plsgivemebackmysocks

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I’m compelled by stories where the characters suffer a lot, but only if there’s catharsis in the end. If they just die without ever getting to recover I’m OUT because what’s the fucking purpose then? Voyeurism? Bye

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I’m a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went “It’s a boy!” and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?

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There is a comfortable feeling in small towns. It is salubrious

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[translation:

Damn those lesbians

they’ve scandalized noble women

They’ve made war without spears

and instead clash shield against shield]

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What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three and two and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

I’m eleven today. I’m eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one, but I wish I was one hundred and two. I wish I was anything but eleven, because I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so tiny-tiny you have to close your eyes to see.

sandra cisneros; eleven

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ADS THAT SUDDENLY TAKE UP THE WHOLE PAGE

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Lena Luthor on Supergirl 5x17

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i’ll literally never have enough of that dylan b hollis dude cause like. hes a college student who just.,.blew up on tiktok. he has the soul of a man who has lived for 60 years in the body of a twink. he cooks and is surprised every single time. he goes CINAMIN everytime he uses cinnamon. he has the kitchen of a 60s house wife and cooks like hes going to kill someone

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did my heart break because of this? yes it did. am I going to cry? absolutely.

i need you all to look at this as closely as i did so you can spot lena’s tear falling down after brainy says i miss her

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I am going to do everything I can to escape

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Who is the dead soul occupying Myrine in Xenia's route?

When Xenia's Sixth Season began, we were treated to this scene:

I had an inkling, based on the happenings of Season 5, as to who the missing soul is. If you recall, Xenia, Ruelle and MC go to the Autumn Temple to search through all the old souls there to see if they can discover who is missing. This goes back to Season 4 when Xenia is sent a letter signed "Val", but after conferring with Danilo, it is confirmed that this is not Val, but rather the acts of a soul who had gone missing about 11 years ago - coincidentally, the exact number of years ago that Xenia attempted (and failed) to resurrect Val.

While at the Temple, MC is drawn to an older section. Ruelle asks why she is going there, that those souls died 100 spans ago. And what happened 100 spans ago? The assassination attempt on the Two Queens that led Safir to fall to a permanent sleep and Edera to flee with their daughter.

But aquagirl, we know who was behind the attempted murder, a Prince of Winter. Even says so in the opening scenes to Sevastian's route.

In case any of you did not read Sevastian's route, I can tell you this - we learn that the Prince of Winter who was beheaded was innocent. He was a friend of the Queens, and as a final act of loyalty to protect them, allowed himself to be beheaded. So...the real assassin is still out there.

Now back to Xenia. I believe that the missing soul is that of the true assassin, more specifically, perhaps the former spymistress. In Myrine's response to Xenia above: "Someone else has taken up the mantle of pulling the strings that keep the nation moving."

This is further confirmed when you go back to the first scenes of Xenia's route - here, we have mentions of spies turning against the Queen and working with the assassin.

One of the fascinating things about Reigning Passions is its world building, and how all these pieces of the prologue are finally coming together, making more sense of the puzzle.

I'll leave you with the last piece of this puzzle - but I'm going to let @silverteresa discuss this one. Not only is she the Piama expert, but also the one working with me on this theory (as well as the Winter Piama theory).

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Same Energy

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Vivienne's heart:

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i know that like if we want the rewards of being loved we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known but like what are the rewards of being loved? are they really worth all that? you talk of love and loving often and sometimes im so in your corner but other times it just makes me angry. is it really all that great?

This ask has been in my inbox for a number of days now, and honestly, every time I try and contemplate what it’s asking my mind stalls. “What are the rewards of being loved?” reads like like asking what kind of cheese the moon is made of, or how much dark there is before the dawn. It’s definitely a question! Theoretically it has an answer! But what kind of answer can I give that will make sense, since apparently….the reward of being loved isn’t being loved.

I mean, in the original essay, the one that gave birth to the meme, the trigger for “being known” is not really all that mortifying. Timothy Kreider emailed his friends about a herd of goats he was renting. Someone accidentally replied-all “oof,” which inspired the reflection about the gap between how we imagine people see us (charmingly off-beat renter of goats, perfect) and how we are actually known by the people in our lives (someone who fritters away their income renting a herd of goats for no discernible reason.)  Kreider concludes that this actually isn’t a gap at all—we are all fully capable of loving people profoundly while still seeing their faults, finding things they do annoying, and commiserating with mutual friends about that person’s quirks. 

I as an individual might like to think I am exempt from this, that I am dazzling and charming and the people who like me don’t even notice my foibles, but the truth is they do, it just doesn’t effect their love for me. 

Hence the “mortifying ordeal”—not only do I have to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s gaze, but I then have to accept that the people who like me do it in full knowledge of who I am. At any given moment, people are walking around fully aware of the fact that I’m a know-it-all and a bad loser, that I am not always emotionally available; my first instinct is to argue and my taste in music is somehow pedestrian and pretentious at once, that I am mostly trying, and a lot of times I fail. All the less-than-perfect things inside me are not secreted out of view; they are very obvious to anyone who has spent enough time with me, who has chosen to be around me for more than a half hour.

And that’s the people who like me!

So if we didn’t want to be known, deep down under all the squirming icky, insecure mess that makes being known such a terrifying prospect, then you’re right. The ordeal isn’t worth it, we should all pack up and go home, because people are always going to fucking see us. The random coworker who watches your face during a meeting knows you; the cousin who listened to your snarky comment knows you. You stumble through the world being known, inevitably, inexorably.

But being seen is necessary to be truly loved—and when it comes down to it, to be loved is to be real. Kreider references The Velveteen Rabbit in his follow-up article, appropriately titled “I Am a Meme Now.” I don’t think he’s wrong to draw on the idea that people observing our secret places, our weird faces, our strange comments and experience of the world makes them ultimate more real. Our experience lives inside us, in our head and impulse and feeling, so we are not objective in this—but we can’t escape all that leak out of us into the sight of others either. We can’t escape being known by someone who isn’t us, and rendered more than just our subjective selves through them. (In some ways, being known by someone else can be even truer than what we know about ourselves.)

The reward of all this—the only one that counts—is that sometimes, someone looks into your bloody beating insides and stays. They see your ugly expressions and listen to your nasty comments and peel back the heavy, wet layers of your intestines to see the guts beneath and still, they love you anyway. 

It is the closest thing to a miracle most of us will experience.

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Woah. Nice!

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There’s so much symbolism in mc kissing Xenia through her mourning veil. Her hands are woven in mc hair, pulling her close, but they’re still separated by her loss. It’s like a visual representation of “I’ll sit with you in the pain.”

This is beautiful. I-

I have nothing to add. - Mod JD