#but you won't die so it's fine

[sage-nebula]

It happened, as things so often did, like a bolt from the blue on one of Pacifica's rare days off from work at the diner.

It was the height of summer and so hellaciously hot, even for—no, especially for Oregon. Having lost access to the private pools and yachts after her father's investments into Cipher capital during Weirdmageddon four years prior, Pacifica found herself at the Gravity Falls community pool, lounging on a pool chair after layering SPF 50 on her skin, and silently telling herself over and over that it was always morally correct to block her parents' numbers on her days off, and that her father probably hadn't yet found where Pacifica's pet rescue opposum, Susanna, had hidden the bell yet, so there was no need to worry.

(Pacifica had rescued Susanna from the diner kitchen two summers ago, when she was fourteen. Susanna was technically a male oppossum, but something about him reminded Pacifica of Lazy Susan, so Susanna he was.)

But it was at that moment that deep laughter followed by a higher pitched "shut up!" and even more laughter from both voices broke through Pacifica's inner mantras. She opened her eyes to see that both of the Pines twins, having once again made their yearly visit to Gravity Falls, had also chosen to visit the pool that day.

Pacifica swallowed hard.

For all that she had tried to deny it even to herself in her tween and early teen years, by now Pacifica had long since accepted that she found Dipper Pines attractive. It was impossible not to, with the way he came back taller each summer, his shoulders increasingly more broad as he grew into the physique promised by his great uncles (or his Great Uncle Ford, anyway), a little stubble that he "forgot" to shave always left around his chin, and his sideburns. Oh, his sideburns. Pacifica hated how much she loved Dipper's sideburns. It was beyond cringe, and the only other living soul who would ever know about her crush was Susanna, but Pacifica Northwest did indeed have a crush on Dipper Pines. She knew, and accepted, this about herself.

But then, on that hellaciously hot summer day at the community pool, Mabel Pines took her sweater off right in front of Pacifica's eyes.

Mabel pulled her sweater up over her head, and it was as if time slowed down. Mabel's arms were just as toned and strong (if not maybe a little more toned, the way the sunlight hit her muscles) than Dipper's. She had been wearing a bikini under her sweater—a pink one decorated with stars that fit her perfectly—and her thousand watt smile revealed she'd finally gotten her braces off to reveal a set of dazzling teeth. And when she tugged her hair free from her ponytail, it swished around her in a cascade of long, brown waves.

Dipper had thrown his tanktop onto a pool chair, and Mabel followed suit, throwing her sweater and hair tie on top of Dipper's shirt. But as Dipper was in the middle of saying something (they were too far for Pacifica to hear clearly), Mabel whipped back around with devilish speed and shoved him straight in the pool.

Mabel laughed uproariously as Dipper came back up for air, sputtering water and shaking his sopping bangs from his eyes. But he was only off guard for a second, and Mabel's mirth kept her off hers for longer. Dipper grinned wickedly and snapped his fingers around Mabel's wrist, yanking her in headfirst after him. Just as Dipper had before her, Mabel resurfaced immediately, though she had to use both hands to shove her curtains of damp hair out of her face. But her smile was just as impish as Dipper's own, and within seconds they were splashing each other, shrieking and laughing as they caused the biggest ruckus the pool had seen all day.

And as she watched them play, the water making their skin glisten and their smiles making their eyes sparkle, Pacifica felt a swarm of butterflies in her gut and a flash of heat in her face that had nothing at all to do with the summer sun above. She curled in on herself in her pool chair, and tugged her sun hat down over her face.

"Oh no."

[lilacthebooklover]

me, looking at the most toxic, awful, horrendously unhealthy fictional relationship in the world: why can't i have what they have? :(

[silverwhittlingknife]

can we have a hint about what the spring break tim patrol chapter of red letter day contains? (you kept having dick say "if the joker shows up" and tim's "he won't." for me to be convinced that goes off without any trouble)

i'm sure it'll be fine. :D

i am delighted you're enjoying the story <333 i haven't updated it in soooo long but i got some very sweet comments lately so i have been looking at my scribbles again <3

[aenslem]

oh no, im once again rewatching the immunity syndrome

[shanedoesdoodles]

I don't think just thinking about my work should cause me a panic attack bad enough to nearly make me faint.

I don't think the work environment that produces that reaction should be considered a good one

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Full Tech Day One pic today from kiko laureano (denizen of skid row / ensemble) & video (that's four seconds of "ya never know" playing over the static image) from & ft. marcia milgrom dodge (director / choreographer) double captioning "there might be puppets in this musical ;)" & "Well Shake my hand! Come see LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS @guthrietheater featuring @actually_will_roland's hand!"

[zeroducks-2]

Baldur's Gate 3 Ending Spoilers Ahead :)

Okay why The Fuck can't we have a romance ending with the Emperor. Why THE FUCK NOT. WHY. THIS IS UNFAIR. LARIAN YOU ALLOWED ME TO FUCK THE GUY, YOU ALLOWED ME TO TRUST HIM AND BE THERE FOR HIM AND TURN INTO A MINDFLAYER MYSELF, AND THEN I CAN'T HAVE A ROMANCE ENDING? THE FUCK???

