#Because it is STILL used in the world to actively hurt queer people for bullshit defenses in courts

[foxgirlmoth]

I made it look like my gf told someone to seethe and cope over slur discourse how's everypony else doing tonight

I guess I wrote most of my thoughts in the notes oops

[so-that-was-okay]

Tips for younger Bucktommy fic writers who're looking to write an accurate characterization, especially when it comes to Tommy (and this post is also for the people who think everything goes too fast with no build-up between Buck and Tommy):

Dating when you're in your 30s and 40s is very different. When you meet a decent person you're attracted to and with whom things go (very) well the first few times you meet, things can go very fast in a very simple way. You know yourself better and you know others better too. So the dating phase can be very short and things can move on to being a real couple and moving together quite fast (if that's what both want). Also, things go even faster when it comes to queer people. In short: less bullshit, more straight to the point.

Love != passion. Of course, it's a generalization but the "passionate" phase of the relationship doesn't last as long as when you're younger. The passion is still there but it's not burning hot, explosive, in the face of the world, "look at us how we loooooove each other", it's more tender. You can have a passionate relationship but it doesn't show the same way as when you're 20. Passion becomes like a slow cooked dish with rich and deep flavors, instead of the rush of an energy drink and 5 coffees in your 20s. Also, it doesn't mean Buck and Tommy can't fuck nasty.

We care less, about a lot of things. Again, it's a generalization and I'm also writing this with what we know about Tommy and Buck. Unless Tommy is hiding his game very well, his personality is pretty clear to me. Look at the date. It was a failure for Tommy, as a gay man who fought his own demons, and others, for years. Yet, he decided to be kind about it. Because in the end, it's not the end of the world. It hurts, sure, but that wouldn't be the first time and he didn't make it only about him. It was also about Buck not being ready. The coffee date was also a good scene. Tommy is almost nonchalant, open. I'm borrowing Ryan's words when he said "whatever happens happens". Tommy went through enough shit to not give this situation the drama that can be easily avoided. And it paid off.

Pouting, sulking, active display of real jealousy, acting like a child (and I insist on the "like a child" because adult can sulk, obviously) = NOT CUTE. AT ALL. I get that the infantilization of adults is very common in fandoms so younger people can relate, and because fic writers often write older characters with younger people in mind as references. But it's not a thing in real life, and when it happens, it's not "normal behavior". Of course they can sulk and pout, but not the same way as a young person would. It's a lot more subtle. Also, in the case of Tommy, he's been shown being very good at communicating what he wants and doesn't want. Buck will dance around the matter more, his frustration would probably show with him being agitated or anxious, being reckless too, because he's just like that, but not Tommy. Make them talk about their issues, even if they go through a period of frustration and miscommunication. Tommy should be the kind of man who will encourage Buck to grow and be better at sorting and understanding his feelings in a mature way but without treating him as a child.

Again, all this could help for an accurate characterization. Anyone is free to write the characters the way they want, go full OOC if you want, it's your fic. This post is just giving some tips!

[punkeropercyjackson]

Jason/Nico shippers 'calling out Percy for his privileged treatment of Nico' is SO.What privilege my guy????Percy is poor,grew up getting bullied nonstop for being neurodivergent,was treated badly by teachers too,had an abusive stepdad and no real friends until she was 12 and had to deal all that except the stepdad even in the series itself AND the added bullshit by the gods and Luke that canonically gave her ptsd.She was also the ONE person who actively went out of her way to be nice to Nico and her not liking him back isn't her being 'homophobic',it's because he's too young for her and she gets crushes rarely anyway and it is WILD to act like that means she personally sought out to hurt him with that and deeper than Tartarus unserious to accuse her of 'never really caring about him' because Rick retconned their dynamic to torment Nico and stain Percy's characterization because he realized he'd made her too good of a role model for kids and people of all ages really

'But Percy's so popular and beloved!'That's not a privilege,she's just fucking good to other people and saved the world a bunch of times out of the goodness in her heart and Nico was going to be popular and beloved to post-Tlo that was literally implied and THAT got retconned too and that's only in in the demigod world,she still spends most of her time the mortal one as a freak and loser.'But Percy is conventionally attractive!'So is Jason and even more so because he's blonde haired,blue eyed and canonically lighter skinned than her!'But Nico is autistic-coded!'SO IS PERCY!!!!It would take too long to list all her symptoms but i have the same personality as her and have since i was a kid so she's just as autistic as Nico is because it's a spectrum.Sorry not all of us are autistic in the 'correct' way i guess.'But Jason is queer-coded!'1.Not canonically! and 2.Oh you wanna play that game?Alright,here's my move:Every single transfem in the fandom i've met have said Percy is a trans woman egg and i made a masterpost that was over 1k of the evidence for it.There,Percy wins the oppression olympics you keep trying to setup by virtue of autistic tgirl swag

And since you guys LOVE 'dunking' on Percy,here's a reminder that's canon:Nico only needed Jason because he didn't have Percy anymore.Percy was his whole world and she feels the same way about him and the feelings started going three ways when Hazel got ressurected.Just because Nico's gay that dosen't mean he only cares about men he's into and his girls are his number one and everybody else comes dead last.Y'all's lil Cmbyn asses can choke on that🖤💙💜

[coveredinredpaint]

hi! my name is rex too and i think thats pretty cool

anyway, i was wondering if you had any tips on dressing feminine but like,,,, also being able to pass? or tips on being confident enough to not need to pass?

heyy that is pretty cool!!

im gonna be honest with you, i never really managed to pass before starting t. there were like 5 times ppl gendered me correctly but after that they immediatly "corrected" themselves. the only person who didnt was a toddler, i hope hes doing great.

all the tips and tricks ppl gave out never worked for me, never managed to figure out why, im thinking it was mostly my voice.

so i got absolutely no passing advice for you, but i can definitely tell you how to work on your confidence and say fuck you to societies ridiculous expectations

(it turned out longer than i distracted, i cant give concrete advice apparently my apologies)

tw: mention of bullying and some mental health stuff but nothing heavy

before i start i will say that it takes time. it takes time to learn and let go of this need to fit in. to learn to do your own thing even if you have to do it alone. to grow and learn who you want to be or are.

first we need to understand that expectations of how we should act or dress or look, whether based on our gender or not, are absolute bullshit. like straight up made up.

step one is kill the cop in your head. every time you judge yourself (or someone else) for something, ask why you care about that. most of the time its cause you have been taught in some way that what youre doing is not according to "the rules". this can be for the smallest things, like when i get really excited and stim about something i used to feel embarassed because "men dont act like that". sometimes i still feel that way. its not something you can just get rid of, so its important to actively affirm yourself that what youre doing is okay and that you are allowed to do what makes you happy.

dealing with yourself is already a hell of a challenge, but other people, that something else. i hope you live in an accepting area and i have heard many stories of people are queer fully accepted for it. but often thats sadly not yet the case. surely isnt for me at my school. there are people who are gonna make you feel like shit, who are gonna call you all the horrible things the voice in your brain calls you too. you are gonna wish you were "normal" sometimes, even if you dont really mean it.

going back to normal? going back in the closet? letting go of the clothes that make my feel better even on the most dysphoric days? fuck no, i finally started to get myself, my life back, im not sacrificing that for some teens whos names i dont even know. so you turn it around, no longer "why do they treat me like that" but "how dare they treat me like that" if they kick you while youre down you better bite their ankles and dont let go. most people who bully people who are "other" are terrified of what they see in us. we are living proof that their belief of how the world should work is very wrong. they call you a fag and a tranny? you better come to school next day in the gayest clothes you own. they call you an emo and bark at you? you better be dressed even more punk the next day. they may laugh at you, yell at you, even record you or push you around. it doesnt matter, they hold no power over who you are.

but please do not try and carry this alone. dont let yourself turn bitter. its is difficult to be treated like shit for simply existing. even when it doesnt hurt as much as it did its still exhausting. find someone to talk to, whether its a family member you trust, a friend, a mental health professional or other queer people online. its important not to suppress your feelings. get them out, by either talking about them or writing or making art or music.

know that its your life and you can live it however the hell you want. be kind to yourseld, be kind to others. if you are not where you want to be to right now you will in the future. cant really call it a life if you didnt live for it. it will get better, you just got to keep going and keep fighting.

