#I'm a woman and that is regularly relevant but not as often as some people make it

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

I am pretty sure I'm not trans. Like, I check every few months, usually around the time a doctor gets weird about my genes. I do, however, also regularly consider removing the gender marker from my ID, even though it would seriously limit my ability to travel unhindered.

I am a woman. I like being a woman. Most of the times in my life I thought I hated my gender were related to fashion, but it turns out sewing machines can be laughably cheap and no one can force you to wear dusty pink to your cousin's wedding once you make your own money.

I just detest that a little letter on a little chip on a little card carries so many exhausting expectations. And changing it to "the" other one would only replace those expectations with the same thing in a slightly different color.

So once or twice a month, I play with the idea of just erasing it and making where I fit in statistics and what room I should pick a cubicle in to change into swimwear in and what random ass word should precede my name someone else's problem. Let the people who care figure it out, because I'm quite honestly exhausted with it all.

It would almost be worth the pain of getting all my ID updated. Almost.

[butch-reidentified]

# of Asks currently pending in my inbox as of 8/11/2024: 534

1. What is a woman?

Deep dive into my perspective on gender identity ideology (GII) & my response to an anon regarding "autogynephilia"

Argument for Using "Cis-Identifying"

Pitch: New Terminology to Replace "[Biological] Sex"

And related: A conversation with a "NERF" about radical feminism, gender identity ideology, and what we/I actually believe.

2. Inform yourself on some of the work I've done for trans people before you continue the trend of cowardly hypocrisy.

3. My thread responding to the way much of the tumblr trans community handled my sharing my story of surviving the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting (often by stealing my lived trauma and removing my url) is easily one of the most - if not the most - important posts pertaining to trans discourse I've made to date, and Tumblr won't let me pin it. Of course. So here it is. And a bonus: This lovely ask.

4. Hope for Women (this is a very new project, WIP)

5. Comparative Analysis of Cult-like Patterns in Gender Identity Ideology, Radfeminism

Another post (not mine) listing indicators something may be a cult

6. Response to an anon asking why radfems team up with conservatives (spoiler: we don't), including THE QUESTION I have about gender identity ideology that would make me change my views completely if answered; response to a similar anon simplifying the differences between TRA, radfem, & conservative views on gender.

About Me:

I am a butch lesbian, married to a badass gnc (but not butch) radfem lesbian goddess whose misandry surpasses even my own; she does have tumblr but rarely uses it - @psychichologramnightmare is hers. I'm 27/Taurus/May baby, though I'll be real, I've never liked astrology and found my birth chart n whatnot always laughably wildly inaccurate to me (sorry astrology girlies). Former competitive rock climber, still in love with hiking and climbing. Wilderness survivalist. Trained & armed woman, advocate for female-only firearm ownership.

My wife and I run our own business, and bought our first home together at 24 & 25 respectively - it's a lovely 4/3 on a quarter acre where we have 5 mango trees and more, plan to start growing our own food and herbs, foster kittens, and provide free housing (and more) regularly for those in need. We do a LOT of IRL feminist action/work/organizing. I post about some of that work pretty often, but I couldn't possibly post about all of it (even if it were safe to do so). I am basically organizing (mostly offline, but some online as well) full-time now.

Survivor of abuse, CSA + captivity, trafficking in my teens where I was forced into porn as a minor, the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando 2016, and more. I am no longer affected by any of these in any negative psychological manner. I own my past, every moment of it, and wouldn't change a thing I've experienced. What I often tell people is, "I'm not glad it happened; I'm glad I was there."

I got my Bachelor's in Neuroscience/Neuropsych, used to work in a top neuro research lab, and have been a coauthor on a peer-reviewed scientific journal publication. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on POTS, ADHD, some of the relevant epigenetics, and norepinephrine dysregulation. I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos & POTS in 2015, before pretty much anyone had heard of them (including most doctors). My POTS is very well-managed now, but chronic pain from EDS is more of a struggle. I recently went for testing for EDS subtype and was diagnosed with Type IV/vascular-type EDS (VEDS).

I practice "witchcraft" (kind of...) as a form of artistic expression. I don't subscribe to any literal metaphysical/supernatural/whatever set of beliefs or narrative, and have had a lifelong inability to believe in such things, but I am passionate about lesbian-centered/lesbian-exclusive (esp butch & gnc lesbian) witchcraft. I am also using this practice in part to connect further with my ancestors and their culture & way of life, but this would take a full essay to elaborate on/explain.

Adoptee with complex history. Working through a lot of feelings surrounding my ancestry - one birth parent was white, other was almost entirely indigenous Mexican (Nahua), and I have like zero personality traits in common with the former but have only been able to meet them irl not the other side - and the fact that my adoptive family (white) has not always handled things well in raising adopted kids. I only learned my full biological family history as an adult and was lied to by them about it my whole life. Which, looking back it feels like I always knew on some level, as adoptees often seem to, and it puts a lot of my childhood difficulties etc in context. Adoption-critical but not abolitionist - I plan to adopt with my wife in a couple years. I've talked a fair bit about my experiences, adoption trauma, ethical adoption, and more. Check out my tags such as #ethical adoption, #adopted, #adoptee, and so forth (tagged on this post for easy accessibility).

I spent many years surrounded by majority-trans-identifying friends/acquaintances both irl and online, deeply involved in trans spaces & activism, and even identified for a bit & was on T for a while. I am not "uneducated" or unfamiliar with trans-identifying people, their experiences, or gender identity ideology in general. You, like me back then, very probably have been lied to about radfems ("terfs") and what we believe and fight for. I am happy to talk in good faith (provided you do the same) 1 on 1 with anyone who is curious about what we actually believe and what we stand for, what common radfem takes on gender identity ideology & trans identity actually are and why.

I have a history of purely physical sex dysphoria (physical sensation like pain or itching). I got "top surgery" (elective mastectomy) due to this and other reasons: constant painful breast cysts & very large breasts (DDD even when I weighed under 100 lbs). I was not trans-identifying by the time I got this surgery (though I tried to briefly identify as nb/transmasc just bc I felt obligated, but hated it). I have never wanted to be a man socially and genuinely hated the very thought. I came out the womb feminist, got in trouble throughout primary school for fighting boys who tried to pull sexist bullshit, always lowkey believed in female superiority (I mean just look at our biology, lifespans, pain tolerance, the things we've done throughout history despite violent patriarchal oppression...). I spent years preparing myself. I read from & spoke to women who regretted this surgery, challenged myself at every turn, dove deep into my mind and thought processes, tried alternative treatment attempts, worked with a non-affirming therapist, made sure my past traumas were fully healed, and waited until I was in my mid-twenties so my brain was more or less fully matured. I have no regrets about it. I still have some (still purely physical sensation) dysphoria ("phantom male genitals" type of thing) at times, but have come to manage this very well. More on this here.

Formally assessed psychopath & participant in research by leading psychopathy experts (read on before jumping to conclusions). Check out this post and my #psychopathy tag (tagged on this post for easy accessibility) for info, particularly about high-EQ female psychopathy, & to find out everything you think you know about us is wrong 💕 (what you know about male psychopaths is usually right tho 💀)

Note: When it comes to politics, I strive to discuss exclusively that about which I am *uniquely knowledgeable* - by which I mean, essentially, that I (believe I) have something to contribute that is unlikely to be found on every other blog. I do not and will not make posts or reblog posts about topics I do not feel this way about. You are not entitled to know my views on every hot-button issue, and I have no intention of speaking on that which I know little about, or that I don't know enough about (through study or personal experiences) to contribute something you can't get a thousand other places.

Tag Guide (WIP):

#mine -> original posts, including ask responses

#ask -> ask responses only

#anon hate, #anon love -> should be self-explanatory. anon love does include some non-anon love for simplicity.

#catposting, #dogposting, #petposting -> images of cats, dogs, and both, respectively (not always my own)

#Wilder wives -> posts pertaining to me & my wife (last name Wilder)

#mvawg, #mvaw, #male violence -> male violence against women/girls

#what we believe -> fairly new tag for posts trying to educate on what radfeminism is actually about/damage control for disinformation & misinformation about it

#ethical adoption -> my takes as an adoptee on the issues within the adoption industry & how adoption can be done ethically

#nahua, #nahuatl, #mexica -> ranges from personal journal style posts about my process of reconnecting with the Nahua community to sharing facts about the language (Nahuatl, pronounce it Nawat) and stories from Mexica mythology etc. posts I make specifically as part of the facts-and-stories series are tagged #indigenous reconstructionism.

#trans violence -> violence committed by trans-identifying people, including threats of and graphic violent fantasies (primarily misogynistic ones)

#trans misogyny, #trans lesbophobia, #woke misogyny, #woke homophobia, #woke lesbophobia, etc. -> what it says on the tin

[doberbutts]

I think the terms TMA/TME work best when they're used as rules of thumb, rather than expected to function as strict categories. They're often helpful, but occasionally they can become obfuscatory, and there are edge cases where they can't be neatly applied. In those cases, they should be set aside, but with an understanding that they will be brought back into conversations when helpful.

