#there’s a lot to say generally about gender as performance and the extent of that etc eyc

[friendlyneighbourhoodelf]

thinking about padmé and gender. femininity is a performance and she’s winning

[copperbadge]

Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?) Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.

Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)

So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.

First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.

Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.

The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.

Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?

I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.

The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.

AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.

So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.

But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.

I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.

On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.

What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.

Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.

So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).

Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.

Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because

IT'S ILLEGAL.

I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.

You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.

Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.

You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.

It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.

I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.

Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.

As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.

[nthspecialll]

The fandom glorifies Arthur Morgan

Now I am not talking about about low honor, I play high honor and got it as the top at the end of every damn playthrough but my Arthur, as it is the cannon Arthur, is not a good guy. I am not going to talk about all of the murder, robbing and stuff he does, because we are majorly aware of it, I am talking his sexism, casual ignorance and disrespecfulness.

I quite often see people say that Arthur Morgan is a woman lover, and he definitely is, he is better than a lot of men from that time (which isn't hard), but he would not hold up in modern times, because he is not from modern times.

Generally speaking, Arthur Morgan is a man who believes in gender roles, he believes in the idea of "a man being a man" and "a woman being a woman." He has opinions about what a woman should do and what a man should do.

I think the biggest hint at this is his relationship with Sadie, because while he accepts her running with the boys he doesn't seem entirely happy about it. "You got a pair of pants and all of a sudden you think you're Landon Ricketts?" "You want to ruuuunnnn with the men?" and also "can Ms Grimshaw spare you?" when the girls asks if they can come to Valentine with him.

Talking of that quest, when he runs off to get Jimmy Brooks he puts Uncle, a lazy old bastard, in charge of getting the girls home even though they are more than capable of doing it themselves as they are healthy young women who knows how to handle horses.

In several antagonize lines against women performers (which are just as cannon as his greet lines) he shouts things like "That isn't very ladylike!" or "Go back to the kitchen" and "go make someone supper."

People keep saying Arthur would "treat them right" and he would, to an extent, he would care for you, he would be nice to you, but he would force those gender roles. He does have a belief women are somehow "softer" and that he as a person with a provider gene should do more of the harsh work.

So now we covered that, lets talk about the racism, or as I probably should rather call it, ignorance, because it is very commonly know Arthur does not judge by the color of skin.

The first one is that Arthur uses the whites-only saloon in Rhodes. Tilly mentions it to Arthur that they don't allow people of color into it, and yet he still supports it, it isn't a big thing but it is something of notice.

Secondly, when he talks to Eagle Flies where he "sets him in his place" Arthur, honey, you are so wrong here. Eagle Flies is being chased by the government for the mere fact that he exists with a different culture, you are being chased because you murdered so many folks, you can run across the sea and live a good life, they are fucked regardless.

When we first arrive in Lemoyne Lenny and Arthur talks about the Lemoyne Raiders about racism and Arthur says "These boys got a manner about them but I haven't particularly noticed," Arthur of course you wouldn't, you are a tall, muscular, white man with sun kissed hair and blue eyes, you are the poster boy for eugenics.

Lastly, which will also bring me to the third point, the casual disrespect:

Arthur causally calling Javier a slur on the boat for no reason, did you really need that one-liner so badly? That goes for a lot of times in the game such as: "are you secretly normal" "what a lunatic" "we should find a better story for that scar" "But you continue to irritate me, I will kill you and make my appologies to the lady" "stick around and you might die for her as well" "oh I didn't know I was talking to a lady." All those were a slight bit disrespectful, enough to be able to annoy the majority of us if he said it to us, and they were also unnecessary.

He is also canonically chronically late, most notably we can hear Sean saying "that man will be late to his own funeral," and when you go around antagonizing characters in camp they are not surprised at all, rather they go "back at it again huh?"

All of this is just to sum up, Arthur is a pretty bad man (also counting in all the illegal stuff) and we tend to glorify him and forget some of these things, partly is also because Rockstar are amazing at hiding them, at making them seem natural, and they are because this is a historically accurate game! It is set in 1899 and this is a man from 1899 he is going to be casually sexist and disrespectful, and again, considering that he is from 1899 he is a decent guy because the majority of folk would be like Micah, not Arthur.

I definitely love Arthur, and I love Arthur exactly because the point of his character is him not being a saint but a human. His redemption is choosing to do good where he can, but even so, this is a man in 1899 and he is going to have a 1899 mindset. If you want to play a game that is set in the past but don't have that type of accuracy it is not Red Dead you want to play.

Also here is an Arthur pic as a thank you for reading all of that. I love him.

[minastras]

mr. vice president // yeonjun

Choi Yeonjun was an ace, and everyone knew it. He was a star athlete, top student, creative genius, school vice-president, and prom royalty. The only person who even came close to his level was you.

at a glance: gender neutral reader, rivals to lovers, high school au, fluff, angst, ft. soobin, beomgyu, aespa's karina and winter

words: 7.3k

warnings: shit tonnes of swearing, brief mention of sports-enforced dieting (not weight related)

——————————

You liked being the best, and you were good at it.

Your list of titles and achievements was long for your age: President of the student council, most promising player on the basketball team, and top performer in every exam season. In any metric you could name, you were always in either first or second place.

The person you had jockeyed for first with for the last four years was none other than Choi Yeonjun, the golden boy, the unstoppable force to your immovable object.

He was the most promising player on the football team. As your Vice-President, you two were the highest-ranking student leaders in the school. Perfectly and equally matched in academics, you both constantly oscillated between the two top spots on the yearly grade rankings. You could’ve been a high school power couple had it not been for one thing: you hated each other’s guts.

Your rivalry was well known throughout the school, although most people saw it as just a mildly petty competition. No one would ever expect such capable, talented, and hardworking students to indulge in that sort of immature behaviour. The only people who knew the true extent of your animosity were your kids.

You and Yeonjun called the other student council members your kids, and they in turn called you both their parents. On the administrative side Yeonjun had under him Soobin, the general secretary, and Beomgyu, the treasurer. On the operations side you led Jimin, head of logistics, and Minjeong, communications and liaison officer. Of course, you two had also fought over who would take admin and who would take operations (the kids voted in the end). Sometimes when you and Yeonjun were acting up too much, one of them, usually Soobin, would say, “Not in front of the kids!”

But as co-leaders of the student body, your school’s star athletes, and joint cohort-toppers, you had a lot in common with each other. Maybe that’s why you disliked him so much: he reminded you of yourself.

——————————

You and Yeonjun were indeed busy bees. Your school days started earlier than everyone else’s, because you were in charge of the morning announcements and had to get ready before assembly. During breaks when the others got to relax or nap or eat you had disciplinary duties, not that either of you ever actually disciplined anyone (snitches get stitches, even for the golden kids). You also finished school later than most; being in the Excellere class for gifted students meant extra, harder, and longer lessons. After Excellere, you both had sports practice two to three times a week. If it was competition season like it was then, you had practice every day. In between commitments you were always stuck in meetings with him and the rest of the student council, or with him and the school principal.

Since school was just about all you did, that meant you were with Yeonjun for nearly every waking moment of your life, barring weekends. And sometimes not even that. You spent far too many of your precious weekend hours with him, either on Zoom calls or representing your school at external events.

“Good morning, Pres,” Yeonjun greeted that morning, punching your arm as he waltzed into the front office like he did every day. He always called you Pres. Never your name, just Pres. You hated it, and you’d told him as much more than once. That only made him do it more. He pointed at the hot pink post-it note on the announcement book. “What’s this?”

“The Spring Festival ticket sales announcement. Jimin finished setting up the website last night,” you told him. “Minjeong says we can start making the announcement every week, and she’ll put it on the school socials after assembly today.”

“Why can’t you do it?” he asked.

You folded your arms. “Because it’s not my job. She’s our communications officer.”

“What is your job, then? You seem pretty free to me,” he said.

“You’re one to talk. Are you still bitter about losing to me, Mr. Vice President?” you taunted, pointing to his student council badge. It was silver and read ‘student leader’, like all the other members’ badges, while yours was gold and read ‘president’.

“We all know I’m equal in rank to you. The President/Vice President distinction is just a formality,” he retorted, but you knew he had been disproportionately upset by the badge thing when you were both sworn in. 

“A formality you gave up being football captain for, and still lost,” you teased. It was childish, but you stuck out your tongue at him anyway. He seemed to bring that out in you.

Student council Presidents were not allowed to hold a second leadership position, so he had turned down the captain role offered to him because he had expected to be appointed President. It was either him or you, that much had never been in question, but he’d gotten cocky. You remembered him being absolutely gutted about losing the presidency to you, not least because he hated the boy who ended up captain. You, however, didn’t really care about your position on your team as long as you got to play. You did, though, care about beating Choi Yeonjun.

“I’m still the best player on my team,” he countered, defensive and equally childish.

“So am I, genius.”

“I am a genius, aren’t I, Pres? That's why I came first in our latest Excellere ranking.”

You were just about to answer when the principal entered the office. It was almost time for assembly to start. As petty as you both were, you knew better than to fight in front of faculty. Yeonjun, having gotten the last laugh, glanced over at you and winked obnoxiously. You’d get a chance to get back at him later.

——————————

Whenever Yeonjun winked or smirked or rolled his eyes at you, you were reminded of the infuriating fact that he was, undoubtedly, extremely good-looking. He was the golden boy, after all, and it was only fitting for that status to extend to his appearance too. Tall and fit, with gorgeous eyes and the stutter-inducing confidence of someone who knew they were attractive. Other students sometimes greeted you both as you walked around the school (neither of you were that popular in the traditional sense of the word, but you were well known to say the least) and he could often make them swoon with just a smile.

