlled by the Kens of the world and the movie basically starts there, with the assumption thst girlboss feminism and pink capitalism cured sexism and explores if that actually is "utopia" if it actually is a "dream life."

im going to end it here because i dont want to get too off topic but Barbieland is such a fantastic critique of patriarchy, it's actually insane. I love that Greta tackles it from the male gaze and works within the logic of men in this society to show why their beliefs of gender are severely lacking at the end of the day because they're focused on the wrong issue!!! its not about who has the power to get the job, get the house, get the girl, its about connecting with other people. its about experiencing every single emotion under the sun with everyone around you and talking about your feelings and just living with other humans in harmony.

it's so good, i could cry actually. greta deserves every single fucking award for this film and the writing holy shit.

#if you think this film is an intro to feminism 101 fim im sorry but you're not thinking about it hard enough #and i can tell you dont really focus on men in your gender equality fight because oh my god what are you SAYING right now #barbie was a scathing critique of patriarchy but i fear you cannot see past the pastel pink font the message was written in #barbie (2023) #barbie spoilers #personal

[racketballz]

Same anon. I'm now curious about the ppg in their respective decades. Like wdyt they'd even wear? Or how would they style their hair?? Pls share your thoughts. I would love to read them!

That’s actually one of my dream projects to do! I’m not even close to being able to execute it but yeah! I don’t know exactly like what’s what yet like I don’t have visual examples I can show you of like specific stylings but blossom has always gave me 80s movie girlboss with the shoulder pads and powerhouse in the work place smashing through the glass ceiling with ease. She as an absolute power over a room whether it be in the work place or otherwise I think just in general these are icons that I think about when I think about blossom. Like you can’t tell her shit because of her humble origins but shes super intelligent and has a good heart but also she’s the boss ya know (any film with Julia roberts honestly) and I just want her to be in a fun situation because she also takes herself far too seriously so I think that would play Fairly interestingly into her clothes! Also blossoms has a lot of hair and I can make it big as shit I think that blossom would fair well in a corporate setting just so she can tell people what to do and be in her element so pant suits and stuff vests uhh older pads that aren’t too egregious LMAO

Bubbles on the other hand I have no idea what exactly she would wear I haven’t watched a lot of 70s movies or media that isn’t music but that being said I’ve listen to A LOT of 70s music and funk and disco (discos kinna scary tho there are a lot of stuff that comes with disco clubbing that’s messy and i just want her to look all cute LOL) and I think that she would look really cute with the styling of club wear or like roller rink stuff! I think it would look super cute because it’s truly a leisure time hanging out with friends and dancing and community and also the clothes are a large part of the performance of going out to those places so coordinated outfits crazy textures and colors (not flower power tho don’t let anyone tell you flower power was apart of the 70s it was apart of the 60s 😤) and also like the clothes are flirty and gay and fun which is bubbles ya know

I did blossom first because I was excited about hers conceptually but buttercup is very simple I simply wanna dress her in grunge clothes and I want her to be on stage 😐 very simple pure indulgence I do think buttercup is a little clean for grunge so I think that it would be interesting if she were to toss between normal people clothes and alternative styling but yeah I dont even have pictures for this or an example I can find but you know grunge

[g-r-a-v-e-y-a-r-d]

River pls tell us about ur furry story you’ve worked on so hard

okay well "so hard" was an exaggeration on my part but the idea is that its set 20 years in the future in a universe that is not so different from ours and there has been a major communist uprising halting the progress of much of the united state's imperialist machinery. much of the world still becomes unlivable due to climate collapse. but it might not be permanent. we arent quite sure. also there was a huge comet that hit mars and now it's molten, but it has an atmosphere, ruining the ultra-rich's plans for colonization.

much of america still belongs to the US government. a lot doesnt though, belonging to one leftist militia or another.

Our story begins along a boarder between the New England People's Collective, a large and surprisingly well-armed communist militia, and the United States, who's military has been stretched so thin that they are hiring ultra-nationalist para-military groups to protect boarders. We start on the capitalist side of a town split right through the middle by a militarized zone. Most days gunfire can be heard through our community, but everyone keeps going through the motions of their lives because what the fuck else are you going to do when you need to pay the rent? one of our cast of characters--Alice B--is in the middle of taking her trash out when it happens... the trash smells different... good even what is this urge she's feeling... its like smelling a chili-dog at a baseball game. she knows its a bad decision... but it smells so good! suddenly fur sprouts out of her hands and arms and back and oh... god.... sharp teeth... a tail trapped in her jeans... she's... she's like a... big... opossum??

so yeah it turns out a lil spacerock crashed thru the barn behind her apartment and now 35% of humanity has become half animal overnight, resulting in a greater need for accommodations to help more people adapt to their strange new lives. its like anarchist x-men. minus professor x. also a bunch more weird shit that either isnt done yet or i dont wanna spoil. its mostly about how hegemony is an inherently fucked up way for people to organize their lives and how a community can come together to kick hegemonic thinking's ass. its gonna be queer, its gonna be furry, and im gonna try to tackle real issues head-on but with a degree of jocularity to show that with a few changes in how we conceptualize our role in this world we can become better than what we are.

[timextoxhajima]

Okay so Imma be a little stubborn and send you a long ass ask because I have things to say, now that the series has, sadly, unfortunately, ended!

Next ask is that, so fair warning, okay bye, thank you for listening to this warning!

READ ONLY IF YOU'VE FINISHED LMLL

[below the cut contains indepth analysis of lmll if you're interested! it's highlighted in pink!]

Okay, the best characters (sorry Juyeon, I like Jang-Won and Mr. Ro, a little bit more) are leaving, very literally, and I am crying my eyes out, no joke! You broke this tough cookie😭😭😭😭 I never thought I could built such a connection with characters and omg, I haven't cried since like Divergent and I have read so many books and why are you doing this, I mean I know but like please dont let her die! I need her to be immortal and sorry I am rambling, I am just emotional! Bye! I'll go listen to sad songs and cry a little bit more😭😭

sis.. when you first sent this in i was already so uwu and then my next thought was: fuck, what about c20???? i hope you didn't cry TOO much...

Dear Dana and Love Me A Little Less, Don't say goodbye, say see you soon! This is not my goodbye, but a see you soon, so I can take some distance (and cry over Jang-won and the series ending) and come back later to read it again and again. ( I thought it was only fit to write this as a letter - so, sorry if this is too long, but just bear with me, okay?) Firstly, Dana, I have already said this so many times before and I will say it again and again, the love and dedication you have for your works is so beautiful. LMLL is your genius-brain baby and the series has touched my heart in ways I thought not possible. Secondly, when you say LMLL doesnt get enough interactions, I understand how much demotivating that can be, and I genuinely wish for it to gain so much more interaction, especially now that it is finished! I have never been the one to follow and updating series with such vigour before ( I am too impatient for updates) but with LMLL, I was so excited and looking forward to each chapter update! You will not believe me but I would read and then rant to my irl friend about it, coz it was very very interesting ( I have already told you I even had a dream starring the characters) So, thank you for writing such a piece! I promise I'll read this atleast a few times more! Lastly, LMLL, for me, started out as an attempt to like reading again, and also with the story itself, I had very different expectations. But, even though I bawled my eyes out for the last two chapters, I like the way this progressed instead to the expectations I had in mind! I have lost people too, people I have confided in, admired, and people who were strong stubborn assholes who made the world a better place. This hits hard after that. The idea of not only showing geniune love, along with the idea of growing as a person, and learning and being kind and geniune, is an idea too brilliant, and honestly, LMLL is so beautiful for having all this! For me, it's no more a story but more like a friend recounting their day! Something I look forward to 100%. Umm, I could go on with the praises, honestly but like this is too long already and I am getting emotional ( don't go LMLL! I cannot part with you yet?! -- can you see the way I wrote this in my notes app, to make sure I didnt make mistakes?) Okay, bye, I hope this wasn't too much, Dana! Your lovely dedicated LMLL reader, Suzy

NAURRRR SUZY PLEASE this super long ask hit me RIGHT IN THE GUT like idk how to put it into words how happy and lucky i am to have you as a reader for lmll! wrt the lack of interactions, i think rn I'm very satisfied actually. I'm getting the reactions i was hoping the series would induce because earlier on i wasn't getting a lot of reblogs and comments/reactions so having this feels like such a huge achievement as a writer. [i kinda feel bad too okay i swear]

and thank you so much for seeing the bigger picture of lmll!!! like YES? i titled it 'love me a little less' because of many many different reasons. the title of the fic had initially been 'love me with your heart and I'll give you all my time', set in the same chaebol world BUT it just didn't stick as well. 'love me a little less' is actually a thought that jang won harboured right from the very beginning because if you noticed, jang won's diagnosis was on Christmas in 2020, which meant she already knew at the point of time her father came back. 'love me a little less' was a warning to her father, her brother and juyeon. another way of interpretation was actually because jang won knows that she's not the kindest samaritan, and therefore she actually doesn't have confidence that she could find love in the first place. she has no gauge of how well she is at conceptualizing love and understanding it. 'love me a little less' is an apology - because she was convinced she was incapable of love. the whole story actually revolves around the grander scheme of things: jang won learning to love and be kind, juyeon learning to grow independent and understanding of his own feelings. i have so much i could say but right now I'm just kind of dizzy from the reactions I've been getting so I'll keep it like that for now. thank you for keeping up with lmll, suzy!!!!! <33333333

#lmll asks #lmll spoilers #tth.suzy <3

[rogueshipagogo]

ppl have been asking me my opinions on space channel 5 vr... and i guess since i bought a vr headset off craigslist just so i could play it and speedrun it before work the day it came out... i should talk abt it now... i dont rly think i’ll be able to separate it into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things i think i’m just going to do a rambly stream of consciousness bc i have a headache... but i DO have good things to say abt this game... so st.... sta stay t tune  d

right off the bat, the thing i appreciate most abt this game- i like that space channel 5 vr doesnt have cash grab vibes. i Do genuinely believe that they Wanted to make this game For the people who are still obsessed with it, and that they ultimately did what they set out to do when they intended to scale certain aspects of the series up conceptually to match the way the fandom perceives it nowadays. but like i’ve said before... i’m not going to Disagree with the very common conclusion that it Needed to be longer, or at Least more intricate plot-wise. one of my fun and fresh excuses for sc5vr being as short as it is is because you arent really supposed to be playing vr games for too long anyways, its really disorienting and kinda painful, but even that doesn’t account for why so much of the game that we got is a rehash of old settings, concepts, songs, and characters. [i dont even have a problem with reusing old songs, i just think the ones they chose ended up being misleading]

for example i think it makes sense that the first report is a remake of the first games first report on the surface, it’s meant to take you back to the way the first game felt and give you an idea of what it means that the games classic scenery can be rendered in actual high quality detail now [same with the recurrence of events like encountering the space pirates in the asteroid belt/the last battle against a villain being singing to it about what it’s done wrong], but i really thought, like, report 1 was going to end up being a simulated scenario for the benefit of lou and kee’s training... which i dont think ended up being the case??? i think they really did write ‘ok here you are in the first game’s setting again, fighting the old enemies again, because... :^) ok have fun playing report 2!’

and then whats report 2... you fight another old boss from the first game... but theres Still no clear villain or motivation for anything thats happening... and there wont be until like... basically the end of the game...

like, glitter is a really cute character, but its kind of underwhelming that shes just a random citizen who was kidnapped by an entity that we NEVER LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT... like part 1 was extremely notable for being about corporate greed and corruption, part 2 honestly wasnt that political in comparison but at least made you do a think wrt purge’s motivation and his methods, and this game just has a plot device that feels like it’ll do smth but then ends up not doing anything beyond what we already learned about it from the information on its character bio before the game was out. if it turns out that cell x is actually relevant again in a future entry in the franchise and they do have a more developed concept for what cell x Is in mind, i’ll do an entire backflip, but for now its just chalked up to being the result of More Space Hijinks that dont need to be explained

ESPECIALLY WITH ALL OF THE ALLUSIONS TO CELL X BEING AN ENTITY THAT FEEDS OFF OF DANCE ENERGY... it had me thinking that there would have to be some New Method of fighting it off that didn’t just lend it more power in the process, but nah apparently just tacking on the disclaimer ‘*this dance energy is not for glitter’ is enough to turn it from smth it can consume for power into big attacks you can use to kill it... like honestly it sounds like im asking for a lot from a game that has Never made too much sense, but considering that in part 2 they could add details like ‘oh didnt you know purge can open pocket dimensions? ulala is capable of manifesting tangible dance energy and the only other person who can do that is purge???’, its not like they havent come up with weird new shit for dance energy to do within the plot before. they just didnt do it in this game fsr

like did anyone else think that cell x/glitter was going to be the result of tossing purge out into deep space and him encountering the sc5 universe’s equivalent of an eldritch alien creature, smth more bestial than morolians?? even if purge wasnt part of it, when you say ‘uh oh, this guy Eats this society’s only source of energy!!!’ i expect the stakes to get HIGH, and i want the ramifications of it to be kinda STARTLING, because blank wanted money and purge wanted to ritualistically end the world but something this near to an ecological disaster that would force an entire paradigm shift hasn’t occurred yet in the series?? its totally new!!! there’s a lot they could do with this but OH DONT WORRY ABOUT IT EVERYONE ulala knows how to make dance energy kill cell x instead of feed it she’s got this we’re good no need to investigate more into all that

i can’t explain why the game is like this. and i dont expect grounding to address it in any meaningful way either. i’m sure they’re Aware of these complaints by now- the game reviewing community has Not been kind to sc5vr specifically due to all of these shortcomings [i didnt even touch on the issues with motion sensing and how many of the games mechanics were removed in favor of smth presumably easier to program yet much less satisfying, like Secret Moves just being mini quicktime events and Turning Your Ratings Into Stars just being replaced with the standard Three Strikes You’re Out method of scoring], but the pr team still seems very enthusiastic abt the game and is still promising dlc and potentially even more games in the series after this one- heres hoping that they’ll at least take these grievances to heart and consider making the experience not only more accessible [aka it will... go back to being a rhythm game with controller input.... and not... an exclusive vr experience...], but also as immersive and detailed as the old games, with less reused plot beats. i can let some of it off the hook in this game simply because i’m aware that it began its life as a tech demo that was only supposed to be that initial first report from the first game But Happening All Around You!, but i Really dont think they could get away with doing this little to expand upon the groundwork set by the first two games again. not with the way people remember part 2 being such a vast upgrade from part 1... the bar had been set so high that this just felt like a huge backslide into something even sillier and harder to take seriously than part 1 before we had any idea what kind of staying power the franchise would have as a hallmark of sega’s quirky antics. like... this game is what i think space channel 5 looks like to people who don’t understand the appeal of the first two games. and that scares me

but i guess for the most part, aside from wishing they had done more to revitalize the setting and the lore of the sc5 universe itself, im kind of glad it didnt do a lot to change the existing storylines the characters have kinda forged for themselves- here i was stressing out that they would pull out some plot development that would utterly and drastically change the way we talked abt the series for the rest of time, but so little happened and so little was added to the bank of sc5 lore that we can kind of all just carry on as usual and keep having the same headcanons we always had.

