#and i hate the fucking implication that young women 20 and up

[iwaasfairy]

You’re right about how people should mind their own business. I would like to add that sometimes it is necessary to inject into a relationship, especially toxic relationships. Because some ends in murder, or trauma, or a baby. Plus a teen ends up with a high school teacher is nasty (that’s the only part I disagree with you/unless if the teacher is in their 20s, but it’s weird) If two adults are happy in a relationship, then people should let them be.

Ok, I don't know why people try to read between the lines of things I said, even tho I know you're just commenting on the post- I'm not talking about relationships where a crime is being committed. I'm not talking about abusive relationships. I'm not talking about minors with adults. I'm not talking about people who are being forced, or being assaulted, or where a crime is taking place. I specified that in the post.

Two consenting adults. Two consenting adults making a choice to be together, and existing online. That's what I'm talking about.

The teacher thing I was referring to was a story of a hs gym coach in his early twenties who never had contact with his future wife in school. He happened to meet her after she was already out of high school. No grooming happened. No illegal shit. Just a consenting adult and a consenting adult, but people felt the need to start calling them out for being happily married years after the fact, when they weren't even so much as talking about their relationship. They're both in their thirties now. They were just a couple existing online.

And like I said, you're allowed to think it's weird. I also think it's a little weird if someone in their mid twenties wants to date a 19yo. But that's exactly the thing I was saying, ok. People infantilize young women, and then deny they're doing it.

You want to tell me a 21yo is old enough to vote, work, drink, drive, fuck whoever they want, go into sex work, have a baby, adopt a child, get their entire body covered in tattoos, get tossed into big adult jail, buy a whole house and get criPPLING debt

but not to date another consenting adult?

Really. Really? And you don't think that's sort of insulting to the young woman in question? All that, but you think it's ok to harass her because she's dating a 29 year old? If you think that's a little silly, then you agree with the point I was making.

And if you genuinely think "yea that's how it should be", then I just don't. agree with you. People only do this to young women. They only do this to women, not to men. It's degrading and gross and anti-woman.

[chalkrevelations]

Episode 31 of Word of Honor, and in many ways OH MY GOD YES, but also, no, show, wtf?

As in, wt actual f is going on? Literally, what is happening?

(Spoilers, so scroll away and come back later, if you need to.)

So, first thing’s first: I feel like this one may end up a bit short, because a lot of it is likely to be just a bunch of keysmash flailing? (EDIT: No, I just came back up here to the top from the bottom, because this is NOT AT ALL any shorter than usual.) I’ll attempt a bit more than exclamation points and worry over whether my poor heart is able to take this, but we’ll see how it goes, because the first thing I’m going to do is say I knew it! and I told you so! I knew you weren’t planning to die, Zhou Zishu. I did call you a liar after Ep 30, and I was right. I mean, what’s the point of having the terrifying master of the Ghost Valley as your boyfriend husband if he’s not going to rescue you after you’ve been kidnapped for attempted ravishment by the evil prince? And get you the best wedding present ever, i.e., a bunch of new disciples? Omg, Zhou Zishu’s face when Wen Kexing finally calls himself a disciple of Four Seasons Manor! (I think he’s so overwhelmed, he doesn’t even realize when WKX calls him “shixiong” a minute before that!) Wen Kexing’s tiny pained smile that he just can’t seem to help when ZZS lays his hand on WKX’s head! That long shuddering breath ZZS lets out, and the way his shoulders just drop, like he’s finally let go of a huge weight! (The worry this brings me, because there are five and a half episodes left, my dude, and your husband is a troublemaker, and I would not be getting complacent, if I was you.) The fact that WKX has knelt to ZZS and called him zongzhu in front of the Ghost Valley contingent – there’s gotta be some political implications to that. Horseback riding! The way WKX keeps holding (up) ZZS! Lol at WKX being all, you all can leave now, we can take our honeymoon alone from here! ZZS knew he would come (I told you so)! Their smiles! Their soft little faces! (Merciless killers! How so fucking adorable?) The hairpin! MARRIED, Y’ALL. Censorship? I don’t know her. ANYWAY, that’s all just a bunch of flailing reaction to the first almost 20 minutes of emoporn. Also, Zhang Zhehan, you should not do suffering so pretty. It makes me feel like a bad person for still enjoying your face so much when your character is in so much physical and emotional distress.

Secondly, show. We need to talk. You should not be this opaque. I’m trying to piece together everything that’s happened in (vaguely) chronological order:

Sometime before dying (before breaking his heart meridians?), Han Ying tells Wen Kexing about the Four Seasons Remnants back with Prince Jin. All of Ep 30 happens, with Zhou Zishu and Xie Wang both making a mess of Awful Prince’s/Yifu’s plans. Xie Wang, the rest of the Scorpions, and the Ghost Valley team retreat back to a lair. Which lair? Who knows, at this point. Cao Weining talks to Fan Shishu. (He explicitly tells this to A-Xiang.) But does he also confront Mo Huaiyang? Because I feel like it must be significant that we get the same turn of phrase to describe Zhao Jing’s relationship with Xie Wang – asking a tiger for its skin – from Mo Huaiyang to Fan Shishu, and then attributed to Cao Weining when A-Xiang quotes it to WKX in the same ep. The show even emphasizes this for us to catch by drawing attention to A-Xiang’s use of it via her struggle to remember the idiom properly. (A. This episode’s convo between Mo Huaiyang and Fan Shishu, which is when we see Mo Huaiyang actually use the idiom, happens AFTER Cao Weining and Gu Xiang leave Gentle Wind Sword Sect. I went back and checked, and it is Mo Huaiyang who uses it, not Fan Shishu. B. In this same convo, Fan Shishu says he still needs to explain all this to the disciples somehow, so C. Was there a prior, unseen convo between just Cao Weining and Mo Huaiyang in which Mo Huaiyang practiced his excuses on poor, hapless Cao Weining first?)

Anyway, Cao Weining then goes to A-Xiang, who’s lit. and fig. in the dark at this point, in her rustic cabin outside the gated community. I notice Cinnamon Roll already has his bag packed. He is done. He lays out the current political web, and A-Xiang seems pretty sure of Liu Qianqiao’s ultimate loyalty to WKX. This is probably important in what happens next. Gu Xiang and Cao Weining decide to run away and elope but then … get captured and taken to the lair. On purpose? A-Xiang did see Liu Qianqiao with Xie Wang in the Secret Cave, standing shoulder to shoulder with Du Pusa as an apparent top-tier henchwoman, and she probably expects to be protected, but this seems like a pretty big gamble. I suppose you don’t survive the Ghost Valley without learning to take some risks. A-Xiang then leads Xie Wang and the Ghost Valley contingent to WKX (at burned-down Four Seasons Manor?) to, she says, let WKX take down Xie Wang. She notes Xie Wang’s use of some potion to control everyone – I assume the Drug Man potion, and I assume the monthly antidote is what’s keeping everyone in the Ghost Valley from going full Drug Man?

WKX and Xie Wang confer in secret. Probably about how much they both hate Awful Yifu. I mean, I assume Xie’er still hates Awful Yifu at this point, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? Probably a key point here: WKX is hiding whatever this was about from his husband. My dude, why are you still like this? I guess that explains the pained cast to that tiny little smile earlier. WKX then takes some of the Ghost Valley contingent and coordinates with the Four Seasons Remnants back in Prince Jin’s territory to rescue ZZS. Husband safely rescued, WKX now heads back to Ghost Valley, to … abdicate? He promises A-Xiang he’s going to come back safely, and my dude, I’m trying to believe you. I really am. I’m trying to have as much faith in you planning to be back all along as I had in ZZS not planning to die in Jin Palace all along, but here’s a key difference: HE LET YOU IN ON HIS PLAN. Which you were a key part of. I find your secrecy, by contrast, concerning.

Other things:

Love the little moment between Gu Xiang and Liu Qianqiao and Luo Fumeng when Beauty Ghost and Tragicomic Ghost turn to Xie Wang in righteous indignation and want to know what the fuck he thinks he’s doing to their little girl. Compare the reaction of these two moms to Happy Ghost being all, “Nope, this is a complete and total in with Wen Kexing right here in a pretty pink dress.” The show continues to draw a fairly bright line between the characterization of the women in the Department of the Unfaithful - who are terrorizing certain people, true, but also watching out for each other after ending up down on their luck – and the general run of men in Ghost Valley, who are basically rotten sociopaths straight out of Batman’s rogues gallery and will sell you out in a minute for their own gain. Yes, this has been made fairly explicit in Wen Kexing’s and A-Xiang’s commentary in past eps and later in this ep about trying to get the Department of the Unfaithful out of the line of fire while not caring if the jianghu burns down the rest of Ghost Valley, but this isn’t just favoritism or a whim, just some fond memories of Luo Fumeng being kind to them a couple of times in the past. I think there’s some commentary here on the kind of men who are so far gone they find themselves outside the bounds of “civilized” society and the kind of women who do – how much easier and quicker it is for a woman, that it could be any woman in the wrong circumstances, and how much further gone a man has to be than a woman to be considered a “devil.” We’ve seen these supportive interpersonal relationships among the women since Gu Xiang “adopted” her two girls in the first handful of episodes and told off Lovelace with the threat of Tragicomic Ghost – and the show is continuing to show it, not just tell it. It’s one of the things I’ve found frustrating about Wen Kexing a couple of times in past eps, when he’s trying to get A-Xiang’s two girls, or other women from the Department, to just leave and go do something else – I feel like even though WKX realizes their circumstances and their personalities are different from the rest of his Top Ten Devils, he’s not fully comprehending that they literally have nowhere else to go, that if they had any other options, they wouldn’t have ended up there in the first place. He called the two girls “puppies” when he talked about A-Xiang having to take care of them, but as Ghost Valley master, who’s enforced the independence of and protections for the Department of the Unfaithful, he’s walking away from his own basketful of puppies. Not to mention, this is one of the vanishingly small places in this particular version of the jianghu that we’ve seen women have any autonomy and power. I … think there may have been a few young female cultivators in Yueyang Sect, but while I’d have to go back and watch to be sure, I remember the Hero’s Conference being a whole bunch of men throwing their … weight around. Anyway, I also love that it looks like A-Xiang tries to kick Happy Ghost in the shin, because of course she does.

Visually, they had a cool thing going on there with the Tian Chuang behind WKX falling in concert with WKX lowering his fan, but they didn’t quite coordinate it enough, and then they cut away too soon. Bah. It was set up to be a very cool visual, if only they had committed to it. Meanwhile Duan Pengju, this asshole, omg. He’s trying to pull off the Collar of Evil and is not succeeding. Srsly, his Collar of Evil is droopy. It doesn’t stop him from monologuing like he’s the actual villain and not some sad-sack lackey. You showed the correct amount of amused disdain during your interaction, but I can’t believe you left him alive at the end of it, Wen Kexing.

I wasn’t really feeling Jing Beiyuan and Wu Xi up until this ep when Jing Beiyuan was teasing A-Xiang about her lack of shame over running away with her lover. OK, fine, you can stay, Qi Ye. Also, wow. Speaking of lack of shame, I can’t believe you just accused your husband of bride kidnapping right in front of everyone’s salads, because that is totally what just happened there.

So the band is (almost all) back together, minus Chengling, who has definitely found out in the worst possible way that one of his dads is the terrifying master of the Ghost Valley that massacred his family and sect. So, this should go well.

Lol at Xie’er lounging in Wen Kexing’s Ghost Valley master seat like some kind of consort. He’s already got a husband, Xie’er. One that would not be happy with a concubine running around, I think. I do wonder what the full scope of their plan/understanding is, bubbling away under this stare-down.

A note – WKX’s hair is styled differently in this ep in the Ghost Valley master scenes than it has been before. Previously, those side bangs were further forward and a little bit chunkier, which, I think, narrowed his face and also helped emphasize the wild-eyed look. They’re wispier and back further, now, which I think softens his face, even when he’s trying to look imposing. Makes him look more, dare I say, human.

