#like people are MUCH more critical of any woman than they'd be of a man

[seriousbrat]

i don't believe in "defending" characters in general, just in discussing them objectively- bc imo characters don't have to be good flawless people in order for me to like them like why should I justify myself? they're all fake. but this goes double for male characters you will never catch me out here defending a man

[luunamoona]

the way community handled queerness is honestly so peak. like, there're 3 main moments i can think of in the show where queerness was apparent and mentioned: advanced gay, queer studies and advanced waxing and britta's pitch in emotional concequences of broadcast television.

in advanced gay, the cornelius hawthorne is seen as a villian for having traits like being abusive towards his son, pierce, him being really racist and him being homophobic. this acknowledgement of homophobia being a bad thing is definitely good for the early 2010s, as many shows treated being queer as a joke back then. also cornelius being fucking murdered at the end of the episode solidifies the fact his actions were deemed immoral and he therefore had his comeuppance.

community only ever uses queerness as a punchline in the context of troy and abed's relationship, the punchline usually being "look at how romantic these 2 friends are how silly", which could be seen as homophobia as the same context with a man and a woman would be treated differently by the showrunners as it'd be turned into a romantic subplot.

the next example i have is from queer studies and advanced waxing. having the dean tell richie and carl that he "isn't openly anything and gay doesn't begin to cover it" is much more progressive than many other media at that time, and even now, as they'd usually have the queer character just be gay for convenience. this need for convenience is commented on in the episode with richie and carl basically coercing the dean into adopting a label that is inaccurate but convenient for his straight peers. back to my previous point, presenting queerness as being more complex and having more nuance than just gay and straight is something that is very useful to queer viewers as it presents an option beyond these 2 ends of the spectrum. unlike what other shows may do with this concept, community treats it seriously, showing the dean's inner conflict with presenting with an identity that isn't his, with lines like "i feel sick". (also side point, the line "i make gayness look like mormonism" goes so hard)

finally, there's britta's pitch in emotional concequences of broadcast television. in this, the dean protests britta's decision to make him transgender and not "all this other stuff". something i love about that scene is the ability to critique queer represention without insulting it. as a trans person, i've seen a good amount of transphobia is television. this isn't one of these times. being able to have trans identity be a part of the punchline without it being insulted is something that is apparently very hard for screenwriters of sitcoms to do, so i commend them for being able to do that. as well as this, this scene acts as a criticism of how basic queer representation in media is, how they like having one distinct, easy to understand label to give their token character, ignoring "all this other stuff". it's telling us that, like in queer studies and advanced waxing, queer idenity isn't black and white, it's a wide spectrum of identities that comes in many, many different colors.

all in all, community's representation of queerness and how it treats insults to queerness is something a lot of other shows should try to strive for. in my opinion, it has some of the most nuanced takes of queer identity and representation out of any sitcom that doesn't have queer people as a target audience. it feels very fitting, since the show is literally called community and it about a group of misfits who bond over their shared messed up-ness. this show is all about finding your people and accepting everyone, as pierce says in for a few paintballs more, "flaws and all". i think the showrunners had an impression this show would speak to a lot of queer people and i love that they were able to make us feel welcome just as greendale does to the study group.

[13thdoctorposts]

Of course RTD's fauxgressive dicksuckers are now using the latest episode to shit on Chibnall and Thasmin. First of all it is lesbophobic to not consider a relationship real/canon without an onscreen kiss, second the fetishization just reeks from the way people are talking about the Doctor as a slut and only acknowledging physical acts, third ew the antiBlackness in portraying this Doctor specifically as hypersexed that is literally a racist trope against Black men and a homophobic trope to boot. Oh and this episode being a weird response to criticism of the Loki series is obvious and embarrassing and should not be celebrated its literally tokenism and using representation as a pawn. Finally, the misogyny is evident in how fandom was just waiting for a MLM ship again to throw away and shit on the WLW ships.

I think these are all very valid reasons to be upset. We knew when 15 kissed another man people were going to come for Thasmin. They claim it doesn't exist, but they can't miss a chance to talk about it.

I've noticed that misogyny has always been in this fandom. But, I think having a female Doctor and her female love interest were 2 things that many people couldn't compute. And honestly, didn't really want to. Let's be real, most fans in this community are male. They rarely have to translate characters who differ from them, unlike women. Since childhood, women have done this when consuming media. Women were expected to see the male doctor's message and translate it through their own lens. That way we could empathize with it. You had to know how because there weren't as many female hero types.

Most men in this fandom had to figure out how to connect to a woman Doctor. Then, connect to a WLW relationship. Neither of these involves a man. And I think they just couldn't do it; they'll claim bad writing, but I think a lot of it was just not understanding. WLW relationships differ from straight and MLM relationships. They just do. The men couldn't see themselves in the Doctor or the love interest. So, they can't understand how deep the love can be there without it being physical. Just like there can be relationships that are purely physical and not very deep. WLW are often emotionally deep more so than the physical. I also think they didn't want to see themselves in the companions. Graham and Dan are great guys, yet they claimed Chibs hated white men. They didn't want to see themselves as the sidekick, they only want to be the hero.

Obviously some women didn't like it for some reason too. I wonder how many like the Doctor being a man because they are attracted to men. They like watching a good-looking guy save the day. I've watched a few Youtube videos where they have said as much. They had learned to connect with the Doctor as someone they would want to be with, not someone they wanted to be. I wonder how many of them are conservative and so just didn't like woke messaging. I wonder how many got sucked into hating it due to the bad faith online takes. They'd rather not like it and be in the online in-crowd than be piled on for every positive post.

It's frustrating and unfair. But, the world is unfair. This fanbase is a mess of hypocrisy. So, you'll never find any satisfaction in it. But 13 has a strong fan base as seen here on Tumblr and irl when ever Jodie and Mandip are at cons... Jodies lines are truely insane, and I know first hand from being in them. There are a lot of here who love it and we just need to remember that when we see takes that are ultimately designed to upset us.

[boonoonoonus]

People only care about House Velaryon as much as it pertains to creating this upotian idea of racial neutrality. However, when you press to say the optics of whiteness perpetuating a form of ethnic cleansing in the House, everyone is blind. They can't see that, and the reason is because whiteness can never see itself as anything but ulturistic. People cannot comprehend, nor can they write anything that treats non-white characters as people with their own motivations, beliefs, and sense of morality because then they'd have to stop using them as tools. Laenor Velaryon is used in this way in fandom to prop up the Targaryens narrative concerning white supremacy, colonisation, and classism. It's ludicrous that's there is no fanfiction or meta or anything interrogating the possibility that House Velaryon could be justified in their dislike of the succession crisis Rhaenyra causes or that Laenor may be upset with her. He is never more than her gay best friend because that is the only role a gay biracial man can play for a white woman.

This is problematic in as much that making a biracial man support someone who is representative of systems of oppression in any which way without critical engagement is dangerous and an oversight. Making House Velaryon black could have been interesting. Instead, it's invited white people on mass to prop up black people as support for their racist fantasies. By that, I mean any writing/headcanon/thought experiment that sees House Velaryon just be Rhaenyra's strongest supporters without explaining why, is just erasure and tokenism. (Sidenote, no one ever gives a why and I think in part it's because media literacy is dead and whiteness has become so ingrained as the standard people cannot fathom why you would never just support the main white character no matter how asinine they are. There is no good argument, and no one wants to do the work to try to create one. Fair enough, no one can demand your labour, but it leave black characters in a sidelined and tokenistic position that supports white people taking them out for brownie points when needed.)

Laenor isn't a person, he's a mesh of plot relevant reactions and external support to make Rhaenyra and the writer by extension look and feel better. Both Laenor and Laena are shown in fanfiction and the TV show to be useful by the very act of their disposal, and no one pauses to wonder if that is a violent act. (It is. It's antiblack and plays into hegemonic violence against black bodies).