BUT!!! there ARE a lot of cute little details here and there that make the experience feel wholesome and like i said not an utter cashgrab- like so many of the character profiles referencing previous games [all of the references to npcs in this game being relatives of the npcs of the last games made me lose it] and how often ulala changes her expressions up and looks right at you and talks to you. the new music they wrote for the game also all slaps and everyones redesigns [if they got a redesign... rip pudding] are stunning

one of the most important things they did in this game was give a nice sort of Update to every character.... for example explaining that ulala isn’t a rookie reporter any more like she was in the first 2 games, that she’s moved up to being in charge of training new channel 5 reporters, and that while pudding is still somewhat stuck on her rivalry with ulala her career isn’t stagnant either, she was just cast in a romcom series as the lead... which is really nice considering how in the past she was portrayed as somewhat of a loser with almost no remaining fans left from her idol years

and you knew i was going to bring up jaguar at some point HES ALL OVER THIS GAME AND IT LITERALLY MADE ME FEEL LIKE MY LIFE WAS WORTH POWERING THROUGH THESE LAST FEW YEARS AND ALSO LIKE IM A GENIUS FOR SPENDING SO LONG POSTING EVERY SINGLE DAY ‘NO REALLY, HE’S THE SECONDARY PROTAGONIST OF THE STORY, ITS ABOUT CHANNEL 5 AS A COMPANY AND THEIR IMPACT ON EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER ENCOUNTERED THEM AND THAT INCLUDES JAGUAR AS WELL AS ULALA HES INTEGRAL TO THE PLOT BC SHE WOULDNT BE ALIVE IF IT WEREN’T FOR HIM’ i feel like it’s really incredible how in this game he has genuinely nice energy and doesnt withhold praise from ulala just to be helpful in a mysterious way later and he like HAS FRIENDS now. like consider how he went from disgraced former ch5 employee who got mad every time he saw them, to kidnapped robot henchman kinda humbled by the fact that now the turns tabled and ulala had to rescue Him, and now 3 years later his bio is all about how he has a new tv show thats super popular and he has a new entourage of ladies who he considers his '’’’’’comrades’’’’’’’ within the station he founded??? AND AFTER 20 YEARS THEY WERE FINALLY ABLE TO GIVE HIS MODEL JUICY ASS CHEEKS??????????????? NO MORE PANCAKE BOOTY???? THE BOY HAD A GLOWUP AND NO I WONT STOP TALKING ABOUT IT

WHEN I SAY MEOW MATCH THE POSE MOTHERFUCKERS THIS BLONDE BASTARD GETS TO BE IN CHARGE OF THE HUNDRED STAGE BATTLE NOW TOO THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE SPACE PIRATES BAYBEE

#its almost 4 am. idk i will probably have more to say tomorrow. my head still hurts #the galaxy depends on my funky moves

[foxglovesound]

🐾, 🌲, 🛠️, 💡, 🌠(instead of whether they are religious or not, how they act and familiarize on their religion, if that makes sense?) for hornetflower, goldenscale, acornbee, lightingface

FIRST OF ALL I’D LIKE TO GIVE A GREAT BIG APOLOGY FOR HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION i wanted to put a lot of thought into my responses (despite how. unprofessionally i wrote them thats just bc i type lazy KFHDSFDDSF) so i took a day or two to mull over as well as comic pages were DRAGGING ON LATE this week q___q !!!! thank u for ur patience AND the interesting questions this was fun >:3c!!!!

🐾: Do they have any future goals?

HORNETFLOWER: Well, honestly?? I’d have to say no. hornetflower isnt a particularly ambitious molly, and she tends to just focus on her current, short-term duties and what she needs to get done. at the moment her main goal is to guide sootpaw to her warrior graduation and to help raise duckkit -- and see duckkit reach her own graduation, of course. however, being minkclaws most trusted confidant, hornetflower kinda makes whatever minkclaws goals are her own goals too -- shell support her friend through thick and thin

GOLDENSCALE: again not really! she doesnt really have any particular ambitions in life, nor is she training an apprentice that she needs to see make it to graduation. part of her does hope that one day she and gorsefang can reconnect, but the rift between them is wide and goldenscale has stopped her attempts at reconnecting with gorsefang after her sibling’s initial resistance. beyond that? not a very ambitious warrior either! her daily goals are probably just getting the word of whats the next hot gossip (u can usually find her sharing tongues and chattering with her fellow clanmates to get those little details hehe)

ACORNBEE: she wants to become the top warrior of riverclan, pretty much! acornbee dedicates her life to upholding clan tradition and code, and her dream is to just become the most admired warrior in riverclan, one that the leader (snowstar….obviously) can trust with her nine lives (supposedly). however, acornbee takes the code a little too seriously -- anything that the leader could ever ask of her, she’d do without a second thought.

LIGHTNINGFACE: lightningface’s main goal in life has become more focused on their career as now they and eveningscale are the senior caretakers and technically like the head ranks of the caretakers. they’ve also got a little bit of a surprise coming on later during the comic ;) and their main goal will be making sure that little group stays safe and is raised happily. 

🌲: What’s their favorite hunting spot?

HORNETFLOWER: probably by the rivers and streams! she enjoys either physically being in the water or amongst the stones overseeing the water flowing by, and she and minkclaw often goofed off together as youngsters around streams and rivers, so she has a particular affinity for hunting in those spots !

GOLDENSCALE: as her name suggests, goldenscale is especially skilled at fishing!! so her favorite hunting spots around the territory would naturally be the streams and river running through their territory as thats where she’s at her prime B)!!!

ACORNBEE: i dont believe she’d have a very specific hunting spot in riverclan, though i’d imagine she enjoys hunting around areas where there’s more shrubbery she can crouch behind and sneak up on her prey !!!

LIGHTNINGFACE: lightningface prefers hunting in the open parts of riverclan territory, where the trees thin out, or near the windclan border! they have a windclan-cat like build, and prefer chasing down prey out in open areas, rather than dodging around trees and shrubbery. 

🛠️: How do they best contribute to their clan?

HORNETFLOWER: hornetflower is a very kind, and nurturing, member of riverclan. besides the typical warrior-duty stuff, such as patrols and hunting, hornetflower also helps out a great deal around camp - she makes sure apprentices are staying safe and out of trouble, and often drops by the nursery to interact with the caretakers and kittens there. BASICALLY she’s a very warm molly and a role model to some, so she best contributes to her clan besides her warrior duties by offering advice and guidance for youngsters and even others her age :3!

GOLDENSCALE: as mentioned before she’s EXCEPTIONAL at hunting fish and streams, so she contributes the best to riverclan by stocking the fresh-kill pile with plenty of fish she can catch, as well as giving tips and advice to apprentices and growing cats on how to more efficiently hunt fish in the river and streams!! 

ACORNBEE: as a very obedient, task-orientated molly, acornbee best contributes to her clan in the smaller ways - she does what she’s told, when she’s told, and she does it thoroughly and properly. she makes sure she gets her tasks for the day done before any free time, and takes her responsibilities very seriously - she also works on the dens and camp setting a lot, making sure everything is secure and, if anything needs patched, she’s the first one reporting to the opening to patch it up! she’s just a busy little bee around riverclan pretty much hehe!

LIGHTNINGFACE: they’re one of the senior caretakers, alongside eveningscale, so they contribute to the clan most by taking charge of the nursery. they make sure caretakers are in order, especially apprentices, and make sure everyone’s staying safe and happy. one of the more important duties they have is keeping a note on kitten personalities and traits, because the senior caretakers often sit down with the leader before a group of kits is to be apprentices and give the leader their input on who should mentor which kit, and what career choices the kits have decided on. of course, the mentor-and-apprentice pair ups are the leaders final choice, but they usually do take the senior caretakers recommendations, and they of course make sure not to pair up a kit interested in becoming a caretaker with a warrior mentor or vice versa!

💡: Give a random fact about them?

HORNETFLOWER: hornetflower is the revamp of an old rp oc named Hopwhisker! I kinda miss the hop- prefix a lot honestly…. Anyways! she had 6 toes and was a scottish fold, both of which kinda got revamped to just big paws and floppy ears, but

GOLDENSCALE: originally she was part of the main group with lampreyface, hornetflower, minkclaw, blackcloud (before cootwhisker got in the way) and marigoldface! they were, conceptually, a very tight-knit friend group, but i ended up making lampreyface older than that generation and the group itself was feeling a little crowded so i broke it up a little. while they are all still friends they’re not like The Group as originally planned sdfhsdf! 

ACORNBEE: she is the second ever cat i used the -bee prefix on :D!

LIGHTNINGFACE: there’s a rumor in windclan that went around shortly after rosepaw’s apprentice ceremony/first apprentice gathering that lightningface was actually rosepaw’s sire - although there’s no real validity to that claim. lightningface just happens to look a lot like their nephew. 

🌠: Are they religious?

HORNETFLOWER: hornetflower isn’t devoutly religious in how she acts, so she doesn’t really pray daily or send her thoughts to starclan daily, but she will head down to the river (a common spot for most riverclan cats to stop by and pray without heading all the way up to starclan’s ledge, should they feel the need to pray for something) and pray for her friends or family if someone she knows is in danger, or battling an illness, or going out on a particularly dangerous job/duty/task. if a clanmate or someone she knows from a different clan has passed away too, she’ll sit down and send a silent prayer up to starclan, asking for her ancestor’s to welcome the aforementioned cat into their ranks securely.

GOLDENSCALE: besides just….believing in starclan, goldenscale doesn’t really do anything or behave in any particularly religious manners. she never really prays unless she feels it’s desperately, desperately needed, and you could probably count the amount of times shes prayed on one of ur hands. her religious behavior/familiarity extends to just simply knowing that there’s a place after death.

ACORNBEE: acornbee, on the other hand, is very attentive in her religious behavior. she typically takes a moment to thank starclan for a catch once she hunts prey down, and prays before she sits down to eat, typically again just a little thank you to starclan for blessing her with a meal. shes not shy when it comes to prayers for starclan, and often thinks to them for advice - however, in her eyes, the closest a living cat can get to communing with starclan outside of starclan’s ledge is the leader: the leader, in acornbees eyes, has direct path with starclan, and whatever the leader orders, it must be a will of starclan. it can be an unfortunate vulnerable way of thinking.

LIGHTNINGFACE: the most notable behavior they do when it comes to religion is the fact they will send a prayer up to starclan before every birth - its usually just a quiet, quick “let this cat and their kits make it through the birth” in their head before they settle down to help the cat in labor deliver kits, alongside eveningscale. they also tell kittens and apprentices lore and mythology, as well as about starclan, so that could also be a way that u can see how they act in according to their religion!!

#worldbuilding #lore #just bc i added extra like cultural stuff abt caretaker ranks n what not in some of lightnings answers

[emperorren]

is it ok if i ask you to discuss more why romance is the way to make a kylo rey dynamic compelling if they aren’t family and the light / dark stuff ? if you dont want to im sorry for this please ignore .

What you have in Reylo is the trilogy’s crucial hero/villain dynamic where the two characters involved develop much more complex and intense feelings for each other than simple hatred—the hero wants to save the villain, the villain wants the hero at his side, and is devastated when (s)he refuses to follow him. By identifying with the hero’s perspective, the audience becomes invested in the dynamic with the villain, and wants him redeemed just as bad as the hero does. Can you have a Star War without these elements? I don’t think so. Now, imagine you’re a writer, you have Rey and Kylo Ren and you gotta make their dynamic compelling in the way I described above. You have to ask yourself: what motivates these characters? Why do they end up caring for each other? Why does the hero want to save the villain? Why does the villain feel affection for the hero?

The Star Wars movies have 3 basic templates to answer those questions: a) familial love (Luke/Anakin); b) friendship (Obi Wan/Anakin); c) romantic love (Padme/Anakin).

We can immediately rule out familial love, as TLJ revealed with no ambiguity that Rey and Kylo are not related. So no bro/sis separated in infancy feels, no Cain and Abel narrative, no “I can’t kill him because he’s my brother (/cousin)”, no “finding happiness in family again through long lost relative I didn’t even know I had”. Not that these narratives were bad, on the contrary—it’s just not happening in this story.

