#cheryl: discourse.

[tearfest]

ㅤㅤ" i guess i'll take this slightly awkward opportunity to tell you your final grade: you got a B. "

open to anyone! plot in source.

[queerbrainrot]

me, a queer, consuming a new Media with Homoeroticism in it™: oh golly let's look at AO3, there must be plenty of fanfics about these two, they have obvious chemistry and tension, great foundation for fics, it's a popular media with big fandom, let's-

The Fics, mostly being x Reader, x Original Female Character: :)

me:

[tearfest]

ㅤㅤ" nick, don't be like that— i mean it. " cheryl couldn't help but to pace, not when tensions were seemingly so high. " i didn't know that my husband was investigating you, i swear. and if i had known, i would've told you. but i know that he doesn't have your name, not yet at least. "

open to anyone. idk what this is but yeah...

"No, really, you really deserve a standing ovation, I almost believed you meant that." His hands come together, giving them a half-hearted clap. "But it doesn't change much, if anything."

[lesmisshippingshowdown]

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!!!

Hello everybody! I just wanted to say a massive thank you for the love for, and enthusiastic participation in, the Les Mis Shipping Showdown so far. It's been incredible to see so many people get on board with my silly little gag and I'm so excited for the tournament to continue playing out

HOWEVER - currently we are lacking in two very important things that only you guys out on the frontlines (on the barricade???) can help with.

1) PROPAGANDA

In 2009, Cheryl Cole dropped her debut solo single and changed lives by reminding us all that we've gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight for this love. I need you all to be more like Cheryl. Don't be discouraged if your OTP is currently losing - and don't become complacent if they're currently winning by a landslide. We're not even halfway through the round of 32 yet, and you - yes YOU 🫵 - can help turn the tides of battle by telling the world, in an easily shareable format, why your preferred Les Amis pair the spare combo deserves to take victory in this noble contest.

Examples of things you could submit as propaganda include: fanart, fanfiction, AMVs, clips or gifs from your favourite screen adaptation or grainy bootleg that prove your blorbos' love, well-researched meta with supporting quotations from the Brick, completely unresearched rants based entirely on vibes, etc.

Ways you can share your propaganda with the world include: appending it in a comment reblog (not whispering in the tags!) of the relevant poll, sending asks to this blog, submitting posts to this blog, or making an original post and tagging it #les mis shipping showdown. (<- please use this specific tag. we're not checking any others. if you just put it in the generic les mis tag or ship tag with no reference to the poll we won't know it's for us)

2) FANART AND/OR EDITS

As much as I loved trawling through Tumblr tags and Google Images (and editing a few really stupid stock photo memes) to find visual references for every ship in the Round of 32, this was a) very time consuming and b) not as collaborative a process as I'd like for a fandom wide enrichment activity, especially for a bracket that's SO chock full of fanon-based shipping.

So, in preparation for future rounds, we would LOVE to receive submissions of fanart and edits for your favourite ship(s) to be used - with credit, of course - in polls.

We are looking for submissions for ANY AND ALL SHIPS INCLUDED IN THE BRACKET, regardless of their popularity, the amount of canonical visual content (like screencaps and production photos), or how likely you think your ship is to make the round of 16. As I've already said, we're only partway through this round and anything can change, plus I have a little surprise planned for the eliminated ships anyway that could still use your artistic contributions ;)

Here's a reminder of the current bracket so that you know which ships we're looking for artwork for:

As a bonus, if you send your art to this blog or tag it as #les mis shipping showdown, it also counts as free propaganda for your ship!

FURTHER RULES FOR FANART & EDITS:

No AI-generated content. Not going to get into the discourse on this one, I just don't want to see it.

No NSFW art, including artistic nudity. This is a theoretically all-ages contest, plus random polls getting flagged as mature will just make sharing that specific match up a complete mare.

Please ensure any art/edits are formatted so that they can be added to the poll as one single photo.

If you prefer to be credited by a different pseudonym to the URL you're using to submit your artwork, please make this clear to us at the time of submission!

Again, if you're posting art with the specific intention of having us use it, make sure you specify that either in the caption or by tagging it #les mis shipping showdown. We won't know it's for us if it just appears with no comment in the general tags!

To keep it simple & avoid any suggestions of favouritism etc., fanart, as long as it abides by the other rules, will be used on a "first seen by mods, first served" basis. We'll make an effort to reshare all art that isn't able to be used in a poll proper either because you got there too late or because your ship got eliminated before we could get round to using it.

