#i find it weird but if you're defining what is valid and what's not based on the opinion of one random guy on the internet ur doing it wron

[janokenmun]

honestly i dont get the "bi lesbian" discourse in particular. like obviously any and all exclusionism in the Be Yourself Regardless Of What Society Thinks community is dumb and stupid but that in particular i dont get

since like. to me (obv u dont have to agree), labels are meant to be *useful*, to convey information. the best labels make a useful statement that can be used to act in a more informed manner; "i have autism [gives information on potential behavioral patterns and needs]." "i am a straight man [gives information relevant to sexuality; both who you're attracted to, and gives information on whether the audience is likely to be attracted to you]." "this is a hill [this area of land rises above the nearby land]"

and to me, "bi lesbian" does that; it expresses a lot in a very concise and relatively intuitive phrase! to me (obv u dont have to agree) it expresses "i am (approximately) a woman who is attracted to both men and women, but ESPECIALLY (approximately) women". and that's useful information!

it also doesn't help that, like *any* attempt at categorization, there will be edge cases and fuzzy boundaries. the definitions between a lake, pond, pool, and reservoir are fuzzy. the distinction between a mountain and a hill is fuzzy. the distinction between a river, creek, stream, and brook are fuzzy. all of these have vague differences, like a river is generally considered to be bigger than a stream, but the cutoffs are inexact and subjective, because nature doesn't like categorization. human gender and sexuality is a lot like this, there is no objective cutoff, people are going to disagree on what exactly counts as what. and that's okay! you don't need to have the exact same definition of river vs stream, or hill vs mountain, or lesbian vs bisexual, because the boundaries are always going to be weird and subjective there; just don't try to force your definition on others and gatekeep things based on subjective cutoffs

[lafemmemacabre]

Goth 101

🦇 tl;dr version for those who prefer that format

Goth is a music-based subculture that started out in the UK in the late 70s/early 80s and spread internationally from there. It spawned from the UK Punk scene, keeping the DIY ethics but turning the music more melancholic, introspective and experimental.

The music genres that the subculture was built around are (dark) Post-Punk, Gothic Rock, Darkwave, Ethereal Wave and a few other smaller subgenres.

While the fashion and other non-musical aesthetics are very prominent and beloved by goths, they're non-essential to the subculture. What defines a goth is the music we listen to.

Our "big 4" bands are The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and the Banshees. However, 3 out of 4 of those bands are Post-Punk acts (Sisters of Mercy being the exception Gothic Rock band), and while very influential to the rest of the goth music scene, they by no means are the end-all, be-all of what goth music sounds like. The genre has evolved through its over 40 years of existence, creating diverse sounds. Anyone darkly inclined can find something to love, even if it takes a bit of research.

The Dark & Gothic playlist on Spotify is a pretty decent way to get started into goth music. In my old blog I had entire tags dedicated to goth music as a whole, and separately to Post-Punk, Gothic Rock, Darkwave and Ethereal Wave too. I had a few playlists based on popular goth aesthetics here.

The longer description of goth music will include playlists for each bigger goth subgenre, but please keep in mind they're made by me in a way that appeals to my personal tastes for each subgenre. I don't know every band that exists and my personal taste is biased towards the 90s.

Now, to a more detailed introduction to the goth subculture...

🦇 Dark alternative vs Goth

What a lot of people need clarified is that the goth subculture doesn't have a monopoly on the dark alternative world, nor are we the home for everyone sad, spooky and weird who doesn't fit in and might listen to any sort of sad, spooky or weird alternative music.

There are SO many dark alternative music scenes that have nothing or very little to do with the goth subculture. We've influenced a lot of them fashion-wise, but just because they copied us we look alike doesn't mean we're interchangeable.

There's no scale that goes from Prep to Goth and measures how Valid™ your inner darkness is, in which if you're anything below goth then you're a poser and lame. It's perfectly fine and cool to be dark alternative without being a goth. Goth isn't a badge of legitimacy or honor, it's just one specific flavor of dark alternative among so many.

Goth is a very small and obscure subculture despite our superficial hypervisbility (our looks and infamy are hypervisible, what we're actually about is extremely buried underground), and most dark alternative people aren't goths.

🦇 What does it take to be a goth?

There's one rule, and one rule only: LISTEN TO THE MUSIC. You wouldn't call yourself a metalhead without being a fan of Metal music, would you? The same principle applies to goth.

There are many types of alternative subcultures; some examples are fashion-based subcultures, another are lifestyle-based subcultures. A third type of subculture that's very prominent (especially in the West) are music-based subcultures.

Goth is a music-based subculture, just like the metalhead, punk, emo, rivethead/Industrial, hip-hop, rave, K-Pop and grunge subcultures are.

This means that, while the music isn't THE ONLY aspect the subculture has, in order to be a goth you have to listen to goth music, and we have a specific set of music genres that our subculture was built around, so not just anything dark and melancholy will do, as we don't have a monopoly on that, but we do have something closer to a monopoly on a specific sound and musical legacy.

You don't have to listen to goth music EXCLUSIVELY to be a goth, that'd be insane. You don't even have to limit yourself to dark alternative music either. You just have to listen to goth music to a relevant degree and be passionate about it and you're in, the rest is up to you.

This means too that the way you dress has no impact on your validity as a goth, whether you don't have the gothic wardrobe of your dreams yet or you just don't want to dress goth at all. I'm TikTok mutuals with a girl who dresses exclusively in pink-white sweet lolita coords, but who's passionate about goth music. She's a goth, no questions about it. On the other hand, a lot of the influencers you'll see online who look like a lost Addams cousin aren't goths at all, and no house decor or outfit will make them gothier if they don't listen to the music.

🦇 What music counts as goth?

From the previous points I made you probably gathered that Industrial and Metal ⁠– both genres that outsiders usually associate with the goth subculture ⁠– aren't actually part of the goth genre. So, what is goth music?

Goth music developed initially in the UK in the late 70s/early 80s off of dark Post-Punk. Post-Punk itself developed from UK 70s Punk Rock, being also influenced by Glam Rock, experimental electronic music, and many other influences more specific to each band that took part in this musical development (Bauhaus were very influenced by Reggae!).

