#view of normality around you. the real world is happening and it’s happening in gay clubs

[insomniamademedothis]

First time back in a gay club after months, didn’t realise how badly I needed it, to be trying to peer over three men hesitantly initiating a three way to watch an ironic drag performance to jojo siwas newest song on stage. Singing happy birthday with the crowd to another drag queens’ mum. It has reset me I am myself again.

#this is why I’m sceptical of all the blogs on here denying even wanting to ever try clubs. you get weird when the world restricts its #view of normality around you. the real world is happening and it’s happening in gay clubs #I saw the three guys a few hours later btw it seemed to be going well for them. I was pleased it’s just a matter of: if you’re tall and #there’s three of you and you’re preoccupied you canNOT be at the front of the crowd #or at least make sure there aren’t short dykes behind you

[byersfanclub]

call it controversial, I'm speaking my mind and if you don’t agree with me then so be it, atp idc what ppl may think about my opinion on this matter but as someone who views mike wheeler as a closeted gay person, meaning mlm, he is a boy who likes other boys and that’s it then I’m also someone who believes mike has never had actual romantic feelings for el at ANY point in the show. I don’t sit around and harass people who believe otherwise. 

mike is not even the FIRST person to show el kindness once she escaped the lab, it’s benny hammond. mike is the second person to truly show el some kindness and basic human decency by allowing her into his home and getting her clean, dry clothes. it’s something I hope anyone would do for anyone in that sort of situation BUT don’t forget it’s also mike’s idea to “send her back to pennhurst or wherever she came from” and comes up with the plan on the spot right then and there to have her go out the back door and knock on the front door and his mom will figure out what to do. they never had any plans on keeping el around until they found out she knew who will was, that he was alive and that she had fucking superpowers. I get kinda sick of ppl trying to twist this around. this is factual, it’s not some anti-m1leve3n thing ppl made up, it is canon. to say mike never wanted to get rid of el at first is just a straight up lie, his main priority was finding will, but he wasn’t going to be an asshole and leave a girl outside in the pouring rain.  

all mike cares about in s1 is finding will. I find it odd that some ppl don’t believe this, whether you think he could have grew a crush on el or not. he literally starts to disassociate, begs to help look for him, sneaks out of his home at night, bikes home and sobs into his moms arms when he thinks will is dead, is outright RUDE to el afterwards until she proves that will is still alive. 

both Lucas and Nancy say things that try to allude to mike liking el, which literally has nothing to fucking do with the plot of s1 AT ALL and they literally have no scenes that I can genuinely go back and look at and be like “aww that's so cute and romantic, I hope they’ll kiss and end up together” 

their kiss was never scripted and it wasn’t even meant to happen, it was something millie suggested and its funny that they chose to do it right after she asks if mike will be like her fucking BROTHER and he goes “no, well, I guess it’s sort of the same” like my brother in christ in what world is a date/boyfriend the same as a brother? he’s not stupid, even 12 year olds know the difference between a brother and a boyfriend. I genuinely think it’s because mike has never CARED about that sort of thing before, because he’s just a kid who wants to play games with his friends, uninterested in girls and dating in general. 

so, when I say that mike unintentionally uses el as his “beard” it’s not meant to be insulting towards el, because el is also using mike to try and be a normal girl. they are both just trying to be normal when both of them know they AREN’T. 

el is the first girl not immediately grossed out by mike, it’s because she doesn’t view him as anything other than a person, she’s not thinking about him romantically at all, she’s a 12 yr old girl that just escaped being in a scientific lab her whole life, romance isn’t going to be on the forefront of her mind, she probably doesn’t even know wtf romantic love even is. you think they’re showing Casablanca in the Hawkins national lab? I don’t think so. 

s2 shows mikes lack of interest in girls even more, and ppl using the reasoning that its because he “loves el” like idk how to tell you this, he knew her FOR ONE WEEK and she barely spoke the entire time and mike was focused on will all of s1. be so for real. really. his lack of interest in girls comes in the form of things more subtle like the dragons lair scene, which has mike and will off to the side, blank faced as dustin and lucas sort of duel for princess daphne. then there’s more upfront moments like mike being completely uninterested in max, while even will seems to be at least a little curious about her (ofc not romantically like dustin and lucas) 

don't even get me started on mikes monologue to will in s2 being 10x more romantic than mike’s “love confession” monologue in s4 which fell flat on 90% of the audience (on purpose, I see u duffers)

the snowball scene isn’t meant to be a romantic scene for m1lev3n but it gets interpreted as one because of they way they film it, and it’s literally done that way ON PURPOSE. they are tricking you, me, the entire audience into believing mike is so upset because el isn’t there. but his reactions to will getting asked to dance and afterwards (with dustin also being upset over Lucas and max) are clear. then they show us Nancy asking dustin to dance along with el showing up to the snowball to dance with mike? 

The ending of s2 solidified mike using el as a cover for his queerness, to be normal, because he was aware that he was DIFFERENT. this is why m1lev3n is so insufferable to people in s3 because its written to be insufferable. they don’t want you to like it. to finally see mike and el as a couple? it’s annoying, ppl don’t like it, the characters themselves are over it and even el herself. 

then there’s will and mikes fight scene which is 10x more breakup coded than m1lev3ns ACTUAL breakup? bro had mike sobbing and throwing up as he biked across town in the pouring rain to apologize, meanwhile all mike did was eat Doritos and burp while complaining abt el breaking up with him, calling her a different species and such. he didn’t actually care deep down, it was more annoying and frustrating that she broke up with him than emotional because he didn’t love her romantically, he’s just mad that he lost his cover that keeps him appearing as normal as possible. 

the ending of s3 solidifies to me that el is ALSO using mike to be and feel normal, because they’d been broken up for months at this point and she suddenly feels the need to kiss him and tell him she loves him too? while mike literally tries to avoid remembering the shit he said earlier in the season, because he didn’t mean it and if he did, he wouldn’t have acted the way he fucking did in s4. BFFR. el only wanted mike back because she lost hopper. 

hoppers letter is meant to be familiar love between el and hopper and it’s meant to allude to the growing romantic tension between mike and will as well, in stranger things, there’s double, triple, quadruple meanings to everything and this is one of them. mike KNOWS he does not love el, he knows this in s2, he knows this during s3, he knows this coming into s4. mike is desperate to not lose her as his cover because as much as mike is “himself” back in Hawkins, he still can’t stop thinking about will because Hawkins isn’t the same without him. he knows he’s thinking about will too much, that he worries about el so much because he’s unable to face his true feelings that he has for will and not her and mike believes that el genuinely loves him (she doesn’t). 

this brings me to believe their official split is going to be a lot more mutual than ppl believe. el has come to terms that her and mike are over during nina, I believe el suspects/knows that mike is gay/likes will. their sbp talk paralleling jack and joey from Dawsons creek is almost too spot on for it not to mean something, especially to know will still pining and jealous over them right after it. 

in conclusion, im tired of pretending I ever thought mike and el were ever a cute ship, they weren’t. there was no spark between them for me and many others. it was like they were being forced into my face and I think the duffers did this with so much intention. not only did they straightbait robin and steve so well, but them “shoving” a straight ship into our face in the way mainstreams shows get criticized by homophobes for gay ships. it’s no wonder one of their favorite shows is Dawsons creek. 

mike wheeler is gay and never liked el. el hopper got caught up in mike’s internal conflict and also latched onto him for a sense of security and to feel like a normal teenage girl. 

fin. 

#byler #elmike #a super long post

[martyfromgiant]

thinking about how pretty much every single show with lesbian representation has been cancelled or ended by the network in the last year. it hurts so fucking much to see shows being cancelled that have a huge fan base or killing off lesbian characters without a second thought. it’s not gay shows that are being canceled, no, it is wlw shows. mlm shows have continued to go on getting praise and renewals where shows like first kill, even though they’re cheesy and shitty, that have lesbian main characters one being a black woman and having a half black cast are cancelled. it had twice the viewing of shows like heartstopper, a show with two white gay men leads, that got renewed in the first few weeks of its release. even with netflix setting first kill up to fail by releasing it at the same time as huge shows like stranger things and umbrella academy, it still was a huge hit and had such a loving fan base.

the wilds with a lesbian main couple and diverse female cast literally centered around the concept of girl power. huge and dedicated fan base. cancelled. killing eve lesbian main characters one of them being sandra fucking oh that explores the dark side of ourselves while giving really good rep. one of the most dedicated fan bases i’ve seen. cancelled. and not just that, what could have so easily been a happy ending for the couple was ripped from us in the last five minutes right after the characters finally admitted feelings after four fucking seasons. one of them is murdered right in front of the other.

i can’t speak much to shows like everything sucks and the society because i haven’t bothered to watch them knowing they get cancelled. i don’t want to get attached to beautifully written and relatable characters for some big rich homophobic network to tell me no, no you can’t have this anymore. that’s happened too many times to me. right as the couple is happy and things are okay, one of them dies in front of the other like clexa, villaneve, dani and jamie from bly manor. some don’t even really get the opportunity to get to that point and others are just left with their relationship unfinished, with things left unsaid. and don’t even get me started on queer baiting.

yeah gay shows in general with good representation are fucking hard to come by but i’m sorry. mlm don’t face the same kind of hardships that wlw do. there’s a reason burying your lesbians became such a well known trope. because lesbians in shows die all of the fucking time for no good reason. i wish companies like netflix, hbo, and prime would stop fucking being cowards and admit the real reason they’re cancelling these shows. it’s not because they’re not being viewed enough or don’t have a strong fan base. it’s because they’re fucking lesbophobic i don’t want to hear anything else about it or any bullshit that it wasn’t a big enough hit. it may be the 21st century but lesbians aren’t magically equal even within the lgbtq community. the only place to get good representation these days is from fan made sources like fan fiction and fan art. made by people who understand how hard it is.

it’s where we get to see what we’ve always wanted to see, the characters we love, loving each other and being happy. we don’t have big writers scratching ideas because it “wouldn’t look good or be good for ratings”. we get a world where villanelle and eve lived happily ever after instead of villanelle dying in front of eves eyes and and floating into the abyss. not some bullshit from laura fucking neal who knows absolutely nothing about the characters we know telling us it’s what they felt was right. glad burying your lesbians feels right to people. but in our fan spaces we get to see villanelle make it out alive, we get to see them have a normal life and watch movies together. we also get to see and express what we feel is right with the fuck ton of queer coding in media. we get to see nancy and robin fall in love, emma and regina confess their feelings for one another, and any of the endless amount of amazing ships that we desire. there is a reason we flock to those spaces, it’s where we feel safe, seen, and where we feel like maybe one day we can have a relationship like that, to be loved like that. but it sometimes doesn’t make up for seeing it all play out endorsed by a company and written by people that actually care about representation and their viewers instead of just money. we all want to be loved and feel accepted and seen but sadly, because of the events of the last year, i’m not gonna hold my fucking breath.

sorry this is a lot, i’m just so fucking pissed

#killing eve #first kill #the wilds #once upon a time #netflix #wlw #fuck netflix #the haunting of bly manor

[old-school-butch]

here is my second anon, on same-sex attraction and the fuckery i've experienced around it in the trans community. i wonder if any ex-TRAs and TIFs will recognize this, or if it's only me who managed such a convoluted mental somersault? also, please forgive me for venting in your inbox, i have no better place. but alas.

i thought myself a gay man for 10-ish years. and yet i had... very clear sexual attraction towards women, clear enough that i've genderswapped 80% of my fictional male crushes so they would have breasts and vaginas, while still considering them "men" because i kept their he/him pronouns. seeing females as men allowed me to tell myself i was only attracted to males. i think a mix of biphobia and lesbophobia, stirred into gender-think. i was only allowed to love women if they were actually "men". because it was ok to love men.

