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pride 2025

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happy make a terrible comic day!!! i haven't stopped thinking about this post since i saw it. in 2018 a common merganser was spotted with 76 (SEVENTY SIX!!!) chicks!! that's SOOOO many baby. so much success.

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'I’m not trying to ‘claim’ Austen as asexual or aromantic. We can never know how someone from the past might have identified if they were alive today. The point is: we miss something when we assume that sexual and romantic feelings have been the greatest consideration of anyone’s life, and fail to look at the relationships they did value.'

I really wanted to write about the potiential of Jane Austen being aspec in my book - and, more importantly, why we need to stop obsessing over her romantic life altogether. But I had to cut it for space, so... here it is in article form!

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'I’m not trying to ‘claim’ Austen as asexual or aromantic. We can never know how someone from the past might have identified if they were alive today. The point is: we miss something when we assume that sexual and romantic feelings have been the greatest consideration of anyone’s life, and fail to look at the relationships they did value.'

I really wanted to write about the potiential of Jane Austen being aspec in my book - and, more importantly, why we need to stop obsessing over her romantic life altogether. But I had to cut it for space, so... here it is in article form!

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add yours!

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What a day of unexpected splendor💕

(I finally finished my Veilguard stamp rally prize for Anime Expo woo!!)

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I finished reading your book! I loved every part of it, I've been wanting to scream about how recognisable it was and how much it spoke to my soul since, oh... the first paragraph? Hearing all those stories of people with the same experiences as me filled me with such warmth and recognition. I felt seen and understood in the absolute best way.

Chapter 4 in particular was a bit of a revelation and helped clarify some stuff I'd been feeling for a long time. I had no idea so many ace people had the "meh, whatever" feeling about gender, and especially that quote about "rounding down to female the way pi rounds down to 3" really spoke to me (and to my engineer brain). Thank you so much for putting down to paper so many of the things I have always kinda innately understood but have never been able to articulate properly.

I wanted to share something that gave me hope recently: this local bank in New Zealand is offering a new kind of home loan called a co-own, where a home loan can be split between any combination of "friends or whānau (family)" their information page even includes some example of groups who have used the service, like 'couple + friend' or 'three mates'. Maybe it's only a shallow corporate incentive to bring in more customers, or maybe it's a sign of the financial times that even a traditional monogamous+romantic couple don't have the resources to buy a house on their own, but seeing those ads on TV gave me hope that maybe one day I would be able to buy a home with a family of my own, even if I didn't want a traditional partnership or marriage.

https://www.kiwibank.co.nz/personal-banking/home-loans/getting-a-home-loan/co-own/

Oh, thank you so, so much for this! I'm so, so glad you felt understood. It was so, so important to me that this book could feel like home for people - somewhere to be seen and welcomed and accepted.

I'll be honest: publishing this book was sometimes incredibly stressful, and I lost count of the number of times I heard 'well, we'd like to help you publicise this, but it's such a niche topic from an unknown author!' I kept going by telling myself 'if this helps one person, it's worth it', and getting responses like this really helps me be certain that I was right :')

And that really is an incredible piece of news! I'll do some research into that and might even write an article on it if I have the time, to help get the word out. It'd be amazing if other governments could be encouraged to do the same thing. Thanks so much for sharing this!

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Where do you fall on the "killing vs. not killing bad guys" argument? I know the debate is complicated and there's a lot of various factors for and against either side, so I wanna hear your take on things.

An intensely complicated subject that tends to get oversimplified on both sides of the equation. I generally don't like to take a "side" on this because I feel like the idea of there being "sides" on killing misses the point.

Unless you're talking about cold-blooded execution of a subdued foe, killing generally isn't a choice you get to make. It's a consequence of the choice you already made to use violence.

While arguments about killing villains exist beyond superhero comics, this is a particular way that they tend to happen in superhero media. Superhero stories depict their heroes as, effectively, SWAT teams. The Green Goblin is about to blow up Newark, so Spider-Man breaks in and smashes his face against a brick wall until he passes out.

Part of the fantasy is the idea that nonlethal violence is easy and reliable. After Spider-Man reduces the Green Goblin's HP to 0, a Windows menu pops up and says "Would you like to finish him?" Spider-Man boldly clicks "No" after every fight like the hero he is.

It allows fans to enjoy brutal takedowns of bad guys without having to reckon with the reality that when Batman brought an entire floor down on top of that guy's head, he probably didn't wake up in a hospital bed. Batman can throw a guy off a third story balcony and watch his knees crack as he hits the ground and the story assures you that he's fine. He'll just need a little stay in the hospital.