Thanks in advance and happy propaganda-ing! 💋

[football-in-tuxedos]

You mention that James Somerton is transphobic but aside from misgendering Nate Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar that one time I'm not sure what you mean can you explain

I mean, that is what I'm talking about, but it goes deeper than that. Cause like, the point he was making isn't...ENTIRELY bad? There's a lot of complexity to it, and it ties into issues of tokenism and the male gaze and fetishization vs. representation, but there is an actual discussion to be had about how queer women are portrayed in media, and by who, as opposed to how queer men are portrayed. He is filtering it through his usual biases, so he's not really diving into the complexity, but there is a real point there.

But the thing is...why go to Nate Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar for that point? Like, if you wanna talk about queer women being allowed to depict themselves in their art, you don't need to misgender Nate and Rebecca to do that. Céline Sciamma, Jambie Babbit, Angela Robinson, Cheryl Dunye, Clea DuVall, Chantal Akerman, Dee Rees, Donna Deitch, do you see my point? Both Alice Wu and the Watchowskis had stuff about queer women on Netflix, the same platform She-Ra is on. He could have named other names.

Now, I do admit some of that might be playing to his audience, and also playing into my point about him being a discoursed poisoned online queer person; Both his audience and queer people who I feel are overdosing on discourse tend to lean towards kiddy shit more than other stuff and a lot of the names I named make artier stuff for adults. And finding those names would take an ounce of research (like, I dunno, browsing down the list of The L-Word directors on wikipedia and looking for women) and their gender identities had to take a back seat to his laziness.

And that's transphobia.

[tearfest]

ㅤㅤcheryl was absolutely terrified. affairs stemming from excessive online flirtations was one thing to write about, but actually engaging in the immoral acts she judged her characters for was a new level of low. but her marriage was on the rocks, barely held together by loose threads following their kids' departure for college; leaving her and her husband alone long enough for the first time in twenty-one years for her to realise that maybe marrying him had been a mistake. oh, how her dearly departed mother would turn in her grave if she knew that it'd only taken twenty years for her daughter to heed her advice.

ㅤㅤshe was the first one to check into their pre-booked room. she'd stayed in this hotel once before, on a road trip to a meeting with her publisher. only that time she'd been alone. not waiting inside for her date to join her. not that she'd class this as a date. it'd been discussed: no real names and no strings attached. and yet she felt like her heart was in her throat whilst she waited: dressed to the nines with a pretty black dress on, in a four-star hotel room, and with a seedy reputation no less. and yet, she'd never felt so pretty. she was fixing her hair in the mirror when the turning of the handle had her stomach churn, seeing their reflection in the glass before she spun around; eyes wide and her freshly glossed petals agape as she stares. " i— i think you have the wrong room. i'm waiting for my husband? " she couldn't even try to sound convincing with her lie, but she just figured it all to be one big sick joke of a coincidence.

open to m/f/nb. cheryl morgan (ap lit professor and smut author) and your muse have been talking online, and they've planned a night at a hotel together. but uh oh, what if they actually know each other... dream connections are a student, one of her kids' friends/partners, husbands coworker/brother, etc.

[tearfest]

ㅤㅤ" midnight feast, more like. " cheryl answered, but her eyes are on her daughter's friend — not the bag of pretzel sticks that was in her hands. she's still dressed professionally despite the time, her curvaceous body clad in a pencil skirt and blouse, having only stepped out of her office to make a fresh pot of coffee to ease her fatigue as she wrote into the night with her deadline rearing its ugly head. she'd leave her office more if she was greeted by a scantily dressed norah. " let me guess... you can't sleep? " she asked, tossing a piece into her mouth with a smile.

( open to; all ) ( plot; you’re my best friend’s parent/sibling/some kind of relative and we’ve just run into each other in the middle of the night. ) ( muse; norah miller. socialite. 28. pan. )

“Midnight snack?” Norah asked the other innocently as she perched herself on the counter, not bothering to cover up the fact that she was wearing nothing more than a pair of panties and a silk tank top.

[female-buckets]

It's crazy to see Aces fans jumping on the Lynx bandwagon right now.

I thought you guys hated Cheryl Reeve? Remember she sent those weird emails arguing that A'ja shouldn't get MVP or DPOY. How can you possibly root for her?

Do you really want Napheesa Collier to win finals MVP after all the U'nanimous MVP versus MVPhee discourse? Seriously, think it through! It's better for A'ja if the Lynx lose. A'ja deserves some peace, doesn't she?

And what happened to the Stew'ja love? Can we bring that back? Stewie, German Stewie, JJ, Laney, Shoes, and Sloot can defeat the Lynx. They can do it. And by defeating the Lynx, they can protect A'ja's reputation from another round of discourse.

So Aces fans, please consider all this before you root against the Liberty!