To give a personal perspective - I'm a trans masc individual who has, upon occasion, experienced misdirected transmisogyny. I was on T for 5 years, then came off it (partly due to health problems, partly due to starting to identify as nonbinary rather than as a man) and began presenting in a more feminine manner, and people would regularly mistake me for a trans woman.

When people thought I was a trans woman, I did notice an increase in hostility, harassment and unwelcome advances from strangers. Groups of men would shout at me in the street, mothers would glare at me and physically pull their children further away from me if I came near. I also started getting catcalled and couldn't enjoy a night out in a club without being groped. I'd experienced some of these things as a trans man and as a girl, but probably never at such a high frequency or so intensely.

I definitely think I got a taste of transmisogyny and people do still assume I'm trans fem from time to time. But I still wouldn't describe myself as TMA. I don't shout it from the rooftops, but if it feels relevant in the context of a conversation, I will say I'm TME. Because I think the terms are about overarching dynamics, rather than whether or not an individual has ever faced a single instance of transmisogyny.

For me, there was always a sense of distance between myself and any negative experience, that came from knowing they'd misread my AGAB - "that lad just called me a chick with a dick! How funny! I'd be so lucky!" / "You're harassing me for using the female showers at the gym when I am literally menstruating. Are you going to stop being a creep, or do I have to show you my bloody tampon?" There's a degree to which I can sidestep or disavow their idea of me in a manner trans women can't.

I also don't know what it's like to deal with many other elements of transmisogyny, or deal with it as an overarching narrative in one's life rather than a freak episode.

I think it's fair to say I have at times been a grey area and I could use my experiences to argue against the validity of TME/TMA, but I don't want to do that. I don't like it when the terms are just used as a way to say AFAB/AMAB while being perceived as less problematic. But I think it is helpful to have little shorthand reminders about specific power dynamics that do have an impact in our communities. I have absolutely seen transmisogyny play out in queer spaces, both online and IRL, and I think it's worth having vocabulary that emphatically reminds people to check themselves and to not assume they don't have internalised bias against trans women just because they're trans masc.

Trans women are a boogeyman in popular culture and the collective unconscious in a way trans men never have been (at least, not to anything like the same extent). Trans women face an intensity of monstering that I think most people won't understand unless they spend a lot of time sharing space with and listening to trans women. The rapid adoption of TMA/TME feels like an attempt to fast-track that understanding en masse. Maybe it's a bit clumsy, but I do think it's having an impact and important conversations are happening. I don't know if the terms will stick or fall out of use. Having been in the trans community for over a decade and seeing how our vocabularies evolve, I'm inclined to think they'll stick around for a few years and then largely disappear. But I feel that while trans women are finding them useful, we need to be respectful of that fact.

Idk sorry to rant in your askbox, I wanted to give my two cents. Feel free to ignore lol

I'm going to be a bit blunt here: in the span of time I've been off tumblr to, you know, sleep... I've gotten 20 different asks trying to convince me to like the usage of tma/tme and also several transphobic asks about my top surgery. The transphobic ones I blocked and deleted because I'm literally 3 weeks out and will not be dissuaded. But I'm simply not willing to continue arguing a point I've made very clear that I don't love the usage of this particular theory the way it's currently being used.

You can like it for yourself. I have said this over and over again. I do not like it for me, and do not think it is accurate for my life or my experiences or the reality that is what I have to go through on a regular basis. True to everything else that I've posted, I don't really care what you call yourself. If you want to call yourself TME and you believe that framework works for your experience, more power to you. Just don't label me that, because I don't think it works for mine.

Trans women are absolutely a boogeyman in a way that trans men often aren't. That is, unfortunately, one of the ways that hypervisibility is such a curse. Everyone knows what a trans woman is, and a good majority of those people also think the only good one's a dead one. That's bad. That's transmisogyny, and we should ally with trans women to help fix this problem.

Also unfortunately, as trans men become more and more visible to the world, instead of facing mass erasure and dying in silence or escaping to live in stealth, trans men are also beginning to become a boogeyman as well. Now we are a social contagion, a craze, with rapid onset gender dysphoria, mutilating ourselves and ruining our precious bodies, carving out our wombs, simultaneously debasing ourselves and also becoming predators lurking to snatch daughters up and forcefeed them our ideology, betraying women by becoming a mockery of men. What's worse, we tend to politically close ranks with trans women and cis women alike so it's harder for transphobic lawmakers to divide and conquer as they're used to with cis men, so instead they have to demonize us to prevent any further allyship.

That's the conversation trans mascs are trying to have.

Genuinely, I do agree that trans women face an othering that most people do not grasp without understanding transmisogyny theory, which is why I think everyone should have at least a basic understanding of it. But I also think that's true of many other demographics, and that if we want to get out of the pit that bigoted society put us in, we've got to work together to do so. It was, after all, the combined efforts of Marsha P Johnson AND Storme de Laverie that brought us out in the open. And among me friend group, we have people from all different races and backgrounds and genders and more locking arms to ensure the safety of each other, wanting to understand and know each other, lifting each other up.

[dr-futbol-blog]

Hot Zone, Pt. 1

Hot Zone (S01E13) is, in many ways, a story about the aftermath of the storm and the events of the Genii siege.

The episode starts with McKay and Zelenka playing Prime/Not prime, a math game. Zelenka is trying to get Ford involved, but he's just not into it. We never see McKay play this with Sheppard but the thing is, Sheppard is better than McKay is at mental math. We already saw this in Rising (S01E01), and we'll see it again toward the end of the season in The Brotherhood (S01E16). Where Zelenka is trying to get the young military member of the team to play the game with them, McKay is more trying to help him understand the game and how it's played. Like maybe he's either had to explain it before had it explained to him previously.

I'm going to go on a limb and suggest that this game was started by McKay and someone that is not currently present. Passing the time doing it is a way of keeping Sheppard close even when he's not there. In fact, we later learn that Ford hadn't been with them from the start but had joined them in the middle of things which would suggest that there had been someone else there with them previously that Ford had come to replace. Someone that might have had to leave for a regularly scheduled gym appointment, for example.

McKay seems to be in a real good mood. Not only is he engaged in the game, he's talking to everyone in an up-beat way. He calls one of his team members "the lovely and talented Dumais," calls one of the guys that has had enough of these shenanigans "Dr. Killjoy," and is just being all-around positive. He even admits it himself, telling the whole team: "Alright, you clowns, listen up! I don't often get a chance to say this, so savour it: good work, boys and girls! Let's go home."

This is the opposite of the McKay that Zelenka claimed is "always like this," the last time we saw him with his science team in The Storm (S01E09). Also, you got places you need to be, Rodney?

McKay does give a compliment to a woman here. It's not in his usual, sleazy over-the-top way when he's performatively hitting on someone. This woman is a member of his science teams so hitting on her would be somewhat problematic to begin with. But he does appear to just genuinely be giving her a compliment because he's in a good mood (and he also turns his back to her pretty much immediately, which signals a complete lack of interest).

And by the looks of it, Dumais is not used to receiving praise from him and isn't quite sure what to make of it. If anything, she looks 100% done with her boss seeming to walk on Cloud Nine.

What ever has Rodney in such an obviously good mood can obviously last only so long. He's reminded of the reality of living on Atlantis when members of his science team start dropping dead under mysterious circumstances. This connects to the events of the previous episode The Defiant One (S01E12), where McKay had to watch a member of his science team die before his eyes, which is also relevant to the resolution of the episode later.

Toward the end of the season (Letters from Pegasus, S01E17), we see McKay musing about leadership. It's a humorous pastiche of his attempts at putting down some of his thoughts for a video message to earth. But the thing is, he has been thinking about it a lot. And the reason for it is John Sheppard and his relationship with the Major (what ever the nature of this relationship may be). He admires Sheppard and hence tries to emulate him. He especially tries to act the way he thinks Sheppard would act when there's danger in the air. And here, McKay displays a lot of leadership. He acts like a responsible leader, taking care of his people and the safety of the city. He wants to make Sheppard proud.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this episode is the first where McKay mentions that he has a sister on earth that he has lost contact with. It connects the episode to Letters from Pegasus, where he's making his video message with his thoughts on leadership to send to her.

They order a quarantine so as not to endanger other people in the city. We can contrast the way one of the scientists, Peterson, freaks out to how cool and collected McKay is. He understands the danger they might be in better than most people but he's still completely unafraid. He's not acting unafraid, he is unafraid. It does not occur to him to be afraid. McKay is also adamant about not endangering anyone in the city.

The plan, as instituted by Weir and Grodin, is for everyone in the city to stay put where they are. This seems to quickly become a problem for Sheppard.