We can also rule out friendship, because friendship in Star Wars requires a solid relationship built on shared ideals, common goals and working side by side. You have essentially two types of friendship in the SW movies:

camaraderie/brotp, seen mostly between age-peer(ish) characters (typically male, like Han/Luke, Han/Lando, Obi Wan/Anakin, F*nn/Poe, though F*nnrey and Leia/Holdo also qualify)who have Gone Through Some Shit Together: the characters are comfortable around each other, know each other fairly well, joke a lot, there might be some tension occasionally but it’s generally resolved within the same movie; it can be a long time friendship or an insta-friendship that blossoms while being in the same adventure together;

mentorship (Obi Wan/Qui Gon Jinn, Obi Wan/Anakin, Obi Wan/Luke, etc.): seen mostly between male characters with sizeable age gaps, who have been each other’s mentor/student for a certain period;

and neither fits the Reylo dynamic as we’ve seen it so far. (sure, there’s “friendship” involved—”You’re not alone” “Neither are you”, and there’s “mentorship” involved—“I can show you the ways of the Force”, and he did, via the Force Bond), but both are are tinged with too much tension, too much electricity, too much unspoken-ness to neatly fit the boxes above—this relationship is simultaneously less and more than friendship as Star Wars does it.

So it has to be romantic love. Remember: you’re going for a STRONG dynamic, so half measures and weak sauces aren’t going to work. There have to be lots of drama and tears involved, especially now that the legacy characters are dead or virtually dead: Rey’s the only living character who is in pain because of Ben’s fall. That pain SERVES the narrative—is actually crucial to the narrative—and has to be MOTIVATED, believable, on Rey’s part. Why would she care so much for Kylo Ben, if Kylo Ben isn’t: 

a) her blood

b) her friend?

Because she’s in love with him, that’s why. Love is one of the strongest pulls a human being can feel towards another, and it doesn’t require a lot of explanation narrative wise, because sometimes love just… happens. Irrationally. Against all hope or better judgment. Romantic love is both strong and chaotic enough to explain why Rey would become attached to her sworn enemy. Thus it’s the simplest and most effective narrative path to follow for these two characters.

(there could have been another way, which I call the Frodo Effect—Rey becoming invested in Kylo’s redemption because she sees in him what she could become at any moment if she gives in to the dark side. She feels compassion for him because she knows they’re not that different, they both have this raw strength, this violent energy that’s so easy to lose yourself in, and deep down she knows she was tempted, and could have gone down Kylo’s path if circumstances had been different. But the trilogy so far doesn’t seem too preoccupied with Rey’s dark side, and neither does Rey: she has some darkness in her and she’s aware of it, but she’s not particularly angsty about it, or worried that it might consume her—certainly not enough for it to be her only motivation to save Ben.)

As for the light vs dark, think of the Jedi and the Sith as archetypal opposites, like two plates of a scale. Star Wars has always drawn inspiration from eastern philosophy, and the light side vs dark side thing is pretty much a space version of the yin/yang dichotomy. Yet the original trilogy failed to address an important part of this archetypal dichotomy, which is that neither side can exist without the other, and each side contains a seed of the other—there’s always a little feminine in every masculine, always a little shadow in every light, and light itself cannot be defined or conceptualized if not against its opposite. The original trilogy dismissed all this subtext with an oversimplified, westernized concept of the “balance” as “light triumph over darkness”… but if you think about it, if you have a pair of forces pulling in opposite directions, the balance CANNOT be one force destroying the other—that’s the opposite of what balance is. And the prequel trilogy HAD the opportunity to deconstruct this oversimplification—it ALMOST did, by showing how Anakin was pushed to the dark side by the Jedi’s fundamentalism and attempts to destroy everything the dark side represents, even on an individual level, by censoring passions, emotionality, anger in their adepts—but eventually failed to properly introduce a new concept of balance as well. It was a set up for something that never happened… until 2015, when the sequel trilogy started. 

I’m fairly sure that by having a boy and a girl at the extreme sides of this polarization, they mean to have them meet in the middle and make sweet sweet love. Romantic/sexual attraction and hopelessly falling in love as a metaphor of the inexorable pull of the light towards the dark side and vice versa, to achieve a balance of opposites that’s the only way to -ahem- creation.

#anon #asks #meta #reylo #romance #light and dark

[sometimesrosy]

story idea anon here! Im not 100% about everything I said exactly but to recap: I have a story idea for basically a series (5 books) and I’ve had it for awhile. The thing is, it’s sci-fi, which pretty much needs plot driven writing. I’m not good at that. It doesn’t make me wanna write. I’m good at character/feelings/relationship driven writing and that’s what makes me want to write and move the story forward. But I don’t wanna give up on the book just because I don’t know how to adapt.

(2) Obviously, because in order for things to happen, the plot is the thing that needs to move forward chapter to chapter in this kind of fiction. I know that. But it doesn’t seem to excite me, at all. I get excited about the slow burn I have mapped out, the story lines that will go on and complete each other from the first to the last chapter, the twists, the romance, the friendships and unexpected partnerships, the cliffhangers etc. All of it. But writing the things the characters are doing?

(3) As in plans and action scenes and fighting and bad guys and whatever? Nothing. It just seems like a chore and makes me procrastinate on moving forward. But I’ve had this idea for so long and I really like it and I really want to tell this story, I just don’t know how to do it right. Do I make it more character/feelings/relationship driven even though it doesn’t necessarily fit the genre? Do I power through the parts I don’t like even though it will make the process last longer? Do I change

(4) stuff? Do I try to change myself and my style? I don’t wanna just give up. Please help. (also i dont know if i’ve been on anon or not cause i just kinda started typing and didnt really stop)

Okay. Sorry for not answering this yesterday when I asked you to send in the missing #1 ask, but I had to do all sorts of other stuff and didn’t have the focus. Now it’s morning and i’m in writing brain, so let’s go.

All right, so it seems like you are struggling with the conflict between what you WANT to write and what you think you’re SUPPOSED to write. 

The key to this struggle is to always let the WANT win over the SUPPOSED TO. Oh, well that sounds like I’m advocating complete and total writing anarchy! Who needs plot! Who needs structure! Nah I’m not. Not really.

BUT I am saying that you need to write the story you NEED to tell, the one that’s humming below your skin. Write the story you want to tell. Write the things that make you passionate. Write the things you’re good at.

Now this doesn’t mean ignore the plot or genre or the things you’re bad at. Facing the frisson of your fears and insecurities and struggles adds a tension to your work and leads you into new places that will surprise even you. So one of the things you can do when stuck between WANT and SHOULD is learn how to BALANCE them. 

Okay, that doesn’t sound like letting the want win, but that’s how I work. 

FIRST. FORGET ABOUT GENRE REQUIREMENTS. I mean, don’t. You know the world you’re writing in and the rules you have to follow. You know what you love about it, work with that. But it’s not as strict as you’re thinking it is. You get to BEND the rules, without actually breaking them. Sure, we love sci fi because of the action and ideas… and sure, i personally might have given up on the literary fiction genre because I was SO bored of it, but if you take the character and language driven style of literary fiction and combine it with the plot and concept driven style of sci fi, what you have is a DAMN FINE STORY. You see what I’m saying? You can use the best parts of BOTH to make your story better. BALANCE. 

You don’t have to sacrifice who you are as a writer to write a particular genre. It’s part of you and it’s your voice and what makes you unique. I’ll tell you a secret. I’m actually a poet. I don’t write much poetry anymore, but I take my poetry and put it into my science fiction and fantasy. My whole writing style is based on, basically, the poetry of the world. I may not give each sentence the attention I would a poem, but the impulse is still there, even if the genre is miles away from what I’m writing. And that makes for a better story. Sometimes I think I’m a better fiction writer than poet PRECISELY because I use my poetry IN my fiction. 

You aren’t WRONG as a sci fi writer because you like to focus on emotions and characters and relationships. You’re a sci fi writer with character driven stories. I guarantee you that people like that. Not all people. And some people will complain that it’s not hard enough or science fictiony enough or too girly or whatever, but, honestly, WHO CARES? Don’t write for everybody. You can’t please everybody. Write for yourself. 

I personally prefer my science fiction to be character driven and I prefer to have some element of love in there, and I need to be able to connect to the characters emotionally. I think this is one reason why I prefer women writers. And one reason why I stopped listening to male critics about “What makes sci fi sci fi.” Because frankly, I’m more interested in how society works and how characters move within society than I am in whether or not my FTL space travel could conceptually work or the intricacies of war and weaponry. If boys want to play technology war in space, they can. I want to find out how that war affects my characters when it’s over and they have to keep living. Now what? 

Oh. In case you didn’t catch that, there is definitely a gender driven status thing within the sci fi community that invalidates women’s stories and glorifies men’s stories, so please make sure that’s not what’s in your head while you are critiquing the kind of story you want to tell. Because if NK Jemisin’s THREE consecutive Hugo awards, and the backlash against her winning them, is not proof that we WANT the different stories, and how some people don’t want us to tell them, then I don’t know what is.

The sci fi and fantasy genre is always changing and shifting to allow for new ideas and ways of writing. That’s what it’s for. It’s speculative. And we like new ideas. There is lots of room for experimentation. There’s lots of room for alien thinking. lol. you see what I did there? The point is, sci fi is about new and different concepts and where they could take us. Go ahead and invent your own genre. Or maybe you’re not inventing it, and it’s already there as a subgenre and you never noticed. There is actually a sci fi romance subgenre, and it’s a subgenre of romance I think. I don’t tend to prefer it because it follows the tropes of romance rather than sci fi, but you can also write sci fi that focuses on romance, like Sharon Shinn. Her stories are very romantic. But definitely sci fi. 

Okay, so that’s some conceptual stuff I want you to think about in regards to your writing process and style. But I also have some practical suggestions/tips/hints that might help you get over your hump. I’ve got two in my mind right now, lets see if I can come up with any others as I go along.

One trick. What I do sometimes, is to set up the overall, grand scheme plot, and really have no idea how I’m going to get there. Like that part you’re talking about, writing about what the characters are doing? None of that is set up. When I get there, I enter into the character motivations. Feelings, thoughts, backstory, personality, goals, desires, fears. ALL of these things are what move my plot forward. Because what I keep asking is, “how would this character react to this situation.” Now if I’ve done my job with character building then I will KNOW because I know my characters history and personality, and I can power the story with their growth and struggles. The question is always, “What Would MC Do?” I drive my plot forward by following my characters through the world I set up and basing their decisions on who they are. Some of them are emotional. Some of them are logical. Some of them are angry, some are pacifistic. All those characters are interacting with each other and shifting the story this way or that. This causes tension and gives us problems to solve and ways to solve it. You pick the ones that get you to your endpoint. Sometimes I think I’ve taken myself AWAY from my planned ending and I’m like, oh well, I guess I need a different ending. And then I get to the ending and, like magic, everything I set up starts falling into place and what I originally planned and thought had failed has been building all along. (GOOD JOB, SUBCONSCIOUS!) That has happened to me TWICE in the past year. 

Another trick. This came from a twitter post where someone was saying how she wanted to just write stories about WLW in love, but she didn’t have a plot. And I said. What do you mean you don’t have a plot? That’s your plot. Love is the answer. Love is the goal. Obstacles to love are what your characters need to fight through. Love is how your characters find strength. I said, make love the super power. Make the villain be the one who is trying to kill love, whether individually or on a universal level. For sci fi there are so many ways to do that. Maybe they’re trying to create a solely logical universe. Maybe they’re cyborgs. Maybe they want to kill a planet that the MC loves, IDK. Use your imagination. Fit it to your story. Don’t create an obstacle and plot that doesn’t connect to your desire for character and relationships and love. MAKE YOUR PLOT ABOUT THAT LOVE. It’s sci fi, you can invent the technology to make it real. Or magic if you’re doing fantasy. IMO it’s the same thing.

Oh here’s another thing. Maybe you need to stop listening to your doubts and internal editor so much, telling you that what you’re writing isn’t right. The thing that helped me get over that obsession with doing it wrong was actually nanowrimo, which I did for the first time in 2006. If you’ve done it before, or if you haven’t, you might be ready to take on this challenge to write a novel in the month of november this year, for this project. You’ve been thinking about it a lot. It sounds like you’re ready. And if you have to focus on getting the wordcount done, and you start focusing on character instead of plot, you won’t have time to get worried about whether you’re being too charactery and not ploty enough. (how is charactery a word but ploty isn’t? anyway.) And then by the time you’ve written it, you can read it over and decide if your plot is thin or it doesn’t move you forward enough, and THEN you can ADD IN THE PLOT ELEMENTS that you don’t write in your process. WHAT? Or you can remove some of the slower character driven stuff and just use it for your character development. Or even take it out and turn it into a short story. THIS is the writing process. The revision process. Just write your little heart out, and then go back over it to add in the elements you’re missing and remove the things that don’t move the story forward. 

TL;DR Whatchutalkin’ bout nonny. You’ve got a plot. You’ve mapped it out. It’s character driven. Stop doubting yourself. If you want more action, stick it in there. Make it relationship/character driven. Don’t change yourself. Make it work. 

ps. i answer questions here about writing, no problem, but i have a writing blog where i try to collect posts (mine and others) about writing, and art and creativity @rosy-writes so if you want to follow or scroll that it might be more focused, although this blog is more active.

#writing advice #rosy-writes #amwriting #writeblr #writing sci fi #plot #character driven #writing practice #internal editor

[baeddel]

There’s a Neverwinter Nighs module called uh... friggin... ‘Tales of Arterra - the Lost’ (awful title, I have to look it up every time) and it has this really really really interesting sidequest where - spoilers (and cw: sex trafficking, rape, abuse) - this brothel is keeping a succubus as a sex slave, yknow... and charging really lavish fees for people to see her, yknow.

You, of course, get to rescue her, and she becomes a party member. The whole story is very like, a straight up rescuing a trafficked sex worker narrative, yknow, it is what it is. The two female party members are very much idealized sexual partners & theres a level of adolescent fantasy to like, everyone abuses this girl but you’re nice to her and she fucks you, right... The teenage guys that make these modules dont know how to hide their fantasies about women behind the pretense of art and characterization yet :P but its somewhat endearing.

