#especially from gay men with majority female fan bases?

[chemsitryforthegirls]

A good portion of tik toks/reels from 27-36 year old white men putting towels on their head and making fun of "Karens" are just outlets for misogyny.

Like in the beginning most "Karen" videos challenged abuses of white privilege or class but more and more they seem to just be an excuse to make fun of women without facing consequences from mostly liberal fan bases.

[woeismyhoe]

I'm gonna preface this by saying I have no problem with representation. I love queer stories, especially when they're organic and natural. I'm bi, and I've had fulfilling relationships with women as well as men. Honestly, I would love a spin-off on Brimsley and Reynolds. It didn't feel.....forced. the characters were new and their story grew organically. Michaela? No. I'm trying to articulate how I feel without sounding like I hate the queer community because I genuinely don't. I appreciated Benedict's story line even if it was a little jarring. He's exploring, experimenting and that's fine. It still doesn't take away from his story. But the introduction of Michaela felt like a guy punch. It felt wrong. I've never particularly like gender swapping in stories based on an original IP, because it changes a lot of dynamics. It changes a lot of story lines. And yes, it's fiction, but I'm sorry I cannot get over it, especially when it's such a blatant case of pandering. It makes me feel as if I'm wrong to question this change and I've somehow internalised homophobia. If so, then why wouldn't I hate other queer characters or be similarly uncomfortable?

Okay I think I can make my argument clear with an example. If anyone has seen the movie Love Lies Bleeding, I think they'll get it. The sexual orientation of the characters didn't matter. It felt right. And it was not important to the story. It was just an established dynamic and we could enjoy the plot easily. It wouldn't have mattered if it was a heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple, the story is largely unchanged. If Michael becomes Michaela, here's the issues I see. Who inherits Kilmartin. We've already established an estate will go to the next male heir if the current owner dies. A major part of Michael's story was his guilt over his inheritance and his imposter syndrome. His story arc taking his place in parliament. It's all gone. I mean, I know the show isn't interested in the plots other than the main character pairing but this felt so wrong. If they wanted a lesbian lead, the just make another show with original characters why force this? I'm not looking forward to Francescas season at all. I'm sure a lot of people will like it and that's their prerogative but for me, personally, the only thing keeping the story moving forward is Benedict. Maybe Eloise. But I feel like the story of the show has lost its charm and has dug itself into a hole like Disney or marvel

I’m going to try to be respectful as possible. As a lesbian, it’s deeply concerning and infuriating to me how so many people including ppl from the community have internalized misogyny and homophobia to queer women. Just because you support and don’t have an issue with queer male stories doesn’t mean you can’t be homophobic to queer female stories. Just because you’re bi doesn’t mean you can’t be homophobic. Why do you think majority of mlm stories are consumed by women? Why are the stories written and targeted towards women instead of the couple’s own community?

There’s an issue going on right now where many fans are okay and THRILLED with Benedict being bi and sleeping with a man, yet complaining about Francesca and Michaela— both have revealed that they have a potential to turn into queer stories. But no one’s batting an eye to Sophie being erased for Benedict’s potential gay partner. People are more okay with a lesbian Eloise than Francesca, and maybe because Eloise fits the stereotype more than Francesca. Why????

Maybe you need to reflect on why you’re feeling this way since you’re clearly favoring queer male stories over queer female stories. Why is a straight male character’s arc more important than a sapphic character who can go through the same arc and even MORE? Why are you okay with Benedict but not with Francesca? Why does Brimsley and Reynolds feel natural but Francesca and Michael is forced and pandering? Why is making sapphic representation pandering unless it’s based on stereotypes, but not gay representation?

This is Bridgerton. They made POCs part of the elites, it’s not historically accurate, the medicine and technology isn’t historically accurate. I see no reason why they won’t change the law at some point for it to be possible for a woman to inherit titles and estates. Even if they don’t go into that direction, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more story to explore for a sapphic character.

There’s so many variants of Michael in other stories and media, he’s not special. But Michaela?? How many stories are there even in the mainstream media where we get a happy WLW couple that doesn’t end in tragedy? Literally 0. There’s no happy ending anywhere in popular media because Bury Your Gays is the default fate of every queer female story that gets even slightly popular. You say make a new show with sapphic characters yet 90% of the time they get cancelled after the first season and this is something we’ve been dealing with for decades and trying to call out.

So again, why is a straight couple’s story more important to you than a WLW couple who can offer a more unique, nuanced portrayal of yearning, desire, betrayal to one’s self, crisis of faith, even loss of identity and room to show politics in the Bridgerton world like how they did with Queen Charlotte— and make a bigger impact on how the public perceives queer women?

You’re uncomfortable with a queer female character changing what you know and are familiar with in the books— that she can’t possibly compare to what a male character can offer. It’s ironic how awfully similar that sounds to homophobes who can’t accept the existence of queer women in society because god forbid a woman can do what a man can for a woman, or even do better.

Don’t watch it if you don’t want to. The rest of us will feel valued and seen and enjoy it together when the season comes out while you distance yourself further from the sapphic community.

TLDR; Queerness makes the story richer than any straightness will.

[mademoiselle-red]

Reading the Renault fandom dissertation, part 4: the online TC fandom analysis begins…

An academic decided to write about us, online fans of Mary Renault’s works, for her phd dissertation in 2018, and as the subject of her research, I will be covering & commenting on what she wrote over a series of posts ✍️📑 (Here is part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, and part 6)

For part 4, we begin to delve into Chou’s analysis of the online TC fandom, which she calls the “millennial fandom” because it sprung up in the new millennium (the mid-2000s).

“While Renault’s works have mostly lost their relevance for readers of historical fiction and gay literature, Renault has found a new fandom in internet communities. On LiveJournal.com, the social networking website that has been a platform for many fandom communities since 1999, there are two major communities devoted to Renault and her works: maryrenaultfics (since 2004) and maryrenault (2005). While these communities have become less active due to decreasing popularity of LiveJournal itself, Renault fandom is still active on more recent fandom platforms such as Tumblr and Archive of Our Own”

So far this checks out. These are all the places we have congregated in.

“Renault’s new fans are not the “older gay men” who have gone digital, nor are they the “serious-minded teenagers” interested in classical times, or the academics who are finally paying the author her long-overdue attention. The cult popularity that Renault’s works achieved in the community of online fan “prosumers,” especially for those who are interested in “slash”—fantasy about male homoeroticism largely produced for and by women—demands a renewed examination of how Renault’s works could be reread and re-evaluated.”

I’m pretty sure there are middle aged men, academics, and serious minded history-obsessed teens among us. But cis women (and bisexual folks) do comprise half of the fandom (according to an informal poll I ran a while back).

“According to Fanlore Wiki, one of the largest Wikipedia websites about English- speaking fan activities, one of Renault’s LiveJournal community has been in existence since 2004, aptly named “Mary’s Handmaidens.” On the Fanlore page about “Mary’s Handmaidens,” a passage describes the gender and sexual constituent of the online community: “The community includes members of both sexes, with (by comparison with many other fandoms) a notable contingent of men, though the majority of writers of fan fiction are women. Various sexual orientations are represented among the membership.” The statement about a “notable contingent of men” is a curious one compared to the “handmaidens” in the title of the community. Despite its consciously inclusive taglines (“the community includes members of both sexes”, “various sexual orientations are represented”), the community adopts a female persona as its identity.”

This is a fair point! The handmaidens group name really wasn’t inclusive. And cis women did and still do comprise the largest group in Renault fandoms (and slash fandoms in general).

“Another example of Renault’s Internet fandom is The Theban Band’s fan arts based on Renault’s novels (see fig. 4). Among fan artworks on Renault’s works by The Theban Band, one piece based on The Charioteer illustrates serial lines of flights from the fans to Renault, from Renault to her characters, and then from her characters to antiquity (see fig. 5). The artwork demonstrates the fantastical disposition of the simultaneous disidentification and cross- identification with otherness, which in the scene depicted is embodied in a leap to another time and place. This artwork captures the moment in which Ralph and Laurie’s flirtatious book-exchange takes place in The Charioteer.”

What about this above image demonstrates disidentification and cross-identification with its subject matter? It appears to be a just a faithful visual rendition of the scene from the novel.

“If Ralph is attempting to initiate Laurie to homosexuality, it is interesting that the knowledge of homosexuality that he passes on (instead of homosexuality itself) is explained as a fantasy. In this scene of erotic initiation of a young boy, the only physical contact between the two characters is through a book that is “just a nice idea.” In the same scene, the two are depicted as dangerously close to a kiss In the passage, Ralph merely makes an “outward movement” and then steps back. What takes place in between, the “[h]alf-remembered images” of “the tents of Troy, the columns of Athens, David waiting in an olive grove for the sound of Jonathan’s bow” preoccupy Laurie’s mind strangely more so than the immediate presence of Ralph.”

I guess she is on the no-kiss team for chapter 2. 😚

“Together with the Phaedrus that Laurie physically receives, the fantasy of a homoerotic past mediates the modern, homosexual relationship between Laurie and Ralph throughout the entire story. In this sense, Phaedrus functions for the two characters much like how Renault’s books function for her readers. The Charioteer is an adoring look to the past clothed as a story about the inner struggles of a modern homosexual, or, more precisely, about how the struggles must be negotiated through a fantasy of the past. Renault’s books were for her mid-century gay readers “a badge of homosexuality” in much the same way Plato’s Phaedrus is for Ralph and Laurie: a communication about desire in the present through a collective fantasy of a past that contains the ideal form of that desire. […] Laurie looks back into a mythical past in order to contextualize his homosexuality, and Renault herself turns to the idea of Greek Love to write about male homoeroticism. In a similar way, the 21st-century fans locate in Renault’s works a kind of male homoeroticism that seems unavailable in the here and now of post-gay sexual politics.”

What are post-gay sexual politics? In what way precisely is the kind of male homoeroticism in Renault’s works, and in TC in particular (since this passage focuses on TC) no longer available in the here and now? While things have improved a lot for queer people, especially here in the west, homophobia has not gone away! Do all LGBTQ people in the Americas and Europe (where Renault’s books are published) no longer face familial and social ostracism after coming out? Readers both in the old livejournal and here on tumblr have mentioned how they could relate to TC because they come from homophobic families and communities. Through TC and the Greek novels, people can read about characters experiencing similar emotions and situations, across time, space and sometimes gender, and feel comforted, knowing that they are not alone, that this love exists, it is real, and it will find a way.

“The three-fold leap in time for Renault’s millennial fans constitutes a fantasy that is thrice removed from the “reality” of sexual desire. If Ralph and Laurie could be said to negotiate their own identity through an ancient Greek philosopher, and if as critics have argued, Renault masks her own lesbian identity by male homoeroticism located both temporally and cultural distant from her own, it is much more difficult to argue that there is a sexual truth being filtered through Plato, Renault’s characters, and finally Renault herself for the millennial fans.”

While Laurie & Ralph and the mid-century gay readers use The Phaedrus / The Charioteer to communicate their sexuality through “a collective fantasy of a past that contains the ideal form of that desire”, the “millennial fans”, according to Chou, are too far removed from the “reality” of sexual desire to receive “a sexual truth.” This assumes that the millennial fans do not use The Charioteer to explore and understand their own sexuality and cannot relate their own sexual realities to the same-sex desires depicted in the novel. This, as I said in the paragraph above, is not true, since many readers in these online communities do identify as LGBTQ+ and can relate to LGBTQ+ experiences. It is true that many of the millennial fans are not specifically gay men using these gay books to reveal their sexualities to each other. And there are indeed straight women among us, but in my experience, we are definitely NOT a majority straight-women group. Most of us are queer people who, like Ralph/Laurie and the mid-century gay readers, have found each other through this book (as friends and as lovers ❤️)

My commentary on Chou’s online TC fandom analysis continues in part 5, and a tumblr username familiar to many of us here makes a surprising appearance in the dissertation 👀👀👀

[rollercoasterwords]

why aren't lesbians more popular in fanfiction?

hello literally no one asked for this but i feel like i’ve seen a lot of discussion about the disparity between mlm and wlw fanfiction, and i simply. have thoughts about it lol. this is mostly focused on marauders fanfic bc that’s really the only fanfic community i’m plugged into, but i feel like it probably applies to others as well -- this is definitely gonna get long so if u don’t feel like reading a lil essay abt it then just scroll past :) 

anyway! i do think the prevalence of gay ships in fanfic is a particularly interesting conundrum given that the vast majority of people who read + write fanfiction are women -- and, particularly in the marauders fandom, i’d guess that the majority of those women are queer. so i guess the question i find interesting can be boiled down to: why do so many gay women gravitate towards stories about gay men?

generally, i tend to see a mixture of three answers in conversations about this question.

1. there’s more canon info about male characters

essentially, i see a lot of people say something along the lines of, “well, it makes sense that there’s more fanfiction written about men, because in the stories these characters are originally from the male characters are main characters/much more developed than female characters.” and i think this answer makes sense, but i don’t necessarily think it’s a sufficient explanation on its own for two reasons:

fanfiction can branch quite drastically away from canon, and there are plenty of popular fics where canon is completely disregarded. even if writers have very little canon information about a character, that doesn’t necessarily mean the character won’t be loved in fandom spaces. which leads to the second reason...

in the marauders fandom specifically, male characters with almost no canon information have become very popular. i feel like i’ve especially seen this more recently with characters like barty crouch jr. and evan rosier, but even some of the bigger marauders characters -- peter, regulus, etc -- have very little information about their actual characters in canon. additionally, there are characters like lily evans, narcissa malfoy, andromeda tonks, etc, who, if we’re going based on the amount of canon information, seem like they should be more popular. 

however, none of this is to say that certain characters should be more or less popular--this is just to point out that i don’t think “there’s more canon information” is a sufficient explanation on its own for why mlm fics are so much more popular than wlw fics. i certainly think it accounts for some of the disparity, but i also think there’s more going on!