Sheppard and Teyla are practicing some form of Athosian martial art using wooden bastons at a room that has been converted into a gymnasium. She is teaching him, and apparently has been teaching him for a while. Although, she notices and makes note of the fact that Sheppard has not been practicing lately, which is interesting.

Although he's getting his ass kicked, Sheppard also seems to be in a real good mood.

I mean, the fact that he's getting his ass beat so badly and is still in such a good mood is pretty telling.

Firstly, he doesn't treat Teyla as a woman but as a warrior, which is something she noticed pretty much immediately upon their meeting on Athos. He sees her as a person. John Sheppard is not sexist. He has no problem getting his ass beat by a woman that is better than he is at something, or learning from her. And he's learning more than stick fighting:

Sheppard: Y'know, no matter how many hours I put into this, you're still gonna kick my ass. Teyla: It is not for the winning that we practise. Sheppard: Well, what's the point?

(This exchange seems to hearken back to the beginning of the episode where Ford failed to see the point of Prime/Not prime. Like, this exact exchange may have happened previously between Sheppard and McKay regarding the numbers; clearly, he eventually learned to love playing just for the sake of playing; just to hone a skill).

Second, this kind of activity gives them time to bond. They are good friends and care about each other. Where Sheppard is wound into tight knots inside, Teyla is empathic and very good with feelings, expressing what she thinks and how she feels. Being around her is really good for Sheppard. And the fact that she is very sexy, and they are a man and a woman, does not make their interaction sexual or their bond erotic.

They get a message through the intercom about the city going under lock-down for a few hours. Granted, Sheppard is head of security and obviously, he should be concerned. His mood changes instantly, just like McKay's did when a member of his science team died before his eyes. We can contrast Teyla and Sheppard. She's concerned. He is agitated. He needs to know whether there's danger and especially whether someone he cares about is in danger.

Elsewhere, Rodney is leading his science team. Unlike Sheppard, McKay is not freaking out but seems to be on a mission, and indeed it's members of his science team that express concern. Trying to figure out why the scientists died, he tells Ford: "Don't worry, my motivations are based entirely on self-preservation."

But is that what they are?

He wants to get to the bottom of the problem, to be sure. It's not to save the day. It's not to get out of quarantine, which he helped set up himself. There's no indication that he's personally in any danger, yet. He says that his motivation is self-preservation but it seems much more like his motivation is actually to keep what ever is down there from spilling into the rest of the city. Where someone he cares about it.

But it's not that he wants to put himself needlessly in danger. He very much doesn't want to die, not now. He has a reason to want to get out of this safely. It's a motivation, but not his main motivation. He even orders Ford to come with him to the Ancient lab for protection. He wants to figure it out, he wants to fix it, but he also very much wants to get out of there safely.

In the gym, Sheppard is pacing during his call to Weir, getting more and more agitated by not being in control of the situation:

Sheppard: Teyla and I are coming up to join you. Weir: We're in a self-regulated quarantine, Major. Everyone stays where they are. Sheppard: They're nearly a mile away on the east pier. D'you really think I'm in any sort of danger walking from here to the Control Room? Weir: At this point we don't know where they contracted the virus.

First of all, let me note that he knows where McKay is, like exactly. Yes, McKay and Ford are both members of his team but he seemed to be enjoying a day off, having no reason to know his whereabouts in that detail (also? He started heading out of the gym finished with the stick fighting class around the same time as McKay was supposed to be returning back to the city; just saying, he threw that towel on his shoulders like he had places to be and wanted to grab a shower before that).

So, to recap: Sheppard was in a good mood. Has been skipping practicing recently. Forgot to bring his radio with him to the gym. Was about to grab a shower. McKay was in a good mood. Playing a mental math game. Couldn't wait for the inspection of never-before visited nooks of Atlantis to be over and return to the city. All I'm saying is that we later learn in canon that McKay and Sheppard have been spending a lot of time together between missions (ergo, episodes), and while we don't know exactly when they started playing "the game," they are definitely doing it by this time.

I also have no doubt in my mind that Sheppard was the reason Ford was down there with them because he wasn't exactly enjoying himself and seemed like he wanted to be anywhere else. And it wasn't just Ford but they were also accompanied by two huge marines. McKay's safety seems to be a pretty important thing for Sheppard, for some reason.

This being the case, he is trying every trick in his book to convince Weir that he needs to be in on the action. He pulls rank, he tries reasoning with her, tries coming up with excuses and ways he could join them in attempting to figure this thing out. Also, look at his eyes when Weir says: "At this point we don't know where they contracted the virus."

It's not a generalized anxiety he's feeling. It's not that he's missing out on the action and wants to save the day. It's not that he's head of security and his city is under some kind of a threat he needs to fix. This is a very specific fear for the people that Weir claims have contracted a virus. Two of them in particular. One especially.

And he is conflicted. He doesn't want to risk making it worse by breaking protocol and evading quarantine. But he also can't just sit on his ass if Rodney is in some kind of danger.

Continued in Pt. 2

[after-witch]

What's your ultimate self indulgent smiling man fantasy?

'Nonners. I love this question, thank you for it, I am totally here for any indulgence of my smiling man obsession.

I don't have a singular ultimate fantasy as I cycle through very similar ones regularly enough, so let me be very very self-indulgent and go into all of them.

Behind a read more because it might be a lot.

So my smiling man daydream fantasies tend to have a few distinct categories.

Folksy/grounded -- where whoever I'm imagining myself to be has made a bargain with the smiling man, similar to the bargain than Jonathan Webster made ,and very often they're in historical settings. Sometimes it's people making a bargain for something earnest, like wanting to have children or paying off some massive debt they can't see a way out of or wanting to get out of being married off to someone (usually these tie into the issues of being a historical woman--wanting to escape a fate); sometimes it's more greedy and selfish, like someone wanting to be a famous artist but wanting that instant magic fix to be famous.

These always end with the character in question being taken behind the mist and used up, after the smiling man is ready to take them.

Servant - where whoever I'm imagining myself to be makes a bargain with the smiling man but becomes his servant in the 'sunshine world' as part of the deal. Usually these characters tend to be desperate but yearning for something that isn't a necessity, like fame--quite often they want to be stage performers because then I can daydream with my music playing and have it be relevant, lol.

Sometimes the servant character falls in love/gets engaged and the smiling man gets mad about it because the character belongs to him, and they didn't even think about that before trying to promise themselves to someone else. He doesn't view it in a "I love them" way, just, "Uhhh you're my belonging, I own you, what makes you think you can just up and devote your soul to someone?"

For supreme self indulgence with this daydream, I turn to "All I Ask Of You" from Phantom of the Opera, where the character and her fiance write a song where my character is alluding to their servitude to the smiling man and all the horror that entails ("All I want is freedom/ a world with no more night/And you, always beside me/To hold me and to hide me") while the fiance is probably just thinking they have lots of personal problems.

And of course, the smiling man gets wind of this song, and is not very impressed and will be having A Talk with the character.

These don't really have endings, they sometimes spin off into other vaguely musical moments, often with "Pure as the Driven Snow" from the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (the official Rachel Zegler version of the song, anyway).

Adults with supernatural or smiling man adjacent histories for these Daydreams, it involves a character who has a background with the smiling man in some way or who has a traumatic event that connects them to supernatural or otherworldly things.

Sometimes it's a character who encountered the smiling man and made a bargain as a child, and now they're an adult and he's coming to collect. I often have him show up looking like someone else and fucking with them, because he finds it entertaining.

Sometimes it's someone who saw a ghost or was involved in another supernatural entities shenanigans (sometimes I decide the Other Mother from Coraline was involved, or a creature like her) but as an adult they have the misfortunate to come across the smiling man, who overhears their history and decides they'd make a great way to help keep the doorway to the other side of the mist open.

One in particular I always return to is someone who returns as an adult to this summer camp style experience where the kids lodge in this large building that used to be an old mansion but was refurbished into a summer camp spot with offices, dorm rooms, etc.

As a kid, they were haunted here by this creepy lady ghost who wanted to take them and have them be their "daughter" (because their own daughter died due to their negligence). And when they come back as an adult to be a counselor or chaperone... well, they end up coming back the summer that the smiling man happens to be there looking for new souls to collect.

And the lady ghost offers to help trap all the kids at the camp if he just makes sure she gets to keep the returned character forever and ever.

Folklore - I would say this is probably the most self indulgent of them. In this type of Daydream, the character is someone who is really into folklore beliefs, believing in old traditions like house spirits and witchcraft, who leaves out buttermilk for a house spirit that lives in the wood shed and makes protective bundles every year to hang up around the house that will ward off bad spirits. Who goes into the woods to gather herbs.

For this, I usually imagine the character was taught by their grandmother or something like that. A grandmother who taught them about fairies in the woods, who told them to sweep out bad energy with a broom during changing of the seasons, and who (to steal from Addie LaRue) said to never ask things of any spirit who comes after dark.