What characterizes the goth sound are elements such as; being bass-driven rather than guitar-driven (in almost every case), guitars playing more of a decorative or atmospheric role instead of being the main focus (which contrasts starkly against genres such as Metal), preference for voices with a lower vocal range (altos, this is your genre to shine in!), optional use of synthesizers, recurrent replacing of human drummers with drum machines, and common use of lots of reverb and delay effects everywhere for an extra sensation that you're listening to music recorded in a catacomb.

Dark Post-Punk was the starting point of the goth subculture, and from it, all other goth music subgenres developed. Depending on who you ask there's a billion goth micro-genres. In my opinion a lot of those subgenres are rather meaningless (a lot of them are just specific flavors of Post-Punk or Darkwave) but the main 4 subgenres of goth music are:

(Dark) Post-Punk

Gothic Rock

Darkwave

Ethereal Wave

POST-PUNK:

Post-Punk took the standard sound of Punk Rock and its DIY ethics and made the sound more melancholic, romantic, experimental, less angry, and more introspective. Dark Post-Punk in particular was influenced by gothic literature and old horror movies (including their soundtracks, the Banshees created their characteristic guitar sound after the violins in the Psycho soundtrack).

Besides the 3 Post-Punk bands I listed as part of the goth "big 4", there's bands such as Skeletal Family, Twin Tribes, Specimen, She Wants Revenge, Sex Gang Children, Xmal Deutschland, Lebanon Hanover, Cruex Lies, The Secret French Postcards and The Birthday Party.

GOTHIC ROCK:

When goth became slightly more established in sound, Gothic Rock is what happened. Less experimental than Post-Punk, a bit more Rock-based, more decidedly dark and miserable than Post-Punk necessarily is, and finally severed from goth's punk roots. Sisters of Mercy is THE most popular and influential Gothic Rock band; they popularized the use of extremely low baritone vocals and drum machines. Despite existing since the 80s, its popularity peak was in the 90s.

Goth as a whole has its "big 4", but the subgenre of Gothic Rock has its own "big 3", which are Sisters of Mercy, The Mission (UK), and Fields of the Nephilim. Other Gothic Rock bands are Rosetta Stone, Corpus Delicti, Inkubus Sukkubus, Mephisto Walz, Angels of Liberty, Two Witches, Nosferatu, Wisborg and Soror Dolorosa.

DARKWAVE:

Goth going electronic! There's basically two types of Darkwave; the one that's more a combination of Post-Punk + Synthpop (very popular in the past decade), and the one that's more a combination of Gothic Rock + electronic music in general (most popular in the 90s). EXTREMELY danceable, but then again goths can dance to literally anything. This genre has existed at the very least since the second half of the 80s and has never stopped being relevant in the goth scene, save maybe during the Deathrock revival phase.

Clan of Xymox might be the single most influential Darkwave band. There's also The Frozen Autumn, The Crüxshadows, Switchblade Symphony, Collide, Dark, Ghosting, London After Midnight, She Past Away, Drab Majesty and Boy Harsher.

ETHEREAL WAVE:

This genre is heavily linked to Dream Pop, Neoclassical Darkwave and Shoegaze. Like with Darkwave there's basically a few styles of Ethereal Wave, I can pinpoint three; the one that's like, regular Goth Rock/Post-Punk but with a lot of extra delay and reverb and other stylistic choices that make it sound, well, Ethereal, dream-like. There's the type that has lots of Folk influences (be it Medieval/Rennaisance-ish type of Folk or "ethnic" type of Folk), and there's one that's synth-based but, unlike Darkwave, sounds like what ketamine must feel like. This genre has existed since the mid 80s but its peak in popularity and relevancy in the scene was in the 90s.

Dead Can Dance is THE most influential Ethereal Wave band, but there's others such as Cocteau Twins (started as Post-Punk, ended up as Dream Pop and Ethereal Wave), Miranda Sex Garden, Faith and the Muse, Lycia, Claire Voyant, Hamsas XIII, Love is Colder than Death, SRSQ, Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Mors Syphilitica.

What about Deathrock, Gothic Metal and Industrial?

Deathrock is goth's American twin, basically. While in the early 80s in the UK morose ex-punks were playing Post-Punk, in the early 80s in the LA Punk scene morbid and brooding punk kids were playing Deathrock; it's closer to Punk Rock in sound than Post-Punk, being more about being spooky and brooding than about being eerie and romantic. Goth is to vampires and witches what Deathrock is to zombies and werewolves.

To summarize the consensus on Deathrock and its place within the goth subculture; it's rare to find a goth who's not also into at least some Deathrock, and even rarer to find a deathrocker who's not into goth. Personally, I think Deathrock is its own separate though very similar thing, but I don't mind Deathrock being lumped in with goth music.

I made a whole TikTok video on why Gothic Metal isn't a goth subgenre, but in summary; Gothic Metal is a Metal subgenre that was somewhat influenced by goth music in its earliest stage of development, but is for the most part a cross between Doom Metal and Death Metal with lyrics inspired by gothic literature. By adhering to a Metal sound it doesn't fit the type of sound goth music has. The goth influences in Gothic Metal were mostly only present in the earliest bands and a majority of the newer acts are completely disconnected from the goth scene.

As for goth's ties to the rivethead subculture (and thus, Industrial music): We've been sibling subcultures since at least the early 90s. Both very, very small and underground scenes that despite being different, had enough similarities in music, idiosyncrasy and aesthetic sensibilities to comfortably band together for the sake of scene viability. That's why you might hear people talking about the "gothic-industrial scene".

Keep in mind too that 80s and 90s Industrial music sounded very different from how it does now (compare your average Grendel or Combichrist song to your average Skinny Puppy or Die Form song). There was a lot less influence of raver music in the rivethead scene back then, and a lot more influence from 80s dark alternative music and New Wave, which are key influences for the goth scene as well.

As told by goth YouTuber Angela Benedict (goth since 1995), every goth back then listened to at least some Industrial, every rivethead listened to at least some goth music, and they all loved 80s New Wave, so DJs at shared club nights had a very easy time entertaining both audiences simultaneously.

🦇 Trivia & other things to know

The term "gothic Rock" was being used in music journalism as early as to describe releases by The Doors and The Velvet Underground, but the word "gothic" there wasn't so much used to point to a specific type of sound at that stage, it was used to imply the mood of the music and that's not where the subculture gets its name.

