#have finally decided to manifest my middle school fixation

[entelecchia]

two households, both alike in dignity -

tybalt and benvolio.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh Ep 36 S4: Seto Joins Dragon Wife in Hell

So I dunno about you guys, but 2020 aged me like a lot in just these 8 months, so I figured it was time to embrace the feeling of being on death’s door and I decided to learn Mahjong. So I could truly embrace the ancients and vibe in their natural habitat.

Anyway, once I learned some Mahjong lore, some parts of Yugioh just open up. Namely--Seto’s dragons. Like a whole lot of stuff about early Seto Kaiba that confused me at the time just makes so much more sense now.

But unfortunately, he dies this episode, and he never pulled out his Blue Eyes White Dragons, and it’s just like...

...but my Mahjong deep cuts...

Like every episode I’m just rubbing my palms together in anticipation that someone will die, but like...I never get to talk about how in Mahjong, there’s only 4 white dragon tiles, but if you have 3, you can steal the fourth white dragon from another player’s discards, and that when you that, other stuff happens...I don’t get to talk about that because Seto’s hella dead.

So lets just get to the death. Dartz decides to make all of our soldier frenemies attack Pharaoh--because that’s all he needs to raise the Leviathan. Like Dartz doesn’t even really need to finish this game. He just needs Yami.

Seto picks up that these friend (and Pegasus) soldiers that Yami refuses to kill are probably going to end the world very quickly so he decides to do something about it. If this were a blog where I talked about cards instead of Mahjong, then I’d dive into the intricacies of what that even was.

But, we’re not, so lets just talk about Pegasus.

(read more under the cut)

This guy harnesses some psychic energy he’s got leftover from S1 and communicates directly to Pharaoh’s mind.

So, hey, what was that about Pegasus not having powers anymore? Like? He’s still doing this? He’s still psychic and he very clearly can still make blank cards so like...I guess you can take out the eyeball and make him nicer, but you can’t take out some of the effed up magic side-effects. (like there was a comment I didn’t respond to (which, sorry about that, been a little nuts over here in California), but apparently there was a movie in between seasons where Pegasus saved their lives--so he’s legit good now...there was a DLC where character arcs happened.)

Which kind makes you wonder about Marik, but we’ll probably never see him again so o well, save it for the fanfiction.

PS Yami is totally fixating on that eye we can’t see, right? Like...it never outright tells us, but does this spiritual Orichalcos manifestation of Pegasus still have the golden eye? A human eye? Or no eye at all? Just skin?

Not like it matters because Seto does some sort of card shenanigans that undo the whole friends that are soldiers thing like it never happened.

MMMMM I don’t like these weird legs on Yugi. Don’t like the thighs it gave to Joey. No! I’m seeing like this skin-tight silhouette of half an ass right now and I really don’t like it.

Along with other card things I won’t go into that consumed most of this episode, Seto finally got hit by a...well, I mean you can clearly see it in the next cap.

So, in Mahjong, there are 3 types of dragons: a white dragon, a red dragon, and a green dragon. I used to think it was really lazy that we’re just calling monsters straight up “white dragon” or “red dragon” in this show, but now it makes more sense because this whole time it was probably baby’s first Mahjong reference but I’m too Western to know that.

Anyway, the white dragon is funny looking because it’s a white tile--just a completely blank white tile. I thought it was a wild card at first but nah--it’s a white dragon in a snowfield--which is a very funny Dad joke from 200 years ago we’re still doing today. But, often, instead of a Dad joke, they’ll just make the white dragon tile a drawing of a blank card, like this:

Kind of funny that the guy who’s shtick is white dragons, ended up with his soul in a blank card. Was that a mahjong reference? Probably not, but I noticed it.

And mahjong aside, the show paid it’s respects to Seto dying and so he took his sweet time passing on. It’s still not that much respect. We aren’t gonna get that amazing Joey death sequence from S3 that took like half an episode of scene-shredding for our mains to recover from, but like...Seto was very determined to keep going, despite not having a soul.

He even finished his turn of cards, as if to just spite Joey Wheeler for that one time Joey hella died before killing Marik.

Shippers rejoice, it’s a Yami and Seto Kaiba death sequence. If you squint really hard, it might even be an embrace. I mean they both have very sharp duel disks on, and if Yugi’s closes for whatever reason, it’ll snap Seto’s head clear off, but what other “hugs” do we really get on this show?

And as for Mokuba, he was quite tragic this episode. I mean it’s Yugioh, so it’s not like you’re gonna cry or anything, but Mokuba just doesn’t really have anything else going for him without his brother so it is legit like...man Mokuba gets a lot of crap thrown his way and even when he’s happy, he still has to live with Seto so just...Mokuba...

Again we get this bubble effect of other people trying to enter the Orichalcos which happens just a Hell of a lot this season. Like Dartz probably has never had a single person WANT to go in the green zone in 10,000 years and then these bizarre children happened and they just want to bounce off that thing like a jello pudding.

I think it took over 5 minutes for Seto to die, and he was very, very, VERY angry the entire time. Just fueled by literally nothing but rage. Could probably go a couple more episodes if he had taken a nap in the KaibaCopter, but alas, even Seto Kaiba eventually runs out of fumes.

Anyway, another Mahjong fun fact. The dragon tiles are considered an “honor tile” and how many times have we heard Seto--who is such a scumball--go off about his honor? It can be hard to use honors tiles because their rate of success is lower, so when Seto’s like “I have to live up to my dragon’s honor or I can’t keep these in my deck” could he be like...making a Mahjong pun as well as a literal reference to whatever he defines as honor?

...Again, just a Mahjong reference I noticed, but probably not what they intended at all. Which is Good Enough for this blog.

After he tragically passed on, and Yami delicately put his body on the ground, -- Dartz decided to make this moment very funny for me, instead.

Bless.

Not as good as Yami the both times his body was chucked casually across the screen this season--but a very good toss, nonetheless.

I have made so MANY clips of this season!

Tristan and Tea kinda just stood there this entire episode while this was all going down and like...I know they can’t really do anything else at this point but like...can someone give Mokuba a hug???

