#slashes are there bc i dont want it to show up in the main tag it��s rly incoherent and also subjective

[kindlespark]

this is gonna be SO long and rambly sorry anyway i saw a post abt how babel does queer characters and it got me thinking abt why the tropes it uses would usually turn me off other stories but didn’t here

MAJOR BABEL SPOILERS //

i feel like i’d be more mad abt how robinramy ended up in babel if it marketed itself as queer lit at all or if its fans were going “WOW AMAZING QUEER REP” abt it. but no one told me any of that, so finding out they were gay was just a fun little bonus surprise to me. i get why ppl are eh abt robinramy not getting together/technically still being subtext (which i dont think is really true btw like the book literally says “robin was falling in love” but idk i guess if you were stupid you might’ve assumed that it was falling in love with oxford given how romantic some of the other language is (WHICH IS ALSO THE POINT bc i think robin’s friendship with ramy blurring into romance is why he romanticised like all his friendships/experiences in oxford BUT IM GETTING OFF-TOPIC)). i just think robin’s repression abt being gay was intrinsically tied to his attitudes on imperialism (wrt refusing to acknowledge anything that complicated his life until it was too late) and i don’t consider it a cop out or queerbait. like i genuinely don’t think robinramy could ever have gotten together without drastic alterations being made in terms of plot and character. plus i think it’s clear that kuang didn’t want to write a story with any kind of focus on romance at all, because it’s not that kind of book. there’s no successful het romance either, so it grates a lot less. the only reason romance is included at all is to show the ways in which white entitlement manifests. so the tragic way robinramy played out just made sense to me.

and i speak as someone who accidentally spoiled myself on You Know What in the middle of reading and i was like ugghh boooo dreading it the whole time expecting to roll my eyes when it happened but then when it did i was like. wow im actually not that mad LMFAO 😭😭😭 actually thematically the book sets it up so well that i believed that this was unfortunately the only way it could’ve gone. babel is about the loss and tragedy and grief that colonised people experience. it’s about the lengths people will go to to uphold empire and the lengths ppl will go to to tear it down like idk 😭 i guess it is bury your gays but it didnt bother me this time because i thought it fit thematically ❤️ i enjoy tragedy as a genre a lot and i would’ve made it gay anyway you know. thanks rf kuang for doing it for me so i didnt have to.

WHICH IS ALL TO SAY that i guess if you’re going into babel for the queer rep without appreciating that the story is fundamentally a tragedy it would feel like it’s just reusing tired tropes….. but i think the choices kuang made were rly deliberate and not in a way that feels like trauma porn or shock value. the book is fundamentally about the struggles of poc so the layer of queerness that was introduced felt like a subtle extension of the experiences of characters of colour in the book, and i enjoyed and related to it as a queer chinese person who kind of realised they had to prioritise their fight for the liberation of poc over queerness mainly because the idea of western queer liberation cannot be dissociated from imperialism and many aspects of homophobia as we know it was an export of christian european empire into our colonised countries in the first place and FUCK THIS IS A WHOLE OTHER TANGENT ABOUT HOW I THINK RAMY AS A CHARACTER IS EMBLEMATIC OF THE TENSION AND STRUGGLE THAT QUEER POC DIASPORA HAVE BETWEEN OUR IDENTITIES GODDAMNIT OK FORGET IT POST CANCELLED i just rly think babel’s handling of queer characters is fine and makes sense and i like it personally and maybe i will make a coherent analysis about it one day but that day is not today byeeeeeee

[descriptionofaruby]

ok so here's the tea

basically my brother comes up to my room says he has good news. talks about *ndrew tate and uhh some guy called ad*n ross (makes me watch a clip of the latter not knowing what fasc*sm is) (i'm censoring these bc i dont want them showing up in tags) and how like bc ross fucked up tates arrested. cool that he can't like... do sex trafficking anymore (i assume? i dont acc know) but unfortunately for my brother i really did not care about this (esp bc he always comes and gives me like, this kind of news whether it be debate streamer stuff or whatever and its really annoying to me because i could not care less). but really the main thing was he smelled kinda bad so i didnt really say much so he would leave faster.

so he did leave but he called me like a minute later saying he was kinda pissed because i was ignoring him. which i guess i was (...eh) but he always talks at me and he knows im listening even when i dont say anything and i was also like playing a game, so. and he said i didnt have to be excited about it or anything either. and also i didnt want to hurt his feelings by telling him he smelled bad lol

to make a conjecture its probably more bc i've been cold to him lately bc of depression/anxiety and because he keeps doing things that bother me. so it's not like i'm not being a bitch, but at the same time i literally cannot bring myself to care about this in the slightest lmao. maybe now he will finally make some friends to talk about his youtuber slash irl drama things with... shrug

so yeah i guess i should apologize to him. unfortunately i dont feel like talking to him and i don't really feel sorry or guilty. oops! maybe if i text him i can make it sound sincere enough because i dont really know what he wants from me enough to make a call convincing

[minasweep]

rain my love

[su9busren]

anyways on a positive note in one of the dreams i had i was dating jo/taro and we had 2 big fluffy dogs

[greyjedireylo]

DONT GET ME STARTED ON MARVEL SHIPS BC I SHIPPED PEPPERONY SO HARD FOR A WHILE AND ITS SUCH A BIG SHIP ON AO3 BUT HALF THE TIME ITS JUST A BACKGROUND SHIP AND THE FICS FOR OTHER M/M SHIPS ARE ALL AT THE TOPS OF THE SEARCHES SO ITS SO FRUSTRATING TO DIG FOR FIC

this was actually incredibly eye-opening to me when I first found this out, like I’d always thought all the big juggernaut marvel ships were the slash ones because those were the only ones I saw talked about, and then at one point when reylo was finally getting really, really high up there for number of fics on AO3 I was looking at stats because I wanted to see where they were as far as M/F ships went. and at the time the only M/F ships on ALL OF AO3 with more fics were the one from that ladybug show and...Pepper and Tony. and I was SHOCKED?? I had absolutely no idea they were that popular but then someone in the marvel fandom explained to me it was mostly because they were tagged as a background ship.

which is a good lesson in maybe not tagging background ships with the main ship tag, because it’s always a nightmare for those shippers to find fics where their ship is actually the central couple.