[tearfest]

ㅤㅤcheryl should know better than to take personal calls when at work, rarely coming off of the phone from a conversation with her husband happy. but the anger that would greet her at home would only be worse than the fleeting and unprofessional embarrassment of leaving her office with tears in her eyes.

ㅤㅤ" oh, peter— almost didn't see you there. " fingers lift to pat at puffy under eyes, a choked laugh escaping the professor as she tried to turn her face away from peter's sweet concern. heels scuffed when she finally turned to face him with a feeble smile, only daring to look when she felt that she looked less pathetic. " i'm fine, darling, honestly. " never had been the best at lying. if only it was as easy as writing her stories. " how's your paper coming along? did you ever manage to settle on a topic? i really did enjoy your piece on semiotics in nineteenth century american literature. "

@tearfest. sc. CHERYL.

his brows furrowed when he spotted the older woman and he made a bee-line toward her the minute he saw the look on her face. ❝ are you okay? ❞ he questioned and tilted his head, shoving his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt.

[supersoakerfullofblood]

hi!!! hopefully you are having a good day!!! but a quick question-

how can i give insight to a character's backstory without it look liking a word-dump?? especially if the whole story have a diary entry format.

Very good question that honestly really depends on your personal style, but here's what's worked for me.

The best advice I can give is to stop thinking of your character's history as "backstory." That's one of the words that's become so loaded in popular writing discourse as to not mean anything solid anymore, like "worldbuilding," "theme," "protagonist," etc. Words like that are helpful once you've made your own definition for them, but with so many voices in Youtube tutorials and social media posts all saying similar but different things for what these mean, it's best to find a word that better suits how you view the concept. For me, that word is "history," because like how the present is founded on actual history, our characters are only the product of their history. Characters, like people, rarely if ever operate in the present tense.

So--revealing history without the dreaded expository dump. To answer this, we first have to look at why expository dumps are so uninviting. Here's an example of it done poorly (I'm writing this as an example, not taking someone's writing to like, diss on them hah):

Cheryl took the elevator up all five floors of the haunted house, which groaned as she went, the elevator left untouched since the house's last occupants moved out. When they arrived at the penthouse suite, Doctor Gastor explained that the last residents here thought they were wizards and practiced daily at arcana. Their names were Abigail and Horace--he had renamed himself after a demon had told him his true name, so he claimed--and they wintered in this remote, northern sphere to avoid Italian summers. Horace was wealthy, Abigail poor, but he had found her in poverty and saw something of the occult in her movements, so he stole her away one summer, and the two found more in common than they would've thought, for they married the next year. Cheryl paced the floor, picked up and dusted off a book titled in runic chicken scratch, and opened the cover."

This isn't the worst example I could think of, but it has the hallmarks I'm looking for. The first issue with this expository dump ("Doctor Gaston explained... next year") is that it shatters the flow of the passage. As a writer of narrative fiction, the goal of every sentence is to lead smoothly to the next sentence. To do this, we always have to be thinking of what the reader wants to read after a given sentence. If one sentence is about an elevator groaning in a haunted house, the reader probably wants to know how Cheryl reacts to it! Is she scared of ghosts? Does she believe in ghosts? Is she scared of elevators? If so, what does she do? Move to hit a button on the elevator to stop it? If scared of ghosts, how does she internalize this? If not scared, how does she internalize perhaps how Doctor Gaston is shivering? (Is he shivering?) These are all places the reader's mind wants to go to after that sentence. Instead, we get this history about some old wizards (if I had the patience, I would've made it longer to really make it intrude on the narrative, but I don't have the patience). If this is the first time the reader's hearing about the wizards, they probably won't care about them. This synopsis of their story interrupts what the reader actually cares about, which is whatever Cheryl cares about in the moment. To fix this interruption, Cheryl could find the book of runes maybe in the chapter before this, because that gets the reader invested. The reader, just like Cheryl, wants to know why there's a book of runes in the haunted house. So Cheryl asks Doctor Gaston about it, which legitimizes this exposition, because it's also what the reader wants to know.

Another major fault of info dumps is when they don't relate to the character at all. Cheryl's history (let's say she's a girl from the country who wandered into the house on accident) has nothing to do with wizards. Maybe in the narrative, she learns to cast some spells, which makes her care about wizards, but at this point, she doesn't. If Cheryl has nothing to do with wizards, or little to do with them, then why should the audience care? When writing a character's history, you should only include the parts that matter to the character. And this written history should never be too long, because you never want to stunt the flow of the piece (what "too long" means is up to debate and your discretion and style).