I can’t believe Valon was the only guy in this entire show about friendship who knew how to hug people. He was in prison since he was 9, and then was raised by freakin Dartz, why is he the only hugger?

PS, apparently Seto’s yummy soul was enough to make the Leviathan open a single eye-ball in curiosity.

Mokuba out there flinging so many insults that he got everyone else banned from watching devil cards. It’s like sports competitions in Middle school with that one kid who won’t stop cussing. That one kid who is the reason everyone else has to sit through a boring ass assembly about sportsmanship? That’s Mokuba.

Now that everyone is ‘passed out’, we can get to the juicy stuff only the olds talk about--which sounds a lot like I’m about to do another segway into talking about Mahjong again, but I’m actually all out of the Mahjong juice. Again, I’m ass at Mahjong.

(and like...the peanut gallery died in the original version, right? I know to never trust a “they’re just sleeping” line in Yugioh.)

Dartz telling me he dragged that ass length blue hair across Egypt?

Man.

I would say that it must’ve really thrown people, but then again, their Pharaoh looked like...that.

So Dartz ended up wandering the earth for 5000 years, cursed to live immortally, unable to revive the great Leviathan, wallowing in his failure. Sentenced to suffer the entire existence of humanity that he never wanted to see survive anyway, unable to die himself.

That’s an interesting plotline that I wish I saw more of. I really like the idea of a supervillian who is already past his prime, who’s already burnt out, who’s so far removed from what happened that he’s fully accepted his demise and is just wandering around out of habit. But, most importantly--that changes my math. That’s like...5000 years he wasn’t slurping no souls because he was too damn depressed. So I’ll append the Deathcount. One second.

OK so we can just subtract 7.3 million from what we had, leaving us with: 7,805,844,047. Barely even made a dent but...eh...when you got the current population of the Earth in there it’s really hard to make a dent in that thing.

PS I still have that google doc where I keep track of the deaths, we have 55 lines of entries, haha.

Yugioh is interesting because you do have some racial stuff going on here where Yami is SO OLD that he doesn’t remember not only his own name--he doesn’t remember what he looks like. He’s even seen it a few times in hallucinations but like...Yami legit doesn’t know what it is to be an ancient Egyptian anymore. It’s been a hot minute, and he still sees himself as a pale skinned Yugi clone when he spiritually manifests in the show. Because the modern day, set in Japan, through Yugi’s eyes--that’s all he knows about life.

Dartz was so impressed by Pharaoh’s magic powers that he knew--he just KNEW that this Pharaoh with the worst hair would be the yummy soul for the Leviathan tummy. But unfortunately...

This is a show that has had so MANY overlapping apocalypses that I did have to sit back and kind of count off on my fingers which crazy person this would be about.

Honestly? Either Seto or Bakura...guessing Bakura because we haven’t finished his storyline yet and I know that he’s the big bad of S5. But man...Dartz was just like “oh...no thanks to that guy. I’ll just take a nap for 5000 years, BIG no thanks.” and it does make you wonder...

...oh...so that’s why you didn’t bother Bakura in this timeline.

It also helps make Bakura even more of a threat. Again, Bakura is great because he’s just constantly leaving nuggets of what a threat he is and then just...disappears for seasons on end. The Bakura we’ve made in our head is probably way more awful than what he may end up being.

But for now, it’s fun to just fill in the gaps instead.

anyway that was it for this episode, I’m off to pretend it’s Thanksgiving week and will look forward to drowning my anxiety in a 16 lb turkey shared between four people.

Anyway, I brought up the cat that falls asleep on metal rods so I have to do this:

And for those that are new, this is a link to read these in chrono order: https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

[saintheartwing]

Ingrate

Kris has had enough of being controlled. Now the SOUL that's been making use of him is going to learn what it feels like to be powerless. Or so he thought. Because the SOUL has something to say. It's going to speak its mind, and Kris is going to listen.

It had been an amazing day indeed. How often did a teenage kid like Kris Dreemurr get to go a whole other world, hidden away inside a school closet?

But that had been what happened. The brown haired, half Asian-American kid with dark brown eyes had dreamed of fantastic worlds along with his adoptive family, the Dreemurrs, a family of monsters, "puca", specifically, a goat-like monster with adorable white fur, floppy ears that hung down, little horns atop their heads, and lots and lots of love in their hearts. He and Asriel Dreemurr had been dear brothers for well over a decade, and Kris had been surprised as all heck to see…

An all too familiar figure had been waiting for them inside "The Dark World". Clad in a big fancy green magician's hat and cloaked robe and with a scarf of pink, Ralsei, another goat-like monster had greeted them, with his face so obscured by the big hat he wore that cast such a large shadow that, combined with deep depths of the Dark World he'd been in, it had been impossible to tell what Ralsei had truly looked like, but when he'd taken the hat off, it was clear Ralsei was that doll, that special Doll Asriel and he had played with as a child. The doll they'd drawn glasses on and played with along with little checkers and chess pieces and playing cards and other toys.

Somehow, Kris wasn't sure how, those toys they'd loved and cherished as children were alive, and real. Truly, genuinely real, and they'd missed the "Lighteners" from the other side of their world, who had once played with them so long ago. And so, Kris had decided, along with his surprising new friend, Susie, a purple-scaled, dinosaur-esque monster with long, frizzy hair, to come back tomorrow and have even more grand adventures with Ralsei and with that adorable little tub of silly lard, Lancer.

It had been dangerous, to be sure. They'd had to fight off laser eye blasting rook-like monsters and bust out of jail, and fight off three-headed cat-like monsters and hordes of creatures themed after chess! It was like Alice in Wonderland but twisted! And all that just to head back home! Granted, being in the Dark World had changed Kris's appearance, given he and Susie a new change in dress, giving Kris knightly armor and a majestic sword, far different from his long-sleeve, light green shirt with a yellow stripe across it and dark brown pants to match his brown loafer shoes, but it'd still been hard just to not outright die! He had been sure he was going to die at the hands of Lancer's father, the cruel, unjust and downright meanspirited and cowardly king, but thankfully, they'd managed to not only beat him, but get the rest of his kingdom to overthrow him.

