#that wasn't at all intentionally queer

[youngpettyqueen]

being in the MASH fandom on Tumblr has reminded me that sometimes fandom experiences aren't the worst thing on the planet

[gen-is-gone]

my for some reason unpopular opinion is that it's boring when Fitz remains unhinged levels of self-deluded and closeted actually. Why does he have to be doctor who's answer to dean winchester, huh? why would this man in his mid-thirties who has spent at least a decade traveling in time and space still have weird insane hangups about being attracted to dudes? why does that need to be the thing about the text that we all collectively think is worth taking at face value? it's boring and fucking depressing and honestly doesn't make sense when the future of humanity in doctor who is that bisexuality is the cultural default and completely unremarkable.

[captainmera]

My God I love your depiction of the Wittebane brother ❤️

Do you think there might have been a chance that your Pip wouldn't kill his brother when Calec goes to Demon Realm? He seems way more tolerable of weirdness and is actually curious about the taboo things. That it makes me wonder if other steps were taken by people around him, maybe he would make different choices and not turned into a brother-killing genocide goop man. Obviously, the blame is still his for what he did, but I can't stop wondering what if.

And him getting along with Evelyn instead of hating her right of the bat is really cute.

Thank you! :D <333

He grew up with this theatrical bisexual of a brother. Pretty sure the reason Belos didn't give a hoot on the Boiling Isles about queer stuff is because he kinda knew, and accepted, that Caleb was kinda queer. In some cases, people can ignore or bend certain rules for people they love. Even disregard them or pretend they don't apply or exist.

(long rant about writing and narrative foils and blah blah under the cut)

Unlike Caleb, I think Philip is the sort that only picks-and-chooses whatever rules he feels will supports his personal wants/thoughts and tosses the rest.

Caleb was not hiding it as well as he thought he did. lol.

I think that, sure, there was probably a turning point for Philip.

And absolutely, people around him influenced him. He's just a kid, a vulnerable one at that, in a protestant Christian cult.

I kinda like to think of it as a corruption arc. Mostly because it seems (to me) that the whole reason Luz was meant to have a depression-arc and Philip getting all "YoUrE JuSt LiKe Me!" thing was because.. There was supposed, I think, to be similar beginnings for them.

But Luz, in season 3, got depressed and felt a lot of guilt, so her arc is going from this happy-go-lucky kid interested in different things, to a depression arc where she questions herself. While Philip has a corruption arc, where he gradually goes from a well-meaning kid interested in different things, to evil and delusional.

I am also combining Luz, King, and the Collector into Kid-Philip's themes.

King is fascinating as a pre-narrative foil for kid-Philip. I think. As King was very clingy to Luz and didn't want her to leave, he too had a delusion about his own importance (disregard that it was kinda true in the end there). King tried to dictate (in that book episode) about what his and Luz' book should be about, how it should go, and it really hurt Luz' feelings. In the end, they solved it. But as a narrative foil, I think for the Wittebanes, they probably had a similar struggle on a larger scale, and it didn't get resolved.

The Collector, too! They're desperate to be close with someone, anyone, who gets them and wants to play on their terms. Kinda like Belos wanting him and Caleb to be witch hunters. Not accounting that Caleb is his own person outside of him-- Which, if you think about it, Caleb made his whole life (in my version anyway) about taking care of Philip. So I'm sure Philip felt like he really was Caleb's entire world. And then suddenly he wasn't. Because of a witch. The Collector, despite having this incredible power (just like Pip having his brilliant brain) is still a child and using their power in selfish ways. Not intentionally, I think, just out of a fear of abandonment or isolation.

I personally am in favour of nobody-is-born-evil-but-anyone-can-become-evil kinda thing.

I would like to explore how Philip gets corrupted.

I am slowly influencing Philip in my fanfic with little things that will, eventually, boil down to not so great moments.

The thing about delusions is that the person truly believes in it. Philip believing he's a hero has to make sense and feel believable.

Belos is a jerk. Philip isn't, yet. He becomes that jerk. But I don't want to write a sociopath. I also don't like using less-favourable mental illnesses as an "easy way out" to write why Philip became Belos and a genocidal maniac.

I have strong feelings about de-stigmatizing mental illnesses in writing, without romanticizing them or leaving out the really awful and less discussed sides of it. This includes diagnoses within all the clusters of the DSM5. I will not sit here and say I only support a diagnosis like Autism or GAD, and not things like Histrionic or Borderline.

And including people with MH issues and personality disorders is important, too, as well as not trying to downplay them.

People throw around Belos with things like Narcissism and Psychopath, without actually understanding what those means or what the different types there are. For example, is he a grandiose, oblivious or a fragile narcissist?

Yes, these disorders are looked down upon. A lot of people who have them aren't very nice people. But that doesn't mean they're evil or have no heart.

Lots of children can display early signs of these, and in a rough time like the colonial 1630s of America, it is not unthinkable that those rough times bred some dysfunctional people. I'm sure Philip has his own slices of pie as far as mental health goes, just like Caleb and many other struggling people.

But, I will not write from an angle that implies Philip just has darkness from the start in him.

There's a reason why I had Caleb go on a rant about being born evil in chapter 5. Because puritans, and Christians alike, at the time - truly did believe bastards were just... Half people. Did you know that if an orphanage found out a baby was a bastard, they wouldn't let it suckle the nursery goat's udders. Because they were afraid it would soil the milk and, in turn, might give the non-bastard babies bad influence. Somehow.

With that kind of logic in your culture, it's no rocket science that people would put nonsense together and think it made sense.

I'm much more interested in how puritanism and witch hunting culture influenced and corrupted Philip into becoming who he became, and why he refuses to budge on his beliefs to the point of murder.

As the owl house, the show, has commentary on systems influencing cultures in a bad and positive way. But in particular, the one Belos tries to influence the Demon Realm with; being a not-so-great way. So! With that as a clue: what made Philip turn bad, most likely, was partially the puritanism and its extremist ways. I think TOH is also a bit of a nudge at the HAYS-code of Hollywood and how it has trickled into most all the American culture-core. As it's both trickled into schools, morality, politics and other things outside cinema.

Just pointing at him and going "He's a sociopath because he became a genocidal tyrant" is, to me, cheap. Not only does it further stigmatising mental illnesses by implying only a disorder can make someone do such evil things. But it also disregards the most horrific truth of all; that the true monsters are people not at all unlike yourself. And that they, too, were children once.

[respectthepetty]

How does it feel to stay winning Petty? Also who would've guessed that baby Barcode would be the one of the BOC boys to collect kisses from all the homies!?

Anon, I appreciate you sending this because, right now, I feel like an elite status female rapper. Like CL from 2NE1 rapped in their 2011 hit, "I am the best", Be On Cloud owns me, and y'all can't tell me shit about this show.

I know I have some Wild Ass Theories and I'm always clownin' in these BL streets, but I love when my theories actually hit their target like . . .

When I knew Teacher Chadok was in a relationship with Teacher Dika since the first episode of The Eclipse.

When I knew Kanghan's house was going to be robbed and his dad would be shot since the third episode of Dangerous Romance, even though I thought Saifah would do it.

When I knew Pat was working with Joke to win over Zo since the first episode of Hidden Agenda.

I love making Wild Ass Theories no matter how crazy they are, like my belief that the twins' dad is involved in this whole murder and sex work plot in Playboyy. No matter what happened in this past episode, I still believe it and am eagerly awaiting the upcoming chaos to see how hard I clowned.

Which is why I LOVE Dead Friend Forever.

I want the record to state that no matter what happens after episode seven, that at this exact moment in time, I love this show. It makes me happy to be alive at the same time this is airing, and I'm not joking. I want to remember that at one point, this show was everything to me, and even if it goes down hill, it had all my attention in the first seven episodes. I want to appreciate it right now because regardless of what happens, it did everything right in the first half.

With the way some shows keep losing their footing in the end, sometimes we forget how good they were in the beginning, and the emo in me doesn't want to forget this feeling. Some of my favorite movies are Scream, Heathers, and Jawbreaker so this show has been giving me the explicitly queer version of kill your frenemies since the very first episode, and I love it.

My internal alarm went off the second Tee got upset that Phi was speaking to White in episode one, then the dark hand touched him making him enemy #1. I didn't like the way he told White he needed to obey him, and I feel like the dark hand wasn't too pleased with it either. It was a vibe.

And now Non has a hurt hand in the past from falling off the bike . . .

Then, Jin was the main character of the previous film, so he was either the killer or the biggest baddie.

But Phi was just so sus, that I clocked him as a killer.

Which meant Phi and Jin were the killers, but Tan has no backstory and people with no history are intentionally hiding it, so they can kill everyone and peace out.

So in my mind, Tan and Phi were regulated to the killers, Tee was the second to last to die, which I'm hoping it's by his boyfriend White who he thinks disobeys him, and the rest of the squad would die as needed. Which left Jin to be the baddie.

All of my theories could blow up at any second because we don't know if Jin actually sent that video or if his computer fizzled out before it finished uploading, so he could still be a killer avenging Non instead of a baddie who wronged Non (but he took the video and that is messed up regardless of what he planned to do with it).

