#something about this dynamic is just

[bamsara]

As a writer who doesn't often read other fics because of personal preferences, but also to focus on my own and spend a lot of time writing something completely to my own exact tastes instead I gotta ask

(This is specifically about long-fics, but short fics can work too)

Personally, I have specific preferences/squicks that make it hard for me to read certain things and prefer to write what I like instead of looking for it in other places (That's not to say that it can't be found! I just find writing it to be a lot more satisfying)

[tumatawa]

I wish she had more scenes... Whateva

[tenojan-in-tevinter]

Honestly there's no one I'd rather be on a forced saving-the-world road trip with than the origins gang. Sorry kotor companions sorry bg3 companions but no one does it like the origins gang. They are a family they are insane they are not to be fucked with they never would have been friends if they were given a choice in the matter. The perfect road trip squad.

They consist of the best dog in thedas, the worlds most royal himbo, a demi-god shapeshifting witch, a bisexual assassin nun, a bisexual assassin orphan, a powerful spell-slinging grandma living on borrowed time (who is bffs with a spirit), a giant spy man who doesn't know how to function by himself, the worlds grossest dwarf, and a giant statue that has a life goal to kill all birds.

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

forever obsessed with dynamics between vampires, specifically that of a maker and fledgling, as a way to explore abuse. the creation of a vampire itself can so easily be a literalization of the lasting impacts of trauma and also much more simply the ways a perpetrator might shape their victim’s very identity. the extremes of isolation in the way that the new vampire, in most narratives, must cut all ties to their mortal life, or else go through an elaborate charade to maintain the facade of humanity, while forever still being removed from it. and the sheer dependence and vulnerability of being in an entirely new state of being, wholly uncertain of what it entails, and relying on another person to define… everything.

[coddda]

Everyone knows that Light and L matched each other's freak but I think their dynamic in the musical (the Japanese ver specifically) is underrated. Like it's not super different from canon but they just had this extra edge of Violence that we never quite saw from the more methodical and careful mindgames in canon death note and I think it's great. Like, yes, they did declare in canon that they will bring each other to justice, yes L says he wants to send Kira to his execution, but in the lyrics of the musical they both outright say multiple times that they just want to straight up Kill each other. It's direct the whole way through. There's more mutual contempt. This game is about nothing more than simply being the first one to Kill the Other (they actually use the word "殺し合い" (koroshiau) or "to kill each other" to describe their game (translated as "murderous ... game")).

(Sidenote but all those references about wanting to send each other to Hell?? Beautiful)

Yeah this is a battle of justice and ideals, yes that clash is a key part of their final confrontation at the end of the musical, but throughout their duets (or even songs like The Game Begins where they're singing by themselves) there's this near singleminded desire to just fucking End each other. It's fucking Raw and it's great.

Also THIS FUCKING SCENE?? THIS SCENE FROM SECRETS AND LIES. Iconic. Actually Insane. My jaw dropped. Light looks like a crazy bitch it's beautiful.

Um. Also. Obligatory Playing His Game (yknow the gay sex song) lines dump. It basically says everything I just said above in like 9 lines. You see what I mean right.

In canon they're playing a game of mental chess, trying to use everyone around them to finally catch the other as their end goal, but in the musical you really do feel like all they see is each other. They would probably beat each other to death with their fists if it came down to that. Idk they're just so excited and fired up about their little game in the musical and it's so unhinged and fun and special and I love it. It's like the writers for the musical decided to kick their murderous intent up a couple notches and the result is absolutely Beautiful.

I also think that the intensity of their rivalry in the beginning just makes the wind-down of The Way It Ends soo much better. It's such a good contrast to their previous duets where they try to sing over each other (Secrets and Lies & Stalemate) or with each other but basically at the top of their lungs (Playing His Game). It feels like there's both a quiet mutual understanding but also an underlying disappointment that the game is finally over. In canon, L's death Is instead the peak of their game, the moment he gets confirmation that Light is Kira is the exact same moment that he dies. In the jdrama it's almost sudden, how L dies, after the quiet moment has already passed. But in the musical L's death, ironically, Is the one quieter moment in their game. Their peak was the game itself. It was Secrets and Lies and Playing His Game. But the end of the game in the musical is not a victory, it's just (as L says) the end of everything they'd been wanting up until this point.

Uh. Fuck it. Clip from the Kenji Urai version because I just love his delivery here. His tone just goes so well with the silence and the sound of the clock ticking. You see what I mean right.

