#i think i always will

[seananmcguire]

Periodically, someone will Blaze the post of all those many pictures of Alice, and I cry every single time. In the good way, I promise.

The only way I've survived losing her as well as I have is by focusing on the fact that other people grieve for her with me. I am not alone. She isn't here, but I am not alone.

I just miss her so much.

[jess-the-vampire]

I hate how people defend Star without thinking much, just because she’s the main protagonist doesn’t mean she’s flawless and innocent.

listen, i love star vs, but it's a hot mess, i'm critical about it so much because i know it had the potential to be REALLY good and the crew fell off the wagon HARD.

it should say a lot that me, a fan, doesn't want a continuation of the show in the future, the ending is just THAT bad to me. It's so bad i feel there's nothing much to look forward to in a future spinoff continuing this canon.

and i want desperately to say this show was fantastic all the way through, but it's not a show you can rewatch because of what you know is going to happen to the plot points, characters, ect ect

i stick to aus for a reason.

and look, toh isn't perfect either, i have pointed out some aspects in it that feel contradictory or not as explained or not handled as great as it could of been.

But toh, even tho it's not flawless and has these issues, is still watchable and still mostly enjoyable all the way through. I feel i can at least trust the crew of toh, to have some idea what they're doing as far as arcs and story, even if it's not perfect 100%.

It's not like with star where you'll have an episode about how "Oh, marco and kelly are thinking about being a thing and marco wants to move on from star cause he actually likes kelly and he feels he needs to move on".

And then like several eps later they break up offscreen, between episodes, for no real reason and it never gets acknowledged again as marco goes back to liking star and that possible character development goes out the window.

Star vs had so many issues it renders the show impossible to rewatch, that's how much of these problems caused it to collapse on itself.

people really REALLY push to defend the finale, but if you have to ignore established canon and/or defend genocide of beings in an anti genocide show to tell me why this is all ok, i think you're already on a bad foot.

and i could go on and on about everything wrong with this but let's keep this simple when it comes to Star herself. Star is a flawed character, which is fine, she should be, but it got to a point where her flaws stopped becoming things she needs to overcome and just aspects the team either didn't see as problems, or just ignored.

and this is the team who brought us Tom and Eclipsa, two flawed characters who make mistakes, but apologize, are sympathetic, are beloved for a reason.

Star, and marco for that matter, stop being likable people because their flaws are never properly fixed by the end.

One of the main flaws being they constantly put each other over everyone else, to a point it comes off unhealthy and makes them seem unlikable and selfish.

marco and star abandoning everyone by jumping back in the well? Never thinking about the weight of destroying magic to the multiverse outside of their own selfish desires? Star's entire treatment of her own boyfriend? Going off to have a love confession as people are dying in a war outside? and so, so much more,

It really feels looking back, starco made them worse as people, not better.

And i think the crew wanted us to come out thinking the complete opposite without realizing or ignoring the fact that the ship was bringing out some of their worst traits and by not acknowledging it, it made things worse.

Because acknowledging it makes the ship look bad, and the team doesn't like doing that. Star might of been the main character of the show, but she came out of it being very hard to like, all because the team wanted to push their own biases and ideas without considering other aspects of the series and how bad it made star look as a person.

it's sad man, there was so much potential for her to have a good arc here.

When you want to write a main lead and you take inspiration from this show, have a character more like Tom and Eclipsa, not like Star.

[ihaveneverbeenasleep]

Why do i continue to let you break me?

[gamergirl929]

Seriously, hearing Chester sing again after so long brought back so many memories and so many emotions.

[pois0ncandy]

think i’ll just miss you forever

[musings-of-a-broken-heart]

There is a love that is held in hands that can never be spoken. A touch or a glance speaks more things that words perhaps ever could. There is so much feeling that I hold that I can never speak out loud and I held your hand once in April and I knew I’d stand by you. Some souls are connected and this I believe; once I wrote three lines of a poem and I met a girl who wrote those same words three days before, call it fate, call it chance, call it luck, I think sometimes we meet people at exactly the right times to form connections deeper than ordinary; some people understand each other sometimes without even words; some lives are strangely parallel. On a cold morning one June with a pink sunrise that gave way to the bluest of skies you said to me, 'I'm glad I met you. Even if we don't speak for the rest of our lives after tomorrow, I'll never forget you.' I didn't say it then, didn't know how to and didn't know why I felt the way I did, but I felt so profoundly that ours was a fated meeting; that life will push us in all directions but that your 'what if' would never come to be or last even if it did- you were meant to be in my life in some way or form and that was how it would be.