After all, Kris had continuously spared monster after monster he'd fought. The king wasn't so merciful.

Now though, as a quilt of dark clouds covered the town, it obscured just about everything but a very faint spot where moonlight shimmered down, casting a single soft beam into the bedroom Kris Dreemurr slept in for the briefest of moments, the room he'd shared with his beloved Asriel. His brother's side was still covered in glow in the dark stars, fancy pancy winner's trophies, a desk with a clock and a lamp, and a high school diploma. Asriel was off at university, it'd be several years before Kris graduated.

On Kris's side, there wasn't much but his desk, his lamp, his bed…and a banged up little red wagon with a cage in it. A cage that had some blood splattered all about it on the carpet.

Why?

Well, when the moonlight faintly filtered in through the window, Kris stirred. He shuddered and quaked, a spasm rippling through him as he flopped out of bed, shuffling as if he was an undead, seeking the brains of the living, taking a few shambling, stuttering steps forward. He took in a deep breath, a croaking, horrific groaning noise rising out from his mouth as he held out his hand, flexing his fingers, and then…

He plunged them into his chest. He suppressed a scream of pain, yanking it back out as he held up a distinct red heart that softly pulsated in his grip, throbbing. BA-BUMP. BA-BUMP.

He trotted towards the wagon, moving slowly, and then he tossed it into the cage, the door to it slamming shut behind the soul as it flitted around within, desperately flailing about as Kris returned to the middle of the room, shambling back, his footsteps ringing through the room as he held up his hand again, and slowly but surely manifested a horrific-looking knife with a gleaming white blade and a dark brown handle. Evidently that sword he had had in the Dark World hadn't come from nowhere after all.

He turned around, his red eye fixated upon that cage, and the heart, the red SOUL of "Determination" that laid within the cage, and he grinned, his smile the work of demons.

"At long, long last." He whispered out. "Now I can get even. Now I can have my revenge for what you did." He murmured. "Making me do what you wanted. Speaking for me. Using my body like a puppet. The entire time we've been in the Dark World, time after time, moment after moment, I had to watch as my body was ridden like a car by somebody else. In this world and the Dark World, to my own family, my friends, my enemies, I had to do what you made my body do, and I had no say in it. Well, now I do. And now you're gonna pay, and you're gonna pay hard." Kris darkly growled, grinning foully. "I've had enough of you exploiting me. Had enough of your stupid little puppeteering. You think this is all a game? You think you can strip my choices from me? Well, you're the one without any choices now. All you can do is sit in there and suffer and DIE!" Kris roared out, holding the knife high as he approached the cage. "I want to see how many times I can stab you before you finally-"

"Ingrate." The SOUL said, the red, heart-shaped thing pulsing strongly, almost blinding Kris with its light as Kris's dark brown eyes that had briefly flared red with his own faintly murderous rage blinked.

"…what…did you just say?"

"You're an ingrate. You should be thanking me."

"For-for what?!" Kris gasped out. He couldn't believe the gall, the audacity, the sheer balls on this stupid invasive soul for what it was saying. "For using me like a big old mascot suit?!"

"For saving your life over and over. When Rudinn and Hathy and their ilk showed up, who convinced them to stop fighting us, to spare us, and to go on their way? I did." The Soul told him. "Who helped you heal up from those awful battle wounds? I did. Who figured out how to solve those clock puzzles? Who found those secret items that helped you so much in the fight against the King? Who figured out how to spare the various monsters from the Jigsaws to the Checker King to the Ponman? Who helped you dodge all those horrible attacks from lasers to missiles to just outright keeping from being stomped on by a giant checker piece? I did, me, yours truly, so what can I say except…you're welcome!"

Kris couldn't believe what he was hearing. His mouth hung open. His hand dropped the knife and it fell to the floor with a clatter as he stared, outraged at the nerve of this dumb thing.

"You were using my body as a puppet! I had no control over any of it! How would YOU like it if somebody was forcing you to do things against your will?!" Kris snapped angrily.

"Would you prefer I let you die?" The Soul inquired angrily.

"You don't know that I would have died!"

"I didn't have any control over you when the King tried to "surrender". That was all you, Kris. And sure, you saved Susie, and then what happened? You almost got strangled to death by the king. You didn't notice he was about to attack you when he did his sneak attack, didn't have the strength to fight back against him when he plucked you up, and who do you think was giving Susie help when she was separated from you two and Ralsei and in the other jail? Yeah, that's right, me, reaching out to her!" The Soul told him. "You're a fifteen year old kid, you got NO game when it comes to this stuff!"

"Oh, and you somehow do? Because that's what all this is to you, a game?" Kris inquired, hissing angrily, getting up in the cage, in the SOUL'S face, shaking it about. "My life is just a game to you?!"

"You think you're the only one without choices?" The Soul finally roared back, Kris dropping the cage, staring in surprise, as real sorrow and rage seemed to rise up in the thing's voice. "I didn't ask to be put into you, Kris! Nobody told me I was gonna get stuck in you! I wanted a body of my own. I wanted to be a part of your life, sure, but to help you as myself, and I couldn't do that! So you know what I didn't do? I didn't sit around feeling sorry for myself, whining about how I didn't get what I wanted. I got off my ass and I took action and I made what choices I could to save your life. Because just waking up in the morning and going out there, putting yourself out for others, that's a choice. It's a big choice, a choice to keep going. The choice to do the right thing! People get it every single day, and I try to choose to do the right thing. I'm sorry I had to take control of your body! But I didn't have any choice about it either! You should just be glad that what I did helped you! There were a dozen times I could have had you do something to hurt people but I didn't, Kris! But not once did you ever think that maybe I wasn't such a bad person. All you've ever done is yell or whine or complain about everything I've done, even when I was saving your life! Couldn't you just be grateful once?!" The Soul cried out. "All I want to do is help. All I've ever done is help, and you act like I'm the monster, when you're the one trying to murder someone helpless and scared and locked in a fucking cage, you goddamn coward!"