Also, the breeding kink of the white supremacist line of thinking shows itself in the way in which people argue the importance of Rhaenyras line continuing by blood, but conveniently saying that the choice to adopt on behalf of House Velaryon is progressive and their blood doesn't matter, choice does. The parallels between this argument and the likes of the Tuskegee experiment or sterilisation of non white persons with vaginas in hospitals and prisons whilst encouraging white people who are capable of giving birth to do so are immense. The willingness of people to fall into white supremacist lines of thinking when arguing for a fictional character is astounding, however its ultimately a pet peeve on my behalf. There are very few critical spaces in which blackness is welcomed in life, and existential alienation extends into the digital and fictional worlds. People are comfortable with prejudice and white supremacy ,it's is the basis on which the West builds legitimacy and precedent, it is not remiss then to say that the inheritors of these social precedents replicate the behaviour and line of thinking.

This is not to say people are unaware, but often the "fun" of whiteness is to be able to not have to worry about the likes of Black, Indigenous, Asian or Pacific islander people because preservation of white happiness is more important. White people get to live in a utopian ideal all the time when it pertains to race and have the freedom to say that discussions on such topics harsh their vibe so they do not have to engage.

But whatever, who cares what I think, I'm just a Black person on the Internet.

[papirouge]

I just had a conversation with a self titled conservative who firmly believes that anyone liberal is a sheep and that electing any republican means their guns are protected. He was pro life too so I asked why he cares about guns over kids lives at schools if he’s also pro life but he just kept repeating that more guns in schools would stop violence and that kids don’t deserve anything once they’re born. They just had to be born because birth rates.

I asked him if he considered school shootings super late term abortions. It’s still killing a child after all. He got frustrated and said he didn’t care about school shootings because liberals are dictators who want to take away all guns and put us under communism. I mean… I wouldn’t mind if all guns were destroyed if that meant kids can safely go to schools.. but really, it felt like talking to a wall because he would never critically think k about what he’s saying. It was all the same thing. So I guess this scrote of a man doesn’t really care about babies or kids.

He also firmly believes in Israel should nuke Palestine because all of Palestine is hamas and anyone protesting for Palestinians should be arrested. I bought a black keffiyeh from a Palestinian store to show support and wore it in my hair but I guess he didn’t notice that either.

These people feel like empty husks honestly when talking to them. Repeating what they hear, get angry about nothing to feel anger then shut down when confronted. It’s like those people aren’t really connected to anything? Or maybe that was a demon in disguise? Idk. There are a lot of those spiritual awakening people online talking about how the spiritual veil is thinning fast

It's so funny to see conservative seethe against "Christian sheep" when then turn around and act like Trump or Musk were the Messiah and doing the most ridiculous hoops to defend their dumb stunts. If Musk was actually smart he would create a cult bc there's so much potential in all those blue checkmarks who complained about not being fairly paid yet still simping for him SMH

And TBH every pro gun conservative should shut the fuck up after what happened to Trump lmao None of them been able to stop that assassination with their guns, yet they're really trying to make us believe that more guns in school will make a change. They're so delusional...

I think pro gun nutcases and abortionists have in common that they'd rather address the symptoms rather than the cause.

"We need more abortion" > why don't we establish a system where women don't need to resort to abortions?

"we need more guns (in schools)" > Why don't you address the causes that pushteens to shoot up entire schools? By making guns access easier, it also means more instable/mentally ill people will access to them and do the worst use of them. That's the snake biting its own tail.

I can't be the only one to have noticed how uncomfortable anti woke conservative pro guns get whenever the shooter is "identified" as liberal (trans, etc.). They cope by literally admitting there's a need for gun control (only for liberals though) OR will blame mental illness. But like I just said, by easying the access to guns for everyone unchecked, more mentally ill people will access to them. They're so full of shit LOL

I genuinely believe all the people who worship Trump or Musk are spiritually blind. It's like they got struck by a curse vanishing their discernment. I get such weird vibes from Musk.... it's crazy how the same people who worship him were seething against Bill Gates... for the very same things!! (transhumanist agenda, population control because yes, campaigning somd push for more babies is ALSO a spectrum of population control, etc). Dude had the potential to be the ace rocket space billionaire guy but fumbled the sympathy bag when he started accusing divers (sent to save kids stuck in that cave in south Asia) of being pedophile - unprovoked.

No comment on Trump. I believe the woman who said God let him win because Hillary was worse, but that this time around, Harris will win because America didn't learn her lesson, is more sinful than ever, and because Trump is basically a POS. Harris will hurt America (Obama is pulling the string behind the curtains btw) but God basically said that's what this country deserved lol

I don't particularly like Harris, but NGL I can't wait to see the meltdown of Conservatives once Trump loses and start sperging coping conspiracies lol nah, God is done with yall. End of the story.

[tara-in-our-hearts]

I thought we had left the tv trope "attractive woman is for some reason seen as uglier than a troll, is described as someone who no man will ever ever want, and then she has a glow up and againt all odds meets her prince" in the 00s.

But no, that's basically Bridgerton season 3. I don't find it believable at all that Nicola Coughlan, even in her ugly dresses in season 1-2, would be seen as so unattractive that no one expects her to ever find a match. Come on! She's gorgeous. Yes, she is the only young woman that's not size 0 in the show. But I do not find it believable at all that her size would be the only thing making people think she's unattractive. And not that the show cares about historical accuracy, but women who looked like they could bear many healthy children were generally seen as more attractive than women without any curves or fat back in the day.

Generally, I think that Bridgerton is the most skilled in mixing modern with historical among the tv series I've seen that do this. It certainly does a lot better than Dickinson or The Great. The modern music in classical interpretations actually works, and it's nice to see a period drama that isn't all white (even though a make believe world like Bridgerton where racism is gone is probably not realistic, and the showrunners have recieved valid criticism for being totally color blind. A better period drama with cast of different skin colors that actually adresses racism is Harlots.)

But I feel like Bridgerton went a bit too modern with the body ideals and the makeup. It's a prime example of art that is made about a historical period reflecting the time it is actually made the most. Also, it reflects contemporary ideas and prejudices about the past that we have. For example that young upper class unmarried women would know nothing about procreation or sex. That's most likely not true for the 1800s.

Another problem I have with Bridgerton - I do like it too, believe me or not, but there are some issues I have with it - is how it romanticizes women's oppression. Sure, it does being up how women are subject to the will of men, but still, the balls and having to marry young and being sold off is still not treated very negatively. And they could have done so much more with Eloise! She should have continued on her feminist path, met other upper class suffragettes, et cetera. But no. And apparently she's seen as the annoying one by the fandom. Tilly suddenly wanting marriage was another disappointment. That sends a message that even women who are opposed to the patriarchy eventually folds. In the books, apparently Eloise gets married too. I hope they keep her unmarried in the show but I doubt it.

I remember an interview filmed between season 1 and 2, with Nicola Coughlan, Charitha Chandran, Simone Ashley and Jonathan Bailey (see below). They were asked if they'd prefer to date in today's world or during the early 1800s. The only one who picked today was Jonathan. Do the rest of them not have enough historical knowledge to understand just how bad it actually was if you weren't a straight man? I know that today's dating isn't easy either but at least women have some rights now in many parts of the world. At least it's legal to date someone of the same sex in over 100 countries. And the freedom to choose what kind of live you want for yourself, to choose if you want kids or not, is so much greater nowadays compared to 200 years ago. They hardly even had access to reliable contraception back then! Imagine having 12 kids just because you like penetrative heterosexual sex. Or because your husband likes it and you can't say no. Add bad maternal health care and no C-section without the mother dying and I cannot for my life understand why any woman would prefer those days. Rant over.

[aspiringsophrosyne]

Episode 9: A Test of Pride.

Oh, don't you hate cliffhangers? Unless the movie's damn good enough to justify it, and those kinds are a rarity these days.

The Good.

This was another episode written by Sam and Travis, and it shows. Later I'll talk about the show's humor compared to the stream, but for now, I'll say that this one had some pretty good gags. The return of Boulder, Parchment, Shears, and Grog slamming Pike face-first into a barrel are peak Critical Role jokes.

You can catch an early nod to "When the Bald Man Cries" before Scanlan takes off; the beret on the dragonfly was a great little touch. 

And hey, Cobalt Soul cameo!

I appreciate the Grog backstory. Especially since, in-game, Travis has been repeatedly reticent (at best) to explore his characters' pasts. Ironic, given that, so far, they've turned out pretty damn hype. The level of brutality is perfect; it shows just how little freedom, care, and love Grog would've gotten had he not spared Wilhand and been given away through him and Pike.