Anyway, there are a few things that are interesting about the story:

1. Succubus, in the setting, are always kept as slaves, although typically in whatever plane of hell shes from and not earth. She tells you about the different men who have owned her over the hundreds of years she’s been alive if you ask her about them. In each case the abuse her, tremendously, obviously. One is interesting because it convincingly depicts a ‘cycle of abuse’ - she talks abt how the guy sleeps with her and then get angry with her, blaming her for tempting him and so on, and beating her, and then he’ll go away and later come back and apologize, say he doesnt know what came over him, how awful he was etc., slee with her, get angry... yknow. Its done quite well. She doesn’t see this as domestic abuse because she has like a very blinkered subjectivity due to being brought up like this. Its actually done very well.

Anyway, here’s the idea: all the men who own her go through this kind of thing, where they sleep with her and then abuse her and it causes them problems in their life, and then they get rid of her, blaming her for the problems that they, themselves, caused. It’s never made explicit that this is what its doing, but its clear that this is the explanation for the succubus legend where she’s a nefarious creature who seduces men and causes them ill fate. It’s actually men projecting their own abuse onto her, narrativizing their encounters... It’s so, so, so fucking good, this is suuuuuuch a close reading of patriarchy and I’m really surprised it came out of some teenage dude’s nwn module and not, like, a bit of lesbian fiction.

2. On your first encounter with her, you’re allowed to go in and see her, for a fee, by the brothel owner. Just to look. There are a bunch of men standing in there looking at her. She’s very much an exhibit. You can go and talk to her and ask her about herself and so on. The entire scene recalls - so explicitly I’d think it was a reference if it wasn’t a nwn module - Emily Short’s Galatea. They’re very similar conceptually; Galatea talks to you abt her sculptor and also only understands herself as a posession. Galatea talks about travelling museum to museum in a crate, while the succubus talks to you about travelling from plane of hell to plane of hell in a cage. The two situations almost in all ways identical.

Galatea is obviously the more mature work: while the sucucbus story panders to male rescued woman/rescued sex worker ambitions, with her constantly going ‘wow you care about my feelings and not just my body O.O’, Galatea continually challenges and undermines this reading. (If you say “I’m sorry” to Galatea, the narrator will interject: “There’s no need. If she gets testy, you can always reset her...”) (I feel obliged to mention the best example of engaging with this projection, which is a line from the doll in bloodborne: “Of course I love you. Isn’t that how you’ve made me?”)

3. The guy who’s keeping her as a sex slave in his brothel is obviously the worst kind of monster you could possibly imagine. You could really not make a more tremendously evil villain if you tried - what worse crime could be comitted? Apart from, like, genocide? Despite this, the game is very uncomfortable actually depicting him as a villain of such magnitude, and is always walking back. Not as in its making him seem like a good guy, it doesn’t at all - but it makes him into such a ridiculous, cartoon villain that its impossible to take him seriously. He’s characterized like Dan Backslide, capturing Dora Standpipe (to do what with is never mentioned in that short, of course). You even get a line from his cousin making very clear that he’s never actually slept with the succubus himself - because “it’d be too obvious” (to his wife) - which is completely implausible. The story is willing to introduce a sex slave, but isn’t comfortable letting any of the bad guys rape her. It deals with its discomfort by becoming completely one-dimensional and willfully implausible. It’s a really interesting little anxiety to see play out.

#long post #rape tw

[desolate-rose]

Chapter 10 the outside world part 2

I had known that there would be consequences for my actions.

I had known, and yet it still hurt.

Daddy always said- my first dad used to say I was too sensitive.

My mind was in a contradictory state of slow molasses sadness and vibrating lightning anxiety.

I knew I shouldn't have made myself stand out. I was so dumb. I'm a giant idiot who has no control over her impulses and can't think her way out of a paper bag.

Why did I have to be so stupid and go do some thing dumb like read way before most children could string a full story together.

God why did I think this was a good idea I should have just-

"Little bird? What are you doing down there?" A lyrical voice broke through my thoughts as my mother crouched down to look at me.

I scrambled to sit up straight and wipe my face, accidentally bumping my head on the stone above me and sending a fresh wave of pain induced tears.

Shortly after I turned two, I was moved out of my first nursery by my parents' rooms into a suite of my own, it was almost identical in structure to the original game Zelda's room, which in retrospect was to be expected but at the time surprised me. But more importantly, the suite had a spiral staircase leading up to the second level the underside of which made the perfect hiding spot for someone as small as me. I just had to crawl to the back where it was so small that no adult could reasonably reach. I had gathered up my blankets and hidden back here when Dottie had set me down for a nap, not expecting anyone to be able to bother me.

Yet here, only a few feet in front of me, was my mother. She had somehow managed to shimmy her way around until she could almost reach me.

"H- h- how did you f- find me?" I hiccuped through my tears, trying to compose myself. It wasn't that big of a deal. I had just been stupid and hadn't thought things through. I was being stupid, and I knew there were going to be consequence.

I furiously swiped at my tears, stupid toddler body! Couldn't withstand the slightest pain or emotion without crying.

My mother scooted herself a few inches closer before reaching out for me. "Dottie told me you had a rough day today," she soothed sympathetically. I sniffed pathetically trying to pull myself together, "It's nothing." I mumbled petulantly, still sounding far too weepy. "I'm being dumb."

My mother had finally gotten close enough to reach me and grabbed me to pull me into as much of a hug as she could give me laying flat on her stomach trying to avoid hitting her head on the stairs.

"Oh baby, you're not being stupid at all! It's perfectly normal to be upset when someone says something mean about you!" she snuggled me further, pulling me closer. "Besides what do those stupid solders know! They're just jealous that they're not as smart as my little genius!" Her voice went up in pitch and she rubbed her nose against mine making me give a little hiccuping giggle.

"You dont think I'm weird?" I slapped my hands up to cover my mouth. I hadn't meant to say that. I shouldn't have-

"No!" she replied firmly. "And if any one says differently, Mommy will break their faces!"

I couldn't help but laugh at that, my new mom always had a way to calm me down. A silly little grin came to my face at the idea of my beautiful delicate mother beating up the two bulky soldiers from before. "Really?" I couldn't help but ask.

"Of course! If someone messes with my baby, I'll bite them" she snapped her teeth playfully at me, before standing up with me in her arms.

I squeaked in surprise, at some point during the conversation she had managed to squirm from underneath the stairs with me caught in her grasp.

"I know just what will cheer you up! How about you go with mommy and daddy on a little adventure?"

"An adventure?" I couldn't help but ask, curious despite myself. "Yup!" she popped the P, sounding excited.

"Your father and I have been working too hard lately. I think a little excursion out of the castle is just what this family needs."

"Outside!" I gasped, I had never really been outside the castle before. It had been too dangerous to take the baby princess outside the safety of the castle walls. Besides what reason would I have for going outside?

"Yes little bird! Outside! How about we have a little picnic?" mother hummed striding out of my room and down the hall toward her office.

Again i rushed to straighten myself up, my face was probably puffy and red and my clothes were all rumpled from how i was curled up "Mommy i don't look…" What's the word for presentable in Hylian "...nice?" Darn toddler vocabulary.

"My little bird always looks nice." "Moooommmyyyy," i whined trying to rub the tears from my eyes. "hush baby no ones going to care if you look a little messy and if they do I'll set them straight." I harrumphed grumpily. People already think I'm weird, I don't need them thinking I'm messy too. "It'll be fine little one, you worry too much."

"Illa!" Mother slammed the door to her office open. "Yes my queen" granny didn't even glance at my mom. "We are going to go out today."

granny finally looked up from her paperwork, her clever eyes quickly darting first to assess my mother then myself. before smoothly sorting her papers and rising to her feet. "Yes my lady, where would you be wanting to go?" mother glanced out the window, "Today's weather would be perfect for a picnic in hyrule fields." Granny hummed, "I will have the kitchens make you a basket, and alert the appropriate people of the change of schedule, might I suggest the area just south of the sacred grounds? The view of the plateau is lovely."

Granny paused in her preparations. "Will your husband be joining us?" "yes could you send him an invitation to join us?" Granny nodded sharply. "Of course my queen, I will have everything sorted shortly, would you like me to call Dahlia to change Zelda into some more appropriate clothing?"

Dahlia? Oh wait, that's Dottie's real name right?

"It's ok, you can have her collect the basket from the kitchen. I'll change Zelda."

Everything was happening way too fast. Before I knew it, everything was collected and a party my mom, my dad, dottie, granny, and at least 5 guards had all gathered at the stables to set off for our picnic.

Now the thing people don't get about horses is how big they are. Conceptually, people are aware that horses are big, sure, but there is a big difference between knowing horses are big, and seeing this 840-2200 pound monstrosity and having the top of your head barely line up with the lowest point of their back. Now imagine that for a three year old.

I eyed the creature warily.

I'm barely 31 pounds soaking wet and 2 feet at my tallest. this thing is 3 times my size.

Now I like horses. I had even taken a few riding lessons in my last life, but right now?

I am far too squishy and small to get within stepping range. it could squish me like an ant.

I tugged on my mom's skirts, never taking my eyes of the monster casually munching on some hay. (it was the same colour as my hair would it be tempted to eat me?!) "Mama can walk to the pic- pic-" Ugh, words. "Outside food instead."

"Aww is my little bird scared of the nice horsey?" I tried to give her a deadpan look. it didn't work from the way my dad was attempting to hide his smile, curse my cute chubby baby cheeks! "it could fit my entire arm in its mouth." dottie muffled a snicker from somewhere behind me. I generously decided to ignore her.

"Don't worry little bird! carrot is a nice horsey! do you want to feed him!" "didn't i just say he could eat my entire arm? why would i put it anywhere near him?" my voice was rising toward the shrill range but that wasn't important.

Ignoring my protests, Mother scooped me up and held me out toward the horse like some sort of sacrificial offering. Do horses eat hylians in zelda? "why don't you give him a pat!" so this is how i die again isn't it? death by getting eaten by a herbivore, at least ill get the hylian equivalent of the darwin award.

Hesitantly I raised my pudgy baby fist, (it was packed fat and would be very nutritious) and gently, GENTLY, patted the top of his head before quickly drawing my hand bracing for a snap of teeth. the animal's ear barely flinched as he continued eating regardless of the weird creatures around him.

Well now I feel silly.

"He's not bad… i guess." I allowed graciously. I was a big girl, I could admit when I was wrong.

"Great let's get going then!"

Wait what!

I squeaked in alarm as suddenly I was on top of the horse with my mother's arms holding me steady.

I tried to hold myself as still as possible while mentally hyperventilating.

What I wouldn't give for a seat belt! The only thing keeping me from falling to my humiliating death where my mother's thighs and the single hand that held me to her stomach.

I could finally look the rest of the contingent in the eye at my height but that wasn't worth the danger I was facing. My estimation for hylian parenting is steadily sinking as no one offers any protest to my mothers actions beyond mounting their own horses.

Mother was going to have to seriously bribe me to make up for this travesty to responsible adult behaviour.

As I stared, open-mouthed, at the cheerful colourful fantasy medieval city surrounding my home, I magnanimously decided to forgive my mother for her lacklustre care of my person.

Castle Town, (yes that was its name- silly i know.) was a bustling trade centre filled with diverse peoples. And I do mean diverse; there were the elf-like hylians, the exaggeratedly feminine Gerudo, a bird-like race I was guessing were the Rito, the rock-like Gorons, and the aquatic fish people I think were the Zora.

I was honestly stunned stupid by all these differing peoples who lived and worked in castle town, quite a few of which had gathered along the side of the road to watch the mini parade that was following my family. I had known, theoretically, that the Hylians and Gerudo weren't the only peoples in hyrule but I wasn't prepared for how inhuman these other races looked. I wasn't human now. I knew that, but Hylians had still looked human ENOUGH for me to ignore it most of the time. Besides the ears, eyes, anatomy, and clear skin Hylians looked human. Gerudo were similar in that they were mostly human looking beside the features they shared with Hylians and their exaggeratedly feminine physique.

But the other races?

I could not pretend the Rito, the Zora, or the Gorons were human.

The Rito were the most human in the end, looking like what a human would look like if we had evolved from birds instead of apes. beaks instead of lips or noses, wings in place of arms, claws instead of feet, an odd mixture of feathers covering the majority of their body and hair on the back of their head.

The Zora were equally if not more odd, their torsos were longer then their legs, gills along their ribs, a embarrassing lack of covering clothing and a more confounding lack of lower anatomy. odd fish/shark looking things on top of their heads with fins and tails falling on the sides and back of their heads the base of which replaced their noses. as one Zora called out a cheerful greeting to the small royal precession i caught a glimpse of startlingly sharp teeth.

The Gorons didn't even look vaguely human. they were literally living borders with heads and limbs!

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

"Having fun little bird?" My mother chuckled, still holding me firm to her.

I nodded dumbly, eyes caught on a particularly colourful Rito who had jumped to fly over a trio of baby Gorons who were rolling away from their frustrated caretaker.

"There are so many different peoples." I breathed, stunned by the sheer diversity of my new home.

"Isn't it beautiful?" My mother murmured in my ear, swinging a soft gaze from a laughing hylian couple to a pair of Rito and Gerudo furiously arguing over the price of fish. "Zelda this is what I- what WE work for." And as I looked up from her shade, she seemed to be illuminated by the noontime sun. "My little princess, one day you're going to be queen, and you're going to be responsible for all of this." She gestured outward with one hand the other holding me firm. "For all of them."

And as the corona of light illuminated her face, I was spellbound. So this is what charisma looks like. so this is what a leader- a QUEEN looked like. new resolution bubbled in my soul, coursing through my very bones like lightning and warming my spirit with the blazing fires of resolve.

I WAS going to help my mother.

I WAS going to learn sealing magic.

I WAS going to save my people.

By the time the burning vigour had faded from my veins we had arrived at our destination, and were in the process of unloading and setting up for the single fanciest picnic I had ever seen. While the location- a large field at the edge of a small forested glen with a platform in the middle- was pretty and semi appropriate for a picnic, the picnic itself was in simple terms, ridiculous.