2. “fetishization” of gay men

i’ve also seen a lot of people throw out the answer that “it’s because women are fetishizing gay men,” and i...just don’t really think this is the issue that some people say it is. honestly, i think that in most of the cases where i’ve seen people saying this, the term fetishization is being misused. in the marauders fandom, at least, i’d argue that the vast majority of fanfiction is not fetishizing gay men, in that it isn’t reducing gay men to sex objects--in fact, i think that oftentimes the opposite is true. even in heavily explicit fanfiction, the characters are often built out as well-rounded people, and there’s almost always an equal emphasis on the relationship and emotional dynamic between the two characters being shipped together. 

i think when people talk about the fetishization of mlm couples, a lot of times the person they’re arguing about is this imaginary cishet woman who’s like foaming at the mouth to read about gay men fucking each other while simultaneously not really viewing gay men as real, complex people--and sure, maybe there are some women like that. but something that i think this straightforward answer of “fetishization” misses is that there is fanfiction catered specifically to straight women, and it often looks very different from queer fanfic. like, i can almost always tell when i’m reading fanfic whether it was written by a straight woman or not, because heterosexual desire and queer desire manifest in very different ways. and my impression is that the majority of queer fanfic is catered towards other queer people--even if straight women read it, too, i don’t really think they’re the main audience. i haven’t tried to research statistics on this or anything; it’s all just based on my impression of this one specific fandom space, and i’m not trying to claim otherwise. but in the marauders fandom, at least, it seems as though the majority of the readers are queer women; in fact, many writers, like myself, are actually lesbians who literally hold zero attraction to men. so why do we still love reading and writing about gay relationships?

3. *vague hand-waving* misogyny 

once we get past these first two explanations, i typically see people saying something along the lines of, “well, of course mlm fics are more popular than wlw fics, because of misogyny!” and then just...leaving it at that. and it sort of drives me a little insane, because i’m always like, yes, but WHY??? that’s like someone asking why the sky is blue, and answering, “well, because of science.” like--okay, yes, but WHAT science? why?? what’s actually happening??

so, if you’ve made it this far into my little esay, here are some thoughts that have been marinating in my brain about some specific ways in which misogyny effects the popularity of gay vs lesbian fanfiction (and, in some ways, gay vs lesbian media more generally). essentially, there are two big things that it boils down to, in my mind:

the inherent alientation of womanhood

the universality of queer desire

and those two things kinda play off each other, but i’m gonnna take them one by one!

1. womanhood as a process of alienation

so, this is something that i’ve been turning over in my mind over the past few months. generally, i try to avoid broad generalizations about women/womanhood, because i think of gender much more as a socialized series of performances rather than any kind of fixed identity category, however! that being said, i do think that womanhood is, in many ways and for a majority of people, a gradual and unrelenting process of alienation from one’s own body, sexuality, and desires. 

what i mean by that is that in a patriarchal society, becoming a woman means being taught constantly and consistently that you are meant to center men in your life (which is one reason that so many lesbians have such a complicated relationship to gender--because removing men from the equation essentially knocks out one of the pillars propping up “woman” as a gender category). teaching someone to be a woman means teaching them to ignore and suppress their own sexuality, physicality, and desires in favor of men’s. i think many people raised to be women learn to think of their own sexuality as an object of male desire; we are told that we should want to be wanted, but not that we should want. learning to be a woman oftentimes means learning to separate yourself from your own desires--women aren’t supposed to be hungry, or messy, or loud, or ugly, or ambitious, or sexual.

obviously, everyone raised in a misogynistic society internalizes that misogyny; so i think that for most people taught to be women, there’s this shared experience of alienation from your own body. we are systematically and purposely cut off from lesbian desire, from sapphic desire--from any kind of desire or sexuality where men are not a focal point. this makes it understandably difficult to envision rich, complex, sexual and romantic relationships between women, because anyone taught to be a woman has to spend a significant amount of time unlearning internalized misogyny in order to truly embrace queer desire.

so, yes; i think that mlm fics and gay ships are more popular at least in part because of misogyny. but i don’t think it’s this conscious, purposeful thing that queer women should be condemned for--in many ways, i think that gay fanfiction actually provides queer women (especially young queer women) a space to explore queer relationships and queer desire outside of the patriarchy that hangs like a specter over any relationship involving women. for queer women who are still working through internalized misogyny, who still struggle to envision romantic and sexual relationships between women that exist outside the bounds of patriarchal narratives, i think it’s understandable that gay relationships in fanfiction have become this sort of refuge. we are taught to center male desire and sexuality; we experience queer desire that we must learn to stop suppressing; when we look at these two ideas together, i don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the exploration of gay relationships in fanfiction is oftentimes a way for queer women to explore their own sapphic desire.

2. the universality of queer desire    

this first point leads me directly into my second, which is that gay fanfiction can oftentimes provide a space to explore lesbian desire specifically because queer desire has a unique sort of universality--it is outside the boundaries of cishet norms and narratives, which often leads to different expressions of desire and different relationship dynamics. for example, as a lesbian, i feel that my lesbian relationships generally have much more in common with gay relationships than they do with straight women, simply because the dynamics of typical heterosexual relationships are so far removed from my own experiences with sex, romance, and dating.   

something that strikes me is that, in many instances, these fanfictions about gay men read to me, a lesbian, as lesbian romances--i find myself reading about these characters and thinking that the way they relate to one another, the way they process emotion, etc, feels very much like a lesbian relationship. i think part of that is because many of them are written by queer women, but it’s also because of this overarching universality of queer desire.

anyway, i don’t really have a final point or conclusion that i set out to make with this. i guess i just think it would be nice to move the conversation a little further past “wlw fics are less popular because of misogyny!”, y’know? at the end of the day, i don’t think it’s inherently harmful that mlm fics/ships/media are so popular in queer spaces, and more often than not i think it’s actually an important medium for all kinds of queer people to explore desire + sexuality + gender + relationships through stories written by other queer people. however, i do think it simultaneously calls attention to the ways in which internalized misogyny and compulsory heternormativity can make it very, very difficult for people to envision lesbian desire and lesbian relationships, and i do think it’s important to like...do some soul-searching, y’know? like, just on an individual level, especially if you’re a queer person, and especially if you’re a queer woman--if you struggle to get into wlw fics/media the way you get into mlm fics/media, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, and it doesn’t make you a bad person, but it does mean that you should probably take some time to think about why that might be! what kinds of things did you learn to internalize that might be preventing you from embracing lesbian/sapphic/wlw (whatever u wanna call it) desire? and i say this as someone who had to spend years coming to terms with their own lesbian desire, who knows how difficult it can be to work through the layers of internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, and compulsory heterosexuality. but at the end of the day, a lot of this fanfiction we’re reading is all tied together by the same elements of queer desire <3 

this is by no means meant to be a comprehensive or even particularly academic analysis of the situation--i’ve just been thinking about these questions a lot lately and wanted to write down some thoughts to help me organize them. if u actually took the time to read all of this and have any thoughts or ideas to share i am clearly dying to discuss + my dms + ask box are always open :)    

[for-ships-that-never-sail]

Ramblings on SamBucky and SarahBucky

1. As a queer POC in a biracial relationship, SamBucky becoming canon would be an absolute dream for me. 😍😩😭🙌🏼 I’ve never cared about a potential MCU ship this much before. HOWEVER, I do understand that the chances of this ship actually sailing are slim to none. So, I’m just happy to be here, lurking on Tumblr and AO3 for SamBucky content along with Stackie content.

2. If Marvel REALLY wanted to, it wouldn’t be hard for them to make Sam and/or Bucky queer. Sam could easily be gay and the only confirmation we would need for that is a simple comment from Sam or Sarah about an ex boyfriend etc. Bucky could so so easily be bi and all that would take is for him to say that when he tried the dating apps both men and women had so many tiger photos and he is so confused by that or something. Making these characters queer wouldn’t take a lot of hard work in terms of writing and it wouldn’t take more than several seconds of screen time.

3. I realize that it is unlikely that the MCU will offer us the kind of queer representation we hope for. Generally, queer stories in Hollywood are about coming out trauma or some other big narrative and just never something simple and happy. The best queer stories I’ve ever seen were the ones where no one was forced to talk about it - someone was just bi, and there was nothing to discuss. They are just living their life. That’s what I wish queer representation was in Hollywood on most days, but it isn’t. Not to say that our struggles should be erased, but we also just deserve some FLUFF you know? Unfortunately, I don’t expect that Marvel is working towards queer representation with any kind of real purpose that way. Sure, they intend to introduce a gay character in an upcoming movie, but the fact that it had to be announced and discussed and is some BIG DEAL is what I dislike about the portrayal of queerness in media. As it is, they are only just coming around to decent gender and racial representation. So better queer representation will unfortunately take some more time.

4. Personally speaking, even if no major queer ships became canon in the MCU, having some of the main heroes actually just BE queer in canon would be MORE than enough for me rn tbh. 🤞🏼

5. I must admit that my interest in SamBucky actually stemmed from the clear chemistry between Stackie. Anthony and Sebastian have SO MUCH vibrant joy, love and respect between them that I started to see so many possibilities for SamBucky. This means that I can also easily understand how some people don’t see any romantic undertones in SamBucky at all. I was someone that didn’t really see many romantic undertones in Stucky (though I would have been FULLY onboard of it becoming canon). What I saw there was deep friendship. So, I know that what I see in SamBucky now could just be something I’m projecting based on what I see between the actual actors. I’m not denying that there is some queer coding in SamBucky canon or Stucky canon. But sometimes I feel like those moments in most of the fan favourite ships are just fan service crumbs and nothing else. And even then, I think some of it might even be done without any real intentions to queer code. It could all just be a simple nod to the BROMANCE, if you will.

6. Marvel has no real excuses for not making Bucky bi/pan, but I see how they might actually struggle with making Sam queer. Our new Captain America being a black man is something complicated in and of itself as shown in TFATWS. Making him queer on top of that would make his acceptance by the general public as the new Cap vastly more complicated, even within the MCU universe (at least in the eyes of the people creating this universe). It can obviously be done, but I don’t see that Marvel would believe they can go there with ease. In fact, they might even think that trying to go there might switch the narrative even more from Sam’s heroics to his personal life, which really isn’t what the MCU is about. For this reason, even if Bucky becomes canon bi, I don’t think Sam will ever really be canon gay/bi/pan, making the SamBucky ship something that will never realistically sail. 🥺💔

7. Being realistic (and sad 😔) about SamBucky never actually having a chance of happening in canon brings me to SarahBucky - another beautiful chance for a biracial ship. One that can very easily happen (literally, it only took one smile and hello for this ship to take off because of the blatant heteronormativity in media - le sigh). At least if this ship sailed though, there will be SOME beautiful biracial romance representation AND it would be hella comedic when Sam and Bucky become in-laws 😂. Think of the potential there. Seriously, just give it a minute.

8. I know it’s TOTALLY unfair that there could be so much love and care between two male or two female characters and still a hetero relationship with just one vague moment has infinitely better chances of becoming canon. But that’s unfortunately where we are still, and hating on SarahBucky won’t fix that. SamBucky is incredibly unlikely to happen (though I will always keep my fingers crossed), so if SarahBucky has any chance to actually happen, we shouldn’t get angry about it and boo it. At least I’m not going to. Supporting the chance to see a new biracial ship on screen, especially one with a beautiful strong-willed dark skinned woman and a mother of two, is a good thing. And personally, I support at least one of the Wilsons to get that 106 year old dick! 😉

[innovativestruggles]

What the Free! anime can teach us about male heterosexuality and toxic masculinity

I’m going to start off by saying this. I am a feminist. And as a feminist who is also a self-professed otaku, the two cannot be anymore incongruent. Despite the large amount of misogyny seen in a still conservative country like Japan, and the unfortunate toxicity seen in some fandoms, I am still able to find joy in watching and reading my fair share of anime/manga.

I am relatively late to the party with the Free! anime, nevertheless I am still glad I gave it a chance. I was initially skeptical, because though it is not a BL genre, I would say from my experience being in numerous anime fandoms, I can already predict what a fanservice anime full of gorgeous half naked men would entail amongst fans. Needless to say, I was correct. However, that isn’t the point of this post. This post came about because I was so pleasantly surprised with the characters, their development and their interactions with each other.

Free! is more than just fanservice. It is about friendship and the freedom to express emotions without repercussion. I absolutely love love how every male character have their own way of expressing their feelings. I love the friendship between them and how they can be vulnerable in front of each other and about each other. It gives that incredible perspective into men and emotions - that they are also human, that it is okay for them to experience vulnerabilities, to be in touch with their emotions, to talk about their feelings with their male friends and to touch each other - all without the idea that they would be perceived as gay.

Character sexuality

I am going to disregard that there are some people out there who fish for a romantic interaction between the characters as soon as one or the other show some sort of vulnerable emotion or experience physical touch. Don’t get me wrong, I ship a lot of the male characters with each other, but this post is not about shipping.

Although the anime does not explicitly state the characters’ sexuality I am going to presume that the majority of them are most likely heterosexual. My reasoning for this is the canonical evidence I see and my interpretation based on these canonical scenes. See below.

When the boys played a game and asked Haru what his first romantic encounter was like, they all assumed it was a beautiful woman...