With that, the Soul's frame stopped pulsating, and it seemed to flop backwards, almost panting and heaving, having finally worn itself out as Kris quietly stared back. He looked deep at the Soul, staring for what seemed to be a long time before he finally looked to the side, chewing on his lip a little.

"I…I get that…you did a lot that helped me. And…let's say I buy that you didn't have a choice. But…that doesn't mean I don't feel used and forced into doing things against my will. It doesn't change how I feel."

"That's fine." The Soul said. "I'm sorry. I really am. But you're acting like a real jerk right now. How you feel doesn't change the fact I saved your life a bunch of times. And my feeling that you ought to be grateful for that is just as valid as you feeling you've been used, isn't it?" The Soul said. "I mean, you didn't even ask for my name." It went on with a sigh.

"…okay. What is your name?" Kris inquired as he rose up slowly and dusted himself off.

"My name's Frisk." The Soul told him. "Where I'm from, Toriel, Asgore, Mr. Sans, Mrs. Alphys, they were all dear friends to me. I've got a lot to talk to you about."

"Maybe in the morning." Kris remarked. "I am dead tired."

And with that, he flopped backwards on the carpet, and drifted off into slumber, the moonlight softly lilting in through the window on his face as Frisk's SOUL, in turn sighed.

"…goodnight, Kris." He intoned. "Goodnight room, goodnight moon."

[drarrymybeloved]

thank you for tagging me @stavromulabetaaa and @ohdrarry!! this is such a fun get-to-know-me game <3

1. why did you choose your url?

my first url was pretty self-explanatory (ihavesomeideawhatimdoinghere— such creativity! and i fancy myself a writer) the current one is my rather belated, yet inevitable, recognition of the fact that i am pretty much a drarry blog. and also of how much i love drarry <3

2. sideblogs?

not a sideblog technically, but i recently made a second blog for my soc fixation! @crows-supremacy is where i dump my thoughts about the soc duology

3. how long have you been on tumblr?

a little over a year now i think!!

4. do you have a queue tag?

i did for a bit, #iq, but honestly i don't fully understand the function as a long term thing. i used it for a spell when there were a lot of new original works on my feed and i wanted each piece to get proper attention without anyone getting drowned out

5. why did you start your blog?

despite appearances, i never started this blog with the intention of becoming a drarry blog. i had actually started it because i had recently become re-invested in johnlock and wanted exposure to fandom. and then some drarry crossed my dash (pretty sure that was you, actually @stavromulabetaaa 😌) andd i fell down the rabbit hole. i've always loved the harry potter universe, but drarry was a ship that i was never fully invested in, (i come from the "shipped dramione in middle school before discovering drarry is a thing" club) and now, well. it was a slow slide, but inevitable. i still very much love johnlock, but there's no denying i'm a drarry gal at heart :")

6. why did you choose your icon?

it's a picrew of me that i like very much! it used to be a non-smiley, very much done with everything nim, but i decided fuck that we're manifesting good vibes only. so now she's a smiley nim <3

7. why did you choose your header?

nothing very deep about it, i love fluffy clouds and sunsets, and the colour yellow reminds me of hufflepuff 💛

8. post with most notes?

this microfic— i was so (pleasantly) surprised at how it was received! i remember struggling with this prompt a lot, and finally just taking inspiration from personal memories. i was unsure of practically every other line, so it was heartening to see i had managed to write something coherent!!

9. how many mutuals do you have?

i have no idea. there's no direct way to track that stuff, but just by scrolling through my following list, i'd guess it's hovering somewhere in the 40s. while i don't directly interact with all of you, whenever i see your little icons in my notifs/on my dash, i go "friend!! hi! <33"

10. how many followers do you have?

tumblr is not about that!! while it is very gratifying that there are people who like my brand of bullshit, i suspect my blog wouldn't look very different in the absence of any followers, which is how it should be really

11. how many people do you follow?

307, covering various fandoms

12. ever made a shitpost?

not that i can recall. i did, however, post something fairly incoherent about Faint Indirections right after finishing it because that fic did things to me

13. how often do you use Tumblr each day?

uhh... pretty often 🤭 i use tumblr the most out of all the social media apps i have. it's truly the most low-pressure, self-indulgent social media forum and i love it!

14. did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog?

nope

15. how do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

i only reblog posts i want to. i don't much care for guilt-tripping or passive-aggressive coercion

16. do you like tag games?

yes! all the tag games— picrews, games like this one, this or that etc

17. do you like ask games?

also yes!! ask away :)

18. which of your tumblr friends/mutuals do you think is famous?

see answer 10. "fame" and "tumblr" are very incongruous in my mind tbh

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

pfftt, of course!! more than one. all my mutuals are incredibly cool and each have very specific vibes i associate them with them <33

i'll tag @curlyy-hair-dont-care @crazybutgood @dracothecupcake @wheezykat @elvenwinters @april-thelightfury115 @rockmarina @inspiration-in-process if you guys want to and haven't already done it! and even if you're not tagged but want to play, feel free to go for it! tag me so i can see your answers <3

[syekick-powers]

i feel the need to write a long post about my experiences as an nb trans guy. i honestly feel like not enough people understand what that means. tw for mentions of miscarriages, deep discussion of transmasc dysphoria, and occasional mentions of sexual assault near the bottom.

my dysphoria didn’t really start until puberty. when i was a prepubescent child, i mostly felt okay about my body and who i was. did i have discomfort with how people perceived me? yes, but it was so heavily sublimated that i didn’t recognize it for what it was until years later. one of my earliest memories when i was a child was sitting in front of the TV in my grandma’s house watching arthur while my grandma cooked in the kitchen up the stairs. i was thinking to myself about gender, and i concluded that i must’ve been a boy, because that’s how i felt. i didn’t know anything about gender as genitals. i didn’t know anything about gender roles. i was a very young child with barely any conception of the differences between genders, and i still concluded i was a boy.