But either way, I'm hoping it comes down to Phi and Jin in that forest because the show started with them.

And I don't think Jin realizes who Phi is to Non since Jin never got a good look at Phi's face in the past.

The Twitter folks spotted that Phi's dad was the police chief from the letters the boys got calling them in for interrogation in episode six.

And now the knife from episode two is showing up in the past in Non's backpack.

Up until this point, I feel the show has laid out a solid story with a good cast, and I think Be On Cloud relied on their KinnPorsche casting to throw people off in this show because who expected Us to be doomed in the first episode? That was like Drew Barrymore dying at the beginning of Scream.

People have felt off about JJ's character, but the show wouldn't really have JJ do anything bad to sweet Barcode, right?

And Barcode and Ta being paired together was a pipe dream for the Macau x Porchay shippers, so it could never happen here!

Especially because Ta and Copper won The Hidden Character, which meant they were going to be the main pair of this show, right?

WRONG!

Barcode is gonna be involved in some fucked up shit, and according to those MDL comments, people are realizing they messed up making any assumptions before this show started based on what the actors previously did.

I truly feel like BOC looked at its lineup and said "Baby Barcode was babygirled so hard for the past two years that the audience won't even think his character is capable of such things"

and I love that for us.

BOC gave these youngsters (19-23 in age) a script from Dr. Sammon and the Pit Babe writers and said "go HAM, bitches"

And the audience stays winning.

This isn't about my Wild Ass Theories coming true. This is an appreciation post for what this show has given to me up until this point - a good mystery.

Every week I have more questions and none of them feel like they will go unanswered. Is Non dead? Did Jin actually upload the video? Is Tan a killer? Why did Phi hook up with Jin? Will White finally snap, crackle, and pop like a bag of Rice Krispies treats for the mere fact that he simply wanted a nice weekend getaway with his boyfriend and now has to deal with all this bullshit?

But most importantly, when did Phi realize he was going to kill all of them after making them run around scared for their lives?

Because by time the show makes it back to the present day, I'm sure we're all going to want to watch these kids suffer in the worst ways possible.

Manipulate, Murder, Mayhem

[genericpuff]

The Elephant in the Room - Queer Erasure and Westernization in Lore Olympus (and all its horrid stepchildren)

This is one people have been asking me for a while now, and I've been waiting for the right inspiration to hit, as is required for my ADHD hyperfixation-fueled rants. After recently watching a video that did an objective review of Cait Corrain's Crown of Starlight, I felt now was the time, because Crown of Starlight effectively proves exactly what Lore Olympus - and other Greek myth interpretations like it - has issues with.

And I want to preface this post with one question - why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

Buckle up, because this one's HEFTY.

In that aforementioned review of A Crown of Starlight, there were a lot of points that came up about how Cait wrote the female protagonist - Ariadne, wife of Dionysus - where I immediately stopped and went, "Wait, this sounds awfully familiar."

It should be mentioned briefly for anyone who's unaware - Cait Corrain is an author who was recently (and still) under fire for using sock puppet accounts on GoodReads to intentionally sabotage the ratings of other debut authors, many of whom were her own peers or from the same publishing imprint as her (Del Rey), and most of whom were POC. I mentioned in that previous essay that I just linked that Cait Corrain is a fan of Lore Olympus and decided to give it 5 star ratings from these alt accounts, not just de-legitimizing the reputation of the books she bombed, but also the ones that she praised (including her own book, because of course she had to leave an obvious calling card LMAO). I felt it necessary to tie Cait into my discussion of white feminism in LO and its fanbase because people like Cait are exactly who we're talking about when we dissect the intent and consequences of LO's writing - much of its brand of "feminism" seems to only be catered to a specific kind of woman (i.e. white women who fetishize queer people/relationships) and seem to encourage/embrace violence towards women if those women aren't "behaving correctly" or just aren't fortunate enough to be white and rich - and so Cait choosing to give Lore Olympus 5 stars in her hate-raiding and even have it visibly in the background of her headshot photos was... not exactly disproving my argument that these are the types of people LO caters to and encourages, to say the least.

But then I watched Read with Rachel's "Did It Deserve 1 Star" review of Crown of Starlight and it cemented my assumptions and concerns regarding Cait's intentions and influences even more.

As a brief tangent, I've read A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Claire. It very obviously is using Lore Olympus as its blueprints, but it's not super obvious that if you didn't read Lore Olympus or weren't aware of it, you probably wouldn't notice. It's still not a great book on its own, it's riddled with writing problems, but at least it can call itself its own thing to some degree.

Crown of Starlight is just blatant Lore Olympus fanfiction pretending to be original, even down to its marketing (which I'll get to shortly) but swapping out Hades and Persephone with Dionysus and Ariadne, and setting the entire story in space. Why is it in space? There doesn't seem to be any actual necessary reason for this, it just is, go with it. I'd be willing to accept this because changing up the setting of pre-existing stories can be fun (god knows I loved the premise enough of Lore Olympus being a modern day Greek myth retelling that I had to go and make my own version of it that's still in that modern setting) but as RWR says in her review:

"... we're told that it's the 'island' of Crete, but then we talk about commbands, airlocks, [holo-shields] and it wasn't really written in a way that I felt meshed 'Greek retelling' and 'sci-fi' in a cohesive way."

Needless to say, Crown of Starlight unsurprisingly suffers from the same problems Lore Olympus does, where it will try to "subvert" the original myths by changing their setting and characters and then doing absolutely nothing interesting with them to justify those changes.

To really drive my point home that Crown of Starlight is undoubtedly Lore Olympus fanfiction, Lore Olympus was literally used as a comparison point in Crown of Starlight's marketing which is a fair tactic to use to advertise to a specific niche or demographic, and while some have argued that Cait isn't technically the one to come up with that marketing jargon, it's made much more clear that she used that comparison herself when writing and pitching the book because it is quite literally just Lore Olympus with a different couple in space, right down to the main female protagonist being part of a purity cult. And of course it wouldn't be a bad Wattpad romance if it didn't have our main female protagonist Ariadne talking about how inconvenient her MASSIVE BREASTS are and of COURSE Ariadne is a poor innocent uwu babygirl who needs a man to come in and rescue her from the evil purity cult and of COURSE it hints at them eventually having raunchy sex just for it to wind up being milquetoast bondage and of COURSE it all just winds up taking traditionally queer characters and stories and turning them into this sanitized Disney-esque plotline where the boy and girl were always meant to be together and nothing else matters except their love-

And that, at its core, really just screams "this is bad LO fanfiction". From the stylization of the book's writing which never outgrew its "adorkable fanfiction writing" phase-

"Realizing that I'm being gaslit by my entire world doesn't make it easier to deal with, but hey, at least I still have some part of my soul!" - an excerpt from Crown of Starlight quoted from RWR's review timestamp 13:03

-to the "creative" choices made to turn Ariadne into a chastity cult girl whose resolution is obviously going to be to have what's implied to be dirty raunchy sex just for it to be like... the most tame level one bondage stuff;

-to the classic "she breasted boobily down the stairs" focus on Ariadne's body and breasts and sex appeal that's being kept in check by that pesky purity club.

And that's really disappointing because I had seen people say, "Yeah, Cait did an awful thing and deserves to be removed from her publishing schedule, but it's a shame that that book was written by Cait because it's actually a really good book!" because now it's just making me even more sus of people's Greek myth adaption recommendations (I'm still mad at BookTok for convincing me that A Touch of Darkness was worth reading). All I could think while listening to some of the excerpts quoted by RWR was that if I didn't know about Cait Corrain and read Crown of Starlight blind, I'd undoubtedly assume it was being written by a heterocis guy... but it's in fact being written by a queer woman.

And this is where I segue into talking about the root of this problem, where the calls are really coming from - Lore Olympus and its erasure of queer identities and relationships, despite also being written by a queer woman who should know better.

I could think of no better character to help carry this essay than Eros.

Unlike many of the characters in LO that Rachel has managed to straightwash by changing their motives entirely or straight up changing their identity from the source material (ex. Zeus, Apollo, Crocus who was turned into a flower nymph, Dionysus and Achilles because they're both literally babies, the list goes on), Eros has largely remained the same on paper who had zero reason to not be queer within the story.

Eros is still the god of love in this, he's still a guy and presumed to be an adult, but we NEVER see or explore him having relationships with anyone other than Psyche, aside from a brief mention of organizing orgies in the beginning that's used as a quick joke and then promptly never mentioned again.

Just like with Crown of Starlight and A Touch of Darkness and all these other "dark romance" stories, it's that brand of "pretends to be sexually liberating but isn't actually" writing, where they'll briefly mention orgies or sex-related things and then beat around the bush or avoid involving them entirely like a kid at Sunday school who doesn't want to say the word "penis".