Makoto’s comment on the girls being cute and correcting Chigusa’s question that it’s not just their yukatas... so to me it genuinely sounds like he thinks the girls are cute

The assumption that Rei has a girlfriend

Gou (being a girl that she is) insists on wanting to know more about Rei’s “love” situation

Gou obviously explained she thought he has a girlfriend but he does not believe in love. So he doesn’t explicitly deny that he doesn’t like girls.

And Rin’s host family asking whether he has a girlfriend, to which Rin has a lot of hesitation because he is in love with Haru and the only person he would think of in that way is Haru

So because of the impression that these guys are most likely heterosexual, it just makes the basis of their interactions with each other so much more important in the sphere of toxic masculinity. 

Men are taught to never show their emotions, their vulnerabilities - especially towards each other. Any form of emotions between male friends, and physical touch would automatically earn them their sexuality - being gay. So when men hold onto these rigid gender stereotypes, it perpetuates and dictates how men should be, how women should be, and therefore, it disadvantages women and reinforces gender inequality. 

As much as anime and manga are fictitious, it is still based on how society portrays men and women. it comes from somewhere, and because the fandom is always in discussion about their thoughts and feelings of the anime, and how the fandom treats other fans within the fandom, there are repercussions that comes from watching/reading fiction.

Character names

One of the first things Free! emphasised on were the “girly” names each of the male protagonists have. What I really like about this, is that just because you have a girly name, just because you show emotions and just because you genuinely love and care for your male friends, as a male character, this does not necessarily mean that you are gay. 

Society dictates that as soon as a man falls outside the male norm - i.e. if he doesn’t have a masculine name, if he has feminine features, if he show emotions, if he hugs his male friends, if he cries - then he must be gay. And this is the disconcerting thing I find with some fandoms - the need to categorise males and females into one box. It seems to me that men tend to have less of a leeway with these kinds of things. If you look at Gou for example, she does not have a feminine name. Her name gears toward more masculine or gender neutral, yet the anime clearly depicts her as having an interest in men. No one bats an eye. But this is different for the male characters, because when you feminise a man in any way, you have this misconception that he must be gay. Such perception reinforces toxic masculinity and ultimately increases the gender inequality gap. This is why women continue to be subjected to gender based violence, because people believe that men should not express their emotions, that they should express them in more unhealthy, aggressive ways or “manly ways”. And so violence towards women is condoned.

Free! is such a breath of fresh air. Not once throughout the entire show when I watched all three seasons did I say “oh, he cried in front of his friends, therefore he must be gay” or “he hugged his friend, therefore he must be gay.” Because heterosexual men should be able to do all this. They should be free to be what we call “being feminine” without being afraid that they would be labelled as gay. 

Heterosexual men can have close loving friendships with their male friends. They can tell their male friends that they love them, they care about them, that they can kiss them, without being labelled as gay. Because women do this to each other all the time and no one makes the assumption that she is a lesbian.

Heterosexual men can cry and be vulnerable to each other without the assumption of being labelled as gay

It’s okay for men to cry in front of their mates

Heterosexual men can hug each other and show physical affection without being labelled as gay

They should be able to express their feelings to each other and how much they care about each other.

And most importantly for the above scenes, heterosexual men should be able to say this to each other. There is nothing wrong with men being vulnerable and emotional, and telling each other that they care and love their friends.

Emotions, vulnerabilities and expressing feelings should be normalised amongst heterosexual men without them being labelled as gay. This is the only way to dismantle the patriarchy and the toxic masculinity that continuously plays in society, amongst film and fiction, and reality.

The characters spoke of their fears, their dreams, their friendships, their future, their past, and their struggles. This is not often something men talk about (let alone to each other) because they view discussions like this as weak and it makes them feel less of a man. But the Free! characters broke through these barriers and really put it all into perspective. And as young men, they portrayed this so well.

So thank you Free! for showing viewers (especially heterosexual male fans) that they can be vulnerable and that it is okay to be affectionate towards your mates.

Feel free to share your thoughts! And please be respectful! 💞

[ohnobjyx]

Would it be that impossible for dd and gg to come out as a couple (provided they respected censorship and didn't talk about it with the media)? I read the other day that homosexuality is not illegal in China, just talking about it and showing in the media, so could not someone as brave and crazy as dd attempt to come out outside of the media? after all they are the first 3 shipped real couples in china, they do have support. Coming out willingly would also save them from being eventually outed..

Hi, anon! (*this blogger cracks her neck and gets ready*) Let’s get into it!

Disclaimer: fake fake fake. Why would you think that we believe in bjyx?

Preface: this post might not be exactly a controversial opinion, since I think many will have the same one. However, it’s alright to disagree: we all have our own perception of the matter, which is coloured by our own experiences (let’s just say that an absolute objective view is difficult). I present here with the most objective post (at least in terms of data and facts) I could write.

Oh, and you all might have noticed, but being concise is not my forte. I tend to digress.

First of all, I assume that the concept of “coming out outside of the media” means that they could have told just close friends and family, without announcing it to the media.

But how would we know that they have done it? (and I don’t mean we should know for sure, ofc). For all we know, they may have already done this, and, from my pov, they probably have. Without entering in “fake” rumours:

TTXS bros know something (repeating myself for the nth time). From the way DZW jumps in whenever it remotely looks like dd is slipping up, how WH poses his questions, how QF teases him. It all seems references to a real, tangible thing, instead of baseless friendly teasing. It’s also very interesting that they have stopped their matchmaking mission and have instead started to defend why dd is “single”.

Their parents are their cover. Even if dd parents didn’t watch TTXS, wouldn’t someone else watch it and ask them about it? Wouldn’t they wonder about the supposed clothes that dd sends home, the medicine, the market stroll? Maybe I’m just projecting, but I wouldn’t use my parents as a shield if they weren’t aware of the situation behind it, because I’d be subjected to their questioning later. That’s why, unless I wanted to tell them or I had already told them, I wouldn’t use my parents as an excuse. So, once is alright, but dd has done it several times, and that, for me, means that his parents know.

That’s what I would consider “coming outside the media”. Of course, this doesn’t involve us fans, and it’s their decision, of which we probably will never hear about (or, at least, not soon, and that’s fine!). 

In my opinion, it’s also the best course of action, especially with all the rumours that are always circulating about them. It wouldn’t be a “brave and crazy” course of action, but rather the most sensible and rational, since it’s the best way to avoid misunderstandings with your friends and family. It’s also considerate for his friends at work, just so they know what to expect when they are on stage and it allows them to understand dd’s reactions.

(Again, we are talking about dd because that’s who anon asked about. I think gg’s circle is less close to him, so it may not be the case with him, but I don’t know enough to say what would happen).

Just let’s suppose his TTXS bros didn’t know anything and just kept trying to act as matchmakers for dd. That’s the kind of situation that’s bound to be uncomfortable for everyone because dd isn’t the kind of person who’d lie (and he doesn’t fast enough to improptu questions). 

The second thing I wanted to talk about is their fans’ support. I want to talk about numbers.

I’m going to explain why I only take the c-fans data as reference. We int fans don’t really count, because we don’t affect their careers directly, as c-fans do. Of course, our support is very useful in showing how many people are rooting for them, like what happened when Roseonly’s livestream with gg was live. And I like to think that they would feel better knowing that there are a lot of people in Chn and overseas that support them and whatever there is between them.

So int-fans do contribute to give more views and likes to their Roseonly livestream (if they can access it, which isn’t always the case), but they won’t buy the roses and impact with real money, so to say.

We don’t really participate in their endorsements, many won’t stay long enough to watch more dramas from them (and I do understand that the lack of eng subs is the main problem), and many don’t/can’t/don’t know how to push them up in the charts. We’ve talked before about how the c-ent industry doesn’t really need the int audience to make a lot of money, and to be highly profitable, and it still applies in a smaller case, like a single idol. 

That’s why I think that in matters of real, tangible fan support, c-fans still make a bigger percentage (around 80-90%) of their support.

So, as of now, there are 3 supertopics in w/ibo that features gg/dd (let’s leave the difference in supertopics for another day, but I don’t support the discussion about people’s sex life, thanks for your understanding):

BJYX. The largest supertopic (top 1) with a wide margin from the others. It has 2.570.000 fans.

ZSWW. It’s the number 5 in the CP supertopics, with 910.000 fans.

LXFY. The number 23 in the CP supertopics with 590.000 fans.

All of them added make 4.070.000 fans. But we have to take into account the overlapping in these three supertopics: many people (like me) are following the three supertopics at the same time. That’s why, in a not scientific way, I’m guessing that those 4.070.000 come to around 4.000.000 once you take out the people that are following the three at the same time.

Even 4 million people is still a huge number of people: that’s more people than the population of the capital of my country, and one tenth of the total census here.

Yet, in China, it means 4 out of every 1400, which translates into 0′003%. It’s also from a very specific demographic (mainly female and young). Of course, it doesn’t mean that they won’t get support from other people if it ever got out, but they can’t know what would happen then for sure.

It means that, in actual 3D world, there are a lot of people who don’t know about their CP. I read the other day some tumblr blogger saying that “we bxg are in our own little bubble, not that many people know about their cp” (was that you, @jcisthebestfightme?) which I agree a lot with. I mean, my w/ibo account and tumblr is filled with bjyx/yizhan, so much that it’s easy to forget that I arranged it to be like this, but that the majority of the people don’t receive so much info about them, nor they analyze their every move like we do.

The only thing they can know for sure is what general population thinks about same sex relationships.

In a recent poll I saw, with thousands of answers about what netizens thought of the legalization of same sex marriage in Taiwan, the supporting votes didn’t get to 50%. In Taiwan, public opinion was like this around the time same sex marriage was legalized:

An opinion poll conducted in November 2016 by the Kuomintang found that 52% of the Taiwanese population supported same-sex marriage, while 43% were opposed. Another poll commissioned that same month found similar numbers: 55% in support, and 45% in opposition. Support was higher among 20–29-year-olds (80%), but decreased significantly with age. (Wikipedia)

(I just want to say, I can’t wait for the younger generations to take over).

More data: the public stance in China could be described as: “no approval, no disapproval, no promotion”, and the public opinion is becoming more and more tolerant, but there’s still a deep-set homophobia, as in only 5% of the lgbt people comes out completely (around 20% comes out to their family), and around 80% of gay men are married to women due to social and family pressure (ofc, these data is from a few years ago, and new polls and surveys are needed, but don’t expect them to carry out a wide-range survey about this nor I think the situation has changed drastically).

In my opinion, society is slowly taking more steps towards tolerance first and acceptance second. One of their best achievement was the lgbt community and many netizens’ refusal to allow w/ibo to instate a ban on content related to homosexuality, which led to w/ibo actually reversing its decision and stop banning that content in less than 3 days.

However, the fact that a lot of people express their support doesn’t take away the truth of a lot of people openly opposing it (let’s remember that there weren’t so many antis to start with in 2/27, but its effects were undeniably large and unjust).

(If any of you read more data about lgbt rights in China, please remember that Hong Kong receives a lot more Western influence, and that public opinion in HK does not represent the actual situation in mainland Chn. Ofc, because they’re more open to lgbt, there are also more data and polls carried out in HK, so a lot of info is HK based).

Leaving this kind of data aside, let’s take another matter of numbers. While they have in total 4 million fans in the supertopics, dd has as of now 35,400,000 fans following him on w/ibo and gg has 26,690,000 fans.

One thing I’m sure they are aware of is the discussion that arises from time to time between the solo fans and the bxg. Another thing they must be aware of, specially dd, is that their fanbase has a lot of females who are their fans, not just because of their talent, but also because they’re single and therefore they can fantasize about being with them.

All in all, even though a lot of people support them, there would be also quite a number of “disappointed” people, with the danger of them becoming antis.

So while I do think they appreciate it, and leave clues specifically for us, and dd goes as far as interacting with bxg, I also feel that gg and dd might not see widespread support, enough so they’d feel comfortable coming out completely with the current public stance on homosexual relationships in Chn.

(And again, from my pov, they aren’t in the closet with their family and friends).

And last, but not least, does “coming out respecting the censorship and not talking about it with the media” mean that it would be known by the general public, or, at least, their fans (in a very hypothetic case, since I don’t know how this could be achieved)? Because then, even if they didn’t talk about it with the media, it would be as good as coming out publicly.

In an idol’s life there’s no “private” and “public”. There’s only “public” and “secret” (and by secret I mean things they “hide” in public/don’t talk about, even though people next to them might know about it). The line between public and private is very very blurred in the c-ent industry.

I always remember the case of an actor who had an affair. Because of his affair (he was married and had a son), he lost endorsements, he was taken out of tv programs and literally erased from filmed episodes. The things he did in private affected very directly his job (I don’t approve of the affair, but the consequences it had surprised me a lot). 

So, while I do think that gg and dd are getting bolder with time, when they were both very startled by the “you’d lose your job if you were in a relationship” phrase, the fear was real and palpable. However, I’m aware that that was their stance a year ago, and that a lot of things have changed (heck, we’ve gone through a pandemic, something I couldn’t have imagined a year ago), so I’m going to observe how they act from now.

That’s why, “coming out willingly would also save them from being eventually outed..” is true, but it’s also true that it would push them into a storm I’m not sure they’d come out completely unscathed. And it may be selfish, but I don’t want them to be the ones who test the public’s tolerance to gay idols.

I think I’m missing my point, so I’ll spell it out: if they want to come out, I’ll support them with everything I have, as I think many fans will do. If they ever prove us wrong dating another person, be it male or female, I’ll support them as a fan too. But I would like any action they take to be decided by them, instead of pressed by fans who just want a confirmation at any cost.

I’ve seen people saying that if they were really together, they should be “honest” with themselves and the audience and come out publicly. In my opinion, it’s easy to judge when you’re not the one who might lose something if you take a step in the wrong direction, and it’s not your income and your job in the line.