i didn’t think about that again for a long time. my mother, bless her, was obsessed with the idea of having a daughter. she told me over and over growing up how happy she was that i was born, how much she tried and tried to have me, how she had three miscarriages before finally giving birth to me. over and over and over, she insisted that she loved me specifically because i was “female”, because i was her “daughter”. this was a constant throughout my childhood, and when i was younger i didn’t fight it. because i didn’t really know anything about gender, and i let the adults decide for me because i didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what i was actually feeling.

would i have identified as nonbinary from childhood if i’d known what that meant? absolutely, i would have. once i knew the difference between penis and vagina, i always wanted to have both. i always wondered if that was weird, but i was too afraid of coming across as a freak to ask any of my peers if they felt the same way or if i was just a weirdo. i don’t necessarily buy into the “born in the wrong body” narrative, because my body is my body. i don’t always feel comfortable in it, but it’s still mine. i want to change it to make it fit myself better, because that is my right as a human being.

but i did have dysphoria. once i hit puberty, the changes my body was doing was enough to fill me with so much self-hatred. when my mom was telling me about puberty, she told me “now you’re going to grow breasts” and the very first words out of my mouth were “but i don’t WANT them!” my mother told me that the feeling of my breasts itching or hurting meant they were getting bigger, and to this day even the slightest unusual sensation around my chest gives me dysphoria. my greatest dysphoria was always around my chest. i never felt this pain when i was prepubescent because i didn’t have breasts. but when they started growing, i hated them so much. i just wanted to rip them off my body. they felt like alien parasites clinging to my skin, like fleshbags that had been stapled to my chest. every single time i felt them move or bounce i wanted to claw my own skin off.

but you know what? i had no idea what i was experiencing was dysphoria. my hatred of my body manifested as body dysmorphia. i felt ugly, ugly, ugly--but i had no idea it had anything to do with my gender, because ninety percent of the self-hatred i felt was because i was fat. that was the largest part of it--my family is descended from northern europeans, which means that our body types naturally favored carrying a lot of fat. when i was a young child, i was aromantic due to gender dissonance, but as a teenager i gradually realized i did want a relationship. but i was convinced i was just such an ugly “girl” that no one would ever love or even fuck me. i hated my body because it was fat, or so i thought. that was what i was convinced of, because it made enough sense.

the first clue that i had that i was maybe not just an ugly girl was when i started using the chatrooms on dA, aka dAmn. i entered a chatroom with a bunch of people in it and introduced myself, and gradually i became one of the regulars and even an admin in the chat. and since this was like a decade ago, the assumption on the internet was that most of the people who used the internet were men. people who came into the chat assumed i was a guy, just because that was how the internet was at that point. and when people came into that chatroom and assumed i was a guy... i never corrected them. i never proudly proclaimed “actually, i’m a girl.” i never acted offended or weirded out (though i was surprised that people didn’t think my alias sye didn’t sound feminine, because at the time i conceptualized it as a “feminine” name), and when people used he pronouns to refer to me, i always got a thrill from it.

eventually, however, i migrated off of dA and onto reddit. i was a fairly frequent reddit user in my later high school years, but i mostly interacted on the ragecomics subreddit, the vocaloid subreddit, and the queer subreddit r/ainbow. i picked out r/ainbow because during middle school i had been questioning my sexuality (at first i called myself pan, but then gradually i drifted to the bi label for a few reasons) and i’d heard that r/ainbow was a much friendlier subreddit, because a lot of redditors claimed that the r/lgbt subreddit had been taken over by tumblr SJWs, and since i was still overcoming a pretty serious case of 4chan poisoning at that point, i decided to pick the “friendlier”, less “SJW” queer subreddit. r/ainbow had pride flag flair (little icons you could put next to your username) and my first ever foray into identifying as nonbinary was changing my flair on r/ainbow to be a combination of the bi flag and the genderqueer flag.

now, i knew for a fact that my sibling also used reddit, and that he’d see my choice of flair sooner or later. eventually, we had a conversation about that, and he told me that he’d accept me and asked me about my pronouns and did all the accepting things he could, letting me know that he really cared about me.

my parents, on the other hand.... i didn’t come out to them for the longest time. i hate saying that i was “in the closet” because so many people use it to mean that the person doesn’t really know themself and that they’re just holding back showing everyone who they really are. i hated this idea that “being in the closet” meant you were being dishonest. so i never really considered myself “closeted”. but i didn’t tell people face to face that i was nonbinary. i was loud and out about it on the internet, but i never ever told anyone directly to their face that i was not cis. at the time, i was still not sure of what i wanted to do with myself. i’d just been introduced to the idea of not actually being a girl, and i was grappling with what that meant for me, what it meant for my self-perception. i’d had the identity of “girl” beaten into my head so much during my childhood thanks to my mother’s obsession with having a daughter that i didn’t know how to self-conceptualize any other way. i didn’t want to transition yet. i didn’t even want to socially transition. i was scared. terrified of what being trans meant. i went through a phase where i said i was “nonbinary but not trans” just because the idea of changing myself so drastically was terrifying, even if i hated my chest and hated presenting as female. (to a certain extent, i never really consciously presented as feminine. i had long hair, which meant that everyone assumed my presentation was “feminine”, even if i wore cargo pants and a leather jacket.)

but gradually, over time, my self-perception changed. i realized that part of the reason why i hated my appearance so much was because i was gendering my own features. my face wasn’t my face, it was a “female” face. my body wasn’t my body, it was “a girl’s body”. a lot of my ambient dysphoria came from just perceiving myself and my body in an inherently gendered way. over time, i trained myself not to see my own body as inherently anything. i didn’t have “a girl’s body”, i had my own body. i didn’t have a “girl’s” face, it was just my face. i still do experience dysphoria, mostly around my chest, but not nearly to the level i experienced as a teenager.