(fr out of all the corny and awful slang for genitals I've seen used in stories like this, "a certain part of my anatomy" is definitely one of the most boring and stupid, like for god's sakes Hades you're both adults and at the beginning of this comic you thought she wanted to bang in the kitchen, why are you suddenly talking like a 7 year old boy LOL)

All that aside, while Eros might still be hinted at being queer and sex-positive, it's only as vaguely as possible so that the story can quickly move on to focus on him and Psyche or, better yet, Hades and Persephone. When Eros isn't deadset on finding Psyche, he's being the gay best friend for Persephone, who he has NO right having a friendship with when he introduced himself by intentionally getting her as drunk as possible with the intent of dumping her in Hades' car as per his mom's command. It's brushed off later as "well Aphrodite maaade him do it, for Psycheee!" but Eros still agreed to potentially put Persephone in danger over a relationship that had NOTHING to do with her and was also mostly his fault in its fallout (which Artemis calls him out for, but of course, like all the other times characters have called out the actual issues in the story they're inhabiting, they get brushed aside so that Persephone can talk about Hades):

Now, the Eros and Psyche plotline is one I've talked about before here and not the focus of this essay so I'll keep this tangent brief, but it's absolutely wild to me that Rachel took a story about a woman going to the ends of the earth to prove her love for someone whose trust she broke (a common theme in a lot of Greek myth stories, such as the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice) and turned it into... woman of color gets turned into a nymph slave for Aphrodite to 'test' Eros, a test that isn't clear at all in what it's trying to achieve, and wait hold up, didn't Eros actually fail that test by kissing Ampelus while completely unaware that it was Psyche-

This is just that episode of Family Guy where Peter justifies emotionally cheating and eventually physically cheating on Lois because "well you were the phone sex lady the whole time so no harm done!", isn't it? (×﹏×)

Anyways. It's all very convenient that the comic will hint at queer rep just to either have it be a constant question of whether or not they're actually queer (ex. Morpheus) OR to have it be promptly swept under the rug to make way for other characters/plot points. It's like when mongie tried to be "inclusive" by writing a stereotypical vaguely Asian character with no specific ethnicity just to get angry at her fanbase for calling her out on this that you can't just call a vaguely Asian character "representation" of anything (because Asia is MASSIVE and covers so many different ethnicities and languages and cultures).

Eros is only as gay as he needs to be to fill the role of "gay best friend" for Persephone.

Krokos is no longer a male lover of Hermes but a flower nymph created by Persephone because... apparently we can't dare imply that Hermes would be into anyone besides his unrequited childhood love, Persephone.

Achilles is introduced as a baby even though it makes no sense in the comic's own timeline where Odysseus is presumably already a well-known hero in Olympus, so much so that he was invited to the Panathenea.

Apollo is turned into a flat-out rapist who's only concerned with getting Persephone at all costs and when that doesn't work, he tries to get ANOTHER flower nymph (Daphne) who's actually genuinely interested in him (contrary to the original myth, there's that "swap it subversion" Rachel is known for) to cut her hair so she'll resemble Persephone more because we can't have a single plot point not resolve around Persephone.

Despite there being loads of genderbent characters already, Morpheus is supposedly the only one we're supposed to assume is specifically trans and not just a gender-flipped version of a Greek myth character. Why? Not because Rachel stated so explicitly, not because the comic has actually explored her identity as a trans woman, but because the readers just assumed it in good faith and Rachel was clearly fine with taking credit for trans representation that's only there via assumption (and only confirmed via her mods in Discord, which is... not how you establish canon information in your comic, Rachel.)

Hestia and Athena are part of a chastity club, until uh oh how convenient that they're secretly in a relationship with each other even though it further vilifies them and their morals, particularly Hestia who was promptly called out for being a hypocrite for taking Persephone's coat gifted to her from Hades while secretly being in a relationship the whole time. Not only does the Hestia and Athena relationship manage to commit queer erasure - of two gods who are considered icons in the aroace communities - but it also makes the only two lesbians in the story come across as assholes AND ON TOP OF THAT ALSO manages to somehow invalidate queer sex and relationships as being legitimate due to the even deeper implication that breaking their chastity vows "doesn't count" because it's not a male x female relationship. It's the 'ole poophole loophole all over again.

And then there's Artemis, who has MORE REASON THAN EVER TO BE IN THE PLOT but keeps being conveniently ignored. Her finding out about Hestia and Athena doesn't get any more screentime than her going "oh you're in a relationship, okay" , we never see her question the true intentions of TGOEM or what it means to her, we never see her have any opportunity to carve out her identity beyond just being Apollo's twin sister (it tries to at times, but then immediately goes nowhere with it, amounting to just poetic word salad), and she really just comes across as what a lot of people assume aroace people to be - alone and standoffish, because obviously someone who's nice and a good person would be in a relationship, there has to be a reason they don't want to have sex or fall in love, and that reason obviously has to be that they just hate everyone and want to be alone forever (￢_￢;) Then again, like many of the queer characters in LO, I don't know if I can definitively call her aroace because it's kept as vague as possible, and - going by Rachel's answers to these questions way back in her Tumblr era - apparently people can't be gay and ace at the same time-

There are undoubtedly loads more examples that I could cover here but that goes for practically any essay I write about LO - the more you peel it apart, the more you start unearthing some really questionable and frankly mean-spirited stuff. Queer people feel largely ignored in LO, alongside many of its derivative offspring such as A Touch of Darkness and Crown of Starlight, and it really speaks to how so many people - queer women, no less - have somehow managed to bastardize and sanitize what were traditionally very queer stories with queer characters. It's like these people think "olden times" and can only get as far as "women were slaves and men were rich assholes". Like, yeah, okay, that was the case for many cultures, but not all of them, and for some of them it wasn't as clear cut as that, many had misogynist power struggles in them while also still celebrating women and queer people in their own way. Greek myth is full of stories of women being forced into marriage or being made the victims of assault, but many of them are supportive of women and their struggles, unlike works like LO that somehow manage to be less feminist and sympathetic to women and queer people than these works from thousands of years ago.

This is another topic that's surely meant for another post, but it really speaks not only to the straightwashing and whitewashing of Greek myth, but also the Westernizing of it. That's not to say Rachel Smythe and Cait Corrain and Scarlett St. Claire are intentionally trying to whitewash another culture's works here, but if you're raised predominantly on Western media, you're undoubtedly going to absentmindedly adopt ideas about society that are primarily molded around Western beliefs .

And this is apparent in LO, while Rachel is from New Zealand, you can tell she grew up on a lot of Western media and its influences are sorely showing through LO's worldbuilding, character designs, and narrative choices. That "modern setting" that I mentioned before is much less Greek and a lot more adjacent to The Kardashians which lends to the theories that most of the media that Rachel consumes is American. Rather than actually going to the effort of doing her research on Greek culture, she seems to just prefer defaulting to the easiest assumption of how modern society is across the board - a generic Los Angeles clone with big glass skyscrapers and pavement walkways. She rarely ever draws food or clothing from those time periods; despite this story being about gods she's spent so little time on the people who passed on the stories about those gods, the mortals, and the gods themselves rarely feel like gods, rather just like Hollywood celebrities covered in body paint. The clothing feels very generic and uninspired with often very little Greek influence, even though Greek clothing is designed around Mediterranean living which you could do a lot with, to such an egregiously Western degree that Hades and Persephone's wedding was Christian-coded. The food... well, there ISN'T any because as we've seen, like the stereotypical American child, Persephone apparently only wants chicken nuggies and Skittles for dinner, so we never see her eat; and not only do we not see Persephone eat, but Rachel weirdly tries to use Persephone's vegetarianism as some kind of anti-capitalist characterization when much of the Greek diet is predominantly vegetarian. It's NOT HARD or uncommon to be a vegetarian in Greece!

(it looks like they're literally all eating the same thing so IDK what Hera is referring to here, it looks like they're all eating toast and lettuce LMAO)

All that's to say, much of LO - and the books like it that I've gone over here - are written with this idea that every culture - including the one that it's trying to adapt - was subject to the same ideas that Western culture lives by in the modern day - that being a vegetarian is "counterculture" in every culture, that the notion of sexual purity is enforced in the same way it's enforced in the Western education system (cough Christianity cough), that queer or otherwise "unconventional" relationships should stay inside the bedroom and not be seen. As much as Rachel claims she wants to "fight the patriarchy" and "deconstruct purity culture", all she winds up doing is reinforcing it through a Westernized lens, which is, as I've talked about before, very indicative of right-leaning white feminism and what it embraces and promotes - being a "good woman" who follows the rules and willingly becomes part of the system that's oppressing them because that's what "good women" do. Women who are confidant in their sexuality are evil and should be shunned for being "sluts". Women who are in relationships with other women "don't count" as real relationships the same way heteronormative relationships do, and cannot be trusted because they're likely trying to spread an agenda that's designed to brainwash heterocis women. Women should only aim to achieve marriage and their entire personality has to be built around their true love. Women are allowed to be kinky, but only as kinky as roleplaying the exact same gender structures that puts the man in a position to dominate a woman, and it should always and only ever be with her first love who she marries immediately, no one else.