[trekwiz]

Followed you after seeing your comment about how ALL christian denominations are fucked and how the ones that try to look progressive just shield the rest from criticism. Its so nice to see someone who gets it, it can be so so so exhausting to try to explain all that shit to people who havent studied christianity and still see it as the "nice, awkward, naive homeschool kid" religion, instead of the extremely dangerous, actively-toxic-to-its-followers-and-their-friends, terrifying death/rape cult that it is.

Anyway i saw you were looking for music recs. It seems dumb to suggest but just in case you havent listened to it, the Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas album has a similarish vibe and is soooo fucking good. Ummm, Chris Pureka (queer folk artist) has some heart-achingly beautiful folksy stuff. Evan Greer (another queer folk artist) has some fucking kickass stuff that, again, has a very similar vibe. Those three are definitely worth a listen. :)

Honestly, one of the things I regret about my growth as a person was allowing people to convince me that it isn't all denominations, for far too long.

As a teen, I was angry about homophobia and the cause was apparent: Christians never hid that they were behind those atrocities. They were openly taking credit, and yet they were joined by, "no, really, that's just the bad denominations. I belong to a really progressive church."

It was amazing, really. Every Christian I met was one of the good ones. They all belonged to a great church that didn't discriminate. They were accepting. And supportive. I couldn't find the evil ones. Where are they? No one belonged to one of the bad churches. But THEY all know which ones are the bad ones. It's all those "fake Christians" from unspecified denominations. Sometimes it was an "opposing" denomination from theirs. It's all so theoretical.

They were nowhere to be found. And yet, these rare bad ones somehow maintain the political power to prevent our full equality under the law. But if everyone belongs to a good church, how do they control the narrative so well? How is the Christian "sanctity of marriage" argument still such a popular perspective if it's just an almost nonexistent few bad Christians? How did the "grooming" bullshit rise to such prominence again? There are no secular arguments for homophobia. Am I supposed to believe that suddenly the good Christians have lost their voice temporarily? That they're just being drowned out by a small powerless minority that tricked them into voting for their candidates?

And then you spend time with those good ones. They deny that Billy Graham supported conversion therapy while calling for a national holiday to celebrate such a "great man." They're very supportive. Don't you know that your sin of being gay is no worse than their sin of committing murder? It's all the same. And you know, some people genuinely have a problem with us having rights, would it really hurt us if we just compromised and let them punch us five times, instead of six? You confide in one of the really progressive "I like to think of myself as a follower of Jesus, not a Christian, because Christians really do bad things" and they use your distress at the fascist threat as an opening to witness, "Yeah, Christians are awful. But you'd love Jesus. He wouldn't support these behaviors. Isn't he great?"

There isn't a denomination of Christianity that doesn't believe that what we are is immoral. There are some that cushion the language to trick us into spreading the message of our oppressor. But not one treats any LGBT trait as being neutral--as a characteristic that just exists. There's inherently a judgment. The "good ones" are just a sleight of hand meant to trivialize the seriousness of what their religion is doing to us.

And it's unavoidable. You cannot create a sect of Christianity that will be good and peaceful in the world--at least, not without throwing away the very things that define Christianity. The basic structure of the religion is inherently damaging to a person's way of thinking: the absolutely worst, most unforgivable thing you can do is question the existence of Jesus or his inherent goodness. Regardless of denomination, questioning the authoritarian leader is grounds for eternal torture. You cannot have a healthy environment based on that perspective.

The concept of witnessing and missionary work is designed for genocide. The whole premise is to make people in other cultures "accept" that they're inferior, destroy their cultures, and join into Christian culture. It's why, regardless of denomination, that missionary work has always been so bloody--even into the present. Those bodies buried at Canadian church schools aren't that old. You can't view the world that way and end up as a good person. The core of Christianity--the very thing that defines the religion--perfectly resembles a fascist regime.

There are no denominations without these critical flaws. That we're so willing to pretend that there is, is why they came back so strongly after just a couple years of legal defeats. The LGBT-phobic sentiment never went away; it's still mainstream Christian thought. We'll never be able to end our oppression until we stop pretending that Christians have a right to these beliefs.

Regarding music--thank you for the recommendations! And please, no feeling dumb for making a recommendation. It's not obvious but my experience with music is. Well, it feels weird to call it new, but in the scheme of things, it is.

Short story: I learned as an adult that having a heart murmur can really mess up your ability to perform music. Music education in school was very frustrating for reasons that I didn't understand at the time. So I just didn't interact with music in any way at all. I expected it in games and movies, but just listening didn't bring me any joy. And in some ways, I haven't fully shaken that--I like listening on work days where I don't have a ton of meetings; it helps me focus on the tasks. I rarely just listen.

There were 2 things that changed my perspective. I was asked to join an African Percussion group in college (specifically Ewe music from Ghana)--I was learning about live audio for video production, and the instructor had me help them setup their PA system during performances. They ended up inviting me into the group, and I finally got something out of music.

A couple years later, I went to my first Renaissance Faire. And I found I was drawn to the really loud music--the kind that you can physically feel, not just hear. Which was an obvious connection to the percussion music I'd been playing. And I loved it!

That led me to be open to play Guitar Hero and Rock Band when I was invited to, which let me appreciate some more music. But I still prefer the playful kind. I'll take bag rock over rock any day.

So I don't really have a lot of knowledge around music. I don't know a lot of the groups people think would be obvious to know. And I don't really have a lot of language to describe what I like about different kinds of music. And so, despite your preface, feel comfortable: I had never heard of Mountain Goats before.

I will say, the content of the Mountain Goats and Chris Pureka were close to what I was looking for, but the feeling of the music wasn't. I found a couple songs from both that I liked, though, so thanks!

I tend to like really energetic music. I often shorthand to "fast" but I recognize that's not the main defining characteristic, I just don't have better words for it. Evan Greer was pretty much EXACTLY what I was looking for--thank you!

What I liked about the folk song I mentioned, and some of the artist's other work before she outed herself as a bigot, was the "fantasy" setting. Folk music is a genre where I'm less likely to enjoy content about modern life. I mean, most of my favorite music tends to lean towards fantasy/renaissance/scifi. But folk in particular, I like it to reflect a different time--past or future--I live here in this time, so it doesn't feel as interesting. I also liked the power in her voice (I don't have the language for what I'm describing; it's not just the forcefulness of her tone, but the way you know the instruments will never compete for focus against her voice), and the driving energy of the rhythm.

Here are some examples of what I personally would describe as a similar vibe:

March of Cambreath by Heather Alexander; Wanderer's Path by Mythemia; Wake Skadi by Hagalaz' Runedance.

Not quite as comparable, but I would consider Zumbaj by Reliquiae (or, since they seemed to have pulled the song for some reason, Šarena gajda by Rece-Fice zenekar és Bea Palya is a close enough substitute) and Dawson's Christian by Vixy and Tony to be the kind of vibe I'm going for.

(Actually, from that selection, it's probably kind of obvious about how much I enjoyed Evan Greer's work. Again, thank you!)

Though even compared to these, I felt like the song I referenced is still a unique outlier in this company, and I wanted more with that kind of defiant old gods kind of feeling.