Also, I love the detail that Kevdak has one blind eye in the present day because Grog slashed it out in their backstory. Took me a re-watch or two to pick up on that.

I dig the focus on civilians. I like seeing how not everybody in this world is a mercenary or can defend themselves as the protagonists can. In the game, there would definitely be individual NPCs that got focus and love, but you couldn't do too much, or blood vessels in the DM's brain would eventually bust.

I love Kaylie's design; it's a cute pixie-ish look that doesn't conflict with her justifiable distrust and angry behavior and makes the family resemblance clear as crystal. 

In terms of characterization, I appreciate that she and the troupe are trying to get help for the rest of the town; you get the impression Kaylie at least could sneak out on her own, but she's not doing that; she specifically charges Scanlan with the task of getting everyone out.

We got to see a little more from Zanror, too. Most of his portrayal was off-screen before the Kill Box fight in the original, so I liked seeing his and Grog's former closeness and Zanror's misgivings about Kevdak before that in these Herd-centric episodes.

The Bad. (Or at least, not great.)

I have something to say about Dranzel's troupe, but I think it fits better a couple episodes down the road. Keep them in mind for now.

Nitpick

I wouldn't have minded it if they'd made the flash back in the beginning of the episode a montage of different towns instead of just the one instance we saw. This would give us more info within the same amount of time, plus you can show multiple pillaged towns and Grog never encountering someone who was completely unprepared to fight back to any degree. Until he meets Wilhand.

This makes his change of heart make more sense and hit harder.

Pacing.

This is another episode with less-than-stellar pacing. 

Grog and Pike's part of the story is handled well, but Scanlan and Kaylie's storyline should feel much less drawn out than it does. There's a cut back to those two, Dranzel's troupe, and the various townsfolk a couple of times; nothing really happens with them before Scanlan convinces Kaylie he can get them out before he reunites with Grog and Pike.

We can fix that.

There's a dragon in the neighborhood: have his presence shake the walls, have Scanlan peer outside only to see a long black tail slinking around the building, or have Umbrasyl's acid breath seep through the roof and down onto the people below, who cry out in fear and pain and then desperately try to stifle themselves so they don't draw his attention. 

You can play up the suspense and uncertainty of the moment and make it feel like something catastrophic could happen at any time.

Pike's Mom?

I believe it was Sam who acknowledged during the watch party for this episode that there was some confusion over whether the gnomish woman we saw in the flashback was Pike or maybe her mother. This confusion was due to her hair being black, and her calling Wilhand her grandfather. Sam said that they didn't want Pike to say "great-great" every time she spoke of him, and that's reasonable. 

Except...

If you've got a scene where a character looks markedly different than usual, to the point they can be mistaken for another character or a relative, you have to. If there was any scene where Pike needed to refer to her great-great-grandfather as such, it was here, so it would be clear that this woman was Pike.

Kevdak

We'll talk more about Ralph Ineson and how fucking intimidating he and the animators made Kevdak in the next episode...but I gotta say, he comes across as a little generic here compared to his stream counterpart. Kevdak's scary, sure, but not in any specific way. He feels scary the way any big, brutal dude would feel scary.

I like the idea of one of the folks Zanror was talking to about a rebellion getting impulsive, attacking Kevdak, and either getting mutilated (losing an ear, or maybe a finger) or being killed outright in turn. This tells us two things: the rest of the Herd is not and maybe has not been happy with Kevdak's leadership, but he is very good at putting down dissenters. It's a reminder of the Herd and its leader's specific brand of brutality.

In the same vein I would've liked to see them do more to tell us what Kevdak's motivations were. In the wrap-up for the first campaign, the DM revealed that, as had been hinted at during the stream, Kevdak had been biding his time until he would eventually try to take down Umbrasyl. By contrast, the audience doesn't even get hints about what Kevdak's deal is in the show. Is he genuinely cowed by Umbrasyl? Is he biding his time until he can rebel against him? Is that just what he's telling himself to avoid coming to terms with the fact that he's a dragon's servant? What's going on with him? Despite the show having multiple opportunities to clarify this for us, it doesn't. 

That's it for this one folks. The last three episodes of the last season were nuts, and this one's no exception.

[delusion-of-negation]

Terfs strawmanning ability is legendary. If they made that Swedish straw-goat, it would never burn down because they'd just keep building it. Also. I'm pretty sure that women are also the gender who're the most into non-con, and other non-con aligned sex themes in fiction. And IRL women are the ones who're most into consensual hard intercourse. Yes men can also enjoy and like consensual hard intercourse, but when it comes to non-con fantasies in the IRL bedroom, women were the clear winner.

re

anon, I'm gonna have to respond to this in parts because I can see exactly what terfs are going to pick at with what you said. sorry.

"Terfs strawmanning ability is legendary. If they made that Swedish straw-goat, it would never burn down because they'd just keep building it."

big agree. nothing to add here.

"Also. I'm pretty sure that women are also the gender who're the most into non-con, and other non-con aligned sex themes in fiction."

this is the part they're gonna start picking at with a few main and very predictable points. firstly, deny and/or blame patriarchy for women having non-con fantasies. not much to add there but a no. saying everything you don't like either does not exist or is just the fault of social conditioning, when there's loads of reasons people have the sexual fantasies that they have outside of social stuff, is really just an oversimplification that isn't supported by evidence for the sake of slotting it into your narrative (like they did on the post with any woman who'd hatefucked, they said it was a lie, they said no women had done it, etc), simply gesturing at the existence of patriarchy and sexism alone, or denying things even happen, is not a fair or nuanced attempted rebuttal. of course sexism and patriarchy have a hand in almost any fucking thing, we live in a dynamic world where everything interacts with everything, but to stop there and dismiss things that aren't the sole result of that by any stretch of the imagination (in fact, given many of the things I'll get to later that cause these fantasies, sexism and patriarchy likely aren't even close to the primary cause), or worse to deny a well known phenomenon even happens, is just completely toxic and destructive to the ability to discuss this.

secondly they'll say something else they said on the post, that this isn't the same as doing it irl, which is true, a fantasy isn't the same as acting on something, but on the post the op wasn't about doing hatefucking, it was about being into the concept. they used the difference disingenuously where it wasn't the point, where it wasn't what we were talking about, and I think it'd be fair to say that criticism of their use of it would also apply to this, since again here we're talking about being into concepts and not about actually doing stuff. but I can go deeper here since we do have more stats on this than on hatefucking. I'll save talking about the fantasy itself for my third point, but regarding irl, my country has gendered rape laws, including when the victim is under 13, and there are very very few ways for cis women to even be prosecuted for rape (they still manage to from time to time, basically via aiding and abetting laws where if you hold somebody down for a man to rape them, you can sometimes be prosecuted for the same crime that you helped him commit), but without a penis you're simply incapable of solely being charged for rape, unless your lawyer is so bad at his job that he can't even go "but your honour, it says penis there". assault by penetration is easier for a woman to commit than rape, but it's still mostly for things men can do. it isn't until you get down to the third most serious that women can commit it with the ways cis women will typically assault cis men, the much less seriously taken sexual assault crime, which more easily covers forced to penetrate. but there's also the fact that by this point most men don't actually know the law - they know the rape laws, but to know that they're actually able to charge a woman for sexual assault isn't particularly common by comparison, law isn't taught as a school class here until college, where it's entirely optional and relatively rare to study. add in the fact that social factors (like patriarchy) cause men to be on average less likely to report, and cause cops and shit to laugh at men who try (much moreso than they'll laugh at women, which is not zero, stop living in lala land if you think it's zero, cops treat both men and women like dirt, they're cops), and the male reporting stats keep dropping. I could go on. when you have less biased stat taking, and include forced to penetrate, the numbers still aren't 50/50 and I'd never claim they were (again, like on the post, terfs will equate me having any nuance with me saying it's 50/50 and entirely equal in every way, I am not saying that and I wasn't saying that on the post), there's reasons for the various differences (power, patriarchy, social education on what it even means to rape someone, etc), but it's also not the massively different number that you get from biased stats and biased laws, and the same is true of domestic violence, the numbers are orders of magnitude closer than people think to each other. the fact of the matter is that women do it irl a tonne more than these kinds of people think, it's hard to get perfect stats, and it's exhausting to have to keep reminding people who cite my country's criminal stats that "hey, it's actually incredibly scathing that the number of cis women who do this is not zero, considering the hoops you have to actively jump through to get charged with this when you don't have the organ that the law literally requires you to have". I guess the tl;dr here is that women do rape irl, no it's not 0.05% of rapes or whatever, it's not rare, but no it's not 50/50 either, and why does nobody have nuance on this really serious topic that requires a metric fucktonne of nuance? they're like 60/40 or 70/30 from what I've seen of better estimates, but numbers are hard to gather for the aforementioned reasons, so it's difficult to know for sure. with a crime where reporting is this messy and with the issues with various self-report studies, I'm not planting any flags.