But he didn’t date. In fact, as far as you knew, he’d never dated at all, nor even spoke about it. He was too busy for love, something that no doubt caused heartbreak throughout the whole school.

You were the same: you had no shortage of suitors but no interest in frivolous relationships that would only distract you from your duties. Your immature rivalry with each other was just about the only non-important thing either of you allowed yourselves to partake in. You had places to be, battles to win, things to achieve.

That was a mantra you found yourself repeating in your head more and more these days. You were starting to wonder what was even the point of pushing yourself this hard. Maybe you were burnt out.

Yeonjun nudged you with a smirk when he noticed you nodding off. “Tired?”

“I’m fine,” you said, resolute, sitting up straighter and squaring your shoulders. As much as he got on your nerves, he was also the closest thing to a friend you had in Excellere. You sat together in nearly every class.

He snorted, amused. “Are you sure, Pres? Because class is over,” he said, pointing to the clock at the front of the classroom. Sure enough, the teacher and all of the other students were gone. It was just you and him.

You pushed him to hide your embarrassment. “Whatever. Move, I need to get to practice,” you said, grabbing your bag.

He pushed you back, hard enough to knock you back down into your seat so he could get up first. “Me too, sleepyhead. You’re not special,” he mocked, swinging his own bag victoriously over his shoulder with a triumphant smirk.

“I never said I was. Unlike you, I don’t have an inferiority complex,” you retorted, standing back up and rushing out of the classroom. You were not the type of person to fall asleep in class, and you sure as hell weren’t going to stick around to give him the chance to remind you of that.

——————————

By the time practice ended, you could barely keep your eyes open. It was past 10pm now, and you sat at the bus stop in your basketball uniform, knees pressed to your chest. Your teammates had all gone home, but since you always missed physical training due to Excellere, you had to stay behind and complete your three kilometre run after practice.

“Hey.”

You cracked one eye open to see Yeonjun standing in front of you, hands on his hips, peering down at you curiously. You immediately sat up straight, blinking a couple of times as if that would erase your tiredness. “Why are you here?” you asked.

“It’s a public bus stop, and I’m a free man,” he said, pushing you aside so he could sit down next to you.

“Yeah, exactly. It’s a public bus stop, and there’s plenty of room elsewhere,” you scowled, pointing to the abundance of empty space on the bench aside from the spot right beside you. He winked in answer. “I mean why are you getting the bus? I thought your mom usually picks you up.”

He shrugged, balling up his navy blue football jersey and holding it out to you. “She’s busy tonight.” You stared at the jersey in confusion. He scoffed and shoved it into your arms. “Is your brain broken? Put it on.”

“No, gross. It smells like your sweat,” you said.

“Ungrateful bastard. I can see you shivering.”

You shoved it right back to him. “You wear it then, if it’s so cold.”

“Fine.” He yanked it back and put it on, even though you could tell he hadn’t yet cooled down from his practice. His chest was still rising and falling faster than usual, the veins on his arms were still sticking out, and there were still beads of sweat on his forehead plastering his hair to his skin. Idiot. “Do you always take the bus home alone? What about your teammates?” he asked, looking around. It was dark, and he’d never taken the bus at this time of the night.

“They finish before me. I have to make up my PT because of Excellere. Don’t you?” you asked. He nodded. It seemed like you both were always the first students to arrive at school and the last students to leave. You took your phone out to check the bus timings. “Which bus are you waiting for?” you asked. Yours was coming in a minute.

“I don’t know,” he said, stubbornly pretending like he wasn't overheating in his jersey.

“You don’t know? Have you never taken a bus before?” you mocked. “Well, I suppose that’s what happens when you’re chauffeured around everywhere.”

“Fuck off, Pres. Of course I have,” he countered, defensive. “I take 47 home sometimes.”

“47 doesn’t run this late. You’ll have to take mine and get off two stops after me,” you said, not really sure why you were helping him. He had Google Maps and thumbs, after all.

Right as you said that, that very bus arrived. You flagged it down and rushed on board, not bothering to check if he was following you. He was, and he again sat down next to you in the back of the empty bus with a satisfied grin.

You sighed and looked out the window as the bus started to move. “Can’t you sit somewhere else?”

“No, I cannot,” he said, pulling up the sleeves of his jersey instead of just taking it off like he clearly wanted to do.

“You’ll catch a cold if you keep wearing that and sweating in it,” you told him. The bus was freezing.

“That’s not how colds work,” he shot back, immediately pulling his sleeves back down. “For someone who bangs on constantly about how good they are at biology you’d think you’d know that colds are caused by pathogens.”

You took your headphones out of your bag and plugged them in. “Fine, then. Stew in your grubby discomfort.”

He said something else, but you pretended not to hear him, continuing to look out the window. The rest of the bus ride went by in silence, until:

“Hey,” he said again for the second time that night, knocking his knee against yours. You ignored him. He yanked your headphones out of your ears in retaliation.

“Ow!”

“What’s the matter with you today? Why were you falling asleep in class?” he asked, holding your headphones high above his head, out of your reach. During a momentary flash of self-awareness it occurred to you that you were both far too old to be acting like kindergarteners. You couldn’t imagine what the principal would think if she knew this was how her two star students behaved in private. 

You narrowed your eyes at him, preparing to be made fun of, and stood up briefly to snatch them back. “Why do you care?”

“I want to know if you’re sick so I can avoid you,” he replied.

“No, I’m on a caffeine ban,” you answered, somewhat reluctantly. He raised a questioning eyebrow. “Our coach puts us on diets before competition season to make sure we don’t get sick. No caffeine, no sweet drinks, no fried food.”

He laughed, completely unsympathetic. “And you still lost last year?”

“We came in second at nationals,” you retorted, “while I seem to recall your team didn’t even make it to regionals.”

“At least we get to eat whatever we want,” he said, knowing it was a weak comeback even before he said it. Last year was a bad season for the football team; they lost to a school they should’ve easily been able to beat and didn’t even get the chance to compete regionally. You had teased him mercilessly for it ever since, just barely stopping short of bringing your national silver trophy to school and putting it on his desk. Or carrying it into a meeting with him and using it as a drinking cup.

You reached over and pushed the stop button on the handrail behind him. “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the deafening sound of all of my medals clattering together. Move. It’s my stop.”

Annoyingly, he didn’t move, forcing you to climb over him to get out and off the bus. He flipped you off as the bus drove away, and you flipped him off right back.

——————————

Two days before your basketball championship, you’d finally admitted to yourself that you were not doing well. All the practices, student council meetings, and weekly Excellere rankings were starting to get to you. Your school days were fifteen hours long, your nights and weekends lost to studying or catching up on the meetings you and Yeonjun missed while in class or at practice. Which was frustrating, because it wasn’t like you hadn't gotten through these things before. You didn't know what was wrong with you this time.

“What’s with all that stuff?” Minjeong asked, watching you force a towel and a bag of toiletries into your locker and slam the door closed before they fell out.

“Yeonjun and I are staying late today to go over the work you guys did this week, so I need to shower here after practice,” you said. “We’ve missed way too many meetings.”

“Yeah, because you’re both busy. His championships are tomorrow and yours are the day after. Can’t it wait?” Jimin said.

You shook your head. “No, you guys are already doing work that’s meant to be ours.” You paused for a second for comedic effect. “Besides, I hope he’s tired after tonight so he loses tomorrow.” They both laughed.

“As expected of the golden kids,” Minjeong said, giving you a hi-five. Yeah. As expected of the golden kids.

——————————

It was 11pm, and you and Yeonjun were sitting beside each other in an empty classroom going over the minutes from the last three student council meetings. His hair was wet from his shower and he hadn’t bothered to get dressed fully, with too many buttons undone, an untucked shirt, and his tie nowhere in sight. You stopped taking notes.

“Can you please put your uniform on properly?” you asked.

He snatched your pen and notebook away from you to add in something you’d been fighting over for the last ten minutes. “Why do you have yours on like that, with everything all done up and tucked in? There’s literally no one else here.”

“You look unbecoming,” you said.

“I’m comfortable. You should try it. You can’t convince me you like wearing your tie and buttoning your shirt all the way up like that,” he said, pointing the pen at your collar. When he was done writing, he looked up at you in satisfaction and smirked, arrogant. “Or am I distracting you?”

You would never admit it, but he was right. On both counts. He was distracting you. “Is Soobin okay? He’s been doing a lot lately,” you asked, ignoring him, looking over your notes again. If there was anything that could get you and Yeonjun to stop bickering for even a second, it was talking about the other council members.

“I think he’s a little tired. Once we’re both done with our competitions we can start pulling our weight more,” he said, humming thoughtfully, as if you both weren’t already doing as much as you could. “But you’re right, the kids have been working hard. We’re not being the best leaders right now.”

“Yeah, we’re not,” you sighed, thinking about how you’d seen Jimin online past midnight a few days ago. You should be doing more.

Yeonjun kicked you in the shin under the table, ignoring your hiss of pain. “You know who’s not okay? You. You’re fucking out of it these days.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m fine,” you scowled. “You’re the only person who thinks that.”

He rolled his eyes at your pride. “Yeah, but that’s because I know you better than anyone.” You scoffed at that, but he continued, “Seriously, Pres, who else gets you like I do?”

“Who are you, Sigmund Freud? Stop psychoanalysing me,” you said, glancing over your notes one last time, checking to make sure you had covered every point in the meeting minutes.

“So you think I’m smart?”

“No, I think you want to fuck your mom.”