And they often have a sibling who doesn't believe in the things the grandma told them and who teases the character about it. Like, the character smacks the sibling's hand because they try to take baked goods that they're going to leave in the forest as an offering, or they try to use buttermilk being collected for the house spirit to make pancakes. And their sibling is just like, 'Ohhh boy, here we go again."

It's lighthearted teasing from the sibling. Mostly just because that allows the smiling man to overhear what the character believes in and have it feel organic.

All of this usually leads to the smiling man deciding that this character could be an interesting way to keep the door(s) to the other side of the mist open. Sometimes I have the smiling man encounter the house spirit, who threatens him to leave the character alone, as she's the only one who still feeds him and believes in him.

(The character does usually have a niece or nephew that she teaches these things too, so trying to keep her grandmother's traditions alive.)

I never really have concrete endings for these types of saydreams as they kind of go back and forth depending on my mood. Sometimes I have the smiling man encounter the character in the woods and nothing much happens, other times he tries to make a bargain and she is smart enough to realize that it's a bad idea.

Often they have conversations about things that she believes in, because he's always interested in people who still believe in the old things that have been overridden by technology and science.

[chat-rouge-et-bleu]

i don't know how to feel about the Christmas ep cos om the one hand i enjoyed it which could be said to be the only real goal of watching a show, but on the other hand so many elements frustrated me. realistically that is my whole opinion, but autism has decreed tis not enough and so i must waffle!

i like that the first solo scene of ncuti he's in a club in a kilt just going for it. so often new doctors are introduced straight away with the companion and not alone and so it's nice to see a doctor regenerate and his first action to be go out alone and explore his new body and his new reality and just kind of let loose, though im not sure he'd be such a good dancer after a day of being but I'll allow it. the outfit changes and slightly more 'out there' pieces do point to the showrunners trying something new with dressing the doctor and having it be more self expression and less a strict uniform (like do the previous doctors just have duplicates of their outfit hiding in the tardis??), it's an element of the show that has annoyed me before and I'm glad to see it be altered.

with ruby it feels like they're trying to go for a more matt smith era companion wherein the companion herself is mixed up with the story much deeper than just being along for the ride; but there is no way her family could afford that absolutely stunning flat and no way they could maintain it to such a high standard with a constant stream of foster children coming in and out. bring back rose era companion houses where they just live on some estate and drink tea, the set design of ruby's flat ruined the immersion as there's no way that could be real. she doesn't come across as a real woman with real struggles, she's so obviously a character and so obviously going to be the companion from the very start because her hair is always perfect and her house is spotless and her outfits are freshly ironed every scene. doctor who works for me when you juxtapose the alien doctor with normal people and normal scenarios (it's not done as well in the case of graham and jodie but still present, he lives in a house that looks like a house and eats food there and it seems lived in. though i must admit i know that house in real life as it is near a place i regularly hung out as a teenager so i may be a tad biased there).

the main other thing that doesn't make sense is why they introduced the idea of those gloves and their being on 3% only to not use that to further the plot. felt like a chekovs gun but then it wasn't relevant again so just broke immersion instead of being impactful.

i think if the goblins weren't a christmas special i would have been pretty disappointed with them, they are rather silly and they sing (which everyone i watched the show with visibly cringed at) and i just don't think they would have worked at all as a mid season episode; they need the context of christmas to work. as a silly episode on christmas day to introduce the new doctor and set up some plot points for the series for me that was OK as it wasn't really about the goblins, it was about introducing ncuti's doctor and ruby. maybe a more serious episode would have overshadowed these new characters (or maybe given them a chance to prove themselves better?). the first episode of any new doctor is a tricky one and i can see why they would choose a villain like that to show off how the new series is slated to be more camp and colourful than previous series.

i must stop waffling now, but it seems like they have more of an idea of where they want to take ncuti than they did when they first introduced jodie. i still think the showrunners did her dirty when she could have been so fun and different, honestly i would have loved if the energy they've given ncuti had been given to jodie. if I'd been strictly male for hundreds of years (though they have since retconned that) and i woke up female i would have fun with it, much more than they allowed jodie to have fun with it. goodbye

[healingheartdogs]

There is a tactic that I have noticed other marginalized but privileged Americans will use when debating politics with white people like me (or people who they perceive as more privileged members of the global majority) and that is to appeal to blind spots that they expect me to have as a white person (or others to have because of their relevant privileges) to attempt to trigger what I assume is some sort of performative liberal guilt they expect us to also have in order to silence us in political conversations while weaponizing their specific marginalizations to defend themselves doing it.

A perfect example of this happened today with a man arguing with me that voting for Biden is harm reduction, and he would know because he's -insert marginalizations here- and since I'm white (and queer and trans and disabled and living in lifelong poverty, but that's less relevant to people making these kinds of arguments than my whiteness) I wouldn't know how much someone like him is at risk and so this fight against fascism can't possibly be as real for me as it is to him and so my passion for my position in said fight is therefore irrational and overly aggressive. Which is partially a fair point, I am white, and I am aware of that as a massive privilege that is a counterweight to my existing marginalizations, I am aware that it causes me to have blind spots, and I know that there are people who are more at risk than others in the event of something like Project 2025 becoming reality. But where this argument falls apart is outright calling it harm reduction (he specifically said "casualty reduction" actually, which I find even more nefarious) to keep Democrats in power and to act like Democrats are not complicit in fascism and that fascism isn't already here, although he does probably honestly believe what he's saying because it is harm reduction for him and it is stopping him from personally experiencing that fascism the way some others already are.

If you present that same argument to someone more marginalized -- which these people generally never do for this reason -- that is where it falls flat on its face. You can't reasonably go up to a poor Black person living in an area dealing with systemic violence from over-policing and say "If Republicans win they'll be killing people like me in the streets so voting Democrat is casualty reduction" because right now Democrats are pushing funding to militarize police, supporting cop cities, and supporting the criminalization of people protesting the police, the fallout of which is felt the most by less privileged Black people and Black protestors who are already being killed in the streets regularly right now under Team Blue by cops who more often than not walk free without any punishment after. Similarly, you can't reasonably go up to a Palestinian American and tell them that voting for Biden is casualty reduction because they're watching their people back home be murdered by the tens of thousands in a genocide that Biden is knowingly funding and arming. Similarly still, you can't reasonably go up to an Indigenous woman mourning the loss of her sisters and tell her that voting blue is casualty reduction because under Republicans bigots would be able to freely hate crime and kill trans and gay people without any repercussions, because the loved ones of the many missing and murdered Indigenous women and the Indigenous women who are being abducted and killed are already living that reality under Democrats while police conveniently refuse to investigate the disappearances when they are reported let alone attempt to identify any suspects when their bodies are eventually discovered by their families who refused to give up searching for them.

If you are a person who is marginalized but still privileged in some way it is important that you continue listening primarily to the most marginalized around you rather than people in similar positionality to you. There is no liberation without intersectionality, and weaponizing your marginalizations while ignoring your privileges to argue for leaving behind people who are even more marginalized in favor of your own survival is how you make yourself into part of the oppressor class. Being marginalized in some ways does not mean that you are immune to pushing anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, ableism, islamophobia, misogyny, etc, and are free to ignore the suffering of other marginalized people if it doesn't run in parallel to your own struggles. None of us are free until ALL of us are free, and the road you choose to try to reach freedom can not truthfully be called the "lesser evil" or "harm reduction" if you are allowing it to be paved with the bodies of people more marginalized than you. Remember that when you're arguing with people in similar positionality to you about the effects of politics on the lives of others.

Whenever you are talking about "harm reduction" in politics please genuinely ask yourself who are the people that harm is being reduced for in this scenario, is that harm that is being reduced currently a real material threat to those people or just future potential, are there people for which already real and currently occuring harm will not be reduced with this course of action, and which of those two groups of people actually needs harm reduction more in this moment? Are you genuinely considering the material realities of other marginalized people in your arguments and arguing for the good of the vulnerable? Or are you speaking over them and weaponizing your own marginalizations to ignore intersectionality and attempt to validate yourself in silencing others while you try to find a way to make yourself feel more safe in a violent oppressive system?

[letstalkwhump]

Let's Talk Whump No. 10

Welcome to Let’s Talk Whump, a series of interviews that spotlight the amazing people in our whump community. I’m Malice and I’ll be your host. 

Today we have @suspicious-pools-of-blood joining us to share his whump story!

Tell us a fact or two about yourself!

I'm a butch (he/him) and I enjoy rock climbing, leatherworking, and losing my entire goddamn mind over Xena: Warrior Princess. 

What does whump mean to you? 

To me it can range anywhere from a trope to a vibe involving some kind of hurt. I definitely consider angst to be whump.

How did you find the whump community? 

It was actually very straightforward; I was up one night and the word "whump" kept rattling around my brain, I'd probably seen it tagging a fanfic at some point, but I didn't know what it meant, so I looked it up and found a definition followed by the Tumblr community. Specifically, it was albino-whumpee's writing that came up, so I was introduced to whump and box boys and WRU all at once. I stayed up all night reading their stuff and then made a sideblog and dove in, dragging my OCs down with me. 