i had crushes on girls as a teen and i'd always feel gross and predatory when i shared the locker rooms with them. i remember so badly wanting to sneak looks at my crushes but doing all i could not to. bc i "knew" that it was wrong. however i never developed into accepting this same-sex attraction as normal, because i got swept up in genderism, and became a "man" and... all my attraction towards women suddenly felt EVEN MORE predatory and violating. i swept it away as male gaze, objectification, leering, still predatory. etcetera etcetera. genuinely did all i could to suppress/explain away my obsession with female bodies. i centered my male attraction, and as the trans movement is very male-centered to begin with it was only encouraged. people (straight females) calling themselves f*gs left and right. every time i started thinking about breasts (i'm boob obsessed for real) or having sex with women i pushed it down as male depravity. i also thought me wanting to fuck women had been conditioned into me by advertising. like, yes, of course everyone wants to have sex with women bc they are trained by society to want this :)) logical. this totally happens to all female people. oh you love the smell of pussy? advertising taught you this. -_-

obviously as a TIF, i felt somehow that male identity and pronouns was a prerequisite to be fully human/be the way i was inside. misogynistic as fuck. it seems i felt this for other women, too. you told me i'd feel the weight of the harm i'd done along the way, when i sent the first anon; this is a heavy one. having viewed women and myself this way for so long. and having written off my same-sex attraction (i salivate when i see bare chested women lol) because, well, i'm a "man" and i violate them with my eyes.

the power dynamic between TIFs is funny/tragic too. ssa ones being treated as if they're straight males and culpable for everything those do. osa ones being the ones with more social capital. bisexual ones centering males bc well, the whole movement shits on women and you don't wanna be "straight" or bi ending up in a "straight" relationship. a lesbian TIF just enters a world in which her attraction (which she's likely felt predatory for her whole life already) is REINFORCED as bad. because now she's a straight man. and when a real heterosexual male is not accessible to shit on, she will be the target of the "gay" ones. god, the trans community is such a complicated type of homophobia...

i feel so good now to be out of it. i've been butch my whole life, i had a buzzcut since i was 14, up until my 20s. tomboyish always. now i have a long braid, and i considered cutting it off when i peaked, but i can't bring myself to do it. i miss my breasts very much and my braid is a body part as well, one that i can still hold on to. i can't let it go. it means something to me, i suppose, symbolically. but i don't feel like i'm a man anymore, and my attraction towards women is not to blame for their oppression. it is so liberating. i no longer feel like i'm degrading or harming women by being attracted to them. and most of my friends who dropped me were osa TIFs, binary and nonbinary... they have a lot to lose if they should give up that identity. they'd get booted out the "queer" community, lose the oppression they built their identity on. it's weird looking back at them. ah, i ramble so much, but thank you, even if you don't end up posting this, for having a space open here to go to. it feels so valuable, and it helps to read others anons.

Oh, I've definitely read wilder somersaults. It's amazing how confusing it is when reality is upside down. A lesbian becomes a gay man, or a straight man depending on the identity of the women she's attracted to. All nonsense, but I do wonder if it allows people to contemplate relationships they had rejected previously. Like, if you're a straight man who decides he's a lesbian but then meets another TIM then you're supposed to also include him, or women might have idealized views that relationships with men might not be so bad if you can escape 'being the girl'. Women, according to the stats, are the most likely to twist ourselves into these pretzels, of course, female socialization at work. So, we must forgive ourselves and each other for our roles in all this.

I'm glad things are working out well for you. There are times when I feel isolated being gender critical, but then I remember the headache-inducing mental repression I had to endure to make myself believe all this and I feel much more free and real.

[br1ghtestlight]

zeke and jimmy jr are so fucking stupid. immediately a 10/10 episode just for tankbottoms (tank tops for your bottom™️)

THEYRE SO FUCKING STUPID THERES TEARS IN MY EYES..... if anybody ever hurts these boys ever in their lives i dont know what im going to do. probably cry about it

BABYYY ZEKE HES SO ADORABLE 😭😭💕 love how squished his face is. he's Three apples tall snd very very small

Hey guys :D love how she's dropped the "hey jimmy jr!!! ZEKE." thing and started being normal about greeting them. sorry we're not even a minute into the episode i just love these kids so much they're sooo sweet and so stupid. accurate middle schooler representation

jimmy jr and tina talking :') they're buddies. love that he's already explained this tankbottoms idea to tina and she Does Not Like It

HEY GENE BROWN EYES MENTION!!! always love to have rhat confirmed

oh that jimmy pesto impression is UNCANNY. aww why are they fighting they were sorta kinda becoming friends. not really but in my heart they were after the christmas episode and them racing cars together

"aahh im bored' oh so he's literally just gay? is that what this is?

JIMMY PESTO SAYING ITS BEEN SLOW AT HIS PLACE LATELY LMAO i wonder why that could be!! surely no real world events coincided with that happening!!!!

jimmy pesto is so stupid i missed him so much. i missed ur stupid stupid handsome face SO MUCH u idiot. kisses him

YOU GET ONE PACK OF RATS COVERED IN ROACHES 😭

love how he's Literally just trying to be friends with bob and bob is like. can you leave? could you please leave?? there's something going on here not even gay people have a word for. this is a brand new type of interaction

"our rats and roaches dont get along" "aah well you're lucky"

"right that was ALMOST a normal conversation but you're you soo you said that" *fart noise* "THATS YOU" why is jimmy literally the equivalent of a boy teasing a girl he has a crush on on the playground bcuz he likes her and doesnt know how to show it. what is their PROBLEM

aww louise reading the burobu magazine 🥺🥺💕 sorry this is relevant to a fanfic im working on. also love these new views of the playground thats also great to have (also for the same fanfic) (there's a lot going on in this fanfic)

jimmy jr is so fucking stupid and literally my baby boy. ACTUAL love of my life. he's so dumb <3

"teatherball? oh my god. another TB" there's literally zero braincells in that boys head this is already one of my favorite jimmy jr episodes. also zeke getting jealous that tina is spending time around a boy who hates zeke?? kinda cute. he liiiikes her :) i think he's also just terrified of will but i think he's also a little jealous maybe. zeke contains multitudes

"I just, uh, don't want to have fun... like that. With a bunch of balls in my mouth."

"Fine. Some people are just more open to new ideas."

presenting this conversation with no context. AND jimmy pesto being gay in the background bcuz of course he would be

okay well im already assuming this b plot is gonna go in the direction of jimmy pesto copying bob bcuz business has been slow for him and he thinks bob is generally a better cook so if he copies him maybe he'll get more business too. which is ADORABLE and reminds me so much of the christmas episode where jimmy pesto recommended bob's food bcuz it was so good. also if jimmy thinks that bob is copying his business FJDMDJFKDKDSJ reminds me of a past episode i cant remember the name of but like better.... bcuz they're gay and stupid

gene is a sweet boy <3 sweet song and moment. love that him and louise are just always hanging out together

ohh jimmy jr he's so sweet 😭 he loves zeke so much its adorable. i know there's nothing anybody could do or say to make him stop loving zeke or wanting to be his friend and its actually really cute. he's been great in this episode

"My sweet best friend. My sweet, sweet Zeke..."

love jimmy jr being just as heartbroken over somebody being mean to zeke as i am FJDMDJDKSKS he's literally DEVASTATED by this news. who would bully zeke he's literally a baby? just a baby boy??

"I don't like bullies. And I especially don't like them at our school. And in our sister's grade. I mean, what if he makes Tina pee and embarasses her? She's already fighting an uphill battle."

louise is both very sweet and protective and also VERY funny lmao SHES ALREADY FIGHTING AN UPHILL BATTLE

love jimmy jr louise and gene's dynamic in this episode. they care so much about their babies (zeke and tina) its cuuute

"i feel bad for zeke too but i just dont think aggression is the answer" coming from the kid who got his ass beat by a nine year old. on MULTIPLE occasions

love mort ordering the burger of the day like he has a gun pointed at his head FJDMDKDKSKSS also mort and teddy getting along!! yay!!!! big win for the tedmort shippers in the fandom

"Zeke... I just want you to know that I'm here for you and I care about you." when did jimmy jr get all emotionally mature??

WOLLY BULLY

"I get why you wouldn't want to tell me, because I'm one of the cool kids..." gonna need a citation for that one jimmy jr

if there's one thing louise is gonna do its ignore EVERYBODY telling her not to do something for revenge and do it anyway. like girl u gotta know when to let something go i know you're protective but FJDMSKSDKDK

"whats going on down there" dont even worry about it rudy

i love school episodes they're so silly. still a 50/50 chance zeke WAS the bully vs being bullied and this is a misunderstanding but either way this is very fun and i love seeing all the kids hanging out at recess and lunch etc

tina has had like three lines total in this episode where IS that girl

"i was the bully" yeah i figured since this episode still has half the runtime left and no other possible way this conflict could go LMAO but on that note its kinda sweet that he's made friends and a life for himself at wagstaff and he's not mean to kids anymore. he's a good kid in his heart & he always was

NOT THE APPLE JUICE 😭😭💔

not tina crushing on will in the background.... its not ur episode girl get outta here

"i can see that" rudy is there something you'd like to share with the class 🤨🏳️‍🌈

"SORRY me spraying juice on you wasn't bullying! That was just an accident." POOR GENE he's so worried about upsetting someone or hurting their feelings

BABY ZEKE COMPILATION TJIS IS A BIG MOMENT FOR ME gonna need to screenshot this after bcuz he's so small. maybe the smallest boy in the whole entire world

"i was always the new kid and it wasn't easy making friends" 😭😭💕 AND NOW HE HAS TINA AND JIMMY JR GENE LOUISE RUDY and even tammy and jocelyn (kinda sorta) and he doesnt need to be nervous anymore..... he has a home and he's never going to leave. sorry brb im crying i love zeke and their littlr friend group so much

BETWEEN THAT AND MY IMPULSE CONTROL ISSUES I JUST STARTED WRESTLING KIDS sorry zeke is many things but he is NOT smart thats why him and jimmy jr are two peas in a pod. not a braincell between them

HE JUST HAD A LOT OF NERVOUS ENERGYYYY okay adhd zeke is literally canon now. to me. like i dont care what the episode says thats true now in my heart they basically said it

and then i kept trying to make them laugh :( zeke noo he's such a sweetheart and a good kid. he never had anybody who LIKED him before who really saw him for who he was until jimmy jr and their friend group. sobbing. I HAD A GROUP OF FRIENDS AND A NICKNAME IT WAS THE FIRST TIME I FELT LIKE I REALLY BELONGED....... CRYING SOBBING THROWING UP ETC

ive been told i have the perfect neck for headlocks. okay thank you rudy

jimmy jr is soo emotionally mature and thoughtful in this episode. TINA WHAT ON EARTH R U DOING IN THIS EPISODE she didnt even react to zeke's story bro. its so over

like a little italian squirrel :)

"Linda's right, Bob. And my therapist would say that you should focus on your own happiness and not compare it to other people's."

"Your therapist is an IDIOT!"

"You take that back, Bob! Do not speak of Doctor Marjorie that way. That woman has put up with SO MUCH in her life! The balls haven't always rolled her way!"

😭😭??? this was so funny lmao. also love how casually teddy mentions his therapist (throughout the entire show!! she was mentioned in his first appearance) and how normalized it is. like yeah he has a therapist and he has mental health issues & trauma and its just something he casually mentions

also mort always talks about ordering the soup at bobs burgers but we've NEVER seen soup on the menu or anybody else eating soup there what is up with that?? does bob make the soup especially for mort??? what is going on there. so many unanswered questions

"Look I don't know what THIS is..." *gestures vaugely to bob and jimmy pesto* Thats literally exactly how i feel whenever i watch an episode with them now. i dont know what the hell is going on between them and quite frannkly thats none of my business!!!

"im not SHRIEKING!!!!" he shrieked

"Zeke! Listen. We've all done things we're not proud of. I used to tell Andy and Ollie that there was actually only one of them. It messed with them for weeks. The point is... we recognize our mistakes and we learn from them. It's how we grow."