And now, I’m going to go have a few Han Ying/Bi Xingming thoughts, actually. God, those months after ZZS left, can you imagine what that was like for them? Han Ying having watched those nails placed in Bi Xingming’s shifu in the first ep, and then having to turn around and go to Bi Xingming and tell him that ZZS was gone, with the seven nails in him? Both of them trying to hold the Four Seasons Remnants together – and then Ying-ge comes back one day and says he’s found ZZS? Mutual aid and comfort, my dudes. Also some projection. I’m just sayin’. Meet me, I guess - this kind of sideline action and extremely rare pair thing is how I tend to roll.

[neednothavehappenedtobetrue]

okay. this is a post about a new character, who is a person in the same 'verse as the main one for Robert and Isabelle, sci-fi and spaceships. she is a pastor in the one specific "limits on technology" religion I made up, but also, she is very cool. she does not live on their main terraformed colony, she lives in another colony with some definite cultural differences.

I am mostly posting this for my own future reference. there are definitely people who will enjoy Gwendolyn a lot, even with the extensive trigger tag situation here, but I think "a short story that has space for more nuance" would be a better venue for her than "my thoughts from Skype at 4AM"

if you do decide to read this, check the tags first, please

shoutout to @anonymus-maximus-er for being my thought partner on this.

but as I understand it now, there are, like , degrees of Intensity in Church Of Man

like, even their chillest followers are kind of intense about it because it's hard to be real, real chill about "god said we were only allowed to use these specific fifteen technologies" or whatever the exact rules are

but as far as incubators go, Aimee's community, the one you saw, would definitely have been like "well, too bad God wants that baby to die" and there are some other communities which would be more like "okay, probably make sure your baby does not die, do what you've gotta do there, but don't come back and talk to us afterwards"

and also for sure there are communities like "do literally whatever you have to do to make sure your baby does not die, we will be here with whole-made casseroles when you're home again"

and like, could some of those kids have benefitted from subsequent quality-of-life stuff they didn't get? probably, yes

to varying degrees

but hopefully Aimee finds a nice community where she can be like "this is so important to me but my babies and I experienced a bunch of technology in order to not die and we got excommunicated."

and they're like "wow that sounds like a lot of Not Your Fault would you like some whole-made casseroles and toddler clothes?"

and she's like "I got excommunicated" and they're like "did you know, perhaps you didn't, that there is no Central Authority for every Church Of Man church in the galaxy? there for sure is not! the people from New Maryland often pretend they are, but we didn't vote for them! your old pastor is just not at all the boss of us, is the thing"

that is the future epilogue I want for Aimee

I feel like the Tau Ceti Church of Man community is small and some people think they're weird, but they're nice neighbors. their pastor is a woman named Gwendolyn or something who is just constantly mad about Richard Brinton That Fucking Asshole

she has never called him any of those words because of decorum, she has just spent a lot of time talking to new people like "wow you seem very traumatized did you know he is not the boss of us?"

"we don't have a pope!"

"we've tried to have a council a few times, but it's logistically complicated"

"every church is supposed to make its own rules in accordance with the texts"

"yes, I have read every single one of his missives to the world, I know which bits of the Texts you probably have memorized, here are some bits I like a lot"

Gwendolyn has some opinions

like, churches are supposed to set their own rules about "necessary" technologies and she has quietly labeled almost all life-saving medical technology "necessary"

meanwhile, Brinton thinks it's necessary for him to have access to telecommunications equipment to he can send his editorials all over the galaxy, so people can be Educated

huh

of course, he does not actually physically touch the telecommunications equipment, he keeps like four people who know how to use it around so they can spread his word, but also, huh

the thing about Gwendolyn is that she has spent a long time watching traumatized New Marylanders join her community, many of them quite young and quite traumatized

also, she was never a New Marylander, she is fourth-generation Tau Ceti, which, crucially

means that her first set of principles is "Church Stuff, Misc" and her second set of principles, right there after the first is "you're not the boss of me"

even if somebody could point to actual scripture that said they were the boss of her, she would have some trouble with it, but some dude! who cannot point to anything at all! no justification whatsoever! nothing in the texts even a little bit! keeps trying to be the boss of her! and also keeps traumatizing all of the people in his community pretty badly! and making everyone else look like jerks!

"I'm more conservative than you, therefore, I am the boss of you"

NOPE

not for Gwendolyn

Gwendolyn votes in every local election and votes for her Senator, who she has met and quite likes. she occasionally goes to protests when the local government does some dipshit thing, but the Tau Ceti local government is pretty well-behaved because if it's not the citizenry will absolutely be like "fuck you, you're not the boss of me" at its government

she has some Very Big Opinions about debtor employment. she's not thrilled about the like, severity of the gang situation in her city, but she doesn't have a lot of optimism that the Government is gonna fix it, so she does community groups instead

also, in recognition of the fact that she can't just throw these traumatized New Marylanders right off into the personal autonomy deep end she is like "okay, if you need someone to tell you what to do sometimes, I will be the temporary boss of you until you are ready to be the boss of you"

she does not Love that aspect of her job, but sometimes you gotta

you can't bring people from "obedience all the time" to "you must make every choice in your life with no backup" overnight, they'll just collapse in on themselves or become targets for worse people

so she does the thing

she and Brinton have a <very> passive aggressive correspondence going as church leaders

there are many many long letters back and forth

they are very polite and also, if any of them are preserved, historians will find them fascinating

"wow these people just fucking loathed each other"

Anonymus, 5:05 AM

your obedient servant, A. Burr

5:05 AM

if they did not live on separate planets, legitimately maybe

like, if she could get to Brinton's house on a horse to yell at him in person, she would have by now

she didn't swear a lot in real life, but sometimes she wanted to

she got real good at saying "that man" or "sugar" or "nonsense" in A Tone, but you could tell

I can't decide if she has a husband or a wife

Aimee's church definitely thinks gay people are Modern and therefore Wrong, but like

I feel like probably their specific religious texts don't even have that much on being nice to people? like, there's definitely a few pages on like "kindness is an ancient value, we hold fast to ancient values, these are them"

but it's like 70% Rules Minutiae

it's also not a super long book

so everybody has very different opinions about how to interpret the Rules Minutiae in light of the 30% of the book that's like "here are our actual values"

"modesty" and "fidelity" are both in the Ancient Values bits for sure

and I feel like different denominations went in different directions on the "modesty" and "fidelity" implications of "gay people"

no, I've decided, Gwendolyn definitely has a wife

show her in the actual rules where she can't have a wife

yes, fidelity, that thing she has with her wife

Anonymus, 5:13 AM

can the wife be a very proper rebbetzin?

organises all the casserole chains

5:14 AM

yes, she can definitely organize all of the casserole chains

5:18 AM

right

Gwendolyn's wife's name is Tara and she came from an Earth Church of Man community where they were like "technically it's not illegal for you to be gay, but, like, ehhhh? we'd rather you didn't and also you definitely cannot have children if you're gay"

5:20 AM

and she got to Tau Ceti and met Gwendolyn who even in college was like "show me in the texts where it says I cannot have a wife."

"show me."

Anonymus, 5:21 AM

sounds like excellent breeding ground for Very Textually and Theologically Conversant, but not actually a religious authority

5:21 AM

the thing is, Tau Ceti is Bad At Authority

if they had a motto on their coins it would just be "you're not the boss of me" but maybe in Latin

but maybe not even in Latin because people who know Latin often think they are the boss of you

Anonymus, 5:22 AM

WHO MADE U KING

5:22 AM

for real

I think there is a dude who is technically the "boss" of Gwendolyn and they take turns giving the sermons and calibrating which parishoners they support based on like, communication styles in a way that often ends up with just all of the women and queer folks being Gwendolyn's people

she is smarter than him, he handles all of the Local Politics things that require you not to go "EXCUSE me, where is the LAW ABOUT THAT"

Anonymus, 5:24 AM

different type of smart

5:24 AM

if he ever tried to pull rank on her, she would either be so startled that it would work or she would unhinge her jaw and eat him

so he's never tried

he doesn't want to! very few people on Tau Ceti even want to be in charge, both because it's like herding cats who will hate you if they catch you herding them and because the finely honed distrust of authority doesn't go away when you become authority

Anonymus, 5:26 AM

"I'm pretty sure I'm up to some bullshit"

5:27 AM

yeah, Gwendolyn spends a lot of time with these sad transplants from other communities, nearly all of them women (because for SOME REASON women tend to get excommunicated WAY MORE OFTEN. HUH. are there ADDITIONAL RULES for WOMEN? I DON'T SEE ANY)

and they're like "please I am so sad and scared just tell me what to do"

and she wants to be like "I am not the boss of you, you have to be the boss of you" but they often are not ready for that, so she just tries to get a sense of what they want to do or what might be healthiest for them and tells them her strong recommendation is that they do that thing

everyone in her community knows she is passionate and can get fired up about some of this stuff, she doesn't hide that, but also, there are some conversations she (a only has with her wife and also (b has had with her wife a number of times

they are basically "our community is like 55% traumatized exiles from other communities and like 30% traumatized people from This One Dude's Community specifically. he traumatizes women and girls and girls he calls women and gay people and parents with sick babies!"

"we have so so many people we take care of now who are so so shaken and traumatized and sad"

"and we only get the people who don't leave the faith entirely!"

"it's not fair! it's not fair that he gets to do that! it's not fair!"

because when you carry the faces of like twenty good people all traumatized by the same garbage person and all you can do is try to take care of them and send passive-aggressive letters, sometimes it sucks!

if they lived on the same planet and she could get there on a horse, she would have done something ill-advised by now. yelled, certainly

but then again, if she had been born on New Maryland she would be a super different person and if he had been born on Tau Ceti there would have been a hard upper limit on how much he could get anyone to listen to him

like, bad bullshit happens on Tau Ceti, but the first time he married a fourteen-year-old girl off to her rapist, his neighbors would have set him on fire

church of man neighbors, regular neighbors, possibly neighbors who are criminals, just all the neighbors

5:37 AM

so her wife listens to her cry and reads over her letters to Brinton to make sure she doesn't actually say anything Too Impolitic (I think her boss also reads them, but he's less invested)

and her wife has these new folks over for dinner and helps them find clothes for their kids and adapt their modesty rules to the thing where it's like, as hot as it is possible to be in Tau Ceti

5:38 AM

like, most of the summer it's like 120 degrees, on a brisk day in December it drops into like, the low nineties

5:39 AM

sometimes people from other communities are like "we do modesty more modestly than they do" and they have to be like "okay, your choices are us dressing this way or us using air conditioning, because people do die in real life of heatstroke sometimes, that is a thing that can kill you"

also, even before Gwendolyn came along, her previous pastor was definitely like "we're gonna make electric fans permissible. we're just... heatstroke sure does kill you in real life"

"particularly in Modest Dress"

she liked him. they had meetings like twice a month when she was young because she had A Lot of questions and her parents were less invested in the answers than she was

when she was like twelve, he was like "maybe they'll give you my job one day" and she was like "I don't want your job! you're the boss of people!" and he was like "they very much would not give you my job if you wanted my job, kiddo"

(even 50% of the organized crime leaders on Tau Ceti are like "hey, I'm not the boss of anybody, I'm just a guy you don't want to fuck with because of all of the friends that I have got"

"I am not the boss of you, but I do have this gun")

5:49 AM

final thought on Gwendolyn: she had a real hard time when Robert Thompson died, because that dude thought her faith was a good reason to murder a husband and father.

and like, that dude is a fucking asshole, obviously, but it's hard

and then Brinton puts out an editorial about it and it is the only time Gwendolyn and Tara's children ever hear one of their mothers swear

because she is usually super meticulous about that

but also, sometimes

there is a limit

she makes several attempts before she writes him her next letter and the subtext of the entire letter is just "fuck you SO much, I do not generally believe in Hell, however, I will make an exception"

there is a limit! a man is dead and his wife and daughter are grieving and then a dude who everyone thinks is, like, the pope of her puts out some bullshit like "of course we don't do hate crimes but also that dude who got murdered deserved it" bullshit

there is a limit she is past it!

5:53 AM

also, they have seven adopted kids

[charlottesweetly]

Hi! For the character thing you reblogged - Charlotte. Unless someone already made that ask then,, mayhaps HCB?

- red

hell yes thaNK U warning tho this ended up SO LONG

Why I like them

An absolute DISASTER, relatable

Soft tbh

I big love Jaime

Her background stuff in the digital ticket akdklslkalksa

Like.... the coffee machine thing

Paul: you know the....the “latte hotte....”