We don't know for sure why this subculture began to be referred to as "goth", initially the music was called either New Wave (just a darker and more underground variety of it) or Positive Punk. However, one of the potential roots of this name for our subculture is that it comes from an inside joke from members of Southern Death Cult/The Cult about Andi Sexgang (Sex Gang Children) about how he was a creepy little guy obsessed with the macabre and dark romanticism living at the Visigoth Towers, so they called him a "goth goblin" and if he was a goth, then his fans were goths too.

From the comments that the goth bloggers/vloggers I follow get, apparently it's common for baby bats and people interested in the subculture to think that they HAVE to find a goth "type" to lock themselves into, like "trad goth" or "romantic goth" or whatever else, and if they don't, they're a poser. This isn't true at all. Most goths wax and wane between fashion styles and goth music subgenres. These terms are far more useful to describe aesthetics rather than people or music.

If you ever hear people talk about "1st/2nd/3rd wave goth/Gothic Rock"; that's an (in my opinion) outdated and not too functional terminology to differentiate between "eras" of goth music, 1st wave being between 1975-1985, 2nd between 1985-1995, and 3rd between 1995-? That terminology was used widely when I was a baby bat but not so much anymore.

"Baby bat" is what a lot of more established goths call newbies! It's NOT meant as an insult nor to be condescending. It's a loving cutesy term and while of course most baby bats are very young, it's perfectly plausible to be a very grown adult and a baby bat if they just got into goth instead of getting into the subculture as a teen.

Most goth bands are easily found on Spotify except for more underground ones that haven't been active for a while (I have so many beloved bands and songs that just don't exist on Spotify), but the real goth jackpot is at Bandcamp.

Facebook is still useful for one (1) thing and it's for finding goth events; that's where I've found out about gothic fairs, goth nights and gigs; from the largely popular ones in my local scene to the very underground ones.

The song most of the subculture agrees is THE first official goth song is Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus, which was recorded as a singular take. It was the first track the band recorded together, too.

The Batcave is infamous nowadays as a huge goth night club in Soho (London) during the early 80s, owned by the band Specimen, BUT as told by the very people who used to frequent the nightclub, the whole thing has been a little overblown and its current reputation is more legend than fact. YouTuber Gothcast has a great video on the subject that was praised by members of Specimen itself!

Most of the most iconic pioneer goth musicians HATE being referred to as goths or to have their music referred to as such. When the term "goth" was first starting to be used to describe our music and scene it was a pejorative used by outsiders and/or mostly associated with the campier and more "low brow" bands (Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend come to mind). Andrew Eldritch from Sisters of Mercy especially hates it, to the point he refuses to even say the word and refers to it as "the G word". Which is hilarious since he sounded the most stereotypically gothy out of the big 4 and looked like this at the time he started to be a piss baby about it:

Goth isn't really a "youth" subculture anymore if you ask people within the scene. Unlike people from many other subcultures, goths have a tendency to stay goth far into adulthood (even if covertly). When you go to any events, besides teens and people in their early 20s, you're gonna see plenty of goths in their 40s and older, a few of them will bring their kids along if the event is family friendly.

Besides the obvious chance of many goths being professional creatives (musicians, writers, artists, etc), for some reason A LOT of goths work in tech and healthcare!

Metalheads headbang, they and punks also mosh. What do goths do to vibe to our music together? We dance! We don't dance the same as non-goths but we LOVE to dance to our music, together or solo. There's no established dance styles to adhere to; it's just letting your body flow to the music. Some goth dancing is very intricate, some of it is very simple, it depends on the goth in question. Just in case, this is NOT like the dance gifs of cybergoths/rivetheads under that damned bridge. Think less that and more Wednesday Addams dancing to The Cramps, or the girl from the Night of the Demons movie. Here's some videos about how goths dance:

We fucking love 80s New Wave. No, Depeche Mode isn't a goth band; yes, you'll have to dig deep to find a goth who doesn't ADORE them. The only one I've come across who disliked Depeche Mode liked Soft Cell instead.

Goth IS international! Not just in the sense that there's fans of goth music basically everywhere, but that there's local goth scenes with their own local goth bands everywhere. Outside of the US + Europe + Canada, there's huge goth scenes all over Latin América (our Deathrock and Post-Punk are at times even popular among 1st world goths), and there's also smaller but still present goth scenes in Africa, Asia and Oceania. She Past Away is very much one of THE most popular goth bands in recent years and they're from Turkey.

The goth scene has always been in friendly terms with the LGBT community. Not only are many of our biggest icons LGBT themselves (the whole band Specimen, AVC from Sopor Aeternus, both members of Diavol Strâin, the vocalist from Male Tears, Cinnamon Hadley, and many more) but plenty of cishet goths (especially the men) embrace gender non-conformity and/or androgyny. In most local scenes, goth club nights are held at gay bars/nightclubs, as they don't tend to have privately owned venues. And either way, at any goth night there'll be tons of gay and gender non-conforming goths no matter where they're held. To varying degrees depending on the locality of the scene, gay and bi people are completely normalized in the goth subculture, and gender non-conformity and androgyny aren't just encouraged, but praised and coveted.

There's goths of any religion you can think of, but Neo Pagans are somewhat over-represented in our community compared to the rest of larger society (for better or worse). Funnily enough, very few goths are actually Satanists of any sort. I'd say the numbers go more or less similar to our local non-goth peers. In the West and westernized countries I'd say it goes; majority culturally-Christian atheist or agnostic goths (usually not militant about it), a few practicing Christians of whichever denomination (usually whichever is dominant in the country they inhabit), the rare but entirely plausible Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist goth, and a bunch of Neo-Pagans. Probably one (1) or two (2) actual Satanist goths per state/province/etc, tops.

World Goth Day is celebrated every year on May 22nd.

"Mallgoth" isn't a type of goth in either a musical or fashion sense. I made another TikTok about it, but in summary; it was originally hurled as an insult towards a very specific type of poser; the American kids in the late 90s and early 00s who imitated how goths dressed and called themselves goths while only listening to Nu Metal and maybe the most mainstream Industrial Metal. They tended to congregate at malls and behave particularly obnoxious to everyone there, further ruining our already delicate image (especially at that time).