But realistically speaking, all of these guys would have body counts. Not because they were aggressively trying to murder, but because you don't really get the choice. It is extremely easy to kill someone and surprisingly difficult to nonlethally incapacitate them. The line between how much blunt-force cranial trauma will knock someone unconscious versus how much will kill them is extremely blurry and it moves.

There are less lethal ways of incapacitating someone than others. Obviously, tasing someone has a lower mortality rate than shooting them with bullets. But the only surefire way to uphold a Code of No-Killing is to not use violence as your problem-solving tool in the first place. And there's not a lot of de-escalation training going around the Avengers Mansion.

So it always just feels kind of self-delusional when superheroes brag about not killing people but their primary mode of problem-solving is to shoot a guy in the face with an exploding arrow or something. You're gonna kill people if you're Batmanning. Sorry, that's just the reality of violence. When you throw a guy off a roof, you don't get to choose what physics is going to do to that sack of meat and bone as it hits the ground.

Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, should superheroes kill people on purpose? Uh. No. I don't want cops extrajudicially murdering whoever they don't like, and I don't want Batman to do it either. Due process exists for a reason.

Superheroes should not try to kill people. But they are going to kill people sometimes, because their hammer is violence and their stories are just excuses to pit them against nails.

"But the Joker always breaks out of prison." Yeah, but he also always comes back to life. If you can nitpick about genre conventions then I can too. Hell, often times you can't even redeem a villain without the next writer unwriting it and making them a bad guy again. At a metafictional level, there is rarely any way to truly do away with a popular villain.

But. Y'know. Let's talk about heroes who aren't fucking copaganda. In the broader fictional sense, should stories end with the hero killing the villain or shouldn't they?

This, again, has no simple Yes or No answer. It depends heavily on the themes being explored and what the villain is meant to represent.

We need to talk about the "demise" of the villain, which can be a literal death or it can be many other things. The primary function of the villain is to be wrong about something. To oppose the hero, who is right about something.

The villain holds bad ideas, bad beliefs, bad ideology. The hero may start out holding good ideas, or they may be something that the hero comes to over the course of the story. But by the time these two meet in the third act climax, they are meant to embody the two faces of the story's central thesis. Regarding whatever this story is trying to talk about, the hero is right and the villain is wrong.

Whatever form it takes, whether literal death or not, the demise of the villain is the final statement on their incorrect or even toxic beliefs. Which often does take the form of literal death because it's easy to write a comeuppance that way.

Luke Skywalker believes that there is love in his father's heart for him, and Emperor Palpatine is confident that Anakin is truly lost. But Luke's love for his family wins out and destroys Palpatine.

Scar is selfish, cowardly, and disloyal. Simba returns out of a sense of responsibility and loyalty to his people, coming clean to them and accepting his place among them. Scar tries to sell out the hyenas to save his own skin, as well as stabbing Simba in the back. For his treachery, the hyenas rip him to pieces; He is devoured by the very loyalties that he selfishly betrayed.

Obadiah Stane, the embodiment of war profiteering and the military-industrial complex, is literally consumed by the clean energy project that Tony wants to move the company towards instead.

Sauron underestimates the power of the small and meager folk, and believes wholeheartedly in Great Men of History. And so when Great Man Aragorn marches to his gates, he allows himself to become convinced that this is his true nemesis, his true rival, the threat he must face. This is the glorious battle that will decide the fate of Middle-Earth. And so he turns his eye away from the common folk that will be his undoing.

The villain's flaws, their toxic ideology, the things that make them the villain, are what their demise is supposed to be about. They can be consumed by their failings or undone by the hero's virtues, but either way, in a well-executed demise, a closing statement on the story's thesis is made.

But a well-executed demise doesn't necessarily have to be fatal, either. Like I've said, it can be things other than a literal demise. Sometimes it absolutely should.

In Civil War, Zemo is driven by an obsession for revenge. His homicidal retaliatory bloodthirst is a toxin that he infects both T'Challa and Tony with over the course of the story. Tony succumbs and has to be defeated with force, though Steve still demonstrates his strength of character by sparing Tony's life in the end even when the madness of the battle threatens to grip him too.

But it's T'Challa who delivers Zemo's demise. Not by killing him, but by making the choice to rise above vengeance. T'Challa breaks the shackles of Zemo's infectious vengeance and chooses mercy. And it's in this moment that Zemo's feelings, his cruelty, are opposed and vanquished by T'Challa's heroic virtue.

Firelord Ozai believes in the Social Darwinist ideology of Might Makes Right. He leads a culture where disputes are settled with deathmatches and believes it is his right to blanket the world in fire because he has the power to do so, and no one can stop him. Aang, by contrast, is a pacifist at heart because those are the values he was raised in; Values of a culture that Ozai exterminated, whose very last vestiges exist only in Aang's heart.