He relented after that, a type of mercy he didn’t afford you very often. You wondered, then, if you really were as not okay as he was claiming. How had he been the only one to pick up on it? No, you were fine. You were fine. There was nothing to pick up on.

The two of you worked in near-total silence for the next couple of hours. That was a pretty standard affair, once you’d both exhausted your barbs and witty comebacks and didn’t have anything else to say to each other anymore. What wasn’t normal, though, was that you weren’t even being bitchy to each other in the comments of your shared Google Doc as you wrote your emcee script. The thought of Choi Yeonjun, of all people, noticing- you were fine.

“We still need to finalise the event schedule for review by tonight,” he reminded you, breaking the silence. You’d completely forgotten about that, and you never forgot anything.

“I’ll do it. You have your match tomorrow,” you volunteered.

“How charitable of you, Pres,” he said, giving you snark instead of gratitude. You didn’t have it in you to retort, although if the kids were around you probably would have. He raised an eyebrow. “What, no comeback?”

Checking your watch, you mumbled, “It’s past 1am. Let’s just finish this script and go home.”

He looked closely at you. You were being weird, he was sure of it now. He could see the resignation in your eyes, the only sign you’d shown in the four years he’d known you that maybe you weren’t quite as untouchable as you appeared. 

“Hey, seriously, what’s wrong with you? I can’t have you breaking now and leaving all the work to me,” he asked, sounding sincerely worried about you for the first time in his life. He had never thought of you as someone who needed to be worried about.

“I’m fine,” you insisted through gritted teeth, “I just-”

You glanced up at him, which was a mistake. The moment you saw concern (of all emotions) on his face, you cracked. You hadn’t cried in front of another person since you were eight years old and broke your leg in a car accident, but now there were tears in your eyes threatening to spill over. Immediately you blinked them away, hoping he would just let it go. Unfortunately for you, however, he had other plans. He laughed and put his arm around your shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Comforting you, dumbass.”

You shrugged his arm off of you, clearing your throat in a futile attempt to ease the knot you felt forming at the base of your neck. “I don’t feel comforted.”

He scowled, leaned back in his seat, and crossed his arms. “Well, then, talk to me.” His tone was so solemn and authoritative that it made you comply immediately.

“People keep asking me for things and expecting me to be able to do everything and saying that I’m capable of anything but I’m a fraud. I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m so tired and I just want it to stop.” At some point during your outburst you’d started to cry, though you weren’t sure when, because his arm was back around your shoulder and he was palming away the tears on your face with his free hand. He hooked one foot around the leg of your chair and pulled it closer to him.

“You’re not a fraud,” he said under his breath, his eyes staring straight into yours and his hand warm against your cheek. You didn’t know why he was being so kind to you, and, more confusingly, you didn’t know if you wanted him to be. Which was mortifying.

Through the sheer power of your embarrassment, you willed yourself to stop crying. “I’m fine. You can let go of me now,” you told him, looking away.

“Right.” He seemed to snap back to normalcy at the same time as you, moving back and dropping his hands. You both got back to work like a switch had been flipped, aggressively avoiding each other’s gazes.

——————————

It was nearly 2am by the time the script was finished.

“You shouldn’t stay up to do the event schedule. We’ll just tell the school we need more time,” Yeonjun told you as you both started packing up. His words, for once, were void of arrogance or mockery. It made you anxious in a way that was entirely foreign to you.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you grumbled, turning away. You hated having to ask for more time, to not deliver something you were meant to deliver.

He grinned. “You mean like this?”

Before you’d had the chance to insult him or tell him to knock it off, he took you by the shoulders and stared right at you, his face just inches from yours.

“What the fuck are you doing?” you asked, but your nervousness slipped through in your voice. He smirked, having heard it too.

“Don’t let this go to your head, Pres,” he began, “but I really want to kiss you.”

You rolled your eyes, trying to ignore your quickening heartbeat. “Yeah, whatever. You think I’m hideous. We’re gonna miss the last bus-”

His lips were on yours without your brain having even had the time to process what he’d said. One of his hands shifted down to your waist while the other moved to your jaw, tilting your chin up slightly. Your own hands instinctively came to rest on his chest, and you found yourself kissing him back without thinking. You could feel his heart hammering through his shirt. He was the first to pull away.

Frozen, you could do nothing but stare at him, with your eyes wide and lips still slightly parted. “What-”

“I had to do it. At least once,” Yeonjun whispered, not moving at all either. He was searching your expression for signs of something, you didn’t know what, but when he didn’t find it he let you go. Neither of you said a single word to each other during the entire hour-long bus ride home.

——————————

What a dickhead. How could Yeonjun go from kissing you to ‘idk about pres’ that seamlessly? He had been so kind, so sweet to you that day. You purged that thought from your head as quickly as it had come.

“There’s our president!” Beomgyu cheered as he let you into the meeting room, and the others broke into applause.

“Congrats on winning your finals yesterday!” Jimin added, still clapping.

You closed the door behind you. “Thank you! Sorry for being late,” you said. “I promise I will not miss a single meeting now that my comps are over.”

When Yeojun eventually showed up, he barely looked at you. You didn’t really know why that upset you as much as it did, or what you had been expecting. Once you all started working, however, you quickly fell back into a familiar rhythm along with the other council members.

“Where’s the chit from the popcorn machine vendor?” you asked Beomgyu, sifting through the stack of papers on the desk.

Beomgyu looked up from the printer that he and Jimin were trying (and failing) to get to work right. It was currently spitting out black and white pages that looked like they had been printed in Hell on a Tamagotchi by Satan himself. “What chit?” 

“The nacho store we were going to get cancelled on us last weekend, so I asked Yeonjun to get a popcorn guy instead,” you explained. Fucking Yeonjun. You turned to him. “Did you forget to call him back? It’s been four days.”

He thought for a bit then shrugged, relishing your annoyance. “I guess so. Whoops.”

“Call him now, before he backs out,” you instructed, turning your attention back to the papers.

“Haven’t you ever heard of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’?”

You didn’t even bother to look up. “Haven’t you ever heard of doing your fucking job?”

He threw the pen he was holding on the floor in response. The other council members exchanged furtive glances.

“Come on, guys. Not in front of the kids,” Soobin sighed, ever the mediator, picking up the pen. You wanted to tell him he didn’t need to clean up after a child, but that would just make things worse. You continued working.

“What’s going on with you two? You’re even worse than usual,” Minjeong said.

At that, you and Yeonjun locked eyes from across the room. He scoffed and looked away immediately. You watched him closely, but you couldn’t read him at all. You were quickly realising that, despite being mirrors of each other and spending almost all of your time together, you barely knew him.

“It seems our Pres is touchy today,” he teased. “They’re a little stressed out.”

You pinned the papers you were holding together with a paperclip and filed them away. “Watch it, Yeonjun,” you warned.

He ignored your glaring at him, your eyes telling him to stop, continuing, “Despite all appearances, they’re not as golden as they so desperately want everyone to think. They even had a little breakdown before their competition.”

Before anyone else could react, you passed the file in your hands over to Beomgyu (what you were doing was technically his job, anyway) and left. The room fell deathly silent.

——————————

Strangely, Yeonjun followed you into the corridor, feeling a weird compulsion to do so. His feet moved under him without him realising. Running after you and shouting your name, he easily caught up with you in just a few long strides. He grabbed your wrist and pulled you back, forcing you to turn around.

“Let me go.” You shook his hand off of you, unable to stop the tears from welling up in your eyes. This was humiliating.

He laughed lightly, unfazed. “What’s your fucking deal? We’ve said way worse things to each other before,” he said. He had a point. And you did have some sort of tacit agreement with him that nothing was off-limits. Maybe you’d been too naive in thinking that that night was different. That it had meant something.

“Fuck off! I need to go fix your fucking mistake,” you shouted, turning back around. Your voice was trembling.

“Pres, relax,” he teased, taking you by the shoulders and spinning you around before you’d even had the chance to take a single step away from him. He leant down to emphasise the height difference between you two, something he did often that infuriated you to no end, pleased by how easily he could rile you up. “Don’t you know throwing tantrums is counter-productive?”

“I hate you, Choi Yeonjun,” you said coldly, biting the inside of your cheek to try and stop your tears. When all he did was laugh, you pushed him away. Against your wishes, a sob broke its way through your pressed lips and you lost it. You balled your hands up into fists and pounded on his chest repeatedly to get him to let go of you; it was like hitting a brick wall and you both knew it. “I hate you! IhateyouIhateyouIhateyou.”

He stopped. “Are you crying?” You crying once the other day was out-of-character enough, let alone twice in such a short span of time. He was pretty sure he’d never even seen you show the smallest sliver of vulnerability before this week.

“Yes, I’m fucking crying, asshole. I’m glad your snail of a brain finally caught up.” You hit his chest again, so weak you barely disturbed a single fibre on his school blazer.

Any sympathies he might have been forming for you earlier dissipated in an instant. He easily grabbed both of your wrists with one hand to stop you, glowering at you, his jaw clenched. “You should’ve known I would tell the kids. Everything between us is fair game, isn’t it, Pres? Why did you even tell me any of that if you wanted it to be a secret?” he snapped.

All the vitriol in your voice evaporated. When you next spoke, you sounded like a child, scared and upset and betrayed. He had never heard you sound anything like that; it was jarring to the both of you. “Because I thought you would understand.”

There it was. The revelation. Perhaps that was what your entire years-long rivalry with this dick of a man boiled down to: a secret hope that he was struggling as much as you, and a frustration that it didn’t seem like he was. You hadn’t even understood that was what it was until you said it.