Cybergoths aren't really goths either. Their music scene is centered around EBM, which is basically slightly darker and slightly more aggressive raver music that may or may not have Industrial influences. And to be honest they behaved like a rapacious invasive species in goth club nights to the point that they almost decimated the actual goth scene and it took us a while to recover from that.

Goths are sometimes perceived as too self-serious but honestly? We love making fun of ourselves and we tend to have a very silly or dry sense of humor. We're just tired of the same cheap and inaccurate jokes made by people who don't know anything about us. The best jokes about goths will often come from goths ourselves; you can only properly make fun of something you understand well! The few times outsiders get it right though? (Sad to confirm that the South Park goth kids are hilarious and I wish they were in a better show) You'll see goths sharing the SHIT out of it, such as me being obsessed with the goths from Ridonculous Race, or the clip below:

[dduane]

Re: Magic systems

kosmonaunt asked:

I have the weird hyper-fixation of wanting to know all their is about The Speech and just how everything works!! I love learning about how power systems work, and it helps since I’m trying to develop my own. I’m always stuck on soft or hard magic systems. Since I don’t know all there is to really know about my system. Do you have tips on crafting magic systems? How do you feel about someone being inspired by pieces of your system?

Inspiration is fine! What you want to make sure you do with whatever inspires you, though, is to work hard to make your own take on it different from or better than what you borrowed. Around here we refer to this as "the magpie principle:" if you're going to pick up and play with/make off with a bright and shiny idea, you need to be working to produce something even brighter and shinier as your part of the "exchange". Whether or not you succeed at this (or can succeed), either sometimes or never at all, isn't the point. The point is to always be trying.

As regards building magic systems: there were three different ones in the foreground or background of my first novel alone—all of them with features that at this end of time I can recognize as being inspired by elements of magic systems in other writers' work. But by the time I'd more fully developed them, each had become something unique. The system I'm probably better known for—the system based on the wizardly Speech and its use—sprang more or less automatically from the increasingly complex answers to the question, "What if there was a manual that could tell you the truth about/the secrets of what makes the world go?". (Because once you answer one question, another pops up. "Where did that manual come from? What're you supposed to do with it? What's wizardry for?" Etc., etc.) I've spent the last few decades, on and off, answering that question in ways that (intentionally) mirror the main characters' exploration of the art of wizardry, and what it means to engage in the business of errantry in a world that mostly thinks wizards are a fairy tale.

Before getting into describing my own approach to building a system, I needed to take a little time to look around and make sure I knew what you meant when you mentioned hard and soft magic. My best guess is that you're referring to what a lot of people are calling "Sanderson's Three Laws of Magic" (fairly enough, as Brandon calls them that himself). I had a look, and have come to the conclusion that they're more general guidelines than laws... as in each of his three essays on the subject, Brandon no sooner names his basic laws/principles than he starts punching holes through them to make room for systems that don't follow them rigidly. (And frankly I find this kind of endearing.)

With his first one, in particular, I have no quarrel at all: the concept that in one kind of magic, which for his purposes he defines as the "hard" kind, rules are extremely important. (Which is why I'm kind of horrified that he apparently got dogpiled about this take on a Worldcon panel, because to me it seems so intuitive. Some of the best fantasy storytellers I know, like this one, would agree with him.) Then later he gets on to the equally valid ideas that limitations on magic are really important, and that culturally interconnecting multiple systems is useful; and here too we're in agreement. This is reassuring to me, considering that I built my first four systems—all of which feature approaches resting on similar concepts—while Sanderson was between four and six years old. :)

People using Sanderson's Laws will look at the three systems in the Middle Kingdoms books and classify them as varying sorts of relatively hard magic, with their power rooted in two or maybe three different sources. (The blue Fire is a gift of the Divine, nearly lost since ancient times and much damaged, but now slowly being recovered: sorcery is a language-based art in which no one's terribly sure where its power comes from: and the so-called "royal magics" probably started out as a blood sorcery that over centuries was shifted toward very specific uses by the power of the demigod-descendants who employed it.)

The Young Wizards novels, though, feature an extremely hard magic deeply rooted in science and (more or less under the hood) very, very rules-intensive... while its power relies on correct use of the language used to create the Universe, and the active cooperation of the Powers still busy about that work. And this is the reason why, though people are going to naturally be curious about the Speech itself, no one's going to hear very much from me about its actual words.

This is because the Speech is canonically described as so powerful that its use is something you can feel in your body and mind (and theoretically your spirit): bone-shaking, life-changing, unmistakable. And there's no way that made-up words on the page can realistically be expected to evoke physical sensations like that in the reader... or like the sense of the universe going silent around you, leaning in to listen, as you speak your spell. The careful writer knows that it's unwise to attempt to produce responses in the reader that, when they fail, will only emphasize how that thing is not happening, and stands a good chance of shattering the illusion one’s trying to weave.

So a Speech-word gets dropped here and a phrase there, but no one's ever going to get enough of it out of me to try to build a spell. Readers are better at doing that work for themselves in their own heads, out of hints and whispers. Over ten books and their interstitial material, there are plenty of those scattered through the text: not to mention the most basic principles of wizardry, which are laid out before the end of the first chapter of the first book in the series. So I'll leave you to get on with deducing what you can from canon.

Meanwhile, if I was about to build a new system, I'd look at my main characters—in the setting of their home cultures—and ask myself for answers to these questions:

What do they want more than anything?

Why can't they have it?

What kind of power will help them get it?

When they do eventually get within reach of the power / the desired thing... what will its achievement cost them?

And will they pay the price?

...Because the payment of such prices is where you find out what your heroes are worth. (Or aren't.) The above arc succinctly describes, in broad strokes, both The Door into Fire and So You Want To Be A Wizard, and a good number of the books that follow them. (Because why abandon what works, or try to fix what's not broken?) :)

With answers to the questions above you can start feeling your way toward what you need—always looking closely at the cultures your characters spring from, and how those cultures will shape their response to the magic they seek. (Or that finds them.) Maybe it's no surprise that the preferred arc structure of a writer who was a psychiatric nurse will be deeply involved with questions of motivation: because motivation is at the heart of almost all human behavior. Find the motivation and you find the character's heart—and, often enough, what kind of magic they need to make their desire and intention overflow into triumph.