I’m sure (reminding you all that I believe that bjyxszd) that they’d come out completely if possible. I’m also sure that they have consulted with managers and public relations experts (and their team would have talked with them about it even if gg and dd didn’t bring it up). Therefore, I strongly believe they are doing what they think is better at the time being. 

To sum up: I’ll support whatever they do, but I don’t want others to push them to do things they don’t want/aren’t prepared to do. They are already between a rock and a hard place, so whatever they do with their relationship is absolutely their call.

So, anon, I hope I have answered you, but I leave here a short summary for you in the case the info was too scattered for you:

Would it be that impossible for dd and gg to come out as a couple (provided they respected censorship and didn't talk about it with the media)? I read the other day that homosexuality is not illegal in China, just talking about it and showing in the media, so could not someone as brave and crazy as dd attempt to come out outside of the media?

They might have come out to friends and family, and, based on dd’s interactions with the people around him and the words he has said, I do believe he has. Because gg is also an honest, sensible person, I think he might have done the same.

after all they are the first 3 shipped real couples in china, they do have support 

Chn is a big country. That means that in terms of public support, sometimes numbers that would be astronomically high in other countries, is not so much in Chn. Translating numbers into percentage, a 1% means 14 million people.

So it’s true that they have a lot of people supporting them, of course. 2 million people is a lot of people, especially considering that many don’t know about them. But when you have to take into account the general public (because it’d be a scandal), since their fans aren’t the only ones interacting with them, it’s still a low number.

Coming out willingly would also save them from being eventually outed.. 

That’s true in the case of family and friends. But if you’re talking about being outed in the media, that’s not possible. Known by the fans = Public.

And remember that in this case, the media wouldn’t talk about them, since talking about homosexuality in the media is prohibited. The problem would come from within the industry and the antis.

[gildedmuse]

Question, which ship do you personally find the most cannon, ZoLu, ZoSan or ZoLaw? To expand on the question which ship for you has the most potential to possibly become cannon, I personally love all the ships, but I was wondering your thoughts on it? Ps reallyyyy love your AO3 works especially the ZoLaw! And the headcanon about them being trained by Rayleigh in the Modern AU!!!

Short Answer:

Zoro x Luffy is obviously the ship that makes the most sense and has the most examples you can point to in the canon while saying, "see that, that is love."

Long Answer No One Cares About:

This question awoke something dark inside of me, and I apologize for the overly long answer.

So, here's the thing: I don't really like 99% of "crack" ships which I would personally define as characters who have never met, whose personalities clash with one another's, and who share no common traits or grounds on which they might potentially relate to one another. Pretty much, if you have to invent a secret, noncanon background that totally changes a character's personality so that they can hook up with another character, I'm probably not going to ship it. Though, hey, if that's your thing you fly that flag high and proud. Shippers should support other shippers, regardless of cargo.

Buuuut.... At the same time, I also do not give a fuck about my ships being canon. Not only because, hey, it's my imagination and I'll do what I want with it, thank you very much, but also being a canon ship doesn't mean shit. Just because a creator decided two characters should hook up doesn't mean that it's logical or sound or feasible or healthy or somehow more "correct" than other pairings. In fact, what it usually means is that one character is a man, the other is a woman, and they are both attractive. Which, you know, is a pretty bullshit reason to start a relationship. If you've ever gone out with someone solely because they're attractive and the opposite gender of yourself than either:

Congratulations on what I hope was some truly amazing sex

So sorry about that awkward sexual encounter

You likely have first hand experience on how unstable and unsustainable such relationships can be.

So being a canon ship does not necessarily give you a pass in my books. For starters, most of my ship's be gay as fuck, and as someone who grow up without a lot of gay representation in media, I have learned not to expect anything despite how OBVIOUSLY DEEPLY CONNECTED characters might be.

[Side Note: And, yes, it's mostly male characters, because throughout the history of entertainment culture the vast majority was created by people men who had total faith in their ability to write realistic female characters despite all evidence pointing to the fact that they never once talked to an actual real life woman. I mean, how hard could it be? All women have basically the same personalty traits (boobs) and everyone knows female are monolithic group whose sole purpose in life is finding the most protagonistic male out there and immediately become his love interest. Which is why I just don't even bother with folks who look down on fans of slash/yaoi/gay ass ships because in a frankly sad amount of media, these pairings often make more practical sense as well as being more appealing to those of us who want romantic relationships based on personality, shared interests, or just between two well developed characters rather than one fully realized character and one cardboard cut out of Generic Attractive Female Person.]

When female characters are written as stereotypes whose defining characteristics is "she's a girl!" then of course the male characters with fully realized personalities and complex characterization will appeal to most people, including those of us who prefers their romantic pairings to have an actual foundation outside of "penis + vagina = love" it makes sense to ship the male characters who we get to see build a relationship, share common interests/traits/goals, and just generally ) So I have accepted that canon couples often mean nothing, because when it comes to romance so many creators are stuck in some heteronormative mindset where they totally forget all the work they've done building the character and defining their personality and sticking them with the first person they meet that has tits.

Basically, I am an English major whose end game is to be a college professor. And I am all about Death Of The Author, but also Show Me Your Workings. I don't need a relationship to be canon, what I need is for there to be a reason behind it. Preferably one that is deeper than "Tarzan love Jane because man loves woman" or "but they're both so pretty!!!!"

Taking all that into account, Zoro and Luffy were my first ship for a reason. There are so many little moments between the two you can point at as proof of their devotion and love (romantic or platonic, however you prefer to see it) for one another. I don't just mean the way Zoro took all Luffy's pain. I'm talking about how Luffy will always say things like, "I hope Zoro and the others are okay" or "When we get there I want to have huge feast with Zoro and the others". How often do you designate one of your friends over all the rest, naming them apart from the group? Personally, I either name everyone or no one, the exception being if one of them is someone I'm dating and therefore actually in a separate category from my other friends.

It's the way Zoro has all this nonverbal dialogue with Luffy which allows him to implicitly trust in whatever mad scheme Luffy has cooked up. When more rational people (Nami and Usopp) object out if, you know, sanity, Zoro can always tell when Luffy's plans are just silly gun, when he's throwing out his first thought just to say something, and when he's statement is made with full, unyielding conviction. And Zoro believes in Luffy enough that, when his captain has that level of assuredness, Zoro has no reason to doubt in him. Zoro is a man of actions - while oaths and promises are important, they only meant anything if you always follow through with actions. Luffy never fails to turn his promises into deeds, and so in a way they speak the same language. They understand one another on a deeper level.

And again, it's small things. The way Luffy can get even post-time skip Zoro to smile, or how Luffy will offer to share his lunch with Zoro, the way at the coliseum in Dressrosa, Zoro gets upset about Luffy not informing him there was a fight and Luffy actually apologizing. They have all these little moments to show how deeply connected they are, how much they understand one another, and more importantly how much faith they have in one another so even when one of them might not fully understand the other's reasoning, they never fail to support one another or know the other will pull through.

In my opinion, that is the bases of a strong relationship. That support and understanding; the sense that even if one of them may fail (and almost get chopped in half as a result) or fuck up (see Luffy. Just... Luffy) that it doesn't lessen the other one's believe in them. If anything, they know these set backs mean the other will fight twice as hard to come back even stronger.

I could literally list a thousand moments when they have each other's backs, when the whole crew doubts one of the except for the other, when they offer support even if it's unpopular or seems crazy. And yet they still have little fights, they aren't "made for one another" the way shallow love interests often are, but when it comes to the important moments they trust one another implicitly and show unwavering acceptance without the other having to validate or explain their reasoning. Luffy trusts Zoro with the crew's life, the most important thing in Luffy's world, and Zoro... Well in many ways Luffy has become the most important thing in his world. You see it the moment Zoro kowtows in front of Mihawk - the man Zoro has sworn to defeat and who is at the center of Zoro's life goal - all because Luffy needs him to be stronger; for the crew, to achieve Luffy's dream.

Mihawk even thinks to himaelf, who is the man you are willing to set aside your pride for, because he knows men like Zoro and the only reason they would ask such a favour from a rival is out of loyalty to someone.

So, yeah, not that it matters, but I'm terms of canon, Mihawk basically says, "this kid is in love, only someone in love would be so willing to set aside their dreams and goals for those of someone else."

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 2nd Season Ep25 [”I’m Different Now”]:

For the season finale [but not series finale, because they’ve already announced a third and final season for next year], we get a huge plot twist that completely changes our perspective on one of the characters, and their various relationships, in a way that has major implications about the future of the story and how things will progress.

Aside from all that, we also get the world’s worst gender reveal party.

Thoughts under the cut.

Just to start off, this episode adapted chapters 96 and 97 like I figured it would, to wrap up this season with a big cliffhanger to hype people up for the final season. And for better or worse, this was a pretty much 1:1 adaptation of these chapters, so there’s not really any differences to talk about that I noticed.

Anyway, I may as well just cut right to the chase and talk about the whole Shocking Gender Reveal Plot Twist[tm], now that that’s out in the open and everyone can stop tiptoeing around it.

It’s not like I’ve really tried to hide it or how I feel about it as a plot point before this, but I really do dislike it on basically every level. There’s a whole lot to unpack about it, but really at the end of the day it’s just one of those old-fashioned plot devices where we’re meant to think that someone being a different gender to what you thought they were is inherently something scandalous and shocking. They could have at least immediately started talking about the idea of her being raised as a man against her will, since that’d at least give it some actual meaning and value, but they don’t, which really says a lot about how that’s actually kinda just a foot-note that the story doesn’t dwell on much, and in practice we’re just meant to be surprised that she’s a girl.

It doesn’t really help that the season just ends right there, when in the manga this whole sequence keeps going in the next chapter, and I think they start touching upon that part of Akito’s backstory then, but the anime won’t get into that until next year at this point, so I think it’s fair to take it as it’s presented right now.

The idea of Akito being a girl is surprising in basically the exact same way that it’d be surprising if we found out that Haru was a Sanrio fan, or something. That is to say, it’d be vaguely surprising, but then we’d all just go on with our lives.

Even at this point you can definitely guess that there’s probably something going on with her being forced to present as a man, but it hasn’t really been explained or touched upon yet, so it’s all pretty nebulous, at least from the perspective of someone like Tohru who barely knows Akitto at all and doesn’t know all the stuff about her past that Kureno does.

In general I’ve never been a fan of this entire trope to begin with, but I think it’s made a lot worse by the fact that, as you get further into the rest of the story, it becomes clear that it’s not even that important, and the majority of what’s going on with Akito’s character has much more to do with the curse situation and how it impacts her relationship with the zodiac members. The whole deal with her character is how being the god of the zodiac from birth forced her to be pretty much raised in seclusion, with her only frame of reference for human relationships being abusive cult behavior. She’s miserable and twisted because she isn’t allowed to live a normal life due to her status, and her possessiveness gets enabled by the people that she clings onto, putting her into a loop of arrested development and mental instability.

And literally none of that has anything to do with her gender, lol. None of it would be different if she was a cis man, or if she had been raised as a woman. Because that whole deal isn’t actually all that relevant to why she is the way she is, why she has the attitude and world-view that she does, and why her relationships are so fucked up. Even if you decided to write out her romantic/sexual relationships with people like Kureno and Shigure by having her be a man, that’d barely change anything about the story as a whole, because even if it was entirely for platonic reasons Kureno would have still decided to stay with Akito and ultimately enable her actions, and Shigure would most likely still more or less do all the same things he’s already done. And obviously to begin with, if Akito was actually a dude that wouldn’t even necessarily mean you couldn’t still have some of these relationships play out this way, so you can’t even really act like the story required her to be a girl for that reason, lol.

And for better or worse, if Akito was written as a gay dude, it could still totally have lead to all the same stuff with her possessiveness over the male zodiac members, and her irrational hatred of the female zodiac members. It’d just be a different, more homophobic sort of trope than what actually happens, in a way that plays out in basically the exact same way. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten a villain who’s a gay dude that irrationally hates women for Reasons [tm], and who has ominous and sinful relationships with men.

Which is also the reason why I don’t exactly think the story would be ‘better’ if she had been written as a gay dude, or as a trans woman, or anything like that. With her whole role in the story to begin with, it’d play out in an obnoxious way no matter what. Mostly I just kinda wish they had completely avoided this sort of outdated, schlocky storytelling to begin with, and just focused entirely on the more interesting stuff about her character.

And in terms of outdated tropes, we haven’t even gotten properly introduced to Ren yet, lol.

I’m also assuming that they’re not exactly planning to change anything about this in the anime, so I’m just going with my existing thoughts about how the manga handled it, since that should still carry over to the anime.

I know that this is all just beating a dead horse with a stick because of how long the series has been out for, but I still just can’t help but be irritated by this whole mess.

I don’t want to spoil it too much, but I think a good comparison to make is the recent Banana Fish adaptation, and how from what I gathered, most people’s reactions to that series’ ending was ‘I know it’s just a product of it’s time, but this is just kinda unironically shitty’.

Ultimately, I think a big part of why this annoys me so much is because I actually really like Akito’s whole character and what the story does with her after this point. I just dislike how it’s shackled to this unnecessary plot twist that ends up dominating the conversation surrounding her even though it’s barely relevant to anything after this in the story.

The stuff with her being the god of the zodiac and how much it fucks up her entire life and all of her relationships is genuinely really compelling, and represents an integral part of the story’s overall message about the nature of abusive families and cults, and the various ways they end up hurting everyone inside them. Her whole arc is about learning how to embrace a life that’s not based around being a god surrounded by their followers, and I think that aspect of it works really well, especially with how it ties into all the stuff with Tohru later on.