He sobered in an instant, his eyes softening in the realisation that he’d gone too far. “Pres,” he said quietly, like he was calling a wounded animal. The guilt in his voice was probably as close to an outright admission of wrongdoing as he would ever get with you. “I didn’t know you were-”

“Whatever, dickwad,” you mumbled, deflated, pulling your hands out of his grasp. “I have to call the vendor before he pulls out of this deal. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Pres, I didn’t know,” he repeated, more urgently this time, still not an apology, following you as you walked away from him. 

You stopped in your tracks and turned back around, your voice now calm and measured, holding up a hand to stop him from continuing. “I will be civil to you for the next week so we can see this event through, but I’m done with-” you gestured vaguely between the both of you. “I’m done with whatever this is. Bye, Yeonjun.”

This time, he didn’t chase after you.

——————————

Why was Yeonjun bringing up the day you both stayed until 2am? The day he kissed you? He made it sound like an average day, as if it had meant nothing to him, but something had clearly changed between you two since then.

He was walking on eggshells around you, trying to crack jokes, and engage you in conversations where he didn’t pick on you. You hated it. It made you feel weak. But you were the only one to pick up on it, which was the upside to every single student council member being up to their eyeballs in stress. None of them really noticed his strange behaviour. Or yours.

The festival kicked off smoothly — so smoothly, in fact, that it took Yeonjun and the rest of the council a whole half hour to realise you were missing. After you and Yeonjun finished your joint emcee duties, they hadn’t needed to call you or report to you for anything.

“Hey, have you seen the pres?” Jimin asked, Minjeong following closely behind her. “We’ve been looking for them everywhere.”

“Nope,” Beomgyu said.

Soobin shook his head. “Me neither.”

Everyone turned to Yeonjun in unison. “I’ll go look for them,” he said, already leaning over to grab his jacket hanging off the back of the chair next to him.

“You can’t leave us too! You’re our second-in-command,” Minjeong pointed out.

“Yeah, whatever. You’re in charge now,” he declared absent-mindedly, not really listening to her, one foot already out the door.

——————————

Yeonjun sprinted straight to the bus stop, ignoring the stares of the other students as he ran right through the festival booths. He got there just in time to see your bus pulling away, letting out a long string of curses that made the elderly man sitting on the bench glare at him. He was usually careful about his behaviour in public, especially when he was in uniform like he was then, but he didn’t care anymore.

Your taunts last week were partly true; he didn’t really know how to take buses, and he really was sort of driven everywhere by his parents. So it took him far longer than it should have to figure out how else to get to your house (he stood there staring at the bus chart for long enough that three different people offered to help him). Even the aforementioned elderly man took pity on him, but not before tsking disapprovingly at his student leader badge and calling him foul-mouthed.

He ran ten minutes from the bus stop he ended up alighting at to your house and reached your front porch without even knowing why he was there at all, but he pounded on your door anyway. You came to the window, peeked out from behind the curtain, and left.

“I can see you, Pres. Open the door,” he called out, out of breath. When you complied, he didn’t even give you the chance to speak. “Why are you here?”

You looked him up and down, deciding to be annoying. You usually did when it came to him. “This is my house. Why are you here?” 

“You know what I meant, dipshit.” How charming.

You let him in and poured him a glass of ice water. It was weird seeing Yeonjun sitting in your living room, like a forced merger of two spheres of your life that you kept separate as much as you could. His school blazer was hanging off the end of the sofa.

“It’s hot,” he said defensively when he saw you looking at it. It wasn’t; he was just sweating from running from the bus stop to your house. He took the glass from you and set it down on the coffee table without using the coaster you’d so nicely placed right in front of him, making you see red. “Four ice cubes? Are you telling me to die?”

“As if you have a superstitious bone in your body, Choi Yeonjun. Is this how you act as a guest in other people’s houses too?” you asked, sitting down beside him.

He loosened his tie and popped the first two buttons of his dress shirt open. “No, just yours.”

“Sure, please make yourself at home,” you said sarcastically. “What do you want?”

“I came to apologise. You disappeared and we all freaked out. God, I can’t believe I’m worried about you-”

You raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Are you sure you know what an apology is?”

“Shut up. I mean-” he groaned in frustration and ran his hands through his hair, something he often did when he got annoyed. “You’re being so difficult!”

“Says the guy complaining about the number of ice cubes I put in his water!”

“For fuck’s sake,” he sighed, putting his head in his hands. “Hang on. Let me start over.”

The living room was completely silent apart from the sound of his heavy breathing. You were about to say something about it — a star athlete being so winded from a short run was pretty entertaining to you — but you decided not to. Your phone dinged. It was Beomgyu telling you the popcorn vendor had shown up late, drunk, and thrown up in the popcorn machine, followed by three increasingly ridiculous reaction images from Megamind. Maybe you shouldn’t have hired a popcorn vendor after all.

“What’s so funny?”

You flashed him your phone screen. “Beomgyu sent me something.”

Yeonjun didn’t even look at it, despite being the one who’d asked in the first place. “I like you,” he declared. 

“Are you having a heat stroke?” you asked, disinterested, typing out a quick reply.

He knocked your phone out of your hand in a huff. “Stop fucking texting Beomgyu.”

Your phone clattered to the floor. “Hey!”

“You are such an irritating person.” He dramatically (as always) got up from the sofa to kneel on the floor in front of you, looking up at you with an indecipherable emotion in his eyes. “I like you, Pres. I have for a while now, but I only realised it the other night. I got scared and I lashed out, but that doesn’t make what I said okay. I betrayed your trust and I’m sorry.”

Your head started spinning, and your heart leapt up into your throat. I like you. Your jaw would’ve dropped open had it not been for every muscle in your body going rigid at once. He casually sat back down next to you, picked up his glass, and took a sip. As if he hadn’t just delivered you the single biggest shock of your life. You could barely get his name out of your mouth.

“Yeonjun, I-”

“Look, you don’t have to say anything. I just needed to tell you because it was driving me crazy. You drive me crazy, actually-”

You grabbed his tie, pulled him towards you, and kissed him. If he was surprised by your boldness he didn’t show it, his hands easily finding their way to your waist as he kissed you back. His lips were cold from the ice water.

“Thank you for the apology. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

He broke the kiss, laughing breathily. “I can’t think straight when you’re kissing me. I didn’t hear anything you said.”

You flicked him lightly on the forehead, unable to stop yourself from smiling. “I said thank you for apologising. I appreciate it. But I’m still mad at you.”

“I know,” he said. Right at that moment, both of your phones went off at the same time. “We should get back to school.”

He stood up, casually took your hand, and started walking. You didn’t pull away.

——————————

Although you did it often, being in school this late at night with no one else around never quite stopped feeling other-worldly. Your body was tired, but your mind was still awake and buzzing and alive. 

“I’m sorry I made you miss the festival,” you said as you finished making your rounds through the school to check each room one last time, switch off the mains, and lock the doors. 

“You didn’t make me do anything.” Yeonjun took your hand in his again and gave it a comforting squeeze, before adding, “Don’t be so full of yourself.”

The words were familiar, but his tone and the warmth in your cheeks were not. Choi Yeonjun of all people was making you act shy and blushy. Revolting.

“The golden boy of the school just confessed to me a few hours ago. How could I not be full of myself?” You stopped walking and turned to face him. “I like you,” you mocked, an over-dramatic caricature of his voice.

Yeonjun groaned and hid his face in his hands. “God, I can’t believe I actually said that. Like a character in a Netflix original.” You laughed, wondering if you’d ever laughed with him, not at him, before.

He’d called his mom earlier and told her not to pick him up — he wanted to take the bus with you, even though it would take him twice as long to get home. Leaving the school, you both turned to look back down the empty corridor.

“I guess this is the end of our late nights,” he mused. Your competitions were both over and there were no more events to organise for the year. All that remained were your final exams.

“Until our Valentine’s Day celebrations,” you reminded him. “Jimin wants to start planning that next week.”

He retorted immediately, “I don’t.” As the lights of the corridor started to turn themselves off (they were on automatic timers, which you found very annoying), he leant down, cupped your face gingerly in his hands, and kissed you twice.

“I want to do this.”

——————————

thanks for reading <3

-minastras

[dee-the-red-witch]

hi so. i'm sorry if you feel like this is something you've talked about too much but i'm genuinely having a hard time understanding- what's the issue with femboys? or is it a finnster-specific issue...? idk i can see how it's an issue of like. performing femininity but not really accepting what womanhood really means but what makes it different from drag in that case? or am i going in the wrong direction trying to understand? i have amab as well as afab ppl in my life that identify as femboys and use it as a loosely-nonbinary term but i also know a couple femboys that are. hm. probably eggs leaning on the term that's less "scary" when it comes to confronting gender, is it about that....?

sorry if this is exhausting for you to discuss i'm just confused and trying to understand

Ok, keep in mind, this is a nonny. Which means I need to treat this with the intent that it's bait. Because that's what fucking happens a lot to folks. So I'm picking my words. 1. Show me where I said I have a problem with femboys in general. Because honestly? No problem with the identity. No problem with the concept. Same with drag, same with Crossdressers, same with sissys. They're all just as valid. What I have a problem with is when people specifically use and abuse things like F1nn5ter's (last I checked, still using he/him pronouns, so that's what I'm using here) use of trap content. Content that gets trans women beaten, abused, exiled, ostracized, and killed on a daily basis to make profit, and does it scot free of any societal penalty, partly because of a massive supporting userbase and fame, and partly because he wasn't out about being a trans woman yet. That right there is where my problem is. People can and should explore, play with, perform, exist in femininity however and whenever they want, but the problem is ONE GROUP OF US KEEPS GETTING PUNISHED FOR IT while the others see far less, if ever. So again, no problem with the femboy identity or femboys in general, but oh yeah, big problems with the difference in treatment. 2. I'm also gonna ask this in return- why am *I* your expert on this subject? Because this happens to so many trans women- we're out, we get seen enough to be noticed, and suddenly we're supposed to be the pillars of the community, delivering Julia Serrano level philosophy, flawless looks, opinions, and knowledge? There's lots of other folks to ask this kind of thing about, why go to the terminally weird, 46-year-old, *OUT AND TRANSITIONING FOR LESS THAN THREE YEARS STILL* writer, artist, leatherworker, and tattooist, who's still VERY clearly in the process of dealing with her own self identification and a lot of past and present trauma, and think I'm going to be the one who's going to give you the perfect answer for this? (lbr, again, so many trans women get quizzed like this, then publicly crucified for saying the slightly wrong thing- see that bit about bait again? because oh yeah, this tactic, intentional or otherwise, has been seen a LOT this year.) Because honestly, there isn't a perfect answer. It's yet another messy human subject because all of us are messy to some extent to begin with. It's never going to have perfect sense or logic. I honestly don't think that it should. Perfect answers tend to not encompass being human answers very well at the same time.

