saint-starflicker - Tumblr blog

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far too old to care about fandom opinions i am an adult with a *sees a take* hm. never mind actually. i am in fact so blessed to have a huge brain and correct inconsequential opinions on fictional characters. there but for the grace of god go i

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hello beloveds ☺️

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i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit

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It was the accidental fandom annexation by fans of House of the Dragon and Doctor Who. (I think Michael Gavey's actor played a younger version of Matt Smith's character? I don't know, I don't watch HotD.)

looking through my old lurking tumblr to find that i blocked the michael gavey tag back in november. crazy there was a point when the majority of the saltburn content was about that freak...

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everyone: writing fanfiction is a great way to explore your various sexual fantasies 

me, through clenched teeth: what if they lived in a TINY house and took NAPS all the time

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i'm sorry but this is the only submission to this trend that i'll consider giving any thought to

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this is not even an internet persona i am just like this and i think thats even worse

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"Guy" and "man" have different connotations with adjectival nouns. Like "tree guy" = arborist but "tree man" = he lives in a tree, or maybe he is a tree.

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no one ever warns you about this about adulthood but no one tells you how important surfaces become to you. like it's a perpetual struggle to get enough surfaces in your life and then in turn keeping those surfaces clean

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Shirt that says REJECTING ONE INCORRECTLY BLACK AND WHITE VIEW OF HISTORY FOR ANOTHER IS NOT PROGRESS

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I voted for These Violent Delights but if you liked The Poppy War and maybe Babel also by R.F. Kuang then you might like...

Fraternity by Andy Mientus has a sad central character, an OP otherworldly being, and a decent amount of lore.

This was the first book I found marketed as Dark Academia, but the author writes from his personal experiences attending a red-brick-walled ivy-covered boarding school and dabbling in the occult but I think it was ghost hunting in his real life instead of demon-summoning. But in this book it's demon-summoning.

Fires of the Faithful and its sequel, Turning the Storm, by Naomi Kritzer. It's also like Babel but with white Italian violinist lesbian characters, and instead of linguistics intersecting with colonialism issues it's institutionalized religion intersecting with...climate change issues...

Sad main character, OP substance-addict girlfriend (ex-girlfriend?), a decent amount of lore.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, I just think was fun. It's hardly the same genre as the books in the poll, but I would argue that it has very Light Academia vibes without the campus academia. It's a cleverly written epistolary story about escaping a language-venerating cult on an island. Despite that subject matter between the lines, I do swear this one keeps things light.

If you end up liking These Violent Delights then boy oh boys have I got a literary toxic yaoi rabbit hole to follow that up with.

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Opposing Israel, opposing zionists, opposing genocide is not antisemitism.

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SAILOR MOON APPLEYJUICE SIPPERS WATCHING ON BOX TV CHANNELS OF SCHEDULED SYNDICATED SHOWS, SWEEEEEEEP

edit: THIS POST BREACHED THE CONTAINMENT OF THE TARGET AUDIENCE, "28-YEAR-OLDS WHO SAW THEIR FIRST ANIMES IN PIECES ON YOUTUBE DURING THEIR TEENAGE YEARS." PEOPLE WHO WATCHED SAILOR MOON WHILE SIPPING APPLEY JUICE IN PRESCHOOL I'M SORRY I GUESS THIS ONE ISN'T FOR YOU

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So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

[saint-starflicker]

it’s okay if your comphet turns out to be genuine attraction to men. it can be hard to differentiate. finding out you’re bi instead of a lesbian is okay. self-discovery is a good thing and you’re not invalidating lesbians by figuring out your sexuality

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Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT