#im always open to discussing my tags fyi

[empresskadia]

You know what's a crazy concept to me now that I think about

That people actually read my tags???

Like all my unhinged simping, thoughts, and absolute filth that goes through my brain go there and people read that....

Yes, I'm delusional as hell, and yes, my coworker tells me I need professional help 😌

[1990jeevas]

since ive gained so many new moots in the last few hours i thought id give myself a proper introduction sooo let's go!

hi my name is damien, im 17 and i use they/them pronouns. im a slytherin, intp, 5w6 and a cancer too, if any of that junk matters to you!

this blog is primarily used to post things i find funny/interesting along with my hyperfixations, so while im mainly posting dream smp content now, ill probably throw in the occasional post from a past hyperfixation of mine or just some shit i find amusing.

just an fyi: i occasionally post triggering content but that stuff is tagged so as long as you have the words blacklisted, we should be good! just lmk if theres anything else youd like me to tag so you can avoid it!

um, quick byf ig?

-dni if u fit basic dni criteria

-im okay with adults following me just like. dont be creepy obviously lol

-i sometimes spam other hyperfixations (namely anime and kpop) so if u dont want ur dash to be occasionally filled with my bullshit then u probs shouldnt follow lol

-while im always up for a small, civil debate when it comes to dumb shit like tv shows, i am extremely uncomfortable with genuine arguing or "hate". if ive done something wrong, please just let me know in a private message. please also use tone indicators in these types of discussions (or at least when you first bring it up to me so i know you're being genuine)!

-i have a lot of problematic hyperfixations so if i ever post something that makes you uncomfortable please just unfollow/mute the tags i use for it instead of sending me a pissed off anon or something lol

-i swear A Lot, especially in the dms. lmk if that makes you uncomfortable when u first dm me and ill either tone it down or not swear at all (i wont not swear in my public posts tho lol)

-my dms are always open and id love to talk to some new people, however, im a very slow responder and i tend to have dry texts unless im talking about something that excites me a lot! i cant really help that tbh but if i seem uninterested im most likely not, i just dont know how to jazz up a conversation to save my fucking life

-i reclaim slurs sometimes so if ur uncomfortable with that, mute words or dont follow (i can reclaim the f slur, r slur, n slur, s slur, d slur, q slur and the t slur. if u dont know what those slurs are and u wanna ask me go ahead lol im just not saying them now so people arent made uncomfortable)

and that's basically all the important shit I can think of! if u have any questions, my dms and asks are always open! thanks :)

[ashintheairlikesnow]

if you want an idea for a specific continuation, maybe after Antoni is done showering, he can’t fall back asleep and Chris notices it and Antoni opens up a bit about his past while Chris comforts him? I just want him to be happy okay (also, “Get Up” was fantastic)

CW: Extensive discussion of scarring/scars, negative stimming (rocking, mostly, but it’s described in detail, just an fyi), references to past torture and PTSD. Noncon touching (nonsexual and not whumpy, but still)

Post-Get Up, this is pretty much just a wee little epilogue for it. Tagging my Antoni and Chris people:  @astrobly, @finder-of-rings, @burtlederp, @oofowouchies, @orphceus, @pretty-face-breaker, @im-just-here-for-the-whump, @thebirdsofgay, @whumpfigure, @doveotions, @newandfiguringitout,  @endless-whump, @stxckfxck, @slaintetowhump

“Why... why are you here, Chrisha?” Antoni’s voice trembles a little, leftovers from the cold shower. Chris’s fingers press over his skin, trail his neck to push into his pulse point and feel at the lymph nodes there. Every touch is too warm, burns him all over again, but he can’t move to push him away. He can barely breathe to speak.

Chris doesn’t answer him at first. He’s kneeling on the tile floor, water soaked through the knees of his jeans and half-drowning in one of Jake’s old t-shirts, rocking forward and back, his eyes narrowed and intensely focused in a way that Chris never is. The blue feather necklace he always has around his neck swings forward and bumps back into his chest with the force of his rocking, and Antoni’s eyes keep drifting there, caught by the rhythmic motion, feeling like he’s being hypnotized.

He feels a strange little urge to swipe his hand out, like a cat batting at a swinging mouse.

“F-for, for, for-for you, here for you,” Chris mumbles, in a voice Antoni has never heard him use. It’s flat and strange, like he’s speaking from a thousand miles inside his mind. The fingers run down over exposed collarbone, trail a tiny line of scars there, mark each one.

He’s lost in the change of texture, maybe, or maybe it’s just that pushing down how he wants to respond to this evidence of Antoni’s evil, his sin, is taking too much out of him and there isn’t enough left to show on the outside. 

“Chrisha-”

Chris just shakes his head, rocks a little harder. It’s in moments like this where Antoni can see the worry that Jake and Nat still have over him, these minutes ticking by where Chris is gone somewhere inside himself, buried in the stimuli that comes from pressing his fingers slowly over the way Antoni’s skin is slippery-wet here, and roughened there, again and again and again. Antoni has seen this only once or twice before - Chris just barely dancing around or avoiding panic by retreating into his own head, desperately chasing the safety there.

“Please-... please stop,” Antoni whispers. Chris doesn’t even seem to hear him.

It’s Antoni’s fault, really. 

He had stayed curled up in the bottom of the tub letting the water run over him in icy rivulets and streams for as long as he could stand it, until the shakes were too much for him and he’d only barely managed, with numb, fumbling fingers, to turn the water off. 

He hadn’t gotten out of the tub so much as he’d just draped himself over the side until gravity did the work for him and let him land with his body on the bathmat and his legs and head against cool tile, water dripping from his hair to pool and puddle beneath his cheek.

He looked like the chalk outline of a body at the beginning of a crime show. He felt a little more than halfway there, too. 

Chris had waited as patiently as he could but worry had overrun his deep respect for privacy and he had found Antoni like that, still naked and shuddering, and now... this.

Chris’s lips are moving without sound, and Antoni stares at them, breathing slowly and with effort, until he realizes that he is watching Chris count his scars. His mouth moves each time his finger presses against a roughened circle of skin.

“More than two hundred,” Antoni says, softly. It’s the strongest his voice has felt since he fell asleep.

“Wh-what?” Chris doesn’t look up, and the rocking pauses, briefly, but then starts up again. What matters, though, is that he pulls his hand back and away, and Antoni can breathe more easily at the lack of touch than he could at the trailing, skimming, light-fingered consideration of every mark he earned.

“I have... more than two hundred... of those. I had Dr. Masood count them when I first... came to live at Natalie’s house. Chrisha, I need you to help me up. I c-can’t... can’t stand.”

“All from him?” Chris asks it quickly, in a single breath. 

There is always a him, a her, a them.

“All,” Antoni says, as firmly as he can in a voice that still shakes. “Pl-please, Chrisha. I need you to come back to me, for a minute.”

Chris’s eyes flicker to his and they’re still gone, for a moment, before the fog in them recedes enough for him to nod and press his lips together. The rocking stills and he pushes himself back into  crouch, sliding his arms under Antoni’s.

Antoni hisses at the sudden burn of the warmth of him against skin that still feels like ice.

“W-why, why, why why why, why don’t you, why, why don’t I-”

“Know about them?” Antoni leans heavily on Chris, all but falls against him, and his attempts to walk are really just Chris dragging him across the floor with his feet only barely managing to occasionally move in time. 

“Um. Yes, I want-... why don’t you-... why don’t we, we know? Does Jake know?”

“No. No one knows.” Antoni’s forehead falls against the side of Chris’s neck and soft blue hair brushes him. He smiles, faintly. “Just you now, I guess.”

“So, so why-”

“Some scars are mine to keep.” He lets himself be put into bed, only vaguely aware he’s not in his own, but in Chris’s bed, in the bedroom they keep here for him where he sleeps on weekends when he’s not staying in his dorm or with Laken. “To make my body my own, I have to keep my scars my own. Do you understand?”

Some scars were mine to earn, they don’t belong to anyone but me. I am the one who made him put them there.