thirdly is probably the strongest point they'd make, by virtue of it being the only one of the three that's genuinely applicable, and it's that the non-con fantasies that women have are about being the victim. it's still a bad point, and I'll get into why, but at least they're on the topic that we're talking about now - being into the concept specifically. anyway, it's not true that they're always about being the victim, no - they usually, as you can see from both stats and general trends in the erotic fiction women write for women (fanfiction and professional alike), do fantasise about being the victim, but that's not 100% by any stretch of the imagination. women also often fantasise about being the rapist plenty of the time. and, as far as I'm aware, the same is true of (again, not saying the numbers are identical, never said that) men - yes, men also tend to fantasise about being the victim, from what I remember of the stats. non-con fantasies fall into a multitude of categories and happen for a multitude of reasons, with only a handful of those reasons being as simple as or anywhere close to "the lack of consent is hot alone", much more often they're, for example, a vehicle to explore desires without guilt - you fantasise that big John from the gym rapes you, because you're not ready to admit to yourself yet that you're bi, you don't wanna be gay, you're a big manly man, so your brain goes "fine, fuckface, what if I made it rape, and now you're not accountable for what big John did in the fantasy because you didn't ask for it", and like video game devs coding an invisible npc with a visible train head because the vehicle code wouldn't work for a train, somehow that shit works for our brains (no, our brains don't react to it or to non-con in fiction like it's actual rape, and as a survivor, fuck the idiots I've seen make that absolutely incorrect claim). this is why everybody, every demographic, is more likely to fantasise about being the victim in non-con than the perpetrator, and why it's not simply the result of patriarchal conditioning to always bow to the whims of the man, it's also the end result a fucktonne of hacks our brain does to get around funky shit and have a sexual fantasy. even the most feminist feminist to ever feminist may have found their brain unexpectedly using this hack to get around something, and even the most manly man to ever man has had the same. and that's just a handful of the many reasons for non-con or dub-con fantasies to happen. there are pages upon pages upon pages of people trying to figure out reasons people have these fantasies, and each time you think you've almost cracked it, you pull on a thread and a whole warehouse full of tangled yarn falls from the ceiling. terfs dunning-kruger themselves into thinking they understand topics like this, and that all of it is the result of one single thing (either patriarchy or the transes, depending on whether they're on their period or not), but ultimately anybody studying this topic knows that the human mind is an endless well of weirdness and stupidity. the tl;dr of this section is that it's not always about being the victim for women, pretty often you find women who fantasise about being the perp, men also will fantasise about being the victim more, and there are some really complicated and nuanced and interesting reasons that these fantasies happen that aren't unique to women or sexism. terfs oversimplify this because it suits their narrative and because they mistake their ignorance for the topic itself being simple and having a simple answer, but that isn't the reality.

so, whether women view more non-con in fiction than men, in my experience and from stuff I've seen, yes, but there's more to that - men tend to watch acted porn and women tend to read erotica (nowhere near 100% at all, in fact these trends are actually an awful lot less cut and dry than people think, both do both and both do more, and amounts vary wildly with different demographics and individuals), and acted porn just tends to have less complex power dynamic plots and rape by comparison to written (again, less, by comparison, not that it never does it, and stats are hard to get on this, especially ones from unbiased sources that didn't intentionally seek out the most extreme shit they could find to paint porn as evil, you literally have to go to pornhub and see that their most popular searches are step-sibling and step-mom and such, and even then a search isn't watchtime, it isn't who was looking out of curiosity and who was looking to jack it, it isn't what's more appealing to studios to make, it isn't information, but most people who've seen acted porn can tell you that the studio stuff tends to be simple stuff and not violent rape, and anybody who's been to an erotica section of a book store or searched one direction on wattpad can tell you that those things jump into complex dub-con plots so readily that you feel like it's actually harder to find fluff). this is simply because it's just easier in written work to address the complexity and to explore the inner reasons and desires that cause the non-con fantasy (those discussed earlier), acted porn just doesn't have as much ability to get into the character's head and explore it, so it often uses simpler kinks that make it easier to appease the viewer - incest, women in positions of power over you, men in positions of power over women, cheating, etc. if you can knock out the story in five minutes without an inner monologue, and have most of the five minutes be sex, then that's the kink acted porn is more eager to do for pretty obvious reasons, while written porn has more freedom there to explore that stuff, more time, more detail, more inner thoughts, and so on. honestly, I find it hard to say that the medium isn't possibly one of the biggest contributing factors here, because unless your kink is just outright the much less common "no consent is hot, violence is hot, I wanna hear you say no" with no deeper aspects to it (and it seems like generally men who like specifically that will tend to fantasise about being the perp, which is fine, have whatever kinks you have, it's just thoughts at the end of the day), acted porn is going to struggle with how to really do that topic. that's probably why, in the one reblog of the post, terfs were saying that fanfiction is all lovey and romantic, while men's fantasies and porn is gross and sexual, it's just that written porn takes time to explore themes beneath the non-con and acted porn simply doesn't have the time to do that sort of thing - at that point, you'd be watching a movie that just so happened to have real sex scenes, and most people would rather just jack it to a movie when that's what they want (have you not seen all those sex movies out there? fifty shades, or the kidnapping one? people do wanna watch that stuff, but acted porn just isn't the medium). tl;dr because again this got long, I don't want to make any firm statements on what men or women really want, especially essentialist ones (which I don't think you were doing), because ultimately I don't subscribe to the terf view that the differences between men and women are massively pronounced, and there are just too many factors that contribute to why these trends we don't have amazing stats on happen (look how much I wrote and I've barely touched on two).

so yeah, that's why I think your point stands, but they won't think so, they'll (as we saw from the post) happily misrepresent, misread, and ignore anything you say to repeat the same points. we're not going to get through to them on this, they're just going to keep writing off all women as precious pure angels who never think or do icky things, and all men as monsters who think and do the worst version of anything bad all the time. it's impossible to break through that barrier unless your essentialism gets shattered by real world experience.

"And IRL women are the ones who're most into consensual hard intercourse. Yes men can also enjoy and like consensual hard intercourse, but when it comes to non-con fantasies in the IRL bedroom, women were the clear winner."

again, I'm gonna have to cite fifty shades, and the frenzy amongst women to get fifty shades themed sex toys and go to town. I have absolutely no reason to doubt it's very common, I've seen plenty of studies that indicate such. but I think terfs would try variations of those same three arguments to attack this point too. they're never going to understand this, unfortunately. they struggle with essentialism and with hatred of men, and those barriers will have pretty detrimental impact on any attempt to get them to view this topic through an unbiased lense. I mean, I can't even explain to them the shit they fuck up re ovid, actual historic facts, because their version of events suits their narrative better. it's pretty tiresome, but I hope I've broken down here at least pretty well how these things are complicated, nuanced topics, and any analysis that begins and ends with "men bad" is going to be utterly useless.