and, of course, with gender questioning, my sexuality questioning was also pretty intense too. one of the things i see a lot of queer cis people not understand is that the experience of being queer and trans is so much weirder than being queer and cis. you have no fucking idea how weird it is to grow up being attracted to men your whole life, loving how they look and their aesthetics and their voices and their bodies and everything--but just feeling so, so alienated at the idea of trying to be in a relationship with them. because of how they’d perceive you. because to them you’re just a girl, and boys are supposed to be the man of the house and women are supposed to be nurturing housekeeping mothers and how weird are you for being attracted to men and not wanting to be seen as a woman. because as a queer trans person, people assume you’re just a weirdo cis straight person with a fetishizing fixation on m/m (or f/f if you’re queer+transfem) couples. i remember when i first started using tumblr i saw a post from someone who said something like “i have read so much fanfiction now that i’m no longer attracted to men as a woman, but as a gay male” and the comments were just full of people screaming UGH STRAIGHT WOMEN ARE SO UGLY YOU GROSS FETISHIZING FREAKS HOW NASTY ARE YOU DISGUSTING SHAME SHAME SHAME and i, who had been reading m/m fanfiction and felt seen for the first time in my life, internalized such a huge amount of shame and self-disgust just from that post alone. any time i was attracted to a queer male character in a piece of media i hated myself so much for being a “fetishizer” because i wanted to be in a relationship with them, but couldn’t because i was just “a sad straight girl who turned gay men into a fetish”. never mind the fact that seeing m/m romance for the first time in my life made me feel seen and understood in a way that no m/f romance in mainstream media had ever made me feel. never mind the fact that i wasn’t even a girl in the first place. it’s nothing like being queer and cis at all.

i still remember the first time i came across gay male subcultures, and how different men with different body types would be categorized with various nicknames. i encountered the bear subculture, the group of men who were fat and hairy, and i felt something click. this, i thought. this is what i want to be. because i had spent so long thinking of myself as just an ugly girl, it never even occurred to me that there may be someone out there who would look at my body type and find it hot and sexy and desirable. my brain had been so drenched in a potent combination of self-hating misogyny, fatphobia, and transphobia that i couldn’t even consider myself sexually attractive at all. and then i found bears, and i realized that maybe someone could find me sexy and attractive, that i wasn’t just a failed girl, that someone could find me beautiful even with the body i had.

and it wasn’t just the whole “fat and still sexy” thing  that struck me about the bear subculture, either, it was specifically “fat and hairy and sexy”. because one of the ways i struggled with gendered expectations as a teenager was the feminine expectation to shave. i hated shaving my legs and my armpits. i have moles in my armpits that make shaving without hurting myself impossible, and my leg skin is so bumpy that i couldn’t shave there without hurting myself either. no matter how much i tried, i would always, ALWAYS nick myself in the shower with the razor, and in the case of my armpits, sometimes the moles would get actually stuck in the razors and it would fucking hurt. and my mother constantly, constantly harangued me to shave, told me that women who didn’t shave were seen as dirty and unhygienic and gross. to this fucking day i cannot wear shorts in public because my legs are SO hairy and i am so terrified of someone handing me shit for not shaving my legs. i literally cannot bring myself to wear anything but full-length pants out in public no matter how hot it is because of how scared i am of someone insulting me for my leg hair because they assume i’m a woman. but the bear subculture? you could be fat and hairy and still be stunningly attractive. you could be chubby and totally covered in hair and still be a total sex bomb.

eventually, i found myself wanting to take testosterone. i thought of myself as trans, not just nonbinary. i started to become more loud and direct about my gender. i was still not out to people in my face-to-face life, but on the internet i became pushier and pushier about my identity. i felt more and more like i wanted to alter myself so i could stop living in this perpetual pit of frustration that was dealing with dysphoria. i wanted to transition, more and more, even if the social consequences of transitioning were severe, because the longer and longer i went allowing people to assume i was female, the angrier and angrier it made me to be misgendered. when i was a child, someone calling me “lady” was nothing. but as i got older, hearing someone call me “lady” made me want to fucking snap their neck. i wanted to correct them so, so badly every single time, even if outing myself put me in danger.

my mother forcibly outed me as trans to the PCP doctor i was visiting, which was extremely stressful and painful for me at the time--but it turned out that the doctor’s brother was actually a trans man, and as a result he was much more friendly to me about my identity than most other doctors would be where i was living in rural nebraska. i had been struggling up to this point trying to find a place to get testosterone. the first place i went to was super gatekeep-y, where they had a policy of not calling you back to schedule an appointment if you didn’t call them repeatedly and insistently, because apparently only calling to ask for an appointment once meant that you didn’t “want it enough” to be “really trans” (never mind the fact that i have terrible phone anxiety). the second endocrinologist i tried didn’t actually prescribe HRT. it just wasn’t his thing. i drove 100 miles in bad weather to see him and he didn’t even do what i needed from him. but then i talked to the PCP my mother outed me to. i asked him to help me find a clinic where i could get testosterone. he did a quick google search and dug up a gender clinic in denver, printed out all their information for me, and told me to give them a try. now, denver was a few hours drive away from where i was living, but i had friends in colorado who would let me stay with them, so i had no problem with finding time to go to denver. in september 2019 i scheduled an appointment to go to this clinic, and they gave me a date and time and i made sure to schedule a trip to see my friends around it.

the moment i went into the clinic, i could tell that i was somewhere that would help me. the staff was mostly made up of black and latina women who were very kind to me. the patients were largely obviously GNC, transfem and transmasc alike. one of the patients in the waiting room when i went in was a person who had the brightest, most HOT PINK mohawk i’d ever seen and was wearing a tricked out leather jacket. most of the patients were also not white. i filled out their paperwork, and eventually they called me back to see the doctor.

the doctor was a nice man. he was wearing a rainbow lanyard. when he walked in, he asked me a few questions about my gender (mostly clarifying questions about my pronouns, since i said i liked both he and they pronouns and he wanted to know which of the two to use for me), listened to me discuss my gender dysphoria, and told me they were going to do a few blood tests to check my hormone levels to make sure that i didn’t have any medical problems that would get in the way of HRT. he sent me to their in-house lab, and the phlebotomist was a beautiful black woman who had a lovely laugh. i waited for a while longer in the waiting room while they ran their tests. then the doctor spoke to me again and told me that everything looked normal enough and i was cleared to start hormones. he said they had their own built-in pharmacy in the clinic where they’d send in a prescription for T and fill it the moment the insurance approval came back. this involved more waiting, but i was so excited about getting my hormones that i didn’t care. my best friend/qpp was with me at the time (they came with me for moral support since driving in denver is so fucking stressful), and i was happy enough that i was going to get my hormones that i didn’t care even if i had to wait all day.