I also think that all the stuff with Kureno that gets revealed in this episode is genuinely really interesting, and is ACTUALLY a plot twist that meaningfully shakes things up, and people actually have a reason to be surprised by it. Especially Tohru, since her whole goal at this point is to break the curse, and now she’s literally found someone who’s already had their curse get broken. It’s basically the first major lead she’s found in her whole search for answers, but in the end it kinda just, y’know, gets overshadowed by the gender reveal and her being shocked about that instead.

It’s also still really interesting to me how the Kureno situation is basically the only time where the story seriously talks about the implications of the animal transformation part of the curse, and how someone in the zodiac might internalize that part of themselves. Most of the time, the animal transformation part of the curse is kinda irrelevant, and the series could work in 99% the same way without it. I think Takaya’s literally said before that she didn’t even plan to include that whole aspect of the story until her editor suggested it fairly late into the process, and I think that shows with how it’s kinda just there for some wacky hijinks early on, and then it just gets benched in favor of the actual stuff Takaya wanted to write about.

But with Kureno we actually get a look into what it meant for him to be able to literally turn into a bird, and how losing that ability affected his sense of identity and how he engaged with the world. It’s still ultimately just metaphorical in it’s own way, but it still feels like more of an acknowledgement of the fact that they literally turn into animals than basically any other part of the story, lol. And in general I just think it’s at least compelling on paper that he ends up shackling himself of his own free will, because that sense of freedom and disconnect made him feel obligated to stay with Akito to ‘make up for it’.

I just wish that Kureno as a whole was interesting enough for me to actually care that much about all of this, lol. In the end he’s just kinda intentionally boring, and it’s more interesting to write about his role in the story than it is to actually, like, watch him do stuff as a character. Which I guess is all just part of how much it bugs me that all of the interesting stuff in this episode, and this whole part of the story, feels like it gets overshadowed and drowned out by a dumb shock value plot twist.

There’s also all the thematic stuff with how he’s basically Tohru if she was taken advantage of and had all of her own bad habits enabled until she ended up barely being a functioning adult. He even has his whole personal conflict about feeling like moving on with his life and developing new relationships is an act of betrayal towards someone that he really needs to let go of at this point. But then you just get into the whole Uo thing and how their whole relationship is about as compelling as the whole Cinderella plot that it’s clearly a reference to, and aaaaaaah why is this series so frustrating, lol.

Really, the fact that I can gripe so much about stuff like this just goes to show how much I like the series in general, since I can’t muster up any strong feelings about stuff like this if I just straight up dislike it as a whole. At least for me, stuff like this is much more frustrating when it’s one part of a larger story that I really love. Thankfully there’s more good than bad when it comes to this series, so I can still hold onto it as a personal fave that I just happen to have complaints about.

I’m genuinely really excited for the final season, in spite of all this, since there’s a whole lot I love about the final third of the manga, and in a funny way, the fact that Akito being a girl isn’t actually that big of a deal in the long run, and what actually happens with her as a character after this is more about her status as the god of the zodiac, actually means that I’ll [mostly] enjoy a lot of it. It’s mostly just this specific part where we get the Big Reveal [tm] itself, and the immediate lead-up to it, that bugs me.

Anyway, as a whole, I still think this is a good episode that serves as a fitting cliffhanger for the season. The actual plot twist that most of the episode focuses on is really good, and serves a really meaningful role in progressing the story, and it gives a pretty clear picture of how we’re entering the final act of the story.

Hopefully the final season will start in April next year like the first two seasons did, but it’s entirely possible it might get delayed because of the whole pandemic situation. But I could live with them holding off on starting the final season until it’s ready to come out.

Also, before I forget, they haven’t said anything about it, I’m pretty sure the final season will also be around 25 episodes long. With how many chapters they have left, if they stick to the same two chapters per episode pace that the anime’s had on average thus far, they could easily cover the rest of the story in 22 episodes, which would be a lot easier to expand by an extra two or three episodes, than it’d be to condense it all the way down to 13 or so episodes.

[bingleycharles]

First off, I don’t spend a lot of time on tumblr any more, and this blog was mainly meant to be a reference blog for wuxia/xianxia genre, which has been my favorite genre for a long time. My main intention was to provide some information that might be helpful (I think MDZS becoming so popular so quickly due to the tv drama came a bit unexpected to us who have loved the novel for a long time) and not really engage much beyond that. But, the more time I spend here, the more I feel that some things need to be said.

There’s been a lot of talk about the MDZS novel dubcon/noncon elements and I definitely had no intention of engaging with that to any extent, but the mentality of this particular group of people (and I use that term generously because it’s mainly the mentality of extremely sheltered children) on tumblr is so unbelievably wild that someone needs to say something, and I guess that’s going to be me. I am going to warn people in advance, that I am going to make no attempts to be nice about this, because after some of the discussions I’ve seen recently, even if niceness was deserved, I certainly am no longer capable of it.

Now that the disclaimer is in place, let’s talk a bit about where this hatred for mxtx and her sex scenes comes from.

1. People who believe that nothing problematic should exist in fiction, because nothing problematic should exist in the world.

Sometimes, this is based on a simple inability to recognize how fiction and real world are not, in fact, the same thing, and this inability can be more commonly found among those too young to understand complex subjects (see great majority of the above children, who have already caused a great deal of damage to vulnerable communities by misusing and misrepresenting terms like pedophilia, incest, etc, etc). More often however, it is based on the inability to understand how real word and fiction are actually related, an inability that is unfortunately found among many people who should be considered adults. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of both, rooted in a belief that real world problems exist because they are normalized in fiction (but not all world problems because no one is trying to get rid of murder mysteries, just the icky problems they don’t actually wanna think about or do anything to solve, but would still like to never see again. All this while simultaneously getting to say “well, I’m against incest in fiction so that’s my contribution to the issue,” so they can then feel good about themselves).

This belief, by the way, that real world problems exist because they are normalized in fiction, has been proven as a false narrative many times, but like “Bible says all gay people are evil” or “climate change isn’t real” doctrines, it refuses to die even when faced with facts. “Fiction does not exist in a vacuum” they keep saying, as if those capable of critical thinking have not addressed this subject so many times, that you could practically walk your way across the Pacific Ocean on their responses alone. The real world problems do not exist because someone once wrote them down in a piece of fiction, and that should be abundantly clear to us all. Instead, problematic subjects exist in fiction precisely because they existed in the real world first, and we, the human beings, find writing things down to be one of the many ways we process information, problematic or otherwise.

There is also an insistence on seeing every piece of fiction as an instruction manual for “bad things,” and honestly, I don’t know what happens in these people’s heads, nor do I want to. Again, according to them, any underage fiction is an instructional manual for a possible pedophile, but tens of thousands of murder mysteries are just entertainment. If you read/write underage fiction, you must be a pedophile, but by the same logic, if you read/write bloody murder mysteries, this logic either doesn’t apply, or murder is just fine. So inevitably we go back to the fact that a lot of these issues are only raised by people who just don’t think anything they personally find “icky” should exist, and that’s rooted mostly in white privilege (and we’ll get to the white minority individuals later) and ethnocentricity (and we’ll get to that in a minute too). Basically, when I hear “people will learn that rape is okay from fiction,” I automatically think you’re either extremely immature or extremely ignorant, or both. Please take a psychology/sociology class or seven, throw in Moral Development 101 in the mix, and get back to me in like ten years, when we can both try and have an adult conversation. In the meantime, arguing against this is like arguing with climate change deniers. More likely to make me dumber than them smarter.  

In short, you will never be able to get rid of problematic fiction, because you will never make the world not problematic, nor will stopping the people who choose to reflect their problematic world in writing fiction accomplish absolutely anything, except them having no way to process their reality, and you being considered an immature child (which most people who think like this already are, so no news there, let’s move on).

2. They believe things are problematic because they believe that their particular experiences are common to everyone else. If they see it as problematic, then everyone else should to see it that way too.

This should be self-explanatory, and a thousand of these discussions have been held in the past, by people more eloquent than myself, about every subject from rape fantasies and bondage (go back a few years to 50 shades), to experiences that are unique to specific minority groups, like trans individuals, refugees, rape survivors, those with disabilities, multi-national and multi-racial individuals, and so on and so forth. Even among the hundreds and hundreds of these vulnerable groups of individuals, there are hundreds of different subgroups, whose experiences are all wildly different, wildly subjective, and all completely valid to them, regardless of how they differ.

None of us have the ability to understand each and every one of those unique experiences. At best, we may be able to somewhat understand a few people who have had similar experiences, but our opinions on a variety of subjects have been shaped by the smallest differences in those experiences, and are likely to never be exactly the same.

What I’m saying is this: the little white girl from Iowa, regardless of her minority status as disabled/lesbian/bi/queer female, will never understand what drives a young/disabled/queer/multiracial/2nd gen. immigrant girl, to write 55k of rape fantasy fiction between two multiracial men, and she doesn’t have to understand it. Neither her disability nor her queerness should give her a single iota of moral high ground over the other individual, or vice versa. Her personal understanding of what is morally right or wrong in fiction does not give her the right (nor should it ever) to pass judgment on anyone else’s experiences, or their method for processing those experiences. There is no sensitive way I can say this, so I’m not even gonna try. You don’t get to be automatically right because you’re gay, disabled, or a minority of any kind. Like, I know this is uncomfortable to hear, but people around here often use their status to invalidate others and to get them not to engage in any type of discussion that would prove their opinions wrong. I’m literally watching children on tumblr going, “I don’t need to know about oppression, I’m gay,” like holy shit. The only oppression you know is your own. That’s it. Please tone down the arrogance and realize you’re not alone in the world, minority or not.

I get that if you were raped, you may never want to see rape in fiction. But in the same vein, there exist people who were raped, and want to see rape in fiction. I get that you’re gay and offended by certain type of fiction, but there are also people who are gay and prefer the same type of fiction you find offensive. This is exactly when words like “pedophile” and “incest” get thrown around a lot, for things that in no way meet the definition. Because there is no factual or valid argument that exists here, and people are browbeating other people by saying “Well, I’m gay and oppressed and I just don’t like it so it has to be wrong.” But when the dissenter is also gay and oppressed, and you have to admit that based on the status you’ve used to validate yourself, you also have to admit that their opinion is as valid as yours, then the only fallback is to point a finger and say that there must be something wrong with them. “Well, your opinion is not valid because you read underage fiction so you’re a pedophile,” and this is literally what keeps happening over and over again.

At the root of all this is a twisted, sick belief, that those who process their issues and their problematic environments in the morally pure and acceptable way are the only valid voices in every community, and that everyone else’s experiences are immediately invalidated by default. It’s a pretty fucking gross rhetoric, and it’s been going on here on tumblr for a very long time now, but it’s only gotten worse, and it’s especially prevalent among the new influx of mdzs “fans.”

3. They believe things are problematic because their culture considers them problematic, and they have no concept of the fact that theirs is not the only culture in the world.

This is particularly nasty proclivity, commonly found in Western consumers of fiction. The Western audiences like to think themselves enlightened, despite the fact that most Eastern cultures have carpets in their government buildings older than the entire Western culture, system of law, morality codes, or their Constitutions. This is mostly true of U.S. in particular because their ethnocentrism keeps self-validating itself through ignorance, poor education, and other evils of capitalism. But it’s also true of other white European consumers of fiction, who have a long history of colonialism to thank for their continuous insistence that their morality is more enlightened than everyone else’s (oh, the irony of that). But not to go too far from the subject at hand, if I had a dollar every time a white girl from United States said “Ew, this rape scene this Chinese author wrote is really gross and I find it to be offensive to my entire existence,” I could pretty much overthrow the entire capitalist system that produced this ethnocentric fucking nonsense in the first place.

In short, there are many individuals in the West, who might be minorities in their general community, but have no concept or understanding of other cultures, other minority communities, or other individuals that have life experiences drastically different from their own, so they judge everything they see from their own perspective, because it is the only perspective they have, and unfortunately, it’s a pretty narrow one. There is an important lesson to be learned here, and it’s the one I’ve already mentioned above:

Being queer, or being any kind of a minority, does not automatically save you from being ignorant, being ethnocentric, being unable to understand other people’s experiences (minority or otherwise), and it most certainly does not mean that your queer culture is the only right queer culture in the world. If you doubt my words, I highly suggest consulting some native-Chinese male queer individuals, who have also read that rape scene by that Chinese author who has upset you so much that you can’t stop crying about it (although it wasn’t written for you, and you were under no obligation to read it), and maybe ask them what they think, since their opinion is the only one even close to being relevant to this particular conversation. I guarantee that their answers will shock and amaze you, and you may even learn a thing or two along the way.

(And if you immediate answer isn’t that their opinions will all be wildly different as well because them all being native-Chinese male queer individuals still doesn’t mean they’re all the same fucking person [because hello? China has 56 ethnic groups alone] and that each and every one of them is a unique individual with a unique perspective based on their particular upbringing, social environment, sexuality, etc, etc, then you’re fucking missing the point, please go back up to the beginning and try again).

In the end, the answer to never having to see anything that upsets you is pretty simple and straight forward. If it’s bothersome, do not engage. If you don’t understand something, if it seems alien to your experience, if your very existence feels utterly repulsed by it, consider the fact that it was probably not written for you in the first place, and simply remove yourself from its presence.

