#this is about people who act like queer people in particular need to be specifically instructed not to molest children

[wellofdean]

So in my ongoing efforts to say nice things about Supernatural and, as @luckshiptoshore said yesterday, "reclaim this nice, gay show" together, and also probably because I listened to Bruce Springsteen earlier today while I was thinking: why is it that this particular love story has me like it does? Why can't I let this Destiel thing go? I mean... I watched all the recent queer love stories and as much as I enjoyed Good Omens and OFMD, they just don't take up real estate in my soul like Supernatural does -- and that's not a decision I made, it just is. I don't know about you guys, but my little rages choose me.

Anyway, I was thinking -- it's probably not just because of queer representation or whatever, and I don't think it's because I want to see dudes be tender -- I think I ran out of that form of interest in the life of dudes awhile ago, but yeah, Bruce Springsteen. Born to Run. He says "I want to know love is wild, I want to know love is real" and I felt like it pretty much hit the nail on the head for me, somehow.

It's been a long time since I have felt moved by a het romance story. I feel like I can no longer believe it when the roles are so pre-packaged in the tropes and trappings of what was sold to me as idealised love in my younger days. And, like, I am Gen X, so it was pretty gruesome out there when I was learning how to want love -- the power of compulsory heterosexuality was strong, and the shit that was sold to us all as ways to love and be loved were pretty gross, just watch any romantic comedy from the 80's or 90's.

I think I love Supernatural so much because of the way Dean plays the role of a standard issue dude, and postures like he is a stereotypical red-blooded American dude, but it's so transparent that it isn't him. I don't know if it's just Jensen things, or if it was consciously done, but I love how unconvincing Dean's act is, and how clear it is that he is a wounded child whose own real desires and needs have been beaten out of him somehow, and I just love the way the real Dean and what that guy wants slow rises out of him as the story goes on, until he's choking on it, and visibly swallowing it down. For me, the queerest thing about Dean is his pain, his aching loneliness, and his sense of failure at being what he thinks he is -- a violent man who only knows how to kill, and I love Dean's moments of clarity, moments when he speaks from his own soul -- when he tells Cas he's sorry, tells John he has a family, tells Chuck "that's not who I am" are just everything to me.

Both Dean and Cas are victims of conditioning and coersion -- Dean trying to be his Daddy's perfect son, and being manipulated by Chuck, and Cas horribly violated and brainwashed repeatedly for millennia in heaven -- and they love each other in defiance of conditioning, because love is wild, and it's the product of their freedom.

I feel like ALL actual love eschews force and arises out of freedom. All real love is specific and weird, and is co-created in the space between lovers from what is most real in them and in that sense, all real love is queer in some way in that it is not part of the big social project of subjugating what doesn't comply. I feel like a lot of people lead lives of mindless compliance and that a thing that's wonderful about queer people and queer community is that we work against the grain to honor what is truest in us, whatever that is.

I guess I just love that, on Supernatural, the kind of love that saves the day is the kind that grows wild, like a weed you can't kill, out of more than a decade of choosing each other, again and again, and choosing to fight coercion and conditioning. Love that just fucking refuses to comply, and in fact, cannot comply, because non-compliance is it's very nature. There's something so hopeful and beautiful about that to me. I want to believe in it, and I do.

It's also why, after ALL THIS, in the context of that narrative, Dean is incontrovertibly queered, and anything else is just straight up narrative malpractice.

[olderthannetfic]

I think for me, one of the big stumbling blocks I had for a long time with understanding the problem with antis and how they act is that I came from the world of anime fandom, and I have seen all the time how the idea that you're expected to be tolerant and accepting to straight men who are really into lolicon or slavery isekai or whatever in the name of "sex positivity" does in fact lead into a lot of normalization of genuine creepy IRL behavior, and ignoring red flags for those. Because I've never met a man where doing a lot of apologetics for his interest in fictional 10-year-olds as a grown man or why you just need to understand that in this fictional culture sexual slavery is totally normal etc. didn't come along with some grosser attitudes about real women in girls - look at how a ton of the guys in the first group, for instance, are always trying to argue that "Japanese culture" is actually A-OK with relationships between young teens and grown adults and it's just your mean feminist American bias that's getting in your way. (None of that shit's true about Japan, btw.) Like if it were a purely fictional-preference thing, they wouldn't be saying that about real-world relationships as well.