Also, exposition only works when it feels genuinely embodied by the character speaking. Is Doctor Gastor explaining the wizard history, or is that the author talking? Some of it sounds like Gastor (the bit between the em dashes sounds like what he would say), but the rest sounds like Gastor is only a mouthpiece for the information I want to put out.

So, solving it. One trick I like to do when giving exposition is to make the exposition into its own mini-scene. You don't want to write, "Carmen was friends with Piper, and they went to the dance once as friends." Instead, give it some space on the page:

She and Piper were the only girls in their group who had gone quiet at curfew. Beatrice’s only crime was in whispering comments in the early hours, short things to guide the group’s banter, never loud enough to warrant arrest. “Not really, no.” “That’s nice.” Carmen nodded and drew his eyes across the crowd. “Did she sleep well?” “Beatrice?” “Yeah.” “I guess.” The path turned up the steep hill on which the dining hall was built. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really slept well.” “Oh.” “It’s just uncomfortable, you know?” “The girls?” She raised an eyebrow. “And the boys aren’t?” “No, they are.” He laughed, and Piper was dragged to the same laugh at Homecoming three months ago. She had requested for the Melpomene band’s recent concert recording to be played after the next pop song, and surprisingly, her request was approved. Carmen laughed as their poor performance boomed from the speakers, laughed at the disruption of a dance, and Piper laughed too. But within the minute, the concert’s strident ballad was supplanted by another chart-topping pop song. But for those forty seconds, music was displaced, and the dancers stopped; city walls fell; Piper had broken something for forty seconds, held power for forty seconds. She said now, “It’s just weird, being here. It’s all too happy. Too clean.”

Exposition can work really well in brief flashbacks. And note how the exposition starts: a mirroring of "laugh" because the image is fresh in the reader's mind, so I take them on a sort of dream logic to the past. Note also that this is planting the seeds for some relevant character-building: Piper's growth into an independent woman--"Piper had broken something for forty seconds, held power for forty seconds." Here's another example from my current WIP:

He thought of Brynjar the day he had given him the knot. It was the spring of Óskar’s sixth year, and Brynjar had taken him to the docks one morning to watch sailing men fix fresh ropes on their karves and clip pulleys to sails to tie them to the boats’ sides. “Never doubt a weaver woman,” Brynjar said, annunciating each word. “They keep everything afloat.” “‘Floating,” repeated the young Óskar. “If the ropes aren’t strong, a boat’ll flip and spin. Like this!” He lifted Óskar above his head and spun on his heels, and Óskar cackled. The father set the son on his shoulders and smiled. “Yes, we need those ladies.” Óskar felt his father’s shoulders raise, and he knew the man forged something witty in his mind. “It means, Óssie, a man is only as good as his woman. And you can tell your mother I said that.” Eldrid, Óskar’s mother, would leave in her sleep later that year, and the witches would say she was sick, and Brynjar would spend some nights looking through the cracks in his home, remembering the gray wife he woke to that morning. In his memory, Óskar did not know whether this new recollection of his mother’s passing tainted his father’s speech or if he really did turn somber, but all the same, a short silence paused the scene at the dock, and Brynjar coughed to break it. His voice was low now. “Dangerous,” he said, looking with eyes like the beads of a raspberry at the men on the dock, looking through them. His jowls lowered like curtains, forced low with the hill of a frown, and in the memory, his skin blued and bloated. “It’s dangerous out there, Óssie. Be safe.” He sniffed. “Be well.” “Óskar?” Ingrid stole him. He breathed back into the world and saw now that the road had turned down and the rock wall had turned in, and they approached a strip of sea.

In addition to providing a character's history, this also fleshes out the world: the importance of women and boats, the dangers of the sea. Before the flashback, Oskar is thinking about a knot, so he thinks about the day he got the knot, which makes him think about sailing boats. At the end of the flashback, he thinks about the ocean ("looking through [the sailors]," so probably at the ocean), thinks about his father's skin if he drowned, and back in the present-tense, uh oh, Oskar is nearing the ocean. It all flows together; we're guiding our reader.