Their rivalry in the musical may have been more shortlived but like Damn they were really enjoying every second of it. They were truly insane about each other until the very end. (Like despite everything I just said about the ending it was still unhinged as fuck. Light Making L Shoot Him and then Making L Shoot Himself with L's Own Hand?? Holy shit man. What the fuck /pos)

Musical Light and L your game might've been shorter but you'll always be famous <33 Please never inflict what you had on anyone else ever please stay in hell forever thank you

[vocallywritten]

Something that really strikes me about the way Colin Bridgerton loves is the intensity of it. Previous romantic heroes in Bridgerton have fought against their love, have even voiced that they would wish it away if they could (and none of this is bad. All drama is fun drama in Bridgerton in my book.) Colin, however, embraces every aspect of what loving Penelope entails practically from the moment he becomes aware of the depth of his feelings, including the pain.

He tells her he does not want to give up his feelings, even when they are a source of pain for him. Which, by the by, is why I think he marries her, despite him not knowing what sort of marriage they will even have after the Lady Whistledown reveal.

He loves Penelope with a genuinely blinding intensity, as is evidenced by his insecurities about her returning his love he had through most of the season. He's been engaged to her less than a week and he's already talking about how much she is the only thing that matters.

I don't really know where I'm going with this it's just a jumble of thoughts I had.

[hilacopter]

normalize liking platonic dynamics just as much as romantic dynamics. normalize being insane over characters as friends and not as a ship. normalize wanting characters to be closer platonically just as you would want them to be closer romantically (I call it platonic shipping). normalize not having characters fall in love for no reason when they were already great and compelling platonically. normalize characters doing things that are usually seen as romantic but in a platonic context. normalize writing platonic fanfiction and drawing platonic fanart. "I am insane about their friendship" can and should be common actually. amatonormativity BEGONE!

[oddthesungod]

they're a little bit fucked up and i love them a lot 🥰

[chappelroan]

8x11 larp and the real girl is a gay dean manifesto, to ME

[darlingboydiaz]

do y'all ever think about the fact that bobby is literally chris' grandpa? like yeah, bobby is a father figure to buck. but buck is also chris' second dad.

that's a dynamic i am reminded of whenever i see eddie and bobby interact outside of the fire station and it's a dynamic that should be explored more overall.

[sysig]

Blind side (Patreon)

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[c-kiddo]

one of my fave things about cr2 i think is that tmn as characters are impossible to separate from their setting, wildemount . like its intrinsically part of all of them. beau and caleb want to try their bests to cut out the corruption in the empire despite knowing its deep-rooted, because they grew up there. veths from the empire too but from a smaller farming community, she's less connected to the government or politics in that way but her being from that town that was destroyed in the war is what makes esseks actions so severely hurt her. yasha sleeps on the floor for comfort and eats odd things because she's been nomadic her entire life. she recognises the big weird lumbering beasts they see in the wastes and just shrugs them off. jester and fjord are always relieved to see the menagerie coast again. jester has drawn that ocean view from her bedroom window so many times, she recommends shops and foods from nicodranas, and fjord worships the sea he grew up besides and worked on. caduceus listens to beau and caleb because he's from the north, outside of the empire, and trusts they understand the complicated political aspects more than he does. in exchange he shares his tea and food from home with them all, and when he's having winter clothes made he brings fabric from home as an example - his family have specific fabrics and patterns they pass down. his tea is only grown in the grove, his staff is from there, grew there with him. and his armour! and lichen! he carries his home with him everywhere. theyre all so rooted in the continent and i love that

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

i've been asked multiple times for Awake Barnaby so instead you get messy lights out Laughingstock doodles

[waitineedaname]

not romantic or platonic but a secret third thing (bonded pair)

[havenotwillnotreadthebooks]

Y’know what would be hilarious and horrible in equal measure? Kidnap fam in Valinor, except all the childhood stories horrify the Valinor-Parents.

Like, Feanor is trying to bond with his shoplifted grandson and hears a “funny” story about Elrond & Elros running away, and hearing Maedhros’ thundering footsteps chasing after them.

The whole imagery of the story is terrifying to Feanor, who was raised lovingly in a peaceful environment himself and raised his sons in a relatively peaceful realm.

To be so small, and have to run so fast, only to be caught in the end. It’s a terrible image. Yet Elrond tells the story with the intonation of someone speaking of a beloved childhood fable. Maybe the lesson of this particular fable was that the children would always be caught if they ran. It doesn’t matter, because here sits Elrond, and here sits Feanor, and Feanor cannot change anything.

Similar events occur with the other Valinor-Parents.