[doberbutts]

hey, so a lot of the stuff you said about insurance hoops to jump through resonated with me as a UK trans man - the NHS system for medical transition is utter bullshit. off the top of my head - wait 4+ years to see a therapist to diagnose you with gender dysphoria, wait again to see an endocrinologist, be on hormones for minimum 2 years before you can wait AGAIN to get top surgery - im 21, and i will probably be about 30 when i get to where i want to be transitionwise if i start now. lord help you if you’re mentally ill as well, because gender clinics wont accept you if you have active mental health issues and trying to get those treated by the NHS is another load of bollocks on its own. all this to say that i can definitely see where youre coming from with your views on transmedicalism, and how it isnt such a cut and dry issue that many people make it out to be.

Ah yes, I've heard the UK system is very bad which doesn't surprise me considering its current nickname as "TERF island" when it comes to trans healthcare. Good luck to you, as you see I've been in that situation before and it was not great.

It's not to say that I "support" transmeds, I don't like a lot of the deliberate meanness and cruelty I see within transmed circles when they pop up. But I do understand the world they used to live in, the world that produced their ideology, because I lived in that world and I see the frustration for what it is. I just think that bitterness and anger and despair has turned onto the wrong target, instead of making it cis people's fault for gatekeeping us from our own medical decisions and autonomy they've decided it's other trans people's fault, which is not fair to anyone, and the means of which they go about advocating for themselves is. Well. Frankly bad.

We see more transmeds in places that experienced this medical nightmare. I think we're looking at cause and effect.

Only sort of related but there's this lesbian I know whose wife sat on the Supreme Court decision for same sex marriage, she is in her late 40s, and I very starkly remember her texting me one day basically going "what the FUCK is with all these kids calling themselves queer?!?!? don't they KNOW!?!?!" And I think... it's a bit like that. That word isn't nice for her. It's not something she can reclaim. She has only hurt associated with that word, from the world she lived in, a very visibly obvious lesbian living in the rural south of the US. On a surface level, it sounds like the completely batshit "queer is a slur" discourse that happens on this site.

But digging deeper, the difference is that when she had her kneejerk reaction, she reached out to someone closer to that generation and tried to understand. It's difficult for her to accept. I honestly don't think she will ever be comfortable being called queer or attending some even that calls itself queer. At the end of our discussion, she thanked me for explaining, said she understood a little better, but would probably still have no better reaction than punching someone in the mouth if they tried to call her that word. Based on her experiences, yeah, fair. I have a similar reaction to the word "nigger" even though my nephew a generation younger has no problem being called that by his friends.

Maybe I am just naive and I want to see good in everybody. But I think a lot of this at heart is just evidence of people who are hurting and traumatized, taking it out unfairly on the closest targets rather than the actual problem. That's all.

[terzosmainhoe]

just a long rant about things going on in palestine right now because if i don't put my thoughts down somewhere i'm going to go insane.

tw // talking about graphic shit obviously, it's a genocide

i feel so sick. i'm so fucking tired of seeing dead kids over and over and nothing being done. i can't physically do anything to help these people who are starving miles and miles away and it makes me so angry. people tell me i'm being too obnoxious, too dramatic, too upset and that it doesn't effect me. but how the fuck am i supposed to see the remains of someone who has been run over by a tank and feel nothing? how many children's bodies with their guts spilling out do we have to see to be taken seriously? how many nightmares of this happening to my own family do i have to have before people understand? these are all living breathing human beings being torn apart all because of greed and disgusting politicians. i'm so angry and confused and hurt and frustrated. my government and my country is actively sending my tax dollars to bomb humans. they're deliberately fucking up any aid and any protest in favor of palestine. my fucking money is being used to drop bombs on LITERAL FUCKING CHILDREN and I'M the dramatic one?! and it's been going on for months. we're literally witnessing another holocaust and yet i am supposed to shut up about it. "you're queer, they'd kill you" is what they tell me. it's so fucking stupid because people in my own fucking country want me dead but that doesn't mean americans should be wiped off the face of the earth. my compassion isn't transactional. i don't give a shit if someone is homophobic, i still don't believe they should be massacred. and queer palestinians exist. not all of them are queerphobic. and what about all the rich ass pieces of shit who do nothing? oh let's worry about the met gala. let's worry about the superbowl. let's worry about all this superficial bullshit while people are literally fucking dying.

fuck israel, fuck the usa, fuck biden, fuck netanyahu, fuck rich bitches who do nothing to help, fuck every disgusting ass piece of shit who's been neutral this entire time, and fuck all the corporations funding it. i hope you're all haunted by every life lost and you never feel another moment of peace or happiness for the rest of your miserable lives.

i'm so done. so fucking done with all of this but what can i do? i am quite literally on the opposite side of the world.

[menta11yi11]

I'm still grieving that people told me suicidal ideation made them uncomfortable and so they kicked me from the group chat and only furthered the belief that I would never be accepted for my transness and mental health struggles.

"You're just such a downer, and you're attention-seeking." I was at the lowest point and then got humiliated by someone and lost 20+ friends in one night. But sure, tell me about how you /care/ about trans people. Tell me about how you're a mental health advocate while you shame people for being overwhelmed and self-defeating.

I know it's a hard conversation but they could have asked for a time-out instead of banning me and locking me out of access to my own threads about my headspace and inner world stuff in the plural server. This person has access to links to what my inner world looks like and I don't. I don't see how I'm solely the one in the wrong here. I didn't handle my venting well so I found other coping skills and I'm doing better now I'm not living with the cult parents who were actively threatening me with homelessness and gaslighting me about the abuse. I was in a domestic violence situation but they didn't fucking care and I just had to accept that sometimes people who claim to be your friend aren't going to step up when things get Real, and I have to find people who won't shame me for expressing hopelessness. I have much better friends now and a therapist who respects me and a case worker who checks on me regularly, and I guess it took a mean trans woman to bully me to realize not every trans person actually cares about others in their community. Sometimes people don't have the capacity for compassion and it's not something I can change or should try to change about them. Idk I still have a lot of trauma around women in social hierarchies because most of the friend groups I've had were queer women who would assert dominance, and other me when I didn't submit to exactly the way they wanted me to be- this isn't like a "grr women evil" but like, as a queer enby woman myself, it hurts 20x more to be rejected by a trans woman. If a cis man is mean to me, I can accept it easier and it rolls off. Not being accepted by a trans feminine person hits a lot of my insecurities that I'm too male to be part of the sapphic community. I'm not womanly enough to be in the squad, I'm not perfectly poised and I'm abrasive sometimes, which makes me come off as "a man invading women's spaces." Let autistic women be angry and blunt, let us express disappointment without this "good vibes only" bullshit. I felt like I was being tone policed constantly and others were controlling my behavior to feel like I could 'fit' into the new friend group. I was fucking miserable and my OCD and paranoia spiraled and I developed an introject of the person who kicked us from their group server. This introject would be a persecutor and tell me about how I'm terrible and how I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't feminine enough, that me not shaving my beard and facial hair was hurting other trans women and making the community 'look bad.' Her own dysphoria was projected onto me and I felt like I had to shave and wear a full-face of makeup and pitch my voice up to not be seen as a man pretending to be a woman. I didn't need that inner critic telling me I'm not enough or that I'm too much for others when I'm struggling.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[trans-cuchulainn]

psa about book piracy

the publishing industry does not work like the film/tv industry or whatever other industries you’ve decided make piracy a victimless crime. it does actively and directly hurt authors

many authors are paid an “advance”. this is occasionally large, but more frequently is small (~£2k) and even more frequently is somewhere in the middle (~£10k). this may be the only payment they receive for what is frequently years of work. in order to earn any royalties, they need to sell enough books to “earn out” (make the publisher back the money they spent on the advance). if they don’t earn out, they will never get royalties. also, the advance for their next book will probably be smaller.

if their book is part of a series, later books in the series may be cancelled because the first book didn’t sell well enough

even if a book isn’t cancelled, the print run may be reduced (=how many copies are printed) which means the book will be in fewer bookshops which mean there are fewer opportunities for it to sell copies

all of that conspires to mean... the author’s next advance is smaller, a series gets cancelled before it’s finished, and generally you have fucked over the person whose work you were stealing

(if they have earned out already, it may not directly fuck over their future books as much, but you are directly taking royalties out of their pocket, so)

if you’ve ever been mad because the 3rd book in a trilogy you were reading never got published, it’ll be because the first two didn’t sell enough. maybe the market was wrong at the time, maybe they took a while to take off, or maybe -- and increasingly frequently -- it’s because too many people pirated them instead of buying them.

