sixwingedknight - Tumblr blog

[sixwingedknight]

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation. the goal, for them, was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-deprivation that so many of us learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

[sixwingedknight]

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[sixwingedknight]

my personal argument for open borders is really simple it just boils down to "i believe restricting human movement and barring certain people from certain places on this earth is a human rights violation"

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[sixwingedknight]

Lighthouse in Breaking Waves, Hendrik Willem Mesdag, c. 1900 - c. 1907

[sixwingedknight]

To them, she is something else - something frightening.

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[sixwingedknight]

tumblr is, if anything, the Appalachia of social media...easy to get lost, sparsely populated, out of the loop with fast-moving modern trends. Attached to tradition. Close-knit communities. Believe in "talk shit, get hit." Everyone is doing their own thing in their own obscure little holler. Prone to pulling the most inventive turns of phrase you've ever heard out of nowhere. Somebody's always starting a racket. We sometimes repel outsiders with much aggression. Lots of talk about hell and damnation to be found. Everybody tends to forget about us for some reason

[sixwingedknight]

Falin ❤️

twt | inst

[sixwingedknight]

Straight man jumped in Gay City for refusing to twerk

[sixwingedknight]

being moderately proficient with computers in the early 2010s was casting a hex on your family to call you sheldon

[sixwingedknight]

YOUNG WOMAN - Actually, detective, I'm a woman.

EMPATHY [Easy: Success] - She says it so insistently, as if arguing with you. You may have upset her.

COMPOSURE [Formidable: Failure] - You feel a pit in your stomach. You did something wrong, but you don't know what.

LOGIC [Trivial: Success] - Her way of dressing, the feminine name, yet deep voice - it should have been clear to you sooner. She's transgender.

ESPIRIT DE CORPS [Formidable: Success] - Almost imperceptible, the lieutenant anxiously twitches his eyebrow.

DAMAGED MORALE - 1

Transgender? What's that?

This doesn't have any bearing on the investigation.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Trivial: Success] - A transgender person is someone who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Oftentimes they will dress conforming to their desired gender roles, change their names, and seek medical intervention to, "transition."

Gender is rather bourgeois, anyway.

Why would any proud Revacholian discard their masculinity?

Changing your gender? That sounds like quite the hustle. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from this woman.

That's cool. I have no opinion on this one way or another.

RHETORIC [Medium: Success] - Just as Mazov dared to challenge the established order of capitalism, so too do others challenge the order of things such as sex and gender.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] - IT'S BEEN SO LONG SINCE WE'VE FELT THE TOUCH OF A WOMAN. WHO CARES IF SHE USED TO BE A MAN? HAVE SEX WITH HER NOW! ITS WHAT A REAL MAN WOULD DO!

EMPATHY - [Trivial: Success] - Don't do that. It's clear now, you upset her for accidentally calling her a man. Just apologize.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Profusely.

ESPIRIT DE CORPS [Medium: Success] - It's important to be a good ally.

DRAMA [Medium: Success] - Make a real show of it, sire!

"Oh, I didn't realize. I'm sorry."

"I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'll leave you alone forever now."

"I haven't been a good representative of the RCM. We're here to help the people of Martinaise, no matter their identity. I'm sorry to have let you down."

[Drama - Legendary 14] Try and come up with an elaborate, heartfelt apology in the style of the turn of the century thespians.

HIGH 83% +1 Found testosterone ampoule on nightstand. +1 Homo-Sexual Underground. +1 Read about the turn of the century thespians. -1 Recovered your gun. -1 Masculinity challenged. This is a Red Check. It cannot be retried.

⚀⚀

CHECK FAILURE

YOU - You try and come up with the words to convey your apology to the young woman, but you come up blank. It's hard to fit, "transgender" into iambic pentameter, as it turns out.

DRAMA - I'm sorry, sire. I have failed you.

KIM KITSURAGI - "Detective? You've been standing there for a whole minute. Are you okay?"

ESPIRIT DE CORPS - Shit, the lieutenant is onto us. We have to say something soon, or we could lose him.

COMPOSURE [Trivial: Success] - Don't worry, we can still salvage this. Anyone have any ideas?

VOLITION [Heroic: Failure] - Let me handle this.

You - "I'm so sorry, I'm so fucking sorry. I'm such a fucking failure. Do you want me to kill myself?"

[sixwingedknight]

You’re in her dms I left her on read for 6 weeks because I’m emotionally incompetent

[sixwingedknight]

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.