Charlotte: OH yeah......*awkwardly waves at Emma*

Hidgens: 20 YEARS AGO I WOULD HAVE HAD TO WALK TO THE DIMMER

Charlotte:

Why I don’t

honestly i cannot think of a reason ;-;

like i’m not even mad about the “she only sees Ted as a side-piece” bit bc it makes everything MESSIER and more relatable

uhh has the audacity to not be real i guess. gotta do everything myself around here and just become her

Favorite scene

JOIN US AND DIE

The bin scene in the DT!!!!

HEADBAND SCENE HEADBAND SCENE HEADBAND SCENE

Favorite line

there are.....too many ok

“Sweetheart it’s......it’s cuddle night”

“Huh? Oh! I didn’t even realise!”

“It is time......to DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE”

“WE’RE GONNA KICK YOUR ASS AND THEN WE’RE GONNA FUCKING KICK YOUR ASS”

“Your own body is your front row seat” (THE IMPLICATIONS)

Favorite outfit

she has like 2 (purple sweater and cat sweater) but definitely cat sweater!!

OTP

Ted Ted Ted Ted Ted Ted Ted

Brotp

Literally everyone this woman could make friends with the entire town if she wanted. 

Paul tho. HC that they’ve known each other since childhood, or in some AUs where Char moves to Hatchetfield after marrying Sam, since she first moved there and they r inseparable

Also Bill!! They go to stuff like couples baking classes together and Bill vents about his ex wife to her a lot bc she UnderstandsTM. 

Nora as well just bc she’s one of my other faves. They chat a lot at Beanies and they both like knitting so they talk about their projects together. Nora also deeply cares about Charlotte and is very protective over her

Head Canon(s)

She only really cries about serious stuff when its really, really bad, but she happy-cries over small things like cute books and kittens very easily. She’s also a sympathetic crier imo, so if someone else is crying she will too

Also.......bi as fuck just bc I gotta project my bi-ness onto every character I like. She never really had the chance to explore her attraction to women before marrying Sam, but I imagine she’s exploring it now.

Very Christian upbringing lmao

Married Sam really young, like 18ish. Mostly to rebel against her parents who didn’t like Sam (i wonder why).

Is like, constantly dissociated and experiences a lot of depersonalisation too.

Unpopular opinion

I dont know how to explain it but i feel like some of the fandom may just see her as a bit of a pushover bc of how she was in TGWDLM with Sam? Or just like as a bit of a sad-cat-lady. As much as I agree that Sam is probably shitty to her I feel like she can stand up for herself and defend herself to an extent u feel? She’s sort of assertive with Ted (That’s not the only reason) and Infected!Sam (“I love you too Sam but I cannot let you go” / “Don’t you twust me?” “Uhhhhhh”) Tbh I think the only reason she started dancing was because she too was getting infected from touching Sam’s brain/being around the spores (in the DT version she hears the music and asks Sam where the voices are coming from!). 

Also I sort of theorise that after infection the real person is sort of still there, but they’re also....exaggerated? So I think the absolute rage Charlotte had going on in JUAD was something she’d been holding back and she probably had a lot of resentment going on in her life (eg “and I know I’ve been so ANGRY with him lately”). 

Oh! I also think she’d be friendly with Zoey like... I hate the trope of women seeing the same guy and hating each other instead of the guy. I’m sure Zoey’s a perfectly nice person and she’s like 10 years younger than Emma, who’s a few years younger than Charlotte and (i assume) Sam so alllll kinds of red flags are going off on Sam already. I like to think Charlotte would befriend her and be like “hey u should leave Sam because u deserve a LOT BETTER than him”

A wish

More content pls.....backstory pls........canon CharTed mayb?? Or at least canon divorce.......

More Charlotte and Paul interaction

More Charlotte and Bill interaction

ANY Charlotte and Mr Davidson interaction bc i have built up SUCH a mentor-like relationship between them in my brain

Any Charlotte and Melissa interaction

Any Charlotte and Zoey interaction (but friendly)

It’s a big stretch but maybe in the film Charlotte and Nora interaction skasklasklak

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen

I’ve seen a few people float the idea that Sam and Charlotte’s relationship is mutually toxic and that she’s kind of shitty too bc she’s also cheating, so that’s something I really hope doesn’t get confirmed

Please Nick do not Ted her I swear to god-

5 words to best describe them

Soft

Sunshine

Mess

Affectionate

Me

My nickname for them

Cat! It can be a common name for Charlottes and since she likes cats a ton I just <33333

Also Lottie! it’s a bit stereotypical but still adorable and makes me think of the animal crossing otter

[mermaidsirennikita]

July 2019 Book Wrap-up

July was actually a really good month for me!  I read a ton of books, and a lot of them were actually pretty good?  It’s been a very transitory month for me; and I’m hoping to keep up the momentum as I start a new job.  The standouts of the month include War, of my beloved Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series by Laura Thalassa, and Lock Every Door, a creepy, apartment-centric psychological thriller by Riley Sagers.

What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon.  3/5.  Heartbroken by the death of her grandfather--the only parent she really knew--Anne Gallagher travels to Ireland.  Ireland was her grandfather’s homeland, she she grew up on his stories of a family she has little connection with.  Going out on the lake, she suddenly finds herself thrown back into 1921, in an Ireland on the brink of civil war.  Taken in by Thomas Smith, a friend of her great-grandfather--who himself died young in the conflict--she finds a young boy who is oddly familiar, and a group of people she can’t help but connect with.  As she grows close to Thomas and enveloped in his political struggles, Anne becomes terrified of her lack of control over the time she’s in, or the future she’s facing.  This is a time travel romance, as you’d probably guess.  And it’s really not super amazing or much to complain about.  There is fluff.  There are the necessary “out of time” moments, the tension between the hero and the heroine.  It does seem that Harmon did her research on the Irish political landscape of the 1920s--but I can’t verify the novel’s accuracy.  To be frank, I think that this actually got in the way of the story to an extent.  The amount of time Michael Collins took up in this novel, acting as like...  the best friend character?  Was a bit awkward.  Otherwise, it’s a fluffy, nice read.

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren.  3/5.  Olive and Ethan hate each other, which is awkward as his brother is marrying her sister.  But after the entire wedding party--save Olive and Ethan--end up with food poisoning, they agree to go on the honeymoon trip together, to save it from being completely wasted.  The plan on avoiding each other the entire time; but when Olive encounters her future boss at the resort and tells what seems to be a white lie, they end up having to impersonate newlyweds.  You can probably guess what happens next!  Christina Lauren books usually feature protagonists with a fun, sweet chemistry, and this novel is no exception.  The beach setting and Olive and Ethan’s angsty, unresolved sexual tension makes most of this book a super fun read.  The only reason why I didn’t give it 4/5 is that the last twenty percent or so really annoyed me.  There is a very typical twist, which wasn’t the problem--how our male lead reacted to it was.  It didn’t ruin the book, but it did make me much less likely to give it a wholehearted recommendation.

Lock Every Door by Riley Sager.  5/5.  After losing her job and breaking up with her live-in boyfriend, Jules is desperate for money and a place to stay.  As luck would have it, she stumbles upon an opportunity that offers both.  The Bartholomew is an old building, populated by the wealthy elite; and Jules has long idolized it as the setting of one of her favorite childhood books.  When the apartments are in between owners, their inherent value makes them targets for thieves--which is why the building’s managers employ apartment sitters.  Jules is offered $12,000 to live in an apartment for three months; and despite her wariness, she can’t turn that kind of offer down.  But when her newfound friend and fellow apartment sitter Ingrid goes missing, Jules sets on to a horrifying search for answers, which yield far more than she’s bargained for.  It’s official: I really do love Riley Sager books.  He’s 3/3 so far, and this one just may be my favorite.  Sager isn’t shy about drawing from classic horror tropes, and this novel is no exception--it owes a good bit to Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining.  But of course, another totally out there twist is thrown in, making the story his own.  I can’t say much without spoiling it.  But if you love thrillers and horror, try it.  What pushes the book over the edge for me is that it has a real point about today’s class systems, and the privileges of wealth and the victimization of the poor in America.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary.  4/5.  Following a disastrous breakup, Tiffy needs a flat, and badly.  So when she sees the ad posted by Leon, she’s desperate enough to take it.  As Tiffy is an assistant editor and Leon is a night nurse, they have different schedules.  They live in the flat together and even share a bed--though they sleep on opposite sides--but never see each other, communicating through notes left about the apartment.  At first, it’s stiff--but gradually, as they learn more about one another and their separate troubles (from Tiffy’s obsessive ex to Leon’s incarcerated brother) they begin to rely on each other for more than just room and board...  This is a really fucking cute, very sweet romantic comedy that touches on deeper subjects than you might think.  The way through which Tiffy and Leon connect is pretty unique, and I felt for both of them.  They were pleasant without being annoyingly perfect, and I just had a great time with the novel.

War by Laura Thalassa.  4/5.  As the apocalypse rages on, Miriam struggles to live in an Israel ravaged by the literal War--that is, the horseman of the apocalypse.  When the supernatural warlord stumbles across her in the battlefield, he’s taken aback by her own fury, and declares that she was sent by God to be his wife.  Thrown in with War and his followers, Miriam is exposed to the true horror of the battlefield--while also learning that there may be more to War’s purpose, and her connection with him, than she thought.  This is the sequel to Pestilence, and part of a big fat series about women falling in love with the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  And I love them.  War is a surprisingly endearing hero, though Thalassa never shies away from how brutal the horsemen are--which I so appreciate.  You never forget that War isn’t a human, however you may love him.  Miriam is another fun heroine, and one of those lovely characters who is honestly quite softhearted but still aggressive and never weak.  It’s a cheesy romance novel, and it’s exactly what you should read right now, immediately.

Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson.  3/5.  Elisabeth is a foundling, raised in the Great Library of Austermeer to take care of its magical grimoires.  When the library is attacked and its most powerful grimoire unleashed, Elisabeth is implicated in the crime.  Sent to the capital to be dealt with, she becomes wrapped up in a conspiracy, with only a suspicious sorcerer to rely upon.  I adored Rogerson’s first novel (An Enchantment of Ravens), and I wish I’d loved this one more.  It was well-written, and the characters were interesting, but I just found the story a bit hard to get caught up in.  Honestly, I think this had less to do with the plot itself and more to do with the pacing and length of the book.  It took way too long for things to get started, and things just moved too slowly for my taste.  However, I do think that tons of people will LOVE this book--if sorcery and slow burns are up your alley, go for it!

On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves.  2/5.  Thirty-year-old Anna is happy to take a dream teaching job--she’s tutoring the nearly-seventeen year old T.J. as his family vacations over the summer in the Maldives.  Flying separately from the rest of the group, Anna and T.J. are thrown off course when their pilot has a heart attack and crashes into the sea, leaving the two of them trapped on an isolated island.  As the years pass and Anna and T.J. survive together, they come to face the reality of a new world--and their changing feelings.  I had to read this for the what the fuck factor, basically?  To clarify, nothing happens between the leads until the guy is almost nineteen, and by then they’ve been alone for so long that it’s honestly pretty understandable.  I feel like this could have been great, trashy fun and it still kind of was, but the writing was so........................................  Not great?  It was really clunky and really awkward, and the characters kept repeating things to each other that didn’t need to be repeated.  The dialogue took me out more than anything else.  But I don’t know, I wasn’t disengaged?  It’s a spectacle of a book.

The Royal Secret by Lucinda Riley.  3/5.  After the death of acting legend Sir James Harrison, reporter Joanna is set to cover his funeral.  There, she meets a mysterious older woman, who sets her on a path to uncover a secret that has been hidden for more than seventy years--connected to the royal family.  I don’t have much to say about this one.  It intrigued me because it was actually published a little over 20 years ago, but due to the timing--it was written when the royal family was at a peak low in terms of popularity, but published right around the time that the popularity took an upswing--it did rather poorly.   It was an interesting enough read, but never grabbed me. The characters felt disconnected and bland, and ultimately the thriller aspects were pretty light, or maybe just not the types that I enjoy.  It’s not a bad book, but it’s also not for me.  

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo.  2/5.  This non-fiction book follows three women throughout the years, focusing on their varied sex lives.  This just wasn’t for me.  Other people will love it, but I was looking for something less...  intentionally poetic.  I wanted it to be more honest and upfront and analytical.  