[eggmeralda]

do you ever feel casually suicidal? like you're not depressed or anything you're doing fine but also it feels like a convenient option

[gregoftom]

oh ok

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

I would also be cool if Barry and Iris just like... pulled their children out of the timeline like Wally did for his kids.

If that happened then they'd be the same age as Irey and Jai.

There is no doubt in my mind that the tornado twins will either be the same age as the west twins or the same age as Wally's new baby.

They're setting up a cousin/childhood friends situation with the younger Wests and Allens. And they're paralleling Wally and Barry.

[monsterhugger]

really starting to feel like what's the fucking point. i'm working my job i'm setting up to go back to university in august and i'm probably going to have to uproot it all in a few months when it becomes illegal for me to get medical care because no one fucking cares enough to vote for a president that doesn't want me and the people i love dead

[izzy-b-hands]

can we just like. leave each other alone at this point

[fridayyy-13th]

(shouting from the rooftops) I HATE OCD!!!!!!!!!!

[demidin]

you ask me if I'm okay and I just give the fucking saddest look before running to you and tryna hug you only to realize you're a tumblr mutual and not an irl homie and I still try to fucking hug you because dammit I'm not at my best I need help

[tvrningout]

writing kaiya's initial death and i'm clenching my fist bc i'm sad but also bc it's so good and makes me so!!! excited!!! to write again!!!

[nedlittle]

genuine question: what is wrong with the peyton beachdeath lma trans thread? I know…too much about peyton himself so we don’t need to revisit that, but i’d love to see you rip into some shoddy scholarship and ways to (mis)understand historical queerness

oh god...

i mean aside from people taking the word of a notorious clout-chasing liar and conspiracy theorist at face value...peyton just doesn't understand or even really care about history when it does not directly benefit him. full disclosure i have not read the thread since it was first posted but it is burned into my memory unfortunately, i also don't know a lot about lma as a historical figure

aside from cherry picking quotes from lma's diaries there were no actual sources. nothing from her biographers, no secondary scholarship at all. it was just peyton presenting quotes purposefully stripped of their context in order to further a point that he wanted to be right.

this should be like. queer history for pre-schoolers but people in the past who were or may have been queer understood themselves and their queerness differently than people do today. peyton is incapable of looking at queerness outside of his very specific 21st century lens. could louisa may alcott have been a trans man? possibly! could she have also been cis and/or gnc? sure! could she have simply been writing in both her private and personal lives about how suffocating the experience of being a woman in the 19th century was? yeah. we have no way of knowing which of this could be true, and whether they overlapped at all. queer history exists in shades of possibility. in some cases (and we're going to use trans men contemporary to lma), like those of albert cashier and charley pankhurst, we can pretty definitely say that they were both men; that being a man was essential to their continued survival, that they would have wanted to be remembered as men. in other cases, it's more slippery because the taxonomy we use nowadays to classify ourselves and especially our differentiation of gender identity vs sexual acts is SO recent that it does a disservice to classify all historical queerness with it.

it's insane that there are MULTIPLE notable 19th century trans men in american history at the time lma was living and he still was like no this is not good enough for me i can only emotionally relate to something if i can force my own image onto it. that's really the problem here, not the shoddy history and the deliberately misleading language, but the fact that peyton is seemingly incapable of enjoying or relating to a piece of media or a person if he cannot find a direct comparison to his own life. he did the same oh "(x) was 100% absolutely a trans man if you tell me wrong you're transphobic" thing with katharine hepburn (iirc??) a few years back and this is a personal gripe but having read a 600+ page bio of hepburn that was very generous to several queer readings of her life: lol. lmao even. his insistence of flatting the experience of anyone with a moderately fucky gender into "you're either Like Me or your not" is so purposefully stupid.

like, do all the trans readings of little women you want! i myself made a deranged little women trans post a few weeks ago. but lma isn't a fictional character who you can apply different literary lenses to! she was a real human person whose relationship with her gender we will never fully understand because we were not there. at some point you just have to accept that it is not your business. why are you so desperate for any shred of historical representation that you are willing to exhume the dead in order to out them?

peyton relates to jo march, so he insists that reading jo as a trans man is the only (morally) correct reading. he likes little women but has to make it fit the public view of transness that he is made his personal brand. i actually followed him for longer than i'd care to admit, and it's a trend with any piece of media that he is publicly into that he has to make a character a trans man in order to relate to them.

he also has this deranged idea that any author writing with emotional depth about the """opposite sex""" must have been trans. see the article he wrote for the niche about how must have been a trans man because he gave dido's emotions and the collapse of her marriage to aeneas the same "dignified treatment as any sprawling, epic battlefield scenes." [direct quote] the article is literally called " vergil had a pussy and i'll prove it." no further comment.

one of his "proofs" is that lma was called "lou" by her family, which he then proceeds to call her for the rest of the thread. lou is....a very normal nickname for louisa both now and then. you know what else was a 19th century nickname for louisa? wheezy. imagine that same thread but he calls her wheezy alcott. thank you, good day.