I gotta be real with you, once I got into an argument with terfs who believed that a dying fifteen year-old, who would die before he was going to turn sixteen, and did, had raped an adult woman (which is possible, I'm not one of those idiots who thinks teens can't rape, they're actually far more commonly rapists than people think, although mostly of peers and people less powerful or younger, like many rapists or abusers), but the reason they gave for believing him to be the rapist was that this adult woman agreed to sleep with this fifteen year-old dying boy in exchange for money. now, I am well aware that this is out there enough to be a fucking wild hypothetical you'd use to argue that sometimes you can justify fucking a teen, and I am not here to debate ethics of scenarios this rare and frankly useless for real world application outside of this one time, but to say that the simple exchange of money is more rapey than an adult woman willingly sleeping with a minor, and to go on to say the kinds of things terfs said about that now dead boy, that they hoped he suffered and died slowly, that pissed me off. no, she agreed to sleep with a minor, she could have said no, and there isn't enough swaying power in a handful of cash to outweigh that, it's not a gun to your head. and that day, years ago, was the moment that I realised arguments as nuanced as those above are useless with terfs. there have only been a handful of times, in my years of debating terfs, that I've reached them and changed their minds, and it's not on topics like this that you manage that, it's when you meet one that by the grace of god is willing to move away from the emotional scenario at hand and go down to foundational beliefs with you, and talk about those honestly and openly, and get into the philosophy mud and not the scenario that they're emotionally reacting to. that is to say that when I debate terfs, when I say what I say here, I know that I'm preaching to the choir and not shaking up any terf's worldview. because these are people who will use literally anything in a scenario to demonise the man, even when the man is a literal dead minor.

[cipheramnesia]

You're a disgusting being for interacting with the monster that is dead-dyke, I'll stab you both if I ever see in real life, know that

I figured I'd just publish this so anyone who wants to can see how fucked up call out posts are. Actually sending me a death threat because I did more than zero fact checking on a call out that's as fake and full of shit as every call out.

On a related note, in my research travels I found what I can only describe as a call out subculture. In essence, a loosely organized group who seem ferociously committed to making sure every single call out they find gets pushed and maintained. This is pretty interesting because it's a kind of resurgence of purity culture, a policing of language and sex that's done under the guise of being progressive or protective, when the reality of it all is oppression of outsiders.

It's not a huge surprise that they often particularly target marginalized people or anyone who shows support to marginalized people. Or, weirdly, seem to be able to suss out someone being part of a disenfranchised social group. For example, the above threat is also antisemitic. I don't bring up my background much, but sometimes it feels like they just... know.

And in a broader sense, I also see a trend of paranoia about sex or language being treated as something profane. My joking post about my neovagina is a good example, it being tagged NSFW or similar literally hundreds of times. I'm baffled and this seems like a good time to bring it up. It's a humorous post with no content that would rate higher than a pg-13 movie rating other than maybe some curse words. Yet it's out there being tagged like it should be 18 and over.

Which brings me to a strange tentative hypothesis that there's some sort of nebulous connection between these types of purity police and radical feminists, which would suggest they spring from a shared authorian or fascist source. And before you dismiss it as overly generalized, let's look at the facts.

Both of them share a use of progressive language designed to make it appear as if they're providing positive resources. However, they also demand uncritical allegiance. If you find any fault with their reasoning, you become immediately treated as a threat. Consider how radfems treat the concept of masculinity, and look to Judith Butler for how quickly they turned agaisnt someone who critized them - including going so far as to take an essay Butler wrote against pedophilia, and selectively pull quotes making it look like Butler was pro-pedo. Now, guess what every single purity police call out post claims? Yeah. It's designed to try to override any reason, and as you can see above, it works. Someone has decided they'd rather commit a transphobic, antisemitic hate crime over the simplest amount of review.

So they have that going on, a kind of low key recruitment to encourage violence and unthinking obedience as opposed to critical thinking. The other aspect is they are both obsessed with purity. Obsessed with having an unblemished legacy of absolutely unimpeachable, perfect behavior. With authoritarians this generally manifests in being able to show a spotless lineage, showing that you unfailingly support the party and its beliefs at all moments of your life, public or private. In radfems, it manifests in their opposition to kinky sex, sex work, devaluation of any woman who may like a man, etc. And for the call out and purity groups, it manifests as that you cannot ever have misspoken online, had an opinion which deviates from the modern accepted norm, never have done anything wrong in all your online history, because they will follow it back as far as possible, and pull something from ten years ago or more just to proclaim how terrible you are in present. Or to use a different example, I remember reading another callout which claimed the subject had got a bottle of champagne after a big fundraiser for rent or some such. And let me tell you talk about puritanism. Did you know you can get a bottle of champagne for ten bucks? Making it seem like someone is a monster for spending three cups of Starbucks on a small celebration is beyond fucked up, it's disingenuous bullshit.

So, yeah, it seems like a leap, but the devil of this is literally the details. The details which aren't included in a call out, the manipulation of language in a call out, the sneaking in of false accusations disguised as "proved" with sketchy screen shots. The demand of unthinking allegiance. The suspicious focus only on marginalized people.

My dear purity police people, my call out culture fellows, your true colors are showing.

(yes you may reblog this, in fact I encourage it, but as usual please be sensible and don't send the asker anon hate, or anything worse - we don't do that, just block or ignore them)

[cryptids]

.

Honestly I find the '2022 Riddler is alt right/a white supremacist' interpretation really frustrating not only because he genuinely just isn't one, but it's also lacking in any critical analysis of the source media itself.

Despite being given extensive explanations of his motivations and beliefs, nowhere in the movie, the novel or even the deleted scenes does he say anything at all about race, nationalism or any other alt right/fascist belief (and I am including dogwhistles too) these are a very distinct ideology. If it was there it would be identifiable, and its just not.

I shouldn't really have to explain his motivations bc like I said they're explained at length... but he's targeting wealthy and politically powerful people in Gotham, most of all those with links to Falcone and the mafia, because he blames them for the suffering he went through as a child after they stole the renewal money, and he wants revenge for it. In his view its more than just the faults of a few bad people though, he believes the system itself is corrupt and designed to keep those people in power while everyone else is pushed further into poverty, and that its beyond ‘fixing’ and the only real option is to destroy it outright. And these are very obviously radical leftist and Marxist beliefs.

The first point of confusion imo is the way that his online following is reminiscent of how the alt right use the internet to recruit angry and socially outcast white men, since the one follower we saw unmasked was another white man. While this isn't exactly the same situation (it's ignoring the fact that they're angry about completely different things? Being a nazi or believing in racist conspiracy theories is a pretty far cry from being justifiably angry about very real government corruption that we know for a fact was actually happening), I DO believe however that it was an intentional choice to give him followers and depict them this way, rather than just giving him regular henchmen, and I'll get to that.

The second of course is his attempt to kill Bella Reál, who is different from his other victims because she's progressive and a good person, as well as a black woman (the other 5 of his targets all being white men). But in the video to his followers he explains that his motivation for targeting her is because he believes she's the same as every other politician, and because she was just elected he wants to use the spectacle to make a statement. Like I said before he considers politicians all equally complicit, and he thinks it's just "more lies" when she says she genuinely wants to do better. He is wrong about her of course, but I'm just talking about his motivations here. The guy that Selina had on the roof (I forgot his name lmao) said that the election was a joke and it wouldn't have mattered who won because everyone is being controlled by the mafia anyway, and that's fully what Riddler believes to be true.

But what I really want people to stop and think about is why this movie has a "good politician" character in the first place. And I love Gordon, but he is there to be a "good cop" for the same reason, and its deliberate that they are both poc. I think if you understand why a character like Holt from B99 is designed to be copaganda, you'll be able to see what I'm getting at here.

Superhero movies as a genre are absolutely full of very thinly veiled military and police propaganda and really have been for a long time now. As much as I enjoy 2022 Batman it really is no exception. I think it does a bit better than most... it surprises me they'd go as far as depicting the majority of politicians as unambiguously corrupt, though if course they still had to add a little "not ALL of them though, there's still some politicians who are good and trustworthy" in there through Bella's character.

This is also why so many superhero movies feature storylines where the villain is the person who is trying to drastically change society in some way (they will often have leftist motivations mixed in with with actions that are scary and bad, which is deliberate to make radical leftism look scary and bad, and I would not be surprised if that's what they were doing with depicting his followers in a way that would immediately bring alt right internet groups to mind in the audience) meanwhile the heroes fight to keep everything the same as it already is. Because the police and the military do that too, their function in society is to protect the existing social order.

And I mean.... Bruce.... I love him very much, but the hero in this story who we're supposed to root for to stop Riddler's violent anticapitalist revolt is literally a billionaire. Do I really need to say more lmao.