This is exactly what the critics are getting at when they hold LO - and its creator - accountable for the messages it's been sending for five years to its audience of middle aged women and young girls. Having a demographic is fine, if this were just a comic for girls it would be fine, but it becomes a lot more problematic when that demographic is being fed toxic power fantasy stories based on a culture that's being gentrified and sanitized of all its original messaging and characterization right before our eyes. It feels blatantly misinformed from the very beginning in its intention to be a "feminist retelling" of Greek myth, because somehow Lore Olympus manages to be less feminist than these stories drafted and written by men from 2000+ years ago.

I opened this essay with a question: why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

I think cases like these really highlight how deep the heteronormative brainwashing from childhood onward goes. That, despite these writers being queer or women, still manage to reinforce the same ideas and tropes and harmful predisposed notions that were designed to be used explicitly against queer people and women. These are things that we can't ever stop challenging, and asking, and truly deconstructing, because it runs deep in many of us who grew up on popular media even as innocent as Disney. Learning about more complex social concepts like sexism and misogyny and queerphobia doesn't automatically absolve us of those very same biases that have been both blatantly and subtly ingrained into us since childhood. All that said, Rachel being bisexual does not mean she's not capable of straightwashing; Cait Corrain being a queer debut author with a POC main character didn't stop them from targeting other POC debut authors at their own imprint; being part of any minority group or identifier does not automatically protect you from perpetuating the cycle that you, too, likely had enforced upon you at some point or another in your life. The fact that these creators and writers are still perpetuating that cycle to begin with is indicative of why it's a cycle at all - it takes work to break on a subconscious level because those cycles are specifically designed to target and hijack the subconscious.

At its worst, do you really think Lore Olympus can claim to be a feminist retelling that's "deconstructing purity culture" when the creator herself admittedly never fully identified or understood sexism until her mid-30's and has the audacity to say her audience is "harsh" on the female characters that she constantly vilifies through her own narrative?

"I feel like female characters in general, people will be a little harsher on them and sometimes way harsher on them, and I used to be like.. before I started writing the story and like making a story I was like yeah, sexism is not that bad, and [now] I was like oh it's bad. It's quite bad [laughs], so like, I don't know, I feel like the female characters in the story don't get so much of a pass. But this isn't consistent across the board, it's not all the time" - Rachel Smythe, in an interview with Girl Wonder Webtoon Podcast

If Lore Olympus truly was just a series meant to be for fun "no thoughts head empty" drama and spice, that would be fine. I've said it time and time before on this blog and I'll say it again: I wouldn't have an issue if Rachel was just writing a story exclusively revolving around heterocis men and women. I'm just frustrated and tired and annoyed that she keeps lying about it, and doubly so that this comic and its creator who claim to be "feminist" have inspired other people in the same headspace to continue to perpetuate that cycle through works that are clearly inspired by LO and never challenged the things LO promoted - violence towards "unconventional" women, violence towards POC, and erasure of queer people. And worst of all, for writers like Cait Corrain, it's more than just writing a really bad book with really bad messaging, it's going so far as intentionally targeting those same groups of people that are regularly vilified in works like LO - people who are just existing, who don't pose a threat to anyone, but had the misfortune of becoming the target of a white woman's insecurity.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is. I don't know what form the solution will come in, if any, to address the ongoing issues with Greek myth adaptions that are being sorely written through an "America as the default" point of view and praised for "rewriting the script of Greek mythology", quite literally cultural appropriation happening live right before our eyes all for the sake of cheap entertainment. Maybe it'll take the failings of works like Crown of Starlight to really get people talking about it. But so long as the roots of these works - such as Lore Olympus - are still being protected and marketed en masse by the same kinds of people who don't see the issue in Americanizing other cultures and their stories, then Lore Olympus and Crown of Starlight will not be the last ones to cause harm to the source material - and the cultures that source material is born from and a part of - they're taking from.

I opened this post with a question, and I'm going to close it with another to really leave it as food for thought. That question comes from another video that I'll link here for you to watch at your convenience that spends even more time diving into and discussing the nature of works like this that have seemingly attempted to "deconstruct" the very dogmas that they still wind up reinforcing all the same.

Does the romance genre have a white supremacy problem?

(yes. yes, it does.)

[yrn-te-ao]

today ~2000+ strong showed up in auckland to drown out the inane ramblings of br*tish parasite posie parker and her maybe 30-50 feral supporters. her screed didn't even get to begin because a counter-protestor dumped a liter of tomato juice on her head, who by the way was a trans woman, who was able to get close just by saying she wasn't a counter-protestor with no further questions were asked, so much for "we can always tell."

her and her entourage happened to slither into the rotunda where my sister and I were, pushing and shoving, then getting mad when people shoved back; hope she and her security detail enjoyed the ear full of max volume harsh noise from a UE boom right next to their ears.

Unsurprisingly, among her supporters were known neo-nazis, all wearing that dorky ass skull mask they always wear, one even sporting an Azov Battalion cap.

We chased her and her little terf and conservative groupie out with their tails between their legs, having to be escorted away by police. she was unscathed, save for the stench of tomato and a bruised ego; a testament to the restraint of queer people and our allies.

After she was chased out, it was noted that there was a nearby rally in support of posie from megachurch preacher Brian Tamaki, a homophobic and transphobic bottom-feeding worm, who upon seeing counter-protestors who were ready to drown out his filth, sicked his brownshirt followers to incite violence against them, which resulted in one of his followers ramming into a member of parliament who turned up to support the counter-protest with their motorbike, as well as reports of them intentionally targeting visibly disabled counter-protestors.

she's not even bothering with the rest of her NZ tour, last seen boarding an emirates flight to london via dubai.

Good riddance you piece of shit.

[wellofdean]

I read your post about Supernatural being queer somehow from season 1 and I have two questions.

1. Don't you think it straight-appropriates the word "queer" to say it just means "not normal"? That argument seems disingenuous to me, and a lot of us want representation, and to see that word applied to explicit depiction of queer sexuality, and it's a cheat that they don't. Queer studies did start as the study of queer sexualities and the experience of queer people.

2. Are you saying that the makers of Supernatural intended for it to be "flesh on queer bones"? Do you think they intentionally sat down to tell a queer story?

Those are good questions my anonymous friend. Thank you for asking. Here are my thoughts:

To answer your first question: no, I don't think it appropriates anything. Here's why: firstly, if we're talking about sexuality and gender, it's queer 101 that no one owes anyone a justification of their queerness, and not everyone who is queer is interested in labeling it or making it legible to you, and they have no obligation to do so, and not doing so doesn't make them any less queer. Furthermore, some people who are queer are not interested in sex, so what about them?

All of that together is why, for me, the entire queer project is much more deeply about non-compliance with hegemony, and specifically with hegemony around gender roles, sexuality and to put it under a big umbrella, patriarchy, than it is about who you fuck. Those things extend into so many other aspects of life that I think you can easily talk about "queering" a very wide range of topics, and possibly? ANY TOPIC.

You are responding to this post, I think, and in it, I made a choice to talk about family and hunting, and our heroes roles and characterizations in that, and did not talk about gender shenanigans or sexuality, because my point was that even before we get to anything to do with it, Sam and Dean are immersed in a queered world in a fundamental, structural way. That said, I assure you that if you go back into season 1 of Supernatural, you will find LOADS that could be said about gender and sexuality, too. As well as other things, and a particularly important area, as @ironworked pointed out in the tags, is blue collar/white collar class issues.

As I said, the depth of queerness in Supernatural is actually dizzying just in terms of the story's BONES to say nothing of how they flesh it out. Queerness is about deviation from the norm. It's about rebellion and disobedience against hegemonic systems for the sake of personal authenticity and love.

Think about Cas for a minute. Cas's whole story is that he rejects his role in a hegemonic heaven. He rebels for love, and that is pretty explicit as early as season 4 when he tells Dean "We're making it up as we go". Fellas, that is THE QUEEREST SHIT EVER even if he didn't do it for Dean, and like... HE DID IT FOR DEAN. Cas did not have to tell Dean he loved him for me to know it, and for Cas to be a deeply queered character. When he DID say it, I wasn't the least bit surprised he was in love with Dean, because seriously, we been knew. I was only surprised I got to have the immense pleasure of hearing him say it and looking at Dean's face while he took it in. Jesus. I will NEVER RECOVER.

This is my perspective on representation in Supernatural: It's excellent, and I relate to, and feel seen by it as a queer person. Nobody needs to get fucked on the maps table for me to do the math that this is a queer story. It is very, very, very thoroughgoingly canonically queer in so many ways, and not all of them are to do with sex. I think some fans will only allow it to be called queer if dudes make out in it. I am not one of those fans.