(this is also why waiting until a series is complete to buy any of them is more likely to result in the series never being complete. the publishers need to know it’s a good investment. better to buy the books and wait to read them, if you’re concerned about cliffhangers, than to refrain from buying them entirely.)

“but the book is still there after i download it so i haven’t technically stolen anything” read the above bullet points again and understand that what you have stolen is not the book per se, it’s the sale, and therefore the goodwill with the publisher that makes them buy that author’s future books and pay that author money

do not @ me about “but what if it’s the only way to access english-language books in your country” because that is not the situation i’m talking about or the majority situation in the general scheme of things. 90% of people who pirate books do so either because they don’t realise it hurts authors or they don’t give a shit

also if your justification is that authors are “rich” i would like to point out that a recent report showed average earnings for an author in the uk to be £10.5k/yr in 2018. that is substantially below minimum wage (for full-time work), so genuinely, fuck off with that

you have no idea what somebody else’s financial situation is, and i know several authors who have been told to their faces that it was okay to pirate from them because they were rich when those people were in fact struggling to make ends meet

(not to mention that authors are technically self employed which means no benefits; this is particularly challenging in countries without universal healthcare)

whatever bullshit “net worth” estimate you’ve found online or whatever bears absolutely no resemblance to most people’s financial reality

so if you think you’re being clever by only targeting authors you’ve decided are wealthy, consider that there’s a high chance you’re wrong

yes books are expensive and yes big publishing companies are the ones seeing most of the benefit of that. but it’s not the big publishing companies that get hurt when you steal them, because they just squeeze that money out of the authors instead to make up their bottom line. does it suck as a system? obviously! does that make piracy a good way to resist it? no, because it only hurts the people on the bottom

some people think that piracy doesn’t affect sales. it does. it has been demonstrated over and over again that piracy impacts sales (see maggie stiefvater’s experiment with the raven king for an example). “it’s helping people discover the books” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. all an author gains from this is more people who will steal from them. exposure doesn’t pay the bills. exposure just kills ya.

many places have libraries. libraries benefit authors, because they buy books. in some countries, like the UK, authors receive money based on how many times their books are borrowed. libraries frequently offer ebooks, so if you’re not able to access them in-person you can still get books. libraries are good! if you can use your local library, you should. free books for you, without fucking over the creators. you can often request books that they don’t carry, which then means that other people also get to read that book.

(“my library doesn’t carry queer books” i sympathise and i realise it can be challenging to request those in a conservative area but also consider that books by marginalised authors are exactly the ones that publishers will yeet if they think they’re not making a return on their investment, so unfortunately, pirating those is extra bad. publishers will drop “risky” shit like a hot potato if it’s not making them money. those are exactly the books we need to show up for.)

obviously in an ideal world we would have UBI or whatever and therefore people’s ability to put food on the table would not be dependent on monetising creative pursuits but that’s not the world we live in. in the world we live in, writing is work and work deserves to be paid for. stealing people’s labour because you feel entitled to it is not more justifiable just because that labour is creative.

the fact that people write as a hobby does not negate the challenges of writing as a profession. the two are actually pretty different. writing as a hobby isn’t easy, but writing as a profession has a whole heap of extra behind-the-scenes work that you don’t see, in case you’re tempted to take the “but it’s not real work” argument. besides which, “but people do it for free on the internet” is a shitty reason not to pay people for their work.

if you can’t afford a particular book, that sucks, i often cannot afford a book i would like. the solution: read other books that you can afford / which your library does carry / which are out of copyright. not: steal the book because obviously you should have whatever you want whenever you want it.

don’t be a dick

stealing screws authors over 

in conclusion: stop trying to justify piracy in my notes or in the replies to authors who complain about it. stop telling authors to their face that you don’t value their work and their time. it’s not cool, it’s not clever, it’s not revolutionary. it’s just fucking over people who are already underpaid and living precariously.

[chaoskirin]

I wanted to explain a post I reblogged to my @chaoskirin blog earlier, about why you can’t separate the art from the author when it comes to J.K. Rowling.

And to qualify this, I was a HUGE Harry Potter fan. I had doubts at first, but once I read the books, I was hooked. HP art, HP RPs, HP fics... You name it, I did it.

I’ve seen a lot of pushback against letting Harry Potter go, because “as adults, we should all be able to separate art from its creator.” (Paraphrased--but it’s always that argument.) The thing with JKR, though, is she refuses to be separated from her work. She has outright rejected the idea of “death of the author” and makes sure she’s integrated into the HP world so thoroughly that you can’t tear her out of it.

I know it’s hard to accept this. I’m sitting here thinking “should I really post this?” Because there’s a chance I’m just way off-base. But as an artist and writer myself, I can recognize that when my real-world beliefs go into my art, they only build people up, they don’t tear them down. Meanwhile JKR often used her work to write stereotypes and illustrate her beliefs in books meant for children. Cho Chang, goblins, lycanthropy as an allegory of HIV/AIDS, etc. And then there was the character stuff that happened outside the books: Dumbledore-is-Gay, the American School That Ripped Off Native American Culture...

Finally, there’s the use of her fame as a vehicle for her hate. Transphobic rants on Twitter, laws created with her blessing which seek to hurt trans people, attacking and near-bullying people who disagree with her, and getting away with all this because she has a blue checkmark next to her name. And this is only scratching the surface.

We could get into how people still love Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, whose racist beliefs were “products of their time.” (which is a non-excuse to be fair--other people who lived during those times were very NOT racist, but that’s a digression.) But their beliefs don’t begin to compare with the real-world harm JKR has done.

Because if she’d written racist caricatures out of ignorance and then apologized when called out, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I mean, some people would. Twitter in particular doesn’t want people to get better--they want people to be perfect from the start. Which brings up a major problem with social justice champions--they paint everyone who fails with the same brush, rather than holding accountable those who STILL fail, while championing those who have learned. And that, in turn, makes boycotting people like JKR more difficult, which is the entire problem with cancel culture: If you cancel everyone, you make the world numb to real problems.

The point is, JKR not only used racist caricatures in her books, not only did she queer-bait and malign AFTER her books, not only did she write MORE stories with the same damaging rhetoric she’d already been called out on, but she continues to actively harm REAL people in the REAL world. As one of the most famous people in this generation, she has a platform, and she’s chosen to use it to hurt.

And her fans already gave her WAY more chances than they tend to give ordinary people who fuck up. It’s not like she went right from hero to zero. She’s had years to realize that she’s hurting people, and she just doesn’t care. Every time she’s called out on the bad stuff, she doubles down. She doesn’t even PRETEND to feel remorse.

I know it hurts. I know it’s your childhood. I know you really want to argue against this because disavowing something that meant so much to you is near-impossible. But please, I urge you to try.

Because she’s still active in her own fandom, and because she continues to regurgitate damaging bullshit which is actively hurting people, and because she has not and likely will never apologize for this, you can’t read her work critically while taking her out of it. You can’t be a fan of it without the understanding that she--and by extension, the books themselves--are harmful. You can’t continue to consume new material without supporting her. You cannot separate Harry Potter from JKR.

