#the tiktok queers would have a field day

[phoenixyfriend]

Imagining the kind of discourse that the tiktok baby queers would make about me if they ran into my Anakin Is Very Gender fanfics and it would give me nightmares if I didn't know most of them are like fifteen

[kerrikins]

The casting for 4 Minutes, the trailer and the subsequent discourse in the fandom has really reminded me of how far the BL sphere has to go in terms of working past stereotypes and bias. (I'll note here that I actually don't know how much of this has gone on here on Tumblr, I'm mostly talking about what I've seen on Twitter and Tiktok).

From the start it weirded me out to see people say stuff like 'obviously it's JesBible' as soon as the casting was announced. Because like - based on WHAT? Regardless of what turns out to be the case (or what we've seen from the trailer, now), at that point the ONLY thing to go on was stereotypes. Jes is taller and a bit bigger so therefore 'obviously' he's the top, right?

Gross. (And oh, I really need the BL world to give me a show with a big masculine bottom and a shorter top just to see some of these small minds struggle to wrap around the concept, lol.)

Then there's been the absolute obsession with the topic of 'omg is it JesBible or BibleJes' ever since the announcement. I expected it from the fandom, but the extent that it's gone on and then also hearing it from the media as well this week was so off-putting. It's reminded me that people really don't like it when they aren't given immediate confirmation of their biases and pre-defined boxes, and they don't like not being given answers, either.

I'll pause here to say that oh, I so appreciate how both Bible and Jes have handled this. They've both made it clear that it doesn't matter, that it's not relevant. Bible even said at one point that 'BibleJes or JesBible doesn't matter, you should think more about whether it's GreatTyme or TymeGreat', haha. (Also, I just want to say that I agree with what one of my friends on Twitter said - maybe, just maybe, 4 Minutes will be the show where we start rejecting this rigid defining of pairs based on who's supposed to be 'the top' or 'the bottom'? Because personally I think BibleJes and GreatTyme sound a lot better than the other way around, lol.)

Another thing I've seen come up is 'oh it's weird to see Bible being a bottom', 'it's weird to see Bible being submissive'.

Girl, what?

He's an actor. Why would he not play a variety of roles! I never see people say 'oh, it's weird to see ____ play a villain', or at least it isn't something that's been said very often, so why is this coming up here? Again: stereotypes (and a bit of fetishization, probably).

As for submissive - one day people will realize that where body parts are going has nothing to do with submission and the world will be a happier place 😭

This is why I would really like to see BLs incorporate something that I haven't seen much of: switching. Both in terms of changing up what role the actors are playing, but also just straight up acknowledging that not all queer couples stick to rigid top/bottom roles! Of course some do, but some don't, and representation of that might help dispel some of this nonsense.

There's also always a faint whiff of bottom shaming that goes on in these conversations, a view that being a bottom is 'lesser' or 'weaker' and it really bothers me. It's insulting to the actors giving their all to the roles but it's also really insulting to all the queer men out there who are being viewed that way according to sexual preferences. (And that's without even touching on the heavy, heavy whiff of sexism and misogyny attached to all of this, because I'm sure we've all seen people refer to the bottom as 'the wife', etc).

Honestly, it just deepens my admiration for Jes and Bible in taking this on. Jes has already gotten a question about how his lakorn viewers will see him now and I think he fielded that admirably, talking about how he's an actor and he hopes/thinks they'll realize that. There's also a bit of an assumption that lakorn is a 'step up' from BL so I love to see him defying that. He's been very firm on handling the media, too - he had an interview yesterday and TWICE had to shoot them down on the 'BibleJes or JesBible' nonsense.

And of course, Bible, my baby - oh, I admire him in doing this. So many BL acting pairs stick to rigid roles and here he is, in only his second role, being willing to defy those and challenge how the fandom perceives him and take on all the weirdness and hate that he's inevitably going to get through at him. I've already seen some people expressing dismay and saying they can't/don't want to see him in this sort of role, and I'm sure he had to be aware that he was opening himself up to that. I'm so proud that he did it anyway and I hope those people reconsider their notions around top/bottom and their expectation that actors stay in neat little boxes.

And all the above is without even touching on all the delays and the history with 4 Minutes, which already made it a bit messy in the first place.

ANYWAY. I don't really know how to wrap this up, since I'm partly just venting here to get this off my chest. But I really hope that this opens up some conversations in the BL space and creates some change for the better.

[leverage-ot3]

I was tagged by my buddy and old siren (freeform) mutual @imaginejolls for this ask game!