ONE we got a big brother jimmy jr mention HELL YEAH‼️‼️ love him tormenting andy and ollie he's such a terrible big brother (affectionate) and TWO in my head this is kinda jimmy jr apologizing for how he's fucked over tina in the past?? maybe im literally delusional about them but him admitting he's done things he isnt proud of and that he's hurt people before. cmon. thats gotta be about tina right. just lie to me at this point

JIMMY JUNIOR LMAOO he's literally so silly in this episode im obsessed with him

WHAT THE HELL WILL??

did zeke make fun of will for being a dancer lmfao thats why he wanted jimmy junior to leave right. he doesnt want jj to hate him

HE MADE FUN OF MY LISP 😭😭 no thats literally actually worse bcuz jimmy junior's lisp is soo. god. but zeke loves jimmy jr so much i know he would never do that to him. he literally LOVES that boy so goddamn much

YOUR LIPS FJDMDDJDKDKDD THEY LOOK FINR TO ME. somebody needs to sedate me im gonna become a jimmy jr fan account after this episode

JIMMY JR NOOOOOOOO ZEKE LOVES U HES UR BEST FRIEND. if they stop being friends after this episode im killing myself. like it would be so over for me. couldnt live after that theyre besties. theyre BESTIES

imagining if this was jimmy jr instead of will and actually literally crying real tears over it

I DONT EVEN THINK I WANT TO DO TANKBOTTOMS WITH YOU ANYMORE. thats literally worse than divorce whats even the point

"I mean, a lot of people don't know this but I have a speech impediment."

"Huh."

"Really?"

"Ooh I never noticed..."

"Yeah. I worked through a lot of it but sometimes it still shows up."

love this dumbass autistic boy. he's my sweetheart angel i would die for him 1000 times over and over

I THOUGHT TINA WAS GONNA ASK ZEKE TO SHOW HIS BUTT SAYING "I mean you could...." i was like ooohkay tina sure. okay

aww bob is so smart. and cool

JIMMY JR HOLDING ZEKES BACKPACK FOR HIM sorry idk why i thought that was so cute. gonna need a screenshot of that

LOVE GENE AND LOUISES EXPRSSSIONS IN THIS SCENE sorry okay im paying attention to their gay little fight too ig

AWWW HAHA ZEKE IS SUCH AN OLDER BROTHER this scene is so cute. him teasing gene and louise <3

THIS EPISODE WAS SOO ADORABLE OMG i loved jimmy jr in this episode and his friendship with zeke. maybe my favorite episode this season?? its hard to say bcuz all of them have been so enjoyable and good but i love school setting episodes and zeke is such a good character. the subplot was also really good w/ jimmy pesto although i will NOT be letting bob forget what happened between them in the christmas episode and when he brought jimmy pesto his pain meds. he might forget but i will NOT. they were seriously for real gay there

#txt #bob's burgers #episode review #10/10 episode loved it 😁

[transmascpetewentz]

Syscourse jumpscare

While I normally don't post syscourse on this account, I felt the need to add to a conversation that's been happening recently (and one that's been ongoing for a while) regarding the term "sysmed" and its usage.

So, a little bit about my system that I rarely talk about on here: we're a polyfragmented DID system. I have been the host since about April, and I don't know most of the other system members very well. We have varying views on endogenic systems, leaning towards pro. I still haven't really decided what I think about this whole debate. Either way, we all can agree on the fact that the term "sysmed" is transphobic.

Transmedicalism isn't just "when people think you can't be trans without dysphoria." Transmedicalism, more than being a belief or a set of beliefs, is a societal attitude about transness and about gender as a whole. Modern transmedicalism is an intracommunity issue, but it is rooted in "science" such as the debunked theories of Blanchard. The difference, however, between Blanchard's "science" and the science around systems, is that Blanchard's "science" is complete bullshit. The gap between FTM "HSTS transsexuals" and "autohomoerotic transsexuals" is almost nonexistent because this "science" is based entirely on the stereotype that transness exists for sexual reasons.

Modern transmedicalism, while it harms everyone in the trans community, is mainly straight gender conforming transmascs trying to weaponize heterosexuality and gender conformity against femmes, gay transmascs, and other non-straight transmascs. Being feminine or attracted to men is seen as a sign of "trending," just like the debunked homophobic idea that being attracted to men made you a fetishist of male homosexuality before it. The history of transmedicalism cannot be divorced from this "science," which is something I've spoken about previously.

To compare this history to anti-endos being mean online is transphobic on so many levels. Anti-endos being mean online aren't what cause young gay trans men to hate themselves for not being attracted to women. Anti-endos being mean online don't spread an ideology that gets you denied T if you show any interest in men. Anti-endos being mean online are not in any way comparable to the severe, irreversible harm that the idea of autohomoeroticism has done to the gay trans male community.

Before the 1980s, there were not even words to describe us, because people didn't know we even existed. Those of us that lived before then just called themselves faggots. So many of our brothers lived their whole lives never realizing there was anyone else like them. The simple truth of the matter is that we live in a world that tries to erase our existence at every point it can, and this erasure is something that shapes how each and every one of us views and interacts with society.

Anti-endos being mean online, while I do not want to minimize the harm they can cause, did not do this. Anti-endos being mean online are traumatized people taking it out on the wrong demographic. They are not continuously silencing a group of people who have been subject to invisible violence for hundreds of years only to be written off as fetishists when people realized that we exist.

Obviously, transmedicalists are not the cause of gay trans men's oppression, and we have more in common with straight trans men than we are different. But transmedicalists are people who have fallen for some of these dangerous ideas, among others, that are rooted in gay trans men's oppression. Anti-endos being mean online are not directly contributing to oppression that is in any way comparable to this.

When I see systems who are cis or not planning to transition bodily use "sysmed" to describe anti-endos being mean, I can't help but be hurt. However valid your argument may be, if you do not experience transphobia, our suffering is not your gotcha. Our oppression is not a hypothetical "[x] is bad so everything that's bad is [x]." We are real people and our voices matter. Allow us to do the talking when it comes to our issues.

Anti-endos aren't off the hook either. If you are cis and you call a trans system transphobic for usage of "sysmed," that is not okay, and you are transphobic. If a trans system is using sysmed, I will still disagree with their usage of the word, but that is for trans people to discuss and sort out amongst ourselves. No matter how good your intentions may be, that is simply not your place.

If you're a trans system (traumagenic or otherwise) and disagree with anything I've said, feel free to reply to this post so we can discuss! This post is directed at cis systems and systems who do not experience transphobia in their daily lives. A system that does experience transphobia regularly who uses "sysmed" is very different from a system who does not who uses the term, and I guess that's the main point here.

#wentz.txt #long post #syscourse #pro endo

[ollieofthebeholder]

to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest): a TMA fanfic

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Chapter 75: September 2012

There should be more people here.

Actually, there shouldn’t be any people here; this isn’t a place anyone should want to be, or really needs to be. But if they have to be here at all, Gerry thinks, there ought to be more than just six people in the room.

Well. Seven if you count the one in the box.

At least, Gerry assumes there’s a body in the box. Or what’s left of one, anyway. The casket is firmly closed and sealed, has been since they arrived. There wasn’t even a viewing this time around, although given the nature of…what happened, that’s not surprising. Melanie wanted to go for a cremation, for a couple of reasons—at least one of which, Gerry knows, is so he can be buried with both his wives—but Lily is his next of kin and isn’t yet considered unable to handle her own affairs, so the final decision for disposition of the remains lay with her. A normal person with half a heart would at least consider the wishes of his only living child. Lily, however, is neither normal nor in possession of any fraction of a heart.

And so, Roger Henry King is getting a full burial with honors.

There’s a man in a clerical collar with a tiny pair of round spectacles who looks more like he’s dressed up as a priest than that he actually is one standing behind the coffin, leading the service. Lily sits in the place of honor, front and center, wearing the same mourning outfit Gerry remembers from her father’s funeral fifteen years ago, this time with the veil covering her face. The only real difference is the absence of her cane, either the silver-tipped fancy one or the sturdy nickel-plated claw-footed piece of equipment she used to drag herself around the last time Gerry saw her—has it really been five years? Instead, she sits in a large, uncomfortable-looking hospital chair with PROPERTY OF ROSEWOOD FOREST HOSPITAL AND CARE HOME stenciled in flaking white on the back, the arms of which she is gripping very tightly indeed. Sitting behind her, one chair over, is a muscular middle-aged woman in black scrubs with a slightly bored look on her face—at least she had the decency to wear black, even if she didn’t dress up. Gerry gets it; she’s a nurse, and she needs to be able to keep herself clean and sanitary if she has to assist Lily, but still.

Melanie sits in the front row directly opposite Lily, dressed up for the first time in a while, the only splash of color the teal streak in her hair and the gigantic glittery bright pink butterfly clipped to it. Beside her sits Martin, it’s a miracle he was able to get the time off work for this, wearing the only black outfit he owns—a calf-length dress with half-sleeves and a high collar that fits him like it was made for him, which, well, it was. It looks good on him, but Gerry knows he’s internally panicking over what Lily might say. She’s not exactly the most accepting person in the world and she’s never been particularly thrilled about Martin’s “inclinations”, as she always puts it, and that’s just her knowing that he’s gay; seeing her only son in a skirt, especially a tailored one, is likely to send her into the stratosphere. Gerry’s just thankful what’s left of his mum isn’t able to get here.

Gerry’s suit doesn’t fit him quite so well, but then, it’s one he found in the back of one of the closets at the bookshop; from the fact that it’s forty years out of style, he guesses that it once belonged to his father. With his hair back in a neat braid and a touch of makeup pilfered from Melanie, he looks different enough that he won’t attract undue attention, even four years after his face got plastered across the papers. In the seat next to Gerry is the only really surprising one there. Evan only ever met Roger once, as far as Gerry knows. Still, the fact that he’s here means a lot. It either means that he cared about Roger, or that he’s there to support Melanie. Either one is fine with Gerry.

There isn’t another soul in the room.

It’s obvious the man leading it has never met Roger, and when he talks about how much Roger brightened the halls of Rosewood Forest before quickly correcting himself to Ivy Meadows, Gerry realizes he’s the chaplain for the nursing home where Lily lives. He’s probably used to running funerals, comforting the bereaved, all of that, but it does mean he never met Roger. And it means he’s doing this service completely on Lily’s memories, or Melanie’s, or possibly just making it up as he goes along. The latter seems more probable, since he’s droning on about things like great worker and brilliant mind and man of God. Gerry doesn’t know what religious beliefs Roger might have held, if any, but even his and Lily’s wedding hadn’t been in a real church, and he’s never known any of them to attend one. Maybe Lily’s found religion since moving into a home, which, honestly, good for her, Gerry hopes it might make her a bit nicer, but as far as he knows Roger never did. As for his being brilliant, or a great worker…maybe it’s just the poetic license of not speaking ill of the dead, but truthfully, even before he lost his job, Roger was never what anyone would call a genius. He’d had his A-levels but not a university degree, and while he’d been a diligent and steady worker, he hadn’t exactly been impressive. Sort of mediocre, really.

The important things about Roger are the things the chaplain doesn’t even know to discuss. Like how Roger taught himself to bake so Melanie—and later Martin—would get homemade cakes on their birthdays, and braved a phone call to his mother-in-law—his first mother-in-law, Adeline Yuen, to get her to walk him through making a traditional New Year’s Eve dish. Or how he took a spinning class one summer in the hopes of being able to give Martin some homespun yarn for his project and been genuinely upset when all his efforts failed. Or how he never, not once, no matter what else was going on, missed one of Melanie’s boxing matches or one of Martin’s concerts. Or how, even when his brain failed him completely, even when he couldn’t consistently remember his own name on a daily basis, he always remembered his “little moth”.

Their absence from the eulogy makes it fall a little flat.

At last, the chaplain comes to a merciful halt. He prays, gives a blessing, and dismisses the gathering. A pair of men Gerry assumes to be employees of the funeral home come in, lift the coffin onto a weird sort of cart-like contraption, and wheel it out of the room. As the rest of them get to their feet to follow, he notices Lily beckon to the nurse and say something. She listens, then nods, then crosses over to where Martin stands.

In a low, genteel murmur, she says, “Miss Liliana asked me to tell you that she is feeling unwell and needs to get back to her room. This is all a bit much for her. She will visit once he has been interred.”

Martin’s voice betrays none of the emotions he must be feeling as he murmurs back, “Of course.”