Dottie had laid down a ridiculously expensive looking blanket made out of what looked like silk with beautifully embroidered birds and flowers. Granny had placed the fanciest looking basket down and pulled out a tiered silver serving platter with tiny fancy little sandwiches and desserts. Three of the soldiers had set off to clear the perimeter, another was handling the horses and the last soldier was standing alert next to the far too fancy set up weary eyes scanning for threats.

This was… was this even a picnic even more? I thought picnics were supposed to be simple?

Hmm yea no I don't want to be looking at this any more.

"Mama can I go play in the… trees? I've never been in trees before!" Is there a hylian word for forest?

"The forest sweetie?"

"Yea that."

"I don't know…" Mother glanced worriedly at granny and father "Aren't you hungry little bird?"

"Not yet mommy but if i play then I'll be hungry. I'm always hungry after I play!" I looked pleadingly at her before she sighed and gave in.

"Ok little one, but stay within the trees and don't wander too far." she fretted looking nervous. i mentally rolled my eyes, moms can be so overprotective.

"Anderson." my father barked, startling me and catching the attention of the soldier tending to the horses.

"Yes sir." He snapped to attention, poster perfect.

"You guard the princess. Zelda, stay within eyesight of the guard alright." my mother sighed relieved, smiling at father while the soldier answered in an affirmative. I take that back, dads can be so overprotective.

"Yes Daddy. Come on Mr. Soldier Man, the forest isn't going to explore itself!" I commanded eyes firmly set on getting away from my overbearing parents.

The forest was beautiful.

The air was clean, the birds were singing, and the only disturbance in my serenity was the clanking of the solder trailing behind me scaring off all of the little creatures.

I glanced back and hummed, he did look pretty menacing, hmmmmm.

I plopped myself down in the grass and started picking small wild flowers. perhaps a daisy chain will soften his menace?

"Princess?" The soldier queried worriedly. "Are you tired? Do you want me to carry you back to your parents?"

I shook my head in the negative "Nope! Im gonna play in the flowers? You want to join me?" I aimed my puppy dog eyes in his direction. Hopefully he would sit and stop clanking so the birds would come back.

"Ummm, princess i don't know if-" i ignored his hesitism turning up my pout. "Pleeeeeaaaaaasssssseeeeeee?" I whined. Please sit so I don't have to listen to you creak like a rusty door hinge.

He let out a helpless sigh before flopping onto the ground metal clanking and clanging, scaring the few remaining birds away and crushing some of the flowers she was planning on using. Ugh, thanks for that.

"I'm going to go pick some more flowers, hold my work for me." I dumped my half way finished flower crown in his lap. "Princess?"

"Stay here I'll be right back."

"Princess!" He yelped trying to straighten himself out caught in his own armor.

"Don't ruin my work!" I called as I hurried off in search of more flowers.

Now usually this would be a dumb move. A small important child wandering away from their caretaker in the middle of the woods! Sounds like the start of a horror story right?

But these woods were about the size of two soccer fields and thin enough that i can still easily see my parents laughing and chatting in the distance.

Flowers, flowers, flowers-... flowers? Flowers! There! Sitting in the roots of a large tree were some pretty bluebell looking flowers. Perfect! As I rushed toward the blue blooms, I noticed something odd out of the corner of my eye. Was that a… rock?

Huh. That was a large grey rock on the top of the trunk of a tree beside the one in which the large flowers were growing. Huh.

It kinda reminds me of...

KOROKS! Those are a thing here!

I spun on my heel to face my new far more interesting quarry. I wonder if I can see koroks?

In the game link was the first to be able to see koroks in over a hundred years. I'm not actually the Zelda but maybe I could see them because I know they exist? Maybe they work by fairy rules? You need to believe to see? I am still a child.

Eh, I'll never know unless I try.

I rolled up my sleeves, kicked off my fancy little toddler shoes and tied my skirt back. Let's see if I can climb this tree.

Huh this actually isn't all that hard. I managed to monkey scramble my way up into the branches and stare curiously at the strangely placed rock ignoring the frantic but hushed calls of the soldier who was supposed to be watching over me. Well I guess…

I huffed, shrugged and heaved to flip the rock over, and in a small explosion of leaves and sparkles suddenly a giggling creature was there.

"You found me!"

I started in bemused awe at the adorable little leaf creature in front of me.

"You can see me! Most people can't see me!" the little creature verbally beamed from behind its little leaf mask.

Huh.

"Well here's a reward for finding me!" The little creature dropped a lightly glowing seed in my lap.

"Usually I would expand the inside of something by a little bit but you don't have any bags or pockets, next time you find a korok make sure to have a bag or pockets ok!" the little leaf continued ignorant of my stunned shock. I did not expect there to actually be a korok.

"Make sure to look for us! We like to be found!" I mean what. Seriously what!

"Bye!" "wait!"

And just like that the little fae was gone.

"Princess where are you!" the solder was sounding a little desperate now, i should probably go back. I carefully stuffed the seed down my shirt and dropped out of the tree straining up.

Now let's give this poor man a break. "Over here! Look at these pretty flowers I found!" I cried, rushed over to the pretty blue flowers I spotted earlier. These flowers would look lovely in my mommy's hair.

"Princess! Don't do that! You scared me nearly half to death!" the solder sighed hurrying to my side. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!" he sighed in relief. "And nearly gave your father a reason to sack me." he muttered his breath, my new elf ears clearly making out his murmured sentiments. "Do you still have my flowers?" "huh? Oh yes here!" he replied handing over my lopsided and slightly mangled flower crown.

Picking the large flowers I used one to quickly tie the flower crown closed, "sorry mr. solder man. i made you a flower crown!" I tried to divert his attention away from my little escape act. "Let me put it on you!"

He was clearly struggling over what to do now, hurt the little princesses feelings by refusing her gift or hurt his pride by wearing a flower crown. "You're gonna look really pretty with it on, i promise!" I wheedled, widening my eyes into an expression of cute expectation.

"Ok princess." he sighed kneeling down to accept his new accessory. Mission success!

With my newly decorated soldier, a handful of pretty flowers in hand, and a mysterious seed down my shirt I decided that this excursion so far had been a resounding success! Now to show the fruits of my labor to my mother.

"Come on Mr. Soldier Man! I want to show my flowers to Mommy." I dashed off, ignoring the yelp the soldier let out as he jumped to follow me.

"Mommy Mommy look what i found!" the small party of my mother and father and their various employees such as dottie granny and another soldier turned their attention to me.

"What did you find baby?" she asked, setting down one of the ridiculously fancy looking little sandwiches.

"I got you some flowers!" I cried practically shoving my quarry at her, Ignoring the smirk the other soldier was giving the poor sap I decorated.

"Oh thank you!" she blessed me with a radiant smile "Oh! You found some blue nightshade!" Wait, I think I remember something like that…

Wasn't it that plant that glowed in the dark and made you sneakier? Oh wow! I found my first magic plant! ( Ignoring the korok and the seed it gave me.)

"I also found a seed!" I enthused, stuffing my hand down my shirt ignoring my father’s sigh and muttering about impropriety. I was three he could deal with it.

"What is that?" my mother murmured staring in bemusement at the softly glowing pod in my hand. Oh good she can see it, I was worried I was going to have to make up some imaginary game to explain away pretending to have a seed.

"It's a seed mommy! Can I plant it in my room?"

"I don't see why not, I'll have Dahlia get you a pot for it when we get home." She scooped me up into her lap, "Now why don't you eat? You’re surely hungry by now."

"Ok Mommy!" I enthused, messily digging into the snacks in front of me, once again ignoring my fathers indulgent sigh.

I'd say today has been a resounding success!

Also on FanFiction.Net! https://m.fanfiction.net/s/13547505/10/

#botw #princess zelda #zelda #botw fic #botw oc #zelda botw #loz botw #breath of the wild #the advertable inevitability #t.a.i #inevitability

[elmossresearch]

Contemporary art & history

“My Bed” is an installation piece by the artist Tracey Emin, who belonged to the Young British Artists generation and her “degree of fame stands out even among [them]” (Grovenick, 2005, p.148). She was born in 1963 in Margate, left school at 13 and started her practise in the eighties. Her work is very much influenced by her experiences as a woman and is known to be remarkably sincere and non-ironic, which seems to be unusual for the young British artist genation. She’s well known in the art community as being the "bad girl of British art", for her controversial works that have been seen as non-art, and also for her blatant expression of femininity.

“My bed” was first made in 1998 and first exhibited in the Toyko’s Sagacho Exhibition Space. It was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner prize and exhibited in the Tate Britain. Currently “My Bed” is on long term loan from the Duerckheim Collection in 2015 to the Tate. This art piece was very controversial in the public eye at the time, and still is not entirely accepted, as many people argued that it didn’t count as art which was probably part of the reason why it became so famous. It “doubtless remains that competition’s best-known work- though she didn’t even win the prize” (Grovenick, 2005, p.148). The artwork included dirty underwear, bottles of alcohol, cigarettes and general bedroom mess. The piece shows a chaotic, disheveled bed covered in common detritus. The dimensions of the piece aren’t recordable as they are changed by where the piece is installed due to physical constraints, and to how it is arranged each time it is set up- it isn’t exactly the same every time.

“My Bed” was created inadvertently by the artist during a depressive time in Tracey Emin’s life, after some relationship problems in her life - we even see these indicated in the piece by the used condoms and pregnancy test. After binge drinking heavily, she retreated to her bed for four days, only drinking alcohol and not leaving the bed. Eventually her survival instinct won over her nihilism and she left the bed to drink water, returning to her bed and seeing it again in the state she had created. She then moved it into a gallery - “By reframing it as art, Emin has turned her worst moment into her most transcendent.” (Hudson, 2017)

A lot of how the bed seems to be interpreted also depends on how it is exhibited and with what works. At one point it was exhibited by some of Turner’s works and Emin compared her chaotic sheets were compared to the tumultuous seas and skies of Turner’s paintings (Hudson, 2017). Emin later chose to exhibit “My Bed” alongside some of Francis Bacon’s paintings when it was exhibited in the Tate, her reasoning that “his life was pretty chaotic he just did what he wanted to do” and that “he was a maverick within society” which she felt resonated with her work. (Emin, VHS Pile, 2013)

This piece got a lot of media attention at the time and controversy about whether it was an art piece or not. People would compare “My Bed” to their own beds and ask if that was art, and Emin actually enjoyed this response as it meant people were relating to the work.(VHS Pile, 2013) When people would give the criticism that ‘anyone could put their bed in a gallery’ Emin responded by saying "Well, they didn't, did they? No one had ever done that before.” However in the art world, the piece lost kudos for becoming so mainstream. As said by Marshall Mcluhan, “Art is anything you can get away with” - just announcing something is art and putting it in an artistic space is enough to make it into art. A teenager showed the reality of this perception by  a prank that became an artwork,

“Khayatan put Nguyen’s glasses on the floor below an official-looking piece of paper to see how it would be received by gallery-goers. The work seemed to hit a chord with the public, striking in its simplicity, yet – probably – a challenging commentary on the limits of individual perception.” (Hunt, 2016)

This piece was photographed by gallery-goers and well received generally, and then documented by the tweets, which in turn created it into what some called a performance piece. If something is declared as art, and received as art at least by one person, or even just the artist, this would lead us to believe it is in fact art.

Similarly, this piece and Emin’s work in general also influenced the creation of the Stuckism movement which was created by one of her ex-boyfriends, Billy Childish. The name of the movement itself came from her referring to his artwork as “stuck!” The movement is all about opposing conceptual art and the professional art business, as they think it is killing the art world, and not real art. They continue to protest the Turner prize every year, and their movement can only thrive because of artists like Emin. One of the signature pieces from the Stuckism movement was directly referencing the work “My bed”, called “Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision” where he examines a pair of ladies underwear, trying to tell if “Is it a genuine Emin (£10,000) Or a worthless fake?”

There was also a performance piece made with the bed called “Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey's Bed” which only caused the piece to become more famous. Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi jumped shirtless onto Tracey Emin “My bed” with words written over their bodies and proceeded to have a fifteen minute pillow fight that required Emin to return to the work and remake the bed into its original state. The two performance artists were arrested, but not charged as both the gallery and Emin didn’t take it any further. The Guardian summarises their intent as non-destructive saying the artists “insist[ed] their performance was not an attack on Emin. "We are simply trying to react to the work and the self-promotion implicit in it. I hope the security guards see it in that spirit."” (The Guardian, 1999)

References:

Grosenick, U., 2005. Art Now Vol. II. Taschen GmbH.

The Guardian. 1999. Satirists jump into Tracey's bed | UK news | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/25/fiachragibbons1. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

Bibliography:

Books

Grosenick, U., 2005. Art Now Vol. II. Taschen GmbH.

Digital Sources

Videos:

VHS Pile. (2013). Tracey Emin - The South Bank Show. [Online Video]. 21 February 2013. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxaoAy9oNtY. [Accessed: 15 March 2018].

Cai Yuan. (2011). Two artists jump on Tracy Emin's bed. [Online Video]. 16 June 2011. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOxPYrdLD8Y. [Accessed: 15 March 2018].

Tate. (2015). Tracey Emin – My Bed | TateShots. [Online Video]. 2 April 2015. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv04ewpiqSc. [Accessed: 15 March 2018].

Articles:

Tracey Emin. 2018. Biography - Tracey Emin Studio. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.traceyeminstudio.com/biography/. [Acces sed 15 March 2018].

