#for .flow stuff

[pb-s-corner]

no comment

[hinamie]

unconditionally

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

For moment, you are home.

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[ravencromwell]

Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge's troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley's death. For we know that Scrooge was a "Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" And we know that he and Marley were "two kindred spirits"

And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we're told, "secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster." How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley's sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, "friend." How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?

Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley's death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes "one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again." The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.

Marley's name is still above the door of Scrooge's counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn't bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. "sometimes," Dickens opines, "People new to the

business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him."

This is why "death of the author" matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his "melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern" becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood's A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.

And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn't "discriminate between sinners and saints", to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold "the good sorts of politics". But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?

Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we're ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.

[mipexch]

hornet's smoke break

[somnimagus]

My page for @sheikahzine; about Impaz's duty to her village, empty of people and full of memories.

[id in alt text]

[noodles-and-tea]

:))))

[clumsypuppy]

horrible truth bomb dropped on my head 20 min ago

[vuelode-irbis]

[ID: digitally drawn fanart of the cat from Flow. They're walking towards the left with a fish in their mouth, they look down to a puddle, in which they see their reflection accompanied by the friends they made along their adventure: the dog looking excitedly at the lemur and the capybara walking behind. End ID]

took a break from birbfest to draw some Flow fanart since i went to see the movie and loved it so much. i love when characters don't talk yet they say so much aaaa

i also made a little comic to my reaction at the end, which was mainly for instagram but i liked the face i gave my fursona so im posting it here too

[ID: digital drawing of an anthropomorphic cat sitting in a cinema room, watching a movie. They're crying as they eat candy from a bowl. There's a thought bubble coming from them that says "I fucking miss my friends". End ID]

i know the movie has some biblic stuff going on but i need more religious education to understand that and i haven't seen my friends in months

[divorceblogger]

this show rules sorry

[nightcatssketchbook]

I was hitting some art block so I felt like drawing some fanart of @abd-illustrates’ Heartless characters!

I realized I never actually watched the final installment of the Concept Corner series, so that’s what I had playing when sketching these. It’s just so fun listening to the brainstorming and cool character connections

[morecrearty]

made a digital redraw of this sketchbook doodle

[snakesonankles]

cat dad ri appreciation piece

[divineandmajesticinone]

4 MINUTES (2024) I 1.03 "I didn't think you were like this. Like what? Like this..."

[catboyidia]

i am never ever gonna shut up about this pic lol school au zakkura and aerti are literally canon now (not actually literally obviously but shush and let me live lol)

[sevastiel]

A Thousand Lifetimes

Drifter appreciation piece :3