“No,” Chris says, covering Antoni up in his blankets, and the weighted one on top feels like a hand softly pressing Antoni into the mattress. A hand, or a body. His breath comes a little more easily, blinking slowly. “I don’t. They, they, they-they don’t... don’t-don’t give us scars, that’s-”

“They still give you scars.” Antoni grins, a faded shadow of a smile, and reaches up to press into the center of Chris’s forehead. “Yours are in here, Chrisha, and they are just a real. Mine are more visible, that is all. I am sorry I scared you. I haven’t felt well, I did not realize I was so sick so quickly...”

He hadn’t known he was dreaming, it had been so perfectly vivid. Hadn’t he heard once that you can’t smell in your dreams? But he had smelled the cloves, overwhelming, almost sweet. He hadn’t realized any of it was a dream.

“I’ll... I‘ll get you some medicine.” Chris all but vanishes out of the room - Antoni blinks and the blue-haired boy is gone when his eyes open again. He lays there, blinks again - and Chris is back, staring worriedly at him, fingers twisting at the feather he wears around his neck with one hand holding a small cup with a thick syrupy liquid in the other. 

“Did I... fall asleep?”

“I, I think so. I’m sorry, I-I poured out the liquid before I remembered you, you, you can take, um, pills.”

“That is just fine.” Antoni tried giving him a supportive smile, even if it wavered, and drank the disgusting sticky grape-y mess down in one gulp, like taking a shot of the world’s worst vodka. “Chrisha please-... do me a favor? Yes? I need... hot water and the raspberry jam I keep in the fridge. Mix together, to make a tea.”

“Um. Why?”

“I don’t know.” Antoni lays back against the pillow, closing his eyes again. “I just know it will help.” There’s a silence, and when he looks, Chris is rocking again, eyes focused on the curve of Antoni’s shoulder showing above the blankets, a tiny circle of scars there. “Chrisha.”

“Yes?” Chris blinks, broken out of his impending fog once more. “Oh, s-sorry, I’ll, I’ll get the, uh, the tea and-and, and, and the water... the water-tea...”

“Please.” He hesitates. “Would you... want to know about my him, Chris?”

Chris swallows, and slowly nods. “You, you, you-you know about mine. But, but, but-but you don’t have to-”

“You cannot understand my scars unless you understand why I hide them.” Antoni smiles, a little weakly. He can feel the warmth of the blankets around him but somehow they don’t seem to penetrate the first layers of skin, he is still cold, shivering. “The tea can wait. Come... come here, please.” 

He holds out a hand and Chris climbs immediately into the bed with him, laying on top and to the side with his arm across Antoni’s chest, tucking his head under his chin the way he does with Jake. He smells like the shampoo he uses at the dorms and a whisper of a different kind of scent Antoni thinks must be the gingery stuff Laken wears on their neck and wrists. Chris has smelled like that before.

But why is he here, smelling like Laken and still alone?

The answer can wait.

Instead, Antoni tightens his arm around Chris, letting fingers run lightly through the blue hair as though watching a waterfall part around them, and says softly, “My him had a first name, but I was not allowed to use it.”

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Answer asap? So I'm having a lot of trouble with my faith. It's mostly other Christians that are making me upset/not wanting to stay a Christian. Im around a lot of Christians where I live that are really hateful,sexist and homophobic and it upsets me and makes me not wanna be a part of a religion where the people act like this. Part 1)

Answer asap; part 2)I know not everyone is this way,but where I live they mostly are and it makes me so sad. I love how yall act on here. You’re so open minded, kind and loving and non judgmental like a Christian should be. How can I not let the other ones affect me? They’re making run scared of it and I don’t want this to happen

Hey there, dear; I really feel for you. Being surrounded by Christians who seem more influenced by bigotry and xenophobia than Jesus’s message makes it so hard to believe that there’s any point to being Christian. When you’re part of a marginalized group that has been harmed by Christianity in general, such as being LGBT+, it’s especially hard to find a reason to stay Christian.

(FYI: This post gets kind of long; I provide some quotes and then answer your questions more directly at the end.) 