Tate. 2018. ‘My Bed’, Tracey Emin, 1998 | Tate . [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662. [Accessed 15 March 2018]

The Guardian. 2017. Tracey Emin’s My Bed: a violent mess of sex and death | Art and design | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/27/tracey-emin-my-bed-violent-mess-sex-death. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

Modern Classics: Tracey Emin - My Bed, 1998 | artlead. 2018. Modern Classics: Tracey Emin - My Bed, 1998 | artlead. [ONLINE] Available at: http://artlead.net/content/journal/modern-classics-tracey-emin-bed-1998/. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

The Art Story. 2018. Tracey Emin Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-emin-tracey.htm. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

Hudson, M. 2017. Tracey Emin's unmade bed 'uncannily similar' to Turner? Don't make me laugh. The Telegraph.[ONLINE] Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/tracey-emins-unmade-bed-uncannily-similar-turner-dont-make-laugh/. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

The Guardian. 1999. Satirists jump into Tracey's bed | UK news | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/25/fiachragibbons1. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

Hunt, E. 2016. Pair of glasses left on US gallery floor mistaken for art | US news | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/27/pair-of-glasses-left-on-us-gallery-floor-mistaken-for-art. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

Cole, A. 2015. Tracey Emin's My Bed at Tate Britain, review: In the flesh, its frankness is still arresting | The Independent. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/tracey-emins-my-bed-at-tate-britain-review-in-the-flesh-its-frankness-is-still-arresting-10144882.html. [Accessed 15 March 2018].

#contemporaryartanditshistories

[atlanxic]

ok so i actually have an extensive arc-v/zexal crossover university au that i’ve talked a lot about on my private twitter and on discord but i think it’s time to put it all on tumblr. i wanted to make this all one post but i actually feel like it’s too much for that? so here’s part one of..... five or so?

yuuto, shun, and ruri lived in the same apartment complex as children, theyve known each other literally forever.

in middle school, yuuto & shun both discover hardcore/punk music and spend a couple years being kind of awkward and terrible about it until high school hits and they kind of level out. ruri teases them a lot for liking that awful racket but eventually she gets into it too, mostly because her and shun are kind of inseparable for quite some time. the three of them go to the local shitty music venue just about every weekend. for the first year or so ruri insists shes going to keep them out of trouble but like i said, she gets more into the music after a while.

shun and yuuto both mosh, shun probably more frequently than yuuto. they show up to school with bruises pretty often and rumours are started that they get in fights a lot or that theyre involved in a gang. there are also rumours that theyre dating, which dont go over very well, and result in them getting in actual fist fights a couple times. they try dating for like... 3 months in grade 7, and then decide that its weird and they work better as friends.

yuuto wears his hair in a mohawk for about a year before switching to the spiky mess we know and love. towards the end of middle school, they meet kaito at a prog-rock concert, all four of them pressed against the front rails together kaito and yuuto hit it off immediately, and exchange phone numbers after the show. shun is immensely suspicious. they text a lot, and then they start hanging out, and then they start going out. shun threatens to beat kaito up, kaito is fine with it, yuuto is not. etc.

meanwhile, ruri and sayaka meet in class. it doesn't even occur to shun to be suspicious of her until he catches them making out. he yells about it, sayaka is understandably frightened. ruri tells him off for scaring her girlfriend. she stays angry at him for longer than she has before. he eventually gives in and apologizes to both of them, but in a kind of dickish way.

yuuto and kaito break up towards the beginning of 11th grade. neither of them are upset about it, they stay friends. it was mostly because kaito felt like he needed to focus more on school, now that he's getting into college prep-level courses. yuuto cries about it once, and it takes several hours to convince shun that violence would be neither appropriate nor helpful.

all four of them move to a different city for college. sayaka goes to school in the town they grew up in. her and ruri stay in touch, but after half a year they decide that the long distance thing isn't working out for them. they still hang out when ruri and shun go back for the holidays, and its fairly bittersweet.

yuuto shun & ruri dont realize that kaito is going to the same school as them until all four of them are present at a queer alliance meet & greet. shun glares at him across the room for a while before yuuto notices he's there and goes over to say hello like a decent person. yuuto and kaito immediately hit it off again. theyre both kind of "fuck you grew into yourself really well im Gay."

immm gonna say that in first year, yuuto & shun live in the dorms together. they eventually decide the res life is not for them but. apartment hunting when youre like 18 and moving out for the first time is a bit much, so dorms it is.

anyway, shun catches yuuto and kaito making out in their shared dormroom like 3 fucking days after the meet and greet. kaito's expression is one of fear and conveys that he knows full well that shun is 2 seconds from beating him up. yuuto is kinda pissed off about it. yuuto and shun have a long conversation that night about how protective shun is. they fall asleep in each other's arms.

kaito avoids them for a little while, but the next time they see him, shun makes a genuine apology. yuuto and kaito start dating again a few weeks later. ruri is surprised and delighted about it. ruri ends up dormed with rin in first year.

they get along reasonably well, but they dont get close until rin accidentally lets slip that she's gay, and then ruri is like "oh thank god, me too." the context is probably: that yuugo visits them like basically every other day, and is Really Obviously In Love with rin, and rin's affectionate with him, so ruri just kind of assumes theyre dating. and at one point is like, do you want me to go somewhere else so you guys can make out, i could hang out with my brother tonight its nbd. yuugo blushes bright red and is like aaaaa its not like that, like, exactly like he does in canon. and rin's like “lmao im gay. i mean. what.”

ruri probably ids as pan? but anyway, shes like "ohhhh cool me too.” they both kind of stare at each other while this new info sinks in, and then yuugo says something and the moment is broken.

this is still a bit before yuugo's gay crisis

[later, during yuugo's gay crisis about yuuya] [rin] yuugo you had a crush on a boy in /middle school/ [yuugo] no i didnt i had a crush on you [rin] you used to complain to me about how hot he was like every lunch break [yuugo] that doesn't mean anything? [rin] obviously it does? how are you only realizing this now

ruri discovers that rin's been wanting to go to queer alliance meetings but has been too shy about it, so she drags her along. and someone mistakes them for yuzu and selena. idk who it would be..... sawatari maybe?

sawatari is like, Flaming Gay, a legitimate twink despite iding as bi.

anyway theyre like, thats not us, youre mistaken, and sawatari, instead of fucking off, is like, "holy fuck you have to meet them, you look so much the same it's eery." sawatari drags them through the party for like 20 minutes before actually finding yuzu and selena, and he's like "look i told you."

and all four of them are kind of like "holy fuck???" they get a selfie together, its not very good because the lighting is terrible, and they spend the rest of the evening hanging out.

yuzu and selena had a class together and hit it off immediately, theyre already dating. theyre a bit surprised to learn that ruri and rin /aren't/ dating. rin blushes at the suggestion and gets raised eyebrows all around. the four of them become fast friends and start getting lunch together and studying together on a regular basis.

ruri and rin meet yuuya through them, and because yuuya is friends with Everyone, they become friends as well. which sets the stage for yuuya and yuugo meeting, and yuugo's consequent gay crisis.

shun, ruri, and yuuto as pakistani immigrants, they arrived when they were very very young but they get a lot of shit for it anyway, especially ruri, who wears a hijab.

i figure the commons would be mostly latinx/mixed. so like, yuugo, rin, and shinji are all latinx. i rlly like the concept of black crow with a bleached-orange hi-top fade and subtle freckles. yuuya, yuzu, and gongenzaka can pprrobably be white? dennis could be ethnically jewish & light-skinned. fusion dimension crew are mostly japanese, so sora, yuuri, and selena. i.. am not really sure about reiji? following the theme i guess white/japanese mixed. tsukikage is japenese & immigrated like within his memory rather than a few generations back, he's bilingual. jack is latino and white-passing.

i like the concept of shun as a veterinary student, partly because i think he'd follow his interest in birds if things hadn't gone horribly wrong and partly because i find the idea of this edgy asshole in scrubs really funny. yuuto takes social work and ends up with crow as a teacher. yuuya, dennis, sawatari, and sora are all drama majors. yuuri is in botany. reiji is a law major, as well as being on the debate team and the student council. he never fuckign sleeps. shun also joins the debate team, and they do Not get along, but since debate team is the yelling hobby anyway, thats fine. yuzu is in the music program. selena is in poli-sci. yuugo stays in engineering. i dont, know about the rest of everyone.

conceptually, this is a north-eastern reasonably liberal college town, featuring two colleges and a trade school. one college is for the arc v kids, the other one will eventually be populated with zexal kids when i get to know them. kaito starts in zexal school and transfers at the beginning of second year. everyone is in first year rn except reiji and tsukikage, who are in second year, and also are dorming together, and also are gay.

so now that thats all set up!! back to the plot!!

ruri and rin meeting yuzu and selena happens a couple weeks after ruri and sayaka break up. selena hears about it and is like, hey if you need a rebound i can hook you up with someone, and ruri is like. "i feel like itd be disrespectful to date someone else before im over sayaka, ill stay single for a while." she never actually completely gets over sayaka, but she does eventually get enough emotional distance to move on. every time she goes home for the holidays they have awkward not-quite-gay moments.

much like in sfu, sawatari is loaded and hosts house parties whenever his father is away on business trips.

once the 4 girls are hanging out on a regular basis, they all sort of get to know each other's orbital boys. like rin and ruri get introduced to yuuya and get to know sawatari better. yuuya's goal is to be friends with absolutely everyone, and they make good progress on it.

yuzu and selena get to meet yuugo. yuugo is starry-eyed at all four of them, but alas, they are all too gay for him. at one point selena slaps him in the face and he spends like the next two weeks thinking about it lmao

likewise, they all get to meet shun. shun immediately decides that he is going to protect all of them. rin finds it kind of cute, yuzu finds it kind of weird, selena is outright offended about it. they get along a lot better with yuuto, since yuuto is just, easier to get along with. he joins their lunch dates once in a while, as does yuuya.

selena and yuuri met in their high school gsa and relentlessly gossip about everyone they meet. selena introduces yuuri to the rest of the girls exactly once, it does not go well. probably kye gives them all backhanded compliments. shun hears about this from ruri later and decides that yuuri is his enemy.

the first time yuuya and yuugo meet, its because the girls have invited both of them to lunch. yuuya introduces themself with a firm handshake and a wink. yuuya flirts a bit throughout the meal, as they tend to do. yuzu tells yuugo after the fact like, "dont mind them, theyre always like that." yuugo tries not to think about it much.

the second time they meet is at one of sawatari's giant house parties. yuuya, being slightly inebriated, is even more flirtacious than usual. yuugo gets it into his head that this is some kind of challenge, and refuses to back down from yuuyas advances until theyre in a closet together and yuuyas hand is up his shirt.

the next gay he visits rin to have a gay crisis. ruri politely sees herself out so they can talk.

i want to say shun is having a similar crisis about having come very close to having a one night stand with reiji. not because it was gay but because he hates the guy.

rin is exasperated but understanding, she rubs yuugo's back and calls him a pathetic baby while he whines. by the end of their conversation, yuugo has accepted that he's bi, and additionally, that making out is Great and he should do more of it. rin is slightly worried and gives him a safe sex talk, he yells and covers his ears during the entire thing.

meanwhile, shun is like "i fucking hate that guy why was it so satisfying to bite him" and ruri is like "bro i love you but thats way tmi, please do not tell me about your sadistic hatesex kink or whatever the fuck it is youre trying to convey." yuuto, also present, is like "i cant believe you made out with that asshole, and you still have the nerve to get angry at basically anyone i kiss for no fucking reason." shun swears up and down that it will not happen again, and also says that he has already apologized several times for being possessive about both of them, please let him live it down.

(it absolutely does happen again.)

(the second time they actually do go all the way, it is the best sex of shun's life, and he's upset about it.)

[yuuto voice] you have a Problem, why cant you date someone decent and have vanilla sex like the rest of us

rin slowly develops a huge crush on ruri. when she tells yuugo about it, hes like "yeah she's really pretty i completely understand."

#ygoavcau #thats my tag for it #yugioh arc v

[uniformbravo]

uhh first day of school post

it was fucken hot

seriously why did it have to be 110 degrees right on the week when i start having to go outside again bye

every semester the first thing i say is “i’m never taking an 8 am class ever again”

the second thing i say is “i’m never taking a class on the third floor ever again”

this semester, somehow, through a cruel twist of fate, i have ended up failing both resolutions with two classes each (two classes are at 8 am; two classes are on the third floor; one of them is at 8 am on the third floor)

((i only have 3 classes, there is overlap in the above description))

painting class was cool the teacher was cool i have to pick between oils & acrylics by next tuesday & i have no idea what i want to do

it was super awkward the whole time bc i sat next to this girl & then a couple other girls came in and sat on the other side of me and it was very clear they all knew each other and i could tell the first girl wished she was sitting w/ them but i was too nervous to offer to switch bc there was never a time that felt right so i just spent the whole class feeling like i was in the way so that wasn’t very.... fun

second class was intermediate drawing & ok

this guy is fairly new to teaching, says he graduated calarts a few years ago, and he seems nice & everything but i got the distinct impression that he doesn’t really know how to run a class

which is totally fair since he’s so new to it

but our first assignment is to “revisit” the final from the last art class we took & basically do it again???

not like a literal recreation of exactly what we did last time, he said he wanted us to like do it differently? have more fun with it?? add our own interests into it??? make it represent ourselves????

the more i think about this the more questions marks happen

he did not explain it well

he said he wants to use this to kind of gauge where everyone is at in terms of skill level, but couldn’t he just have done that by having us....... actually...... you know......... bring in our finals from the previous classes........................ instead of having us redo it....................................

this is literally the final project we’re talking about, the big thing that’s due at the end of the semester, the thing we were each given weeks to work on, and when does he want this in by? 