Star Sign(s): Sagittarius sun, Aquarius moon, Capricorn rising

Favorite Holidays: halloween :3

Last Meal: my mom's cajun beef stew with rice pilaf and a roll

Current Favorite Musician: I've been listening to a lot of noah kahan recently (vermont represent), but I also adore hozier, gracie abrams, lizzie mcalpine, phoebe bridgers, etc. I've never been the same since I was told my taste in music was yallternative. I also love lil nas x and found a new musician through tiktok that goes by brye that is really good

Last Music Listened To: the playlist I listen to the most, especially for sleep: immaculate fall vibes (technically the name of the playlist is just a bunch of the artists featured in it but the description is immaculate fall vibes). my most recent song was save me by noah kahan

Last Movie Watched: this is so embarrasing but I watched the meg with my dad yesterday lmao. I have a weakness for stupid monster movies (we used to watch the shittiest syfy movies together when I was in hs. the shittier the better). I thought he'd like it because jason statham but he was meh about it

Last TV Show Watched: last one I was invested in was the new episode of percy jackson, but I did watch a little bit of that polish show high water on netflix the other day which seemed interesting

Last Book/Fic Finished: god I actually haven't been reading fic for a hot minute which is really surprising. probably my reread of of the northmost winds and skies by @jjackfrost. wasn't in the crossover fandom until earlier this year but actually adore that pairing. this is now my comfort longfic (+400k). it's so good, I read it and I wasn't even in the fandom at the time and it was amazing!!! all the characters are written so well, the voices and pov are great, the worldbuilding and storyling is amazing! I've gushed in the comments before but ugh I love it so so much. inject this into my mf veins

Last Book/Fic Abandoned: I don't really abandon fics, I just wait for them to get updated again. as for books, I really tried to get into loveless by alice oseman because aroace rep but I couldn't really get into it :/

Currently Reading: nothing at the moment (not going to list all the fics I'm waiting for updates for because I can't remember them all and the ones I can remember would take up like multiple pages lol)

Last Thing Researched for Art/Writing/Hyperfixation: ooo this is hard. technically speaking I've been hyperfixated on playing animal crossing so the most recent thing I looked up for that was what treasure islands were lmao

Favorite Online Fandom Memory: oooo I'm not sure actually? I really love having mutuals even if we don't talk. I also really enjoy when people engage with my posts and appreciate my tags and aus. I like sharing my thoughts and ideas with you guys and it's so heartwarming and validating when y'all enjoy it right back

Favorite Old Fandom You Wish Would Drag You Back In/Have A Resurgence: I agree with jolly, I miss siren dearly. can they just do a leverage in like five years and retcon the last season? thanks

Favorite Thing You Enjoy That Never Had an Active or Big "Fandom" but You Wish It Did: probably some of the kdramas I've watched. I adored the guest on netflix but there's no fandom. I really REALLY wanted some fix-it fics for the ending of my name but there weren't any because the fandom was too small :(

Tempting Project You're Trying to Rein In/Don't Have Time For: so many things that I jump between (the adhd of it all lmao). I really would like to make a leverage ot3: are they queer video essay and I have some stuff typed up BUT I work in the healthcare field and I'm really hesitant of putting myself on video because when you work in this field it can be weird if clients or employers find your channel. so that's technically on hold for privacy reasons rn. I also really want to learn how to sew and make clothes and my roommate has even offered to help (they used to do competitive cosplay) but I'm just very unmotivated. I want to get back into witchy things but don't have the mental energy to invest in that other than appreciating my stones

tagging 10 moots but anyone can play!!!: @leverageclips @all-things-breathing @digitaldiscipline @peachyteabuck @vampirewalterskinner @buzzmcnab @sidras-tak @my-beloved-lakes @kajaono @suddenrundown

[wonkyreads]

The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton

2 out of 5 solar systems

Cleo McQueary is lost in life and absolutely obsessed with what happened to the crew of Providence I. Twenty years ago all 203 of them had simply disappeared and no one at NASA seemed to care enough to figure it out. Cleo and her friends, though, hatch a drunken plan to break into the space ship to puzzle it all out for themselves. The plot spirals out of control from there in ways the official synopsis doesn’t touch on so I feel obligated to leave out as well.

The Stars Too Fondly is marketed as a queer space odyssey rom-com and while I can see where they’re coming from, it (along with the mention of a heist) wasn’t anything like what I was expecting. I’d compare it to Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers more than just about anything else and it has too much heart to be distilled down into just ‘rom-com.’ I can see it being an absolute hit with the right audience. That audience just really wasn’t me.