And also, I'm not an expert. Nor should I have to be one. Especially when in my usual fields, I get to charge 50-100 bucks an hour for consulting, and here, I'll be lucky if you kick five bucks in my paypal or gfm in exchange for this. That said, nonny, hope you have a good night. Keep in mind this whole #2 section? Is rhetorical. I'm not expecting a dialogue or reply, and I don't really want one, at least not one with a greyface and shades. If you want to talk more? come off anon.

[ripaxed]

I wanna know more about the transmasc heather hc,,, like where did it come from or how would he realise it maybe?

Oh boy!

A have of whole. timeline in my head for this.

So. so the youngest reference we have of Heather is TDDDDI

“I’m guessing either your parents are divorced or you were really fat and pimply once.”

With the video messages from home Island’s final five received showing us Heather’s parents together, it’s the latter that is strongly implied to be true.

Of course, Heather very much does not look like this anymore. While a lot of people do thin up around puberty-

“Of course, only the toothpicky of us is going to fit through that vent. I’m talking model thin. So surely the most athletic of us would want to show off her natural sleekness!”

“For once, I agree with you.”

-I do not consider this to be the case with Heather.

I think of this as a young Heather feeling body dysmorphia and coming to her parents (mainly her mother in my head, as she speaks of her mother far more than her father) for support. However, her mother tells her she feels this because she isn’t thin.

Heather feels miserable, so she listens. She does whatever it takes to look like what others want her to. And eventually, she does.

She still feels miserable. Because it was never about that

The general concept of Heather performing mainline attractiveness for the approval of others extends to World Tour. In Can’t Help Falling in Louvre, Heather is in the line up of girls who wish to be DJ’s model in the tiebreaker. She certainly doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself there, rather seeming very desperate for some form of validation (possibly heightened by the recent loss of her tooth).

Furthermore, we have the idea of femininity being forced on Heather in Brunch of Disgustingness.

“Thanks Heather, but I prefer to keep it natural.”

“Like my mom always says, a lady can always use a little boost in the looks department.”

To me, this scene calls to mind the idea of a younger Heather in Bridgette’s position, not wanting to wear makeup (so to say, not wanting to appear feminine) but having her mother enforce in onto her.

I believe most of Heather’s dynamics with female characters as being drawn from this experience. Lindsay is very outwardly feminine and finds nothing but joy in it, which Heather never did, Gwen rejects a lot of traditional expectations people have of her because they see her as a girl, which Heather was never able to escape. Thus her relationships with them and others are incredibly hostile.

Now, going into World Tour, we have Heather’s antihero arc and her relationship with Alejandro. With both of these things, we see Heather at her happiest.

Now, Heather’s villainy in Island is strongly gendered. Her dynamics with Gwen, Leshawna, Beth and Lindsay, even Trent, are fundamentally written with the idea Heather Is A Girl to the extent you can’t conceptually genderswap Heather and write her dynamics in anyway similar as they are in canon.

In contrast, in my own opinion, WT Heather is not even half as gendered as she was before. You could genderswap Heather and her relationships with Alejandro, Gwen, Courtney, Cody, Sierra, DJ, etc would not change in any particularly notable way. In that sense, Heather as an antihero is strongly opposed to her as a villain.

Regarding her relationship with Alejandro, as it nears its climax we have this moment

Which is an interesting bit of gender non conformity, putting Heather in the traditionally male role while putting Alejandro in the traditionally female role.

Then we have the iconic moment of:

“You mean… I’m the good guy?”

Not only do we a bit more nonconformity with “good guy”, but we also see that Heather’s dynamic with Alejandro puts her as the hero and that she finds joy in that position,

Taking this in addition to how Heather’s villainy is so strongly tied to her status as a women, we can equate the concept of hero vs villain to the concept of male vs female.

As I already said, Heather’s relationship with Alejandro and her antihero arc are where we see Heather at her happiest, which is why I began viewing them, especially the good guy line, as equating to Heather experiencing gender euphoria.

As for when the Gender Thoughts finally hit Heather, I think it would be post TDA but pre-Celebrity Manhunt, when Heather’s hair was growing back.

We never see Heather with short hair, and to me, never had Heather until then. For the first time, Heather saw himself looking “boy-ish” and started to feel some amount of gender euphoria. Though, I don’t think he really understood what he was feeling at the time, and immediately started wearing hair extensions to bury that feeling out of panic.

I think Heather wouldn’t start transitioning until he was into his romantic relationship with Alejandro. Now, I personally hc Alejandro as genderfluid, so being in a relationship with him is what made Heather realize he didn’t have to be a girl if he didn’t want to. I have a similar train of thought regarding his friendship with Harold, who I headcanon as transfem.

So yeah! I think that’s everything. Sorry if you weren’t expecting a answer that long anon fhhsrhvfhjb

[olderthannetfic]

I feel that sometimes claims about how only fetishizing fujoshis enjoy gay porn or romance with heavy top/bottom dynamics, or any claim that only "straight" people of the opposite sex like X flavour of gay porn, oddly gender essentialist as well. While socialization does mean there are certain trends at play and you can usually tell which gender it's catering too I think it's inaccurate to say there's no appeal for the unintended audience or that it could be an authentic expression of an individual queer man or woman's desire for the same sex that simply aligns with what the opposite gender tends to gravitate towards.

When it comes to porn I think the desires of men and women are far more similar than people like to act, and there's a far greater division between people with different kinks than different genders. I also think there's this tendency to overlook the influences of the larger context that might be mistaken for preference regarding the contents of the porn itself. Like how women tend to be more anxious about live action actors potentially being abused IRL, or find it harder to suspend their disbelief when "scary IRL but fun in fiction" happens to a female character because it hits too close to home. Guys seem to do a lot of performing sexuality as well, including porn consumption, in a way that's less about their actual desires than Performing Manliness even to themselves (which girls do too, just to a lesser extent since truly explicit female sexuality is so invisible or demonized in mainstream culture). And then there's a significant segment of the population that due to poor sex ed doesn't have a firm, conscious grasp on the way porn differs from reality and so will feel like extreme intentionally kink is reflective of someone's IRL beliefs while also getting influenced by more subtle manifestations of sexism in porn that are mainstream enough there's no instinctive flinch, which then makes some women wary of porn in general. I could go on but it's not nearly as simple as "girls like this and boys like this" because even in that context there are so many external factors that have little to do with the sex acts themselves.

--

[burningvelvet]

this is a long analysis on titanic (1997), re: my last reblog on titanic’s depiction of rose coming into her own sexuality, being sexually dominant, & actively pursuing jack romantically, + LGBT themes, feminism, & the cal/jack/rose triangle as a freudian representation.

—this is one of the great and unique things about this film and also i’d like to point out that although we see jack liking rose first, rose is the one who actively pursues him every step of the way which is almost never seen in films. the roles are almost always reversed. she’s the one who lies to protect him, she’s the one goes to see jack again on the deck under the guise of thanking him, she’s the one who snatches his art book and asks about the nudes, she’s the one who asks to be drawn and specifically drawn nude, she saves him with an axe, she’s the one who initiates sex, etc.

i despise it when people talk about titanic like it’s the most boring cishet movie of all time when it’s one of THEE most progressive/subversive imo (in terms of popular mass media). jack is one of the only major male romantic figures i’ve ever come across who never says anything sexist even in jest, who never dominates their scenes together whether emotionally/romantically/sexually, and who genuinely helps the female protagonist become a better person rather than vice versa. i can’t even think of comparable male characters, so yes in a way he is the perfect example of a manic pixie dream boy. i would go as far as to call their dynamic a subtle gender role reversal and i don’t know why this isn’t talked about more.

there’s also been a lot of queer interpretations and analysis on titanic which i think is apropos. jack and rose have been seen by some as being butch-coded/lesbian-coded ever since the movie came out, and you can also make a case for rose representing (metaphorically or literally) the experiences of gender-envy or being GNC, especially in the scene where jack nonjudgementally teaches rose to “ride like a man, and spit like a man” — and she says “why can’t i be like you, jack?” — etc. — jack actively encourages her to go against the gender norms and i don’t think it’d be a reach to say that he would be supportive if she was LGBTQ+ and vice versa & that they’re both clearly allies regardless of interpretation. Take for example Rose’s line to Kack: “I know what you must be thinking— poor little rich girl, what does she know about misery?” & Jack’s response: “No, no, that’s not what I was thinking. What I was thinking was, what could’ve happened to this girl to make her feel she had no way out?” — As Rose says, Jack “sees” people, and validates/recognizes them in a way that is similar to the queer theories on queer kinship, allyship, & solidarity. Rose and Jack find each other and feel kinship for each other through their mutual progressive/bohemian values in a way that is commonly experienced by LGBT people finding other LGBT people, which is heightened by Rose/Jack’s mutual attraction & their blooming relationship being socially frowned upon (due to classism + Rose’s engagement).