The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting by Ben Lewis.  4/5.   An account of the history of Salvator Mundi, the allegeded Leonardo da Vinci work sold for $450 million.  Lewis writes in an engaging manner, revealing both the painting’s history and the case for and against it being a Leonardo--and what I really love too is his examination of the questions surrounding its value even if it is a Leonardo, considering the painting’s extensive restoration (which could have arguably taken away from the artist’s original hand) and its general quality compared to other works by Leonardo.  I’m not sure if people who aren’t into art history or at least history would be into this, but I found Lewis’s skepticism and reserve regarding the topic weirdly refreshing.  I have a lot of feelings about Salvator Mundi, and I appreciated the way he communicated his.

The Descendant of the Crane by Joan He.  4/5.  After the death of her father, Hesina is left as the heir to the throne.  The issue?  She thinks that her father was murdered--and in her pursuit of the truth, she seeks help from a sooth, one of the magic-users forbidden by the Eleven, the wise people who restructured the kingdom years ago.  She is then set to work with Akira, a thief who’s meant to represent her in court as she struggles to find the killer--but ends up on a path that will reveal more than she’d bargained for.  It’s hard to not spoil this one?  It has many twists and turns, to the point that it did get kind of convoluted (and the ending is far from resolved, though there’s no guarantee of a sequel). But I admire He’s ambition and the scope of the story.  I hope we do get a follow-up!

[ithinkthingsaboutstuff]

Ode to Odo (DS9)

Hey my pride month people 

i Have been trying to come up with something to post for pride month and i finally found it, a deep dive textual analyse of my new fav space goo. I will be looking at star teaks changeling and how the character has been show to be asexual or at lest how it was coded that way intentional or unintentional this argument is worth exploring. 

SPOILERS for a show that’s over 20 yrs old, but i’m not one to judge 

let me start off by saying i have not finished watching DS9 i am on the first half of season 7, so there my be some holes here. secondly i will be looking at how the character can be looked at as asexual and how his relationships are shown and formed under this lens. 

A no nonsense detective who almost always gets his felon. The master of neutrality in hell on earth, the keeper and pursuer of justice in any and all forms. This description fits just about fits about a million hetero male characters that tend to fall under the sheriff detective trope. this trope in and of itself is not a bad thing per-say by there are fundamental issues and criticisms that can be made, 

usually characters like this are often presented as having disdain or at lest disrespect for most people impractically women, they are also either useless or corrupted and need to be overthrown or pushed out. they are hetero men who hate there wife or prey on young women around them that the hero has to save.

Now with all of that being said that brings me to Odo, this character could have very easily have fallen under this trope trap, he is set up as a lone frontier lawman with basically unlimited power over the station (security wise, and before the series starts) with the only eyes on him being cardassian oppressors so he could have very early could have done anything he wanted if he kept order (the aforementioned preying on women) . but he choose to be as just and fair as possible given the situation.

I bring this up to show how he is set apart form this trope, but this set up to his character also has some interesting implications to his sexuality (asexuality in this case)     

for example this scene for ep 2x08 

(i will be looking at 1.06 - 1.40 but the scene is gold and i was unable to shorten it) 

now this moment is his first meeting with what became his best friend (spoiler,and then girlfriend)  

this moment shows two things 

1) - he is not naive about sex, as he identifies how his words sound after the fact

2)- its not something that crosses his mind as a possibility for him or at lest as something he would ever ask for 

3)- Kira is not aware of his intentions to interrogate her until after this moment specifically after his apology to her, so it shows that he is every different from other men she has encountered in this hell hole (which she say at 3.40-3.55)

This scene on its own dose not show an asexual character but it defiantly has elements and traits of one (but given the context of the scene it is understandably overlooked) 

now this second scene shows a more relaxed version of Odo 

(i will be looking at 0.00 - 1.35)

this shows his order but it also shows is care and tentativeness that is not seen by Kira,   

that is an important detail, she dose not see him in a romantic light

 BUT

it is never shown to be her fault 

rather it is shown as Odo being unable to connect his feelings to his actions in a clear away (a common problem for asexual people trying to be in relationships with non asexual people) not out of unwillingness but out of lack of experience and overall uncertainty of how those experience and relationships usually work. 

later in this ep Kira dose get to together with another man, 

(side note, Odo dose not make his feelings for Kira her problem rather he accepts her choice and reluctantly moves on.)

After one of my fav Odo scenes in ds9, (looking at 0.00 to 1.30ish)

now to get to my point, it is not just Odo and how he views himself but how others, Quark in this case view Odo

1) - quark doesn't believe Odo’s feeling were real until now

2)- that Odo has no passion therefore was unable to show certain types of love 

3)- that Odo is cold and unfeeling because of this

4)- the ‘someone like me’ can be taken in different ways about him being a changeling, but that is not the focus of the ep so yes that is a good argument but i think it has more to do with his overall demeanour, a quiet man who dose not express himself in a passionate way and therefore sees himself as unworthy of the love that he feels,       

so this shows a man struggling to come to terms with his feeling but not in the typical ‘i am unlovable’ way though that is still presented it is less to to do with the things he has done (that is normally used for the scared man trope) and has more to do with how he feels incomplete as a person because of inner qualities and traits he feels he lacks (passion, romantic’s ect)

and finally my last example is from when he is in a relationship with Kira 

i am looking at the first 30 seconds 

this right here shows his whole approach to there relationship 

1)- he sits with her even though he dose not eat 

2)- he dose not need to be there but he enjoys being there

3) - he may not get the exact same thing out of this experience she dose but he enjoys it all the same

4)- she tells him inadvertently that its ok that he dose not take part and that if he is uncomfortable that she understands

5)- he tells her point blank that it fine and that he is not uncomfortable because she is what make the experience enjoyable for him

so much asexual subtext here it hurts, it shows two people who care deeply about one another’s wants and needs and how one’s dose not override the other’s and that they clearly respect each-other and is the foundation of there whole relationship. That is all done in 20 seconds, 

but i digress, I’m not saying that Odo is a perfect representation of asexually (don’t get me started on what the fuck happened with the fem changeling and ep 5x17)     

but i can say that for the most part Odo could be very easily read as asexual and I personally do see him that way. As it show that an asexual person can have romantic agency, that lack of passion is not lack of feeling and that love and enjoyment can take many forms in a loving relationship. 

[soulvomit]

Something that’s changed as of my 40s: other women don’t get mad at me for having strong opinions about fashion anymore.

Other women no longer get mad at me for having strong opinions about mainstream fashion. They no longer are as quick to assume my opinions are about them. I guess at this age I’m just another middle aged person who doesn’t like a lot of youth fashion, but the thing is, I didn’t even like a lot of youth fashion as a youth. It’s just that it’s now okay for me not to like it. Nothing rises and falls based upon me wearing what the hip 20 year olds are wearing, because I’m so far past 20 at this point that it’s not even worth my bother. I’m starting to think about fashion that I can still wear in 20 to 40 years and I’ve stopped thinking about trying to squeeze myself into every new trend that rolls off the conveyor belt. I’m never again going to look young so I’m more focused on looking “best possible version of my real existing self” however I can manage. (My own fashion choices tend to go to extremes, I’m either all decked out or I’m “unisex  nerd style” - band/fandom t-shirt and jeans, hoodie or flannel.) Up until I started approaching midlife, if I didn’t like things celebrities were wearing, or the clothes on the rack at the mall, other girls and women my age always heard “I don’t like that trend” (often because I felt *left out* of that trend) as “I don’t like the people wearing it” or as a personal attack on them (I wouldn’t have even said the thing if they were into that, fwiw). I express myself roughly the same way, but people respond to me differently.  I suspect it’s that women my age AREN’T EXPECTED to be into youth trends.  But when you’re a youth and you’re not into them, you’re seen as an unfun scold who thinks they’re better than other people their own age. You’re seen as unfriendly and uncharitable and not a team player.  Here are examples of trendy stuff I’m not into. There are a couple of modern styles I definitely do not like. I don’t like the present iteration of female “geek chic.” The male or unisex version tends to be based on practical everyday clothing. The most “youthful” they look is teenaged to 20s, and somebody in their 40s or 50s wearing it would tend to parse as “Cool Dad” or “Gen X tech worker.” But the female version - whole dresses printed with your favorite franchise - looks and feels weirdly infantilizing to me, tends to be made of cheap fabric, and tends to have a weirdly “little girl” cut and fit. I do not like the look of most print-on-demand dresses and skirts, or the fabrics used by Hot Topic. I do not like the look of most “fast fashion” or a lot of mall clothing. It doesn’t mean I don’t like people who wear those things. It doesn’t mean I don’t think it even looks good on some people. But I hate the textures, and I hate the way that those fabrics enhance every dimple. I’ve tried galaxy leggings on and my legs always look lumpy and bruised. I have strong opinions about present makeup fads. I have expressed this even to my friends who are huge makeup fans, and I haven’t gotten any negative replies. Again, it’s the commodification and compulsory nature of mainstream fads that I don’t like, not the people wearing them. I hate the implications for ordinary women’s lives now that the Overton window for “heavy makeup” has shifted all the way over to theatrical makeup. But if I had expressed any of this in my 20s, I would have had a bunch of female friends MAD AT ME for expressing it. (My women friends often ended up being much older, very counterculture, or very gender-non-conforming. This was a snarl I just kept running into with mainstream gender-conforming women friends.) The flip side is that there are a lot of really elegant as fuck classic styles that tended to be on-trend with young hipsters, that I think middle aged and older people just wear a lot better, because younger people just look like they borrowed their parents’ clothes.  The thing is, though, there are a lot of youth styles that I did not like when I was young. I did NOT like feminine youth styles of the 90s, once we left behind the 80s and hit the grunge era. Many of the iconic 90s feminine styles were excessively “little girlish” for me. Also, I felt excluded by a lot of the trends because so many 90s trends were geared toward a model-thin, petite-build body type that I don’t have. I like teen masculine/unisex fashion (I live in band and fandom T-shirts, hoodies, and jeans on my days off).  I like a lot of adult masculine fashion. I like adult feminine fashion. But I’m not into  feminine fashion when it looks like scaled-up children’s clothing. Something about that kind of look just deeply bothers me. I don’t dislike other women for wearing it, and some women pull it off.

[wrestlingisfake]

Evolution preview

Ronda Rousey vs. Nikki Bella - Rousey, a former UFC bantamweight champion best known for a 12-0 streak in mixed martial arts, is defending the Raw women’s title.  Bella is a two-time WWE divas champion (once holding the belt for 301 days), and probably the best representative of the WWE women’s division from 2006-2015, after Trish Stratus and Lita retired but before the “divas revolution/women’s evolution” angle.  Rousey is the latest effort to build upon the new era, and Nikki is the veteran of the previous era out to prove she’s still on top.

This matchup symbolizes a lot of the problems with the way WWE books women’s wrestling.  Rousey runs down Bella for being promoted for her look and implies she benefited from dating John Cena, with the gist being that Nikki isn’t a “real” athlete because she’s too pretty and/or a slut.  On the other hand, Nikki’s heel act involves whining that she isn’t given enough credit for building the platform Ronda just waltzed into (the implication being that Nikki actually deserves no credit) and making light of Rousey’s losses in UFC (which was a legitimate mental health issue for her, at one point).  We’re expected to decide which side is more awful and root for the other, but the entire spectacle becomes revolting in a way that (for example) Roman Reigns vs. Braun Strowman would not be.

In general I think WWE has a very disturbing mentality about top women’s bouts, where the basic trash talking we’re accustomed to in pro wrestling has to be distorted into this hateful, passive-aggressive metacommentary on what is wrong with types of women.  Rousey and Bella aren’t fighting each other so much as what they each allegedly represent--carpetbaggers and starfuckers, respectively--and it just feels like it’s less important which woman wins than which type of woman is deemed acceptable.  This has been a creative problem within WWE for at least 20 years, and getting past it is the last great roadblock for gender parity in wrestling.  Unfortunately it doesn’t feel like WWE even recognizes the problem, because this match could have been the division’s John Cena vs. Brock Lesnar but they’re determined to turn it into a Jerry Springer segment.