As to your second question, I think there is a wealth of evidence in the filmic oeuvre of Eric Kripke to suggest that as an artist and a writer, he is concerned or maybe even preoccupied with masculinity issues and issues around family, and around the way patriarchy fucks men up. So, yes. I think he knew what he was doing and he knew that queerness was part of the mix. For fucks sake, it's a family of men who hunt monsters. That is very fucking on the nose. Do I think he kicked off Supernatural in 2005 planning a 15 year operatic queer romance between Cas and Dean? No. I don't think anyone planned for it to go as long as it did, and it's a matter of record that some things were influenced by fan response, actors' chemistry, different writers and showrunners' preferences and etc. What I will say is that when they had a choice to "straighten shit out" or lean into the queerness, they fucking leaned in, nearly EVERY TIME. Like, it's pretty amazing how consistently they lean the fuck in.

I'll admit -- I wasn't watching it with those eyes the first time, and I didn't give it much real estate in my mind when I watched it as it aired from 2006 to the end, but the last three episodes reshaped it for me and made me angry, and also made me need to watch it all again, this time with an explicitly queer lens, and BOY HOWDY let me tell you this: the Supernatch rewatch journey is a wild and wonderful trip to Queertown. It is legit more difficult to argue that Dean is straight than it is to argue that he is queer. There is a full on CORNUCOPIA of story evidence to support that read and relatively little that convincingly counters it on the straight side, and that starts right at the beginning, when they bend pretty baby Dean over a police car in episode one, and he smirks insouciantly in his lip gloss. Do I think everyone involved knew how that looked? Sexy, submissive and a bit gay?

YES I DO.

[notafragilething]

Not-So-Late Night Buck & Tommy Ramblings: I'm Back!

I have survived my chaos week and, with the help of a very large Iced Latte, I'm here to share all the thoughts that have been building up this week in the world of Buck & Tommy. I'm not going in any specific order but I'm going to start with the thing I find most significant and that is what is happening in regards to interviews with Ryan this past week.

Another clip of Ryan talking about Buddie dropped today and I've seen two extremely opposite reactions to it amongst fans. In this clip he basically said he wasn't a writer, he'd be open to it if it happened but said it was important for the storyline to be seen as a heterosexual man supporting his bisexual friend and how things didn't change. Some people think this means Buddie is definitely happening in season 8 (or even a reveal of some feelings this season) while others think this means that Buddie is getting less and less likely. Those favoring it and saying it means Buddie will happen seem to be focusing on the fact that they were still allowed to ask Buddie-related questions. I bring this up because I do think it plays into the discussion of whether Tommy will be a more long term love interest moving into season 8.

What I find most important about this answer is how it is almost exactly the same as all his other responses to Buddie-related questions from that week. He hit the exact same key points and I think it's very obvious at this point this isn't an organic answer. These are points that PR and marketing very likely told him to hit. And the fact that he is answering all Buddie related questions by explicitly saying Eddie is heterosexual is really standing out to me. That is, in my opinion, very intentional.

So what do I think it means? I think it means that they are definitely not planning on buddie happening (this season or next). They are intentionally linking all questions about buddie to very explicit statements that the one member of that pairing isn't queer. One big issue earlier this season, when Buck came out, was websites taking answers from other interviews and writing clickbait articles suggesting Buddie was going to happen. This makes it harder for those types of articles to pop up. It's why we likely haven't seen as many like we did with Oliver's statements (which were very similar minus explicitly saying Eddie was heterosexual). I personally think this is how they'll handle it for the remainder of the season and they'll progressively continue to distance themselves from Buddie moving into next season. Personally, I think there is a lot happening to suggest Tommy is sticking around and they're being intentional with how parts of the fandom are reacting to that. Especially since it's been a very positive reaction so far for this new couple of BuckTommy.

In other news, which is somewhat related, we know we're getting Tommy next week because he is was in the trailer. We also know that we're getting Captain Gerard at the medal ceremony. I've seen a lot of people predicting this will somehow impact Buck and Tommy but personally, I think this is going to play into bringing Tommy more into the 118 family. I think we're more likely to see an interaction between Tommy, Hen and Chimeny over him being there.

In my last post I also had people asking me about Oliver deleting a bunch of photos from Instagram. I did a bit of research and that seems like it's the norm for him.

Be back tonight for an update on the Buck/Tommy Hospital kiss reel because it hit 1 million views.

[neil-gaiman]

(spoilers ahead) i wish my question were more positive, but mr gaiman, why did you choose to include wlw rep only to brutally kill almost every example of it?

just watched the first 5 eps of the sandman. i was loving it, until we met rachel and she died 15 minutes later. after johanna walked off into the rain i looked it up and found out she wasn't coming back. i was disappointed but kept watching. in episode 5, i was excited to meet bette and judy but as i slowly realised where the episode was leading i had to stop watching. i looked up spoilers again to confirm both characters died.

i felt sick to my stomach, and researched more to confirm that yes, there were no other wlw characters in the show. maybe i should keep watching, give the sandman the benefit of the doubt. but as a young queer woman desperate for positive representation, having 3 wlw character die brutally in the same episode they were introduced in, and the other written off...

i understand the show is intentionally dark, but considering i was drawn in by promises of positive queer rep, and knowing from my research that there are many mlm characters who don't die or get to live a long life, it feels your lesbian/bi female characters were given the short end of the stick.

at this point, i wish you hadn't included them at all, so i could be saved the trauma of becoming attached to characters i identify with, only to watch them all die in horrifying ways. this is a constant trend in media deep down, it reinforces the idea that queer women like me can never have a happy ending.

even if you don't have an answer, please acknowledge this ask in some way. thank you.

If there's a Season 2 you will see many of these characters again, because Death doesn't stop characters from being in Sandman. And if there's a Season 2 you'll meet several more important wlw characters who will survive much longer (and who may if we get the opportunity spin off into their own story, as happened in the comics).

Always remember though that Sandman is a show in which, given enough time or bad luck, people die. That isn't a judgement on anybody, as I hope episode 6 makes very clear. It's part of the human condition. It's also why people are complaining on Twitter that I've got it in for cis white males (many of whom die in season 1), and it's why you can get articles like the recent one in Gay Times applauding Sandman for its LGBTQA+ representation.

Does that help?

(Also a small footnote. Gay Times describes Zelda and Chantal as "twins". It's made clearer in the comic that nobody in the house actually knows their relationship. They are a couple of women going through life together with love, but whether they are physically lovers, related or just incredibly close friends is none of our business.)

[rushingheadlong]

You know something I don't think I've ever seen people talk about is how Freddie changed the lyrics for Big Spender.

Because in case you don't know, all original versions of the song are sung by women - and it is made very clear that they are singing to men:

The minute you walked in the joint I could see you were a man of distinction A real big spender [....] So let me get right to the point: I don't pop my cork for every man I see Hey, big spender Spend a little time with me

Probably not too surprising, then, that when Queen performed this song in 1974 Freddie had to do a bit of a gender-switch on it:

Though, it would probably be more accurate to say that Freddie made this song gender-neutral because he didn't change it to be about a woman. He eliminated the first use of "man" entirely and then sang "I don't pop my cork for everyone I see" (instead of "every man").

And honestly there's probably a whole dissertation you could write just about those changes alone, but what I really love is when Queen brought the song back in 1986 and Freddie changed the lyrics again:

Because yes he still dropped the first "man" but the "everyone" is changed and Freddie instead sang "every guy" with just the barest hint of a "-rl" sound at the end to give him plausible deniability if anyone asked about it.

So much of Freddie's music speaks to his experiences as a queer man but, because of the nature of the times in which he lived, he couldn't always be directly open about that fact. Most of his love songs are intentionally vague, and he sang about "somebody" or "you" to avoid having to use gendered terms as much as possible.

Freddie singing "I don't pop my cork for every GUYrl I see" wasn't just an adjustment to the original lyrics, it was a specific change from how Freddie had sang it before in order to make it more gay in a way that he could rarely be with his own music, and that is what I adore about this. It's such a little thing, but it gives such a unique insight into how Freddie balanced his sexuality and his stardom, and how the relationship between those two changed over the nearly 12 years between these performances.

[bengiyo]

I Feel You Linger in the Air Ep 7 Stray Thoughts

Last week, Jom and Yai began their romance officially, and we saw further evidence that Jom's drawings are connected to the time travel or dimension hopping experience. Yai took Jom to a gay speakeasy, where James came out and expressed his attraction to Jom. Yai got jealous and turned a bit petty with Jom for a bit. However, the two had a beautiful moment where they agreed to try this. I really hope James doesn't betray us, because I liked him encouraging Yai to step up for Jom. We also confirmed that Euangphueng and Maey intentionally brought Fong Kaew to the house to distract Robert, and that Robert may be involved in the fire that killed Fong Kaew's dad and scarred her mother.

I am glad I saw a post earlier giving context that the poor women being murdered here are based on real people. Tee always has something to say about the real dangers queer people face in their lives, and it's a tense warning at the beginning of this relationship between Jom and Yai.

Unsurprisingly, the parents are anti-gay as their two queer kids suffer in front of them.

I already know this party is going to involve pairing Yai with a girl as a way to further secure the dad's power.

At least Jom has some sense.

Yai basically described what Fong Kaew is going through with this short story.

There goes Lamyai clocking them, and she's a gossip.

I have thoughts about them introducing Nuey last week, who cannot hide themselves, and Yai now being unable to do so now that he's connected with someone.