I also think it’s important to point out that sexuality is a core theme of the movie in general, & this is esp important considering it takes place in 1912. From Rose’s Piccaso painting of the prostitutes, to Rose’s comment at the table about Freud re: male overcompensation, to Cal slut-shaming Rose, to the nude French prostitutes, to Rose saying she’d rather be Jack’s whore than Cal’s wife. The theme of being a “ruined woman” is rampant. Many of Cal/Rose’s scenes are laced with subtle sexual implications with him wanting Rose to be sexually submissive/passive/exclusive/available (“do not deny me”) and her clearly not being interested in that role (Cal asks her why she didn’t come to his rooms late at night when he asked her to, and he’s always the one initiating contact, & she clearly hates him). It is also very clear that Rose sees her wifely duties as performative, and to some extent her gender itself is performative (see: the scene where she watches in anxious disgust as she sees a little girl being taught how to act like a lady through table etiquette, and Rose immediately runs off to Jack). I also think it’s ironically symbolic that Cal gives her his mens coat toward the end, and we see pictures of young her wearing pants and riding horses “like a man” as her and Jack fantasized, etc.

I also think it’s intentional that Jack is slightly tomboyish/androgynous looking, younger, and open-minded, whereas Cal is older, dominant, and represents a sort of Byronic “tall, dark hair, handsome, rich” version of masculine appeal. There’s also the split in politics, class, etc. — they represent opposite ends of male sex appeal while both being attractive. The love story wouldn’t be effective if Cal was unattractive bc his sex appeal is necessary to the narrative. Jack and Cal’s contrasting versions of sex appeal are what make this love triangle so effective yet conflicting (aside from their differences in personality and Cal being abusive/Jack being supportive) because the contrast between Jack/Cal highlights and brings out Rose’s sexuality and her transgressive sexual desires. She refuses to be sexually passive for Cal. In nearly all of their scenes together, Rose and Cal are constantly competing for sexual dominance through their dynamic—whereas with Jack, Rose doesn’t have to compete for dominance bc Jack accepts her for the way she is and actively lets her take the reigns and sexually guide him, and Jack feels comfortable in the role he plays. During the drawing scene and in the car scene, he’s presented as being shy and nervous but is still clearly enthralled by her, whereas Rose is suddenly the comfortable/confident/more knowledgeable one, even making jokes when Jack reacts to seeing her disrobe. Typically in cishet romances, the roles would be reversed, which is what Cal desires—that’s Cal’s tragedy, that in the end when he searches for Rose during the sinking and then later on the Carpathia, he’s mourning a fantasy of who Rose was, & tried molding her into a submissive version of herself & destroying her dominant/masculine side.

For these reasons, I believe Jack also represents a part of Rose’s subconscious mind, and that the lines “he exists now only in my memory,” “it was the ship of dreams, and it was, it really was,” are symbolic of this. I see their relationship as being more importantly a deep bond of friendship and a connection between two kindred spirits than being solely romantic. To use a Freudian model, Jack helps bring out Rose’s “id” whereas Cal tries to supress it and bring out Rose’s “superego,” and Rose ends the film by forming a healthy “ego”—this is what makes the Cal/Jack/Rose love triangle so riveting and effective, because it represents this clash of values and this tug-of-war thru this Freudian Trio.

I’m considering turning all this into an actual academic essay atp lmao

[fanonical]

So in your mind what’s w the garudo? To me they seem to think presentation = gender way more than the other peoples.

But in your version what’ll you be doing? Sorry if this one’s a bit blugh

no, i think you hit it square on the head. there is some semblance of a gender binary culturally recognised by the gerudo (they, after all, interact with men all the time) but as of BOTW/TOTK, the traditional gerudo culture dictates young gerudo girls of a certain age move to Gerudo City, which forbids men from entry. that's how it is on paper, anyway -- in actual fact, Link can walk right up to the guards in front of Gerudo City, be perceived as a "guy" and thus refused entry, then change into women's clothing IN FRONT OF THEM, and be allowed in, whereupon there is nothing Link can do to be kicked out from Gerudo City other than change out of the outfit.

In reality, the Doylist answer to this is it's a videogame abstraction -- and the whole thing is rather transphobic & racist too; a lot of the stuff going on with the Gerudo is between "kinda" and "very" racist just in general. i don't know how to (or if i adequately can?) address all of the problems there in my fic? . "desert race of giantess middle eastern warrior women" goes pretty deep to the core with this one, and that's before you get onto Ganondorf. and the whole stuff with the crossdressing... look man, if other people thought the Vilia storyline was meant to be progressive or sympathetic, i guess i'm glad they got that out of it, but it felt like a big transphobic joke to me. i'm changing pretty much all of this, and a bunch of other stuff. i still think it's not gonna be perfect (not really for me to say how unsalvageable some of the Gerudo stuff is in terms of racism, but i think i'm gonna reach out and talk to a couple of my friends about it and how they feel and what they might do etc) but i'll be changing stuff, and emphasising the good changes Nintendo has made over time whilst rejecting the worse ones

one thing i think i will do on the transphobia front is change it so that Gerudo City will allow trans women inside the walls if we are actively performing femininity to some degree. now, this is of course transphobic too, but i think it's kind of interesting to explore a more complex situation where trans women are a recognised type of person, and by the official legal policies of Gerudo City accepted in as women, but because of overtly binaristic, cisnormative overtones to the society, culture, politics & history there are probably still quite varying reactions, responses to transfemininity etc. because, well, that's my experience in a lot of gendered/women-only spaces! and i'd love to explore that through Link.

i also think that just before the Great Calamity, maybe there weren't as many openly trans people across Hyrule, perhaps due to social conceptions about gender at the time; i think maybe in the pockets of surviving towns and cities and villages 100 years later whilst Link has been asleep, trans people have become more recognised and embraced to some extent -- including in Gerudo City -- but, like in the real world, the change is slow, and some people struggle to see past their preconceived notions about gender. i just think it's more interesting to relate aspects of a #trans Hyrule to the trans experience now (i.e. in a time of great cultural shift for trans people both for good and for bad) but also exploring how and why it would be different in a fantasy post-apocalypse lol. i also don't want to overdo it into a depressive circlejerk of trans misery, either though, so don't worry, it won't be like that, i am making sure to steer very very clear of this.

i do also have maybe some potential reasons as to why there's been a cultural shift on transness in Hyrule (and particularly Gerudo City) in the 100 years after the Calamity though -- and i'd love to say more, but unfortunately, i've already said too much 🤐 gotta leave soooome stuff for the fic, and i have to check some stuff against lore before i commit to it.

great question!

[papirouge]

I saw a post you made about the fall and its consequences, more specifically about women's role and having to be submissive to their husbands. I've always thought about this and think it's weird how many christians don't realize how a loss of independence to your husband was never God's original plan for women, but simply the punishment for us.

I think just like you that this explains many behaviours in both men and women - because the Bible does state that men would want to rule over their wives too. And we could try to explain many things through the so called "male and female socialization" which I do believe in, but then where did those ideas and tendencies to socialize children certain ways depending on their gender came from? And why are they so similar no matter what country or culture their from?

There's definitely a tendency for male domination and female submision in many spheres of life and they literally show even way back in the past. Like a good modern example would be porn and BDSM. Like why are most subs female and doms male? Why is porn so demeaning to women, showing them performing degrading acts while men tend to perform violent ones onto women? Why do men desire these types of acts, why do so many men want to perform acts that are known to hurt women and not bring them any pleasure like sodomy? And why are so many women so easy to guilt trip into these types of acts? We can't pretend like theres much pornography where men are shown doing degrading acts, and usually when they do it's in the context of gay porn.

And me pointing out that men wanting to dominate it's also a consequence of the fall it's not me trying to excuse them or anything, just me pointing out that's not a natural desire nor something that women should tolerate from them. I do try to understand the male perspective in this too, as I realize we're all trying to navigate this fallen world to the best of our abilities. Doesn't mean i'm going to make a male positive blog either, nor am I the type of women to hype men and their masculinity so they won't feel "emasculated" or whatever - thankfully I got mostly spared from being male-identified and i'm pretty female-centered for some reason lol. I wonder why for some of us is easier to shake off all that propaganda and for others it takes years if ever...

I also ponder a lot about how our world would be like if the fall never happened, not only in the context of male-female relations (and female-female and, to a lesser extent, male-male interactions) but life in general. There are some very obvious parts that are taught for an specific time and place, but I wonder how many parts are very specific rules for our fallen world, and how different some would be for Paradise.

The loss of female independence was literally part of the curse of the Fall. When God said "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” it implies this may not be the case before (in Eden). IDK Eve comes off as a pretty independent woman, smart enough to convince her husband to disobey God.

God didn't create Eve as a meek sUbMisSive waifu but rather an eloquent and intellectually independent person able to make her own (although bad lol) decisions. If God wanted Eve to be submissive and emotionally reliant to Adam to the point of not being authorized to argue over his decision/opinions, He would. (and if that was the case, both of them would still be chilling in the garden and the Fall would've never happened)

If anything, God established pickmeism as a curse after the fall lmao

I like the take that basically says "if women were naturally more submissive, men wouldn't have spent the entire history of humanity to try to tame us". You can't tame something that's wired to obey - because there's no need for it. So this whole "female socialization" comes off as circle reasoning : are women really naturally submissive or are they socialized from their birth to be so?