But see, I have literally never seen those kinds of arguments from, say, women who write fanfiction about teen/adult relationships. To me the problem with a lot of anti behavior is not just that it's pro-censorship (which I oppose on principle, I don't think any of the stuff mentioned in the previous section should be censored, for instance, much as the prevalence of lolicon in anime squicks me out) and that it's puritanical and sex-negative, but also that it goes after the wrong people. There IS a huge creeper problem in fandom but it's largely not coming from the predominantly AFAB and queer world of fanfiction and shipping, most of whom are pretty good at separating fantasy from reality. Or their "fucked up" ship might not even be "their" fantasy but just thinking a particular character dynamic is really interesting and it happens to fit into some particular "problematic" broader dynamic. Sometimes it's specifically that it's fucked up that we like, that's what makes it interesting!

But I do get uncomfortable sometimes when people take the fact that censorship is wrong, harassing people for what they ship is wrong, what you like in fiction is not necessarily what you want in real relationships.... and take it to the extreme of "fiction has no impact on reality / there is never ANY connection between what gets you off in fiction vs. real life" (I do think it's rarely an exact 1:1, but for some people there is a connection), or feeling like you're never allowed to just privately judge people for what porn they're into or they talk about or post about when they go horny on main, or decide you don't particularly want to have, say, cis men who are super into loli as a part of your social circle.

Because I've seen cases where men use that, and other people being shamed for taking issue with how they talk about it because it's not "sex positive" or "you're just like an anti" etc., to raise the temperature on what kinds of creepy and red-flag behaviors are allowed. Or like, people start to get suspicious of things these guys are doing to real people, and question themselves because they worry they're just judging them for liking loli.

I mean, is it wrong to think that a guy who is really into underage girls AND talks a lot about how culture needs to "normalize" it AND makes people feel bad for being uncomfortable with that particular interest of his, is throwing up a lot of red flags for how he's likely to view real women and girls and IRL sexuality?

Once again, I've basically never seen cases where a fanfic writer (other than in some cis-man-heavy fandoms like MLP) who is into some "squicky" dynamic feels like they have to constantly talk about it even to people who are uncomfortable, or feels like they're not "accepted" in a space where they can't constantly bring it up. Maybe they exist. But then maybe it's fair to say that behavior is creepy in a way that just peacefully shipping [whatever "problematic" dynamic] and writing and reading fic for it is not.

But I've seen people be like "a lot of you act like 'well that behavior is only problematic when cis het white men do it' well no i think you're still sex-negative if you're against ANYBODY liking it" and like I'm sorry but power dynamics matter, and HOW you talk about this and to WHOM matters and I think it's just kind of ignorant to act like there isn't a huge difference between how a lot of cis men in anime fandom talk about this shit vs. other kinds of people in fanfic fandom, and that the former is very much informed by the fact that cis men and especially cis het men have cultural power that they are throwing around in the way they influence those spaces.

--

[eivor-wolfkissed]

Replaying dragon age now that I'm older- I've actually changed my opinions about Anders a lot and honestly? I *hate* Anders. There are certain things about his character I do like, and I like the tragedy of it all. But honestly I'm just not the biggest fan of him anymore. I think he's a good example of a bad activist who ends up hurting others more than enacting good change. He's more of a selfish accelerationist, rather than someone who listens to the people and fights for change that actually benefits them, but in the long run, his actions end up hurting mages even more in my opinion. He was a better person before he ended up getting jaded and possessed by Justice, then later, Vengance.

I think another thing that fueled my dislike of him is watching his hardcore fans do terrible things on here to other people (like watching some of his chronically online white fans accuse people of color within fandom of supporting police brutality just because they liked certain characters or held nuanced opinions about the templar/mage stuff, and misgender/exclude trans fans from queer fandom spaces for the same reasons stated above, to name a few things). All of these things combined have lead me to just be extremely annoyed by Anders overall. Not to mention his dick behavior towards other companions- like supporting Hawke selling Fenris into slavery, while pretending to be a freedom fighter? Lmao. Cringeworthy. Anders is not a morally good character by any means. For the things I do like- I do always side with the mages in DA2, and I fully support the actions taken to help mages escape the Kirkwall circle specifically. I really enjoyed doing the side quests with the mage underground. I love Anders' refusal to be caged and his determination to live freely (just wish he respected that in others and didn't support selling Fenris into slavery simply because he didn't agree with him. That's beyond selfish and straight up diabolical. Again, another thing that reminds me of IRL white leftists who refuse to deconstruct their bigotry). I just think the final action of destroying the chantry only invited chaos and didn't actually help mages at all (see the violence in DAI and how many innocent less powerful mages get killed by mobs of non mages because they no longer have protection. The circles needed a lot of changes but ripping them away completely and suddenly left a vacuum and invited way too much chaos imo).