Do you think your views on whump has changed? Maybe the way you consume whump media?

This community was basically my first foray into reading original fiction online instead of just fanfic, and now that's definitely what I read most.

Favourite whump trope?

One of my favorite tropes is carewhumpers--not of the bad caretaker variety, but more whumpers who don't let whumpee have any caretaker but whumper themself. Relatedly, I like captor bonding (not sure if that's an actual term, but that's what I call it because the term Stockholm syndrome has a super gross history), as well as intimate whumpers, nsfwhump/noncon/dubcon, slavery, power imbalances, etc. Also a big fan of a whumpee who internalizes their hurt hard enough to become a whumper against a new whumpee, continuing the cycle of violence and abuse rather than the typical whumped-turned-whumper trope where the two characters just switch roles. I really like the mental/emotional side of whump, seeing how both whumper and whumpee feel about what's happening, why whumper does what they do, and how the whump changes both of them as people.

And your favourite piece you've written? 

Really hard to pick, but currently I'll have to go with Not You Too and its companion piece Wish . It's more angst than any physical whump, but it's an important piece for developing and understanding the psyche of my main character.

What's your writing style like? 

Oh man, calling myself out here on this one. Don't be like me, kids. Often times I find that not being sober helps me get over mental blocks that prevent me from getting the words onto the page. It depends on what I'm writing, but usually a couple bourbon old fashioneds or an edible get me into the mood to write, night time, lights off, candle lit on my desk, relevant OC or WIP playlist playing. I'm trying to get better about that though because needing to be intoxicated to write is not good. I try to write regularly but usually I just end up sitting in front of my Notion board for hours on end while procrastinating on work I should be doing.

Is there anything you struggle with writing?

Cisheterosexuality is fuckin impossible for me to write.  I have no experience with it so I'm profoundly confused when I have to write about it for plot reasons

Is there anything you're working on at the moment?

The current piece I'm working on is my main character's first time sleeping with another woman. I am, if nothing else, committed to realism in writing, so I did spend more time than I wanted to today remembering my own first time and cringing but hey, at least I got the vibe!

Do you have any writing advice?

Make some lil guys and rotate them in your mind; literally no one can stop you

Shout out time!

@winedark-whumpk-whump has some truly fantastic stories and was really encouraging when I was struggling with engagement and feeling self-conscious about my original content.

Anything you'd like to add? 

Thank you so much for this interview, this was lots of fun!

Thank you for joining us, @suspicious-pools-of-bloodod ! It was great to have you here!

And to all you folks at home, have a whump-derful day!

[laundryandtaxes]

That permanent physical alterations to the body are bad seems to be an underlying value here in your argument? But why should we have that value? Is it because it’s dangerous? Bodies should stay naturally ‘whole’ in some way? Or something else? Otherwise I don’t understand why permanent physical alterations would be seen as a negative outcome.

I don't think body modification itself is a bad thing at all when it is understood explicitly as body modification. When it is framed as giving us access to some new part of ourselves (the way Plume and similar services present HRT not as the simple ingestion of cross sex hormones but as bringing out a new person that was hiding within us) or fixing a problem that doesn't exist (no human being has ever been born in a body that was not intended for them) then I take issue with those frameworks, and it is very much the case that a lot of people approaching the "transition or what" crossroads are in a moment more or less of crisis that may lead us to think we are doing something other than what we are doing. Long after I had discarded the concept that there is a certain natural, pre-existing distinction between people for whom transition will work vs those for whom it will not, I was still considering a mastectomy for myself as a distress reduction measure. I know more than one woman who has made that call for herself in a similar situation. When I discuss permanent physical alteration, I'm discussing it not as always the worst case outcome but as a decision made often under what feels like emotional duress, and as one that we must at all times understand basically as body modification and not as some other, more fundamentally transformative process. I have not done a deep dive into the long term impacts of estrogen use because they are not relevant for me personally, but I have familiarized myself quite thoroughly with the problems that arise from giving female human beings large doses of cross sex hormones for a long time, and I and most other people would only accept those outcomes and those risks if we felt that the cons were merited because of the amount of distress we are in, and the amount of relief we expected to get out of those medical interventions. To put it another way, there are normally very few reasons a person might consider having her breasts removed. In any other instance than this one, usually we would see the removal of someone's breasts as a fairly drastic step to take. It is still drastic in this case, even when an individual comes to the conclusion that it's the right thing to do. A double mastectomy on a breast cancer patient is a drastic move, even when it is absolutely the best possible clinical outcome. It is drastic here as well, because it's not something different, it's still a mastectomy.

There are lots of very objective cons to long term testosterone use in female human beings- vaginal atrophy, cardiovascular problems that do in fact outpace the cardiovascular risks that are associated with just being male, it seems that fears of elevated uterine cancer risk were overblown and that's good news but for years it was simply a given that hysterectomy was an outcome of transition and hysterectomy is so big of a deal that we still don't understand all the massive risks associated with it like greater risk of dementia- and frankly there are certain associated practices that yes, I think doctors should probably not even be attempting given the prevalence of problems associated with them and the propensity for certain surgical inventions to just outright fail, but even outside of permanent physical alterations, when we consider just a practice like binding that frankly does often cause permanent problems for people, these are practices that cause our bodies harm. Reduced lung capacity is harm. This is not in and of itself reason to never ever approach any of them- I eat fried food, I eat food grilled over charcoal, I drink alcohol fairly regularly, I like the occasional cigar. The argument is not that things that cause harm to the body should never ever be done.

To be very clear, the reason I've kept responding to you is that I really do think it's good to engage with people who are trying in good faith to understand what I've said. And I still think you are doing that, but I think it is worth noting that you've now just dropped the initial question entirely- is gender dysphoria, the sense that something is wrong with the kind of body you have when there is nothing wrong with the kind of body you have, a form of emotional distress- and have now moved on to what is frankly a different question, which is what kinds of body modification are baseline acceptable for human beings and for what reasons. When you find the goalposts moving so much, I think it indicates a baseline discomfort on your part that speaks to how difficult it is to think outside of an ideology that basically every person in the west at least has been being steeped in for at least as long as I have been out. I obviously don't think that's a personal failing at all, and I'm really grateful that you're open to even thinking about these questions, and I can kind of understand the impulse to figure out "the rest of it" as it were, but a lot of your language here was intentionally or unintentionally trying to get me to reveal some disagreeable moralistic underpinning which you could then identify as so rotten that it gave you an easy opportunity to discount my thoughts here. When you find yourself looking for reasons to believe or not believe something, I think that is indicative of a real baseline discomfort with the topic and all the relevant questions.

[orangenfrottee]

Hey ho there, feel free to ignore this and I hope I'm not bugging you as I awkwardly slide in here, but I must ask: if you had full creative control of the show, how would you run season 5? You can pick and choose whatever leaks you want to include.

Ah!!! Thank you for your ask <3 I might have spent a couple nights typing out my answer, but in short: I'd cherry pick old story arcs, bring back everyone I like and who doesn't run when they hear Riverdale's calling.

I'd definitely get some decent writers (I'm partial to Jane Espenson, but no idea if she'd be a good fit) and definitely some diversity. I might accidentally fire all men and then play up all their shitty recurring themes for fun as a weird inside joke between me and the show.

I think if they ever gave me creative control of the show it would swerf hard to the crazy and not leave that lane because honestly, i think that's what Riverdale does best.

So, where would I start...

Instead of giving season four a decent ending, I would start with an extra long pilot with the title 'previously on' where the best and most important bits of the teens' school lives is shown with a heavy focus on Jason and the Farm. Parallely, we get to see the lovestory of Chic and Charles. The episode ends with a few very short scenes of the prom where everyone's happy and pretty.

Then we'd start on the real season five. It's been seven years and our characters are older and more grown up.

The show would at first only present the present lifesbof our characters and the barest bones structure to keep as much a little mysterious as possible (but here I tell you what happened during timeskip, too).

Archie is often considered the main character, so let's start with him:

Archie went to the Army after school (though he didn't actually pass his exams and thus didn't graduate, Mr Honey was quite amused). On his most recent tour he met someone special: Eric, his new friend.

Archie was wounded in battle with a... giant mutated elephant with sharp teeth and hallucinogenic venom. Or something. He isn't really sure what happened, but he's got a huge new scar all over his torso. The abs stayed in tact, but oh his pride. During recovery he met new wheelchair user (and on occasion crutches) Eric who has trouble walking since his legs are misshapen/he only has one. Archie thinks Eric got maimed by the same elephant he was, but thinks it rude to ask.

For Eric I'm picturing Sabrina's Ambrose.

With his hurt pride, Archie can't stay with the military and decides to go back to Riverdale.

Eric doesn't have a place to go, so Archie invites him along.