A title change could be interesting, as a way to legitimize Nikki and level-set Ronda, but I doubt either of those things are goals for WWE right now.  Rousey’s role is to steamroll through everyone in her path, and Nikki’s role is to pass the torch.  Rousey is going to retain, probably by tapout; the only real question is whether it’s a brtually one-sided squash or if Nikki gets to employ enough heel tactics to make a real fight of it.

Becky Lynch vs. Charlotte Flair - Lynch is defending the Smackdown women’s title under “last woman standing” rules, so anything goes but the first woman who fails to answer a ten count loses, and the woman left standing will be the champion.

So this program manages to be the opposite of what bugs me with Rousey vs. Bella.  That may be because it’s a secondary concern, or because it’s on Smackdown where Vince McMahon is paying less attention, or both.  The vibe here is very much Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin from 1996, when Bret was still technically the babyface, but Austin was catching fire, but Austin couldn’t just be a babyface without losing the edge that was getting him hot.  There is far less of a sense that this feud is substantially different just because the combatants are women, because the feud isn’t about “which of these women is the right kind of woman?” but rather “these two wrestlers are gonna fucking kill each other.”

I’m sure there will continue to be hand-wringing about WWE mismanaging Lynch and the wisdom of her heel turn.  But what’s done is done and at this point, they’re on to something with her and it would be foolish to alter course.  I can’t even recommend booking Charlotte as a heel because right now her “I just don’t understand why my best friend would treat me like this!” act plays perfectly against Becky’s bad attitude.  If Becky’s going to be Steve Austin, it’s not time for a Vince McMahon to screw her over; she needs a Bret Hart who is aghast and scandalized that she would tarnish the principles of good sportsmanship, and WWE is shitty at packaging that sentiment in a heel unless it’s transparently conniving.

Lynch ought to win.  I don’t know where that leaves Charlotte in terms of her direction for Wrestlemania.  It’s starting to look like whatever feature role they had in mind ought to go to Becky anyway.  But the right thing for the business as a whole is to figure out how far they can take Lynch’s new act.

Trish Stratus & Lita vs. Alicia Fox & Mickie James - Trish and Lita dominated the WWE women’s division circa 2000-2006, and they’ve come to be regarded as the living legends of women’s wrestling.  This started as a feud between Trish and Alexa Bliss (one of the top women in today’s division), with the intent of adding Lita to make it a tag match (that Alexa’s sidekick James happens to be a veteran from the tail end of theTrish/Lita era is a bonus), but Alexa couldn’t get medically cleared for this show so Fox is filling in for her.  What had been designed to be a clash of then vs. now has become kind of then vs. then slightly later.

I would expect this match would have originally been about giving Alexa the rub against two legends, but now that she’s just cornering the heel team it’ll probably be an easy win for Trish and Lita.

Kairi Sane vs. Shayna Baszler - Sane won the NXT women’s championship from Baszler in August, so this is the rematch.  Not much has changed in this feud because Baszler acts like the title loss was a fluke, so it’s still a battle of a big MMA bully and a little joshi underdog.  They occasionally tease that Sane is going to hulk up (asuka up?) and bust out some epic strong style shit, but we may not be at that point in the story just yet.

Originally WWE acted like the entire NXT women’s roster would be on this show, but as of this writing the only NXT representation is this match.  That, plus the fact that Baszler is one of the Four Horsewomen of MMA with Ronda Rousey, makes me think that there could be a reason they went out of their way to get Baszler on the show.  Sooner or later WWE will want to do an angle based on that--if not now, when?

I could easily see this going either way, but Baszler really has nothing left to do in NXT, so a second title run feels pointless.  She should probably just lose and pick a fight with the Raw or Smackdown women to build to her moving on up.

Io Shirai vs. Toni Storm - This is the final match to determine the winner of the second annual Mae Young Classic tournament.  I haven’t heard of any particular stakes in the tournament; it stands to reason the winner will automatically be added to the NXT (or NXT UK) roster, but that’s probably true of the loser as well.

I honestly haven’t followed any of this tournament, so I don’t have any useful insight on the match.  All I really know about Shirai is that she was the ace of World Wonder Ring Stardom and is frequently considered one of the best wrestlers in the world today, male or female.  Storm was a semifinalist in last year’s tournament, and also the first women’s champion in Progress.  This could go either way but it feels like WWE is more into pushing Shirai as a major acquisition, while Storm is earmarked for the fledgling NXT UK brand.

Sasha Banks & Bayley & Natalya vs. Ruby Riott & Liv Morgan & Sarah Logan - Banks, Bayley, and Natalya have been out of the title picture for months, leaving them with little to do but feud with Ruby’s Riott Squad stable.  At one point it looked like losses to the Riott Squad were going to trigger a Banks/Bayley breakup, but apparently WWE couldn’t figure out what to do with that so they just made up like it never happened.  Natalya has been playing the role of Ronda Rousey’s sidekick, so she’s handy to round out the babyface team.

Banks has only just been cleared to compete after being sidelined with a concussion, so this match will be a litmus test for where she’s headed.  If she scores the winning fall, that suggests WWE is confident about putting her back in the mix at the top.  If she’s pinned or submitted, I think that indicates that they’re still concerned about her durability and want to hold her back a while longer.  Unfortunately I’m not all that confident in WWE’s confidence in Banks, so I’m picking the Riott Squad to win.

Battle royal - This will be a standard battle royal where all the participants will enter the ring at the start of the match, and the last one that isn’t eliminated will win.  Eliminations will presumably occur when someone exits the ring to the floor over the top ring rope.  (Historically many women’s battle royals have dispensed with the “over the top” part, making eliminations easier, but WWE seems to have moved away from that.)  The winner is supposed to be awarded a future title match, presumably for either the Raw or Smackdown championship.

This is largely designed to make sure everyone who didn’t have a match on the card still got to wrestle on the show.  For Raw that means Ember Moon, Nia Jax, Tamina, and Dana Brooke. For Smackdown that means, uh, basically everyone except Lynch and Flair: Asuka, Naomi, Carmella, Lana, Peyton Royce, Billie Kay, Mandy Rose, Sonya Deville, and Zelina Vega.  Maria Kanellis is also involved, even though she’s on 205 Live now and has been doing a non-wrestling role since returning to WWE in 2017.

Returning to WWE for this match are Michelle McCool, Kelly Kelly, Torrie Wilson, Molly Holly, Ivory, and Alundra Blayze.  Ivory was around during the Attitude Era, but her pre-WWE career goes all the way back to GLOW.  Blayze is the only woman on this show who wrestled in WWE before the women’s division was reactivated in 1998.  Interestingly, both Ivory and Blayze are a bit older today than the Fabulous Moolah was during her iconic feud with Wendy Richter in 1984.

It’s tough to guess who would win this match.  If the winner goes after the Raw title, I would expect her to get squashed by Ronda Rousey at some point before the end of the year, and I don’t see any of the Raw names fitting into that narrative.  If we’re setting up a Smackdown title match, Asuka would make sense, although you might want to keep Asuka and Lynch apart for a while to build to something bigger.  Naomi vs. Lynch would be good, even if I wouldn’t give Naomi good odds of winning.  None of the returning veterans strike me as being groomed for a “coming out of retirement for one last title shot” storyline, but you never know--maybe they think Blayze chasing the title could be big at the Royal Rumble or something.

If I gotta pick somebody, Asuka is a safe bet, but I don’t really think this match will be about safe bets.

[bobbystompy]

64 Quotes I Enjoyed From 2017

Below are my favorite quotes from 2017. Though most occurred throughout the year, some took place before but were encountered during.

(Allison Greene)

The irony and thematic implication of this first quote -- transcribed in January -- is not lost on me.

1) “I wish you all a Happy New Year. Meaning that I wish for your New Years Eve to be happy. It’s hard to wish hundreds of thousands of people to have an entire happy year. That’s a lot. That feels greedy and hopeless and also some of you might not deserve a happy year. Everyone deserves a happy moment or day now and again but a whole happy year I would wish on maybe eight people and four of them are terminally ill children.

Also please remember that the turning over of one year to another is a mental construct that bears no more weight than the things that keep us apart and in competitive categories as human beings. Time is not moving. You’re not losing or gaining ground. You’re not separate from ‘them’ anymore than you’re separate from your own umbrella. It’s now, we’re us and this is here. If you’re in pain, this too shall pass. If you’re in luxury, this too shall pass. Ask an old lady how she’s doing. The internet is not real. Draw a picture on a napkin.” - Louis C.K.

2) “Flowers cost money you could spend on alcohol.” - Tracy Cunningham

3) "Never make fun of people for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading."

[that one felt profound when I first read it, but there are probably holes you can poke]

4) “Middle America does not have a monopoly on tough times.” - Drew Magary

5) “The whole point of going to a wedding is to complain about it.” - Drew Magary

6) “The world is too noisy and distracted to probably ultimately survive. Everyone needs to shut the fuck up. The answers are in the silence. Monks set themselves on fire to protest and make this point.

Just consider it.” - Garry Shandling

7) “The fact that Chargers fans get to live in San Diego isn’t as much of a solace as you think, either. When you’re unhappy, Southern California can be the loneliest fucking place in the world. Everywhere you look, you are surrounded by people whose lives are seemingly more perfect than your own. And the fantastic weather acts a kind of lingering nag... an irritating reminder that you SHOULD be happy even if you’re not. When you live somewhere miserable, at least you have an excuse for it. People leave you alone, or they help you drink the pain away indoors. You’re not surrounded by a bunch of fucking Jack LaLannes and Navy steakheads making it worse.

[...]

This is how the San Diego Chargers ended, and their fans deserved better. There won’t even be rain to help water the team’s grave.” - Drew Magary

8) There is no meeting without a Gentry story. He tells the story of Doug Collins’s college coach at Illinois State, Will Robinson, putting Collins in front of a mirror and saying, “Now, that’s an ugly motherfucker.” Then Robinson gets a basketball, hands it to Collins, and says, “Now you’re a handsome motherfucker.”

-- “Seven Seconds or Less” by Jack McCallum

9) "This is gonna be bad. So be good." - Patton Oswalt, on the next four years

10) REPORTER: You always hear about guys in the zone. What’s it like to be in that zone and have that moment two games in a row?

DION WAITERS: Oh man, I love that moment. I mean, you can never shy away from that. I just feel—one of my favorite quotes is, uh ... I forgot it already. One of my favorite quotes. But yeah, can’t be afraid of taking them shots.

11) "No person can be explained in one trait." - Jason Benetti

12) That Federer could dig so deep without losing the spirit of grace and generosity he has carried for much of his career--amazingly, it didn't sound insincere when he told the crowd in Melbourne that he would've been happy if Nadal had won--was enough to make Agassi introspective. He fired off a text to a friend, fellow American ex-pro James Blake. Watching Federer, Agassi wrote, "makes me feel like I was much more of a broken person than I even realized."

-- the 2017 Australian Open

13) “Do you, because everyone else is taken.” - Uber driver

14) Federer's physical skills have tended to obscure just how he resilient he has been throughout his career--a point not lost on him. "My mental toughness has always been overshadowed by my virtuosity, my shotmaking, my technique, my grace," says Federer. "That's why when I lose, it seems like, 'Oh, he didn't play so well.' And when I win, it looks so easy." He says it has been that way since he was young. "Just because I don't sweat like crazy and I don't grunt, I don't have this face on when I hit the shot like I'm in pain, doesn't mean I'm not trying hard," he says. "It's just how I play. Sorry."