Do not assume that you know why it was written, do not assume it is a personal attack against your existence, do not assume that you understand (or ever could) the culture that gave it birth, the history that formed it, or the shared experiences of those who happen to like it. Do not assume that you are the authority on problematic when it comes to anyone else’s work except your own, because you are a unique individual, your moral beliefs and expectations are your own, and no one else is required to share them. The world does not have a common morality, and if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be a common morality of a white girl on fucking tumblr who isn’t gonna take an intercultural competence class unless she’s in her fourth year of college, and even then, the exact privilege that allowed her to take that class is gonna make it pretty unlikely that she’ll understand it. It’s a tough life I know, but you’ll get over it tolerably well I’m sure.

In the simplest words possible, please try and turn a mirror towards your own propensity to think that your viewpoint is superior to all others, quit making excuses that amount to your particular minority status somehow making you immune to rampant cultural ignorance, because it’s literally been centuries of this bullshit from white colonialists countries for the rest of the world, and everyone is pretty fucking sick of it.

People are simply asking you not to be a dick to other unique individuals on the sole basis of the fact that you are incapable of processing their world, their culture, or their experiences, in the same exact way that they have, and frankly, it’s really not a lot to ask.

[safflowerseason]

Idk if this is weird but where do you think Amy and Dan are on the sexuality spectrum?

It’s absolutely not a weird question at all! Although I’m not sure I can give an answer as thoughtful as my usual Dan/Amy posts….I’m obviously a major Dan/Amy shipper, lol, but of course I am very aware there are plenty of fans who ship Amy/Selina and Dan/Jonah. And I think it’s especially significant that for the most part, the textual foundations for those ships are actually found in the Iannucci era of the show (and, as usual, my answer to this question is mostly about Iannucci-Dan and Iannucci-Amy). You have Dan, obsessed with the physical/aesthetic trappings of masculinity, who seems to primarily view sex with women as a conduit to professional gain while there is little textual indication he enjoys it on its own merits (except with Amy). And Amy is a ball of ambitious anxiety who can’t unclench long enough to be in a sexually satisfying relationship with a man. Both characters also have fairly intense relationships with other members of the same sex, in addition to one another—Dan with Jonah, although mostly in S2 and S3, and Amy with Selina throughout the course of the show.

If I had to bet money, based on what we see in the show, whether it was Dan or Amy who had a consensual sexual encounter with another member of the same sex, it would probably be Dan, for a few reasons. On a very superficial note, Dan’s absolutely the type of guy who would be in a fraternity, and fraternities are some of the most deeply homoerotic institutions in the United States (there is extensive academic research about this. See also Dan pushing Jonah up against a wall, smashing a burrito in his face, and calling him “handsome.”). For another, his relationship with Jonah in the early years of the show is partly bound up in their competing performances of masculinity, and it’s not a stretch that their sexual hostility toward one another (or Dan’s with another man at some other point in his life) could actually turn, well, sexual. I do not think the show ever means to seriously imply that Dan and Jonah are interested in fucking one another, but the reading of their relationship works that way, if you want to take it there. Reid Scott and Tim Simons do have a particular spiky kind of chemistry that the early seasons of the show very much leans into—I believe that the S1 episode where Dan uses Jonah for intel was originally called “Dan Dates Jonah” or something like that. By late S3, the Dan/Jonah dynamic has faded into the background, and then Mandel takes their energy into this kind of less charged, bro-y territory in later seasons.

As for Amy…it’s harder to evaluate her because Veep is such a male-dominated show. She is presented as more sexually repressed (I find this concept problematic, but the show is pretty explicit about the framing) and also a lot more emotionally guarded…and considering her suburban/slightly blue-collar middle class socialization, I’m not sure she would have ever explored her sexuality enought to really consider sex with a woman. She’s vaguely propositioned by Melissa from Clovis, but the sexual implications seem to go right over her head. Amy’s primary female relationship in the show is with Selina, and while they are deeply drawn to one another for various reasons, personally none of it feels sexual to me as a viewer. As for whether or not Amy would be interested in exploring a relationship with another woman, I think she’d have to go through a lot of intense self-reflection and discovery first, and I’m not sure Amy is primed to ever do that for herself. Of the two of them, I think Dan on the whole would have a more fluid sexuality, whether or not he feels the need to identify as something other than straight.

Does that answer your question enough? I’m not sure I can give you, like, a number on the Kinsey scale, lol, but that’s my inital take on where things might stand. I don’t think Veep isn’t especially interested in exploring the sexuality of its characters insofar as they might differ from privileged heterosexual, cisgendered norms…it's a pretty small-c conservative show in that sense. Most mentions of same-sex relationships/sexual encounters are played for laughs, unfortunately…the way Gary’s sexual orientation is called into question by the other characters in the show is basically a bunch of off-color jokes about how gay men like “feminine” things. And the lack of attention paid to the sexual harassment of women in the workplace is another example of this curious distinterest in using gender and sexuality to criticize the political institutions at the heart of the show. But this absolutely does not and should not preclude a deeper examination from fans. What else is critical analysis and fanfiction for?

As a final sidenote, it has been interesting watching Succession as a Veep fan, knowing the two shows share the same creative DNA. Succession is also fairly small-c conservative, but the writers seem to be more consciously exploring performative masculinity in the workplace (not to mention the intersection of family and power, a intersection that is primarily defined by sex). The Boar on the Floor sequence, just off the top of my head. But even in a broader character sense—the way Tom acts when he’s in the office versus around the Roy family, the contrast between Roman and the other men in the office, Roman and Gerri’s connection, etc. The Succession writers also seem more interested in constructing complicated relationships between male characters that are purposefully sexually ambiguous, like Kendall and Stewey.

[saezutte]

yuletide letter 2020

Dear Yuletide Writer, 

Oh, hello again. I didn’t see you there.

This year, I have transcended earthly desires and struggled to find any fandoms to request. I want nothing. I wish my cat was nominated as a Yuletide fandom so we could all write stories about her life. 

Nonetheless, I have some small requests!!!! I believe you can make me happy in ways I’ve never been happy before. I trust you. Happy end of 2020, the cursed year, I hope you are blessed with rest. 

My AO3: saezutte

My public twitter: juncassis

My tumblr: here but I do not use tumblr much anymore, sorry.

Do Not Wants

[note: I have no actual triggers, nothing you can write for me will make me any more depressed or anxious than I already am]

Death (of major/important/beloved characters)

Suicide attempts, self-harm

Rape (outright; OK with dub con, manipulation, noncon short of violent-rape-for-violence-only)

Eating disorders, body shaming

Angst without a happy ending, really too much angst at all

Established relationship

Cheating

Actual Unrequited Feelings

Pregnancy (the actual process; breeding kink is fine)

Scat or watersports

Hard BDSM or any kink complicated enough that the characters would have to discuss it ahead of time

Homophobia as a plot device

Excessive attention to identity or politics, sometimes known as “issue fic”

Note on AUs: I am ok with the usual popular AU tropes but I do not want them combined, e.g. A/B/O is fine and coffeeshop is fine, but I don’t want an omega barista getting his scent all over the lattes he makes for some alpha lawyer who comes in every morning. (Ridiculous example, but you get the point.) For AU/modern settings of fandoms with magic, I often like it when the magic is still there in the AU setting. I also like AUs which maintain the general outlines of the character’s relationships, like if the characters are childhood friends in canon, I like to keep that intact.

General preferences:

I am a pretty basic bitch when it comes to fanfic: I like it when two clueless boys pine for each other through some shenanigans and then lock eyes/lips/dicks.

If you fed a neural net every fanfic written in Stargate Atlantis fandom between 2005 and 2010, the result would probably be some nonsense I’d enjoy.

I love many tropes. Tropes! Bed-sharing. Sharing an umbrella. WASHING EACH OTHER’S HAIR? Confessions where they are having an argument and then one of them yells “Because I love you!”

I love situations where characters are forced to spend time in close proximity and find themselves with feelings.

I love fakeness: fake dating, fake marriage, arranged marriage, marriage of convenience, fake lust induced by sex pollen or heats, aliens make them have sex, whatever.

I love porn, if you want to just write me some quick porn, that’s great. I do prefer (per the established relationship DNW above) that it be first time or get together porn. I know that can make it hard to just write porn, but I don’t need much to be convinced of sex.

Nirvana in Fire (TV)

Requested characters: Mei Changsu, Xiao Jingyan

Note: I also love Lin Chen so if you want to write some MCS/LC or LC/Fei Liu or LC/MCS/JINGYAN OT3??? go for it. I am also a Nihuang/Xia Dong shipper so if you want to put that in… somehow… my gay little heart would be happy. I also like Nihuang/MCS/XJY or MNH/MCS + MCS/XJY but I’d like the focus on the men in that case!

I watched this show because someone recommended this show to me as, like, Chinese Game of Thrones but good. I think it’s genuinely one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. I love plots and revenge and good people doing bad things for justice. Even the ending is good for me though obviously it left me unsatisfied on several points.

I am deeply into sickly doomed genius MCS and every time he got even more deeply ill, I fell deeper in love. Every time he coughs up blood, my heart would race. I love his terrible schemes and stupid self-sacrificing choices. I find watching this show very soothing because I knew he would always come out on top in his schemes. I trust him. I love handsome clueless Jingyan and how he’s just so good (it’s terrible.) I love his mom and how much he cares for her. I love him but he is useless, he needs his Xiao Shu and I need fanfic to restore him to him.

Note: So my limited research on this says that male/male sex practices were accepted and well-known in this time period in history, so I really don’t want them thinking “oh no what are these weird gay feelings.” There are other barriers to them being together, like a ruler or official being overly attached to one person was considered very bad. I am also a big supporter of the socially-approved polygamy of this time period, so I don’t need Jingyan to refuse to sleep with his wife or something out of loyalty to MCS—he has to do it! Or all their plans are ruined! And he can enjoy spending time with her or the concubines without affecting his feelings for MCS—you could explore that complexity in fic if you like.Prompts:

Mei Changsu isn’t dead, he’s hiding again, Jingyan searches for him

They start having sex during the series, the ending is averted [somehow]

Post-canon, MCS is alive and Jingyan hides him in the palace with his consort/concubines to keep him on as an advisor without anyone objecting

omega verse where MCS was an alpha before he “died" but an omega after he came back.

AU where male/male marriage is customary (maybe aristocratic men are expected to have one male and one female consort?) and so MCS decides the best way to influence and help Jingyan in the capital is by becoming his wife or one of his concubines

anything just get them together and happy.

Tokyo Babylon 

Characters: Subaru, Seishiro

I read Tokyo Babylon as a child and I imprinted on it deeply, now I love politics, ghosts, stalking, age differences, magic. Within the CLAMP canon, I love TB for its episodic focus on smaller stories, the commentary on contemporary society, and Seishiro being an outright creep. I love onmyojutsu and exorcism and Subaru’s innocence getting ruined. I love the city of Tokyo (where I currently live! but do not be intimidated, I don’t know the city well because we’ve been in quarantine most of the time I’ve been here and won’t judge you for details.) I’m open to fics that comply with X canon or not.

With Seishiro/Subaru: It’s bad but I love that predator/prey dynamic where the predator ends up being hopelessly entranced/obsessed/in love with the prey. My read was always that Seishiro lost the bet and couldn’t admit it—he’s just, you know, killing twins to avoid dealing with his feelings! Relatable! (?!?!) Subaru, I love particularly in his evolution from innocent to adult in love to betrayed. I’d prefer post-TB fic to during-TB fic (so Subaru knows Seishiro’s deal and loves him anyway.) I am also a fan of Hokuto and you should feel free to bring her back to life to troll if you desire.

Prompts:

AU or reincarnation plot where they are Heian period rival onmyoji

Because this is such a heavily place-based series, if you are a writer who likes to play with details of real life locations, I’d be interested in versions of different “Babylons” if you have an idea for it.

Tragic first times post-TB lol

Seishiro is a virgin the first time they have sex

I’d probably love some fucked up dub con for this, however you want to play it

Honestly, do whatever you want as long as you don’t fuck me over like CLAMP did.  

プリティーリズム | Pretty Rhythm

Characters: Hiro, Koji

Pretty Rhythm came to me at a weird time in my life. I lived in a house of spiders in Yokohama and did nothing for eight weeks. King of Prism cheer screening transformed my life and I didn’t even know what it was. Then I got weirdly deep into Rainbow Live and the Pretty Rhythm franchise overall. I am a scientist of prism theory. Idk why I like it, it’s just wholesome and crazy and there are penguins and DJ Koo. I love every TRF song because I’m a 90s gay at heart. It’s truly the end point of all media development. The prism world represents the fearsome power of virtual/digital+real hybrid life. Yes, I know I’ve lost my mind. I went to one of the real Prism Stone stores, the one in Harajuku.

Hiro Hayami: one time a fujoshi asked me to describe what types of anime boys I like and the first type I listed was “prince but bad” and my example was Hiro. Hiro is the crazy gay stalker disaster of my heart. He overcomes great hardship to achieve his dreams and foolishly falls in love along the way and he does everything wrong and Koji keeps leaving him. The moment when Hiro is crowned King of Prism in Pride the Hero was one of the top ten moments of my life. I made friends who don’t even know Japanese watch the movie unsubtitled with me on my birthday.

With Koji, I’m a bit guilty of “I want to give the character I love the most the character he loves the most” so I do like him less (it would be impossible to like him equal to how much I love Hiro). But he has many good points that make him perfect, like how he also sucks underneath his chill exterior. I love to see him go apeshit.

I also love everyone else in Rainbow Live, no exceptions. I love all the girls. If you do write the girls, I would prefer they not be paired with the OTR boys. I would prefer they be paired with each other, any combo is good.

Prompts:

this is the sort of pairing where I love fic where they split up and then 15 years later meet again as washed up has-beens but there’s still time for them to find each other

Canon-compliant companion piece showing the “background” of them getting together romantically over the course of the series.