They need a job and since Eric has a calendar full of sexy half naked firefighters AND since they both have abs, Archie decides that type of uniform is the perfect fit for them and trades his newly renovated and well running boxing gym against the old fire station Penelope Blossom owns. (Literally, they even meet at Pop's to exchange keys and sign papers Penelope brought that Archie doesn't even skim.)

The fire station is quite out of everything, but it has a huge pool Eric likes to swim in and a fire truck. To make ends meet Archie sells his sperm to the Greendale sperm bank.

Archie is of course in love with Eric but unfamiliar with the concept of bisexuality and struggles to identify his attraction for what it is. Eric is a foreigner to Riverdale (or is he?) and unfamiliar with the town's culture and quirks. Still, something going on in Sweetwater River seems to be related to him.

Archie and Eric share the Andrews' House - and in the house next door... live Gladys Jones and Polly Cooper!

After Jughead and Betty left for College Alice' horrid mom impulses settled on Jellybean who didn't stand back, grind her teeth and took it but instead broke Alice' teeth. Her and FP were not amused (though FP was also angry at Alice for being too strict). Alice moves out but stays as a journalist in town.

FP gets in trouble for being a brutal gang leader without a gang beating up criminals behind the boxing gym on tape. Not wanting to go to an illegal fighting club prison, he hides with Canadian Serpents behind the border. (Joaquin's identical twin brother and Ricky live there, too. They're happy there.)

Maybe he'd call once or twice with misleading wrong snake facts that have nothing to do with the current mystery of the episode but fit into perfectly by chance.

Jellybean was invited along, but she chose to stay because she thinks Riverdale is rad and the old Cooper House is luxurious as hell. Also, her mom came back to become the new Sheriff!

Nearly seven years in, Gladys still holds the position because no one legally qualified wants it and she manages to keep gang violence at an all time low for Riverdale. Plus, she and Mary Andrews are not exactly friends but able to work well together. When there's another serial killer running wild in town she has no problem with having another girlfriend of Mary who happens to be a skilled professional in the most relevant field take over for a bit. If needed, the Riverdale gangs are usually willing to add muscle to good causes, too.

Jellybean has left Riverdale for university and will only be present for holidays and breaks. She'd still be played by Trinity because I love her and honestly, real nineteen year olds look like fourteen year olds everywhere in the world. Also this gives the viewers 'Archie vision': he will always see his best friend's toddling baby sister in the young woman which makes her the only undatable (legal) female on this planet for him.

While attending Riverdale High she lead the Andrews Boxing Gym and made it the most successful gym in the area. It won't be a plot point in the show (apart from her being angry at Archie for just trading it against trash) but there will be framed newspaper articlesband the like in Gladys' house.

Around the time everyone graduated, Polly was released from Shady Grooves and is back to her old smart self - and really missing her babies! As Choni leave for whatever private college Blossom women have always gone to, Polly takes them and goes home - just to learn on the porch that not only did her mother sell her childhood home more than a year ago without anyone ever telling her, the college fund she never had gotten legal access to and planned to use for the twins is gone too and her sister left town without saying goodbye.

Gladys has always taken care of all the stray kids she found no matter how tight the budget was and now there's this young desolate mother with twin toddlers in front of her posh murder house she'd gotten for cheap and she has this new gig as sheriff. Of course, she takes them in.

They stay in Betty's old room at first, but they soon get to remodel the attic to give Polly her own room. At present, Dagwood has Polly/Chic/JB's old room and Juniper the one facing Archie's. (When Archie sees her in the room, he actually has a flashback once to when he and Betty used to be so young, but then Juniper turns her gead, stares at him really creepily and smiles weirdly. Archie will be somewhat scared from then onwards and be reminded of when everyone thought Polly might gave killed Jason. Juniper would murder.)

At first, Polly's a full time, stay at home mom, but once the kids are older, she starts working part-time: for Gladys.

It turns out they work amazing together. Gladys tends to jump to convenient conclusions and threatens violence way to freely. Also, she is intimidating as fuck.

Polly is everything she isn't: level headed (to a point, in comparison at least), brilliant at combining clues and steering people (remember how she infiltrated Thornhill and made Cheryl unknowingly assist in her snooping plans?). On top of that, she has these stepford smiles and all the ways to appear unthreatening drillend into her head. Honestly, she and Betty are quite alike. While Betty has the lockpicking skills and knows her way around cars, Polly used to be really into fashion (or something) and, with all her experiences at the Sisters, the Farm and Shady Groves, Polly knows psychology.

She started solving some of Gladys' cases at the breakfast table, but now she's officially a deputy or an advisor or something. They're essentially like FP and Jughead, just that Polly is an adult (and that she wouldn't be in a gang beating suspects up regularly).

(These characters would all be mostly in the background though.)

Veronica finally gained perspective on her relationship to her father and grew up. Hiram's cut out of her life for good. They won't ever interact. (In fact, Hiram either moved to New York or he had a minor traffic accident where he lost all of his memory for good and now lives as Ram Rod and works as a trainer at Penelope's newly acquired boxing gym. Everyone is confused about it but doesn't care to ask.)

Veronica is successful at whatever she's doing and doesn't plan on ever moving back to Riverdale, but maybe something is up at Pop's that requires her checking up on in person and she just happens to cross paths with Betty who is also just there for the weekend. And they haven't had quality time together for years, because it's so hard to stay in contact sometimes even with people you love so much you'd die to keep them safe.

If I could come up with something meaningful for them to catch up on emotionally, I'd have them sitting together in a booth at Pop's for a whole episode just talking (but I'm not that deep).

Veronica might be engaged, but we see it fall through without really getting to meet the guy. She mostly just talks to Betty about him on occasion but in a somewhat messed up way. Ultimately, she realises how she treats him in some regards like Hiram treated her and her mother. She wants to grow up further and not be like her father anymore. Since the fiance was only a trophy pawn, she breaks it off and concentrates on introspection/ maybe therapy for a bit.

Later that season her sister comes back and surprise: Hermosa embraced becoming Daddy.

(These would have to be restricted to two half episodes only, she definitely deserves story arcs that aren't about her dad.)

Careerwise: she has a couple businesses, maybe a restaurant chain or a franchise and she seems to collect startups. She reinvests a lot and has to travel quite a bit but can work remotely too.

Everyone seems to want FBI agent Betty and if I'd go that route I'd have her demask Charles as the fraude fake FBI who hires guns for hire and fake emergency teams while making up fantasy horror stories about serial killer genes to scare his biological family into killing each other that I wholeheartedly believe he is. But I also like Betty's interest in mechanics and would love for her to have a career in mechanical engineering. Maybe she switched majors at uni and now works for a company developing prosthetics. Maybe she tries to get Eric into joining a study. (I mean, prosthetic legs would help his work as a fire fighter...).

She's in town to visit Polly and the twins but after talking to Veronica she spontaneously stays in town. She can do her work remotely, really. The two of them move into a two bedroom 'shared bnb' (or whatever it was called in season two) and we finally get to see their friendship on screen.

Betty isn't in a relationship at the moment abd she's so into her work, she isn't looking for one either.

Jughead had broken up with Betty seven years ago and never really had a well working relationship after. He's grown obsessed with finding a way to recreate what he had with Betty.

Not in a totally creepy psycho way, he's simply not understanding that he might be sex positive and he had been in love with Betty, but he is ace and quite aro, too. It doesn't help, that he finds people sexually attractive on their online profiles just to be repulsed by the tought of even kissing them goodbye in person.

(I don't think tv is generally a fitting medium for this, but I guess he can narrate for himself and make it work.)

I guess he has to be an author. Obsessed as he is about finding love again (he wouldn't call it like that) he figures it had either been the location or the constant fear for his life. He chooses to return to Riverdale. He probably instantly moves with everything he owns to Riverdale (not that it's much beside a modern laptop, the typewriter and his camera).

Archie gives the great advice how Jughead is obviously still innlove with Betty, duh.

He of course runs into Betty some day, they end up investigating some random murder together and find themselves in familiar positions and kiss - but it just isn't there anymore. Jughead feels nothing and Betty isn't really into it either.

Veronica later points him in the direction of maybe not being allo (because she used to question herself as aro).

Funfact: Jughead would have failed graduation with Archie if Mr Honey didn't forge some records that weren't actually submitted from Stonewall (they claim all records were deleted during a power outage). Jughead knows and is deeply shamed.

Thornhill has been renovated! Toni is pregnant! Choni will be raising their kids (surprise, it's going to be twins!) in Cheryl's ancestral home. Choni are married and happy.

Toni has reopened the White Worm with Fangs somewhere at the Southside and yes, let's make her the official Serpent Queen. Let her work lots of social causes (remember toys for tots?), grey area rule bending for good and of course she works well with Gladys. I've seen talk about her being a social worker floating around and honestly, I think that works amazing. She's working the local cases (and a few unofficial ones) and I think she and Cheryl are registered foster parents. On occasion (like once) they'd be shown taking care of a random kid.