and then, the nurses told me that i was going to do my first shot that day. they took me back into a back room with a vial of T and a needle and taught me how to do the injection. it was subcutaneous injections, so i didn’t have to worry about doing the long, scary intramuscular needle, but i still warned the nurse that i was a needlephobe and that i’d probably need to hype myself up for it quite significantly. but i was in a fuzzy state of mind at the time, too sleep-deprived to really feel any kind of fear. so the nurse told me “just pinch a bit of skin up and inject the needle halfway at an angle” and i was just like “okay!” and stuck myself immediately. the nurse was genuinely surprised.

i walked out of that clinic feeling giddy and unbelievably relieved. for the longest time i’d experienced nothing but obstacles when trying to get myself hormones. and all it took was one appointment at this gender clinic to get the prescription i needed. i was overjoyed beyond measure.

and i noticed, after i started testosterone, that my gender changed too. before i started T, i considered myself mostly non-gendered. i wanted only neutral pronouns.  even if i didn’t mind certain masculine terms, i still only wanted they pronouns. but the longer i was on T, the more masculine i felt. the more male i felt. and that, truth be told, did not bother me in the least. i feel comfortable in my skin now on testosterone, more than i had ever felt before. and i’m still changing. i’ve only been on T for about a year and 2/3rds or so, and bodily changes from hormonal transition take like 5 years to complete. i have a much deeper voice now, and i’m growing facial hair, but since i still have boobs and wide hips, people still assume i’m a woman. and even then, i’m happy as who i am. i’ll probably be happier once i get top surgery, but i’m still much happier with how i look now than i ever was as a teenager.

and you know what? i’m fine being a nonbinary guy. i consider myself both nonbinary, and s a trans man, because my gender isn’t wholly male, but i still feel comfortable being seen as “a man”. for the longest time i called myself “none gender with left boy”, but now it’s more like “guy gender with left eldritch.” i like thinking of my masculinity as inherently weird, like i’m some kind of odd colorful nonhuman creature that is man-shaped and has a deep voice and a flat chest but is still unmistakably nonhuman. i have a deep love and respect for the nonbinary community all those years that i identified solely as NB, but now i realize that thanks to the testosterone, i fit in somewhere else.

and let me tell you, it fucking hurts to be on tumblr, now realizing that i am, at least partially, a guy, and seeing how trans men are treated in queer spaces, both by t/er/fs and by other queer people, even other fucking trans people. it honestly feels to me like any time a trans man tries to speak about the specific experiences he has as a trans man, you have people either being like “you’re not oppressed because you’re a man so this didn’t happen”, or you have people being like “stop trying to dominate the conversation and take the focus away from transfems!”, or you’ll have t/er/fs either calling you a gender traitor or trying to indoctrinate you so they can brainwash you into detransitioning. and god fucking help you if you’re a trans man of color. MOC are already demonized enough for their identities; trans MOC get the worst of both worlds where they’re perceived as a threat due to being not white, AND due to being a man, AND due to being trans. it’s like everyone universally hates you for what you are, and refuses to let you speak about your problems because theyre 1) not “real” problems, or 2) you’re “stealing resources” from “the people who really need it” (i.e. transfems).

and this pisses me off so fucking much. i have no interest in playing oppression olympics with anyone, let alone my fellow trans people. i don’t want to claim that i’m “more oppressed” than transfems because by and large, i have led a fairly privileged life, and i recognize that. i know that i was lucky to be born to middle class parents who didn’t abuse/neglect me, who don’t hate me for being trans, who didn’t throw me out on the street when i came out to them. i know i am not more oppressed than others, even as a fat, queer, neurodivergent nb trans man--because i am white. because i was born to middle class parents. because i was not abused or neglected. i know this. i know it very well because my mother fucking raised me on a steady flow of “you’re so lucky to have us, you’re so lucky you’re not abused, so many other people have it so much worse than you do, you should be grateful we’re not abusing you.” and she did this so fucking much, in fact, that now i have a goddam complex of “everyone else has it worse than me so i should just shut up forever and never complain about anything because i have it so easy.” so when you have other people in the trans community itself playing the oppression olympics card, acting like focusing on anyone else aside from a very narrow group of people is “taking away resources” when it’s literally just trans men talking about what they experienced throughout their lives, i really don’t understand it. i don’t hate my trans sisters. i don’t want to pick fights with them over who’s had it harder. i want to stand in solidarity with them so we are united against the people who want to hurt and kill us. so when i see people acting like trans men are somehow “decentering the important people” when they literally do nothing else aside from just tell people shit that’s happened to them, i really have to wonder why they consider trans men to be less important to the conversation. over and over i’ve been fed messages that trans men are just secretly misogynists, that they just hate trans women and that’s why trans men get fooled into becoming T/ER/F/s. like, have you considered for a moment that maybe the reason why trans men and transmasc nbs get pulled into T/ER/Fi/sm is because so, so many trans spaces are SO FUCKING HOSTILE TOWARDS US??? AND THAT T/ER/FS MIGHT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS???? 

idk bro. the internet’s version of feminism is just hatred of men, of any and all kinds. it is just pain turned outward against people perceived to be the problem, who are not. so many people are like “trans men are just misogynists” but being fucking real with you, most of the people in my life who have mistreated me and been cruel to me over my gender are cis fucking women. ive heard so, so many stories from other trans men about how badly the cis women in their lives mistreated them because of their gender, their transition, their appearance. i hear stories about trans men being fooled into dating t/er/fs who then mentally, physically, and sexually abused them into detransitioning. even my own fucking mother, who raised me with this feminine expectation because she so badly wanted me to be her perfect “daughter”, reacted badly to me coming out as trans, because she confessed to me at one point that it felt like i was “rejecting how [she’d] raised [me].”