Even God acknowledges this reality because He compels us in the Bible to be submissive to our husband. That's because He knows that's not natural to us, but we have to embrace this behavior in the convenant of marriage because that's how He established it. Good thing Christianity is also cool with celibacy so that women refusing to be submissive to a man can also thrive❤️

I think your surroundings growing up matter A LOT on whether you're male identified. Many people say women who grow up fatherless end up clinging to men more (daddy issues) but I've seen wayyyy to many pickme with their parents still married to believe it lol I actually believe who women who grew up surrounded by positive female figures tend to be more emotionally resistant to male pandering. I know cause I am. I've seen too many women help & support each other to elevate men as thee savior of my female condition lol

And if the fall didn't happen we most likely wouldn't be there chatting on Tumblr dot com bestie 😭 Eve and Adam were chilling with all the animals of the Creation, titties out, eating fruit all day... Homegirl fumbled the bag BIG TIME.

[sendmyresignation]

I didn't finish Girls to the Front partly bc I got distracted but partly bc I heard a few other people saying it felt biased or lacking a further critical analysis, I'm curious it it references any of the women who were involved in DC hardcore or hardcore in general, re the books assertion that hardcore is overly technical and masculine point thay you alluded to in your tags. I know that it was still a very male dominated scene but the continued way that some people act like the women who were there didn't matter or aren't worth discussing has always irked me, and I'm curious if you had thoughts

sorry, i just got the time to answer this! i wanted to be able to give some quotes so it didn't look like i was pulling anything out of my ass. but yeah, so while the book does occasionally mention women in hardcore, Marcus has this rhetorical strategy where she brings them up, but not without first diminishing their existences and then dismissing their contributions.

There's reasons for this, I think, actually. One is that she really wants to sell this idea that punk was more influenced by women in the 70s and then, suddenly hardcore happened and the "macho-ism" of hardcore meant that the 80s lacked the previous generations female presence: "its penchant for louder-faster-harder performances and frenetic slam dancing were catnip for boys anxious to blow off adolescent steam... [the mosh pits] drove most girls to the sidelines". This is true... but only to a certain extent and is also a generalization, the other thing is I think she just reallllly wants to make riot grrls this supreme influence on women in the 90s, like there were sooo few women in DC (not out front, not as personalities, as she quotes from Jen Smith). But, by writing off the entirety of the 80s, she loops hardcore and posthardcore together?? like rev summer bands were explicitly challenging the violence and the "hard" rhetoric with vulnerability- spiritually v connected to riot grrl. and, ofc, rev summer was conceptualized by amy pickering! like she is directly responsible for not just the term but is herself the catalyst (Marcus says: "The scene's previous golden age... was what Fire Party's Amy Pickering had then dubbed Revolution Summer" which I feel removes a lot of her involvement, esp when Marcus criticized the fact Fire Party rehearsed religiously for months before performing live, therefore they weren't a part of the summer itself and also stood in contrast to the Olympia-riot grrl values of anyone-can-play diy). She also, in an attempt to re-enforce this riot grrl linage into The Canon excludes women in DC who weren't direct inspirations on riot grrl (so for example, Chalk Circle is mentioned a hell of a lot in these histories bc she was a mentor for Olympia grrls after moving to Cali, wrote a precursor zine that a lot of riot grrls read, and was in a band with Kathleen Hanna, Holly Rollers always gets mentioned bc of Juliana Luecking, etc) but Pickering and others gets left out bc she's an imperfect role model (wanted her band to be seen outside the paragram of gender, she worked at Dischord, booked shows, was friends with most of the hardcore scene). Unsurprisingly, then, Marcus v. conveniently leaves out the black women in DC; Pickering's band included drummer Nicky Thomas (who is literally never named in the book, only Pickering is mentioned when talking about Fire Party which i find particularly egregious) and their first show was dedicated to Toni Young of Red-C and Dove who were legit hardcore bands.

She also is weirdly inconsistent about the contributions of female instrumentalists (that idea of personalities...); again, the members of Fire Party outside their vocalist are never mentioned, Unwound is briefly offhandedly namedropped but Sarah Lund's name never appears, Christina Billotte is mentioned and quoted when she's involved in riot grrl (Autoclave-era; later she would grow distant from the DC meetings) but is only passingly mentioned when Slant 6 is formed and none of her bandmates are named, Maria Jones is name dropped as a significant presence in DC because of the Holly Rollers connection but none of the other bands she was in are shared, including the all-girl, all openly queer Broken Siren, I could go on and on and on. Unless you were a frontwoman or directly involved in riot grrl, you were not relevant enough for Marcus to care about, which I find frustrating. who gives a fuck about female vocalists when the "technical" nature of guitar or drums makes them much more gender-locked positions in rock music? again, there's also a divergence about proficiency, as if attempting to perform complex, serious music was like.... giving into the masculine musical culture? which i find incredibly essentialist and insulting to women invested in their craft. Ultimately I find Marcus incapable of adequately accounting for the variety of women and their reasoning for being in a band during this period and it does a disservice to the history to simply pretend any woman not Doing It Correctly is worth forgetting or dismissing. so, hopefully that answers your question lmao. id still recommend girls to the front, if just because it presents riot grrl pretty unedited and the timeline is super helpful when dealing with a very fragmented small subculture and seeing that it gets preserved. but MAN did a lot of the analysis get on my nerves lmao

[whatudottu]

Thinking about talpaedans again, how I’ve gone ahead and given them (among direct inspiration from armadillos) that alien element in ant genes, and how in the blazes Andreas survived getting crushed by a castle-

As stated previously, I gave talpaedans that ant-based edge because of the desire to have a whole construction/deconstruction site within one ‘family’, or to the extent of ant biology plus civil engineer lingo, a ‘colony’ or ‘union’ which would include smaller groups more akin to family even if most anyone in any given city is related to their ‘queen’ (haplodiplody is an interesting beast). And ant gender doesn’t directly translate to ant sex because of some sleeper genes that, when activated in a certain species series of events, give an ant on the individual level a specialisation. Some specialisations are general but some are sex locked, and in talpaedans I’ve been thinking of making that split between construction and deconstruction.

This would mean that Andreas specifically would have a gendered specialisation, jackhammers so to say, and so indeed lives up to that by being a being in castle crashing. An example of a gendered counterpart would be a set of cement mixers, except with a little more techno organic ingredients, which can in a carbon-based lifeform be a self-produced tar (since tar is made from wood, coal, bones and other organic substances, a few ingredients here and there plus canonically black blood, you get fucked up ant biology just like the ants that explode themselves) and kinda serve to glue stuff together if sealing the cracks isn’t enough. A gender neutral specialisation would be a ‘used everywhere’ adaptation like forklift or scaffolding tools which kinda translate to ‘has big claws’ on one end or ‘has long hammed’ on the other.

And these are just only a few examples, this does not even include drills (it was Omniverse to make Armodrillo a jackhammer and drill), bolt guns and more.

Okay but why am I - a gender apathetic lad - trying to make the talpaedan equivalent for male a deconstruction tool and the talpaedan equivalent for female a construction tool? Well because I recently learnt about specific techniques of home defence that certain colonies of ants perform!

Inspired by the ants that collapse the entrance to the colony (and causing casualties in the process), wouldn’t it make sense for the male-ish deconstruction equipment to stay and turn a little corner retreat into a full on bubble of air in a sea of dirt, entirely defensible and difficult to get in (thanks to the rubble of actual genuine architecture because if you’ve got a whole city of civil engineers you’ve got a whole lot of actual underground city planning). For the predominately female-ish warrior force (especially my wonderful passing mention of a ‘bolt gun’ specialisation), the backlines and really the only thing for a colony deems worthy of fighting for - the literal fucking colony - and collapsing tunnels, trapping choke points and being 100% certain that any young, elder or otherwise non-combatant is kept safe between layers and layers of controlled rubble.

And so with this I bring to you, how did Andreas survive a castle collapse? That’s because no matter how good someone is at sealing off tunnels, the actual destruction of the passage isn’t entirely controlled and can indeed BACKFIRE to those unprepared or unused to the responsibility. Regardless of Andreas’ own experience with tunnel closing (a precaution done during wartimes which, given that [my headcanon] Andreas was in one of the first few generations of peacetimes, is not as necessary a task to do so much as just keep in mind), there’s a reason why talpaedans are so heavily armoured. Being buried in rubble is no easy thing - hurts like a bitch - but with the collapsing of tunnels being a rather purposeful if still variable defence, having crush resistance helps keep more folk alive. And I suppose, the best way to survive being buried would be to have collapsible armour oneself, the metal having room to cave and potentially have internal cushioning (such as techno-organic fur) just to prevent sharp shell pieces from stabbing vitals.

And hey that’s the end of the post, which was total not inspired by me rereading Kariachi’s necromancer Argit reviving Andreas fic no no it was the Casual Geographic video on ants yeet-

[banghwa]

Loved your discussion on Like Crazy and queer loneliness. <33 I just wanted to say that as a queer person who has to mask+pass as straight/cis almost 24/7 because of safety reasons and has essentially no irl queer community b/c I live in a conservative area, I feel disconnected to my own queerness constantly and Like Crazy and FACE have quickly become a kind of safe space for me. Like…I don’t know how to articulate this but I feel so seen in Jimin and the MV almost made me cry??? I mean I’ve always felt “seen” because of him to some extent, but this album has taken it to another level. Idk but this album makes me feel like one day I’ll finally get to a place where I feel both safe and seen.