AU where Koji is a prism world fairy sent to inspire Hiro but Hiro is kind of a mess

dirty, dirty porn… let Hiro get fucked

I have a lot of doujinshi with multiple copies of Hiro (a la the Mugen Hug jump) but I’d like something where Hiro gets overwhelmed by many Kojis

They start fake dating as a publicity stunt and have to keep doing it… especially good if it starts when Koji is at max hating Hiro level

Ring Fit Adventure 

Characters: Dragaux, Ring

Keeping this one simple: I like to be encouraged to exercise by a storyline and a trainer that never mentions weight loss, lol. The world is fun and pretty and I love that buff dragon.

AND THEN THE PAIRING. I’m sure Nintendo has some market research that told them a certain subset of users are very motivated by enemies who seemed to once be lovers or best friends. I am that user.

What is up with these two? They were so in love! Now Dragaux is a horrible swole bro (not in a good bro way) and Ring is training me instead? I can’t compete with their love. It’s the only time the game makes me feel inadequate.

You can keep Dragaux and Ring as dragon/ring-like as you like. Obviously I’m down with dragon fucking but you can also make him a human fucker too. I play with Ring on the masculine voice setting for maximum BL vibes as I exercise, but, you know, it’s a ring, I don’t think it has gender. Feel free to incorporate the player or other random characters too.

Prompts:

AU where Dragaux and Ring owned a gym together and Dragaux sold out to a big chain of gyms

What happened between them when Dragaux was still captured, pre-game? Bondage… literally??

Ring is always bossing me to train, but I’m really doing all the work. Why doesn’t he fight Dragaux on his own for once?? (because the sexual tension is too powerful.)

Tragic flashback to their dramatic break-up ending with their present day reconciliation.

Player/Dragaux/Ring threesome??? I’ve unlocked the sexercises???

With all fandoms, you are free to disregard the prompts and do your own thing. If you’re not sure about me, you can probably dm seriesera on twitter, she knows what I’m into. 

Well, I suppose that’s all for now. Please stalk me online to get more details on my bullshit. I hope you have a nice time.

Best,

Caitlin 

[thedeviousdevilxx]

So last night in my search about the history of K/S shipping, and early Star Trek fandom, I clicked a link from fanlore about a dude who was maybe still is I dunno very vocally anti K/S slash fanfiction, and his rant kinda came off very hostile towards female fans, and fandom in general. Read below for more

So I skimmed reading it because it was a long ass RANT, I won’t link to it, but it’s on the fanlore page of the history of K/S shipping, zines etc. He is a gay man who vehemently opposes the shipping of Kirk and Spock. Okay fine, the one major point he makes after your get all through his ranting about what “real” men are, and how women can’t ever know what life for a man is like and thus cannot accurately write men (see the problem here?) etc etc. That’s the gist he elaborates much more. So the point he isn’t wrong on, is yes the overwhelming female fan is often straight, and likely especially during the 70s-80s pre online porn era were not familiar with gay sex which means the sex scenes were cringey or super vague. Fair enough. It’s not like these women, often older women, married, with jobs, some with kids, others were collage students/aged *early 20s could find info on gay sex etc easily as we can today.

The next one which I do agree is how men are socialized to be not emotional or secure/connected to their emotions, and thus this prevents them from bonding with other guys in the way women can and do. He does say other stuff that just reeks of misogyny, yes gay guys can be sexist! It exists. Anyways his main point is that when two straight men are close friends this perception as “oh they MUST be gay!” is harmful. And he is right! We still see this in “no homo bro” kind of thing between guys because they FEAR the idea someone might misinterpret their relationship as anything but platonic. This is because being assumed gay is still seen negatively. Even in this day and age. So this guy latches on to, hey Spock and Kirk have this beautiful friendship, and this dirty nasty girls want to wank off (yes he does make a joke about vibrators in the very beginning) to the idea of Kirk and Spock having sex, and that’s fetishizes gay guys, but also ruining good examples of male friendship. 

His tone really came off as extremely hostile towards women, and quite vocal about his out right disdain. But he did bring up valid points amongst all that garbage. Most of the 100+ comments sided with him, but one queer individual pointed out that this idea that two men as close friends being seen as romantic, is just NOT something found in that context. This commentor was like “hey when a dude and gal are friends, it’s assumed to be leading to romance” and lists off examples. And is like this assumption of being close friends = romance isn’t just attached to two dudes in media. And they continued saying a lot of people wish it wasn’t always so (personally their example of Mulder/Scully was to me felt like a natural progression and not forced like some het relationship in shows/movies are but their point using them still stands). A counterpoint as well, is this deep denial of queer relationships and just saying “oh they’re JUST friends”, and this denial of gay relationships as just two dudes being pals, nothing gay here is also harmful!

The argument about fetishizing gay men by straight women in the same sense as straight men fetishize lesbians was another point of contention they had against K/S. And that’s a worthy concern and criticism. However unless you know the author’s personal attitudes, and feelings about gay rights + issues, maybe they ain’t straight or a woman/cis etc, can the charge of fetishizing be accurate based solely on what they ship and write? It does happen , I’ve seen in pretty much all fandoms (calling m/m ships sinful, cheering about their fav fictional ships being able to marry after it was made legal in the US there is many more insidious examples but these come to mind rn), but to damn the entirety of K/S shippers are horny bored dumb women (which is what I felt he viewed them as from his rant), is just tactless and really overshadows his really good points on the worrisome view that straight women can perpetuate harmful stereotypes about homosexuality and fetishize gay men instead of viewing them as complex, unique human beings that are not all the same, that they are a marginalized group facing deep injustices in our society, and many within fandom who enjoy m/m ships do not care because they only see these ships are solely entertainment and ignore everything else. If you’re only exposure to lgtb+ issues is through fanfiction, maybe research and expand yourself because fanfiction is entertainment and should be enjoyed as such but if all you think of in terms of gay guys is your ships, that’s a problem!

Another point that irked me is this idea that women cannot “know” the emotions of men, that women writing can’t write “real” men. They are women’s version of men, and it’s like well that’s all of fucking fiction, tv shows, movies, everything because most write with all sorts of characters that are different to them. Fantasy and sci-fi are full of aliens, do YOU know the “real” emotions of aliens? elves? nah but this dude never once mentioned that most media in all shapes and forms are dominated by male writers, male directors, editors etc. Do these men know the “real” emotions of women?! All those cool women characters are often not written by women but men writing their version of a woman (and sometimes it’s bad, good, stereotypical etc which is an issue when we all venture outside our sphere of experience and knowledge, and it can be so fucking bad aka that white women writing about a woman crossing the US/Mexican border and getting major acclaim but it was so deeply offensive + relying on stereotypes. However it should not stop people from writing things outside their scope of life, we wouldn’t have fantasy/sci-fi etc, but you gotta put in the research, and be aware of issues that could pop up. One question authors need to ask, is this a story I should be telling? Have trans, gay, characters of color in your fiction if you are not these demographics yourself, but should you right that trans coming of age story if you are cis? Eh probably not unless you run it through actual trans people, but even that is an iffy situation for most. And this is why it’s so so important to have diverse voices, creators, writers because it just enriches everything so much! But let’s face it, the media is male dominated, white, and het  so it’s no wonder fandom is female dominated with I would argue a lot of lgtb+ voices as well, and often transform the media they consume and deeply love and enjoy! 

He says a lot of really gross and shitty things in my opinion that are just so wrong that they overshadow his legit points. It just was wrapped so much in anti-women views that it felt very much like the wider condemnation society has about any women’s interest. Yes I agree women are socialized to idealize romance, romance is the ONE piece of media that is always targeted at women from a young age, the Princess finding/meeting/getting her Prince and happily ever after. Doesn’t matter if she’s strong, independent, gotta find her a MAN is prominent in media geared towards girls. It’s changing, it’s expanding to include queer/lgtb+ voices, and not just white het focused. 

The thing that bothers me overall is Media, aka movies, the tv shows, games/popular books, their reach to audiences, their influence in far, far, far greater than fanfiction can ever be. The readers are small, aka millions watching/reading versus, a few thousand on Ao3 or FF.net. With the advent of social media, the bridge between fandom and the original creators + actors is narrowing. Back in the day unless celebrities, screen/script writers, directors, creators went to a convention, the only way to communicate with them was through letters. Con meet and greets, and letters. So this means things that were well exactly not hidden(the early zine mailing lists communities were) but kept out of sight, are now being pushed into the open and creators are seeing fanworks, fanfiction, and knowing what “ships” are, and which ones are popular. Hell it’s even been used to queerbait audiences (looking at YOU Teen Wolf), but you have shit storms like Reylo’s, and or adored Fannibals that the creator encouraged, it’s a whole new world for fandom. There is a lot of growing pains between marking out appropriate dialogue/behavior between fans and these celebrities/creators. 

But I just fucking hate how it’s dismissed as oh just creepy straight girls fetishizes m/m relationships ( how have demographics changed?) what about gay men within fandom, poc in fandom, not everyone is straight cis or white and to just lump all fandom as such is disingenuous. Criticism is important for fandom, to examine it like any other phenomena but realizing it’s reach is limited, in comparison to the wider sphere of Big Media. Most fans of Star Trek TOS are not K/S shippers, and their presence isn’t ruining canon as this dude lamented, preaching the purity of canon and these horny women are ruining it (yeah he pretty much says so). How dare people transform canon to fit their own narrative! Scandalous! outrageous! 

The canon will never really change, but that’s the beauty of fiction, we all can take what we want from it, interpret how we like, transform it because we want to make it a bit of our own, and is that really bad? Do we all have to accept that the original creator/author/director says? I think we can agree we’d all enjoy fandom a bit less if we took the words of the creator was the ONLY WAY to enjoy their thing. We may disagree about things, but in the end this is about fictional characters. Spock and Kirk are not real, the represent things to people, they are vessels for whatever we want them to be, so if some gals want to imagine them as romantic lovers because they enjoy that. Why scream and rail against them because you prefer the canonical deep friendship. They ain’t taking that away, and yes some might be obnoxious and believe it’s canon and tell you why very loudly. Remember they’re a minority in a very large fanbase. If their presence bothers you SO much, just kindly fuck off and find your own community!

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

headcanon #028: sexuality

word count: 770 words

ash never had a big moment of “realizing” or “coming to terms with” his sexuality. he’s always known, even when he didn’t know there was a word for it, that he liked people and gender never really played a role in limiting or directing that. in some ways, he was peripherally aware that all of the cartoons he’d watched as a kid only had romance lines between boys and girls, but that was never something he stopped to think about until he got older than when he was having his first crushes of his own.

growing up, his parents (mostly thanks to his mom) had a very wide social circle that included people from many walks of life, though it did lack in some areas, sexuality not really being one of the lacking areas. granted, most of the queer people his parents were friends with identified as either gay or lesbian, so pansexual wasn’t a label he knew from his parents’ friend circle.

ash only discovered the label pansexual when he was in his early teens, but quickly grew to realize that the definition of it fit him well, so he claimed it as his own. now, ash doesn’t really care if he’s referred to as bisexual or pansexual as long as someone isn’t maliciously trying to invalidate the self-labeling of pansexual he generally uses. he knows many understand them to be strictly different sexualities, but ash feels definitions of both accurately describe him and he self-labels himself as pansexual over bisexual only because, to those he doesn’t have to explain the label to, it describes his experience with sexual and romantic attraction more fully in that it specifies not only that his attraction spans across genders, but that gender itself does not actually play a big role in said attraction. what would really bother him would be having his genderless/cross-gender attraction invalidated for the sake of calling him hetero- or homosexual, especially if it was based on the idea that him seeing a woman makes him heterosexual or him seeing a man makes him homosexual.

ash is out in the sense that he never goes out of his way to obscure his sexuality in private. that said, he also doesn’t feel like it’s much of anything that’s anyone’s business, so it’s not something he’s discussed with the majority of people, though it could probably be deduced from the way he speaks about love in gender neutral terms. since ash is so closed-off about his private life, his sexuality just doesn’t come up as much in conversation as it could. he has no desire to hide it beyond his desire to keep his relationships in general private.

ash never actually really came out to his parents. it wasn’t a topic he ever breached with them until last year when he introduced his boyfriend at the time to them (the only partner he’s had that’s ever met his parents). he pretty much knew they would accept him for his sexuality, but he still hasn’t actually told them he specifically identifies as pansexual since it didn’t really come up.

publically, ash is of course assumed to be heterosexual. he never does anything to explicitly claim himself as heterosexual, though he obviously doesn’t directly imply otherwise either since he’s not allowed to. he’s not one whose sexuality is often called into question among fans, having been romantically linked to several women and being very opposed to in-group fanservice of the performatively shippy variety. he has to talk about love and relationships in a detached fashion as an idol, but even then, he almost always speaks in gender neutral terms. still, some of his songs do specify female love interests (though others are gender neutral), but that’s because they were written about women. ash refuses to “het up” songs he writes about people who don’t identify as women, but those do all end up still needing to be gender neutral or written from a creative perspective. when he covers songs, he never changes the pronouns and that’s about as close as he can get to singing love songs about men.

it does bother ash he can’t be out on a public and professional level, though it’s honestly not something he loses sleep over since he views taeyong as someone who’s not entirely him anyway. taeyong isn’t meant to have any romantic or sexual desires so much as have them projected onto him, and ash reluctantly knows that. it would bother him more that he has to be closeted if his public image were more in line with who he really is to start with.

[jgroffdaily]

It’s been almost two years since we last saw Mindhunter’s intrepid FBI team, led by plucky but serial-killer-obsessed Holden Ford—played by Jonathan Groff, of Hamilton and Frozen fame. With his off-screen affability and dangerous penchant for on-set laughter, it’s a credit to the baby-faced Groff’s abilities that Holden—a character loosely based on actual agent John E. Douglas—appears convincingly world-weary at the start of season two.