And yet, by some miracle, so many of us do stay! And many theologians of marginalized groups have addressed the question of why they stay despite the harm Christianity has done to their communities.

Letty M. Russell in her work Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church, for instance, says this:

“I have always found it difficult to walk away from the church, but I have also found it difficult to walk with it. …The alienation [Letty feels as a woman] is shared by many other[s] whose pain and anger at the contradictions and oppression of church life lead them to challenge the very idea of talking about a feminist interpretation of the church. It is also increased by knowledge of the disdain and anger of those theologians and church officials who consider women like me to be the problem rather than the church itself. It is impossible for me and for many other alienated women and men [and NB people!] to walk away from the church, however, for it has been the bearer of the story of Jesus Christ and the good news of God’s love. …The church is a sign of the coming fulfillment of God’s promise for New Creation. As a sign, it is always provisional and is in constant need of renewal in order to make an authentic witness to God’s love and justice in changing historical, political, ecomonic, and social contexts. Indeed, it sometimes is in need of revolution: of building a new house of freedom where people’s hopes for human dignity are incorporated both in social structures and in expressions of faith and service.”

What Russell is saying is that she and many others refuse to walk away from the church, from Christianity, despite their alienation because in it they see the hope of God’s New Creation – there’s a pull that they can’t deny, and so instead of walking away they intend to revolutionize Christianity, to tear it down and build it back up from the inside into something better.

African American Theologian Howard Thurman is another vital voice for those who wonder why they should bother staying a Christian. Here’s what I said in an older post about him:

Howard Thurman framed his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited around this question of how an oppressed person can possibly be Christian when their oppressors are also Christian. The start to his answer with “the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew.” Jesus was a poor Jewish man, a person of color living under the oppressive Roman Empire – and so, Thurman argues, Jesus knows intimately what we are going through, because he lived it too. And he continues to live it with us today, standing always with the marginalized.

Thurman and other Black Theologians have also discussed how the power of Jesus’s message cannot be buried by the oppression of some Christians. When enslaved people were brought to the Americas from Africa, their were taught a kind of Christianity that was meant to convince them to stay submissive to their masters. Instead, they heard the liberation and justice inherent in God’s message, in scripture, and they took the oppressive Christianity of their masters and transformed it into a Christianity that could nourish them through their hardship. This is what marginalized Christians do in every place and time -- those of us who are LGBT+ and Christian do it today. Many of us grow up in churches that tell us our existence is sinful, but we hear the Spirit sing to us of good fruit and love and our goodness and we transform what we hear into something better. 

So this is why we stay. We stay because even when we are surrounded by homophobic, racist, sexist Christians we feel the call of Jesus to something much better – and we are invited to be a part of the revolution. We know that Jesus stands with us, with the oppressed and the outcasts, and that his message and ministry are for us. 

So, finally, to answer your question of how you can keep the bigotry of the Christians around you from affecting you: I’m not sure you completely can. What they do and say is wrong and goes against everything Jesus stood for, and so it is right and just to feel anger and hurt over their harm. But instead of letting that anger and hurt cause you to fall away from faith, pray that Jesus will transform those emotions into action and motivation on your part – that your anger and hurt will lead you to pursue the faith of Jesus that says to love one’s neighbor and one’s enemy. 

Also come to terms with the fact that even if religion did not exist, there would still be bigots. These people may use a warped Christianity to justify their bigotry, but for most of them those prejudices would still be there even if they didn’t have a religion to use as their justification. We know this because even in regions of the world without a predominant religion, there is still prejudice. 

Know that it’s okay when you feel doubts and dips in your faith because of the people you’re stuck with. When you find yourself drifting, don’t give up! You can trust that God is with you in your doubts, and will be patient with you as you find your faith again.

Finding faith communities (online counts!) where you can interact with the Christians who are on your side can help you from being wholly disillusioned by the Christians around you. So can finding tangible ways – from praying for certain marginalized groups to donating to or serving good organizations – to enact the way of Jesus in your own life. 

Finally, check out our “why we stay” tag for a few more posts that I think should help you. 

I’ll be praying for you, anon. Peace

If anyone has more advice or encouragement, please add!