Now I know I need to add a disclaimer before I get accused of doing this, but I am NOT saying Riddler's actions were justified in any way at all, or that anyone has to be sympathetic to him. He's a serial killer and a terrorist lmao. My points are just to stop conflating any kind of violence carried out with political motivations as being the same as the alt right's as if it's all interchangeable (also think about who it benefits when we do that), and we need to go beyond just arguing about fictional characters as if they're people and be more critical of the media itself and why these characters and stories are being written and portrayed the way they are in the first place.

[gregrulzok]

Geto + His Family Headcanons

It's mostly Nanako and Mimiko

I won't let you guys forget how much I love them help

Sexuality/Gender Headcanons first

Geto is gay, and he and Gojo DID date. I consider this practically canon.

I also imagine Geto as an AMAB nonbinary man - he has no plans to transition, but he does feel totally comfortable being seen/referred to as a woman (or anything else, really).

Larue is an FTM Gay man. He is in love with Geto.

Miguel is unlabeled and generally doesn't restrict himself to dating or identifying as any one thing.

Manami is a lesbian. She has very little patience for any man outside of the family.

Toshihisa is a cishet and is only slightly put off with how queer the rest of the family is.

Nanako is still figuring herself out, but so far thinks she likes boys and girls. Mimiko is a lesbian, but is thinking about her gender.

(No I won't refer to them in the past tense. Leave me alone.)

Now the rest:

First and foremost: Geto is Nanako and Mimiko's dad. I don't accept criticism.

Geto is vaguely Buddhist, but it's less religious and more of just a lifestyle.

When Nanako and Mimiko find him mediating they try to imitate it, but get bored too quickly.

Larue is Nanako and Mimiko's designated babysitter and he absolutely loves it. He takes them shopping and spoils them almost more than Geto himself does.

Toshihisa's designated form of affection is mild violence. He softly shoves/punches the other family members to show love, but he won't do it to Geto out of respect. (Geto kind of wishes he would).

As for the girls, Toshihisa swears up and down he doesn't like kids and calls them brats, but when they were younger he'd always pick them up and throw them at the nearest soft surface. He liked hearing them squeal and laugh.

Miguel regularly hosts little family dinners when everyone is available - he's a wonderful cook and he teaches Nanako and Mimiko how to prepare traditional dishes from his homeland.

Manami has been unfortunately shafted into helping the girls through puberty and talking to them about things Geto isn't quite equipped to handle... It's as awkward for her as it is for them.

On the other hand she gets along famously with Nanako, they like to talk about fashion trends and have girls nights.

Mimiko gets on the best with Miguel, she likes hearing his stories and he's the only one that always knows how to make her laugh.

When they were younger, Nanako and Mimiko would crawl into Geto's bed due to nightmares. Geto is only mildly disappointed that they grew out of it.

Mimiko made everyone in the family little friendship bracelets. Geto's says "Papa", but she asked him not to show anyone (she's still shy about calling him anything but Geto-sama in public).

The girls love to do Geto's nails and hair, and are steadily getting better at it because Geto has yet to tell them not to.

Toshihisa and Miguel get on surprisingly well. They aren't incredibly close, but Miguel is the only one that effortlessly shrugs off Toshihisa's spiky personality so they'll spend time together without conflict.

On the other hand, Manami and Larue keep finding stuff to fight over.

Geto takes care to know little things about his family - how they take their tea, what gifts they'd enjoy, their birthdays, things like that. He thinks it's very important to keep them all happy.

He also has a little folder full of pictures of them.

Whenever there's time, he'll try and organise some way of spending time with them. Whether it's a group movie night, or going to a cafe with the girls, or just taking a little stroll with one of them, he thinks it's important to keep in touch as much as possible.

I just. He loves them. He loves them so much.

They all love each-other.

Geto values found family over everything and he still considers the people from the academy to be his family.

And I just.

I'm so soft for them.

What do you mean they're the villains.

[narniangirl1994]

The scene on the train in 3x18 where Eddie says "It's Abby, his fiancée is Abby" with disgust and then storms off has been interpreted by a lot of people as jealousy. And while I'd like to think that somewhere deep down (or not so deep?) it was, I read it moreso as fear and indignation on behalf of Buck.

How could Buck, this incredible person who has just as much worth as anyone else, so willingly risk his life (above and beyond the call of duty) to save this man on behalf of the very woman who broke his heart? How can he value himself so little to put himself in danger like this (after everything he'd just been through) all for a woman who didn't value him enough to let him go?

I read this scene as Eddie having more care for Buck's life than Abby herself. Yes, Abby was desperate and terrified, but she also knows better than most how selflessly reckless Buck can be and how devoted he always was to her. She knew her fiance was likely in a dangerous predicament and didn't once bother to say "be careful" to Buck as he went off, promising to bring her fiance back.

I know she couldn't know for sure what exactly the situation would entail, but it still struck me as her putting her fiance's life above Buck's own and being ok with any danger he might face as a result of Buck's love for her. Again, I'm not blaming her for the situation or Buck's choices, but as a former first responder who knows what Buck is like, she should know better than anyone what it means for Buck to promise her they'd bring Sam back...

I wish we could have had her acknowledge his worth in that final scene (after Sam hopefully would have enlightened her about what Buck did on the train). On top of thanking him for everything he did to save Sam and apologizing for the way she left things with Buck, a part of me wishes she would have tried to make him understand that he doesn't have to give everything to someone else in order to deserve love or have worth.

But if she had, we might never have had Buck's therapy arc where an objective professional is finally helping Buck realize his own worth. Self worth can't truly come from others, ultimately it has to come from within (although support and affirmation from others certainly helps).

So ultimately I think that scene was critical to Buck's development, but it was still tragic to see Buck (and in some ways, Abby herself) value his life so little. At least it was nice to see just how much Eddie (and Bobby) cared about Buck...

[something-tofightfor]

why do you still consider yourself a fan of bb if you are just blasting him all the time

Why couldn't you ask this off anon if you're so curious and want to play the Ben Barnes Fan Police with someone that's been a fan of him for almost a decade?

You don't have to like or agree with all of the career or personal choices that someone you're a fan of makes. People taking on shitty, beneath them roles or making subpar music or dating sleeping with associating with vapid idiots doesn't make me any less a fan of their previous (or potential future) work.

I'm excited for this GDT show episode. I am very curious about why he needed to be cleanshaven because I think it makes him look like a child, and I'm leery because Netflix is behind it ... but I'm excited to see what he does with horror and with a script written by someone that I KNOW has some serious horror-creating talent.

I've "blasted" him for taking on a role as a manipulative villain that emotionally abuses and physically maims a teenager, and talking about it like there's any actual redeeming qualities to the character. I am too old for poorly written YA that is nothing but tropes. I am DEFINITELY too old for multiple seasons of overacting and shitty, low budget special effects.

Shadow and Bone wasn't the first of Ben's projects that I've side eyed when it comes to quality, either. Locked In was a goddamn dumpster fire. By The Gun was AWFUL. We don't need to pretend like everyone liked them.

I've blasted him about his COVID travel and his association with Julianne Hough for good reasons that I've gone into in detail before and won't do it again. But I know too many people that lost loved ones to COVID to ignore him blatantly disregarding the things that he used his IG to promote for MONTHS and to flat out deny personal involvement with another person that never once took it seriously.

If they'd admitted that they were actually together and didn't play up the "we're just friends!" angle, it would have been a different story. It's hard to fault someone for doing the types of things he did with her with someone that they're in an actual relationship with, but anyone that had fuckbuddies or hookups with strangers during COVID is going to get seriously judged by me - especially when you go out of your way to hide it by blocking people and deleting comments.

I've blasted his music, because I do not like it. I think the lyrics are juvenile for the most part, and the fact that he's spent so much time talking about how "from the heart" and "deep" and "introspective" they are ... and then he releases fucking songs about Tinkerbell and 11:11 and using word salad just to make things rhyme and then making two music videos where all he does is stare at the camera and look sad because women left him or he never even had them in the first place... I'm gonna question it.