...There are quite a few "How to design your magic system" pages out there. You might glance at these to see if there's anything useful in them for you:

How To Build An Amazing Magic System For Your Fantasy Novel

How To Create A Magic System In Six Simple Steps

Building Your Magic System: A Full Recipe

How To Create A Rational Magic System

However, my favorite is the "So You Want To Write A Functional Magic System" page at TV Tropes, which is nicely arranged yet also completely nonprescriptive—a pick-'n'-mix jar of prompts, things other writers have done that've worked, and generally useful ideas. (And try not to vanish too far down the many interconnected rabbitholes...) :)

Now get out there, build the world, and make the magic(s).

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

Ngl sometimes y'all write posts like Miguel and they.. I don't know how to say this

They aren't offensive to trans men - but the takes SMELL offensive. Like..

There are very clear parallels between Scrutiny of Miguel - and Transmasculine Transphobia

(pov: me reading some of the posts up on here)

The way y'all talk about Miguel and his shots? IT'S WEIRD.

They'll be posts about how sad it is that Miguel has to take shots and how he'll 'never feel like a real Spider-person' because he lacks some of the biological functions like Spider Sense. How sad it is that he'll 'never be able to feel apart of what he's created'.

And how tragic that is and how he'll always be an outsider who will never fit in so of course he's taking it out on Miles

Which... Nah, I think he just doesn't want billions of people to die, which he genuinely believes will happen.

And it's like.. valid take.

But also I am dude who has to take shots and lacks the biological functions that 98% of my demographic have. And somehow I manage to feel like a real man.

I am a real man.

And I know those two situations are unrelated and completely divorced from one another but the fact the rhetoric is the same always has me like

Be sitting there like 'waitaminute I think I've seen this episode before-'

And I get where you're coming from. But also it really sucks. Cause I know most of y'all wouldn't put that rhetoric on trans guys. But yet it's still applied to Miguel, who's narrative is a parallel, because y'all find him unlikeable.

But defining someone's identity based on their body's capabilities is not it.

Miguel IS Spider-man. He's not an outsider. The shots don't make him any less of a Spider-man.

You can doubt Miguel's validity, but like.. Please think before using his shots and his lack of powers as a 'gotcha!'

Because he's not the only guy who has to take shots to reaffirm their identity.

In fact, what he's doing isn't even rare. Please remember that.

Taking shots to look, feel, and function the way you're meant to doesn't make you any less than the people who don't.

Miguel is Spider-man. He's not an outsider. That's the point of the movie. ALL of them are equally Spider-man.

Including the dude who has to take shots.

[rollercoasterwords]

i think a lot of people have different definitions on fetishisation which makes it harder to approach as a conversation

i’m curious how you yourself would define it?

i currently have no real standpoint on the matter but it’s a topic that i’d be interested to explore

true!! and honestly that's one of the like. issues with this style of "hot-take activism" that i think is becoming increasingly common with the growth of short-form content social media because like. if you are not willing to take the time to first explain the foundations of what you're talking about, and in your mind "fetishization" means one thing but to another person it means something entirely different, then u two could argue back and forth all day in the comments of like. a tiktok post but that conversation will never be meaningful or productive if you are literally talking about different concepts.

so! good question. my working defintion of fetishization would be the reduction of a human being to a sexual object based on a facet of their identity, such that you no longer view that facet of their identity as part of a whole and complex person. so like, in the context of this discussion about "mlm fetishization," i would consider fetishization to be when someone views gay men's homosexuality not as a complex part of their identity but rather as material for getting off, in real life. so like....someone who does not view real live gay men as whole and complex people, because they are incapable of seeing past the sex object they have made of their sexuality.

and part of the reason that i say i struggle to find like. evidence of material harm in women writing mlm fic is that. i think by and large most women who write mlm fic do view gay men as people, and don't treat them as objects of sexual fetish. like to the extent that there are women who make weird comments or maybe don't treat gay men normally, i think that issue is more down to individual instances of homophobia and ignorance than it is like. a systemic issue that causes material harm to real-life gay men.

like i mentioned in the notes on that original post, i'm reading "girls who like boys who like boys" by lucy neville right now, which does a really good job of trying to take a comprehensive look at the reasons women are drawn to sexually explicit media involving gay men. and one thing that becomes clear very quickly when reading is that women (even straight women!) are not monolithic in their attraction to mlm SEM. most women have varied and nuanced reasons for why they enjoy mlm SEM that go beyond "oh i think men being gay is hot"--most of them don't even care about the labeling of sexuality within this media, which indicates to me that the sexuality in and of itself is not an object of fetish. and to the extent that most women do seek out mlm SEM because they think men being gay is hot, it's not a matter of "i think men being gay is hot and that their homosexuality is only relevant in the context of getting me off." does that make sense?

like--real quick, i'll give an example with lesbianism. because i see people saying all the time "it's weird when men watch wlw porn so it's weird when women write mlm!!" which. drives me up the fucking wall for a number of reasons BUT. what i will say about it now is that there is nothing inherently wrong with men getting off to sexually explicit content involving two women. genuinely--there is nothing wrong with men experiencing sexual attraction to women and finding it hot to see two women together and getting off to it. the problem is the context of patriarchy in which this is taking place, which leads men to objectify and dehumanize women on a systemic level, in a way that causes material harm and leads to fetishization. the problem is that many men who watch lesbian porn do not view lesbian relationships or sexuality as a valid and complex identity that exists independent of their arousal. (also, watching porn and writing sexually explicit fic are. two very different things in the first place).

at the end of the day, sexual attraction and arousal are not inherently evil things to experience, and getting off to something is not in and of itself the same thing as objectifying it. the problem is when this starts to affect the way you treat people in real life, and if you getting off to something makes you incapable of viewing that thing as something that exists outside the context of you getting off. that, to me, is what fetishization is.