Cheryl used her College time to study two things: business and Riverdale town history. Remember how in season two she took so much pride in her ancestors because she believed them to be good people? She might be disillusioned but she is the Blossom heiress and her and Toni's as well as Jason's kids will one day inherit a better family legacy. She'll invest in Southside rebuilding projects, advocate for new town memorials, maybe rebrand some of the Blossom product lines. Something like that

She won't run for mayor yet, but she's definitely invested in (local) politics.

Of course the pregnancy was with artificial insemination, the donor was either an unsuspecting red head from the Greendale Sperm Bank or they use some of Jason's that has surly been saved to guarantee the Blossom line when everywhere was scary talk about sperm counts going down due to mobile phones.

In addition: the maple factories need worker bees! Cheryl has a few programs with Toni to get Serpents/random Riverdalians newly released from prison or just with bad luck into a steady job and a cushy appartement overlooking the ex prison on the Southside. Pop's is also participating. Ethel works as a landlady for said appartement complex.

Also, why not add a second Blossom-Topaz lovestory to underline this incest-adjacent show and bring back Toni's grandpa and set him up with Nana Blossom. XD

Then during this season's arc, the Blossom uncle's corpse will be found in the river and the mistery is whether the FBI will figure out who the corpse us and what happened or not.

I love Reggie. Since Varchie is unlikely thanks to Eric, him and Veronica rekindling their relationship would definitely be a possibility I'm into, but he also seems to have an interesting connection with Kevin and Fangs that could be built on.

He would definitely have a car he'd love very much and I think it would still be Bella.

I'm not sure about his career, but it wouldn't include his father's car dealership. Maybe he'd be a successful movie star just in town between movie shootings.

Kevin was doing something with musicals on Katy Keene, I think? Writing or directing? He was trying to nake it big, but some plans fell through. Now he's back in Riverdale. Luckily, they are just about to open Riverdale's first theater in the relatively newly built but forever closed prison. Next to the Southside Theater the complex holds a mall and the White Worm.

Fangs works full time as the manager of the WW that he co-owns with Toni. He meets Kevin again once he's back in town.

Sweet-Pea somehow ended up as a junior doctor at the Riverdale hospital. He spends all of his scarce free time at the WW.

Some of the background Pretty Poisons officially work for the police now. Different than Gladys, they are actually ccccc for the positions they hold.

Peaches works as a manager for one of Cheryl's companies. She's happily married and has a kid (or something).

How long in prison do you get in the US for standing in as the head figure of a crazy pen and paper cult that has literal murders committed in his name? As a blond white dude probably just parole? So honestly, once they actually bring his case to court (and they have nothing against him because anyone could have been under the mask at any one time and people know of different gargoyle kings) he's released of all charges. No one in Riverdale actually knows though since his case took forever, Bughead had already left Riverdale and Alice didn't step up to follow the case. No one wrote about it, so no one knows. They just assume that of course the guy will be locked away forever, he's guilty.

In reality, he and Charles have bought a house somewhere in a different street of Riverdale where they aren't quite known and have adopted a couple kids.

Charles meets Alice regularly for lunch and she thinks he's this workaholic FBI agent only living for solving crime. They play a long con game I don't know the goal of.

(They have been behind the tapes even if that storyline gets totally ignored. They pretend FP being in exile is their doing, but the tape responsible was just a random security camera in the area.)

Josie's plans in New York sadly fell through (I haven't seen any Katy Keene but I want her back)

Lot's of bonding scenes with her brother Kevin who's also back in town. The two share a flat and on occasion burst into song together. Since I've already invented the Southside Theater, maybe she'd find a job there, too.

Val and Melody stayed in Riverdale aftee highschool and made careers in town for themselves. Maybe Melody at city hall and Val as a marketing specialist at the farm, Riverdale's most outstanding new grocery mart. Half of all Riverdalians don't get the controversy of the name, the others either think it's brilliant or tasteless. (Kevin for example has repressed the nemories so gard, he doesn't get it. Josie is very protective and angry at Val for working there.) The store belongs to the eccentric redhaired Eva Everafter or whatever pseudonym Evelyn can come up with to thinly hide her identity behind.

Somewhere in it I'd throw in a few lines vaguely referencing older happenings like "I still can't drink tap water" and the very first time Veronica sees Archie again after seven years she identifies him through his ab muscles.

So in short: Archie would be very dumb, everyone else is just there.

Also: Pop's would serve 50% vegan burgers and milkshakes so I could dig in with gusto.

[know-the-way]

Sorry to bother, through your posts I learned that SRB had an IG takeover yesterday but I missed it Ç_Ç Can you pls tell me if she said something relevant or hopeful about Zelda/Faustus/Spellwood? When I say hopeful I don't necessarily mean them ending up together. I'm not delusional, Faustus went too far in his madness and authors clearly submitted to fan wishes of having Z in a lesbian ship (a total asspull). I meant them having a plot wise proper closure as in they share history together.

I’m sure you’ve already hunted down the info shared in the takeover by now, but imo – there were positive and negative things shared about Zelda/Faustus. The ‘negative’ would be that when asked if there was a chance Spellwood could end up together, SRB said, “No spoilers, but y’know - after you put someone under a Caligari spell and kill them in a separate timeline, you are in the dog house, mister!” Which I think is incredibly fair, but it hints that we are probably not headed towards a happy ending for the two of them.

However, there was… a rather decent amount of talk regarding their past/potential feelings they had for one another. SRB was asked if Zelda ever loved Faustus and her response was ~*interesting*~, to say the least – 1. Because she implied that if Zelda ever did love him, she probably did not realize it since she would have felt “forbidden” to love someone and 2. She brought up the idea of Faustus loving Zelda without any prompting and said, “to be honest, I think he did.” Which is like… the closest we’ve ever come to “confirmation” that either of them ever had any kind of genuine affection for the other.

Ultimately, if I had to guess – I would say we probably are going to get some more insight into their past and I am hopeful that includes closure for them, but I think – no matter what – it is going to be hella tragic and hella painful. So I would just… be prepared for that. lol

In regards to Zelda’s “lesbian” relationship – I genuinely did not read the relationship as fan service. I personally feel that if they were giving in to fan service, Madam Spellman would have been canon 10 episodes ago. Everyone’s welcome to their own opinion, of course, but I think Marie serves a very important purpose and is going to help facilitate a lot of growth for the characters. The witches in Greendale are just breaking free of centuries upon centuries worth of oppression and darkness, with what I interpreted to be a path towards night AND light now. Hecate is “The Dark Mother,” but she also allows her followers to love and be loved. Which is entirely new territory for Zelda’s coven. Marie is a wonderful bridge for them in this uncertain time as she is a steward for the path of light. In addition, she seems to have some sort of mystical connection to whatever is coming in the next season, so that may prove to be very useful for them when they start to combat the Eldritch Terrors.

AND, in learning how to process and accept emotions better through Marie, this may help uncover some feelings of the past that were buried a long time ago in order to properly process them now. *looks in camera like I’m on The Office* If you catch my drift.

Also, just gonna say – and this not directed entirely at you or any other one person - as a bisexual woman, I am bothered by the repeated implication that being in a relationship with a woman automatically makes Zelda a lesbian. As much as it would bother me if someone said her being married to Faustus inherently made her heterosexual. We don’t know what Zelda’s sexual identity is for certain, but it is incredibly discouraging to see the conversations about her sexual identity limited to such polarizations (gay or straight), when bi/pansexual is a perfectly valid identity itself (so is choosing not to identify at all). You can simultaneously be attracted to both women and men – can personally attest to that fact – so this could certainly be the case for Zelda, as well. Sorry to go off on a tangent, it’s just that I’ve seen too many people try to label Zelda one way or the other based on her behavior and not who she/the writers declare herself to be, and that’s disappointing as someone who often feels the need to defend or “prove” my identity pretty regularly because I don’t look or act a certain way.

I don’t think it’s anyone’s direct intention to be dismissive of bi/pansexuality in these conversations, but I just needed to express that the way these conversations often play out (across the entire spectrum of the fandom, tbh)... can be indirectly hurtful. :/

[werevulvi]

How did you learn to be comfortable with your hirsutism? I've never been trans or detrans or dysphoric so my situation is not like yours but i'm hairier than average and even approaching my 30s i still struggle with my natural body. I've tried going noshave as a dare a couple of times and just feel overwhelmed with revulsion and shame. Even if i think it's conditioning for the most part i don't think i can undo it. Is there a point of no return?