If it's so meaningful to him and such a labor of love, give us more than thinly veiled "well it's not about anyone specific, it's about the things I've felt over the years". Don't spend 3 months as a 40 year old man playing emoji tag on IG and then get defensive when people assume that the songs are about one person - without ever outright denying that it's about them.

It's great that he was finally able to create and release music of his own. I'm happy that he's doing something that makes him happy, but when you release things like this - or take on "difficult" roles or date problematic people ... you open yourself up to criticism from the press and from fans. I've NEVER just blindly liked everything someone does because I'm overall a fan. My favorite band has made a few CDs that I don't like. I skip over a lot of songs on them and even on the albums that I love, too, but that doesn't mean that I like their other body of work any less. There are movies and shows that other actresses and actors that I follow have made that are flat out HORRIBLE, and I've never not admitted that. (We Can Be Heroes and Wonder Woman 84, I mean YOU specifically).

Ben has a great voice and some serious musical talent, but it's not showcased with this EP very well, and I prefer his covers to his original content.

You can be criticial of actors and musicians and artists and friends and family when they do things you don't like or approve of without turning away from them.

It's healthy to be critical of the things and people you enjoy. I have a lot of opinions and thoughts and if you've followed my blog for any period of time, you know that I've never been shy about that. I do not sugarcoat things unless there is an absolute NEED to do so - and Ben Barnes is a 40 year old man (and a public figure!) and should be able to handle some criticism when it's legitimate.

[queerlennon]

Lesley-Ann Jones Is Untrustworthy

So I’ve seen some people in the fandom reading and citing Lesley-Ann Jones’ biography The Search For John Lennon recently and to be honest it’s concerning to me. Lesley Ann Jones has proved in the past to be an extremely untrustworthy source for info about the people she writes about. I understand that it’s exciting to have a book about John that’s not written by the typical “Lennon biographer” type (aka an ageing straight man) and for said book to also promise to shed light and focus on his bisexuality but, if we’re going to analyse John respectfully and accurately, it’s important to identify sources that are biased and untrustworthy, even if they’re technically within our favour. Especially when it relates to his queerness. And seeing as LAJ doesn’t have the best record when it comes to writing about rockstars’ sexualities in a respectful manner, it’s best to treat her words with caution.

Info about exactly how she’s a bad source is under the cut

Firstly, it's key to talk about LAJ's journalistic background when discussing what sort of writer she is: she's worked for papers such as The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Mail On Sunday. Essentially, the bulk of her work has been for tabloids and traditionally the writing style for those kinds of publications place an emphasis on sensationalism and gossip. Now obviously that doesn’t discredit her work immediately, authors are usually able to write in more than one style so it doesn’t necessarily mean the tabloid style is going to carry over to her biographies; but it’s good to keep in mind when discussing and analysing the legitimacy of the narratives she creates and the stories she recounts in her work. 

LAJ has received criticism in the past, particularly from the queen fandom of often overexaggerating, or just straight presenting false information in her bios about Freddie Mercury. She is the champion of the claim that Freddie was bisexual and not gay. Her evidence for this is over-exaggerating and (seemingly intentionally) misinterpreting the nature of the relationship between Freddie and his friend, Barbara Valentin. LAJ claimed that the two had a relationship and even lived together:

“Barbara was very open with me about the sexual relationship she had with Freddie.”

(x)

(x)

However, no-one in Freddie’s life has ever corroborated that Freddie and Barbara were anything but friends. As for the claim they lived together, according to Peter Freestone, an extremely close friend of Freddie’s:

In the event, Freddie never actually lived there although Barbara fulfilled a huge role in Freddie’s life at that time... Freddie became very disillusioned when with more and more frequency articles were appearing in the German press’s gossip columns... about the relationship between him and Barbara... After one article claiming to have knowledge of him and Barbara getting married, Freddie... concluded that it could only be Barbara who was providing the information.

(x)

This exaggeration of their relationship and the insistence LAJ has on presenting Freddie as bi because of it has attracted criticism from queen fans for obvious reasons. For one, it’s borderline homophobic to essentially lie about a gay man having a relationship with a woman while downplaying his relationships with men. No, she’s not portraying him as a straight man, however it’s still erasure of the specific struggles Freddie would’ve faced being a gay man in his time, therefore those who want to analyse him would be missing some of the picture when trying to understand him and his life

LAJ’s research methods are also... questionable. This is a post from Crystal Taylor (one of Roger Taylor’s roadies) about her methods for her David Bowie bio which, if to be believed is particularly concerning.

(x)

LAJ is also known to greatly exaggerate her own relationships with her subjects. She often claims to have been friends with the people she writes bios about (coincidently the people she does this with are dead.) Back in the day she would meet with artists while on tour so the idea is convincing enough. However besides her word there’s nothing to suggest that she had close friendships with Freddie or Bowie, two people she claimed to be good friends with. There’s also this comment from Brian May which actually goes against the idea that she was close with Freddie:

(x)

So with all of this in mind, let’s look at the quote from The Search For John Lennon that’s been circulating around Beatles tumblr:

That Bowie worshipped Lennon is no secret. He'd banged on about it often enough. The ex-Beatle had gone to his hedonism. They'd met in Los Angeles, during John's Lost Weekend. I lunched from time to time with David in New York while working there as a music journalist, before he married Iman. He lent me his house in Mustique, to write the first draft of my first biography on Freddie Mercury.

The crazy pair went out to play, according to David, when John was on yet another break from May and far away from Yoko. They genderbender-ed about, John indulging again that 'inner fag' of his. What larks.

They later 'hooked up': 'There was a whore in the middle, and it wasn't either of us,' David smirked. 'At some point in proceedings, she left. I think it was a she. Not that we minded.' By the time they made it back to New York, the ambisextrous pair were 'lifelong friends'.

I’m suspicious of this story for several reasons but first I want to make it clear that none of them have to do with John having sex with men or being bisexual. I’m a very firm believer of John’s bisexuality (my username is literally queerlennon lmao) but once again I think it’s good to examine the legitimacy of sources, even when they favour our position.

Firstly, LAJ’s source for this story is the claim that David told her, which considering I can’t find any info about them being friends besides her word, combined with the fact that she’s lied about having close relationships in the past raises a lot of flags.

But even if we assume LAJ isn’t lying and did know Bowie, the quote is still suspect, particularly the line “John was on yet another break from May and far away from Yoko.” According to May in her book Loving John, her and John had only one break from their relationship (the phrase “yet another break” implies multiple) that lasted a week, and for the entirety of that week, John was with Yoko. (x)

Finally, the language LAJ uses to describe John and David’s sexualities not only puts me on edge but very much makes me question her intention. Phrases like “the genderbender-ed about,” “indulged his ‘inner fag,’” and “ambisextrous,” all come across to me as fetishisation. Bisexuality is already very highly fetishised and sexualised and LAJ is most definitely not concerned with deviating from that representation. That phrasing combined with the way she also discusses Freddie’s sexuality, where she’s alleged highly sexualised claims about him having threesomes:

And quite often that involved other people as well. Other men, other women. There would be a number of them in the bedroom at any given time. In fact they were raided by the police once and the police stormed in and they found more people than they were expecting to find in the bed that morning.

(x)

— leads me to believe that LAJ is an author less concerned with exploring John’s sexuality as apart of his life, something that made him who he was, and more concerned with including details about “bisexual threesomes” as shock value, as a sensational point she can use to to promote her book in press tours and interviews. Like a tabloid writer. And this sort disrespect representation of John’s queerness, imo isn’t that much better than the biographers who dismiss or underplay it. I totally understand that for a lot of us, finding out new info about John’s queer identity is exciting, especially for those of us who are queer and identify with a lot with John for that reason, myself included. But we shouldn’t be giving credence and legitimacy to someone who firstly, isn’t trustworthy and secondly who’s reason for talking about it is gross and exploitative at best and biphobic at worst.

tl;dr, LAJ is an incredibly untrustworthy source of info and in her own over exaggerations, treats discussions of queerness in an extremely problematic and exploitive way so please take anything you read from her with a massive grain of salt.

[mostly-mundane-atla]

Well I got at least two people interested (@esmeralda-anistasia and @deathsmallcaps) so why not.