[confused-stars]

Nagito Komaeda, huh? Yeah… he’s quite the character, isn’t he?

i'm being completely normal about him

jokes aside though, he's one of the most unique characters i've ever come across. it's so easy to miss all his complexities (especially if you don't do his free time events), and it's so easy to hate him because the first trial feels like such a betrayal if you're already attached.

plus the way he acts after he finds out the truth is just so rude, but it makes so much sense, he's lost all his hope and finds himself in a position where he thinks he's the only one who can fix anything anymore. i love how hard the ending twist hits when you realize that oh, he wasn't being malicious at all. he was legit trying to be a hero. it's so tragic.

like, sure, he's a person who'd be incredibly exhausting to be around irl, especially with all the self-deprecating bullshit, but that makes sense for his character, too! he says he's "a worthless human being who can't do anything right" and that's. he literally can't do anything. because he's a puppet for his luck. he walks into a room and chaos follows. he can somewhat predict it and try to use it for what he wants to happen, but that doesn't always work.

and when he was a kid, he definitely wasn't able to steer it like that. so all those terrible things happened to him and people around him, and he internalized that. he grew up in the role of a bystander to the despair that his talent caused. of course he feels alienated from the other ultimates, who can actively use their talents to change the world. the most Nagito can do is create an intricate plan and hope that his luck helps him out.

and when you're living with that, cheerful apathy as a coping mechanism suddenly makes sense. and since it's a cycle, he has to believe that all despair will be worth it for the luck that comes after. if he doesn't believe that, then what's the point? one good thing that happens doesn't cancel out the bad thing that happened before, but he can't let himself face that fact, because it's the only way he can make any sense of his miserable life at all.

so whenever something terrible happens, his reaction is to get excited because he's messed up enough that he's unable to feel the appropriate grief or hurt - he just automatically focuses on "this is great! something really good is going to happen to even it out!" and that's the whole hope aspect of him. his hope is unshakeable. (i've barely started Ultra Despair Girls, but i'm pretty sure even as Servant, he's still thinking about how creating the greatest possible despair will lead to the greatest possible hope)

and then there's the fact that he's queer-coded af (apparently the developers said they wanted him to challenge Hajime in regards to his sexuality, but they dropped it because it didn't fit into the plot and his characterization). this boy has a crush and doesn't know how to deal with it (and him being written opposite of Hajime who is always fed up and takes no shit is such a god writing choice)

so there's all of that, and then you learn that this guy was also told he had a year left to live at most, and his brain is deteriorating at the same time, so you could easily attribute some of his mannerisms to that (he reads as autistic very easily, but the lack of social awareness, the bluntness, the mood swings and so on could very much be because his brain is slowly losing its functions)

he's probably in pain. and his whole "i'll help someone kill me if it furthers hope" is heartbreaking because really, if he's going to die anyway, he just wants his death to mean something.

that said, he's also so damn annoying. you can know all of this and love him deeply and still, when he opens his mouth, you immediately get the thought "god shut the fuck up for two seconds". he's such an experience.

[novellady]

Tomorrow's the day I send the letter.

It's decided. I've told people. I have people who love and support me. I have people who've said, "You have a place with us if you're not safe." I'm glad I told people. Because I want to chicken out. I keep thinking, here at the finish line 'I don't have to, I can keep pretending, I can bear it a little longer' I haven't rung the bell yet. There's no going back when I do.

I have a grandmother that I broke ties with at 13. My parents, though, still see her. Both dislike, if not outright hate, her. But they see her, help her, now that age is likely going to kill her.

She's not a good person. She's hurt my father in ways he hasn't bothered to repair or treat. She wanted, actively, to hurt me as well. She twisted the narrative to get the support and pity of others.

When I left her at 13 it wasn't really my choice. I had agreed. But I'd also bargained. Asked god to repair my family. Now, I have no regrets about our estrangement. I understand her, pity her maybe, but feel I owe her nothing.

Logically, telling my parents I'm a lesbian is very different than what she did. I doubt my parents will see much difference.

For the first time in 16 years I wonder what their relationship with her is like. I've seen my father receive calls from her, the disdain on his face. But I haven't seen them alone with her. Am I to become this horrible woman to my parents? When I lean on others will they read it as my twisting the narrative so that they are the bad guys?

Before they returned to her, and maybe they had sensed how unwell I was, because they assured me they would never abandon me like they did my grandmother.

But here I am, on the eve of something that should just be a slight change in expectations, and I'm comparing myself to my grandmother. Because, to my parents, her faults and mine won't be so different. Every sin is equal.

I know, I know. I'm a thorough atheist now. I don't believe in god or sin. But, fuck, is 22+ years a long time to believe something. And I understand the world from their perspective. And if they're honest with themselves I, a queer person, am not different from my abusive and abuse enabling grandmother.

I'm just sitting here, trying to distract myself, because I can't breathe around the expectation and uncertainly. And I don't have a counselor or therapist, so y'all get to deal with my struggling to acknowledge this bullshit.

[dgcatanisiri]

I won’t say this is my last word on the subject of Legendary Edition bullshit, because... Well, I know myself enough to be able to say that I NEVER have a last word, I’ll always want to rant again later on. But let’s just make this a sort of master post of the issues overall.

So... Is it fair to hold a game that is a good roughly fifteen years old to the standards of the present? Not inherently. So if the games were being produced in any sort of unedited format, that it was a strict translation, 1:1 ratio, of the original to the remaster... Honestly, I’d still be bitter as all get out, for reasons I’ll expound on in a minute. But it could at least SEEM justified. I could consider it the kind of thing that would be expected - if KOTOR got a remaster today, I would not expect that Carth and Bastila would be made into bi love interests, or Juhani would have her romance patched up so that it has the same level of detail and attention as the het romances. If Jade Empire were remastered, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sky or Silk Fox’s same sex romances adapted so that the straight romances had to be closed out first. That is the kind of thing that, on a functional, practical level, I could understand. Doing a translation from old hardware, the old engine, I get the PRACTICAL reasoning for not making things better. I still object to this on the moral level, to say nothing of the representational one. But PRACTICALLY, I see why - y’know, there’s only so much financial resources going in, and changing things like romances, even if justified, means doing new writing and getting the voice cast back in, which has complications the longer since a game’s original release - actors retire or even die, the passage of time changes voices (like listen to the difference of the exact same lines by James Earl Jones between both versions of the Lion King). Even without those complications, that means paying them, which, in the production of video games, for everything that goes in, something else must go out. So that is the practical argument.

BUT!

But.

But, the thing is, even apart from everything else that I’ll get in to shortly, is that there have been a lot of claims from BioWare about inclusion. There have also been A LOT. of homophobic bullshit from BioWare and Mass Effect. And yes, I’m calling it like I see it.

Because we had the game that followed Jade Empire, with a M/M romance option, be Mass Effect, with NO M/M romance option (but FemShep and Liara could bang - the writing obviously favored the MaleShep portrayal, given that there was no marketing use of FemShep until ME3, and we had ME2 give priority to having loyalty conflicts between MALE Shepard’s romances, but not Female Shepard’s, and we even had BioWare hem and haw about how “well, the asari are monogender, so they’re not TECHNICALLY women, so it’s not REALLY lesbians...”). Because the official claim is that they just “didn’t think about it” in time to have these options included in Mass Effect 1. Because we’ve had writers now come out that Jacob Taylor was originally written as a gay man, but in the game itself was a straight man. Because there are plenty of women who throw themselves at Male Shepard, and Shepard is animated with having Significant Looks™ with these women, but not a single man who expresses any interest in him, until ME3 finally offers SOMETHING, which came to just Kaidan and Cortez.