They wait for Lily and her nurse to leave before they follow. The funeral home has a memorial park attached, meaning there are no headstones rising from the grass—only flat plaques set into the ground, some of which are studded with flowers or flags—but somehow Gerry isn’t surprised to be directed along a paved path to a large stone mausoleum. Assuming Lily ever actually does come to see Roger, she wouldn’t be able to get her chair over the grass. At least with it being a stone vault, there won’t be the whole thing with throwing dirt into the grave, which Gerry is grateful for. Roger, of all people, doesn’t deserve to be covered in dirt.

Melanie checks briefly at the threshold, but with Martin’s supportive hand at her back, she braves her way in for the rest of them to follow. There is a stone sarcophagus open off to one side; the priest stands next to it, the casket before it on the wheeled contraption. Gerry can’t see the two workers who must have brought it in, but after the chaplain says a few words of the ashes to ashes, dust to dust variety, they emerge out of the shadows, lift the casket, and drop it unceremoniously into the sarcophagus, like they’re delivering a package instead of interring a body. Melanie flinches and takes a half-step back to press against Martin and Gerry. Both of them, without saying a word, wrap an arm around her shoulders. She takes a handful of Gerry’s suit jacket on one side and a handful of Martin’s skirt in the other, but stays silent and stone-faced as the workers lift the gigantic slab for the top and, with surprisingly minimal effort for as heavy as it must be, slide it into place. With a final blessing, the chaplain dismisses them, and they re-emerge into what little sunlight there is today.

Melanie takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and turns to Evan. “There’s a café a few blocks away,” she says, her voice rough, like she’s been gargling glass. “If you like to join us.”

Evan nods, but doesn’t say anything. Gerry’s never been up here, not this part of Devon, so he just trusts Melanie and Martin to know where they’re going and follows them to a quaint little place, very white and clean and tidy, with both indoor and outdoor seating. It’s not exactly crowded, but all the same, Gerry isn’t surprised when they elect to sit outside. A waitress comes to take their orders, but after she leaves, they all sit in silence for a while, broken only by the chirping of late-summer birds and the light breeze rustling the leaves of the big, showy rosebushes planted around the edges of the patio.

Finally, Melanie speaks again. “Thanks for coming. You didn’t…have to.”

“Of course I did,” Evan says gently, because all of them know damn well she’s not talking to Martin or Gerry. “What else are friends for?”

“Yeah, but you’ve got…work or, or class or something, right?”

“Right. And I told them I was going up to Devon for my mate’s dad’s funeral and wouldn’t be in today.”

“And they didn’t give you grief?”

Evan shrugs, obviously unconcerned. “Couple of them did. All I had to say to the lab supervisor was Ivy Meadows and suddenly I had the whole week if I wanted it, and I just told my thesis advisor where he could shove it. There are more important things than a master’s degree, and there will be other jobs.” He hesitates, then adds, “I…kind of expected there to be more people, if I’m honest. I, I thought your dad was pretty well liked.”

“He’s been out of a job seven years now,” Melanie says. “And…it’s not like anyone from Ivy Meadows who knew him was left to come. Maybe Hannah, I think she’s…but we lost touch after she quit, and that was before…you know.”

Evan winces, but nods. Martin sighs heavily. “She might’ve been able to come, if this had been in London, but…well, Mum insisted.”

A delivery van trundles by, and for a second, Gerry wonders if it slows down to look at them, but it moves on quickly enough, so probably not. He refocuses on the conversation as Evan says, hesitantly, “Well, it makes sense she’d want to visit, right?”

Martin shrugs. “Maybe, but I doubt she will, honestly. It’s mostly because Melanie and I live in London, and because that’s where the Yuen family plot is.”

Evan blinks. “The who?”

“It was Mama’s maiden name.” Melanie stares at the tablecloth like it holds the secrets of the universe. “Before she married Dad. Amy Yuen Xinyi. What of her family didn’t make it back to Fatshan to die is buried in Kensal Green. But Lily’s not really one for tradition and this is closest to where she is, so it’s probably where she’ll end up buried when her time comes. And she doesn’t like us.”

“She likes you,” Martin mutters.

“Bullshit. She thinks I get you in trouble.”

“Neens, seriously, Mum doesn’t think I need any help to get in trouble. As far as she’s concerned, ‘bad kid’ is my default state and always has been. I can’t tell you how many lectures I got before they got married about why I wasn’t more like you and Gerry.” Martin winces and glances at Evan. “Sorry, you don’t…”

Evan just raises an eyebrow. “Martin, I’ve known you since we were sixteen. Do you really think I didn’t know by now that Melanie is the only person at this table who wasn’t a complete disappointment to her parents? If it weren’t for the fact that mine don’t socialize, and that I don’t talk to them, I’d have suggested they come up here and meet her.”

Martin gives a surprised-sounding laugh. “That would probably be a disaster waiting to happen.”

The delivery van rolls by again, or maybe it’s another one for the same company. Gerry watches it less because he’s concerned about it and more for somewhere to look as Melanie sighs. “Mama died when I was seven. I’m sure she’d have been plenty disappointed in me given time.”

“Hey, don’t say that.” Gerry’s head snaps back around to frown at her. “You’re a goddamn delight and any mother would be proud of a daughter like you.”

“Any mother should be proud of a son like you or Martin or Evan, too, and we all know how that worked out,” Melanie points out. “It’s immaterial. I’ll never know.”

Martin and Evan both blush. Gerry shakes his head at Melanie. “The difference is that our mothers never loved us in the first place, only what we represented for them, and that ended pretty quickly when they decided we weren’t going to be what they wanted. From what I’ve seen, yours liked you for being you.”

“You never met her.”

“No, but I’ve seen that picture of her taking you skating for your birthday,” Gerry reminds her. “You know, the woman who’s smiling and laughing with you, for you, knowing she’s so sick that in less than a week she’s going to have to go into a hospital and that she’s likely not coming out? That woman? That’s not someone who would ever have been disappointed in you.”

Gerry still, despite having known Melanie for sixteen years and loved her for fifteen of them, doesn’t speak Cantonese, but he recognizes every single one of the words that flow from her glossy lips as an obscenity. He also sees the suspicious brightness in her eyes and the slump of her shoulders and knows it’s only halfheartedly directed at him. He takes her hand and kisses her knuckles and murmurs softly, “Je t’aime, ma petite soeur.”[1]

Melanie’s French is about on par with Gerry’s Cantonese, but from the tiny smile she gives him, he knows she understands that much, at least. Evan smiles, too, then it morphs into a puzzled frown and he stands up. “Hang on. Those guys must be lost…I swear that van’s been by four times already, and now it’s slowing down.”

He starts towards the street, but the delivery van accelerates, quite naturally, as if the driver was just waiting for something to get out of the road and is continuing its journey. Martin frowns in its direction. “You’d think whoever runs the company would give them better directions to deliver.”

Gerry shrugs. “This is outside their normal route.”

“How do you know?”

“Mum used to use Breekon and Hope for deliveries all the time. They’ve got a pretty broad delivery range and branch offices in a couple different places, but Devon isn’t one of them, as far as I know.”

Martin shivers slightly. “That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”

Gerry pats his arm as reassuringly as he can. “I promise, Martin, she just used them for delivering the…normal stuff. Not that she had a lot of that, but still.”

“Yeah, okay.” Martin sighs.

The waitress finally comes back with four cups of tea and the sandwiches they ordered. As she sets them down and gives them all a brilliant smile, she asks, “And what brings you four up here? I don’t think I’ve seen any of you before.”

Gerry frowns, because it looks like she’s flirting with either Martin or Melanie and he’s not about that—Martin won’t be interested, he’s gay, and Melanie is probably not in the mood—but Melanie doesn’t seem to notice. “We came up to bury my dad.”

That fast, the waitress’s smile vanishes, and she looks slightly horrified. “Oh. Oh, I’m—I’m so sorry to hear that.” She gathers her tray to her and scurries off awkwardly.

Evan snorts. “You seem to have broken her.”

“Eh.” Melanie shrugs. “She asked. I wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.” She picks up her tea and adds sugar to it.

Martin holds up his own. “To Roger.”

“To Roger,” the other three echo, clinking their cups against his, and they start telling Evan stories about Roger he hasn’t heard before. Melanie doesn’t exactly relax, and she certainly doesn’t look cheerful, but at least she looks less lost by the time they finish their meals and Evan solves the squabble between Martin and Gerry over which one of them will cover Melanie’s part by taking the check and paying the whole thing. He offers them a ride back to London, too, but they already have their tickets, so in the end he just gives them a lift to the train station and leaves them with a promise to see them the next time they’ll all be at the pub.

The trains don’t have compartments or three-across seating anymore, haven’t for years, but Melanie is skinny enough that doesn’t usually stop her from squeezing in between them if she needs it. Sure enough, when they find their seats, she sits on the hard plastic gap between them and curls against Martin’s side. Martin doesn’t let her do that for long, though. Instead, he just sweeps her onto his lap and holds her like a little kid.

“I’m not a baby,” she mutters, but makes no effort to get away from him.

“You just buried your dad,” Martin says in a gentle but firm voice. “You don’t have to be a baby to want to be held after that.”

Melanie sighs and flops her head against his chest. “I love you,” she says softly, reaching out a hand for Gerry. “Both of you.”

“We know,” Gerry assures her. He takes her hand and puts his free one on Martin’s shoulder, closing the circle, so that both of them know he’s there and that he cares about them. “We love you, too.”

[1] "I love you, little sister."

#ollie writes fanfic #tma fanfic #to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest) #gerard keay #melanie king #martin blackwood #evan lukas #loss of a parent #grief #funerals #hospital mention #implied/referenced homophobia #implied/referenced parental abuse #burials #French

[queerticulate]

I gotta say the whole supposed moral panic about fetishizing gay men through fandom seems like a bit of a trojan horse for homophobia to me. People of a variety of sexes and orientations finding gay sex/romance appealing is not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is when women start harassing gay men to join them in the bedroom, or random people disturb gay "couples" in public with sexualized remarks on their displays of affection or lust for each other. Now I have been very active in my local and national LGBT scene for years now, and you know how often I've heard of this happening? Never.

You know what does happen a lot? This being done to queer women. I myself and pretty much all of my friends have multiple experiences of this happening. Men commenting on you when you're kissing a girl in a bar or nightclub, men whistling when you hold hands in public, men who become obsesses with trying to seduce you when you say you're a lesbian. I even was with a lesbian couple when they got sexually assaulted by a man during freaking Pride. So for one, I think the panic is really overbearing, and very misdirected. If you want to help LGBT people and protect them from harm resulting from being fetishized... direct your efforts at protecting queer women.

Absent of real life consequences, I gotta wonder how many people rage about the potential of people of a variety of sexes and orientations getting off on the idea of (attravtive) guys having sex or a romance say this, because truly they cannot cope with gay sex or romance being considered something attractive at all. A lot of homophobia that queer people experience is centered around this belief that we have to cower and beg to be accepted, that we have to present ourselves as the abberation to the perfect cishet folks. If we act like our lifes and loves are just as normal or in our eyes better than cishet stuff, we are often punished as being too much. Queer men especially face a lot of punishment for existing in public and expressing their sexuality. Any public display of affection regularly gets met with disgust, hate, or even violence. I know so many guys who are scared to kiss or hold hands in public. I also know several recent stories of gay men being beat up within my city. Male on male sexuality is also treated as something dirty. Immediately if you participated in it, no matter if you only ever had a 100% safe sex, in my country you immediately get signed up for more extensive health checks. You get barred from blood donations too, also for being in a gay relationship at all regardless of your sex pratices. Heck, even if I as a woman would have sex with a queer man I get the same treatment. So really, people in fandom creating some online buzz about 'wouldnt it be cool if these guys kissed/fucked/were in love' really feels like it does more against real life homophobia for queer men as i see it existing, by normalizing it, by lifting it up as desirable, than it seems to do harm. Cause the main problem is and has been that queer guys are told they cant exist, or need to be scared, or are dirty. All this talk online that so much attention going out to fantasized queer men's relationships is bad, that you're a dirty freak if you do that, i don't know, it mostly sounds like reinforcing the main form of homophobia queer men face.