First of all, this is very much science FANTASY more than the hard sci-fi I’d expected. I’m a chronic overthinker so every modern day pop culture reference and impossible piece of science magic sent me spiraling. And there was a metric ton of that. So, if you’re the kind of person who will wonder why TikTok and Thomas the Tank Engine are still relevant in 2061 or if a ‘food extruder’ would be super convenient or a hellish prospect for someone with celiac, then this might be a skip for you. I think I’d have had an easier time with all of it if Providence I hadn’t been launching a mere 17 hypothetical years from now when it seems people from 2061 had made little to no new scientific advances (despite so many kids purportedly having gotten obsessed with Providence and then going into STEM fields). And also if there was a single pop culture reference that wasn’t from 2019 or later. I care far too much about the logic of it all and this is a book that requires the reader to largely just go with the flow. It is intentionally silly and often requires a hefty suspension of disbelief.

Because I am nothing if not nitpicky, a couple smaller things that made it difficult for me, personally, to stay within the narrative: Sometimes conversations lacked dialogue tags and it tripped me up every time. This is about a group of 20-somethings, but it absolutely leans very YA (by which I mean I haven’t read someone sticking out their tongue so often since fanfiction in 2010 but also the cadence of the writing/narration is very bright and young and often immature). I just cannot pinpoint why the formatting chosen for this novel didn’t work for me. It flips from a close third following Cleo, to old Providence I reports and private messages, to a [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] perspective rapidly within each chapter. Usually I love having multiple weird perspectives, but I think there was a lack of separation, especially at the beginning, that got under my skin as a reader.

Probably the biggest issue I had over all was honestly a marketing problem where huge parts of what the plot of this book is about were fully left out of any synopsis I read before or after. I was honestly so excited to read this book (between sapphic space heist, the title, and the cover I was so sold) and I’d have never requested it if I’d known that it contained a plot point (plot gimmick, trope, ??) that I almost always dislike. For the record, it’s a totally fine plot point/trope and doesn’t require a content warning of any kind, I’m only not being explicitly clear about what I’m talking about here because they chose to leave it out of their marketing and I’m writing this review before the book is actually out. I’m trying so hard to avoid spoilers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not holding marketing decisions against Hamilton, it’s just super frustrating in general.

I feel like I’m being so negative when I don’t necessarily mean to be. This debut was not all bad. Not in the slightest. I can recognize that it wasn’t meant for me. It didn’t focus on what I wanted it to and I went in with all the wrong expectations. It’s just that as someone who often reads reviews before I pick a book up, I want to get all the reasons I wasn’t 5-star in love with this out of the way first.

So now for some of the things done right: There’s what I can see being a solid romance here and beautiful found family dynamics. I enjoyed the diversity and the different places each character was coming from and how easy it was to distinguish where their priorities differed. There’s action sequences that fully drew me in. I love the inclusion of multimedia bits, especially the ones that give new information from an unexpected direction (I mean, the one that’s very clearly the abstract for a scientific article? So good!). There are ideas and themes here that I absolutely adore, like how far people will go for those they love and how easily power can corrupt an ideal and just the messy business of still having growing to do into your twenties and thirties and probably forever. I can absolutely see this book being loved. Truly and fully.

I’m just so utterly bitter that it couldn’t work for me.

[I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Huge thanks to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for this eARC.]

[hardestgrove]

like not to get too deep on my stranger things shitposting blog but like, people being so rampantly anti billy but lacking and thought or nuance to that argument or trying to moralize their dislike of his character instead of just saying "i just don't like him" (which is literally a valid reason all on it's own) is in part directly because challenging material being removed from school curriculums, the increasingly poor quality of the american education system and the focus on standardized testing. Also a cause of this is places like tiktok which are finely tuned capitalist time sinks that create addicting doom scrolling echo chambers built to both make you feel bad and spoon feed you validation of a limited point of view so they can make money off of you.

In elementary school my art teacher was a ww2 survivor, sometimes he would gather us all in the projector room tell us stories from his childhood instead of showing us slides of Dali and Rembrandt. Not all of them were happy, some people would argue should not have been told to children our age even thought they happen to him in his real life when he was around 12. But these stories are foundational to me and my understanding of the world now. I loved this man deeply and he helped to inspire my love of art and creativity and helped art be the field I want to work in to this day.

I read Maus in high school which people have recently spoke of banning and watched Persepolis. I took a class about the literary use of the "Monster" and the "Other" where we read things like Frankenstein and watched Bladerunner and talked about the groups these monsters where metaphors for. We had a whole class discussing how many "monsters" are just people with conditions that were then demonized for their otherness (did you know the insult "pinhead" originated as an insult/slur against people with malformed skulls usually from microcephaly who were then exploited in freak shows?). I took a course on satire where we read A Modest Proposal (which is a slam against the English landlords who were treating the irish horrifically at the time, not a dude proposing they ate babies).