It's a good thing that Jom stood up for Prik. He has an ally who also cares about Yai to tell Lamyai to hush.

I find myself worrying about windows and sightlines a lot this episode. Euangphueng and Maey are having a moment and I'm worried that someone will see or hear.

I suspected that Maey has survived some horrible things, and this is as horrible as some of the things I imagined.

One of the things this show is getting right about existing under homophobic is the constant sense of surveillance hovering over you. Robert represents that so clearly.

Oh, sensual oils. This is promising.

This use of both mirrors with Jom out of focus is driving me insane.

Big fan of the little bit of stubble they keep showing on Yai.

Jom was loyal to Ohm. It's probably been a while since he was intimate with someone.

Intercutting the massage with Jom masturbating is one of the most erotic things I've seen that wasn't overly sex since ITSAY episode 3. The way this was shot and scored clearly indicates that they both came, or at least Yai was close.

As much as I like seeing Nonkul and Bright do sensual things as their characters, we gotta get Jom out of here. He comes from an era where he isn't a slave.

Guide is absolutely crushing this role as Ming. He has built incredible chemistry with Nonkul.

There's something private about the way Nonkul smiles that draws me in every time. Bright has a similar thing with his brows.

Yai is running around making mistakes while Lamyai is running around righteous.

And now Uncle Dech caught them, and immediately went to Yai's dad.

Even Ming, the fan favorite, is struggling with his friend being queer.

Oh, Ming, don't confess when you're drunk.

And there's the pairing Yai with a girl part of the party I expected.

Now why the hell are Euangphueng and Maey running off now? I'm gonna need all of the gays to get it together.

Absolutely obsessed with the possibility that there is a picture of Jom that survived to the modern era.

Yai, my dude, you cannot abandon the heteronormative rituals so publicly like this if you want to protect Jom.

Thinking about O'Shae Sibley, who was killed for voguing as these two dance outside.

I am not immune to BL fantasy sequences involving dances.

Why...are we rapping?? What in the Marty McFly is happening?

I am not immune to boys making out in the rain.

Okay, that horny want in Yai's face, and Jom nodding yes? They are about to fuck for sure. This is about to go south so quickly.

Yep, gay turmoil begins next week, but we may get some nice love scenes first.

That was a fantastic episode. They really balanced the danger of being outed with the inherent need to connect that bubbles over in all of us. I felt the fear for everyone's safety, but I actually really like how badly everyone was hiding this week. That's basically the point. You can't win. The only way to be safe in the closet is to be perfectly quiet and alone. You cannot have anyone if you want to be undiscovered. Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Like Nuey last week, Yai and Jom cannot hide. There's no amount of careful that can hide the warm feelings between two people. This was perfectly executed.

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

Thank you, I feel like I'm the only one who is ambivalent about the Cat King. I know he was supposed to be sketchy but it leaned a little too far into creeper for me haha.

Call me Cat King neutral. Which is what he is, a chaotic neutral god with all the mercurial self centered behavior that this typically entails.

His first punishment was fair (in the ways gods understand fairness), Edwin leashed one of his cats with magic and now Edwin is leashed. His bold pursuit of Edwin was, well, Edwin was receptive and it wasn't a matter of the Cat King having no basis for believing Edwin wanted to be seduced.

His punishment became less fair, and his pushiness became less excusable ("I'm a consensual Cat King" my butt), as the season progressed. Their dynamic became that of a cat and mouse game.

Ultimately I think the Cat King was supposed to represent Edwin's sexual desire; its awakening, it less manageable and ignorable over time, the shame and secrecy, the desperate gatekeeping of it. Until, that is, Edwin embraced who he was. Edwin understands himself better because of the Cat King and now he's the one with power over his own desires. Which is what that last scene between them was supposed to be, I believe, Edwin having become the cat and not the mouse. (Notice how the Cat King is more pathetic the more Edwin is self aware and self accepting?)

There is a big big problem with any display of sexual desire or propositioning being considered predatory when applied to queer characters. A long sad history of any queer sexual forthrightness being a defense for murder in the real world. A long sad history of any queer sexual self realizations being considered a reasonable reason to kill off characters in fictional works. Edwin was essentially grappling with 'the love that dare not speak its name' and he embraced it, embraced himself, now he has a name for how he feels and so he's the one in control of his desires.

However, they mirrored Edwin and Crystal a lot in the first season. Which means they mirrored the intentionally signposted abusive and coercive relationship she had with David with that of the manipulations the Cat King subjected Edwin to. That's why I can see where so many are getting the abuse reading from. You're really not alone there 🙂.

[noahkirschtein]

In honor of jdash confirming newt is gay

it's been 3 years since the tweet(s) and i still have a lot to say. the discourse surrounding it has long since calmed down, but to this day some people's responses bother me immensely and i wanna get a few things off my chest.

"it undermines his friendships"

um.. no ? i can't believe people still have this weird mindset. straight people can have friends of the opposite gender, gay people can have friends of the same gender. bi people ?? pan people ?? they can have friends. (don't even get me started on the weird spot nb people land in with this weird friend mindset some homophobes have).

if you never saw newt's relationship with thomas/minho (or even alby) as anything other than platonic before, then newt being gay literally changes nothing.

"he did it as fanservice"

no. if it was fanserice he would've pandered more to the ships; newtmas being the most popular but thomas was not mentioned. if it was fanservice and for any personal gain he would've hinted at other characters also potentially being queer. if it was fanservice he probably would've at least confirmed newt was into thomas; but he didn't. cause it wasn't about any romance, it was about newt and a part of his character.

the crank palace would've been the perfect opportunity to pander more to shippers if that's what he was doing, but there were no explicitly hinted romantic feelings there either. (there were certainly ways to read certain parts of this book as queer, but i won't get into that in this post.)

"he was forced"

yes and no.. the final push to him confirming newt's sexuality was because someone criticized him for donating the proceeds from the crank palace to lgbtq+ (and BLM) charities. however, the way his tweets were phrased leads me to believe what he says. he voices his apprehension to confirm something so long after the work was released in fear of it coming across as insincere. (*cough* jkr *cough*). he also mentioned in this same 2-part tweet that his upcoming series (at the time) would feature lgbtq+ characters much more prominently and explicitly (no plausible deniability).

tldr for this point: it was someone criticizing him that finally made it happen, but i do believe he genuinely stands for what he said. he'd gone through a lot of personal development during the 11 years between the first book's release and the tweets, i don't doubt that for a second.

"there were no hints in the books"

this is a hard one to talk about without outing myself as a newtmas shipper, but i have a few things to say.

james did not intentionally write newt as a queer character. if you read through the books and didn't pick up any queer subtext/undertones, then that was how he, at the time of writing, intended it. however . does this mean there was nothing there ? how come a huge part of the fandom read him as queer then ? it's all up to reader interpretation whether certain subtext is or isn't present in the work they're consuming.

link to the part 1 that i never see people acknowledge when discussing the "announcement": https://x.com/jamesdashner/status/1336775453755895809?s=20

[kaleidescopeghost]

Hey with the stuff on womanism, why do you think those like 2-3 white folks were say hating? On the black community, from what I saw they saw a word they never read before and were confused. Instead of educating people told them to choke and die which I don’t think helped anyone out

Well, I don't think those folks were intentionally hating on specifically the Black community as a whole, but they were definitely hating on the term Womanism (simply for,, sounding Black and being a term they never heard before, even if they didn't realize that was Why the term sounded so strange and unnecessary to them) ((probably bc they don't ever actually Talk to Black people tbh)).

However, that being said, it was Not just a case of innocent ignorance, they weren't Just Confused, they were incredibly rude and that's a Major distinction that needs to be acknowledged--Even the people who looked it up on a very surface level immediately agreed with the people who had No clue what it was Stupid and basically pointless, which was just ignorant and rude even when read with good faith. They looked at this term that wasn't theirs, wasn't even About them, and started piling up on this one Black person for calling them out on their aggressive and willfully ignorant behavior (one of those people being an open LGBTQIA+ exclusionist who has a long ass post with the phrase "inclusion is harmful" in it and the Context being they believe the queer community should be, well. Just LGBT, and they consider Q+ folk to be just,, inherently invalid which is Just nasty behavior that I want to mention because it matters who says what and what they believe in conversations like these).