Now the world is a big place, and i cannot presume to know about all local variants of homophobia and common queer experiences. Maybe there are places in the world where queer men publicly getting harassed as if they're sex dolls is a huge issue. In which case: your complaints are valid. I am sorry people in your life are going through that. I am sorry this post feels like another horror thrown on top of it. But maybe, when adressing a global audience... do as i do here... presume not the whole world works in alignment with your local point of view. Contextualize your complaints. Let your brothers and sisters in another country know you're fighting against stuff happening in your area, instead of just being another demon coming to reinforce homophobia.

#rant #homophobia #shipping #mlm ships #fandom #lgbt #im just grossed out by in how many fandoms a weird combo of 'no you cant talk about them being gay thats bad' with #'but we can talk about the filthiest straight fantasies with the same guys' has arisen #and a lot of talk about how a popular mlm ship must be fetishization #how it must be that people are judt doing it cause the guys are attractive and that this is somehow wrong #it really feels like people are shaming queer sexuality and romance in itself and disguising it in social justice talk to get away with it

[alltheselights]

I agree with you on everything and I love your clearsightedness, except one thing. I think youre right that LTHQ/Sony don't want Larries around as unconditional fans because we support Louis too hard, so we have to be taught in regular bursts not to trust him and hate him instead. I think HSHQ/Sony do want Larries around because we also support Harry hard and we're very handy to defend his queerness when he's playing all sides against the middle and getting shit for supposed queerbaiting from normals and other fanbases. We're gonna to be super useful for getting SM hype when MP drops and defending H from claims he shouldn't have taken the role because hes not gay. But Louis, they do need Louis to keep Larry going just enough (he is kind of necessary for that) and lets be real, make Harry's image more approachable and relatable for us, but they dont want him to come anywhere near reaching his potential as an artist as we've seen proved conclusively by now. This is just more of the same old bullshit they always pull to drag him back down and damage him again because the tour went far too well. Its the same shit. The same people. The same tactics. Damaging syndicated articles, and fandom sabotage 'from his own mouth' except it's always a version of Louis that doesnt exist when you actually see or hear him. It's about us , about Larries, and how easily we can be made to turn on him but only if we never turn on Harry. I really think thats what its all about now.

I actually do think you have a point here, so I’ll add this to what I said - maybe HSHQ do want Larries around, but they want us fully in the background while they continue to cater to his solo fanbase and especially to the locals, who they want listening to his music, buying his album, and attending his concerts. Hardcore fans are important, but those locals are the reason his streaming and overall sales numbers are so high and it’s hard to sustain that interest.

You know, I’ve noticed more and more lately how this side of the fandom's view of Harry strays further and further from the general public view every single day. For example, I constantly see people talking about how het Harries and locals only like “sexy” Harry and how they must HATE the rest of Harry’s stage behavior and clothing. In reality, people have known how Harry acts and dresses for a long time and it adds to their attraction to him. I don’t get how people haven’t picked up on this considering Harry has become MORE popular with the general public and expanded his mostly female fanbase since Vogue. I try to avoid Harry and Louis content on TikTok, but often when it pops up, I find people talking about how Harry was “written by a woman” because he’s masculine while still being in touch with his feminine side and he’s sexy without being threatening. These aspects of Harry’s image that many Larries claim het Harries or the general public hate are actually a huge part of peoples’ perfect boyfriend fantasy of him, and both Harry and HSHQ know that.

It’s just extremely frustrating to watch people come up with excuses and alternative meanings to very clear, unsubtle lyrics (e.g. I bring the pop to the cinema, if you’re getting yourself wet for me, choke her with a sea view), make excuses for certain types of behavior or ignore it entirely (so much of Harry’s stunt content never even makes it to Tumblr, I’ve noticed, while all of Louis’ does), or blame everyone around Harry and then turn around and spew vitriol toward Louis immediately when something happens. Especially considering what the consequences of all of this stuff are for Harry (his career is on the rise) and what the consequences are for Louis (nothing has improved for him in terms of promo or public image even after his sold out world tour).

It’s just hard to watch how Louis gets punished by his fans when he gets nothing out of this shit. This quote you said toward the end: “It’s about us, about Larries, and how easily we can be made to turn on him but only if we never turn on Harry.” You’re right. And it’s horrible.

#asks

[bookandcover]

This month’s read for my family’s Anti-Racism Book Club, Lot, is a compelling, well-crafted portrait of place, family, and the immigrant experience. Somewhere between novel and short story collection, these chapters shift point of view, blending the larger narrative of protagonist Nicolás with other stories from his neighborhood. While the perspectives vary, similar themes unite the work, particularly discussion of queer identity and the intersectional experience of young, gay, men of color. The author’s narrative tone and style is confident, visceral, and stark at every turn, while still exhibiting transcendent moments of love, beauty, and hope against a dark canvas of poverty, infidelity, drug addiction, and violence. The writing uses untranslated Spanish—a literary move I appreciate, as it makes insiders and outsiders of the readers themselves. You know when you are or are not the ideal audience. You know if this book is both for you and deeply not for you as a reader. 

The interwoven narratives and the shifting of points of view was, at times, confusing. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Nicolás’s narrative was spaced out every other story, and we were often cued in to his narrative through the mention of his family members: Jan, Javi, and his Black mother and Jamaican father. One section of Nicolás’s story is told from Jan’s point of view, capturing another angle on the same family. I read the entirety of Chris’s story (with older sister Nikki, and cousin Gloria) thinking that this was the same narrative point of view, and later on I had to look back and sort this out. While this was confusing, it had an interesting effect of blending characters and experiences. Nicolás’s narrative was also out of order and circled throughout his memories. The threading together of all these experiences meant that the book as a whole felt less like a portrait of a family or a plot arc for a single protagonist—all though I felt the presence of these elements—than a portrait of the concept of “shared ground” (ground is shared, literary, in this Houston neighborhood, but also figuratively in the common threads in the experiences of these characters.) 

Nicolás’s plot arc does end with hope (a lot more hope than is contained in some of the other narratives). His name is not revealed until the final story, which focuses on his blossoming love with Miguel, and the possibility that he might be able to trust again, to open his heart to another person after lifelong experiences of broken trust with his family members. At the same time, this is not some kind of heroic “make it out” story, which is also a tension that appears in other characters narratives: TeDarus and his buddy Mix drop out of community college; Avery takes young teen Raúl under his wing, but then stops showing up for their drug distribution route; Poke moves in with Emil, but is unable to save his friend Rod from the streets. Don’t make the mistake, this book seems to be saying, of assuming we’re telling the heroic story, the one where someone is an exception and not the rule, the one were miracles happen, the one where people overcome and escape their very natures. The terrible power of circumstances, of utter lack of resources, of no perceived alternatives is clear: “there’s the world you live in, and then there are constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to look up.” Yet, these stories—the familiar, the everyday, the common, the shared—are just as worthy of being told as the miraculous exceptions. This is an important project of the book as a whole. 

Despite the fatalistic nature of life in this neighborhood—where it might feel like everyone, eventually, is pulled into drugs, just scrapping by financially, normalizing violence and abuse—there is real and tangible life and hope in these stories. One of my favorite stories was Bayou, in which two young men discover an injured, earth-bound chupacabra. Sprung from the pages of Latin American folklore, the chupacabra, in such a realistic book, is surely a suggestion of these kids’ imaginations, an unusually large dog playing tricks on their minds. But then, at the end of story, the chupacabra is very real; its brethren run to collect it, and the two young men stand in shocked awe of their presence. They weren’t able to share their discovery with either the local news or an ex-girlfriend (those who they want most to impress), but these witnessed the fantastical. I loved this twist, which put me in mind of the transcendence of the mongoose in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The gritty realism of the hurt chupacabra that the boys collect made me think of Gabriel García Márquez’s brilliant short story A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings. 

Change is also a threatening and driving force in this book. As much as the theme of “being stuck” pervades these pages, so does the forward march of time and the process of change that is out of the narrators’ control. The gentrification of this neighborhood seeps into the book as Nicolás ages. In a cringey moment, a whiteboy (always written like this) date tells him he’s “living in history.” The impact of hurricanes—Harvey, Rita—is cataloged, showing how the damage to this impoverished area spells the end of a way of life—of a once vibrant cultural community—that was hanging on by only a thread to stability. Nicolás struggles with being the one who remains, at his family home and in the neighborhood, as the demographics change: “and when I was gone, that’d be it—that would be the end of our story.” There is a fatalistic sense of the passage of time, as powerful as the fatalistic sense that Nicolás and Miguel both experience that they will never leave, that they can’t even choose this option, even when they—logistically—could. 

In addition to Bayou, my favorite of the stories was Waugh, the story about Poke, Rod, and their ring of young male prostitutes. While this story, on the surface, was one of the most grim, one that revealed the dark underbelly of the neighborhood and a level of desperation to which Nicolás never fell, it was also poignant and devastating. Poke’s middle-aged lover Emil is a figure with a lot of hope; he doesn’t pressure Poke to be something he’s not and he consistently treats the boy like a human being. Their story ends with real hope for their bond—although also with the possibility that things will fall apart and Poke will be right back where he started. The strongest cause for hope is Emil’s backstory, which reveals the stakes for him in showing care to Poke. Emil’s story about his family fleeing their country (that doesn’t exist anymore), and watching his dad and uncle shot on the side of the road, while his mother took the wheel and took her children to safety will continue to weigh on me. You feel, in the narration of this story, that Emil understands abuse and violence and loss in a different way than the “johns” Poke works for. Yet, Poke is unable to find Rod—his friend, his fellow prostitute who has fallen sick—at the end of story. While perhaps Poke “made it out,” Rod doesn’t, and perhaps Rod’s choice to not join Poke at Emil’s house will be part of Poke’s successful escape. We’re left to wonder this, while Rod certainly believed that he could not impinge on Emil’s kindness and Poke’s delicate position with him. 

Another moment of deep tragedy is Avery seeing his son strung out on drugs at the end of Avery and Raúl’s story, South Congress. Avery, an older drug dealer, takes the young undocumented teen Raúl under his wing. Avery seems to have real hop, in spite of his circumstances. He asks Raúl about his plans for the future. A lot of Avery’s hope rests on his estranged son, who has been raised by the boy’s mother. Avery expresses conviction that his son could “get out,” proud he was a college kid, with a different kind of future. Then, they see him: on the street, completely drugged out of his mind. Furious, Avery beats him, and then he disappears from his and Raúl’s drug circuit. A later mention of a Raúl working at the restaurant where Nicolás and Miguel work made me hope that Raúl’s fortunes slightly improved, but this—like so much in these stories—is no guarantee. 

These stories embody and express complex nuances, insisting on both change and stasis, agency and entrapment, hope and failure. One such nuanced relationship is that between protagonist Nicolás and his older brother Javi. When Javi dies halfway through the book, I found this to be so sad. It’s made clear that Nicolás doesn’t want to sell the restaurant because he doesn’t want anything to change, because if nothing changes maybe his brother will somehow, miraculously, return. At the same time, despite Nicolás’s love for and dependency on his brother, Javi is incredibly abusive and deeply unaccepting of Nicolás. But Nicolás still loves him. I felt Javi’s death through Nicolás, felt the tragedy of the loss despite rationally understanding the terribleness of Javi’s as a brother. This showed how much narrative proximity to Nicolás’s character is developed throughout the book, even as the broader portrait of the neighborhood is painted. 

Appropriately, Nicolás reflects in the final story on the essential nature of the self, and how we each are what we have to live with: “You bring yourself wherever you go. You are the one thing you can never run out on.” As a character who has tried desperately to avoid looking at certain aspects of his life, his decisions, and his emotions, this self-realization is poignant and is what left me with the most hope at the end of the book. No one is exempt from facing themselves, just like no one is exempt from certain risks, whether these be drug addiction, familial death and loss, or mental illness. While there is a disproportionate number of hardships facing those low socio-economic and non-white racial backgrounds, there is also the fundamental nature and experience of being human, which includes tragedy. As I read this book, I thought: some people get lost so far in themselves that they can’t figure out the way back out. And this could happen to anyone. At the end of the book, we see Nicolás symbolically and literally at the edge of the sea and land, trying to do exactly this—find his way back out of himself, so that he can open himself up to love again. 