wednesday

as in 2 days from now

wednesday

and we were all like “uhhhh can we have some time to work on it in class”

and the thing is, he didn’t even have a set due date, he’s treating this class like a democracy so whenever we were like “so wait when do you want this by” he’d be like “idk what do you guys think?” like i dont know dude!!! you’re supposed to have this shit figured out, we don’t know the scope of the assignment we don’t know the amount of work that should go into it, we don’t know how long it’s going to take, that’s supposed to be on you!! what the hell,

the whole thing was very

unclear

we were all trying to figure out what the fuck he wanted from us and as soon as it started turning into “yeah just bring it in by wednesday” we were all like panicking like “you want a finished recreation of our last class’ final project in two days” so we managed to amend it so we’d have the first half of wednesday’s class to work on it but still jesus??? the whole thing ended with him saying “just bring in a drawing on wednesday, does that sound good?” uh no not really 

u want to gauge our skill level but ur only giving us 2 days to show it

buddy ur getting a pencil sketch of an idea that could be cool if i had more time to like refine it n shit

also just because i want to reiterate: if u wanted to see our current skill level why didnt u just have us bring in some of our previous works

like what the fuck

what

aaanyway despite all my complaining i think this could be an.... interesting class??? this is for intermediate drawing by the way, which is the class that i was like “boy i hope this is more interesting than beginning drawing” and hoooo

he said he wants to focus heavily on “conceptual art”, u know, art that has meaning n shit, he explained it as having something to say about the world or something like that, which is. cool i guess. the main thing i kinda latched onto was when he said he wanted to make the class enjoyable for everyone and have us doing drawings we’re interested in, so if the class can follow through on that promise then i’ll be good to go but if he pulls a “every drawing has to have some deep meaning and commentary on the world around us” then i will be. unhappy

i dont even know if he actually does drawings?? i mean he’s from calarts so obviously he has to have done art for that but like when someone asked if he’s gonna show us some of his work he was basically like “um yeah, but i don’t really have a lot, im more into exploring ideas for art than actually making it” and he said he’s into performance art so it’s like. that’s really cool & im happy for you but just curious why are you teaching a drawing class then. like a legitimate actual question tho, how does this class relate to what you do and how u gonna teach us if ur not putting these things into practice yourself

i realize im being kinda harsh because i only spent maybe a little over an hour in this class today so this is really just first impressions talk, like. i could be hugely underestimating him, maybe he is a fantastic teacher and i’ll have a lot of fun with this class??

but even as i type that im remembering other things he said, like how the assignments aren’t gonna be like in other classes where you’re told specifically what to draw or like how the lecture portions are gonna be like a seminar where we discuss art-related topics

it’s just super unconventional and it seems really experimental on his part like he really doesn’t know what he’s doing (which, again, understandable since he’s new and all) so it’ll probably just end up being the weirdest art class i’ve ever taken

and a couple years ago i’d probably have really really hated it just based on the lack of guidance alone, i could see a genuine complaint of this class being “it doesn’t feel like the next step after all the technical work and learning we did in beginning drawing”

but at this point im really intrigued and willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, and i’d rather treat it like an experience than a poorly structured class

and maybe that’s easier for someone in my situation to do since i didn’t really care all that much about this class in the first place so i didn’t have any expectations for it to meet anyway

im literally just taking it to fill my requirements so if it turns out to be an interesting experience then all the better, as long as i can pass

Side Note About The Grading, By The Way

the syllabus has a grading system listed

an A is described as “outstanding work, which exceeds guidelines of assignments, shows technical prowess, creativity, expression, intelligence and personal growth”

a B is “high quality work which meets the guidelines of the assignment”

like is it just me or shouldn’t the latter description be just fine to receive an A??? u did what u were supposed to and it was “high quality” like that is. the definition of an A assignment, the first description should be for an A+ like legitimately is this just me or

and then for a D it’s like “poor quality, little effort or understanding of the assignment” the “understanding” part is throwin me off like if the student didn’t understand the assignment then maybe u should explain it better for them?? i can see poor quality and low effort being good reasons for a low grade but not understanding seems a little unfair

im just getting into specifics now tho

i think im done talking abt this class now

hoo boy

an interesting first day to say the least

#''first day of school post'' or as i like to call it ''immediately complaining about my classes after just one (1) day'' #retag later #today posts #school / #sorry i've been making so many school posts i just #need to let it out somewhere #also i love talking abt myself & my life :)

[thesquidwizard]

I was told reading  Philosophical problems with blah blah blah would answer why making 500 genders would solve gender stereotypes I am petty and affable so I read it

If you want my opinions and my mind slowly melting i am kindly putting this under a read more cuz its fucking long as shit

the TLDR is : this drivel doesnt mention the problems of gender stereotypes or neogenders at all its just some guy wanking on why women need to give up their spaces because he thinks their wrong and annoying ( Kathleen Stock especially)

I’d love to @ you lake-lady, but you blocked me for thought crimes and im to lazy to try to get around that ( if you actually read this before recommending it to me, you are very very strong and very very brainwashed)

the first 14 paragraphs are circle talk "GC feminists are wrong, i will prove their wrong, they think "this" it is wrong ill prove its wrong etc etc etc" if you survive that that, They focus on Kathleen Stock in their words "Stock presents an articulate, relatively comprehensive, and moderate form of gender-critical feminism" first: If Margie’s self-diagnosis (“I’m a boy”) is questioned by the therapist, the therapist can be construed as . . . “converting” . . . a trans child to a “cis” one. If, on the other hand, Margie’s self-diagnosis is affirmed unquestioningly, the therapist is effectively failing to affirm Margie in a sexual orientation of lesbianism; something which also looks like conversion by omission. (Stock, 2018e) -They spend 5 paragraphs explaining why Stocks hypothetical girl^ isnt converted to male heterosexualness by transitioning, and not affirming Marges Gender identity is Dangerous They do not address Stocks ACTUAL concern that Gender Affirming Therapy without any kind of therapy and research on GNC and SSA children is conversion by omission because it doesnt take into account if these feelings stem from gender stereotypes and homophobia. Stocks is not concerned that you are converting this girl straight( sex is real she would be SSA either way) she is concerned your transitioning her without affirming her sexuality and giving her support in the knowledge that being a lesbian is okay and perfectly normal.-

Next: concern about female-only spaces is about legal self-identification without any period of “living as a woman,” prior male socialisation in a way which exacerbates the tendency to violence against female bodies, and the fact that many self-identifying trans women . . . retain both male genitalia and a sexual orientation towards females. (stock) If the evidence shows (as, in fact, it is already showing) that some males—whether genuinely “truly” trans or just pretending—turn out to pose a threat to females, and it’s really hard to tell in advance which ones will, can’t we then make a social norm and/or law to exclude all [natal] males from female-only spaces . . . ? (also stock)

-Quotes are separated by garbage but this whole section is what we have all seen before " why must trans woman suffer, just because cis men hurt woman" except its really long it acknowledges male violence rates but refuses to acknowledge we have already seen men (and identified transwoman) taking advantage to hurt woman. This whole chunk is just SOME woman must be sacrificed for Trans feelings-

They do put: Finally, we know that some men who come into contact with children in their work will offend against them. Yet we do not exclude all men from working with children, even if using gender as a watershed would prevent those offenses. Why does the good of minimizing child sexual abuse not lead us inexorably to the conclusion that we must outlaw all male teachers and coaches? Because our practical reason recognizes complexity: We readily see that even the most highly desirable states of affairs (minimizing abuse of children) do not have simple, quasi-mechanistic implications for policy or decision-making, and that they do not justify the indiscriminate suppression of other goods (even less important ones, such as professional vocations).

-And id like to add with the rise in pedo crimes I am 100% down with separating men from children because i do not think any child should be endangered just to keep men in jobs.-

They also put this quote in:

there is clearly a difference between the experience of a child who is treated by others in way that are characteristic of boys and also feels like a boy, and a child who is treated by others in ways that are characteristic of boys whilst feeling that they are really a girl. (Finlayson et al., 2018)

-And are you sure? are you really sure? I feel like there might be differences between social conditioning, experience and feelings. A boy treated like a boy and a boy(who feels like a girl) treated like a boy are still experiencing being treated and raised like a boy?? one just has emotional differences  (is it internalized homophobia, Gender non conformity, a developed fetish?? who knows but they still experienced boyhood)-

-Next section says we cant make single stall or any other kind of netrual or trans bathrooms because its to hard? and it hurts trans feels reminding them that they have birth sexes because thats hate speech???-

also this: Our social world is arranged in a way that makes exclusion from the sex/gender they claim—on the basis of a lack of “authentic” belonging (Serano, 2007)—central to trans subordination. As with other forms of social subordination, trans exclusion has not only material dimensions (Blair & Hoskin, 2018; Hargie et al., 2017; Moolchaem et al., 2015; Movement Advancement Project and GLSEN, 2017; Rondón Garcia & Martin Romero, 2016; Serano, 2013; Stonewall, n.d.; Yona, 2015), but also discursive ones that work in accordance with the logic of so-called performatives. Performatives are utterances that do things with words: specifically, they accomplish something in the act of saying it (Austin, 1975). The classical example is marriage—in the act of declaring a couple married, a celebrant brings about a change in their normative status, provided the celebrant is the right person in the right circumstances. This presupposes a normative background (that is a set of laws, conventions, or other rules) governing all those matters: who qualifies as a legitimate celebrant, what the right circumstances are for the performative to do its work, what marriage status means in terms of spouses’ rights and obligations, etc.

-Celebrating a Marriage is celebrating a couples chosen form of representing their relationship publicly and adding each other to their legal family, how is that the same as letting men into woman's bathrooms because they have feelings??-

-Theres more babblery about subjugating trans people by not pretending biology is fake, and that saying they cant just taking womans rights and spaces is denying their reality and existence we find out the author is a gay(cis) man so why does he have opinions on womans spaces and issues who fucking knows ( he really likes the word unintelligible)-

-Im tired, Ive taken several breaks just to stay clear headed( mildly sane) and now we are onto why Trans inclusive practices dont threaten the concept of female, male, lesbian and gay. Okay buddy ole pal bring it on-

Stock (2018b) has also argued that trans inclusion on the ground of self-identification/declaration threatens “a secure understanding” of concepts intimately related to “woman”—namely, “female” and “lesbian.” It is hard to see this threat as a real one. After all, conceptually, “trans maleness” and “trans femaleness” presuppose “cis maleness” and “cis femaleness” as their other—namely, the case of female and male for which no transition, no reaching across, is required: the case of femaleness and maleness already on this side of (= “cis”) their sex.

-At some point i expect to find out Stock implied his dick is tiny or something " gender crit feminists are wrong im gonna argue with just this one" In this section he manages to be long winded and say nothing have a taste:

Stock (2019b) argues, correctly, that “sex [i.e., maleness and femaleness] is not determined by any single, unitary set of essential criteria,” and that “there is no single set of features a person must have in order to count as male or female.” She goes on to state that: (a) “you do still need to possess some” female (biological) sex characteristics to count as female; (b) that this is “a real, material condition upon sex-category-membership”; and (c) that “medical professionals [assigning sex]. . . rely upon an established methodology, aimed at capturing pre-existing biological facts” (Stock 2019b). Stock presents (a), (b), and (c) as if they were true without qualification. In fact, they only describe how, for very legitimate reasons, sex is understood and assigned within the discourses of biology and medicine; but our everyday usages of “male” and “female” may well be more capacious. It does not follow, of course, that there is no connection at all between these discursive domains—biology and the everyday. Rather, something like the biological meaning of “male” and “female” refer to the central cases of “male” and “female” as those terms feature in everyday usages. But those usages, if trans-inclusive (as they should be), will also cover, legitimately and usefully, noncentral cases of those selfsame terms.

-Yes you need to be female to be female, it doesnt matter what you look like how much you weigh your hobbies or tastes you just need to be female. Observed Biology is observed not assigned we dont pop out blank slates until someone says "ya this ones a girl"-

There really is no good reason to fear that such trans-inclusive practices will imperil “maleness” and “femaleness” as concepts. It is the very fact that those concepts have and will retain central cases that puts to rest any such fear. What makes something like the biological meanings of “male” and “female” the central cases of everyday usages of those words is “[o]rdinary-life truth seeking, a certain level of which is essential for survival”; this “involves a swift instinctive testing of innumerable kinds of coherence against innumerable kinds of extra-linguistic data” (Murdoch, 1992). Reproduction is a key aspect of human experience: The existence of each of us and the perpetuation of the human species presuppose it. The extra-linguistic reality of the dioecious configuration of human bodies, which is functional to human reproduction, means both that the concept of “female” and “male” are here to stay, and that their central cases will remain well-understood, even after we give up on trans-exclusionary attitudes, practices, and policies. To put it another way: trans-inclusive linguistic usages, policies, and so on, cannot threaten the distinction between the concepts of “male” and “female,” which hinges on the nondisposability of the central cases of those concepts.

For similar reasons, it is difficult to agree with Stock that characterizing as “gay” trans men attracted to men, and as “lesbian” trans women attracted to women, “leaves us with no linguistic resources to talk about that form of sexual orientation that continues to arouse the distinctive kind of bigotry known as homophobia” (Stock, 2019d). After all, our linguistic conventions make cissexual womanhood and manhood the central or paradigmatic cases of “womanhood” and “manhood”; cissexual (though not necessarily gender-conforming) lesbianism and male homosexuality the central or paradigmatic cases of “lesbianism” and “male homosexuality,” and so on. This will not change. First because of the prevalence of cissexual women/men and cissexual lesbians/gay men, in terms of sheer numbers, relative to trans women/men and trans lesbians/gay men. Second, because of the ways in which the concepts of “man,” “woman,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “cis,” and “trans” sit together with the concepts of “male” and “female,” which reference an extra-linguistic reality, of which, as we have already seen, we cannot but take notice. Given these linguistic and empirical facts, a trans-inclusive use of the terms “lesbian” and “gay” does not carry the dangers Stock (2019d) worries about.

-I keep going back and checking the date this was published  in 2020 clearly this man has neither been online except to stalk Stock, nor talked to a human who actually believes what he is arguing against. No one is mad at transwoman for liking woman or vise versa its the kind of woman and men they go after and EXPECT romance and validation from ( ie lesbians and gay men, ie threatening what lesbian and gay mean in "inclusive" climates) fucking knob.-

I dunno if this is translated or the writer isnt english but he keeps using subordination where "opression" would be used and umm. anyway onto "Overemphasizing Sex-Based Subordination"

first he explains the difference between paranoid and paranoid structuralism there is so much fucking bullshit then we get to some quotes! that are bullshit-

Even assuming that the socialization of trans girls mirrors that of cis boys, the fact that trans girls do not identify with maleness can be expected to make a difference to the outcomes of such socialization (Finlayson et al., 2018).