And to be clear, this isn't a post with intent to shame all Anders fans. Not all of his fans act in the way I outlined earlier- just a particular, small but loud subset of them I have observed up close and interacted with one on one in the past. I don't think it's wrong to like this character at all- it's silly to claim that someone is morally wrong for liking a fictional character. There are things I still enjoy about his character! However growing up, getting a little wiser about activism, and watching *some* (not all) of his fans act like genuine bigots towards other dragon age fans, have made me lose more and more enthusiasm for him overall. It's also extrordinarily tiring to watch extremely sheltered and privileged people who have never witnessed acts of mass violence say that his final act of blowing up a church is Good and Moral when in actuality, it ended up murdering people who had nothing to do with the conflict. I do firmly believe that people who are gung ho about that action have a very idealized view of violence and do not actually comprehend how horrific and traumatizing these acts are on societies as a whole. It only ends up hurting the most vulnerable people and does nothing but invite violent chaos. I will fully admit I used to be one of those people, until I actually talked with and listened to real life refugees and other people who have experienced acts of terrorism and violent revolution in their respective home countries. These things always impact the most vulnerable members of society in horrific ways, and never actually holds people in power responsible... and all too often, pushes societies into even more authoritarianism.

Anyways. That's my essay on why Anders now annoys me greatly as an adult fan and why I veiw him more as a tragically doomed character rather than a freedom fighter. Anders, to me, is a terrorist in it for him and his. Not a freedom fighter. Everything stated here is my personal opinion- I'm not interested in debating people on my post, only sharing what I now think of this character- any kind of combative harassment added to this post will be ignored, blocked, and deleted.

It will be interesting to see what happens after I post this. If this post upsets you, please ignore it and do something healthy with your emotions, please do not engage in bullying.

[emotionallychargedtowel]

Desert Hearts rewatch notes

Desert Hearts (1985) is one of my favorite movies, but as with most of my favorites, I've gone quite a while without seeing it at times. I put it on the other day for the first time in years and took some screenshots in the hope that I might get some folks on here to give it a try that haven't, or at least bring back some memories for those who’ve seen it before. Then, when I sat down to post the images, I found I had more to say than I realized.

This was my first time watching this movie since I got into the whole BL/QL genre and I was curious to see if it would seem any different to me after a period of being more immersed in queer stories than usual. Mostly it swept me up into its own world, something this film is really good at. But I did find myself thinking at times about how aspects of it mapped onto QL tropes and more general romance tropes. I also couldn't help but see some parallels to the actual lived experiences of myself and people I know.

Queer romance tropes in Desert Hearts

Three tropes stood out at me that I've run into in the QL world, some of which I've seen in hetero romance settings as well.

Fish out of water - Vivian goes from her life as an academic in New York City to staying at a ranch outside Reno in pursuit of a "quick" divorce. (Having to spend six weeks in a strange place in order to get a divorce was "quick" by 1959 standards.) Helen Shaver, who played Vivian, points out in a featurette included with the Criterion version of the movie that Vivian has been living a very cerebral life, living inside her own head while cutting herself off from her body from the neck down. This radical change of scenery is exactly what she needs to be able to open up to something different.

There’s a similar dynamic at play in hetero fish-out-of-water romances. But I find this trope a lot more interesting in a queer context. Queer identities have a more complex relationship to difference. Among other things, characters who seem to be at home in the environment of the story often turn out to be alienated from it due to others’ perceptions of their sexuality.

Age gap (with the younger person pursuing) - Cay, who is ten years Vivian's junior, is definitely the pursuer here. This isn't a specifically queer trope per se, but it can manifest in some specific ways in queer love stories.

LGBTQ+ identity can put people on unusual timelines in their lives. (This is an idea I first ran into in a book by Jack Halberstam in undergrad.) Sometimes this means being in a more "youthful" mode later in life than cishet people. Other times it means being a particular kind of late bloomer. And so on. So with life stages not conforming to typical expectations, what does it mean to love someone you have a significant age difference with?