#lot #bryan washington #important reading #short stories / novels #family anti-racism book club #houston tx #lgbtq+ books

[thatheathen]

Dear Transphobes

What's annoying to me about vile transphobes who tell us to die constantly (ex. "join the 41%" misunderstanding the statistic at the same time) because our existence triggers them so much. These vile bigots with their one trans joke whine endlessly online about how "woke" Netflix is, claiming Netflix is "forcing LGBTQ agenda!" onto people (yet Dave Chappelle's trash standups are still on the app, but whatever). Netflix and every other private business WANTS engagement, they thrive on controversy i.e. shitheads attacking trans people or black people. Profits over human rights; the Corporate media motto.

"THESE SICKO TRANSGENDERS ARE RUINING MY FAVORITE MOVIES!" Bruh, the whole world isn't you. You are not the world -- you triggered little transphobe. These same people will say how LGBTQ are ruining hollywood, but then turn around and call hollywood pedos. Pick a lane, Jesus fuckin Christ. Diehard bigots honestly make less of the population more than people may believe, but that doesn't mean there's no prejudice from others in the world. That happens. You'll never see my trans ass in Florida or Texas to then be surrounded by cruel fascistic bigots making my life hell. No thanks.

I feel for my queer comrades in those fascist states eager to exterminate them. I'd think about moving, or move near people that make you feel safe even if it's still in the same state that's trying to make being queer in public illegal. It's disgusting. Trans Genocide is a real threat these days. Ignoring that means you're not paying attention (I'm looking at you elitist Democrats). But I digress. My heart goes out to all the activists trying their hardest to protect trans youth and fighting for trans rights. I love you all and you're amazing. Arm Trans Women!

The vile bigots who hate queer and gay people on their TV assume Netflix's audience are all dumb, being "brainwashed" by the "woke mob" twisting the arms of Streaming platforms, and nobody thinks for themselves except the pissbaby bigots, fascist ghouls, conservative reactionaries, terfs, and creepy incels... They don't follow any common (toxic) ideology at all right? Hmmm....

All these trash people with their trash opinions are having massive meltdowns on twitter, facebook, reddit, or IMDb reviews ALL because a show has a few queer people in it. Regardless if it's done well or not, whatever the fuck that means, it always makes them breakdown into pure rage and start going off on "clown world" this and that. They furiously keyboard warrior out about how miserable gay people in a movie, tv show, or video game makes them. As if the cisgender heterosexuals are the real oppressed group who are forced to be tormented by homosexual media. Good. Please continue to suffer, I really don't care.

Our queer existence troubles these cretens to an extreme degree it's kinda funny sometimes, but also scary if they decide to take action on their extreme bigotry to any marginalized group that isn't harming them, but rightwing media will FORCE their views onto them, and tell these credulous bigots that queer people are harming society, and thus the next school shooter is born. Progressive values = tyranny. LGBTQ representation = pedophilic normalization. Civil Rights = forced diversity. Woke = communism. Antifascism = cultural marxism. All these rightwing dogwhistles that has roots in antisemitism and white supremacy are eaten up by miserable boomers and people who hate seeing change and basic human rights we fought for, but they believe we don't deserve.

"Free speech!" But not for us though. We leftwing queers can never go out of line and say anything to upset these vile mothersfuckers that continue to boil my blood beyond my patients will allow me to withstand. Simmer down rightwingers, you're not the main characters of the human story. We're a blip in this timeline. Why do we have to waste time on hating LGBTQ folk, Black & Brown people, Muslims, the disabled, and the homeless? Human nature makes us cruel? No. It's bad human behavior and I believe it all can be unlearned. But sure, believe that humans are naturally cruel and we don't naturally love and nurture. Godforbid if that were the mindset of civilization huh?

These fragile homophobes and insecure transphobes don't think that's what's happening to them, being coerced and groomed if you will into believing that trans people are the reason why their life sucks. Trans people are the go-to scapegoat for almost any rightwing grievances in rightwing spheres. The disaffected cishet white males feel like their ignorant violent thoughts are being validated by these far right grifters and far right media pundits that only care about money and ratings. They're all lying to them so much they don't live in our reality at all. Some are too far gone. Don't bother saving them.

Somehow all those lies about trans people from Steven Crowder and Tucker Carlson isn't brainwashing to the transphobic rightwing that obsess over genitalia and controlling people's bodily autonomy. They're "tellin it how it is" which is also annoyingly idiotic. No, they're telling you how to think. It's all opinions not based on any facts. Big difference. It's so easy to see, but they refuse to face reality. The "I think for myself" crowd who also tells you to "do your own research" as some profess they're not right or left, which is complete hogwash bullshittery and plain cowardly to dare to take a stance on anything. Believe in nothing they say.

So I have an unpopular solution for all the vile transphobes out there who have told me to kill myself and tell trans youth to kill themselves when you "simply disagree" with their existence, and don't want trans folk to exist period, while blindly supporting anti-trans legislation etc. Hey I know a really cool way to make the evil wokeness to stop:

#dark thoughts #rant #thatheathen

[gobstoppr]

an essay on why meta knight is transmask

(this was a thread i put on twitter first so formatting might be a lil weird but here it is)

so meta knight never chooses to show his real face to others right

hes someone whos more distant towards others, even to those hes close to, like kirby

and like the thing is that even after having his true face shown dozens of times, it even happening in a colosseum full of waddle dees, he always immediately retreats after it happens

because regardless of what sorta explanation there is to argue for past entries, such as him wanting to be more respected, seen as more mature or stronger than kirby despite resembling his cutesy species,, or just wanting kirby to view him as a someone powerful and important,,

its a bit strange that hed still be so committed to hiding himself yea? like esp in forgotten land. hes been protecting this town, hes defended dreamland time after time, hes one of kirbys closest allies

but even in official art of him all casual with friends, he refuses to take it off

he has nothing to gain from hiding it from his close friends like kirby and such, they are already aware of what he looks like,, and no one ever remarks on it, as even kirby can understand that the answer is simple. he just prefers being seen this way

he does not need any sort of concrete explanation at this point. no big secret to keep. he just feels embarrassed without it, and does not want anyone to see him like that

he feels more comfortable as himself and more confident in his abilities when he is able to have this masked version of himself as the 'real' him

and simply put all i can see here is that this man is trans as hell

this feels very much to me like how presenting and gender identity can often work, its just not in the framing of actual gender terms. he chooses to alter his appearance to change social perception of himself, to feel more comfortable and like it more accuratly represents him

and my favorite part of this right. is how normally the other people in his life treat him. kirby is just as kind and friendly and willing to go all out in duels with him regardless of the fact that he refuses to show his 'real' self

because for him, and the other characters around him, the version of himself he presents to the world is the truest self

i just want you to look at this interaction in kirby fighters 2

in this game, dedede and meta knight are partners in battle, and yes, they are extremely gay (i am very proud of them), however the point i want to get to is that in the final final battle, halfway thru, meta knights mask breaks. and ya know how dedede reacts? he immediately pulls out a different mask for him to wear, not even trying to look at his actual face.

yes, the masks are spooky and evil or whatever, but the reason dedede got them out was not to just win the battle, its to help his friend when meta feels extremely self conscious despite both of em still wanting to finish the fight

his friends just understand hes just like this! and they are supportive!! and it makes me go :D

in conclusion! meta knight is transmask . see what i did there

he is a trans icon and deserves the recognition as such

now check this shit out

#meta knight #metaknight #kirby #text

[yjwhatif]

With the semi/cryptic confirmation of Ed and Barts relationship in the series I have a question:

Do you think everyone knows about them (in world) or do you think they’re keeping it secret from some?

It’s just a thought that’s been in my head recently. It is most likely fuelled by the whole drama of G&B not being able to depict a “specific character” (it’s definitely Bart) as gay. They’ve had to hide the relationship from their audience - because of ridiculous reasons - but there are still moments that bring up the question - Are they? Before the reveals from AskGreg, I kinda thought- well they are clearly not together yet, but perhaps they both have feelings for one another and are just waiting for the other to make the next move because they’re nervous idiots who don’t want to have read the situation wrong — all while their friends are like - seriously guys? just get together already. Kinda like they did in s1 with Wally and Artemis - and I guess early Supermartian as well - which I would have been okay with... though with the likelihood of there being at least another two year time skip you’d probably have missed the getting together moment - which would kinda suck. Anyway. With the information about the chances being they were supposed to clearly be in a relationship throughout S3 — which makes the whole structuring of ILLUSIONS just make sense — it’s got me viewing their moments with a whole new energy. Also, I saw this post by Greg —

And let me just clarify, I have no idea if this is actually referencing the Ed and Bart stuff, it might not be (probably isn't). This is purely me speculating.

My reading of this is they got told they couldn’t depict Bart as gay pretty late on and that specifically affected ILLUSIONS where they likely intended to confirm the relationship with that first shot - the kiss on the cheek moment. Even now that moment is just odd - because it’s there but it’s not - because technically there is no actual kiss… which I think is absolutely the point. It plants the seed without actually breaking any rules - all by keeping the momentum but removing the specific kiss frame. It’s the only moment that I feel is explicit in saying they are in a relationship - everything else you can just read into and imply there’s something - but they technically don’t confirm anything.

The whole thing is actually quite interesting - despite the reasoning for it being totally ridiculous. By keeping/showing what they did... People notice it. People talk about it. People reflect on it. More people talk about it. People writing. Make. Create. Discuss it. An entire audience is formed who want and support it. It’s a whole thing now because people noticed it and generated a positive response to it - and that was before all the AskGreg information. The whole reason YJ got a season 3 is because the fans fought to get it back. Enough people talked about it - and kept talking about it - to convince TPTB that the show should come back. Greg and Brandon know this. They know the power the fans have and maybe they hoped that power would help them again in freeing Bart from these ridiculous restrictions. #letbartoutofthecloset

Obviously, we can't know until S4 is released whether G&B got the permission to confirm Bart's sexuality the way they envisioned - but maybe the responses that came during the release of 3b were enough to convince TPTB that they were fighting a losing battle. But who knows, people in power can be very stubborn at times, so we will just have to see what we get. Fingers crossed they eased up though - and not just because of the Ed/Bart relationship (which I am obviously a fan of -- it's fine if not everyone is) - but because these restrictions on LGBTQ+ content shouldn't be a thing and need to stop -- there is just no validity in them.

Anyhow. despite their not being allowed to officially confirm the relationship, Greg's comment about Ed's having a boyfriend they can't name basically confirms the fact without technically breaking any rules again. Masterfully done Wiesman. With this, it implies the pair are in fact dating during S3 which brings us back to the original question... but who knows??

With the comments of Virgil during ILLUSIONS, it's easy to assume their friends do in fact know. They also seem to have no problem being close and interacting with one another whilst in the presence of others -- that is, except for one moment...

Ever since the first time I saw this episode (ELDER WISDOM) I have always found this moment strange - because Ed seems to get kinda awkward when Barry comes to check on Bart. (Or that's how I see it at least.) He realises Flash is standing there and immediately pulls his head down averting his gaze -- almost like he doesn't want to be seen by the elder. But why? Does Barry not know about the pair -- or maybe he doesn't know about Bart and Ed thinks their current closeness is too revealing -- who's to say Bart's even fully out to the world yet -- who's to say either of them are? We certainly don't since we weren't allowed to be shown. We can't know until we know - so until then we can play the speculation game while we wait.

Bart is certainly a bit of a secret keeper when it comes to being himself. I'm still convinced the Bart we see onscreen is merely his interpretation of what he thinks people expect from a speedster in this time. We saw 'real' Bart, he was snarky and cynical and nothing like the Bart we've had for the past two seasons. He said it himself - he's playing a character - and I don't think he knows how to break out of it - not while the possibility exists that it might hurt those he's grown to care about. Bart wants to be seen a certain way to avoid acknowledging the truth of the past - if people see him as happy and smiley, then no one will question him on things he doesn't want to talk about. The problem with that is you can't hide yourself forever - cracks begin to form and eventually, the truth comes out whether you want it to or not. So who knows how comfortable Bart is revealing any of his true self to those he cares about. Maybe his relationship with Ed will be the thing that finally helps him find comfort in being himself, whilst also trusting others to still accept him as himself... and maybe getting him that bit of therapy he really needs.