-this guys back, love this guy doesnt know you dont fucking socialize yourself-

It is a mistake to treat “violence and discrimination against trans women . . . as if it were unconnected to that faced by cis women” (Finlayson et al., 2018).

 -Finlayson marry me your so smart, that big brain of yours is sooo sexy. Anyway transwoman and "cis" woman face violence from the same people.. Men. but it is not for the same reasons and most transwoman who face violence are brown and black sex workers( if your gonna care go wholesys not halfseys). As opposed to woman who face violence no matter their class, race, nationality, age.. etc etc etc-

Saying “Not giving people everything they desire is not a denial of their humanity” (Allen et al., 2019) amounts to an insensitive dismissal of the serious argument that trans exclusion is ipso facto harmful.

-I want an affordable home and access to food and water whenever i am hungry, you want me to pretend reality doesnt exist so your feefees dont get hurt-

The claim that women “are a culturally subordinated group . . . [while] at best, trans women are a distinct subordinated group; at worst . . . members of the dominant group” entirely discounts the ways in which sex, gender, and cis/trans status intersect. These intersections produce more complex, shifting, and context-dependent power relationships than are captured by the M > F formula.

-Sex based oppression is actually like jello, sometimes woman are less oppressed or oppressed slightly more to the left, I too can just kinda say words-

A dubious assumption underlies this statement: “[T]he fact that our concept-application [of, e.g., ‘woman’] might indirectly convey disadvantage towards some social groups [e.g., trans women] is not itself a reason to criticise the concept use, because the concept use has a further valuable point” (such as “to pick out a distinctive group, relative to recognisably important interests”) (Stock, 2019e). The dubious assumption here is that the “valuable point” of a restrictive use of the concept will be lost if the concept is broadened. The assumption is dubious because even in its broad, inclusive use, the concept retains a readily identifiable central case.

-Yes you dunder head if we start calling lizards mammals we lose the point of what makes a mammal a mammal, which complicates and endangers our way of researching and understanding mammals by making woman "whoever the fucks wants to be one" we loss the ability to easily talk about things that are exclusive to woman the more female language is edified the harder it is for females to unite to talk about womans issues, womans health, girls puberty, womans oppression etc etc.-

-my fuck i dont even care to learn this mans name and i have a personal hatred just for him, i hope ya'll have noticed he uses several different "sources" for his arguments and yet pins GC feminism on Stock alone. Anyway here we go into Doing Philosophy and Debating Policy in the Age of Social Media and Digital Platforms ( i think this man nuts every time he types out philosophy)-

my god we have brough Plato into this, Stocks must stand alone but we are at fucking plato, anyway this section actually has some brains in it there drivel but also truth:

Needless to say, in real-world face-to-face exchanges, unalloyed communicative action is known only by approximation. But there are very good reasons to think that the distance between the ideal (namely, communicative action) and the real is especially wide in the context of the quasi-spoken digital media used to construct (and respond to) the gender-critical case against trans inclusion. Stock (2019f) herself, discussing the reception of her arguments, has complained about countless “half-arsed takedown attempts” by “online philosophers,” crediting, conversely, philosophers she meets offline with “interesting, constructive, and charitable” objections. She also notes that social media siphons “users into paranoid, angry silos” (Stock, 2019d), and that “when reading disembodied words on a screen” it is “easy enough” to engage in “projection” (Stock, 2019a). Why and how do social media and allied platforms have this potential for distorting genuine communicative action?

First, they enable new manipulative communication practices, such as flaming and trolling. The popular support base of gender-critical academics makes ample use of these, though gender-critical scholars are also at the receiving end. Rather than using the quasi-spoken features of social media and allied platforms with a view to genuinely advancing understanding, online activists may exploit these features for strategic aims. Common techniques include drowning a post or blog with irrelevant comments; exposing the blogger to ridicule; deflecting attention from the point she made; forcing her to address spurious objections; pretextually professing a failure to understand, demanding endless further explanations; and so on. Some of these techniques are available in spoken exchanges, but social media and allied platforms magnify their power by enabling “widely-distributed individuals to organize and galvanize around issues of common interest [or] political advocacy” (Stewart, 2016); and by facilitating the use of nonverbal or nonargument-based, but effective, communicative devices, such as memes, gifs, and emoticons.

Another way in which these digital media distort genuine communicative action is by affecting the motivations of the blogger, or micro-blogger, herself. Specifically, they facilitate the interference with genuinely communicative goals (reaching understanding) by noncommunicative, strategic aims. I will discuss three: acquiring influence, career progression, and venting.

In traditional academic communicative practice, one’s recognition as an expert is supposed to follow from the credit that accrues to one as a result of the soundness of one’s research methods and arguments, judged through peer-review processes. But “in the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one” (Hall, 2014). Veletsianos and Kimmons (2016) have found, by examining a large data set of education scholars’ participation on Twitter, that

being widely followed on social media is impacted by many factors that may have little to do with the quality of scholarly work . . . and . . . that participation and popularity may be impacted by a number of additional factors unrelated to scholarly merit (e.g., wit, controversy, longevity; p. 6).

-This section like every section goes on forever but we finally finally reach our conclusion-

Cooper (2019) has invoked a legal pluralist perspective to argue that it is possible, and may be desirable, for gender as conceived by gender-critical feminists (as “sex-based domination”) and gender as conceived in trans-affirming terms (as “identity diversity”) to coexist side-by-side in the law. Access to women’s spaces is just the kind of policy matter that need not choose between one conception of gender and the other: it can and should be granted on the basis of both. While a compelling feminist case has been made for inclusion (Finlayson et al., 2018), the best feminist case against inclusion suffers from a number of argumentative fallacies (Aristotle, n.d.), and is at odds with well-established and sound uses of practical reason. Many problems in gender-critical thought are consistent with the explanation that paranoid structuralism is too often presupposed in gender-critical work, rather than being treated, productively, as a hypothesis. The nature of the publication outlets favored by gender-critical feminists (social media, blogs, etc.) is also likely to be implicated in generating some of these problems.

I think one of the things i would like anyone who managed to read this entire thing to take away from this is that not ONCE were male bathrooms or male spaces mentioned, not once did this apparently "cis" gay man say that he welcomes and wants transmen in HIS spaces or that he has even thought about it

(((( also he didnt even mention neo genders so my original question 100% unanswered, even fuckface magee doesnt think demiboys are real. He doesnt want to or even mention solving sex based oppression he just wants woman to stop fighting to keep men out))))

#gender critical #gender critical feminism #GC #radfem #terf friendly #anyone with a strong brain try to read the original piece its contras brother i swear to fucking god #id say radfem friendly but he doesnt touch womans issues he doesnt care #trans exclusive

[rosawayneisawesome]

Riposte: Answers to the questions from Babeworld

We were SO happy with the answers to the questions. They were so insightful and beautiful – exactly what we wanted. What made them even more lovely is that neither knew what the other was writing, so it gave us a sense of intimacy and insight into how they each viewed their friendship as individuals. There were also really beautiful moments where they both describe the same event, such as moving in with each other, yet from their own perspective which creates such an interesting narrative.

Georgina’s Answers

Alright lids

I tried my very very best to hand write my answers but I have acrylic nails and joined up writing. It was hard! And I kept misspelling everything which I guess could be like hehe how authentic and cute but I deno i dont even have dyslexia I just make up spellings cos I know my iPhone will correct me. I can handwrite like a few sentences here and there cos I do like the aesthetic and my handwriting is kinda cute ngl.

Anyway

What about Ashleigh makes you feel joy?

Her tenacity.

How do you think Ashleigh has changed you as a person?

Ashleigh's effect on my personal growth as boring as it may sound has been in like, practical ways. Like teaching me where to apply for mental health help, showing how to access benefits (actually she did the whole form for me) and like taking me to my first AA meeting and holding my hand. With patience and just overall validating my addictions and illnesses she’s given me the tools to make positive changes in my life. Before we met I hadn’t really had many successful friendships having one year expiration date on close relationships before they begin to break down or require distance because I’m so mentally messed up (plot twist-ours became the latter). Relationships are tough, yeno?

What’s one of your favourite memories of Ashleigh?

This is tough because what may be surprising to people is that we’ve only known each other like a couple of years maybe less (I’m terrible with numbers so this could be a lie) but like in the grand scheme of things it’s been brief. And within that time we’ve had so many life altering experiences and relationships and artistic opportunities and traumas and episodes and living situations and laughs. So much happens. I think probably being able to watch her achieve things like a first in her degree, a place at RCA etc where we can cry happy tears at the sight of personal and professional growth.

Has your relationship evolved since you first met?

Definitely. In the beginning I feel like we thrived in codependency spending every waking moment together and sharing a bed. There was comfort in this new found friendship where there was a natural give and take. We wanted to help each other excel emotionally and academically and creatively- seeing each others potential. We were also in between turning points. For Ashleigh it was education and for me it was work. Now our relationship has grown up and matured. I’m content in that our life events won’t always align and it’s okay to explore things as individuals whilst never failing to come back together and return to that sister-like dynamic that is always there.

What were your first impressions of Ashleigh?

First impressions were weird because I was looking for a room in a houseshare where the deposit wasn't crazy and they allowed cats. I was in desperation mode and looking to impress haha. Ashleigh was my point of contact and her facebook pictures presented a mysterious and arty character. I was intimidated by her honestly. I thought she was too cool for me. Cool and well liked, seemingly without trying, and I was shy.

If you could take an attribute from Ashleigh and swap it with one of your own what would it be?

Definitely her admin skills. Anything that requires like problem solving and logic. She’s a pure wiz at adobe, can make a spreadsheet, will keep on top of emails and is productive 12 hours a day. That kind of like natural incentive to work and organise myself and others is something I was not born with. And this extends into her personal life- she has successful interpersonal relationships and life long friends and I truly believe it’s down to her ability of knowing how to compartmentalise everything as well as being a good friend/daughter/girlfriend. Me? I’d lose a friend down the side of a couch or leave my two years late smear test at the back of a bus.

If you could sing a karaoke duet with Ashleigh, what song would you choose?

Break Up Bye Bye by the Frock Destroyers to live out our cock destroyers fantasy

What is your favourite way to spend time with Ashleigh?

As nice as meetings at big institutions, hosting lectures and performing at events are- we can’t wait to get home for a maccies *ashleigh’s apple music recently played playlist plays softly in the background* discussing ideas, stories, aspirations and discourse.

What is Ashleighs hidden talent?

It is her creativity. She credits everyone’s influence but often can’t acknowledge the independent creativity that lies within her.  Within art institutions it’s easy to feel boxed off as a practical person or a conceptual thinker- it’s always logic versus creativity and sometimes we aren’t allowed to believe they can overlap. Her hidden talent is her artistic talent. Hidden from her by herself and hidden from her by the people that are supposed to shine a light on it.

Describe Ashleigh in three words

Tall, Traumatized, Gay

Ashleigh’s Answers

What’s the best thing about being friends with Georgina?

It’s rare to find a friend who you can admit your wrong-doings to and not be judged. It’s also rare to find a friend who helps you use these wrong-doings to become a better person: G is that friend.

Describe Georgina in three words

Trauma, poor and under rated.

What were your first impressions of Georgina?

This girl needs help. Nah I’m joking to be honest the first time we met it was in a weird situation - she was coming around to try and find a house for her and her son (cat) and i wanted to help a fellow poor girlTM in need so she moved straight in. She seemed standoffish and cold, but later i realised she was just overworked and underpaid. She grew on me like a weird rash, I'm pretty sure I did the same to her.

Has your relationship with Georgina evolved since you first met?

Meeting G went from us both being like “who is this bitch.” to “she’s my bitch”. From then on she’s become my art wife, best friend, carer and collaborator, and I would probably have to throw myself off a cliff if she were to cut ties. I think i see so much of myself in her, she’s become of the people i do look up to the most- in a healthy way i promise!!

what’s one of your favourite memories of Georgina?

I think when we landed our first commission and i told her and we both sat and were like ‘we got this. we can do this” emphasis on the we. Being estranged from your family and feeling no one understands you is so isolating, so to feel part of a community, even if it’s just two of you, was such a big moment for me.

how do you think Georgina has change you as a person?

Before i met Georgina I was ashamed to admit i grew up on a council block, ate pasta and sauce and wore primark trackies. She’s basically helped me embrace my authentic self (ew cringe) - but for real! Since meeting G i’ve become more politically engaged, able to express my blackness and owned my disability. She’s taught me to be unapologetically me, and for that I am forever grateful. Babeworld wouldn’t exist without her, she showed me that being an artist doesn’t have to be this firm set of middle class ideals- but rather a safe space for me to express and vocalise my feelings. She constantly uses her privilege (particularly of being white and non disabled) to stand up for me, educate others and give me the support i need to do it for myself also. I’ll come in all guns blazing if you try and be ableist to me now, and I have G to thank for that.

what about Georgina makes you feel joy?

It’s so important to have that one friend who you can just fully vent to. She is a born listener, and a born learner. She takes it upon herself to continue to educate herself about marginalised groups and find ways to support them. the world would be a better place if we had more Georginas.

what’s your favourite way to spend time with Georgina?

I would say a codeine-binge but I don’t want to glamourise prescription drugs taking so: A three course maccies with the footy on sitting nowhere near each other because we have bodily contact. The occasional awkward eye contact as we reach for the last crisp.

what is Georgina‘s hidden talent?

I’d tell you but it’s a trade secret.

if you could take an attribute from Georgina and swap it with one of your own what would it be?

Confidence. I have a weird overconfidence which i wish i could slice in half and give to her because tbh, mines excessive and hers is massively lacking. Someone who actually has as much talent as her deserves to snap her fingers like a princess.

if you could sing at karaoke duet with Georgina what song would you choose?

You don’t want me to sing trust me. Think dying cat meets teenagers during the voice breaking phase of pubity. But if you really want to hurt yourself like that it would HAVE to be The Best- Giggs. It features a scouse rapper and that accent sends me sideways.