Because we had one of BioWare’s heads, one of BioWare’s founders, say in an interview right around the release of Mass Effect 2 say “Shepard is too predefined a character to be gay.”

That is what I mean by homophobic bullshit.

And I haven’t even started on Mass Effect Andromeda.

And I’m gonna start on Mass Effect Andromeda now.

So after ME3, after Kaidan and Cortez were actually romances, we honestly gave them a lot of faith - they got the message, we said. They understood that they couldn’t just cut out M/M romance in the game, we said. They didn’t need to have the constant observation that demanded they provide good representation, we said.

And then they cut Jaal’s bisexuality, leaving him straight on release, without even a chance to flirt and be turned down, the bisexual male character who did remain not only was planet bound, he also is a character who a solid argument can be made that he falls into the trope of the Depraved Bisexual, a trope that over in Dragon Age, Patrick Weekes specifically said that they wanted to avoid and so didn’t make a character bisexual because of that. And the gay man is not only almost totally disconnected from the game (aside from one point in the plot, he can be avoided entirely and is not included in almost any other group setting among the Tempest crew), he is also an accessory in his own plot line, which was also heavily criticized for being intensely homophobic. And of these, the only thing BioWare deigned to change was Jaal’s bisexuality. (Which, personal note, I’m uncomfortable with personally, because as it’s implemented, it just feels kind of afterthought-y. Much like Kaidan’s in ME3, being unchanged from a new FemShep romance, despite the active inability to romance him in ME1.)

So it is not just a matter of “you have the ability, you’re changing other things, you should do this.” I mean, that is absolutely there - the mods exist for the original game, to the point of being able to even get the romance scene to fire right without Shepard’s gender magically changing once the clothes come off. (I have a vague memory of, at some point, probably around the “too predefined” comment, that being another excuse, that there was difficulty with having the models play nice with one another in that scene.)

But this is about addressing a pattern of behavior on the part of BioWare, that they have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the bare minimum that their own statements on matters of representation and inclusion claim they aspire to. That if the fans are not actively holding their feet to the fire, they are GOING to take their fans for granted - “you don’t get better quality content elsewhere, we’re your only choice!” But “only” choice is not a “good” choice. It’s not a choice with quality.

So if we don’t make a big damn deal about this now, when they have a chance - when they have a CHOICE - to make things better, to provide better representation, to correct the mistakes of the past... What will we get in the future? How will they backtrack on this in the future? How will they exclude us in the game they just announced a few months back? How will they continue to tell us that they don’t want gay people in this setting?

Look, I don’t use these words lightly. But that is, whether it’s a conscious attitude at all or not, what they are telling us. By not including us, by making us optionally involved, by making us disposable within our own stories, by cutting out our content, they are saying that they do not envision a world, a future, that includes queer men.

And anyone who does not speak up, does not condemn this, does not demand that they DO. BETTER... That is tacit approval and agreement. Because you’re saying that things as they are now - the removal and undermining of our content, of our EXISTENCE in these games - are perfectly fine and acceptable.

And yeah, I’m sure that reading that has probably made some people mad, believe I’m being unfair by saying that, because it’s going to push away allies. Thing is, and this is one of the things that always comes up in anything even tangentially activism related... THIS ISN’T ABOUT THE FEELINGS OF THE ALLIES. This is about listening to the people who are being hurt and saying “you don’t deserve to be hurt this way, things need to change.”

BioWare needs to change its approach. And, as we have seen, it does not come just because of a handful of angry queers, demanding to be represented in their games. It comes because of the community at large calling them out and saying “this isn’t right. What you have done is not right, and we are calling on you to fix it. To do better.”

Don’t just stand there and shrug this off. Because evidence tells us that if they aren’t called out on this now, the next game will not be better. And we will be in this exact same place, having this exact same argument, all over again, in a few years when the next Mass Effect game comes out. When the queer men are given the shortest end of the stick again, and people who are right now saying “what do you expect from a remaster?” will either suddenly turn around and go “I don’t know why BioWare would do something so homophobic” or, worse, “well, it’s something, I don’t see why you’re upset.”

We’re upset because we keep having this argument. And we are going to keep having this argument until people are willing to actually DEMAND that things be better. This is the chance to make things better now.

At this point, a post-release patch that includes a Male Shepard/Kaidan romance in ME1 that is tracked through to the following games is a bare minimum fix, a change done to make it clear that BioWare understands their mistakes in the past and want to make things BETTER.

It may not be easy, but genuinely fixing problems never is. But it’s work that needs to be done.

[conduitandconjurer]

Meta 

Klaus is opportunistic, but never in such a way as actively hurts others.  Klaus is a conjurer, a conversant with the dead, and therefore a being of change, self-actualization, and transition.  Down to the “hello” and “goodbye” hands.  He’s a harlequin, a trickster archetype, LIMINAL, nonbinary, an agent of unexpected wisdom and, again, change, change, change.  You can’t expect a corvid to behave like a lion. 

There’s apparently some static circulating the TUA fandom about Klaus’s behavior in season two. I’m well into it and still not seeing why, but I think part of the misapprehension is that he uses and then neglects Ben, rendering their partnership in the execution of his power unequal, and opportunistic, providing him the fodder that fueled his cult.  

I’d like to address that as a new fan, on several counts:

1) the desire to see Dave again and the willingness to tamper with the Kennedy Assassination timeline (unaware, so far, as to the world-ending effects) in order to spare his One Great Love from dying in Vietnam.  I will side-burner this one right now because I haven’t gotten to the end of season two yet and don’t yet know to what extremes Klaus will go to see this happen.  

2) His relationship with Ben.  The real reason why he keeps Ben a secret hidden under a bushel is, imho, complex.  This one goes out to @vericey, who thought up the headcanon, but in essence, Klaus has never wanted the powers (the “greatness thrust upon him”) that he was born with, unlike his siblings, who have savior complexes (their own highly difficult psychological battles, which I am NOT discounting here), and who seem compelled to use their powers to save others. It’s both an obligation and a validation for them.  For Klaus, that’s never been the case. HE DIDN’T ASK FOR THAT RESPONSIBILITY, SO TO HIM IT’S CONTRACTUALLY UNFAIR TO ASK HIM TO HONOR IT.  He has no desire to be a conduit to thousands upon millions of dead souls who need him to attend to their unfinished business.  Attuned and emotionally sensitive, he is already daily over-stimulated and overwhelmed by their needs and demands.  Enter Ben, the byproduct of that unwanted ability, who is the sibling who had a statue at the academy. The sibling everyone mourns.  Ben already has more presence among the other Hargreeves kids than Klaus, who is still alive.  The siblings have disregarded Klaus as a junkie since adolescence.  They never bothered to learn WHY he gets high, WHY he has his head plugged into music 24/7, WHY he runs from responsibility. It’s not because Klaus is truly unreliable or selfish: it’s because in order to bear his unwanted special ability, he has to numb the ambience.  But what KLAUS knows is that his siblings would suddenly hold great value in his presence if they knew they could use him to talk to the brother they actually DO miss.  So he mentions Ben only sparingly, and never discusses Ben’s CONTINUAL presence.  It’s a desperate bid to gauge whether or not his family values him FOR HIM. 

3) Which brings me to the cult.  A lot of fans see the Klaus Cult as some kind of comic relief that reveals the depth of his self-centeredness. It’s not entirely untrue, but there’s another layer. Klaus conceals and obscures, Klaus mutes and hides, as a way of coping.  This applies everything from his sardonic sense of humor, to his drug abuse, to hedging on the truth about Ben, to avoiding conjuring unless he must, to taking advantage of people’s preconceptions of “enlightenment” and “holiness” in order to climb the (homophobic, cissexist) social ladder of 1960s America.  