In the case of Vivian and Cay, Vivian may be older, but Cay is poised to initiate her into practices and feelings that are pretty familiar for Cay and totally, mind-blowingly new to Vivian. This creates a kind of role reversal. At the same time, Cay has never felt this way about a partner before, so in many ways, their relationship is causing her to have some new and intense experiences as well.

The thing where a character figures out their sexuality for the first time because their feelings toward a love interest act as a catalyst - This is certainly a trope that comes up in stories about queer romance, but it's more debatable whether it's a queer trope in the sense of a trope that is used by and resonates with queer people. I guess I'd say the theme comes up in different ways when a story is very geared toward the "straight gaze" and when it's more authentically queer. With the "straight gaze" version you get things like "gay for you." With more authentic versions, well, I don't think I've noticed many commonalities there. But I will always defend the use of this trope when it's done well in a way that centers queer experience, if only because falling for a specific person is exactly what forced me to come to terms with my own sexuality.

Side note: Speaking of coming to terms with my sexuality, it really is an indication of how deeply in denial I was about my bisexuality in college that seeing this movie for a class didn't help me figure it out. I was deeply affected by it and fixated on it for weeks after seeing it, but it didn't get through the thick shell of obliviousness I had built up around myself.

A connection to personal experience

There are quite a few ways that Desert Hearts resonates with my own experience but one really stood out to me this time around. [Spoilers ahead.] When Cay goes to see Vivian at the hotel where she’s staying after she leaves the ranch, she goes for a last-ditch, Hail Mary move—she takes off her clothes and climbs into Vivian’s bed. At first Vivian tells her to leave, but then she softens a bit, clearly interested but conflicted. Then this moment happens.

I related to this so much. When I fell in love with a someone who was (at that time) presenting as a woman and it started to look like I might actually have a chance, I had so much anxiety about whether and how I could be intimate with my crush and whether I’d be able to “perform” decently. It turns out, as we learned when we compared notes sometime later, we had each had the same worry and we’d both bought an instructional book about lesbian sex (I think it may even have been the exact same book!).

I think part of my anxiety back then stemmed from the prospect of starting from scratch with a new set of practices and skills after being acclimated to sex with men. It made me feel like I was off balance. But when I actually did get close to my crush, another, much more pleasant side to my inexperience came up. It turned out that not having a familiar script for what to do made me much more present and gave me a sense of freedom. I remember thinking that it was like going from traveling down the same old route to exploring a new place that we had to write our own maps for. And that was pretty exhilarating.

Soon after that relationship happened, I read Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. There was a passage where Lorde described something very similar from her own life. In this passage, she’s reflecting after her first sexual encounter with a woman after having a similar set of anxieties.

So this was what I had been so afraid of not doing properly. How ridiculous and far away those fears seemed now, as if loving were some task outside of myself, rather than simply reaching out and letting my own desire guide me. It was all so simple.

She’s so amazing at evoking these feelings, isn’t she?

I can’t think of any other places I’ve seen this type of experience discussed besides these two. (I’m pretty sure others exist, but the fact that I haven’t come across them suggests there aren’t very many.) There are plenty of stories out there about hetero sex performance anxiety and its eventual resolution, but I think the queer version of this kind of learning has some big inherent differences that go way beyond the genders of partners being different. So it’s really nice to see it come up here, and be handled in such a sweet way.

In case you’re wondering, once Vivian is able to “let her own desire guide her,” in Lorde’s words, she also finds that her fears were misplaced. The resulting love scene is beautifully executed even by current standards. It’s even more remarkable to see it in a film that was released in 1985. It’s equally remarkable that this sex scene was shown in rather explicit detail.

about, by, and/or for?

I'm also thinking about this movie in terms of the for/by/about queers typology that @wen-kexing-apologist came up with a while back. In my estimation, Desert Hearts belongs right in the center of WKA's Venn diagram. It's about queers, of course. I'd also place it in the "by queers" category. The director, Donna Deitch, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is an out lesbian. It's not clear whether the other co-screenwriter was queer. Her personal life was mysterious enough that it seems like a definite possibility. And the movie is based (somewhat loosely) on a novel by Jane Rule, who was also an out lesbian and whose work as a writer was very focused on lesbian characters.