I've always been mostly comfortable with it, but that's not saying I haven't dealt with any amount of shame or stigma about it. Especially a couple of years ago, I did struggle with it. Not everyone in my life loves hairy women, and that does affect me, so I hope I can offer some insight, or uplifting words! I think there are several aspects as to why it's fairly easy for me to love my body hair unabashedly now, and also reasons as to why I've struggled with it. Firstly, being viewed as male makes people less likely to call me gross or stare at me for being hairy, even though some still do because I often wear very feminine clothing (people tend think that hairy men in feminine clothing is "distasteful" ...apparently) and my parents really do struggle with my body hair. Even my sister has promptly given me unsolicited shaving advice. (I’m not exactly sure how my family views my gender, if it’s as a woman or more like a trans person, or as a female who identifies as a man, or I don’t know, but it’s obviously not as an actual biological man. Which I’m totally fine with and really don’t care, as they’re entitled to their opinions of me, but like it’s relevant because they probably wouldn’t have thought my body hair is gross and bad if I had actually been male, which is my only complaint: the sexism nestled in with however they perceived me.) But outside of my family and aside from my femininity, my ability to mostly blend into society as a man (which only some women do/can/want) means most people don't care about that I'm hairy, or might even praise me for it. Like if I just dress a little less girly, it's suddenly "cool" and "oh so manly" that I have hair on my chest, kinda.

Another aspect is that when/if I tell people I "identify" myself as a (trans) man, they also praise my hairiness as a positive personal achievement. Where as when I've instead "identified" myself as a woman, people have instead expressed disgust, being sorry, and other ill-placed compassion, for my hairiness. Like someone saying "I'm jealous of your beard, that looks awesome, dude" does affect me in a very different way from being told "I'm so sorry you grew a beard, I hope something can be done about it" and having been given those very different reactions based on what I've called myself (while looking the exact same way) has definitely affected my confidence about my body/facial hair.

However, I could still love my body hair even when I kept getting tons of crap for it from other people. Receiving all that crap made me feel terrible about my hairs for a while, but I also couldn't make myself truly hate them. I could within a couple of years find my love for them again. Probably so quickly because I had already loved them before, and because I was unable to hate them, despite being under that intense social pressure to conform.

When there's no one around to have opinions of my body hair, and it's just me, I first and foremost enjoy simply how they feel. That's how I started my journey to embrace my hairs. Wearing a long skirt or dress and my thicc thighs suddenly don't clamp together, because my leg hair serves as a natural barrier, which reduces friction? Awesome sensation. Wearing a shorter skirt and feeling the wind in my leg hairs on a warm summer day? Another awesome sensation. Armpits not stinging when putting on deodorant? Very nice, indeed. Not having to deal with any razor burns, and much more rarely any ingrown hairs? Neat. Twirling my fingers around my chest hair, because I still don't have a stim toy? Very soothing. Cuddling my beard? Very calming and reduces my stress levels like a LOT. It's almost as nice as petting a cat.

Then after finding how I love all those sensations and more, it became difficult for me to shave as the shaven sensation left me feeling oddly naked and like I was missing something. Without noticing, I had started to connect emotionally to my hairs as not just part of my body (for better or worse) but as truly part of ME.

Kinda like how many people feel about their head hair, regardless of their preferred length. Many people like having head hair, and would feel naked and at a loss if it was suddenly gone, which applies to both men and women. I started feeling like that "naked and at a loss" without my body hair, because I had emotionally connected to simply the physical sensations of having it there.

But I was still struggling with the appearance of my hairy body being there all visible, so on that point what I did was starting with simply covering up. Wearing clothes that would hide how hairy I was, basically. And not looking too long in mirrors, but also not avoiding mirrors. I'd glance. Except I still went swimming in just a bikini, regularly, at a public, local pool.

I think my experiences with going swimming while hairy, and otherwise hiding my hairs, helped me slowly get more comfortable with how it looked. Because I realised that despite all the comments, etc, it's really no one's business how I groom my body, as long as I'm clean and smell fresh. And my hairs are definitely clean! They're freshly shampooed and conditioned! I'm only saying that because keeping my body hair clean, helps me curb that feeling of being hairy somehow supposedly being equal to being dirty, which it isn't!

The more brave I got to test myself, I decided to show my hairs in public more and more, outside of the swimming pool area. Like with low-cut shirts, short sleeved shirts, tank tops, shorter skirts/shorts, etc. Eventually I developed a stronger connection with my body hair, became protective of it. And I started seeing beauty in it too. Looking at body positivity stuff made by other hairy women out there (mostly on Instagram) inspired me a lot, and having a supportive girlfriend who kept telling me my body hair is hot, helped a lot too. Feeling attractive shouldn't be the end all be all, but I'd be an idiot if I denied that it's uplifting and inspiring to hear/see that my own body hair is attractive.

As a result, I can quite freely love my body hair now, and show it proudly, but it took a lot of work and I still feel a little bit weird about it. Like sometimes I catch myself being puzzled by that I'm so hairy yet female. So like it is deeply ingrained, the belief that female body hair is somehow bad, dirty, gross or shameful, but it's NOT objective truth. It's just subjective opinions that very many people unfortunately have. It's natural, protects the skin, can increase sensitivity, can help regulate body temperature even, it's cheaper to not spend lots of money on shaving products, and lots of other good things that come with being hairy. I think the only negative is when my bracelets, rings and necklaces get stuck in the hairs and yank them out... which doesn't happen often!

I still feel that shame tugging in me whenever my mom decides to berate me for being hairy, and I have to remind myself that that's just her opinion, and not an incredibly valuable one!

So no, I don't think there is a point of no return. Like it’s never too late, as long as you’re still alive and kicking. We continue to be maluable and adaptive, and changing as people throughout life. Any opinions or beliefs that we have can change. Sometimes on a whim, but more often from working on ourselves, consuming media that informs us why we should change an opinion/belief, testing out what works and what doesn't, challenging ourselves, facing our fears, etc, and sometimes it can take a lot of such work and determination to achieve the desired result. But I think, when it comes to self-acceptance and self-love it's always possible to achieve.

Although I may still struggle a little bit with my body, I managed to come to love it in general, and feeling really connected to being female, despite still having dysphoria, from having hated my body in the past, and I think that says a lot. I mean that to say, if I can do that, I'm sure you can too. I hate to say it, but really all it takes is willpower and not giving up.

[kittyit]

hey, i hope im coming to the right person with this but i really need some advice. i'm a teenage lesbian, and ever since i was about 9-10 years old i've been struggling on and off with gender dysphoria. some days i feel fine but some days (like today) i just really wish i were born male. i dont know what's wrong with me but it totally sucks and ruins my mood. nobody would ever be able to tell that i have gender identity issues. i dress and act pretty effeminately (1/3)

but on the inside i wish i sometimes were a boy. transitioning is totally out of the question, but even if i could, i still wouldnt want to. i know a lot of kids wonder what it’d be like to be the opposite sex, but this has been a long term thing that has caused me a lot of stress. it’s a really confusing and frustrating feeling. i have no way to relieve the dysphoria other than to wait until i feel better about myself another day. when i was younger i used to identify as ftm, but later decided i was just a cis lesbian because i didn’t feel like the trans label fit me. im sorry if im bothering you in any way but i saw a lot of your posts about detransition and dysphoria and i was wondering if you had any advice for me

——————

i’m actually really glad you sent this to me! not bothering me at ALL! i’m a femme with dysphoria and i’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about. having gender/sex dysphoria is not a uniquely lesbian experience but there’s absolutely a significant overlap - and butches get the worst of it, with the feelings they’re having reinforced by the reactions of the world to their butch existence.

i feel the major root of my dysphoria is something like this: when you’re a lesbian, you love women. lesbian love is usually not shown to you, or if it is, it’s in a way that doesn’t recognize how real and vital it is. when i was a little girl, all the messages i had to receive about love where about what men could/should/wanted to do/provide for women. the only way for a woman to be happy was for her to be wanted and taken care of by men in a myriad of ways.

so there was that overwhelming social message, saturating basically all media, advertising, just everywhere! men will openly say the same things too and try to enforce them as best as possible. same sex attraction is porn or a joke to most of them, even very young.in addition, there can also be a messages like that from other women. i had a lot of feelings for straight & bi identified girls when i was a girl who wanted something that i couldn’t give to them. often these feelings were accompanied by romantic, sexual, or intense emotional entanglement. regularly they were accompanied by the statement “i wish you were a boy.” i felt it in my heart too, because i felt like, wow, if i was a boy, she could love me back. i could actually make her happy.

the horrible feeling of not being able to fulfill other women or have a normal, healthy, happy relationship is very, very tangled up in my dysphoria. the more i’ve been able to embrace (instead of accept or ignore) being a lesbian, and the more i’ve been around lesbians who are unapologetic (or fighting to be) about being a lesbian, the more my dysphoria fades.

when love between women is positioned as not-real, not-enough, a joke, women who love women will also feel not-real, not-enough, and like jokes.

so i hope this was at least a little relevant to you! i really want to hear from more femme / feminine lesbians who have dysphoria. there as many ways to feel like a failed female / failed woman as there as female people alive and the more we talk about what we’ve gone/are going through the more we can help each other and ourselves.