As the show’s freshman outing ended, Holden was becoming increasingly invested in the real-life serial killer and necrophile Ed Kemper, which led to a major panic attack and breakdown. Between the pressures of keeping the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI afloat and his workaholic obsession, Holden was in rough shape.

Season two jumps from the late ’70s to 1980, where Holden and co. are investigating a new wave of serial killings that will eventually be dubbed the Atlanta child murders. With the support of the bureau, Holden’s team has moved out of its old basement office—but that upgrade brings with it a new sense of exposure and looming menace, especially since Holden also meets Son of Sam David Berkowitz and Charles Manson this season. We caught up with Groff to discuss the pressures of working for David Fincher, Mindhunter’s graphic sex scenes, and why serial killers aren’t actually the actor’s jam.

Vanity Fair: The two-year gap was tough on Mindhunter fans. Why did the show keep them hanging for so long?

Jonathan Groff: [Laughs] Only David Fincher has the power to do that, because he really takes his time. He worked on the scripts until he felt they were ready and they were exactly what he wanted them to be. That’s the honest, basic answer. He didn’t want to turn out a second season just because the first was successful. He wanted the story lines to be as interesting and complicated as possible. David Berkowitz and Manson aren’t the only two serial killers that we do this season; there’s a lot more that I think will be an exciting surprise. Manson has always been Holden’s holy grail in terms of serial killers that he wants to speak with, and he gets his wish this season.

Netflix got some heat earlier this year for allegedly glorifying Ted Bundy in a docuseries, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, and a Zac Efron movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Do you worry that Mindhunter could do something similar or open old wounds?

From the very first meeting we had about the show, David Fincher’s mission statement has always been that he doesn’t want to make comic book villains of serial killers. He wanted to show them as the sad, deplorable human beings that they are, and to explore their psychology. In no way did he ever want to celebrate the serial killer, and every single day on set operated with that mission and goal at the forefront. There is that temptation, in our cultural obsession, to make the killers powerful again by investing in them. We’re interested in taking an honest look and doing the opposite.

Do you see these men as monsters, or have you developed sympathy for them while doing the show?

I compartmentalize the work on the show, and I read as much as I can about any killer we’re about to interview—but I don’t really live for it. Serial killers aren’t my jam in that way. The thing that turns me on most about working on the show is exploring the psychology of the scenes themselves. Those long, 15-page interviews with the killers are the most fun for me as an actor, because I get to really lose myself and explore the psychology. If I stop and think about what the serial killers have done, I’d get really depressed. There is no empathy for serial killers in my mind.

In season two we meet the mothers of the murdered children from the Atlanta child murders. For the first time in the series, we’re looking at the families and parents of the victims. That was way more emotionally draining and heartbreaking for me. As the serial killer Ed Kemper said in season one, “We should all get death by torture.” I don’t think serial killers are really looking for sympathy anyway.

Do you take any emotional baggage from the show home with you?

I’m not a Method actor, so I don’t take any of it too seriously after they say, “Cut.” I go for a run every morning, and when I go home it’s pretty easy for me to shake it off. I think it might affect me in subconscious ways, because I definitely ate a lot during season two—a lot of Mindhunter emotional eating. My morning run [is] not only to stay in shape—but subconsciously, it’s my way to shake it off and mentally prepare for the new day.

Working on the show gives me so much respect for the people who actually talk to the serial killers, or those that talk to the families of the victims. It seems silly of me, as an actor playing pretend, to have any sort of damaging, emotional reaction to it when those people are out there living it every day.

Did you spend any time with real-life agent John E. Douglas when preparing for the role?

I emailed with John, but we had never met until about six months ago. He asked me to do the audiobook for his newest book, The Killer Across the Table, where he writes a little about Mindhunter and the characters Holden Ford and Bill Tench [Holden’s partner, played by Holt McCallany]. I did the reading, and then as a bonus feature on the audiobook, we did an interview with each other. The first time we spoke on the phone was really cool, and I was grateful to hear that he likes the show and what we’re doing.

Four months ago he came to New York and we had lunch for the first time. At the end of season one, my character has a panic attack and meltdown, and John Douglas did have a complete physical and emotional breakdown over the course of his career. We talked about that, and how exhaustive the work was for him. He was really encouraging, so it wasn’t awkward to meet him in any way.

In season one you had to portray a really intense sexual awakening for Holden. As an openly gay actor, were those straight sex scenes fun or daunting?

I think it was both. When I was 22, I was on Broadway doing Spring Awakening, where I had a very extensive sex scene with Lea Michele. It was the climax, no pun intended, of Act 1, and because I did that eight times a week for two years, I got really comfortable doing sex scenes. It was the routine of, “Here’s where I pull down your underwear and pretend to finger you,” and it was choreographed and blocked kind of like a dance.

Over the years I’ve heard horror stories from my male and female friends about their sex scenes. It usually stems from a lack of communication and the actors being thrown into it. When I got to Mindhunter, David is such a specific and intentional director, so there was never any wiggle room to feel weird, awkward, or afraid. There was just a lot of respect on the set—and it sounds so weird, but I end up really enjoying those scenes because there’s not a lot of dialogue to memorize. You’re telling the story physically, and there’s a natural vulnerability when you’re butt naked with another person that can’t really be faked.

What’s the most difficult part of working for Fincher?

You have to be on your A-game every second of every day, which is actually the most difficult and rewarding thing. It’s really simple, and that’s all that he requires of you. When everyone is doing it and we’re all vibing, it’s so much fun. It’s what I imagine it’s like to be on a really intense sports team, and that can be really confronting at times. We were shooting in Pittsburgh for a very long time, working long hours for nine months. At the wrap party for both seasons, when you’d expect everyone to get wasted and be exhausted, everyone said that it was the best experience they’d ever had.

Switching gears completely: With Frozen 2 coming up in November, do kids ever recognize you as the voice of Kristoff and lose their minds?

I do make voice memos for little kids because they never recognize my voice in person. I sing as Kristoff and the voice of the reindeer, and that’s when they freak out. Usually parents take video of their kids listening to it. On the street it’s usually just, “How do I know your voice?”—which isn’t as much fun.

[sadncssfossilized]

sexuality troubles.

i’m so fucking confused. being non-binary/trans makes everything so fucking hard. i don’t know where i fit... anywhere on the sexuality spectrum. i have no idea if all of my attraction to men is real or if i’m forcing it on myself bc im afab. i don’t know if i’m bi. ive always wanted to be attractive to men ever since i was small i think as a coping mechanism because of trauma. but i’m also extremely scared of older men, even if i do find celebrities attractive. but a lot of male celebrities i straight up DONT find attractive at all, they’re like cardboard to me. i don’t know if that’s because i think a lot of hollywood white men hearththrobs look extremely bland/the same bc white society or if there’s something genuinely off with my attraction to men meter. ive heard people say that not being able to process whether a man is attractive or not is a lesbian thing. but i don’t feel like a lesbian. i don’t feel female. i love women, i have always known that, but i don’t feel like a woman and i don’t want to be a woman. i want to look masculine. i want to be masculine. i don’t want to be a girl anymore. i don’t want to be a man, completely, i just want to be.... not a woman. not a man. a nothing.

is it a preference or am i only attracted to women?? i loved being bi. i love the flag i love the options, and i don’t really process people’s gender’s except on a social level. ive never been close with ANY boys across my life, or even more than acquaintances because of my shy and reserved nature and i’ve never connected with any on a personal level both because of fear, being flustered, and feeling like they’re cooler and more superior to be and genuinely a different species so to say, so i don’t know if that has to do with my fear of being sexually involved with them. i’m always afraid men want the worst from me, and i always get the feeling that they are judging me based on my attractiveness to them and discard me mentally as soon as i am not and i hate that so much. i think because i’ve never known a boy truly and deeply, i keep prejudices against them and don’t think that they are as compassionate or HUMAN as non-men. but at the same time, i’ve always felt called to get self worth from their attraction to me. literally since pre-elementary. even if i think a guy is ugly i still base my worth off of if he’s attracted to me?? it’s automatic, and fucked up. i’m scared to go further than flirt with a boy. i’m scared to mess up conversationally , i’m scared of entering a relationship with one especially because i’d be the “woman” in it, and i don’t want to be fucked like a man fucks a woman. i want a queer man so i can feel safe and normal around him. straight men are an enigma to me. they scare me so much with their lack of societal awareness and cruelty. i feel like they don’t GET IT you know? but if i ever was to date one, since i’m pre transition and in the closet i’d have to pretend to be a woman and pretend to be okay with that. the idea of a man taking me like i was a woman makes me want to hurl.... that’s not the relationship dynamic i want at all.

all of my emotions toward men are so fucking conflicting. ive dreamed of kissing men before, fantasized about being soft with them, holding their hand, cupping their face and kissing them gently, but if they’re an irl i never fantasize about what they would be like sexually, land the idea kind of off puts/repulses me in a way. thinking of my irl women crushes kind of makes me feel the same way, but i’m more open to the possibility of that? ive never had a relationship with a man and only probably had like 1 male friend across my entire life, so my fear could be because of trauma + fear of the unknown + bc of my prejudices bc of my lack of experience + dysphoria. meanwhile, i’ve had 1 girlfriend and all of my friends have been female my whole life. ive just NEVER been comfortable around boys/men. which i feel like is less indicative of lesbianism and more of like. trauma haha. i sexualized myself at such a young age to cater to the boys around me and even to the adult men around me, it hurts to think about. i hate how trauma complicates everything. i don’t know why i have that impulse, i don’t know why it started. ive just never felt safe around a boy. i feel like they always want something from me. ive been attracted to them but i’m soo scared o f them. like, i always have something to prove, whether it be my personality or humor or attractiveness, just to stay in their presence.

nsfw incoming.

ive tried to jack off to a lot of gay porn and i think my men attraction meter is broken because so many of the men in gay porn are ugly/unattractive to me. straight up. in their face, and body. and the body ideals in the gay community, where i would fit in post transition, don’t.... resonate with me. like not to be crude but a lot of the body types of the men in here are unattractive to me, but then again it’s white dominated and caters to a very specific vision of a huge bubble butt, way huge thighs, overly ripped chest, bland ass white boy faces paired with ugly haircuts. is this what i’m supposed to be attracted to? the men i’ve been attracted to irl do not look like that. the men in gay porn are all so passionless too. (which is honestly an issue i have that makes jacking off to women in porn sort of difficult too??) i don’t know. i don’t feel like i’m attracted to men the same way gay men are. but then again, how would i know that? i don’t know any actual gay men. i just know from some porn blogs? some pornhub videos? i don’t fucking know. i jack off to images/videos of men very few times compared to how much i get off to women bc of my particularity . it’s more difficult, but it’s easier by when i think about how the man feels, like his pleasure, his sounds, his expressions, rather than the aesthetics of it all. not to say i don’t appreciate the aesthetics of some nice men- chris evans, frank ocean, rob mcelhenney, taika waititi, nice. which sounds like a very non-lesbian thing to say i would think, but i know a ton of lesbians who talk about celebrity men super raunchily and stuff, so i don’t know anymore and i don’t think i know enough about lesbianism to know whether these are lesbian experiences or not. the majority of men content ive jacked off to has been gay fan fiction, and that has actually been easy to get off to bc of the descriptions and the i can visualize characters and passion the way i want. it’s harder to do it with actual videos/images of men, because it’s so different in my mind and imagination m, but that may be bc gay porn can involve a lot of roughness/impersonal-ness? also i feel like i still have a certain degree of internalized homophobia toward both wlw AND mlm despite working through my acceptance of my sexuality for a number of years.

i just want a person. but i don’t know if it’s beyond my control who i’m sexually attracted to. my sexual attraction to men is a lot lower than to women, and it’s a lot easier for me to make them bland in my head and not be able to point out a unique thing about them . i feel like girls are more... distinct/easily alluring to me than most men you know. that may also be affected by how women actually know how to dress and look unique and men don’t really shift from 1 bland societal style, i don’t know. i don’t know. i want to be attracted to men. as a transmasc, i want to be gay. i don’t want to be straight. ive been gay all my life, and i don’t want to leave that label. i want softness and love. but men scare me, and i don’t know if it’s because of a tragic coalescence of bad life experiences (or lack thereof) or because of genuine lesbianism. ive talked so much about being bi, and even been called a confused lesbian before by transphobes, and ever since they said it i cant stop questioning. i feel like at this point i HAVE to be a lesbian or something, bc that’s how this shit goes in movies and stories. i don’t want to be a lesbian. i want to be attracted to men, i wanna be bi and be equally attracted to both, i want experiences with both in my mind, but irl i get so fucking scared and i don’t want anything to do with it. i don’t wanna be a straight transmasc and i also don’t want to become what transphobes have spent their time telling me i am. i want to be what i’ve always thought i’ve been, bisexual and transmasc. i was comfortable with bisexual, until everybody else kept telling me to question and it’s been eating me alive since. fuck. i don’t know anything. is this a preference and bad combination of a huge number of deeper factors or am i straight up NATURALLY not attracted to men? have i been lying to mhself? have all my attractions in the past been fake? this is gonna sound terrible but i don’t want to be a lesbian. it doesn’t feel right. and id be proving the horrible people right, and have to retract everything i’ve ever said about being bi to my following on my other social media. and i’ve said a LOT. and i’d also have to give up my admiration of my irl men crushes and male celebrities and their sexiness. all of this shit is so ridiculous but at least i’m being honest with myself with this post. someone help me haha