The key to 90% of Klaus’s opportunism is that it’s BENIGN.   What he does may affect others but only insofar as they choose to react in a way that harms them.  He never gives them the tools to hurt themselves; he simply interacts in the same sphere as they do, without action and without judgment.

(Klaus’s outlook on life is very Eastern-hemisphere, and it’s no surprise that when he was traveling the world in the era of oft-high white hippies appropriating Eastern thought, he visited India.)  

 Think about previous examples: robbing a convenience store for like an armful of junk food; trying to steal money from his millionaire dead abusive father; letting Ben haze a racist cop to get his sister’s husband out of jail.  It’s the same thing with the cult.  Ben levitates Klaus, Klaus quotes pop songs by TLC and Destiny’s Child to wow crowds into seeing him as a guru. People are happy and peaceful, and he happens to get lots of money and flourish in queer havens across the country, like San Francisco, where otherwise he’d probably be brutally murdered for being gay.  Does anybody get hurt? Nope.  And to me, that’s what’s crucial. 

 Incidentally: the only time Klaus was ever connected to someone else getting hurt was when Patch died by Agent ChaCha’s gun.  Be assured he blames himself for that, but he certainly didn’t ask to be kidnapped and tortured for days, nor did he ask Patch to go into the hotel room without backup from Diego.  

I think people should bear in mind that while Klaus is a master of nonaction, he is also never selfish in such a way as gets other people hurt.  He is the first person to comfort as well as sensibly aid a sibling in a moment of real crisis. Three examples off the top of my head:

A) Being the only sibling aside Allison to seriously question locking Vanya away in the very room where she was abused by neglect as a child, insisting, “this is Vanya, she used to cry when we stepped on ants!” and “Why don’t we just let her out and ASK her what happened?”  If anything, Klaus is a champion of respecting the will and rights of others. 

B) Putting a hand on Luther’s shoulder while crying himself, when Allison was discovered nearly killed by Vanya (poor Vanya, she’s a whole other kettle of fish and I frankly adore her), as well as being very kind and patient with Luther when he was drunk earlier (and physically assaulted Klaus):

C) Rushing into a police riot zone to rescue Allison while her husband, frightened of her powers, was running into danger: 

Klaus has a compassionate heart.  He just has issues with confrontation and with follow-through, because this is a life he would forfeit in a second if he could. And who can blame him?   Frankly Klaus has the healthiest outlook on Reginald Hargreeves and his abusive bullshit, of all the siblings. He’s the only one who calls Reginald out, establishes healthy self-other boundaries with his “father,” and is then at peace with the ways in which Reginald continues to fall short, certain that these failings are no fault of Klaus’s own.   Just see their conversation in the barbershop in “heaven.”

Let me repeat: 

HE DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS RESPONSIBILITY, SO TO HIM IT’S CONTRACTUALLY UNFAIR TO ASK HIM TO HONOR IT. He will try, when it concerns the welfare of family members, but he doesn’t see why he should be somehow predestined to “save the world” when he never claimed the ability to do so. 

4) And that’s not even touching Klaus’s Complex-PTSD, which began before Vietnam and is still a MAJOR and FORMATIVE part of how he behaves now.  

[spaceskam]

our fainted thrill carries on (11/13)

warning: mentions of anxiety, kidnapping, child abuse, etc

ao3

Regardless of their ambiguous relationship status, Alex had promised to let Michael know when he got to the motel safely.

Midnight passed.

1 A.M. passed.

3 A.M.

5 A.M.

7 A.M.

“You just forgot, right? You got back and went to sleep, right?” Michael asked, leaving his 5th voicemail of the night. He’d called 30 times and texted even more, spending the whole night curled up on the couch and biting his nails until they hurt. “You’re gonna call me when you wake up and you’re gonna be so pissed that I blew up your phone. I checked four times, you brought your charger, so if you’re ignoring me on purpose, then… Please be okay. I need you to be okay. I love you, bye.”

When Alex had gotten up the morning after their talk and just started packing a bag to still head out to meet the active Camerons, Michael had been stressed beyond belief. No matter how much he said it was a bad idea, Alex deemed it necessary. Then when Michael tried to invite himself along, Alex told him no.

“I swear to God, I am going to kill you when you get home. You can’t just not return my calls, that’s a real dick move,” Michael spat, taking a shaky breath, “I miss you, come home.”

He’d bothered him for the rest of the week, trying his damnedest to either get Alex to stay or get him to let him tag along. It would’ve been fun, he’d said, a road trip with all of them. Alex had banished him to yard work after too many minutes of failed, teenage-esque coercion.

“I’m worried,” Michael sniffled at 8 A.M. Alex should’ve taken his medication by now. Had he done his morning PT? “Please call me. I won’t be mad, I just need you. I need to know you’re okay.”

They’d been slowly trying to build trust again and now he wasn’t answering. Was he hurt? Was he avoiding him? Was he just having so much fun he forgot? Did someone take him?

“Alex,” Michael said, stress crying into his palms at this point as his whole body shook with a new, unknown level of anxiety, “I need… Just one response, okay? Just one. So I know you’re alright. I love you. Please take your medicine and eat something if you haven’t. I love you.”

For years, Michael had gotten accustomed to never being able to talk to Alex when he wanted to. He was overseas playing G.I. Joe and Michael avoided even trying. But now, now after months of Alex picking up when he needed him, months of spending so much time together, months of needing him to breathe… Now it felt like his entire world was crumbling and suddenly he was considering filing a missing person’s report.

“But that’d be stupid, right? You’re on a secret mission, I’m a… redacted… so I just gotta wait. Just gotta… Please be okay. I love you more than anything and I meant what I said. So, you know, if someone took you and is listening... Tell them I’ll fucking kill them. I won’t hesitate. Don’t worry.”

Michael pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes, trying to will himself to feel better. His hand seized up and his body hurt. He just needed Alex to be okay and alive and home. He needed him to come home.

“The person you are trying to reach is not available. Mailbox full. Goodbye.”

He dropped the phone onto the couch, raking his hands through his hair and pulling hard as he tried to calm himself. This wasn’t just anyone, this was Alex. If Michael trusted anyone to get themselves out of a sticky situation, it was Alex Manes. He was strong and smart and ungodly talented. He should be okay.

So then why wasn’t he answering his fucking phone?

“Whoa, what’s going on here?”

Michael looked up at the sound of Rosa’s voice. She was staring at him in concern which was new, but he couldn’t even take time to register it. He was shaking and felt like he was suffocating, his whole mind blurry and thinking of the worst-case scenario.

“Alex won’t answer and he’s not home and I can’t get in touch with him and it’s been hours and, and he said he would call or text or, or, or, or‒”

“Hey, it’s Alex, I’m sure he’s fine,” Rosa insisted. Michael shook his head, pulling on his hair a little harder.

“No,” he whispered, shaking his head, “No, he said‒”

“Did you try Kyle or Jenna? See if they’d pick up? Maybe Alex lost his phone,” she tried, coming closer. The couch shifted as she sat beside him and he tried to take a grounding breath just like Alex showed him. Identify the trigger and breathe. Except he knew the fucking trigger and he couldn’t breathe because it was an actual problem.

“No, I didn’t call them,” he said, staring at his phone. His messages were still unread and it brought a whole new wave of panic. He’d never felt so fucking helpless in his life. He just wanted Alex.

“Give me your phone,” Rosa instructed, taking it before he could actually hand it over. Which was valid because he felt like his skin was being turned inside out. He should’ve followed him or put a tracker on him or put a fucking handprint on him or something. Anything.

Anything would be better than this.

“Okay, let me try Jenna,” she said after Kyle’s went to voicemail. Michael groaned pathetically, shrinking in on himself again.