This brings us to Eduardo… First, can I just say it made me so happy to see Greg’s confirmation of Ed being gay - though it is slightly annoying that he was robbed of his explicit onscreen reveal in S3 thanks to the drama with Bart. His whole relationship to his powers in S2 to S3 fits the representation of coming to terms with your sexuality/identity from a very negative point of view. Feeling like it’s something that needs fixing or needs to be “cured” - to then finding the light and freedom in accepting yourself for you. His growth between seasons is brilliant. He understands the hate and insecurity the teens are feeling because he felt it himself. He does all he can to help them because he never felt he got that help when he needed it - and no one deserves to feel worse for being who they are. Obviously, the things he talks about are framed in the context of dealing with/accepting the meta-gene - yet there are certain moments where it seems he’s saying more than that…

All of which got me wondering - why did Ed originally runaway? It certainly wasn’t because of the meta-abilities he did not yet have. All he’s ever said on the subject was he thought he wanted to be with his father - the man it seems he barely had a relationship with. No, I think Ed has been running from himself for a long time and his dad just happened to be an actual direction for him to aim for. The way he speaks about his wanting to be “cured” and “praying to get rid of his powers” suggests an upbringing around religion and traditional ideas of there being a ‘normal/proper’ way to be — while anything that doesn’t fit that way is treated as other or something that needs to be changed or 'fixed'. Maybe he ran to avoid being found out and run the risk of being ostracised by those he loved. Or maybe he was found out and leaving wasn’t entirely his choice*. If this was the case, I can certainly imagine him not wanting to come out to his dad for fear of his reaction and completely losing all chance of that father-son relationship they’re both trying so hard to keep. It can seem easier to live in secret than risk the reality of loss. So while the meta-gene likely wasn’t the main thing he was angry about in S2, it was able to become a physical thing he could blame and focus his anger on - without having to think about where his issues truly lied… Though with a bit of time it also became the thing he was comfortable conveying his feelings through...

“I’ve learned to accept, even love my meta-abilities”

I love this line so much and it’s all because of the delivery by Freddy Rodrigues. There is the slightest hint of a pause before he says “meta-abilities”, which gives the impression he was about to say something else before then remembering himself and who he was talking to. Then there’s the small inflecion he put on “love”, which makes it sound like it’s the first time he’s heard himself say the words out loud. I don’t hear him talking about the gene - I hear him talking about finally accepting himself - all of himself - for the first time in maybe ever and finally feeling happy because of it. I hear growth... From being the angry 14-year-old skater who just wanted to run away and escape any way he could. To the 16-year-old councillor/Outsider jumping straight into the danger to protect and inspire those who need it. Both he and Bart are such strong characters with so much more to be seen - especially when it comes to the insecurities which lie behind their masks. They both compliment each other pretty perfectly - both powers-wise and personality-wise - meaning while they try to hide themself from others, I don't think it'll take long for them to realise they can't hide from each other.

Anywho, that’s all the speculatary nonsense I’ve got for today. This turned into such a patchwork of vaguely linkable thoughts I’ve had which barely relate to the one I started with - but that is usually how it goes. Take it as you will…

Also, completely unrelated to YJ, but Bi Tim Drake now exists in dc canon which is really cool - seeing all of the joy it’s sparked has really given me something to smile about this week… There is hope after all. 🌈

— LB ⚡️☀️

* OK so here’s a little random snapshot into the chaos of my mind— as I was writing the Ed stuff I had a scene pop into my head of Ed finally -for whatever reason- having to tell his dad that he didn’t leave his abuelo’s home - he got kicked out. His dads confused about this and asks Why? What did you do? And Ed’s like Nothing… I didn’t do anything wrong… he just… found out something. So Seniors like Found out what Eduardo? And Ed’s getting really nervous now because he doesn’t want to say it - That I, um… I’m… Senior step a fraction closer as he picks up on Ed’s anxiety but remains an appropriate distance - Son? Then after a tensening silence he finally says it - sounding the most vulnerable he has ever been - I’m gay… The silence is there again, heavy and unnerving, neither saying a word. Ed can’t move as he’s lock in his elders unreadable glare. Expecting the worse his head drops to take in the floor - anything that isn’t the disappointment ahead - he feels the urge to disappear burning up inside him - consuming him. Then just as he’s about to escape he’s suddenly grounded by a steadying hand rooting itself on his shoulder. Tentatively he lifts his gaze to witness his father, there, with nothing but love and support in his eyes - Mijo. The clamping in his chest dissipates as all the tension escapes at once, along with the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. Ed embraces his dad and the elder embraces his son. Together. A family.

Anyway. That’s probably a load of rubbish but hey my minds full of it… but basically I really want to see a tender moment between Ed and his dad. For whatever reason. Something where Ed’s in a vulnerable state and in need of some emotional support from his father - and without hesitation his father steps up - because that’s what we haven’t seen from them yet. It would perfectly portray the strength of their relationship as father and son - despite their previous struggles - and prove that Senior is willing to support his son no matter the situation as the father - not just the scientist. Its the final step in their healing journey and I wanna see it so bad!!

#letbartoutofthecloset #long post #my totally random thoughts #bartwatch #eduardo dorado jr #bart allen #young justice #yj #yj outsiders #young justice outsiders #yj season 3 #dc #bartuardo #zetaflash #el dorado #elder wisdom #yj3 #illusion of control #lgbt representation #lgbtq+ #young justice invasion #yj season 2 #relationships #my random ideas #analysis #speculation #identity #sexuality #self acceptance #growth

[fuckyeahisawthat]

I'm just curious (still learning) at what point after 1100 AD would Joe and Nicky been in actual danger due to homophobia? At what point would they have to start lying to people about the nature of their amazing relationship, just to stay safe? Thanks!

(This is in reference to this post, in which I skimmed over like 900 years of sociological changes in identity formation in very very broad strokes.)

So. Here’s the thing. As “western” queer people in the modern world, I think we highly associate safety with being able to be out of the closet. Can I kiss my partner in public or walk down the street holding hands without fear of encountering hate speech or physical violence? Can I tell my friends, family and coworkers about my relationship without fear of social ostracization or economic consequences?

But that’s a very modern perspective. Between “pride parade!!” and “we will definitely be murdered if anyone finds out we are lovers,” there is...A LOT of space for different kinds of historical queer experience.

So it’s not so much that Yusuf and Nicolò could be safely “out of the closet” in 12th century Baghdad but not in 19th century London. It’s not quite as far from that as you might think. But they wouldn’t have thought about it that way.

In the first few hundred years of their existence, the Islamic world was...full of contradictions when it came to homosexuality. You had a strong taboo against adult men being the receptive partner in penetrative sex, but you also had poets--like, the most famous poets of their times--writing tons of homoerotic poetry about desiring young men and boys, and that was normal and even celebrated. (If you’re familiar with the sexual mores of ancient Greece...lots of similarities here.) You had clerics writing about how there should be harsh punishments for “sodomy,” but in practice in everyday life very, very few people were ever actually disciplined in the legal system for something like that. And other forms of sexual activity between men, like kissing and various forms of non-penetrative sex, were just...not a big deal. At the same time there was kind of an unspoken “don’t ask, don’t tell” social contract around sex between men. Like, we know this thing is definitely happening, and we’re not going to talk about it, and that’s what makes it socially acceptable to continue happening. So you can have a society that in the written, religious record looks fairly intolerant toward sex between men; in practice is actually quite tolerant; where everyone sort of knows things about certain people, but where no one is really “out” in the modern sense of the terms.

At the same time, pretty much everywhere in the world at this time but definitely in the Middle East, casual touch between men was much more normalized. Two men holding hands or linking arms when walking down the street, sitting pressed up next to each other, falling asleep with your head on your male companion’s shoulder...a whole range of things that look decidedly snuggly to our modern gaze would have been totally acceptable between friends of the same gender, and would not have been considered sexual in any way. (This is still true in much of the Middle East today.)

So you can easily imagine a scenario where, like, Nicolò is lounging with his head on Yusuf’s shoulder, eating dates and listening to some saucy Abu Nuwas poem being recited, and then they go back to their private quarters and they have as much sex as they want. Are they “out”? Not really. Is anyone bothering them about how they’re living their lives? Not in the slightest. Do some people in that room see them and know? Probably, but that’s their private business and we’re not gonna talk about it. Frankly that sounds like a pretty sweet existence for a 12th century queer.

To be fair, they have a few advantages. They’re men, which means no one will really question them traveling together, without wives or families. They can easily say they’re friends or business partners and no one will really give it a second thought. I’m sure having to break off contact with their families was sad, but it’s also the case that there’s no one around asking when they’re going to get married to a woman and have children so we have someone to inherit the family business. It gives them a kind of freedom that a lot of other queer people around them wouldn’t have had.

I think once they meet up with Andy and Quynh, they do do things like pretending to be two married couples traveling together. But that’s more because of sexism, because two unmarried women traveling with two men who were not their husbands would turn some heads.

In Europe at the time, Christian theology is pretty not-into all kinds of non-procreative sex, but sex between men is not necessarily viewed as a worse sin than, say, masturbation, or sex between men and women out of wedlock. And it’s like, a category of sin that a lot of people are doing all the time, so if you were to confess such a thing to your local priest, you would be told to do penance but the consequences would be fairly mild. And many of the same things regarding casual touch hold true. Various rituals of kissing, including men kissing men on the mouth, are used as greetings, to seal contracts, and as part of mass.

Medieval Europe also had a concept variously called passionate, romantic, or chivalric friendship--close relationships between two people of the same gender that could be long-lasting, physically affectionate, emotionally intense in a way we would today read as romantic, and (allegedly) celibate. Were some of these passionate friendships actually queer relationships with a sexual component that just wasn’t talked about? Probably. Were some of them what we would define as queerplatonic or homoromantic asexual relationships today? Probably. Is it even useful to try to stuff these experiences into modern relationship categories? Debatable. The point is...the borders between what was defined as friendship, romance and love were different. Two men who traveled together, slept in the same bed, shared resources, were emotionally intimate with each other, and otherwise entwined their lives would not necessarily have been assumed to be sex partners in medieval Europe. And (I think this is the important part) Yusuf and Nicolò would not necessarily have seen being perceived as passionate friends as “hiding” the true nature of their relationship or as assigning some lesser value to it.

In terms of how they are perceived in public, I think things really don’t start to change until the early 20th century. It’s a gradual process, but over the first half of the 20th century, more or less, affectionate touch between men becomes defined as “gay” and a mainstream (straight) masculinity that is concerned with defining itself as “not gay” emerges. Affectionate touch, and then any show of loving emotion between men, gradually becomes less and less acceptable, to a degree that probably seems absurd to two 900-year-old Mediterraneans. (The absurdity is really well-expressed in the van scene, which is literally like “Bro is it gay to [checks notes]...express concern about the well-being of the person you were just violently kidnapped with?”)

Like, on the one hand, you have queer people talking openly about their sexuality in ways that were not an option at earlier times in their lives. But at the same time you have to be careful holding hands walking down the high street now because someone might chuck an empty beer bottle at you. Must’ve been a real wild transition for them.

#the old guard #long post #joe x nicky #nicolò di genova #yusuf al kaysani #queers through the ages #asks answered #graceundersunshine

[centrally-unplanned]

The Liminal 90's of River's Edge

River’s Edge, a 1993 josei manga by Kyoko Okazaki, is something I picked up primarily due to hearing through the ‘net-vine of its influence on FLCL. Which is clearly there – adrift teens smoking on a bridge?

A smog-belching factory defining the grim normality of the town they live in, whose purpose is commented on to be unknown to the characters?

FLCL is a hodgepodge of cultural symbols and River’s Edge certainly part of the, uh, hodge. The parallels end there though – River’s Edge is *peak* josei in that it is utterly engulfed in the edgy drama of its high school protagonists. There is no way around the fact that this just isn’t a very good story, when it has plotlines such as boyfriend of Haruna, the main character:

1: cheating on her with her close friend,

2: which they do while doing hard drugs together,

3: resulting her getting knocked up,

4: which her hikikomori sister finds out via reading her diary (the 90’s!)