15) "I’ve always said the only way to change anyone’s opinion is to make him laugh first. It still is." - John Waters

16) “Women like babies. Men like their sons and daughters.” - Kevin Haack

17) “At once, Federer would triumph over his two greatest rivals: Nadal and Hawk-Eye.” - Chris Almeida, on Roger Federer’s 2017 Aussie Open win

18) “Brady did everything in Super Bowl 51 short of fertilizing crops with his own feces to feed his teammates.” - Bill Simmons

19) “It's still hard to believe the Falcons actually lost this game. They're the first team in Super Bowl history to lose with a pick-six in its pocket, one that felt like an unlikely gift given that it came from Brady. Some will throw around the "choker" label, which is inelegant at best and condescendingly incurious at worst. If choking means running after a quarterback on 68 dropbacks until there's hardly any air left in your lungs, the Falcons choked.” - Bill Barnwell

20) “Keep in mind: Plenty of people already think Chance The Rapper is corny. Plenty of people have been thinking it for years. Plenty of people who now love Chance The Rapper had to get over the corniness threshold, to train themselves to love the yawpy ad-libs an the voice-cracks and the general hyperactive teenage energy. When Chance won Best New Artist and howled the word 'God' in his acceptance speech about 32 times, I saw plenty of grumbling — We get it, dude, you believe in God — in my Twitter timeline. Someone even said that the music industry had figured out how to manufacture a marketable version of Christian-rap figurehead Lecrae. And that gets at another common complaint about Chance: that he’s an 'industry plant,' a creature created by the music business, one who uses 'independent' as a buzzword rather than as any kind of unifying philosophy. Those of us who love Chance, that line of thinking goes, have been somehow hoodwinked or manipulated into it. And there have been plenty of other perceived sins over the years: the overalls, the KitKat commercial, the constant references to Nickelodeon cartoons, the persistent smiling. Whether or not you love Chance, there is a strong possibility that he’s annoyed you once or twice.” - Tom Breihan

21) “Traveling is the antidote to ignorance.” - Trevor Noah

22) "But mostly, it's in how Celebration Rock treats every day like the last day of school, raising a glass to the past, living in the moment and going into the future feeling fucking invincible." - Ian Cohen

23) “In fact, it turned out that there was nothing ‘dangerous’ at all in picking on women and refugees. People will pay you good money for that. The dangerous ideas are the ones they don’t pay you for, the ones that don’t get you on HBO. You’re actually dangerous when you do what Yiannopoulos did in the ‘pedophile’ tapes: defend society’s most hated outcasts, and tell the truth about the complexities of gay men’s sexuality. You’re dangerous when you stick up for those on the fringes rather than kicking them. There’s nothing courageous or edgy in bullying the despised and excluded. But it might be dangerous if you dared to empathize with them.” - Nathan J. Robinson

24) [Taj] Gibson was asked if his dunk over Dwyane Wade was his favorite moment as a Bull. "It really wasn't. That was just a dunk. It really wasn't one of my favorite moments of my career, to be honest with you. I had a lot of shining moments in my career. Just being around Thibs, he taught me that people don't look at, some of the games, most of the games, they look at the bright spots. I have a lot of different bright spots in my career. The biggest one in my career would have to be just being on the team when guys were down and having a coach look at me and know that he can count on me. No matter what position, no matter what time in the game. And he would trust some of the most important plays for me to do. Those were the most important moments of my life, just having a guy between Fred and coach Thibs, knowing guys that are ahead of me, making twice as much money as me, and he's still calling my name through crunch time. Those were the best moments of my life."

[have some, Carlos Boozer]

25) “You can't let politics dictate what you read or who you fuck.” - Chuck, “Girls”

26) “Watching Kawhi Leonard play basketball is like when you get the email you’ve been waiting for and it says all of the things you were hoping it was going to say.” - Shea Serrano

27) “This isn't a choice, like my diet. This is a necessity, like my drinking.” - Ben, “Veep”

28) “It's like how love songs never go out of style because no one's ever written one that's closed the book on the subject.” - Brian King, Japandroids

29) Pitchfork: A lot of the lyrics on the album take advantage of this universal, mythic rock'n'roll language, like on "Fire's Highway": "Hearts from hell collide/ On fire's highway tonight/ We dreamed it, now we know."

Brian King (Japandroids): Personally, I really like the concepts of good and evil, heaven and hell-- the extreme boundaries of how people can feel and how fast things can change. I like that that language. I'm not talking about just some night you felt a certain way, I'm talking about the night you felt that way-- that one time. People have always alluded to those extremes as a way of characterizing the most intense feelings since blues and the early days of rock. A blues singer won't be like, "We broke up." He'll say, "Satan stole my baby from me." You just pick it up.

30) “Friends of mine, hitting partners, are Federer fans for real. They own his racket, his sneakers, the hat with his RF logo. When he loses, they're wrecked; when he wins, it's only slightly less painful, because it's one fewer win they get to witness.” - Rosecrans Baldwin

31) “Bad ideas rarely spread when the population is educated about better alternatives.” - Greg Graffin

32) This entire story (9:47 to 10:15)

RIP, Don Rickles (1926-2017)

33) “Being pregnant is cool and weird: Your bones ache, your gums bleed, your ligaments basically just start giving up. (A hormone called ‘relaxin’ is involved.) You plan decades ahead, then worry you’re jinxing it all. You’ve got a decreasingly nebulous imaginary friend there to listen to your hopes and fears at all hours and you occasionally get the hiccups. But the strangest thing about being with child is the way your body becomes not yours, and not even the baby’s, but the world’s. Complete strangers reach out and touch. Internet commenters opine. Photos of yourself splayed postpartum on a gurney, hair matted to the side of your face, one boob swung free, are triumphantly text-messaged to fathers-in-law without your express written consent.

It’s not fair, it’s never fair, but it’s nevertheless the shared experience of so many women during a powerful, vulnerable time.” - Katie Baker

34) "I just watched Deadheads spin around for three hours looking for miracles." - Brad Back

35) “Comparison is the thief of joy.” - Theodore Roosevelt

36) "The Spurs’ run of NBA success is now old enough to vote, and in a couple of years it will be legally old enough to share finely aged red wines with Popovich, although I suspect he’s been slipping it glasses at home for a few years now. One of the cornerstones of that success has been an ability to find talent where nobody else looked." - Rodger Sherman

37) "Cutting at the right time is more important than being fast." - Bill Belichick

38) “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” - “Justified”

39) “An asshole is not a brilliant visionary just because a toilet has a bottomless appetite for what comes out of it.” - Albert Burneko, on the passing of Roger Ailes

40) "He would’ve been a rock star no matter where he’d been born, or when." - Rob Harvilla on Chris Cornell

41) "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house." - Rod Stewart

42) “I have never regretted taking a walk. Every time you walk, a bunch of cool shit happens. You burn calories, for one thing. You think of cool ideas. You also get an immediate sense of the layout and vibe of wherever you happen to be. It’s a cheap shortcut to feeling like a local. I walked around downtown Atlanta for two hours once, which was long enough for me to realize, ‘Oh hey, this is the part of town that sucks!’ Then I went and walked around a cooler part.

Also, walking forces me to pocket my phone and actually look around for a bit (in theory…sometimes I check the phone while walking, which is galactically fucking stupid and could get you killed). I can actually feel GOOD about the world when I walk around, because I’m seeing it as it stands now, instead through the horrifying prism of online news and discourse. The sun still shines out there. People are smiling. It’s not bad. You wouldn’t even know we’re all gonna die soon. Not everything has rotted away just yet. You can leave the shifting sand dunes of the day far behind, to borrow a phrase from Professor Fartsniffer up there.

Also, you don’t have to look for a parking spot.

I walked today. I walked past a school and saw a bunch of kids playing touch football and they accidentally launched the ball over the fence and into the road, where they couldn’t get it. So they asked me to grab it for them. I hucked it back over and one kid shouted ‘YOU DA REAL MVP!’ And you know what? For that one little moment, I was, indeed, da real MVP. Step aside, Kevin Durant’s mom. I saved touch football. What did you ever do?

That kind of experience isn’t really possible when you’re sitting in a car. When you drive, you’re basically in a kind of self-imposed purgatory. The goal is to get wherever you’re headed so that you can resume your life again. I have tried to slow down and savor my surroundings while driving but it rarely works out because A) It’s not safe and B) I want to make good time. I have my eyes on the road and my ears on my SWEET TUNEZ, and I’m only slowing down to gawk at an overturned milk truck. ‘Wow, that looks BAD.’

The most important moments in life usually happen when you’re walking. Ever ask someone you’re dying to go out with if they wanna go for a walk, and they say yes? It feels fucking GREAT. That’s gonna be a good walk. Then maybe you two walk down the aisle after you get married, and then walk through the hospital to see your new baby in the nursery, and then walk with that child as takes its first steps. And then maybe someone close to you dies, and you have to walk with their casket to their gravesite. I’ve made some of these walks. I haven’t forgotten any of them.” - Drew Magary

43) "‘A great nation does not hide its history, it faces its flaws and corrects them.’ - George W. Bush

Let us again state clearly for all to hear. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is a history we should never forget and one that we should never ever again put on a pedestal to be revered." - Mitch Landrieu

44) "Just found out Joyce Manor is playing in Bristol on 7/13. When god closes a door, he opens a moshpit." - Chris Trott, after missing the Captain, We're Sinking Show in Chicago on 7/12 due his England trip

45) “The most prestigious honor in music isn't a Grammy. It's ‘I like this band enough to see them at 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday.’” - Steven Hyden

46) “I think of you every time I speed up my podcasts.” - Christine Jastrow’s 31st birthday tribute to yours truly

47) "A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce

48) “Personally speaking, a millennial is anyone younger than me who gets on my fucking nerves. I don’t think of like, Dak Prescott as a millennial, because he seems cool. But Chris Brown? Fuck him sideways.” - Drew Magary

49) "It's a scientific fact that a beer tastes better when it travels more than 5 feet in the air" - @PFTCommenter

50) Dustin Brown perfectly summed up what it's like to play on Centre Court. "It would be nice if we're playing every match out there. It's very comfortable. Even when things aren't going your way, it relaxed me a bit to say 'this is where you always wanted to be,'" he said after his Wimbledon second round loss to defending champ Andy Murray.

51) "One thing I’ve always found fascinating about Federer (or, rather, the way we talk about Federer) is that there’s never been any backlash. Normally, when an athlete has been around as long as Federer has, and has been as great as Federer has, and is on the receiving end of so much adulation, some sort of noticeable backlash occurs. Never with Fed.

Relatedly, people root for Federer unabashedly, and did so even during that stretch in the 00's when he was as dominant a force as any sport has seen. Casual fans tend to root for the underdog, but Federer was so sublime that he made people root for Goliath." - Andrew, Deadspin reader

52) “‘Federer manages to scamper across himself’ is one of the more Federer tennis calls I've ever heard.” - Brian Phillips

53) “Everything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.” - Jon Snow

54) “Be present.” - Megan Filip

55) "The successful person is one who finds an opportunity in every problem. Unsuccessful people find a problem in every opportunity." - Lou Holtz

56) “It ain’t a hit till Nate Dogg spit.” - Mack 10

57) "Nobody goes to work tomorrow. General strike, fuck this country." - some of Blake Schwarzenbach first words at the Jawbreaker reunion

58) “It’s hard getting good news -- you don’t know what to do with it.” - Blake Schwarzenbach, at the first Jawbreaker show in forever

59) “When I was a child, I spoke like a child.” - Davis,“Treme”

60) “In one sense, the story of human history is just people inventing progressively more advanced ways in which to be awful idiots, in groups.” - David Roth

61) "Reality gives nothing back and nor should you." - Kobe Bryant

62) “Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

63) "Brevity is the soul of wit" - William Shakespeare

64) "If I shoot an airball, call the foul." - Dirk Nowitzki

[femslashrevolution]

On the personal as normal; on the normal as political

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

A few months ago I had a conversation about pubic hair, with a lover of mine. Your bush is super hot, my lover said. I’m blushing, I said. Then she asked: was my decision not to shave a political one, or just a “this is fckn sexy” one? And at that last question—I wasn’t sure what it was, or why it was happening, but something reared up in me. Some looming, rebellious objection. It wasn’t my lover’s fault; she is a thoughtful and considerate communicator, and had done nothing wrong. And it was strange, to feel as I did; because it wasn’t as if I was new to the idea of female body hair being a site of political dissension. I’m thirty-five years old; I was hassled by my schoolfriends in middle school for not shaving my legs and hassled by my girlfriend in high school and my Womyn’s Center mates in college for shaving them. Patti Smith’s Easter, with its iconographic pit hair has pride of place on my record shelf. I have done my time in the trenches of feminist debate, and when I was younger I spent my fair share of time agonizing over which personal grooming strategy made me “the best feminist." 