Frankly, I don't mind educating. I'm very used to it and I'm good at what I do-- but this Black person showed discomfort and distress because these folks were just. Attacking a movement that is Important To Black People and Other People Of Color, and they were met with "Just Educate These Adults!!!" "Do you get mad when Literal Children don't know things?? Do you tell them to die when they have Questions???" "People don't know keywords to search for!!" And pushing all this blame for the situation on this person which wasn't fair because truthfully we live in the Internet age and marginalized communities don't Owe anyone a calm, polite, collected, gentle education when those same people are calling shit they don't even understand stupid just for existing, especially when it's culturally relevant, and we're Especially allowed to get mad about the way these people can just Say Whatever and immediately get backed up when they were just incredibly rude for no reason-- we're allowed to get rude back too! :') in all honesty, it was the call out and the disapproval that Was the education ( the lesson being What They Said Was Bad! And that they needed to go give themselves some reeducation bc their ignorance is leading them to say harmful things). It can be a tough pill to swallow, especially when you don't know the gravity of what you're even saying and then being met with harsh rejection, but the only reason that happened was because these folks looked at "Feminism But Black Inclusive" and immediately was like "this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard or seen" 😭 and they Swarmed and Ganged Up On the first person who called them out. Not okay behavior. We're not going to be nice to people who can't A.) genuinely just look things up. If you look up Womanism, you'll see your search engine literally Gives You key terms to help you in your research. And B.) be open minded and calm when hearing Black terms.

We just can't constantly sacrifice our health for these people, because it is genuinely a lot of work and pressure we're expected to just Offer Up at any time simply Because we are Black and just magically know everything and are now also expected to be spokespeople for our entire race which is unfair.

So yeah, I don't think it was completely unfair that this Black person was mad. They used ways of expressing that in a way I wouldn't have, but I'm very much against the idea that Black people need to be Perfect, Articulate, and Polite to people who are aggressors and who speak ignorance. It might not seem like it to someone who doesn't know what Womanism is, but those people dropped the ball in a Major Way. You can't just trigger marginalized people like that and expect a kind, specifically catered education from strangers just because You don't know something-- sometimes you say something fucked up and people yell at you and everybody should be able to learn from their mistakes in these scenarios.

(also, it could be the autism, but they weren't telling people explicitly to die :') just to choke lol in my mind people can survive choking lol + the whole reason it was said was to be like "you might as well be physically unable to speak because I don't care what you have to say here". Like I said, not the way I choose to express myself personally, but I get why it happened and I don't think they deserve crucifixion about it and I Definitely don't think their anger invalidates them at all.)

TLDR:

BIPOC, Especially Black people do not owe anybody an education. We're just people and it's really strange we're expected to be polite teachers in the face of ignorance and aggression.

Those people were willfully ignorant, called the wrong thing stupid, and then got yelled at by people who belong to a marginalized demographic where that word really matters to them. It's not nice, but it is fair.

It shouldn't be our cross to bear, to educate people who act like this, simply because we were born Black or otherwise POC. Honestly, a lot of the stuff we know, we know because we had to educate ourselves using the same internet we're asking them to use but during our time, there were way less resources. To us, it very much is a matter of needing these people to Want to put in their Own work on their Own time, using the resources that already exist. There's loads of BIPOC authors, journalists, and creators who talk loads about this stuff, and the learning process is kind of like math in the way you can't always just be given information plain and simple on a silver plate without a Lot of other context. Which is also why we have such an emphasis on educating yourself. All you gotta do, essentially, is check Who is writing what you're reading and cross reference different material to make sure you're getting a well rounded understanding of what the general consensus of the community is. I literally used a Britannica article to brush up on my knowledge before posting and it wasn't hard to find :") the article wasn't even written by a Black Person from what I can gather.

This might not be the answer you want, but I trust you to see how these people expecting an education from random Black folk They upset is presumptuous and a bit entitled. She didn't owe anybody any sort of gentleness in this situation, even if she said some mean stuff. It wasn't nice, but neither were they and the whole situation could've been avoided by Them looking things up for themselves before calling something that was heavily implied to be influenced by race stupid. It sucks for people who just Don't Know Shit, but BIPOC aren't obligated to be helpful to people who Already aren't putting in the work.

But the good thing is that there Are loads of preexisting resources from willing professionals from all across the world and all across time who are respected that teach you everything you need to know that are Free and At y'all's finger tips. Y'all just gotta look. The reason we're oftentimes so frustrated is because We also did the same research because we cared about learning this stuff, so we Know if these people cared, they'd do the same thing.

Okay! Very long post lol but I'm done now! I am still open to further questions and clarification but I hope this was helpful. We're all just people in the world, and we're all just learning, but it's good to practice just. Being polite and looking before you leap 😅 because the initial thing that started this whole mess was people saying some really rude stuff about something that means a Lot to us culturally as Black people.

[cipheramnesia]

hi :) i know youve already answered recs for queer horror movies, but do you know of any more trans horror movies, specifically?

Trans horror films by and staring trans people is pretty thin. I'm not versed enough in the small and indie short film world where I think most of these are likely to be found. The closest I know to a mainstream horror movie with a trans protagonist played by a trans actor is Bit, which is a movie so bad I would have not finished it otherwise. Not recommended.

My most controversial pick is probably going to be Sleepaway Camp 2+3. I've talked about this series at length and it's probably going to in the trans movie discussion for as long as humanity exists. That said, I find trans woman slasher Angela Baker delightful fun. The first movie is a different animal and it's um something.

The Wild Boys is honestly amazing. I don't know if there's a right way to go describing this, but the basic premise is a group of murderous juvenile delinquent boys are shipwrecked on an island which slowly transforms them into women. Women all play the roles of the delinquent boys, creating a strong sense of realism. It's a strange, violent, queer, surreal French film and I would call it a queer horror essential.

Titane wasn't intended as a trans movie by its director, but its also hard not to interpret trans elements in a movie where a woman disguises herself as a man including breaking her own nose to radically alter her face, eventually is sort of taken on as an adoptive son, and never really wholly returns to any feminine roles. Much like The Wild Boys, it's a glorious and surreal movie and another movie I'd consider required viewing.

Boarding School is a whole lot. I'd say it needs some trigger warnings for child abuse, child death, and nazi / holocaust trauma at least. Boarding School is a strange and highly distressing mixture of revenge, ghost story, and child abandonment, all wrapped around a young trans child exploring gender. It's a stunning, gorgeous and dreamlike movie. Not precisely surreal, but paralogical in places.

We're All Going To The World's Fair is by a trans filmmaker! Fuck yes! I wouldn't call it mainstream, and it's clearly on the experimental end of the film spectrum, but it's widely critically acclaimed and has a lot of trans feeling put into. I'd also recommend it for atmosphere and a sort of quiet sense of emotional unrest. Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's next film, I Saw The TV Glow has been picked up by A24, so keep an eye out for it.

Bad Things is sort of the inverse of World's Fair, a queer movie staring queer and trans actors, it's, well, fine. For a film with a banger of an idea (The Shining but all queer) and so much queerness in the production, it's shockingly flat, listless even, as if no one wants to be on the set. But, well it exists I guess.

Der Samurai is hard to say if it's intentionally trans, but features a strange gender ambiguous figure in a gorgeous flowing dress who terrorizes a small German town with a samurai sword and seems to be seducing a young, lone policeman through the night. Ultimately tragic in its conclusion, still a beautiful film and dear to my heart.

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to the Chucky movie series. Starting with Seed Of Chucky and going through at least season two, it gets very weird with gender and is very queer.

[apollos-olives]

thank you for answering my ask. i didn't want to make any assumptions nor did i want to harm or offend you or anyone who is queer by sending it.

I myself am Muslim and I have met Muslims who are queer, trans, part of the lgbtq+ but i never really understood their understanding when it came to Islam and homosexuality as few of the Muslims I've met were practicing and most seemed to deny many parts of Islam to justify being queer which didn't make sense. Your response has made me understand it though and I do appreciate it as the concept of homosexuality and Islam is almost 90% discussed by people/scholars who are not queer.

I am by no means trying to turn this into a religious discussion because I am not learned but what you said about a singular sin being a singular did stand out to me. Although I've always known that as a fact, I've never actually took into consideration what it meant in it's entirety, although Islam does have the concept of major sins and minor sins, so wouldn't that have an impact?

But again while I was reading your answer, I found myself nodding because your response was very much logical and made sense to me. You mentioned that everything that is a sin has a particular reasoning behind it and that homosexuality being a sin has no real reasoning behind it and I don't have anything to refute your point with. But I will bring lgbtq+ activists who discuss things like being queer, homosexual, trans, etc to children as children can be influenced easily (btw I'm speaking specifically about people like Jeffery Marsh) into the discussion as something I disagree heavily with.

Many scholars have also discussed story of prophet Lut (AS) which really is the only story where homosexuality is ever mentioned and while I do agree that the homosexuality aspect of the story is focused on more than what is necessary, if the homosexual part wasn't important would it then be put in the Quran. And if homosexuality was not a sin, then shouldn't their be examples of homosexuality in the Quran or hadiths? I don't expect this to have a concrete answer as even I will admit that I can use this "what about" argument for literally everything that is not directly mentioned in the Quran.

The one thing I do disagree with is the transitioning of trans people - not because I don't believe in gender dysphoria or that I disbelieve in people being transgender - but I do believe that the permanent altercation of a person's body is haram because although you stated that perhaps transitioning might be the best option for people who are trans and you compared it to people who are disfigured (as an example) to me it still seems as an act that goes against God's will because doesn't Islam have the concept, that the more difficult the struggle, the better the reward? Forgive me if this is a terrible assertion to make as I am speaking from a heterosexual point of view and my understanding of your struggles will not be the same as actually experiencing your struggles.