[danlous]

I blocked this anon but i wanted to use it as an example of a few things i feel it embodies very well:

1) The treatment of abuse and sa victims in this fandom is absolute garbage. People i follow are generally lovely but outside of them there are so many fans who have fucked up ideas of how abuse works and don't have any genuine sympathy for victims. I already noticed it when the show was airing and some fans mocked others who dared to have a strong reaction to hyperrealistic domestic abuse depicted in the show, like what did you expect from a show about blood-drinking monsters you're so fragile etc., as if fantasy violence that is distinctly imaginary and dv that is a very real existing destructive thing were in any way comparable. It shows as constant excusing and erasing of Lestat's actions and victim blaming against Louis and Claudia because people think only if you're perfect you can be a real victim when in reality anyone can be abused and it doesn't have anything to do with their moral character. I feel the way this fandom treats abuse victims is regularly rude and dismissive. If this anon is an abuse victim themselves like they claim it just makes it sadder because i would never talk another victim in this way and i did nothing to warrant a response like this

2) As this anon makes abudantly clear, the earlier Jonah discourse didn't really have much to do with Jonah or his relationship with Louis or any genuine analysis about the show, but some fans' enthusiastic desire to find more flaws in Louis to bring him down a peg and make him appear more evil so that other characters' actions would appear less awful. By 'other characters' i mean mainly Lestat because lets be real it's almost always the Lestat fans, and usually (white) book fans, doing that because they can't accept that the show unlike books doesn't act like the sun shines out Lestat's ass, so they need to find ways to make Lestat and Louis more equal in their shittiness so that Louis would be less of a victim in their relationship (because again, they imagine person's innocence and goodness define how much they're a victim). It's so stupid for many reasons but especially because Louis is already a very flawed character in canon! And Louis fans are usually the first ones to acknowledge this like i've seen close to zero Louis fans acting like he's a saint, his flawedness is a part of why we find him so interesting. He was a pimp exploiting women and in the present day he lives obscenely rich in a city built on slavery paying poor migrant workers to drink from them. You don't need to make up additional theories of him being a sexual predator to validate yourself. And you definitely don't need to insist a headcanon you made up based on one ambiguous line is actually irrefutable canon and other fans are abuse apologists when not agreeing with you. Good lord

3) Last but not least, going back to the first two; some people in this fandom have some very weird and harmful ideas about sexual abuse and are not taking it seriously enough. It left a bad taste in my mouth how many people acted like the whole Louis/Jonah thing was some smug "gotcha" moment and talking about in humorous or performative "oh i'm so shocked" way. I also found out there are alarmingly many people in this fandom who think someone in their late 20s having sex with a 16 year isn't sexual abuse. I'm asking everyone who thinks that to unfollow and block me. I guess that line of thinking is predictable considering how deeply the books are entreched in pedophilia and rape apologia so that many people who are big fans of them are going share Rice's deranged opinions. This is one of the fandoms where i'm happy that it's going to expand and have more and more non book readers who are capable of taking their lestat and rice goggles off, and the shitty section of old fandom will get more and more inconsequential

[swordsonnet]

well, 2022 was certainly... a year. feels weird to look back on it now. i guess i achieved quite a lot in the first half of the year, at least from an outside perspective: finished my degree (and got a first!), was president of my uni's lgbtq+ society, helped organise a pretty big trans rights protest, performed my poetry at a bunch of open mics, met some cool people, finally started therapy and got on antidepressants...

and then july rolled around, i got covid and had to miss my graduation, and as if that wasn't enough, i developed a chronic illness most likely triggered by covid. now i can't work or study, i can't do most of the things i used to base my very fragile self-esteem on, and... idk idk. on the one hand it objectively sucks. it sucks a lot to have a chronic illness that makes you feel like shit every day and that there currently isn't any treatment for, it sucks to have no idea when or even if you're going to get better, it sucks to know that things might get even worse. i don't want to sugarcoat any of that.

but on the other hand, i think having this illness taught me a lot about myself. i know that sounds corny, but it has literally forced me to listen to my body instead of other people's expectations (or rather, my warped perception thereof). i've had to stop defining myself by my achievements and learn that i have inherent worth as a human being. that my life isn't less of a life just because it looks different from other people's.

from the outside, it might seem like the first six months of this year were so much better in every respect for me, but i don't want to see it that way. i don't want to turn myself into a tragedy. life with a chronic illness is often difficult, yes, but that doesn't mean that there's no joy in it. they're smaller joys, usually, they're not as easy to find, but i'm trying to look more closely. i'm trying to accept that humans are messy and that grief and rage can exist alongside happiness and hope, and that doesn't make any of those feelings any less valid.

i'm more at peace with myself than i was a year ago, i think. i'm working with myself now, not against myself. i have some truly wonderful people in my life who have been so understanding and supportive throughout all this, and i'm so glad to have them on my side. i don't know what the next year will hold, but for now i'm tentatively hopeful, and that's enough. i'll take it one day at a time.

happy new year, everyone! may 2023 be a little kinder to us all.

[sparxwrites]

your Scott and Cleo writing popped up on my dash and while I’ve only watched last life I am in love w the true aspec (especially aro!!!) vibes of it and the validation in the idea of rejecting a soulmate and choosing someone yourself but still not as a soulmate. just wonderful vibes that really resonated! I’m not loveless but it felt like your depiction of Cleo was akin to a loveless aro which was very cool to see outside of an informational post <3 thank u for the lovely writing!

on the one hand, i'm delighted my work resonated with you! but on the other hand, as a writer, i do find like... "identity readings" of my work to be kind of depressing. like, if you just scan something and go "oh hey that person is x and that's what this fic is about!", you miss. a lot.

that fic is about a lot of things. yes, it's about cleo saying she doesn't experience (romantic, or perhaps any) love - but if you actually read into what she says/thinks (rather than uncritically accepting her own, unreliable narration of the situation), it's also about someone who clearly has a deeply unhealthy relationship with her own emotions and does not understand them. like! she tells joe she doesn't even know how to be kind (despite plenty of canonical evidence to the contrary). scott shows affection to her, and she can't even name the feeling it gives her in response, just the physical sensation of it (affection, cleo. you're feeling reciprocal affection). that's not someone who's got a good understanding of what she's feeling, or a healthy persepective on her emotions and self.