(And honestly? I’ve stopped myself from thinking about my gender identity because the thought of being anything other than cis feels so frightening to me because now who tf am I??? Figuring out I wasn’t straight was difficult enough to admit. But leave it to Jimin to give me a gender crisis I can no longer ignore. And a part of this realization feels so freeing despite the uncertainty.)

(Sorry for all of this lol but I really just wanted to share this with someone, even as an anon. Your blog means so much to me and I alway enjoy reading your thoughts.)

EXACTLY!!! its so unfortunate that this is something a lot of us can relate to :(( but im so happy to hear you find comfort in like crazy and face in general :')) it really is that though like. i doubt like crazy necessarily had that intention but the way it was displayed and performed just has this underlying grief that i think a lot of lgbt ppl can see themselves in. the overlapping of desire and loneliness, the eroticization of alienation, the longing and grieving for something you never had because putting yourself out there would be a risk beyond what most people can understand... even if it wasnt necessarily the intent of the EP i think its so lovely that despite everything we can see ourselves in it, and find connection through a struggle that speaks the same "language" ours does.... :')

as for the gender stuff, oh my really it was the same for me :')) figuring it out was so scary. i had the same thoughts around "what does this mean about who i am? do i even know who i am?" figuring out gender stuff is a long journey, honestly a lot more challenging than understanding my sexuality. n i feel like even now nearly 6 yrs since first coming out to my friends im still figuring stuff out. and thats fine ! it may feel scary right now, and for a long time even. but it is also such a freeing journey that i wouldnt trade it for anything. i hope your journey brings you much joy and love and community, regardless of where it leads you <333 rooting for you my love <3333

[casualbluebirdmentality]

this post is literally just me ranting about my own gender experience/questioning as an afab person.

(despite all the cws and tws, it's really not that overwhelmingly negative-- moreso just yelling my confusion into the void lol. i'm just really paranoid abt accidentally ruining someone's day by not tagging smth, hence the literal max 30 tags.)

you can read it if you want but if not,, understandable lol. either way, enjoy this picture of a quokka that i got by googling "cute animal":

...ok.

figuring out ur gender as an afab person is so weird, cuz it's like:

am I uncomfortable w my tits (always have been) for Gender Reasons, or is it the societal conditioning that they're sex objects/will make ME be viewed as a sex object if they're "too noticeable"?

is the visceral discomfort that I've always had (literally since childhood) at even the THOUGHT of having a period a Gender Thing, or is it the societal taboo that makes it impossible to speak/think about it?

do I like the idea of being perceived as masc for Gender Reasons, or bc I know it will make people take me more seriously and make me less of a target for abuse/harassment?

do I feel like a boy in disguise/an imposter when surrounded by other women/in female spaces bc I actually am more masc in my actual gender, or because gender roles and their "boyish interests/presentation" and "girly interests/presentation" have been so ingrained in me that it feels like if I don't match up with That Exact Image of being a very femme woman, then clearly I'm just not a woman at all? (/s for that last phrase)

(A more specific/personalized addendum to that last one: I've got a sister and we both did a lot of performing arts stuff VERY frequently growing up, especially as a duo, and whenever the roles were a boy and girl (which wasn't most of the time but still happened fairly regularly), I'd always be the boy bc she was more femme than me & always wanted to be the girl, whereas i didn't really care-- so like, was that because I'm inherently more comfortable as a more masc person? Or did I just not care either way at the time cuz I was a damn kid just having fun playing a role, and now from years and years and YEARS of doing that I've just conditioned myself into thinking of myself as "the guy one" when paired with a woman/surrounded by women??????)

And THEN for me personally, you throw in the fact that both Nate/ND Stevenson (creator of the first show that ever made me feel Seen as a queer person, to the extent that it broke my brain a little) and Elliot Page (right after/while playing his Umbrella Academy character, who was the only "female" character I've EVER felt I could truly relate to in such a full, overwhelming extent for some reason I couldn't name, and whom my friends at the time literally said "had big [my name] energy," without having been told anything about my feelings at all) BOTH came out as transmasc. So it's like,, am i transmasc? All Signs Point To Yes, pretty much. And I distinctly prefer when my tits are squished firmly against my chest, which sounds a whole hell of a lot like chest dysphoria.

...Except that when I got a binder to try it out, threw a hoodie on over it, and looked in the mirror, it was just like,, weird. And a minute or so later when I caught my reflection in the mirror out the corner of my eye without thinking and my brain automatically perceived my chest as like, FLAT flat for the first time, it pretty much shouted "WRONG WRONG WRONG" and started clanging pots and pans until I took it off.

But, irl my nickname is a typically "male" short-hand (as in, someone reading it would assume it's a guy 99.9999% of the time) of my (feminine) name, and I much prefer it. So like I guess I'm just generically nonbinary... but I also really don't want to say that I'm not a woman? But that reluctance could just be reluctance at relinquishing what makes me "valuable" in society's eyes, or in accepting that I've "failed" to be what I was "supposed" to be. Or in losing my ability to "speak authentically" about things like sexism, even though I Know Full Well that that's not how that works, like, at all. So it's just... ????????????????????

The only thing I have been able to figure out is that I definitely want to be more buff and athletic, and definitely make my body at least a little more masc in that regard. So like, Buff Sword Lady definitely, at least. (I do quite enjoy swords. A lot.) So maybe I just want to be butch?

But I don't look like that yet, and it's so hard to figure this kind of thing out without actually being able to physically see yourself that way, without being able to actually feel it first-hand and compare. So I'm just, like, here, a fantasy writer doing muscle work-outs alone in my room every day, hoping that micro-dosing on jock culture will help me finally feel Right lmao.

[blackamite]

tumblr((.))com/mtlwcollection/699836496999530496/ what do you think about this post? have you experienced something like this before?

I mean, I agree that women enforce gender roles just as men do, tbh I hadn't realized people were saying otherwise. Something to realize is that gender isn't the only role you are playing out, we have a lot of them in society (although the extent you perform them depends on culture).

For example, you may see a somewhat short person from behind and know they're a kid, regardless of their body type. How? Well, children often wear bright colors and wear hairstyles that can tell them apart. Being able to tell them from their clothes isn't a bad thing, and it would be strange if an adult wore something similar.

The reason women tend to enforce this (in my experience, more than men) is because they're helping you with, seemingly, a confusion. For example, if I go to a fancy restaurant wearing a hoodie, a friend may recommend I don't do that next time. Similarly, they may recommend I shave - not because they're trying to side with the patriarchy, but because they're trying to help me. (Or maybe they're just embarrassed that I stick out. Not everyone is nice)

Of course, this is about normal women criticizing gender nonconformity. Gender is not a good role imo, but I understand why people treat it like any other. I don't have personal experience with feminists not liking masc women because the few feminists I’ve know irl have been radfems and for the most part, more masc than me tbh.

Another thing I'll mention is that I think autism plays a part here. For one, I'm pretty oblivious to how people feel towards me, so if people had been excluding me for lack of femininity since I was young, I'd probably just have chalked that up to social interactions being difficult in general. While I found it easier to be friends with guys at many points, that was more likely due to shared interests and looser social expectations.

That it to say in general, I think it can be hard to tell apart what is being discriminated against for lack of female socialization in conversations, and what is just lacking social skills or coming across as rude/hard to talk to, and I wonder if that might be happening in the original post when they feel this hostility even from feminists. 

[joeycontextual]

This week I read Queer: A Graphic History, written by Meg-John Barker and illustrated by Jules Scheele, a graphic novel introducing queer theory in an informative and understandable way. Exploring topics of queer identity has often been something with quite complex, and with a text like this being presented to people, it may make the discussion surrounding sexuality, gender identity, expression and presentation and other important discussions accessible to more people interested in the theories behind queer identities. It is not only about queer theory, but talks about societal ideas of gender, performance, sex and how those ideals have developed over time. As well as this, it speaks about queer history and the history of language surrounding those topics.

Something I liked about the book is that they raise some points that are usual assumption a non queer person, or a person who doesn’t know about queer identities, may make about the community. One is that “identities are fixed and essential”, the quote “This assumption can be questioned because of how contextual sexual identities and practices are: they’re understood and experienced in very different ways at different points in time, and across different cultures and communities.” (pg.28) presents the progression of someone’s identity developing. A lot of people say that you should have ‘always known’ that you were queer, you hear family saying that they should have ‘noticed when you were younger’, but it is perfectly natural for people to develop an idea of their identity later in life. In the pictures, it shows three different progressions, going from an “(assumed) straight girl”, a “butch lesbian young adult”, to a “trans man in a relationship with a woman.” Sexuality and gender identity are things that develop over time, and there is no correct way to be queer.

The next page mentions another key assumption, that sexuality and gender are binary. “When researchers ask people to place themselves on a continuum of sexual attraction, at least a third of people generally fall somewhere between “exclusively gay/lesbian” and “exclusively straight”.” (pg. 29) Meaning that that third are identifying beyond the binary of gay and straight. As well as this, they mention a study at Tel-Aviv University where there was a “similar proportion of people experience themselves to some extent as the “other” gender, as “both” genders or as “neither”.”

This is a text relevant to me as a queer person interested in gender theory, and as someone who likes to write about gender, identity and the portrayal of queer people in popular media. I want to create art and writing that accurately describes the queer experience, as well as being good representation for queer people, and I think understanding gender theory is incredibly important in that.

Barker, M.-J. and Scheele, J. (2016) Queer: A graphic history. London: Icon Books.