At the end of the day we all are Muslim and I am a firm believer that as long as no one purposefully tries to harm Islam and spread misinformation, only God can judge. I do not agree with majority of Muslims who deem it appropriate to condemn people to Hell simply for existing as I do believe that people who are not heterosexual 90% of the time are not making their struggles up, nor are they making false claims. Regardless of my opinion on whether or not homosexuality is a sin, I admire your attitude towards it and I do believe that Allah loves all. Allah is All-loving after all and Allah does not make mistakes nor does He intentionally do things to harm anyone.

Thank you for your perspective and for teaching me something I genuinely did not know. I hope that this ask does not come across as hostile because these are simply my thoughts and I am more than willing to open my mind to different perspectives.

i'm glad you're being very respectful with your disagreements and i'm happy to answer anything as long as it's in good faith. thank you for being so kind :)

i will say that yes you are right that many queer muslims are not practicing and often stray away from islam to justify their queerness, and i've seen it happen from a lot of queer muslims around me. i do believe it's not because their faith is weak or that they purposely are doing it with the intent of malice, but i think it's because a lot of people have trauma when it comes to religion. religious trauma affects many people in the world, even outside of islam. almost every queer muslim i've ever met has been religiously traumatized, and therefore are afraid of islam and the people who practice it out of the concern that they may be harmed again. while islam is beautiful, the people who practice it can harm those who do not follow it properly in their eyes. i personally have religious trauma that my parents gave me over being queer, but i've moved on from it and have accepted myself regardless. unfortunately that is not the case for every muslim, and queer muslims especially are targeted and harmed more and more as of recently. because of that religious trauma, queer muslims are likely to stray away from allah and islam because they associate islam with their mental, emotional, and bodily harm. and i absolutely understand it as well. not everyone will get it, but it's understandable how you will want to stray away from religion when it has only harmed you. i believe that is the biggest factor when queer muslims deny parts of their islam in order to "justify" being queer.

you are right in that islam does have major sins and minor sins. of course, i am not a scholar so anyone could correct me if i'm wrong, but while there are major sins and minor sins, i still believe that sins are singular. to me, a major sin would affect like... a persons own moral judgement about their actions, if that makes sense? like a major sin would weigh down on someone's chest more than a minor sin would, and would therefore make the person want to repent even more. while all sins count the same, some have more of a guilt to them that may affect a person and their relationship with allah. me eating gelatin isn't going to be as heavy of a sin on my shoulders as, for example god forbid, me stealing from orphans, right? they're both sins and equal in count, but not equal in weight. if that makes sense? that's how i view it. a major sin affects a person more personally and affects their relationship with their deen and their relationship with allah, rather than count as more or multiple sins on their shoulder. you are, of course, allowed to disagree with me, this is just how i view it. alhamdulillah god gave us all our own minds to think and make decisions and beliefs and values for ourselves.

i personally don't know who jeffrey marsh is, but i do understand your concern about children. the thing is, children can be queer too 🤷‍♂️ i found myself being attracted to the same sex as young as 3 years old. i, of course, did not realize there was a term for this until i was 11 where i fully came out as queer, but i felt horribly repressed and did not know what those feelings were until i was told that they were normal to have. so i do believe that at least exposing children to the fact that "hey, queer people exist and that's okay :)" is... okay 👍 yk? and of course, exposing children to stuff that is sexual and inappropriate is wrong, no matter if it's heterosexual or homosexual, but i don't believe any queer person is advocating to harm any children by telling children about basic queer education. there IS a lot of queer discourse over this within the lgbtq+ community, and discussions about whether or not children should be involved are still happening to this day. you can feel free to have your own opinions, but you must respect others beliefs as long as they aren't harming anyone. personally, i think it's okay to expose kids to queer media and reality, as long as they are not forced to. kids are naturally curious 🤷‍♂️ let them explore. if more queer media was available when i was little, i would've for sure have come out as queer when i was muchhh younger even. and 11 was pretty young anyway lol. the thing is, being queer isn't inherently sexual. there are different types of queerness and a lot of it isn't sexual at all. there's romantic love, platonic love, aesthetic love, etc etc etc. implying that being queer is solely sexual only harms the community more. i'm asexual (as a general term), which means i do not want to have sex. ever. i just look for romantic relationships instead. there are different types of queer love and not all of them are sexual. is sex a big part of queer history and liberation? yeah. but is being queer just about sex sex and more sex? absolutely not. being queer is about accepting yourself for who you are. and why not show kids that? why not allow kids to explore and accept themselves for who they are as well? the moment people realize that the queer community isn't inherently sexual and that queerness is for everyone to feel accepted in, that's when we become more and more liberated. and the thing is, you don't see heterosexuals get the same problem with children though. heterosexuals always get to kiss in public, hold hands, get married. they dominate the whole world. no one has ever been discriminated against for being a heterosexual. heterosexuals see a boy baby and a girl baby play together and be like "oh my god they're boyfriend and girlfriend lol!" ... like... is that not forcing children into romantic situations and possibly implying sexual stuff too?? how is it fair that heterosexuals get to "force" their children into being heterosexual but god forbid a homosexual holds hands with their partner in public while minding their own business, yk? no one is forcing children to do anything. we are just trying to expose the reality of what we are facing to the world so they can realize we are normal and can accept us. no one chooses to be queer or trans. no one chooses to live a life of pain and struggle and oppression. we feel love the same way everyone else feels love. do heterosexuals get to choose who they fall in love with? no. love isn't a choice. love just happens. you can't force and choose someone to love someone else. love is unconditional and free.

as i said before, homosexuality was never mentioned in the qur'an. the word used in the qur'an does not mean homosexuality, it was talking about the indecent and horrific acts of rape, pedophilia, premarital sex, infidelity, etc that the people of sayedna lut (as) were doing. and while we've already talked about how homosexuality is not a sin, i do want to mention that the swana region has a very rich queer history to it! i personally am not very knowledgeable about this but i'm sure if i ask the right people, if you want me to, i can give you resources to learn about queer history around the islamic countries. before colonization and western ideals had been spread through the land, swana was a very queer place. so while homosexuality was never mentioned in the qur'an or in the hadiths or whatever else, queer people have been existing for thousands and thousands of years. we have always existed and will continue to. i'm not sure if this story is true but i believe prophet muhammad had an experience with some trans or "femenine men" during his time? in any case, i think looking more into queer history would be great to learn more about how islam and queerness are related to each other.

your concern over trans people transitioning is understandable. while i've already explained it before, i think the best way to think about it is like. trans people are often suicidal. the percentage of trans minors who commit suicide each year is genuinely horrific. if transitioning is the only thing that can help them become healthy again, then allah will allow it. allah wants the best for us and wants us to be happy and healthy. being trans is a health and science related issue. i don't really know how to explain it to you since you are not trans yourself, but please try to understand that you honestly might never actually understand what it's like. being trans is a type of experience that differs for everyone, and if you aren't trans yourself, you may never understand what it's like to feel the need to transition. transitioning is hard, it's long, the process is incredibly expensive. no one is doing it for leisure. people do it for their health and to become healthy again. isn't it haram to not eat pig if you're starving and on deaths door? didn't allah say it's haram for you to not eat or drink something, even if previously told not to, if it'll save your life? didn't allah say that you can do anything to your body and break any rule as long as it's for your health so you survive? being trans is like that. often, transitioning is something that is for health, not for leisure. i can't explain what dysphoria feels like, but it's miserable. it's always being afraid of calls because you are afraid of speak with your voice because it sounds wrong to you. it's wanting to dig your nails into your skin and tear off your flesh because you hate it you hate it you hate it. it's wanting to grab a knife and chop off parts of your body. it's wanting to scream and sob and rot. it's wanting to wear extremely unsafe tight clothing to try to look the way you want to. it's wanting to vomit every time someone calls you the wrong gender. it's the horrific feeling of utter dread hearing your deadname from people you love. it's the urge to just end it all. it'd be so nice to just end it all. if no one will give me what i need, the best option is to end it all. it's horrible and awful and there is nothing to fix it. it only gets worse and worse in most cases, to the point where people start harming themselves and many trans youth end up killing themselves. is it not haram to forbid people from getting treatment? no matter how much that changes them? isn't it all in the name of health and safety? yes, allah said that the harder the challenge, the more rewards you get, but allah did not make us to suffer. allah is already challenging us by making us trans in the first place. that challenge is lifelong, even if we transition. discrimination is still a challenge and still kills people every day. allah loves us and wants the best for us. i don't expect you to completely understand, since you aren't trans yourself, but this is how much it affects us. transition is necessary and it MUST be available for people to receive. and even if you still don't agree... so what? who are you to judge and decide who and who doesn't get to do what they want with their own body? everyone owns their body and ONLY their own body. no one should judge or condemn anyone else for doing what they want with their own body as long as it's not harming anyone else.

we are all muslim, and we all must support each other, no matter how different our views are, because allah loves us all and wants the best for us. thank you for asking, this is a great discussion to have :)