But these are only small exposition dumps, and sometimes, we need to convey much more information. You can subtly convey much more information than you realize through dialogue and description, because how a character talks and acts is guided by their histories. If a character is short-spoken, they may have had some interpersonal trauma that you can flesh out more when the time is right:

“No,” Sylvia whispered, trapping Chloe again with her stare, desperate. “I can’t sleep over.” “Why not?” Jane asked. “Mom says I have to be home by seven.” She looked down at her empty plate, at the crumbs from one slice of pizza. “But you haven’t asked her,” Jane prodded. She shook her head. “I did before.” Still in disbelief, Jane asked, “What did she say?” “She said I have to be home by seven.” She blushed. “And I can do whatever till then.” “Oh,” Jane said. She slunk back in her chair. Chloe turned back to her parents. “Can you call Jane’s mom?” “Sure thing.” “Thanks!” She swiveled back and, fingering the fruit Phoebe scrambled on her plate, decided to eat it later. She grabbed a second slice from the box. Moments passed as they ate in silence, Sylvia watching her plate, and the muffled television played something in the living room. Mom and dad laughed. “I should go,” Sylvia said. She bumped the table as she stood, reciting, “Thank you for having me.” Jane looked at the clock hovering above the front door. “It’s only six-twenty.” “I need to go home.” “Oh.” Jane stuttered. “I’ll see you next week!” Chloe said the same. “Thank you. See you.” She opened the door and slipped through. It clicked behind her. Chloe and Jane paused their gnawing and looked up at each other, sharing a thought. They hadn’t heard a car grumble on the gravel, didn’t hear anything drive by at all, and neither of them knew how close she lived. They scraped their chairs from the table and crept to the dining room window like characters in a Jones Bones movie, Jane thought. But when they pulled back the curtain, she was gone. No cars drove on the street, and the sidewalk was empty. A golden glare shrouded the street and surrounding houses as the sun lowered behind a roof.

Throughout this book (The Ghosts of Glass Lake, available now ;)), it's implied that Sylvia has a controlling and/or abusive mother. In this scene, Sylvia is curt and direct. You can almost feel the urgency behind her words, how she bumps the table as she stands, and how it almost sounds like she's rehearsed this exit. It's also implied that no one came to pick her up--she walked home, but neither Jane nor Chloe know where she lives, and neither does the reader. Maybe she walked home for miles because her mother didn't pick her up. You can get a lot of meat from implications!

But still, there are times when you just need a lot of dense exposition, usually near the beginning of a book when you need to describe the setting. My best advice, if you ever need to do this, is to keep it as brief as possible, and to pay extra attention to pacing/flow/tempo/whatever-you-want-to-call-it so it doesn't distract, doesn't feel like a chore:

The seventh and eighth graders of Carmen’s church spent one Saturday every winter at Camp Catechism. The campus set its roots in northern Michigan, breathed easterly winds from Lake Huron, and sparked to life as batches of middle schoolers arrived on midnight buses. Cabins formed a bivouac in a birch forest, and one mile to the east lay the lake and the curve of its horizon. It was frozen now, and the limbs of trees wavered slowly under snow, ice eating at chipped, white bark. The chapel the middle schoolers sang in now was a wide A-frame built and reeking of old wood. A low stage headed the room from which stood a pianist, a drummer, and a guitarist, a stage from which Roman Richards would soon discuss Ephesians. The dining hall was a short walk from everywhere and displayed from a wide window the canopy of the burdened forest, ossified waves, and the sun glinting unbearably against it all. Cups of hot chocolate were filled and refilled on a counter at the entrance of the dining hall, and campers drank these violently, abrading their throats as adolescent drunks. Boys and girls separated into two large halls subdivided into tight rooms for each youth group, everything barred entrance from the other sex. As a general rule, phones were banned, as were drugs, candles, and cursing, though the popular boys forged unique methods to circumvent these restrictions, and anyone caught with contraband was witnessed a martyr for a greater sense of vagrancy. Still, most campers lived within their rules, their obligations, just as they always had at church, and any rule breaking (“sin,” as Roman Richards claimed) was relegated quickly to myth, to rumors spread away from pious ears. As such, Carmen and his contemporaries were only loud ostensibly, never committing to a biblical criminal record. This was not to say that anyone at Camp Catechism was reserved—they spilled everything about their lives to their youth group leaders, but no one yet could articulate exactly what they meant, exactly what they felt, and scantily of dreams, ambitions, or desires.

And as all good exposition does, it flows well back into the narrative. The last paragraph above is a bridge between the camp description and a look into Carmen's inner life.

You may also find halfway through your narrative that you need to dump a bunch of character exposition, and you need to do it urgently. My trick for this is to make chapter A flow into the exposition, chapter B be an extended flashback scene, and chapter C to pick up where A left off. For example, if you need to talk about a character's relationship with his father but haven't done that yet in depth, find an easy way to transition into a flashback chapter that does just that. It's an enlarged version of the flashback tool I talked about above!

Now, all of this is what's worked for me, and I write third person distant POV narratives. It sounds like you're writing first person close POV haha. So I don't really have any examples to help with, but the general advice to 1. Keep the pacing/flow/tempo/etc. so exposition doesn't distract, and 2. Write exposition only about what matters to the character, preferably only what matters to the character in that moment, then you should be a-okay. Exposition is only as bad as it distracts, and these are the strategies I've found to distract as little as possible and to use the exposition to meaningfully build my characters as much as possible.