i'm not saying cleo is not aromantic, or that you were wrong to read that into it. i wrote her there, and will always write her, as someone who has a very complicated relationship to, uh, relationships. depending on how one defines aromanticism, she falls in or somewhere adjacent to that category. but i also write her as someone who struggles with the fact she's technically a "monster", and historical trauma relating to that and the way people have reacted to her, and her own irrtational guilt/shame about her "monstrous" status. she's someone who struggles with the fact she's loud and brash and domineering, and jumps straight to violence or aggression a lot of the time - which is tangled up with her understanding of herself as a monster and as someone who is dangerous and "inherently bad". and so her reaction to all of that is "i'm incapable of love or kindness", both as a pre-emptive defence against being accused of just that, and as this weird distortion of "i'm unloveable, and so if i convince myself that i'm incapable of caring about others then i won't be hurt by forming unreciprocated bonds with people.

and it's also about a gay man who's had a woman assigned as his soulmate, and his set of equally complicated feelings about that and about whether this means he is somehow "wrong" about his sexuality. which, again, you miss if you just zoom in on cleo as 'aspec rep'.

because really, fundamentally, this fic is about two non-straight people trying desperately to make sense of something deeply upsetting and worrying that has happened to them and that is inherently intertwined with their orientation(s) - to parse through the extent to which "soulmate" is a technical term for a randomly-assigned "someone you share health with" vs something that the world assigned them based on who it thought would be a "good relationship fit" for them. and them knowing it's probably the former, but worrying about what if it's the latter because that idea taps into similar very deep-seated anxieties they both have ("but i'm '''incapable''' of love" / "but what if i'm '''capable''' of loving a woman").

so you have someone who is saying she is incapable of love, romantic love specifically and also love or caring for others more generally - but also someone who has a trauma history, and a lot of self-worth issues, and something that's arguably internalised misogyny (or at least an internalised sense of shame for behavingin a way that's not gender-compliant), and is dealing with all of that in a way that's psychologically unhelpful. and you've got that contrasted with someone who's struggling with what kind of feels like an instance of homophobia (though in reality is chance) and who is looking for reassurance about that. and they're kind of talking at right angles to one another - cleo's trying to talk herself into being okay with abandoning her soulmate (and therefore into an understanding of soulmate as a relationship designation, not a mechanic, because she's yet again pre-emptively pushing someone away so there's no temptation of taking emotional risks), and scott's trying to talk himself out of being okay with it (and into an understanding of soulmate as a mechanic, not a relationship, because he's aware that it feeling like a microagression is a bit irrational).

if you reduce that down to "she's loveless aro!", you're a) flattening something really complex and nuanced that i spent like a week putting together into Yay Identities, which i find kind of a bummer as a writer, and b) a) conflating a form of emotional self-harm with An Identity (which is, tbh, the bigger deal given it worries me on a number of levels, especially if that's the bit that is resonating with you).

all of that said, i'm not having a go at you, anon. i'm not angry, i just... thought this was a good opportunityto talk about something that often frustrated me with what i guess i'll term "noveau-fandom", where people write fics that are clearly a single-issue "look at this person's Identity!" thing, and then where other stuff gets viewed through this lens of "rep" as a result of that being a common type of story. and sure, representation is a great thing! but representation isn't a story; it doesn't make a story good; and if you're reading stories uncritically (which this phenomena is part of) then you're going to miss a lot of the author's intention / possible interpretations you could read into stuff. and you're also, like here, going to end up mistaking representations of unhealthy thought/emotional patterns as "representation", just because the narrator is a reliable one and the author didn't guide you through it.

[reverielix]

hey there :D

i was actually really surprised to see a fellow stay who's so into astrology heheh, i hope you're doing well ♡

apart from requesting for some of your first impressions on my chart, i would like to ask you to guess who i bias in skz based on my placements huehue

🙆‍♀️💓

Hi!!! This is v interesting👀

So first off, let's tackle some interceptions, retrogrades and the chart shape, ruler,...

Something very important to look at is that you have interceptions. Libra is intercepted in the first and Aries is intercepted in the 7th (which you can read up on in this post under the block quotes, and funny enough, you even have the same duplications lol for the intercepted signs it’s the other way around so keep that in mind). Now, first house interceptions are very difficult within a chart because the whole purpose of the ascendant (here Libra is supposed to balance the oppositions and extremes in your chart) is not integrated into the chart.

Also I want to mention that your sun is in a weird place in your chart and it could be that you define yourself by your achievements way too much as you can become increasingly guarded with age. Your self-expression is highly restricted as your persona is constantly held back by your high standards for yourself. This causes you to retreat in your shell and refuse to speak to others about what’s really bothering you. With your Uranus as the only planet in retrograde, I sense that your individuality and the fact that you are special isn’t clear to you. You might think your just another person struggling (especially also with the 5th house in Capricorn). It could be, though, that your friends/other groups of people who show support to you shed light on you to shine. It might be through groups of people like that that you feel motivated or free to speak your mind. With your north node in Taurus it might be your self-worth that you have to find through digging deep within yourself and understanding what you really desire and how to get it in a strategic and cunning manner. I also see a big perfectionist in you and a tense overworked person who needs to learn how to relax and indulge from time to time. Jupiter also concerns me a bit as it is the daytime benefit and your sun is in the northern hemisphere. The only harmonious aspect it makes is with Saturn (which is also in a weird position but I think I’ve already talked about that lol: you overwork yourself in an attempt to gain validation, a good reputation/respect and in oder to make sense of who you are/to give yourself purpose). You might base your whole existence on how perfect you’ve done something and on how society perceive you/your status. Going back to Jupiter (sorry that this is messy lol), I see a bunch of problems with challenges toward your beliefs!!, education and what makes you happy. You might be very nit-picky or criticize yourself/others when it comes to those things because ultimately you believe that career and status should be your main focus as you understand that you have to work hard and go through hardships in your life in oder to accumulate wealth (the 12th house here could suggest that you aspire to accumulate as much wealth as possible). You might be somebody who values success over happiness (and you probably also really seek to run away and learn new things as you feel restricted by your life where you are now. The escape might be stray kids/kpop.)

Hope this was insightful!