In college I took an entire mandatory course in my freshman year at art school called critical inquiry where we went through all the different kinds of theory-- Marxist, feminist, queer etc.

All media has a message, even dumb popcorn blockbuster shows. In some ways it is all propaganda. Critical thinking is important to understanding the world around you. Being able to understand multiple points of view is critical to interacting with the world. Schools are more and more less likely to teach these skills for reasons ranging from no time to actively suppressing them which leaves children open to getting a lot of info online with very little way of engaging with it in a way where they can think for themselves and pick it apart. This fandom skews young and it shows because there's very little genuine thinking, discussion and analysis of the text and a lot of frankly poorly considered takes and dickhead behavior.

I urge younger folks to engage with problematic content and listen to video essays and podcasts and whatever that explain critical thinking concepts and different kinds of theory used in analysis. If it feels like your school isn't teaching you how to be able to really seriously think for yourself please use the nightmarish hellscape that is the internet to find people who will and even when you find those sources be critical of them and never completely assume they're right, always ask "what's their angle?". Learn about dog whistles and indoctrination tactics. Learn how to protect your brains and how to engage with texts more completely for your own growth, entertainment and education and so you don't get blindsided by fucked up subtexts you didn't even realize where there and accidentally let shape your thinking.

[kitty-fry-coded-issue]

Something Came Up?

As some of you know, I'm in college these days and I don't spend a lot of time doing much more than sleep and draw. You may also know I spend a lot of time on Tiktok and I'm a lot quieter on Discord than I used to be.

The college I chose to go to is a trade school, teaching newbs to become technicians. I'm specifically learning collision repair and that's separate from the rest of the school in its own ways for its own reasons. To go to this school, I had to move to a relative's house. She and her husband are retired and occasionally have her grandson over but it's very different than what I'm used to. The house is often too quiet.

I've also had to put a lot of time into finding a job and get a driver's license. Go California for having the most difficult time to do that. There's still a lot I have to do in these fields, I'm running out of money and I have to ride a public bus to and from school. It's not the best but it could be worse and I'm greatfull it isn't.

That's not even all that's happening right now though.

On top of everything happening outwardly, a lot has been happening internally.

I've identified as asexual for almost 4 years as most of you know. I think. I first heard about the label in sophomore year of high school but was hesitant about using it because of my family. (For those who don't know, I'm Christian just like my father's side of the family and the people I'm staying with. Whatever assumptions you just made, put that on pause. Just give me a second, it's important for this next part.)

I'm also a lesbian, recently called myself that because I have a girlfriend and I love her very much. We've been together since July and she makes me very happy. I'm not gonna tag her and I'm not gonna tell you who it is because I don't want to share. She's the best and she's all mine. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

It gets better because a couple weeks ago, everything went very downhill very suddenly. Few people know about this. Only one Discord server and my cousin really know. It's still recent and I'm still unsure if it's right but it feels better. I'm nonbinary. I think. I'm just not the girl I was raised to be and it's becoming a problem for my mental health which might not surprise some of you who've gone through this.

For the most part, I'd rather use they/them pronouns because it feels better in the long run. If it's a dangerous situation for queers or it could out me, she/her for obvious reasons please.

Because of how I was raised and my family, there's a lot of turmoil about the thought of my parents found out. I have no real way of knowing how my family would respond to any of this.

I'm currently hanging out with my parents and the older of my two younger sisters for her birthday. I don't get to see them often because of school schedules (my parents work in the school system and my sister is in 6th). Pretending is always fun, especially if you're pretending to be the straight cis girl you're not. I've pretended for a long time, maybe someday I'll tell my family. Not yet though, I'm going to pretend until I can support myself just in case it goes sour like I think it would.

TL;DR

So I guess the short version is I'm coming out of the closet to y'all as a lesbian ace nonbinary? I'm very terrified of what this'll effect and how things will change but I wanted to let y'all know what's been going on with me since I've been quiet on all my socials. There was a reason I for it.

I'm also almost at 100 followers here so maybe I'll do something? Idk, I doubt it tbh. My Tumblr is very quiet. I'm very sorry to everyone who sent me asks/requests and I never did anything about them. I've got several blogs and they're all quiet. My Twitter has no followers and my DA has nothing really there.

Thanks so much for reading and I hope you have a good (morning/afternoon/evening/night)!

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