And again, this exposition dump problem doesn't have hard and fast solutions. Every author deals with it in their own way, and I'm sure with practice, you'll find what works best for you and what comes naturally to you, just as I'm always discovering and refining what works for me. The advice in this post is, I think, a solid place to start from :)

[hbogirls]

Riverdale characters as Swiftie stereotypes/archetypes?

veronica posts stuff like "unpopular opinion: [something really inflammatory]" or "am i the only one who [something that causes many people to rush in and say that they agree with her]." basically she puts engagement above all else and finds great success that way

kevin believes every single theory that passes in front of his eyes. he's very into the numerology of it all and believes she is sending him messages through even her casual outfits. obviously should the tide ever turn against her again, he is going with the tide.

betty also loves the clues, but she's far more judicious about which ones she believes than kevin is. she will occasionally lean gaylor if that's where the facts take her, but she mostly gets likes on joke posts.

cheryl is a gaylor for sure. it's partly rooted in her already seeing things through a queer lens and partly rooted in her being nosy as fuck, but she knows the texts and the theories, make no mistake about that. toni is a more casual fan, but cheryl got her into gaylor stuff, and she thinks it's fun in a semi-ironic way

archie is a swiftie in the way nfl and mlb players are swifties. he gets asked about it for a funny little tiktok once a year, and everyone is impressed when he pulls a deep cut as his fav

jughead makes fun of her endlessly online, but he can't post his spotify wrapped because, well, there she is.

tabitha is like a classic, offline, lifelong swiftie. she's gonna like all of taylor's ig posts, she knows all of the songs, she's gonna wear a fun outfit to the concert, and she knows nothing of any discourse. she's a nice and normal girl!! ditto for reggie tbh

uncle frank and gay kevin's gay dad attend the eras tour together and get mad at girls using the men's bathroom because the women's line is too long

[skuntank]

mobile link for my art clicky click : )

link for headcanons tag

hi i am billy i like to draw. i am 30+ and i dont care to update that number every year so thats as good as youre gonna get. i am a nonbinary transmasc dyke and accept any pronouns (with a preference for they and he)

Official legally authorized super duper non negotiable for realsies #1 biggest fan ever of Cheryl Pokemon, Gardenia Pokemon, and Diantha Pokemon ✨

WHAT THIS BLOG IS:

a sideblog (I follow from @hotshotshitshow !) for me to indulge in fandom-based hyperfixations, post my art, and ramble on about headcanons! especially that last point!

a place that focuses on and celebrates primarily female (and nonbinary) characters! i make a point of not giving much time or energy to male characters or m/m ships. i may discuss a few here and there in passing, but they are not and never will be the focus of this blog.

trans safe and terf exclusive! i will always have more love in my heart for and more in common with trans women than i ever will with a terf. terfs are welcome to block me.

a space for me to be as openly creative as i please! i delight in ripping apart side characters that dont have much canon development and frankensteining them back together. if you are of the belief that "at that point you may as well just make an oc," then you are welcome to block me.

very happy to swap and discuss headcanons! jamming with others about headcanons often is the highlight of my day. pokemon is the fandom i am the most comfortable doing this with by far and i am likely to not have much to say about other fandoms, unfortunately.

very happy to accept unsolicited drawing prompts ONLY for my favorite characters and ships! and if you asked something directly to one of said favorite characters, I may even draw the response in character! : )

mature in nature of the content that i post! i am a fully grown adult and expect you to be one as well if you follow me. i block minors with no exception. i do post somewhat regularly about sexual topics, which i tag with "the nasties" if that is something you need to blacklist.

SLOW to respond!!! I love getting messages and I try to answer everything I get but I am easily distracted, forgetful, have low social energy at any given time, and generally like to take a while to think about things (on top of working full time.) Please be patient with me!!

WHAT THIS BLOG IS NOT:

a pokemon news blog! im just some schmuck that loves climbing aboard the pokemon hype train as much as anyone else. if you found me from my gamefreak teraleak posts, you are still welcome to follow, but do not come here with the expectation that i consistently post about pokemon news.

Interested in getting involved in proship/anti discourse! People on both sides need to go outside. Don't drag me into anything and we can mutually move on with our lives if we come across something we don't like.