Quick disclaimer: I understand that some fans can be very sensitive to this topic and take general criticisms as personal attacks and jump to the defensive. Please don't justify your ships to me if you have that reaction to anything said in this post. It's not my business and if I'm honest I really don't care. Your experiences are not mine and will not change mine and nothing I'm about to say is meant to be read as an insult.

Okay onto the rarepairs in question!

I was ten years old when the episode Zuko Alone first aired and Ursa fascinated me. She was so elegant and sweet, and yet the implication was that she was also capable of assassination. Her disappearence and the fact everyone involved kept pretty hush-hush about her gave her character an air of mystery and Zuko's memories involving her made him a great deal more interesting and sympathetic (i still rolled my eyes every time he showed up and thought he didn't deserve all the cute moments with Mai until The Day of Black Sun, and even then still thought Jet was cooler in every way, but you can't please them all). She had quickly become a favorite character and I've held onto that adoration for about 15 years now.

I also really wanted her to kiss Hakoda.

They had compatible personalities and deserved some luck in love after all the heartbreak and trials, and they both loved their children despite having to leave. Ursa was never treated as dead, just gone. She could have been anywhere and there was nothing to say she couldn't have crossed paths with Hakoda and his men.

There was also something about it I didn't quite have the words or media exposure to explain. Often, in fandom or canon, if a relationship is biracial, the partner who is fairer-skinned and/or of the dominant or invading culture, who the audience sees themselves in, is the man and the one who is darker-skinned and/or marginalized or colonized is the woman (heteronormativity got a head start on this one). There's a lot of ugly "taming the savage" rhetoric in this, usually paired with blatant misogyny that's supposed to be in the woman's favor (like suggesting that a woman could only be complicit in this culture because it was what she was told and didn't know any better). The woman's family and friends who oppose this are depicted as unfairly prejudiced against this strange man as if their distaste for people who can be or have been responsible for things like genocide or subjugation is the same as the other side seeing these people as deserving of genocide or subjugation for the crime of not being like them. Sometimes it's the other way around, where the partner seen as "more civilized" is the woman and the one seen as "less civilized" is the man, in which case the woman is often abducted or otherwise the man's defining feature is his brutishness. This supposed brutishness is both intimidating and attractive to the oh so delicate if a bit repressed captive/wife (as well as the audience) and can manifest as being fiercely protective of her, which is how he shows his affection if there is a language barrier between them. And if you grow up Native, this is easy to pick up on and often in the back of your mind, because at least 90% of your media representation likely has some aspect mentioned above.

(Man that was a lot of academic style analysis)

But the dynamic between Hakoda and Ursa wouldn't leave room for any of that. Hakoda, as an absent parent backstory, is defined by having to leave despite how much he loved and would miss his children. Ursa, as an absent parent backstory, is defined by the crime she was willing to commit for her children (for Zuko specifically, but how long would it actually take for Azula to shoot her mouth off at the wrong place and time and also be targeted by Azulon?). Ursa was the one whose willingness to kill sent her fleeing into the night. The culture of her nation betrayed her and made her choose between her own safety and that of at least one of her children. Hakoda is charismatic and a good leader, but he is also soft spoken and understanding, and above all else, gentle. He isn't here to hurt innocents. He's here to see to it that the next generation of his people will not fear invaders or raids or even know that snow can be black from soot. And he's someone Ursa can finally feel safe around and confide in, and she could be the same for him. Someone he doesn't have to be the leader for, to whom he can admit that he just wants to be home and let the tears fall.

I'm honest enough to admit that one of the reasons I liked The Search was that Ikem wore his hair a lot like Hakoda did and that was close enough to it being canon for me.

Another one is Jin/Smellerbee. Something about their personalities strikes me as being so wonderfully harmonious and I like to imagine Jin, smooth-talking and streetwise but still the most genuine person, being the one to sit Smellerbee, who never really got a chance to think about these things, down and explain that anything she might be is okay. That it's okay to not be in love with a guy friend who gave her a purpose and loyal companionship. That it's okay to like girls. That she can have more than one partner. That it's okay to be different from what's considered normal and proper and not have an easy word to describe it. And eventually she'd realize it's true. And eventually she'd realize that she wasn't teasing when she called her beautiful in a wild sort of way.

I also like to think that Smellerbee clearly has more specialized fighting skills and is very good at what she does but Jin is strong enough to bench press her no problem. And Smellerbee acts all tough (because she is) but blushes whenever Jin calls her cute or pretty because she's not used to it.

Sometimes Longshot is involved too. Not as a third wheel or the exact same kind of partner, more like a ghibli style relationship with Smellerbee. Like is it a gentle romance? Is it an intimate friendship? It's love and they know that and don't have to define it by others' perception. And Jin gives Longshot kisses so he doesn't feel left out, which gets him a bit bashful because she really could have anyone, she already has Smellerbee of all people, and she still finds him deserving of a peck on the cheek. They probably all bunk together.

This actually started from a fic I wrote but don't intend on posting more than snippets of. Basically, i was tired of a lot of fanfic tropes, especially those having to do with friends to lovers and soulmates (this world is not kind to aromantics and the last thing I wanted in my escapism was romance being established as a level up for relationships), so I wrote something to actively subvert all of them. Jet and Smellerbee were each convinced they owed the other a romantic relationship after all they'd been through together, even though neither actually wanted it, because that's how all the stories go. So after he dies, she remembers all those times that would have been romantic if either was actually interested, but were instead just uncomfortable because it was entirely social convention and no feeling. But then she comes across Jin, who she's never met before, but who takes her in her arms and reassures her and sympathizes with her, and in this tiny apartment in this seedy side of town, she feels safe. She seeks permission for every touch and kiss and tells her this encounter doesn't have to be anything she isn't comfortable with. And when Smellerbee has to leave, Jin insists she take a candle to light her way, and winks when she says she can return it the day after. She gives her an excuse to visit again. And Smellerbee blushes and accepts it.

And then there's Teo/Haru and Teo/Ty Lee. No special reason I just think both would make a cute couple and want Teo to be happy. He's a good boy, more people should love him. Let him impress people with wheelchair tricks and get smooched.

[hello-nichya-here]

Zucest - PDA

Hank Rusty Truman: Are they into public displays of affection?

***

Of course! She even calls him "Zuzu" in front of literally everybody. Yes, it is affectionate. Always affectionate. Including when she had just shot lightining at him. I will take no criticism. Fuck you, fight me. "Dum-dum" is also a pet-name, and Zuko will call her "Lala" and "Zula" in front of others - half the time he does it to get on her nerves, and the other half he's just so caught up in being all sweet to her that he forgets there are people around. And obviously, calling each other by formal titles like can be sweet and flirty, and don't even get me started on how they make the words "brother" and "sister" sound dirty.

Some of their displays of affection are subtle, and could be mistaken as purely platonic/familial. A hand on the shoulder, head-pats, hugs, always sitting right next to each other, praising and standing up for one another, bickering and teasing (that IS one of the ways they show affection to each other)... Zuko also decides to play the role of a gentleman in public (only in public 😈😈😈), pulling up a chair and holding the door for her, and he also has her be the first woman he dances with at every ball, festival or party.

Other things they did, however, made people uncomfortable long before they had undeniable proof that, yes, these two are definitively lovers. At every ball, the only other women Zuko would ever dance with  were Katara, Suki, and Toph, and these dances always looked far, far, far more innocent than the ones with his sister - who would simply not dance with any man. They'd constantly have these private conversations in front of everyone, whispering to each other and chuckling, and then they'd either leave the room holding hands/with arms entwined, or one of them would make an excuse and leave, with the other, who was obviously staring at them as if under a spell, making up an excuse to leave two minutes later. Their hugs last waaaaay too long, they're far too protective and possessive of each other, and praise each other waaaay too much.

And, of course, we have the things they do when everyone already knows about them. Azula will sit on his lap at every opportunity, and will even make some very inappropriate comments about how "loving and selfless, but rough and demanding" her big brother is. They'll kiss and full on make out in front of anyone that happens to be in the room whenever they want to get a taste of each other... which is all the time. It is also not a good idea to watch them practice their bending and spar with each other unless you want to (or is at least willing to tolerate) a hot, shameless, highly incestuous fight that is just guaranteed to turn into sex (because fighting IS one of their ways of demonstrating love and lust)