In the early hours of the morning some days ago I sat on a couch at a close friend's house and I watched days and months and years go by and I realized nothing matters as much as it does in a minute. I watched a friend agonize over half a mandarin and I didn’t understand why or what was going on in her world but I knew it mattered to her for some reason and I thought well why not help her figure it out and look after the thing? I saw the world with the innocence of a child and I remembered something a friend once said to me many years ago when I was young and suicidal. In a list of reasons she sent me a picture of a sunset and she said ‘because the world we live in looks like this.’ And isn’t that true? Why must anything matter? The world is beautiful. People have lives and thoughts and ideas and things that matter to them that are deep and intrinsic that we can never really know or see or understand but isn’t it enough to know it matters to them? Isn’t it enough to be kind? I sat in that room with the stars so close I could hold them and rainbows dancing in my hands and in her hair and I cried and I cried and I cried because the world is so so beautiful and I was choking on feelings I could never say in words; you would never see the world with my eyes and I would never know the world you see-humans are inherently isolated by the limitations of our perception that can be similar but never the same as another's.

I look into your eyes sometimes and I choke up on all these feelings; I hide my face in your shirt and I cry; I sit in the passenger's seat of my mother's car and stare out of the window as I weep behind my mask because in a house of poets and storytellers words have no meaning and yet my heart is so full of them, sometimes I feel as though I'm drowning: I'm sorry/I don't know how to be a daughter that you could want/I love you for all you've done for me/I hate you for all this grief and rage I've inherited/how can you not remember? There is so much I could never say. There is so much lost in translation somewhere in the process of me trying to speak them in words and your understanding of the words I speak; There’s a whole world I see that you can never really know and there’s a whole world of yours that I wont. All I can do is hold your hand. All I can do is hold you. All I can do is hope that you feel these things too- that somehow, without having to be spoken you understand.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The math just adds up!

[liquidstar]

If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)

At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.

Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.

[phantom-of-the-501st]

Remember that this is not the proof that they love each other

That was a last-ditch attempt from Crowley to get Aziraphale to stay

This is the proof that they love each other

Their love wasn't just made real because they kissed

It always existed

[nailbats]

Revitalizing this dead tumblr with memes I’ve been posting on my Twitter, I am here to provide the goods

[catmask]

its true that romance amd friendship will not solve everything but. objectively speaking its very hard to get sad when you can say 'lets go get cake tomorrow okay' and someone will go get cake with you. like there is some good at least. you know

[endusviolence]

Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

[divorcetual]

I am actually so serious I think it really messes with a childs creativity and joy to tell them to never make a mary sue OC. Like that unbridaled form of joy where you make a self insert OC who super cool and everyone loves them and they have every superpower in the world SHOULD be something a kid makes, it nourishes their ability to create things for fun and not be stifled by "oh but what if my character is too overpowered and cringey...". whatever

[laughingcatwrites]

As a reminder that good exists out there, a coworker recently confessed to me that he found out his child is questioning their identity (kid's gender redacted for this post). The kid is keeping it from him, so he can't say anything to them or show that he knows, but he's doing his best to get mentally prepared and educated so that he'll be ready whenever his kid does feel comfortable enough come to him.

For context, this guy is a big, bulky middle aged dude who loves sports and typical outdoor "manly" activities. As his coworker and friend, I know he's a kind and sweet teddy bear of a person, but his kid probably views him as a stern, authoritarian figure, the way most teenagers view their parents. His family lives in a conservative area, so I'm sure between that, their dad's looks and interests, and the fact that their dad is a Figure of Authority, the kid is worried that they won't be accepted.

But you know what? When he found out about his kid, the first thing he did was reach out to his closest queer friend and ask for resources for parents of questioning children. His biggest fears are that his kid will be bullied or discriminated against and won't feel comfortable enough to be themself. His second action was to find himself a mentor in another parent who went the same situation (kid coming out in a conservative town). The other person is preparing him for some of the struggles his kid may face and the fights he may need to take on as a parent to make sure his kid is safe and treated well.

Something I want to emphasize for people focused on language as the primary method of allyship is that when we spoke, he used some outdated terms and thoughts about gender and sexuality. That does not make him bad. These were the terms and thinking used about questioning teenagers when he was growing up and he never needed to learn more current ones. But now that he does have that need, he's throwing himself in head first because that's his kid and he's darn well going to make sure that his kid feels welcomed and has a safe place to be themselves even if they never come out to him.

[aritaylor-ix]

I shouldn’t, but I do too.

My eyes wandered desperately searching for that smile singing along to every word. Wishing to stay in your presence just a little longer, even if it only meant simply sharing a dancefloor. Feeling my heart and stomach drop again and again and again. Fighting with every ounce of my being not to just run up to you and take in every single moment of the night like we always had. To laugh again. To dance. That joy created and understood by us alone.

Through the throat scorching and heart on fire with things I cannot express, yet they remain ever so present on the edge of my yearning tongue. I woke up yesterday with a stomach ache that I couldn’t explain. Then you had told me how you were feeling and I realized… it was you. I was feeling you without even knowing it.

So much to say and so much left unsaid. But even without saying it out loud- I felt it, I felt it, I felt it. Bittersweet doesn’t even begin to describe what it was like to finally feel again