I would appreciate you liking this post if you have read all of it!

fandom preference stuff under the cut:

pokemon is and always has been the absolute love of my life and my faves from it are:

+ gardenia, cheryl, diantha, cynthia, rika, geeta, hunter j, cyllene, cogita

+ gaiashipping (gardenia/cheryl), phaesporiashipping (cynthia/diantha), geeta/rika, gothicrockshipping (roxie/marley)

other things of great importance:

+ karlach, karlach/shadowheart, any of the other bg3 ladies

+ sadie adler, sadie/molly, just about anything red dead related

+ noi, noikaido (dorohedoro)

+ midna/zelda (legend of zelda)

this of course is not an exhaustive list, but rather a list of what you are the most likely to see here.

I also enjoy monster collection games in general, such as neopets and palworld

You will undoubtedly see me bitching from time to time about popular male characters and m/m ships as well as misogyny in fandom. This is not the blog for you if you are a big fan of the more popular male characters and ships in most fandoms I have stated above, or if you're one of those bozos who gets upset when a lesbian vocally doesn't like men.

[tearfest]

ㅤㅤ" i don't give a shit about football. but i'm the only woman in this house, and jordan makes sure to watch all of your games. if not live, then he'll record it. it's wholesome, really. " and it nearly makes her feel bad for the return of her inappropriate thoughts for his close friend. nearly. whilst her night of fun had been unjustifiable the first time around, she feels that the wrongs of her husband gives her a considerable amount of leeway. " besides, i might write a novel about a football player and his teammates mother. age gaps really sell nowadays. " ㅤㅤshe closes the door behind her, briefly hesitating as her hand lingers on the door handle behind her — glancing down and adjusting her nightie so that the neckline was lower and her full cleavage was on display beneath her open silk robe. she'd sworn to herself to never cheat again as she'd found the guilt to be too much to bare with, the burden only having eased over the last year or two since she'd found a lipgloss three shades too bold for her in her husbands car. but dakota had only gotten more handsome, and the excitement that came with sleeping with a professional footballer was too much for her to push aside. every inch of her body craves dakota fuimaono, and she deserves just one night where she's not left alone with her expansive imagination, right? ㅤㅤshe abandons her slippers by the door before following him towards the sofa, eyes widening at the initial shock of the accuracy of his words before she's laughing a loud and hearty laugh, standing by her desk as he sits down. " no, he didn't fuck his secretary. but he is fucking the receptionist down at the station, and probably has been since he hired someone to build this for me. he doesn't know that i know. " her index finger lifts to tap against her nose, offering him a knowing smile before she's shaking her head at his crude comment. " i wish. the last time i had any real fun was with you, which is as embarrassing to admit as it probably is to hear. i bet you've spent night after night with countless models and stars — just like you deserve to. " ㅤㅤshe pours herself a fresh glass of wine before she's moving towards the sofa, not to sit, but to stand directly in front of him — her chest at level with his eyes as she tilts her head, gazing down at him. " what, you're telling me you didn't come to this party with the plan of fucking your friends super hot mom? " she takes a sip from her glass, never once breaking eye contact with him. " if anyone could get in trouble here then it's me. a married and well respected professor and author caught having a scandalous affair with a professional footballer? and my son's friend, no less? my hypocritical husband would file for divorce, and i don't know whether my readers would lessen or increase if the news broke out. i mean — it does sound like something straight out of one of my books. "

"holy shit, yeah. it's been that long. you've seen me on tv? didn't expect you gave a shit about football. but you’ve always been full of surprises, haven’t you?”

and just like that, dakota somehow got himself into cheryl's good graces. their conversation so far was friendly and innocent enough - but he remembered exactly what happened the last time they were left alone for an extended period of time. jordan's uni graduation happened to coincide with a game that dakota had in the area, and he was already riding on a high by the time he arrived. he approached cheryl in good spirits as she quietly minded her business in the background. and the next thing he knew, he was deep inside of her while her husband slept in the next room. he remembered the way his eyes rolled back into his head as he railed her with all of the force his twenty-two year old self could muster. he was young, but he surprisingly knew how to fuck. and after an incredibly long, aggressive session, he came on her and passed out. by the time he was done with his nap, it was three in the morning and his flight was at eight. so he kissed cheryl's head, glanced at the picture of her family on the wall and left before he was found at the scene of the crime.

throughout the years, he avoided coming back here because he didn't want to bring any drama to the morgan household. it wasn't often that a married woman with a successful career and seemingly perfectly nuclear family did something as reckless as fucking her son's friend. his hotter, richer, more successful friend. and even if he was using that term of endearment very lightly, dakota was aware that his connection to cheryl was inappropriate. the friendship with jordan was uncomplicated, sure. he had no interest in being as close as they were in high school. maybe fucking his mother was playing a role. but their relationship was getting more and more distant by the year. as dakota’s career grew, jordan’s remained stagnant. he wondered how much resentment and jealousy was bubbling below the surface. maybe that was an issue he had to visit later. right now, he was too aroused to focus on anything other than the beauty in front of him.