i want to be happy in my body. i want to be happy in who i am. but when casual hatred of men is so fucking condoned in queer (and even trans) spaces, it makes it really fucking hard to feel happy or comfortable in any of these places. at all. hatred of men doesn’t help anyone. it hurts trans men, who don’t need to be shit on so much just for being themselves and presenting in a way that makes them happy. it hurts nb people, especially those who are masculine-presenting or masc-of-center, AFAB and AMAB alike (since so many people see AMAB nbs as just “man lite”). it hurts trans women, both in and out of the closet, because it assumes that they’re male too and that they don’t know anything about female experiences despite being women themselves. it hurts cis men because it teaches them that people are going to assume they’re inherently threatening and violent and evil, even if they’re trying their best not to be any of those things, so why bother trying to be otherwise when people already expect you to be a violent, predatory asshole? and fuck, this whole bullshit of “men bad women good” doesn’t even help cis women either, because it fools them into believing all women are inherently safe, making it easier for female abusers to take advantage of them because “i’m a soft pretty girl uwu i could never hurt you like those bad evil dirty violent men could. how could i possibly hurt you. im just a sweet innocent girl uwu.”

like you can say “men aren’t oppressed for being men” all you want, but that doesn’t stop people from hurting and abusing and even killing trans men, queer men, men of color, neurodivergent men, disabled men, etc. and if you don’t believe that these intersections can intensify their oppression just because they’re men, then i really don’t know what to fucking tell you. trans men both queer and straight are shit on for being men because cis people see us as sad, broken failed women and other trans people see us as threatening and dangerous stealers of resources. cis queer men are shit on for not being “real” men and will be called things like “sissy” and “f*g” for not conforming to traditional cishet masculinity. men of color are seen as inherently threatening and dangerous just for existing as men and POC simultaneously. and disabled and neurodivergent men are also seen as “not real men” because they can’t perform to some arbitrary standard of able-bodied masculinity imposed on them by neurotypicals, for being “weird”, for not being “tough enough”, for their behavior being seen as threatening just because neurotypical people can’t understand what they’re doing, for having accommodation needs that people don’t want to meet because it’s inconvenient for them. sure, a white, cishet, neurotypical, able-bodied man is not going to be “oppressed” for being a man. this particular type of man will live a “privileged” life. but just acting like all men have no problems period and that their problems aren’t “real” problems just because they’re not women is NOT going to make men stop and go “wow maybe i’m being an asshole” when confronted about misogyny or whatever, it’s going to make them get defensive and double down. you don’t start a conversation with someone by telling them that their life was so easy and they don’t know what real problems are.  if you REALLY want to open people’s eyes to misogyny (and transmisogyny), the way of doing that is NOT by shitting all over all men and acting like they’re all evil bastards who’ve never known what it’s like to be oppressed. and i hate how the phrase “not all men” has turned into an invite to be dogpiled and abused, especially when you’re talking about trans men or queer men or MOC, because clearly you’re just a dumb evil man trying to mansplain misogyny to the righteous, pure cis women who are clearly the only group of people on the planet who’ve ever experienced any kind of gender-based oppression at all.

i am an nb trans man. i am trans and nb and a man. and i am sick and tired of seeing trans men be mistreated. me talking about my issues is NOT “stealing resources” from transfems. me talking about my experiences with misogyny and toxic beauty standards is not “taking” anything away from anyone. i am not “dominating the conversation” just for talking about my life. i am not a threat to other trans people just for fucking existing as a man. i want my voice to be heard--not at the expense of others, but i’m tired of other voices being elevated at the expense of my voice. iim not demanding that all the resources be funneled to trans men. i’m not asking for trans women and transfems to be listened to and respected and validated less. i just want trans men to have an equal seat at the table. i just want us to be told that we are welcome specifically because we are trans and men, because our community should welcome all trans people. i’m not going to ever play oppression olympics with anyone because i will always, always lose that fight, but i don’t have to be the most oppressed person in a discussion for my voice to deserve to be heard. i have struggled my entire life with my identity, both gender and sexuality wise, and i am just sick and fucking tired of people telling me that i’m wrong for whatever reason for doing this or that or the next thing when i’m just existing as myself. i’m not fucking hurting anyone. i live a pretty blessed life compared to others, considering my parents and some of my other family have no problem financially supporting me while i grapple with my ADHD and depression. i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: i’m not asking to take away resources from anyone. i just want trans men to be listened to and elevated too. our voices are also important. we contribute to the trans experience too. we go through systemic oppression too. and it’s not unfair or threatening for me to say “hey, i’m not trying to take away from your problems, but i also want to talk about what i’m going through and be validated for it too.” it’s not like by validating transfems, we cannot validate anyone else in the entire community. it’s not “mom says it’s my turn on the valid” here. we can uplift each other without taking from each other. and the amount of casually condoned hatred of men i’ve seen is fucking exhausting. it hurts every single time i see it. it’s fucking r/a/d/fe/m rhetoric too, this idea that all men are inherently bad. and seeing people espouse it uncritically hurts pretty much everyone.

i guess what i’m saying is, that i’ve had a long life journey to get to this point of being happy with who i am. and i refuse to let people tear me down for it just because they’ve swallowed too much t/er/f rhetoric to understand that this casual, pervasive hatred of men hurts everyone. it hurts trans and cis men. it hurts trans and cis women. it hurts nb people of all kinds, masc-aligned, fem-aligned, and unaligned, transfem and transmasc alike. it doesn’t do anything but wank the oppression boner of angry cis women who think that trans women/transfems are the root of all evil and that trans men/transmascs are just gender traitors that need to be raped and psychologically abused until they accept that they’re “really women”. i don’t want to steal anything from anyone. i just want to be listened to and told that my experiences matter. and our community is really not doing that right now, and it’s bullshit.

trans men, transmasc nbs, i love you. i love all of us. we are not “dangerous”, we are not “threatening”, we’re not “stealing resources” just for fucking existing and asking to be heard. we are amazing people, choosing to fight for our identities in a world that would strip us of all our agency. we deserve to be happy. we deserve to be loved. and if no one else is going to do it, i’ll love us anyway.