5: prompting them to get into a *knife fight*, the wounds of which abort the baby

And that is the most tame of these plotlines, trust me. By the time the gay character’s fake-but-she-doesn’t-know-it girlfriend *immolates herself* for attention you are willing to flee to the nearest monastic order to just chill out for life. This manga is 14 chapters y’all, you can finish it in under an hour, there is not enough character screen time to justify this level of drama. Its a classic early-adolescent fiction problem; your first time hearing about sex and death is so cool! So *real*! But once the novelty wears off there are no characters underneath, the shock is a magician’s misdirect so you don’t notice the hollowness behind the curtain.

We also forget how much the digital revolution has changed art in fast-paced, low-cost genres like manga by allowing consistency and polish; Okazaki is an accomplished, well known mangaka and some of these panels are so messy and detail-less:

Which isn’t a criticism per se as this was what the genre looked like at the time, and much of the art is great, but it's just to say overall this isn't a visuals-first affair. It relies on writing that just doesn’t deliver.

------

At least most of the time, because in its overwhelmingly maudlin current are ripples of some really good moments. My standout is when the narrator voice goes poetic, setting up a repeated motif:

Even as it is a bit cheesy this motif still spoke to me, the “flat battlefield”, the power of that phrase the story imbued into it. A fight with no contours to its course, no metrics to measure victory by? You don’t need to experience a knife-fight abortion to get that struggle, my daily mundane life is that (obliquely, through a certain lens at a certain time when the mood is just right/wrong). That is the universal feeling of ennui and social displacement these kinds of stories aim to have empathy for, and that the rest of this story failed to achieve. And credit where it is due – main girl Haruna, who narrates this and through whose eyes most of this story happens, doesn’t really have much drama at all in comparison to her peers. While they do insane shit she just watches and helps where she can from the sidelines, defined by her listlessness as opposed to everyone else’s tragedy. The flat battlefield is exactly the kind of pain someone like Haruna would feel – this arc works.

From the social critic lens, what I think is more notable about this story is what it does not contain. Its universal aspirations are betrayed by how utterly of its time it is. River’s Edge falls into the edgy-punk sphere, but original punk was defined by its targets - The Man, The Establishment, the polluted cityscapes and imprisoned activists, Thatcher’s & Reagan’s right wing triumphalism, original punk knew what it stood against. In the post cold-war, mass-culture era of the 90’s, however, the appeal of those causes faded – how could things so distant and so temporal be the cause of such deep personal ills? It's often said that Japan predicts America’s cultural movements ten years out, but in this case it was right on time – 1993’s River’s Edge flows neatly alongside the 90’s American counterculture void.

But we no longer live in those liminal 90’s, that void between the intensity of the 60’s+ social revolution and today – we now have causes, but they are, ahem, as personal as they are political. Sad edgy teens are no longer sad or edgy – they instead fall somewhere on the Depressed/Oppressed axis, their condition diagnosed. Alienation is now a mental health issue (with treatments, certainly always effective yep yep, criminally underfunded and denied to those who need them), gay teens struggle for acceptance as a political cause. Even if the problems are inwardly focused, the solution can be translocated outward – change media, change language, change executive leadership, only then can the struggle be resolved. It’s the grand cycle of history – the teen edginess is activist again, even if the targets are wildly different.

River’s Edge never mentions the word ‘depression’. No one mentions therapy, or acceptance, or really any solution to their various problems - the problems are experienced internally but exist externally, a world broken only by a vague sense of ‘modernity’, if anything at all. The language in which this state of mind is discussed is now antiquated, a sort of radical acceptance of hopelessness as the natural state of man. Its aspirations to universalism have already been left in the dust of the changing times, an ill-fitting, out-of-fashion way of thinking even as Depression Fics dominates its former niche.

Which is why this otherwise-silly story still spoke to me, as I still resonate with that way of thinking more than anything else in vogue. I keep being told something is out there, but all I ever see is an endless horizon - and I am glad to once again share the view.

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Anyway, happy 30th anniversary to Smells Like Teen Spirit!

#River's Edge #essay #I don't read too much manga but I do aspire to change that #this probably ranks an 8 on the 'insufferable writing' scale but I had fun with it regardless #90's nihilism

[onebizarrekai]

undeniable proof that shuichi and kokichi were gay in v3

prepare yourself for the most big brain thing that has ever bigged your brain

chapter 1

shuichi saihara spends this chapter following kaede around because they were just trapped in a godforsaken killing game and everything seems to suck. when faced with a situation such as this, the natural inclination is to either find someone to latch onto or to distrust and stick to oneself. shuichi does the former because he is a twiggy little man who would probably die in a fight before anyone even attacked him.

what is kokichi doing in this chapter? sticking to himself? stalking someone? that is the real question. nobody knows what he is doing because he is not the protagonist and not the obligatory party companion. however, since v3 follows a theme of fiction, it is totally logical to believe that some system must be in place, but kokichi is not bound by such a system because kokichi represents anarchy.

he does not stick with another for all to see, nor does he remain alone. alas, he searches for a secret companion and has not found one yet. who shall he find? shall he find any? the truth is, he gravitates towards shuichi. it’s supposed to be in secret, but there is a way in the game to see what really happened.

if you speak to tsumugi right before everyone is asked to gather at the cafeteria a second time, she mentions sonic the hedgehog. kokichi runs by, saying “got to go fast”. this means that kokichi has either played sonic the hedgehog or is at least well-versed in sonic memes. if you get this dialogue, and only if you get it, later, kokichi makes another sonic reference, saying “faker? I think you’re the fake hedgehog around here!” while he confuses everyone, the dialogue makes the odd choice of stopping on shuichi, even though the dialogue box only includes “…” and nothing else.

chapter 2

if you have unlocked tsumugi’s sonic dialogue and go to the monomono machine, you now have a 5% chance of getting sonic merchandise. if you give this merchandise to kokichi, you get some interesting dialogue. he says “wow, shuichi! how did you know that I grew up playing sonic and that it’s my absolute favorite video game series of all time?” this immediately maxes out all 5 of his friendship fragments, and you can get all 5 of his hangouts without giving him any more presents. you’re probably wondering why this is important, but you will see.

as kaede is now dead, shuichi finds himself horribly alone. while kaito is there and starts calling him his sidekick, the force of protagonist syndrome has caused shuichi to gain the courage to hang out with anyone, including kokichi of course. I don’t need to talk about kokichi’s hangouts. they literally end with “I stole your heart, so now I’m satisfied!” and it doesn’t get gayer than that.

or does it?

if you investigate the bathroom part of ryoma’s lab during this chapter and click on a very specific spot in order to enter one of the stalls, you can click on the toilet 5 times and shuichi will lie down on the floor. while it’s to investigate the underside of the toilet, and there is nothing to be found, the words “kokichi was here” are written on the ceiling above the stall. if you’ve already hung out with kokichi at least once in this chapter, shuichi will sigh and wonder what kokichi is doing right now.

if you’ve given kokichi the sonic merchandise, and you reach kokichi’s final free time event in this chapter, he will actually question shuichi after he finishes bandaging kokichi’s finger up, briefly commenting on how shuichi managed to get close to him so quickly and asking him “what his trick is”. he says “you must like me a whole lot, shuichi. I hope you don’t bail on me after this.” word for word, literally just hear me out.

“kokichi places his warm hand on mine, and I feel like he’s prying much deeper than he usually does.”

“I didn’t think that was possible…”

chapter 3

little did you know, giving kokichi the sonic merchandise unlocked a bonus hangout. yes, you heard me right. a WHOLE bonus hangout. you can hang out with him again whenever you want in this chapter. kokichi only says “good to see you.” you can select yes or no.

the screen will fade to black.

you have used up a free time.

if you have reached this hidden part of kokichi’s relationship sequence, random dialogue that isn’t in the normal game starts getting sprinkled in, as well as certain easter eggs. when angie starts her whole shtick, since you’ve already hung out with kokichi 5 times, there are a few things he has to say straight up, like how he’s going to teach shuichi about cults so shuichi doesn’t accidentally join the student council.

chapter 4

now that you’ve finally reached chapter 4 and activated the secret kokichi pathway, you get a hidden scene, much like the others that are triggered by having specific items in your inventory. in the middle of the night, kokichi breaks into shuichi’s room and shakes him awake, telling him that someone stole his almond milk.

shuichi tells kokichi to shut up and rolls over.

fun fact, if you get the hangout with miu where she checks whether shuichi is a virgin, she does, in fact, say “ha, I can’t believe this!” and if you zoom in the window behind her, you can barely make out kokichi’s face. peering in. watching you. if you click on him at any point during this hangout, you will hear a voice clip of kokichi’s laugh and shuichi will internally respond to miu’s dialogue differently. he will think “miu is the last person I need to know about this…”

in this sonic dialogue route, shuichi responds slightly differently to kokichi revealing that he is the mastermind. although his dialogue is mostly the same, he counts approximately 22 extra crying sprites, implied to be caused by additional heartbreak.

chapter 5-6

these chapters play out mostly the same way until the very end, the only exception being when you’re investigating kokichi’s lab. if you click on kokichi’s throne 13 times, one of the bookshelves will slide out of the way to reveal a hidden bathroom. there is an envelope taped to the wall that says “for my beloved detective, who habitually smacks things over and over.” it says “if you’re reading this, I’m probably dead. or am I? wouldn’t you like to know? nishishi.” shuichi comments about the fact that kokichi literally wrote that stupid laugh out, only to start crying again.

make sure that you have kind lie equipped as one of your skills before you start the final trial.

if you’ve done everything exactly according to plan up to this point, the ending is different.

tsumugi decides to show kokichi’s audition tape instead of kaede’s. he says “I’d love to be a part of danganronpa! I can finally be a bad guy without being scared!” but then kokichi looks directly at the camera. he says “naw, just messing with you. guess who?”

the screen cracks.

kokichi has suddenly entered the scene of the trial. tsumugi looks horrified. her wig falls off. everyone is at a loss for words. suddenly the screens and lights around them start to black out until everyone is left in almost complete darkness.

shuichi finally asks kokichi how he’s alive. he’s like, “you DIED” and kokichi is like “or did I? it’s the grand finale, shuichi! I owe you the truth this one time, because you’re my favorite.” everyone listens intently. “you see, by observing your irrational actions, almost like that of a main character… I was able to conclude that we exist in a fictional world that plays by certain rules. but we all been knew, didn’t we? not quite! someone forgot to test for exploits.” himiko just goes like “what the fuck you smokin?” and kokichi just laughs. “my self awareness has given me more power than you can possibly imagine! let’s just say I learned where the hit boxes are broken and installed a few cheat codes in the meantime!”

“no… that’s impossible! this isn’t supposed to be part of the ending at all!” tsumugi doesn’t like that one bit. she just kinda breaks down crying. shuichi isn’t paying attention to her though. he had accepted oblivion only to be greeted with kokichi being alive. as annoying as kokichi is, they are hopelessly in love. maki is a little disturbed.

after passionately reuniting with shuichi, kokichi says the thing. “this world is mine now, tsumugi! you got nothin on this! it’s time to say goodbye to this trash dump and create a new reality!” tsumugi just kinda goes like “noooo!!!”

everything goes black. shuichi has a vision about entering creative mode. kokichi has opped him. they take hands. “let’s create someplace way more fun.” maki and himiko and keebo look at each other because they’re floating in the background and watching this happen even though it’s supposed to be an internal vision. the screen goes white.

shuichi graces us with some internal protagonist dialogue about how he doesn’t really understand what’s happening anymore or what’s waiting for them outside of this world, but he thinks that things might turn out ok.

after unlocking this ending, you unlock a super secret video that you can view from the main menu. it’s a fully animated video of kokichi and dice dancing to world is mine. this is what they spent all their budget on

#april fools #saiouma #oumasai #ndrv3 #shitpost #I spent like 3 hours writing this #drv3 spoilers #random stuff #shuichi saihara #kokichi ouma