he made his way into the outhouse and kicked his shoes off the door. "huh. it's nice in here. surprised that your geriatric fuck of a husband was actually able to get his shit together and do this for you. or rather - pay someone to do it for you. what happened? did he fuck his secretary?” the words flew out of his mouth before he could stop himself. “whoa, sorry. none of my business.” carefully, he sat on the sofa, spread his legs and stared over at cheryl. "did i just walk straight onto a porn set? is this a casting couch?" he laughed, poured himself some wine and got comfortable. "you're gonna get me in trouble, mrs. morgan. swear that i came here with good intentions. scouts honor."

[lyledebeast]

Pride Month Movie 25: Swoon

Tom Kalin's 1992 biopic focused on Nathan Leopold, who murdered ten year old Bobby Franks with his lover Richard Loeb in 1924, is near and dear to my heart. It is much more directly based on the Leopold and Loeb case than either Rope (1948), which I watched earlier this month, or Compulsion (1959), but never feels as though it is accurate for the sake of accuracy. The film draws heavily on the court transcripts to show how the legal and psychiatric institutions of the day viewed homosexuality, even though the murder was not sexually motivated. The film is as interested in the discourse surrounding the trial as its outcome

At the same time, the scenes prior to the trial are surprisingly domestic. Richard badgers Nathan about going to the store for the supplies they need, Nathan gets annoyed at Richard's inviting people over when he wants to study, but other scenes show them having fun both together and with their friends. Kalin does not shy away from the terrible thing they did, but this is also the only retelling of these historical events, as far as I'm aware, that follows the two to prison and shows Nathan's grief over Richard's death. These two murder a child together, but they are also boyfriends who argue about where to go for lunch or when to have sex. Why should they have to choose? Basically, Swoon is the standard by which I judge every couples scene I see or write.

What I so love about the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s was that it had very little interest in making queer people palatable to straight audiences and much interest in expressing the emotions queer people felt at the time, including rage and frustration in response to the AIDS crisis and increasing homophobic violence. Nathan's declaration, "I wanted to murder the idea of suffering as my condition" is so much more raw and powerful and, frankly, satisfying than the polite pleas for tolerance made by contemporary mainstream films like Johnathon's Demme's Philadelphia (1993) We do have much more diverse and nuanced queer representation today than in the 1990s, but today's filmmakers owe so much to pioneers like Kalin, Greg Araki, Cheryl Dunne, Derek Jarman, and others.

[thejugheadparadox]

i dont wanna like Get Into Ultimately Pointless Riverdale Discourse but im procrastinating so hard on my essay and the choni femslash poll has got me well pissed off honestly! obviously i voted choni bc steven universe is not beating riverdale on my watch but why is it all "vote cheryl" lol. there are two people in that relationship toni actually does have the capacity to be a well-rounded character and not simply a cheryl prop. cmon guys i thought we were past this

[rayofsunshinc]

The fact that I have to make this post is really wild but gay erasure will not be happening on this blog?????

Aaron, Richie Tozier, Kevin Keller and Mickey Milkovich are gay. Cheryl Blossom is a lesbian. And to be honest, it's essential to majority of their characters to fully understand them, not that it has to be mentioned in all their threads, but as far as backstory goes...

Only one that is questionable is Richie if you want to get into context of the books, but my portrayal is more movie-based (with other influences) and also I choose to write him as gay. I DO NOT want to get into that discourse, I've have enough over my time within the It fandom. No shade to anyone who chooses to interpret something different.

Also just a side note, I write Eddie Munson and Bucky Barnes as gay. I can go into my reasoning behind this, but it's what I choose to write and it's stated in their bio pages.

I really don't write any of my current active muses as straight. There might be a couple in my inactive muses. (Not to straight erase either ....... if that's even possible.) I do have muses who it's unclear of if they're gay, straight, bi, pan in canon ... because sexuality and romance does not come up AT ALL for their storyline (only within the fandom). But as a concept (not for each individual), sexuality is fluid and I have more friends who are "queer" than not irl and online, so as it relates to me as a bisexual person and my personal life, it makes sense to write queer people. Call it projecting or whatever you want LOL but this is my blog and I'm going to do what I want.

I shouldn't have to explain myself, but as we know, fandom can be exhausting. Please, don't come into my inbox/messages A) if we're not mutuals and B) if you're trying to ship m/f with ANY of my gay muses (especially canon gay characters ....? like wtf that's honestly the part that floored me)