I'd also consider this movie to be "for queers." It was marketed to a wider audience, of course. But as I watched some of the bonus material and looked at writing about the movie, I saw a lot of evidence that Deitch made the film for her community and they embraced it.

Shaver had a really lovely story in the featurette I watched about this. I forget the exact nature of it, but she described how she attended some kind of event with Deitch and Charbonneau where the audience was full of queer women who gave them an incredibly long standing ovation that she found very moving and helped her see how impactful the film had been.

I’m also sure Deitch had queer viewers in mind (at least in part) when she set out to fill a glaring gap in Sapphic representation. In an interview with AfterEllen, Deitch said, “My goal was to make a lesbian love story that did not end in a bisexual love triangle or a suicide. Because that’s all that had been made at the time I set out to make Desert Hearts.” (Note: I’m not linking due to transphobia concerns regarding that site but folks should be able to find it easily if they look.)

In summary…

If you haven’t seen Desert Hearts yet I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

(And yes, that’s Denise Crosby from Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting beside Jeffrey Tambor.)

[taylortruther]

That NYT piece is unhinged, and it will make the Kaylors feel like the New York Times agrees with them. Why can’t they just stan genuinely gay artists, not a woman who has only publicly dated men, and who has said this speculation makes her uncomfortable?

i think it's okay that the ny times wants to post opinion pieces like this - like it or not, taylor's sexual identity is a hot topic and has been one for years now, and the interest around it does speak to our societal concerns!

but i think this article in particular pushes a lot of thoughts that i have to challenge whenever i see them. primarily, that songs about fear or yearning in love are exclusively queer topics, and that a woman couldn't feel specific ways around a man. when it comes to taylor specifically, this article (and many similar ones) neglects to mention that she feels fear and trapped because she's felt hunted (by the media, "hunters with cellphones") every time she leaves the house. she's described men in her life being uncomfortable with her security or being seen with her or associated with her. she explicitly stated multiple times in her music and in miss americana that she found happiness with joe because it was happiness without outside input, and she had to unlearn an entire belief system (that she needed to be good and liked) in order to find security again.

i always understood why queer people saw themselves in her music. because fearing being "found out," needing secrecy, having to hide what you truly mean, is a completely relatable queer experience in a world that is so unfriendly to us. the writer touches on this at the beginning, too, with chely wright saying a huge star would need to come out in order to truly break up the status quo, and by saying that queer readings (even if they're "wrong") are necessary to normalize equality... but i think not diving deeper neglects a critical piece of this discussion. taylor's anxieties about fame and love are necessary to understanding her work, with or without the queer lens.

also, i think it's just glib sexism that makes people think that her tender love songs couldn't be written by a man. i don't know why the author thinks inthaf and hits different can ONLY be about women because nothing in them is gendered. maroon, sure, the line about lips is titillatingly questionable. but some gaylors have also said this about cardigan (men don't dance!), or treacherous (men don't use their hands in sex!), or so it goes (there's definitely not an extremely well-known sex act called a pearl necklace absolutely not) and like... even if taylor was a gold star lesbian, and wrote those songs about women, they still... could easily apply... to one's experiences with men...

idk like i hate this idea that queer people and straight people experience love in completely different ways. YES, societal/historical context changes how we experience the world. but we are still the same species. we still experience heartbreak and yearning and fear and joy and love and peace with people.

[pluralprompts]

I am not a system, but I have many friends who are and have researched specifically DID due to having those friends. I'm curious your opinion on me writing these prompts - as I don't intend to invade a space intentionally made to provide positive content to communities that I'm not a part of.

Firstly, you can do whatever you want forever, so jot that down –

Okay, okay. On a serious note, I think it's fine. Some disagree with me, especially when it comes to DID, but I don't think someone has to be a system, have any specific disorder, or be of/have any particular identity to write about these sorts of things. I am much less concerned with the identity of the author than I am how the character of a particular identity is written. That is to say, I am interested more in variety of plural and system representation, especially when it comes to positive or optimistic views on our lives*, than I am worried about whether the one(s) writing that representation are plural or a system, too. I care more about if the author is making a well-intentioned effort than if the author personally knows they're a system and openly identifies as one.