Now…coming in with the guess: I definitely see in your chart how you get infatuated easily with celebrities (Venus and moon in the 9th + the 10th house places as you most likely admire their work ethic and aspire to work just as hard as them. Infatuation is also indicated in your chart with the tight Neptune-Venus aspect along with Pisces ruling the 7th.). Maybe your bias is Changbin? Lmk if I messed up, I probably did haha My explanation is that the tightest aspect your Venus makes to another celestial body is Mars in Leo in the 11th and this screams Changbin (my second guess would be Hyunjin? Or maybe Chan?) Also, his fast raps, way to draw attention to himself and strong presence (with that Leo stellium lol) might be indicators of your attraction toward him. (Y’all, watch them say it’s Felix or something hahahaha)

[transienturl]

Humans are good at seeing patterns that aren't inherently obvious, right? Like, we have object permanence. We can take actions based on things we think we know without them being right in front of us at that very instant. Pretty useful, that skill is. Couldn't do a whole lot of anything without it. So it makes sense that, biologically, we enjoy that, right? We believe in stuff. It's more fun to follow sports when part of you believes in destiny and miracles and all that stuff. It's more meaningful to pray when some part of you believes that good things will happen if you're earnest and modest in your prayer. It's more challenging to overcome the negative or intrusive thoughts that come from mental illness when part of you believes they're true. It makes sense to me that, unrelated to how valid or invalid these beliefs actually are, some part of our feelings towards them can reasonably be attributed to the idea that we are evolved to want and look for and find them. I've tried to apply this idea to morality before, but while I mostly understood the concept I was getting at, I don't think I quite managed to word it understandably. I had the idea just now to begin with the object permanence thing first, and here's an attempt at that. So, moral beliefs are kind of like any other beliefs, right? Except that they sort of *only* exist in the object permanence sort of way. If I'm put in a scenario where, say, my family is in danger directly in front of me, or where I'm offered something lucrative with consequences for others, my direct reaction to it is probably pretty emotionally driven, right? That doesn't define my moral viewpoint. I can feel things or do things that I think in the moment or later on are morally questionable or wrong. A system of morality is something you have to believe in, a pattern you have to put together for yourself out of experiences and tales. So, my question is, like... what, exactly, is the root of the idea that morals are inherently consistent? It's an idea that feels, to me, pretty impossible to question. But it's possible to imagine, thinking of things like this, that our moral beliefs are "just" the patterns we best managed to discover from our experiences and how we felt about them, and that doesn't make them any less valid... but I could imagine a world where, biologically, my brain were more incentivized to look for contradictions in an otherwise highly ordered world, and my moral views being completely different given the same feelings about the same things, and that's pretty damn weird. Anyway, let me speak of an example: my personal moral belief is that the suffering of people I don't know well or don't relate to is equally heartbreaking and worth minimizing as the suffering of those I'm close to and cannot help but share the emotions of. Normal. And for this reason and others, there's a mismatch between how much I feel for someone emotionally and how much I feel for them morally. All super normal; I bet there's essentially no human for whom this is not in any way true. So how do I justify this? I think one of the ways I justify this is that I feel like I have the understanding, from my life experiences and from stories, that the more you come to understand someone, the more you understand their pain as well as their happiness. This is a pattern that I noticed and that I assumed and continue to assume would be true, and I don't have to actually check if it's still there. I assume that if I were to meet with or watch a documentary about victims of Covid-19, and come to truly understand how they feel, and if I were to do the same with anti-mask and anti-vax protestors, I would ultimately feel extremely strongly on a direct and emotional level that we have to do everything we can to prevent the suffering caused by the disease and that the protestors' concerns are understandable but misguided, and crucially, I think those feelings would feel correct. So I chose to act as closely as I can to how I think I would if I felt so strongly that I had no other choice. I can't actually logically

justify this, all the way down, besides by saying that on some level I feel like consistency has to be correct, and I can't actually justify that statement in any meaningful way. Like, what prevents us from thinking that, morally, selfishness and greed are good? Sure, we live in a society in which they are almost always counterproductive anyways, and we try and design our social norms and societal systems so cooperating is best for each person, but most(?) arguably-well-adjusted people, I assume, generally think causing the suffering of others for you own personal gain is at least a bit morally bad (unless they 'deserve' it, which is a whole 'nother thing). Why, exactly? My only answers are "because we feel a bit bad when we do that, and we notice that pattern" and "because we observe our role models feeling that way." Both are biological. And if someone either didn't experience that feeling or didn't notice the pattern and didn't have any role models express it... well... I guess they wouldn't feel that way. Most of this still sounds pretty obvious, I think, so clearly I haven't managed to distill the interesting part down yet. But I think it's interesting to consider scenarios like abortion, with all this in mind. Or adoption, say, or... crap, really good examples of strong emotions we feel for hard-to-define reasons are hard to enumerate. I was going to use "why we would feel bad about the lunar rovers getting destroyed" as an example originally. But um... yeah. I think it's entirely uncontroversial to state that most people who are strongly *morally* anti-abortion have that stance because thinking about the idea of abortion makes them feel an intense negative emotion, which I understand, and that they can't help but conclude that something which makes them feel a strong negative emotion is a strongly negative thing, which... I mean, a) you have a duty to educate yourself to see if your emotional response is different with more understanding and b) you have a duty to recognize that that correlation isn't actually always true and find counterexamples in your life until you convince yourself of this point, but it's not like I don't see where the idea is coming from! And like, we as a society obviously have to move people towards understanding that the experiences of the people whose lives things effect are more important than how they make unrelated parties feel... ...but, you know, can I actually justify that statement? Does it make sense for me to personally morally believe that my feelings about a situation are less important than the feelings of the people involved? Can I be sure that I am not the sole arbiter of right and wrong in this world? (Answer: Yes! Why? I've seen people fail at that, and I find it distasteful, and so if I were to fail at it myself, and I were clever enough to be self-aware, I would find my own behavior distasteful, so that would be wrong! Yet, I recognize that I was taught to feel this distaste through example and through story, and through those people being idiots, and without those lessons, I might not have such morals, and I might think of myself as the center of the universe. And I want that reality to be inherently less correct than this one, but I haven't yet figured out a reason why.) I guess, though, that more than anything my brain is a puzzle solver. My dad likes to say that the best part of being given a puzzle is being told that a solution definitely exists, because eventually he'll figure it out. I guess I like math puzzles where I'm told there's a way, and I like video games where it's designed such that there's a way, and computer programming in which I'm confident there's a way... but in the question in life of "is there something unambiguously right or true, on which you can base your judgements without question," I have no idea if there actually is a solution. Some people's minds see a pattern to answer that one, and I guess... I don't yet, and am double checking all the other ones I see to see if I missed it.