A few more minutes, a few more calls unanswered, and all it did was make Michael’s anxiety grow to insane levels. What happened? What the fuck could’ve taken them out? Sure, Kyle he could understand, but Cam and Alex? What kind of manpower did these people have?

“Oh my God, he’s dead,” Michael breathed‒or, tried to breathe, “He’s dead. He’s dead and the last thing he remembers is me being a total dick. He’s dead.”

“Hey, don’t say shit like that, he’s not dead,” Rosa insisted, swatting his leg. Michael just choked his tears, rocking slightly. Horrible, intrusive images of Alex’s dead body flooded through his mind. Bloody, beaten, shot, destroyed. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. “It’s Alex, he’s not dead, stop.”

 “Then where is he, huh?! If he’s not dead, where is he?!” Michael demanded. Rosa glared at him.

“Acting like this will get us nowhere,” Rosa said, standing to her feet and gesturing for him to do the same. He was pretty sure his feet wouldn’t work if he tried. She rolled her eyes when he didn’t move. “Listen, I want you to really think about what’s going on right now. If something is wrong, your most useful people are out of commission. You have to actually put in the effort.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Michael argued. 

“You sure about that?” Rosa prodded.

She stared him down for a moment and he carefully took a few grounding breaths. He had to be logical at least a little bit. If he was going to get Alex back, he had to at least have a starting place. So he closed his eyes, focusing on changing that anxiety and sadness into anger. It wasn’t hard. It felt like a reflex.

He took a few more breaths before he opened his eyes.

“I know where to go.”

-

Michael Guerin let himself into the Manes’ residence for the second time in one week.

Jesse Manes was sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and not even bothering to stand in fear like last time. Instead, he just looked up at Michael. His fingers itched, eager to just throw him into the wall. But he waited.

“Tell me where Alex is.”

Jesse paused, looking at him over the top of his mug. He looked genuinely confused, but Michael didn’t buy that for a second. 

“Did you warn them that Alex was thinking about going out there? Did you tell them about him?” Michael demanded. Jesse slowly lowered his cup.

“Now, son, I thought we were getting along last t‒”

“Answer me!” Michael demanded, throwing the mug across the room and slamming it into the wall. It was a perfect demonstration of what he’d do to Jesse if he didn’t get an answer.

Jesse sighed, looking longingly at the shattered mug for a moment before turning his attention back to Michael. He was too calm. There was nothing calm about this situation. Nothing at all. Alex was missing. So were Kyle and Cam.

“I didn’t warn them, but they already know who Alex is. He’s got Manes features and every active member knows of every family member of the other factions for safety purposes. If they took Alex, it was because of you,” Jesse said simply. Michael’s heart dropped into his stomach and his breathing threatened to choke him all over again.

“Bullshit,” Michael spat. Jesse sighed and gestured to the chair across from him. Michael was hesitant to do so. Last time they sat and spoke cordially, Alex went missing over the very thing they spoke about.

But, then again, Jesse had warned him.

Michael reluctantly took a seat.

“They have a theory that says any human who gets involved with an alien is just as dangerous and corrupt,” Jesse said. Michael scoffed.

“You think that too.”

“I don’t think that,” he said, still oh so calm, “I think it shows weakness and is a symptom of being overly empathetic to creatures that aren’t worth it, but I don’t think it’s something one can’t come back from. Alex has… other compromising issues. He’s disabled, he’s got PTSD, CPTSD‒we’re just scratching the surface. I understand why you’re worried.”

There was a level of coldness to him that Michael couldn’t comprehend. It was like there was a legit disconnect and he didn’t see Alex as his son. He viewed Alex, not as the man he was, but as the idea of what he was. A disabled, queer veteran. End sentence.

“He’s your son,” Michael said, eyebrows drawn together and shaking his head, “He’s your son, why don’t you care? Why aren’t you worried? I-I’ve seen so many shitty parents in my day, but most of the time they at least pretend. You can’t even give him that.”

“Alex made it clear he doesn’t want me pretending,” Jesse said simply, “And I learned a long time ago there’s no reason in being worried for him. Worry doesn’t change what that boy does. If anything, it makes him run towards the fire. He’s made his bed.”

Michael shook his head, leaning back in his seat and looking up towards the ceiling as he tried to collect himself.

“Alex is… He is the strongest person I know. And I have no idea how the fuck he became that with you as a father,” Michael scoffed, “No matter what bullshit is thrown at him, he can be kind. He can still love so much. He doesn’t trust you, but he still loves you. He doesn’t trust me, but he still loves me. Do you not understand how fucking incredible that is?”

Michael looked at Jesse, seeing that he was basically unphased. It didn’t make sense. How many years had this man put effort into becoming something that he forgot how to be human? How had Michael spent years trying to avoid falling into the cold arms of humanity and failed, but Jesse Manes had successfully evaded it completely?

“I’ve encountered a lot of monsters,” Michael said, leaning a bit closer and making sure he held eye contact, “I’ve encountered so many and, despite the fact that I’ve also met my fair share of loving people, I still became one. I’m still this. But Alex? Alex has been wronged by every goddamn person he’s ever met and he’s still good. He is unapologetically good. And you know what? He deserves to see that there’s a point to it.”

“How exactly do you expect to do that?”

With a simple thought, Michael bound Jesse Manes’ wrists with an invisible string. Jesse managed to hide any type of alarm.

“We’re goin’ on a road trip.”

-

Alex’s head hurt ungodly bad.

“Alex, hey, welcome back to life.”

He squinted and saw Kyle looking down at him, shirtless for some reason. He tried to move, but it just hurt worse so he stayed put.

“What’s going on?”

“We may or may not be trapped in a cellar,” Kyle said softly, lifting something. It was then that Alex realized Kyle’s missing shirt was being pressed to his head. “But it’s okay, we’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

“Me? What happened?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Kyle asked. Alex closed his eyes and thought really hard. He felt disoriented and achy and probably had everything to do with that head wound he couldn’t really feel.

“Um, getting to the club?” Alex said, trying to remember what happened after, but it was blurry, “Did I get any information?”

“Well, I don’t know, you don’t remember,” Kyle sighed, “I’m sure it’ll come back to you. Right now, just stay put.”

“What’s going on?”

“A couple of guy’s cornered me. I don’t know how they knew I was with you, but they cornered me and threw me in the back of a van. Same with you, but you were already unconscious by then. Not sure what happened, but you’ve got a pretty nasty head wound.”

“That’s it?” Alex wondered, “Where’s Cam?”

“Shh,” Kyle hushed, looking around and stroking Alex’s cheek as if that would cover up what he said. Maybe it would. He leaned down and put his lips right by Alex’s ear. “Don’t talk about that or we’re never gonna escape. They can’t know she’s involved with us, okay? Just play along.”

Alex gave a microscopic nod as Kyle sat back up.

“I think you’ll be okay. It stopped bleeding,” Kyle told him.

“Good, I need to kick someone’s ass,” Ale said, groaning as he tried to shift again. His body still felt too heavy. “What the fuck, I’ve had a head wound before. They don’t usually feel so… They… I…”

Carefully, Kyle hand traveled from his cheek down to his arm. He carefully put a little pressure over a spot just below the inside of his elbow. Alex jumped, his body reacting to the spike of pain. Kyle whispered his apology, but it was clearly something had happened to his arm. Kyle reached down more, grabbing his hand and lacing their fingers together. When he sat up straight, it brought Alex’s arm right into his line of view.

Branded into his arm was that familiar three men Neptune symbol, tiny and yet so, so obvious. In the first head, the one meaning Manes, was a little red dot, the product of an injection. His eyes went up to meet Kyle’s. His face was schooled, but his eyes showed his worry.

“And you?” Alex asked. He shook his head, saying they hadn’t done it to him.

Alex took a deep breath and nodded. 

This is why he hated going in blind.