 But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels normal. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of "at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous. And though I acknowledge the usefulness, in many contexts, of interrogating received wisdom and assumptions about what constitutes “womanly” or “hygienic” female behavior, I would argue that in this world—this world which, today more than ever, teaches women never to be at home in our bodies, never to be comfortable in our bodies, never to stop thinking about our bodies and feeling guilt and shame about our bodies—that there is value to carving out spaces of normalcy, as well: space for us to breathe into all our inconsistent and idiosyncratic ways. 

What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked. 

I am no longer a fandom newbie, but neither am I a long-time veteran of the wars. I wandered wide-eyed into fandom in my late 20s, already a full-grown adult: a near-lesbian in a foundering long-term relationship with a man, I was also a crafter and feminist and compulsive reader of literary fiction; and I was looking, with mercenary intensity, for writing which explicitly portrayed the kind of sexual complexity with which I was struggling in my personal life, and which I was pointedly not finding in published fiction. I knew zilch about fandom traditions or fandom political histories; all those fandom battles which old-timers were already heartily sick of fighting. I just knew: god! Here were people writing about sex (between men) so viscerally compellingly that even I could understand the appeal: I, who have always felt vaguely repulsed by men’s society and men’s bodies—even, inconveniently, the bodies of men I loved.

And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, the normal thing to do in this subculture into which I’d wandered. 

 Unsurprisingly, this provoked some interesting reactions.

Due in part to my ignorance when I came on the scene, I’ve since had a lot of interactions and internal debates, and witnessed a lot of fandom dust-ups, about those three things: writing female characters; and writing female characters in relationship to other female characters; and writing female characters fucking other female characters. (I have also written a lot about this, as well.) Some of these interactions have involved talking about why folks write queer women characters. More of them have revolved around why folks don’t; or don’t like to; or don’t think it’s a fair thing to ask; or don’t like it when I do. Common objections I’ve heard to writing and reading women fucking women include: there are fewer female characters in source media (or they’re not as interesting), so finding them and developing investment in them requires more work; f/f writing doesn’t get as much attention, and it is disheartening to choose political correctness over reader response; writing female bodies while living in a female body in a culture that hates female bodies is more emotionally difficult/traumatic; female bodies are gross; the mainstream hypersexualization of lesbians means that is it anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex among women, especially kinky sex; mainstream objectification of female bodies means it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex involving women, especially kinky sex; the omnipresence of sexist tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write female characters as anything less than morally exemplary, which is boring; the omnipresence of homophobic tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write a story that deviates from the anti-trope script (e.g. “happy lesbians with well-balanced relationships”), which is boring; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and including female sexuality is too close to home to be enjoyable; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and expecting hobbyists to be warriors in the army of capital-r Representation is obnoxious; fandom space is dominated by young women, and expecting them to be warriors in the army of capital-R Representation is sexist when we don’t hold middle-aged male media creators to the same standard. 

I could write an essay about each of these, some of which are really complex points with some merit. But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not. 

The $64,000 question: do I agree with this?

Are electrons particles, or waves?

I mean, let’s get this out of the way: if writing about women is political, then writing about men is political, too. Masculinity is constructed as the default flavor of humanity in our society, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear critical examination, nor does it mean that the actions of men aren’t informed by their socialization, or that everyone’s perceptions of men aren’t informed by power structures. Nor does it mean that men are immune from the toxic effects of life in a heteronormative patriarchy. If we as writers experience a focus on men to be a relaxing break from the stifling responsibility of depicting oppression, that is (a) pretty understandable, since that’s the myth of the (white cis hetero) male experience that’s sold to us from birth, but also (b) probably in need of some interrogation, since it doesn’t actually reflect anyone’s lived reality. Not even the lived reality of dude-bros who roll their eyes at the words “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”; and ESPECIALLY not the lived reality of queer men, who are, let’s remember, real people with a real history and a real present of active oppression due to their orientation. 

As to the question of queer women: was I right or wrong, in my fandom-naïve days, to assume that writing sex and relationships among women is essentially the same as writing those things among men? 

Yes. That is, I think I was right, and also wrong.

In a 1995 essay, Paula Rust enumerates many of the widely divergent and in some cases mutually incompatible interpretations of the oft-quoted second-wave feminist slogan “The personal is political”:

The personal reflects the political status quo (with the implication that the personal should be examined to provide insight into the political); the personal serves the political status quo; one can make personal choices in response to or protest against the political status quo; one’s personal life influences one’s personal politics or determines the limits of one’s understanding of the political status quo; the personal is a personal political statement; personal choices can influence the political status quo; one’s personal choices reveal or reflect one’s personal politics; one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s personal politics; personal life and personal politics are indistinguishable; personal life and personal politics are unrelated.

If we adapt Rust’s terminology slightly to accommodate the act of reading and writing fiction, so that “the personal” becomes something more like “individualized character depictions,” then I think this passage becomes a useful tool in breaking down how we think about reading and writing women versus how we think about reading and writing men. It seems to me that often, when we are reading and writing about men (especially cis white men who are canonically assumed to be straight even if they fuck in fanfic), our attitudes tend to hang out in the spectrum ranging from, on the more nuanced end, “choices about individualized character depictions can be made in response to or protest against the status quo” to, on the less nuanced end, “individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated.” Since straight white men are the default, depicting them doesn’t feel primarily political. It feels normal. Things that happen to straight white male characters seem not to carry the burdensome weight of responsibility and representation that plagues female characters, especially queer female characters or female characters of color. The unspoken logic here posits that the things that happen to men, just happen! The traits men have are just traits! Men can be evaluated as individuals, because there is nothing to distract from that individuality. No matter that whiteness/straightness/maleness is not actually nothing, only an invisible something; and never mind that the completeness of the divorce between individualized character depictions and greater political realities is to a large extent illusory. The fact remains that that’s often the in-the-moment experience of reading and writing about male characters: they can exist as individuals, because their maleness is the norm. 

By contrast, when we are reading and writing about women (especially queer women and women of color), our default assumptions tend to range from “individualized character depictions can influence the political status quo” to “individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable.” It is burdensome to write about queer women because we feel that every individualized queer woman character we write, in her body and her actions, must both bear the brunt of, and actively resist, all that baggage listed above. She must subvert (on a meta level) and/or stand against (on an in-story level) the tide of mainstream objectification, of lesbian hypersexualization, of sexist and homophobic tropes, of poor treatment and shoddy development at the hands of media creators, and on and on. Everything that happens to her or doesn’t happen to her, every physical trait and every mental tic, is massively overdetermined, because we feel that to write about queer women is to body forth our own personal politics into the world—and, more than that, to transform the landscape of queer female representation entire. 

OBVIOUSLY, as a writer and reader this is neither fun nor possible! No character can do this. 

Please let that sink in. No character can do this. No character is so well-written that she is going to transcend the Oppression Soup in which we all swim; and even if she did, she would not be enough transform the landscape of queer female representation into an egalitarian wonderland. We can stop hitching our wagons to that star because it’s not going to happen. Good news! We are not failures because we fall short of this demonstrably impossible metric! Similarly: my friends and I can install low-flow shower heads in every bathroom in every apartment we move into, from now until our deaths, but we are still not going to offset the effect of Nestlé extracting 36 million gallons of water per year from our national forests to bottle and sell at a profit. Or again: my personal choice to make my own clothes, though potentially politically meaningful to me as an individual, is never going to counteract the coercive power of a global fashion industry that earns $3 trillion a year peddling the lie that women who are larger than a size 10, or who don’t have expendable income to keep up with the latest trends, are not employable, fuckable, or worth taking seriously. This is not to say that making my own clothes can’t be politically meaningful for me personally. Nor is it to say that I am incapable of meaningful political action: I can help to take on these oppressive and exploitative industries via mass organizing: public actions, legal challenges, legislative lobbying, investigative exposés, mass boycotts. But there is absolutely nothing that I alone can do, with my body or my apartment or my novel, that will dismantle these power structures. 

For one thing, this is not how institutional oppression works. Yes, the ramifications of oppressive power structures can manifest in intimate details of one’s life, and it does well to be conscious of that. But the causality doesn’t work in reverse: identifying and purging artefacts of oppression from the intimate details of one’s life, while potentially personally meaningful or satisfying, won’t meaningfully reduce the overall strength of the originating oppressive power structures in society at large. I cannot take down the fashion industry by making my own clothes. I cannot save the world from Nestlé by installing low-flow shower heads. I cannot dismantle sexism and heteronormativity by writing a queer female character who carries perfectly on her shoulders the representation of every oppression she suffers, and perfectly represents my personal authorial politics—or, indeed, by writing a host of such characters, and sharing them with a few thousand people on the internet. This needs to stop being the expectation, or even the ideal. To hold the queer female character to such a standard is to make of her even more of an unattainable exception to human existence than she already is: for none of us can stand in for All Women, or All Queers, or All Queer Women; and none of us should be asked to do so. 

For another thing, this is not how fiction works. Fiction doesn’t convince through intellectual perfection. Fiction convinces through building empathy and voluntary identification in readers for characters who may or may not be wildly different from them, and may or may not be placed in radically different situations than they have ever found themselves in, but whom they the readers, on some basic human level, nonetheless recognize. Crafting an individual character who inspires that kind of gut-level recognition is difficult if the author is assembling them primarily as anti-oppression talisman rather than a flawed and complicit individual; or if the author is undermining the voluntary nature of the reader’s identification by making the character, Ayn Rand-style, a prostelytizing mouthpiece for the author’s own philosophy. I think this is part of what people mean, when they object that writing women, or queer women, or women of color, feels “too political”: the strictures of talisman-creation undermine the ability to foster empathy for a real-seeming individual. But this is not a problem with writing queer women! It’s a problem with the unrealistic expectations we’ve placed on ourselves around doing so. 

I mean, for my money, the way to craft characters who do inspire this gut-level sense of recognition is to draw on one’s own experiences—one’s own passions and one’s own struggles—while also refraining from providing neat and tidy solutions to which real people (and hence characters in the moment) do not have access. People are messy; we have to be able to let our characters be messy. To paraphrase John Waters, who surely knows whereof he speaks: we have to let our characters make US uncomfortable. We have to let them make us feel queasy and ambivalent sometimes, just as we sometimes make ourselves feel that way. We have to let ourselves discover things through the journey of writing and reading that we did not know when we started out. 

Does this mean there is no point in research, no point in educating ourselves about over-used tropes and the history and current reality of queer representation, no point in critiquing media that perpetuates these tropes? Of course it doesn’t mean that. The goal—my goal, anyway—is to write characters who ring true to life, who come off as real people, with real struggles. And in order to do that, a writer needs to be familiar with the toxic and un-lifelike nonsense that gets endlessly recycled in media. It’s helpful to know, for example, that the “lesbian dies, goes mad, or returns to the heterosexual fold at novel’s end” trope was originally imposed on lesbian pulp writers as a condition of publication if they wanted to avoid obscenity charges: here is an example that’s, VERY clearly, not an artefact of lesbian reality but an artificial and homophobic narrative imposed from without. I think it’s valid to make the point that maybe, in this year of our apocalypse 2017, we have reached a point where this narrative should be largely avoided. 

But you know: there are a lot of artificial and homophobic narratives. And there are even more narratives that, while not intrinsically artificial or homophobic, have so often been twisted that way as to be forever tainted by suspicion and pain. And that suspicion and pain twist back into real lived experience in ways that can be complicated and unpredictable. If our culture is a house, then so many of its walls are built of tainted narratives, and so many of its other walls are built up against those tainted walls, that it’s very difficult to dismantle the structure, or determine what’s sound and what’s not. As a real-life queer woman, I have never met an anti-oppression talisman, but I have met plenty of queer women who have made me uncomfortable—myself at the top of my own list. Though I squirm at the “lesbian goes crazy” novel ending, I have known many queer women, myself included, who struggle with mental illness (as well as many who don’t). Though I have noped out of media for egregious and self-serving use of the “lesbian was just waiting for the right man” trope, I myself am a near-lesbian who once fell in love with a man, and I know others who have done the same (as well as many who haven’t). Though I share the frustration over the assumption that bisexual characters are universally flighty and commitment-averse, I also know several flighty and promiscuous bisexuals (and many bisexuals who are neither, and many flighty and promiscuous straight folks). Though I cringe a little at depictions of alcoholism and drug abuse in queer female culture, I am myself a queer woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. In a cringe-y catch-22, I am deeply uncomfortable with both the demonization of the working-class butch/femme subculture by the middle and upper classes of lesbian society AND ALSO with the degree of forcibly normative gender expectations I personally have encountered in butch/femme environments… so I decided to go ahead and write a whole novel about that, despite the fact that I might avoid someone else’s treatment of the same subject matter. 