Ozai would kill Ozai and Azula, who often gets left out of this conversation. Because theirs is a culture where righteousness stands hand-in-hand with brute strength. Where who is right is decided by who is left standing when the dust settles, and who is a pile of ash. Aang defeats Ozai; By Ozai's belief system, Aang is stronger thus Aang is righteous and it is his Conqueror's Right to execute Ozai where he stands.

But Aang doesn't just beat Ozai; He rejects Ozai's way of life. He renounces the belief system of the imperialist colonizer and holds true to the belief system of a people they destroyed. While a simultaneous outcome plays out between Katara and Azula, as Katara similarly chooses mercy once she's obtained a position of power and control over Azula.

Special note also to Zuko who demonstrates that he actually cares more about protecting people than about winning his Glorious Deathmatch of Imperialist Honor. Which also serves as a rejection of Azula's beliefs that relationships are founded on fear and control. Zuko, too, rejects the belief systems of Ozai and Azula and warrants recognition. Ozai would never have taken a hit like that for Azula. Azula would never take a hit like that for Ty Lee.

It's this mercy that breaks the Hundred-Year War, destroying not the perpetrators of it but the very principles on which it is founded. This philosophical annihilation of Azula and Ozai's very understanding of strength and power is their villainous "demise", and weighs far more than just cutting their heads off and calling it a day ever could.

There is no correct answer to whether or not heroes should kill. What matters most is how the demise the writer chooses for the villain reflects upon the story's central ideas and thesis.

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Gale Portrait! ✨💜

I usually don’t draw him much but I’ve always have a soft spot in my heart for this man 😌

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A snippet from my book on asexuality & aromanticism that I was kinda proud of.

Allonormativity and amatonormativity feed right into incel culture, and we cannot fight misogyny without also fighting them.

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today i’m thinking about how the despair demons tend to single rook out and how the first time this is recognized is after the treviso/minrathous decision

like, listen. i know it’s probably just a game mechanic thing. but it’s interesting to me that every despair demon in the game does this—single rook out. and how you encounter a lot more despair demons the worse the situation gets. and every single time, without fail, rook is their primary target.

like. the potential juiciness of it all. rook who carries regrets and despair hidden behind a smile that no one can see behind until the regret prison. rook who has to keep up a brave face as the leader so that the team doesn’t collapse because someone has to make a decision.

the narrative juiciness of regret…despair…someone sedate me

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Is this anything

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Essek Thelyss | Critical Role fan art for my ongoing PC project.

Support me on Patreon to help keep personal projects like these alive!

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What the flock?! such smart names!

Science should let more cartoonists name things. That how we got the thagomizer and the Rube Goldberg machines. Anyways! SHERLOCK CROWMES!!!!!

Check out my stuff!

✧Read Namesake✧ ✧Read Crow Time✧ ✧Store✧ ✧Patreon✧

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Shout-out to aromantic people whose lives are so fucking busy that they periodically forget what day of the week it is. today is Wednesday, June 5th. Happy Aromantic Visibility Day.

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I forgor - Australian readers, physical copies should become available in September/October!

For everyone elsewhere, I'm afraid I don't know yet if/when the book will be available, but I'll try to get some answers from my publishers soon.

My book on asexuality and aromanticism, Love Expanded, is released today!!

When I first started writing, I thought it would just be a book explaining what ace and aro identities are. But the more I wrote, the more it became a book about how allonormativity hurts everyone. 

It encourages everyone to believe they’re fundamentally incomplete without a romantic partner.

It makes people think a romantic partner is the only intimate, nurturing relationship they need, leaving them without a support network if that relationship fails.

It can lead to people feeling obliged to consent to sex they don't actively want, because it's the "normal" thing to do.

It means anyone perceived as “abnormal” gets desexualised by society (disabled people, neurodivergent people, fat people, etc).

It makes people afraid to leave abusive relationships because they’ve been told ‘love conquers all’ or that singledom is even worse than abuse.

It makes everyone think the default way for humans to live is in self-contained family units… when there’s no reason we shouldn’t live with friends, or have friends co-parent our children, and many many more options.

So if you’re interested in a book unpacking all of this and talking about the steps we can take to fix it, please do check it out! And happy Pride and Aro day <3

(US readers: because of some complicated publishing stuff ™ , physical copies won’t be available in the US until next spring. Some US people have been able to order copies either by changing their location or by using Amazon, though I understand many of us. Do Not Want to do that. :'D Ebooks should be available now though, or at least very soon!)