The pattern here is hopefully obvious: even drawing from the pool of my own personal lived stories, many verge on or overlap with narratives that are often toxic in their execution. So what are we to do? Does all this add up to a wash, a free pass for the continuation of any tired and harmful trope imaginable? No. It adds up to a call for a nuanced and subjective calculus around analyzing works of art: an acknowledgement that some versions of Narrative X or Character Y will spark that sense of recognition or that shock of injury for audience members, and others won’t, and others will for some audience members but not for others, and all of that is valid to talk about. And it also adds up to a call for writers of queer female characters—especially those of us who are queer and/or female ourselves—to allow ourselves the freedom to write individualized queer women who, though they may not body forth our personal politics, make us familiarly uncomfortable. Characters with whom we are intimate. 

Characters with whom we feel at home. 

Taking a larger view, I think that we need to close the gap between our reading and writing of men, especially straight white men (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated”) and our reading and writing of women, especially queer women and women of color (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable”). Both sides need to shift. Neither extreme is true, and we are doing a disservice to all our characters, and our works, if we disregard the nuance that lives between them. But more intensely, and more specifically, I would argue that where queer female characters are concerned we need to work toward an attitude that—however partially and strategically—begins to uncouple “individual character representation” from “personal authorial politics,” and does so with the express goal of allowing these characters normality. Weird, inconsistent, flawed, complicated, mundane normality. We need to let go of the intimidating and paralyzing attitude that queerness and femaleness raise the political stakes in such a way that mundane fuckups, either on the part of the author or the character, are no longer allowed. 

To extend the analogies from earlier: if we have the water pressure to support it, we should install low-flow showerheads, not because we can thereby compensate for the evils of Nestlé, but to save on our water bills. And if we have the time and inclination we might make our own clothes, not because it will magically deliver us from the perils of the beauty industry, because it it a mode of self-expression that is also personally empowering. And if we can, we should write and read complex, flawed queer female characters, and support others who write and read them, because to do so enables us—real-life queer women, and people who know real-life queer women, and even people who might be intimidated or repulsed by real-life queer women—to feel that real-life queer women, in all their flawed and problematic glory, are more human; more at home; more recognized. Closer to the range of the normal. 

None of these things is going to save the world, and we don’t need them to. They are important and life-sustaining anyway. 

(The author can be found online as havingbeenbreathedout on Tumblr and breathedout on AO3. She can be found offline on the wide open beaches and labyrinthine interstates of sunny southern California, where she lives the social-justice nonprofit life and also enjoys Bloomsbury history, kissing girls, poolside cocktails, early-morning yoga, and crying about fiction with her live-in editor/BFF/queerplatonic life partner fizzygins.)

[jackblankhsh]

Inauguration of a Nightmare -- building the avalanche

JANUARY 20, 2017– the resistance begins

Sirens randomly wailed as emergency vehicles screamed towards grim scenarios.  For any city native it’s a common sound, though one is tempted to call it foreshadowing.  A palpable dread pollutes the dreamlike atmosphere of this fog shrouded metropolis.  Any other night it might feel like the start of adventure and perhaps it still does, though one can’t help feeling what lies ahead is too dark to enjoy.  Yet, it’s the perfect time for Chicago to feel ethereal. The last few months have certainly felt unreal.  

In that time America elected a new president.  By many standards the man is barely human.  A mass of congealed hate and rotted dumpster meat wrapped in ruby cheeked Peking duck skin, cloaked in a miasmic aura of narcissism, dishonesty, and the kind of childishness one hopes never to see in a world leader; there are many facets to this wicked pig.  Like a matryoshka doll many entities exist within his soul: the Twitter crazed tantrum throwing teenager, world’s most successful conman, the unstoppable pussy grabbing hand rapist, demagogue extraordinaire, and gold plated plutocrat.  His obvious flaws caused Olympic grade mental gymnastic in many of his followers, while he fought hard to ultimately lose the popular vote, yet still become president.  

So on the night of his inauguration thousands gathered in Chicago.  In Washington protesters assembled for the event itself, but they got off on the wrong foot.  Violence erupted, and though brief, it tainted the message.  The goal of these protests is not to spill blood, or burn the world, it’s to avoid silence.  Activists want to show where they stand:  against what is coming.  This is especially necessary now given Trump’s pathological lying, and routine desire to rewrite history for his benefit.  Even after winning the election he found it so implausible that he lost the popular vote he began alleging voter fraud.  Not only does he operate under the delusion the country loves him he thinks reality is open to revision, particularly if it doesn’t match the fantasy in his head.  That’s why people are gathering in order to leave a mark which cannot be denied.  

Walking there, distracted by bleak visions of tomorrow – Vlad and Donnie raping Lady Liberty while dead eyed Stepford wife Melania watches, waiting to be told what to think, and press secretary Spicer prepares alternative facts to explain the grotesquery favorably – I wandered down the wrong street.  Instead of joining at the designated assembly point, Wabash and Wacker, I strolled down an empty avenue cordoned off by a smattering of cops. However, police made no move to stop a solitary oddity drifting with the trickle of 9-to-Fivers.  I blended in, and got a chance to observe the cops in waiting.  

Chicago police have a long history with protests, not all of it good, but in that time they’ve learned a thing or two.  Instead of trying to herd the rally they simply fortified the only target of assault. The odds of anyone getting within spitting distance seemed improbable, and because I beat them by chance I will eternally regret not taking the opportunity to hork a wad of phlegm at the building.  An officer moved a barricade aside to let me out of the area, complimenting my sideburns as I passed.  It made me wonder about their feelings.  Some may not have voted for him, but are now ordered to protect his property like dutiful centurions.  One can only hope that given a crisis of conscious, a moment that requires humanity not slave devotion to orders, they’ll do the right thing.  But for now they simply want the night to pass peacefully. They aren’t alone.  

Demonstrators assembled loosely, crowding into a tighter collective by Kupcinet Bridge. There to shout across the river at the name TRUMP glowing in blue tinted lights.  Among the masses a throng of musicians calling themselves Sousaphones Against Hate provided an odd soundtrack to the evening’s events.  One doesn’t think of sousaphones when picturing a protest, but they added a flavor to the affair more clichéd choices would not. There’s something about a brass band playing “The Imperial March” – it put a smile on the face of a man dressed as a nuclear missile, his costume chillingly implicative, but given the music one could only grin as well.  

Homemade signs declared the litany of grievances against President Trump from his failures as a human being and business person to his grotesque, undesirable political agenda. It’s unnerving to watch a young woman hold up a sign in hopes of reminding the world she’s deserves decent treatment because she doesn’t expect it in Trump’s America.  After all, she isn’t the right color, or on the right side, literally and figuratively, though it is heartening to witness so many gathered to stand with her.  

Amidst the activists at least two different publications vied for attention.  Handed for free to any who wanted them, one extolled the virtues of socialism, the other communism, while both asserted this presidency is the fault of capitalism.  Some took the papers gladly, though a few accepted them with a roll of the eyes destining them for the trash can unread.  Wandering the crowd I picked up discussions as protesters tried to comprehend how this reality came into being.  Everyone seemed to subscribe to their own theories which tended to lean toward their personal cause.  African Americans asserted racism as a primary factor in Trump’s win, while many women blamed sexism, but it’s important to note no one dismissed anyone else’s idea… except for one young man jabbering a slew of Orwellian weed tangled gibberish.  Many politely ignored him.  The point being that under a microscope everyone there clearly believed in a different cause, specific to their personal lives, yet those factors go somewhat to the wayside as activists assembled to resist the new president.  

A problem with contemporary protests is that everyone wants to come together as one but be heard individually.  Of one goal, demonstrators expect to be heard in multiple voices, each distinguishable from the whole.  This results in a garbled message.  However, that didn’t happen here.  Whatever a person’s reasons, everyone came to protest Trump.  And that message came across.

That made it sad when the various local news outlets seemed reluctant to record anything. I watched camera operators fiddle with equipment, but not shoot a thing.  They swapped idle chit chat waiting for, I can only assume, something unpleasant.  Riots are ratings gold after all.  I thought maybe they wanted to wait until the crowd reached a more sizable proportion, but honestly, the mass never reached anything critical.  Though thousands may’ve come a casual glance could tell the number easily stayed below ten, possibly even five… or dare say two.  Friday’s rally didn’t have an astonishing turnout, though Saturday would demonstrate perhaps many merely opted to wait to march in solidarity with the women of America.  

Still, this is a new era.  Reliance on old media is unnecessary.  I saw several in attendance recording, live streaming, photographing and video documenting the event.  The regular news may not have covered Friday’s protest in-depth, but the irregular new news, beamed out across social media, spoke volumes.  

#

The night started. Chants kicked up then died down, not enough voices joining in.  An organizer shouted into a crackling PA system that occasionally cut out, her voice vanishing before returning midsentence in a cloud of static. Volunteers passed out chant sheets, so anyone in attendance would know what to say.  Glancing over one I noticed a preponderance of, “2, 4, 6, 8…” followed by rhymes like, “No more violence, no more hate.”  After an hour, though, standing around felt like doing nothing, so I went into Hoyt, a nearby hotel tavern.  Also I needed to piss.  

Inside I found a pair of bottle blondes taking selfies, giggling over white wine without a care in the world.  Most eyes glued to the Hawks game on TV.  A few tourists glanced out the windows, and as if for the first time noticed the protesters choking the street.  They speculated about what could be happening.  It didn’t seem clear despite the “fuck Trump” signs and mass of humanity shouting anti-Trump rhetoric.  Then in true tourist fashion they hurried to the windows to snap pics, capturing real world souvenirs.  

Then midway through a refreshing Scotch I saw the protesters start marching.  I slammed the contents of my glass, and hurried outside.

“This is it!” I thought, “The resistance has begun!”  

Rushing to catch up I saw the demonstrators halt at Michigan Avenue.  Anticipating the attempt police stood ready to hold the movement back. So for a time the protest seemed destined to merely pinball between two streets until a group of activists turned the flow towards the river walk.  

Anxious to storm the Tower, the march poured down the concrete steps.  Hurrying to lower Wacker the maneuver seemed naïve.  Surely police must’ve anticipated such a move, though in fact they didn’t need to.  As already mentioned, barricades stood preventing anyone from getting close enough to piss on the gutters out front.  But motion feels like action, so the bulk of protesters surged onward. Signs held aloft elicited honks of support from passing motorists.  Cheering, feeling rejuvenated, on the road to success, the march circled like a shark.

It was then I saw a couple pausing from the protest to take a picture.  Passing by the infamous Billy Goat Tavern, a boyfriend photographed his girlfriend.  She posed to have, not only the landmark, but her sign in the photo as well.  The march slowly getting away from them, while they made sure to get the right shot.  

Shortly afterward I heard two demonstrators talking:

“Which street do we turn down to get to Trump Tower?”

“The next one?”

This exchange taking place a block after the relevant street.  I thought about directing them, but momentum seemed in favor of simply wandering the streets, shouting for attention.  When an organizer cried out, “We’re going to Lakeshore Drive!” trying to corral the herd to the Chicago landmark I departed from the march.  Gumming up LSD with protesters has become a predictable move in recent years.  It felt like the obligatory song of a one hit wonder trying to win back fans drifting to the exit.  Make no mistake, the spirit is willing, the flesh is not weak, but the movement is already fatigued.

Every day is a fresh pot of awful drunk choking back vomit.  This weekend’s protests are important, but they are more indicative of what’s to come rather than anything expected to effect change.  It would take god-sized optimism bordering on lunatic naivety to presume protests alone will unseat this “man.”  This is only the beginning.  

Now that it’s proven a call to action can assemble the masses it’s time to consider the next move. It isn’t enough to simply get people together.  Protests, after all, are more symbolic than effective.  Their main accomplishment is proving there is a movement, but they have to have an impact on something other than awareness of said movement.  

A friend of mine put it best, and if I may paraphrase:  it starts with a snowflake building to an avalanche.  We now need the avalanche.