* I am comparing, of course, to the two main portrayals of systems in fiction: that we are evil (serial killer trope), or that we need to be fixed (fusion treated as the inevitable, and only, way for us to recover and live happy lives). There are ways to approach these tropes that avoid simply perpetuating stereotypes or disableism, and I would hate for anyone who relates to either to be told they cannot read or write about experiences similar to their own, so I am not saying these should never be written – but at the same time, with these being so prevalent, and so often without nuance, I am naturally more interested in fresh takes that show more pleasant sides of plurality, or at the very least more relatable struggles, than just more of the same.

With this in mind, I don't see singlet writers of plurality as an enemy. Rather, I see any inclusion of plurality in creative writing – from a simple OC kept to oneself, to a poem shared with a writers' group, to a bestselling series – to be normalizing plurality, introducing the concept to some and serving as a reminder of its existence to others. I'm someone who finds representation to be very important to progress, and thus I consider anyone who offers respectful** representation to be an active ally to plurals and systems. I would rather have a singlet writer make some mistakes while creating representation because they don't have personal experience with the subject than have less representation overall; if you're willing to write a character as a system, I'll be glad to see more representation out there.

** When I say "respectful", I don't mean it has to be sanitized or perfect. I just mean that it's done with research, and avoids relying on stereotypes, treating us like a horror trope or, again, like we inherently need to be "fixed" by final fusion – by becoming as singlet-like as possible. Again, looking for good intentions, here.

Besides, people who are presumably singlets will keep accidentally writing systems anyway, regardless of what I think. Seriously, do you know how often I keep coming across this? Sometimes I just sit and wonder how many of these authors are plural, and how many of them know it. Especially considering how often writers describe their characters as "acting on their own".

And on a similar note, I don't want anyone to feel pressured to out themselves as a system in order to write about plurality (especially considering writing about it can be part of someone's questioning journey). I've seen how that's gone down in places like the queer community (*cough* harassing authors into coming out even when it may not be safe for them to do so *cough cough*) and am not interested in repeating it here. You do not have to tell anyone if you are a system – and you do not have to tell anyone if you are a singlet. You have a right to privacy about your identity and what goes on in your life, no matter the subject matter you write about.

In the end, these prompts are for anyone who wishes to write about plurality. Or even wishes to write in general – I'm well aware that many of these prompts would work for settings in which everyone is a singlet! If you want to write them, you're welcome to. If you mess up, that's okay. It's pretty difficult for even systems to write about what it's like being us, sometimes – you won't be alone in that just because you're a singlet.

(On that note, there are plenty out there who would be happy to give more specific advice if there's any particular details or story beats you want feedback on! Cannot recommend @writing-plurals enough for this.)

Thank you for the ask and for your interest in writing about plurality. I wish you luck in whatever it is you're looking to write!!

TL;DR: it's fine lol don't even worry about it, just try to avoid stereotypes and negative tropes about us, and maybe ask around for a plural beta reader or sensitivity checker if you're worried.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

so I’ve seen some posting about oil fire going around and as one of the people sitting in the eye of that particular hurricane i have a couple thoughts. keep in mind that I obviously can’t speak for every single Poster etc etc, obviously this is just my view on things. in particular don’t quote Twitter at me because the only time I was ever active on there was back when “have a visible professional social media account” was considered important for the job hunt. I know nothing of Touhou Twitter or Touhou Reddit and I am content in my ignorance

Anyway there’s three major points of criticism I’ve seen, and one of them as basically “it’s just a nothingburger that came out of nowhere” and even ignoring the history of that in Touhou in general, I’m going to set it aside because I don’t think it needs a more specific rebuttal than the length of this post. so on to the two more substantial complaints I’ve seen:

“it’s just a sex ship”: look, I won’t deny that there’s been a lot of sexposting. i’ve probably posted more about cock in the last 48 hours than in the last five years combined. almost certainly more than i will in the next five too. but there’s a subtext to it that often gets missed (not just by critics but also by a lot of sexposters).

these are two characters who have had... a bit of a history with being sexualised by the fandom. i shouldn’t need to recite all the “slut sanae” memes, those who know know and honestly they were never funny, but they existed. tsukasa meanwhile was stuck with “sex fox” pretty much from the beginning due to some kuda-gitsune legends specifically involving their rapid reproduction.

obviously this is going to go more into the personal view and i reiterate that i’m not speaking for Everyone’s posts, but I’m asexual. the whole emphasis people put on sex as a cultural thing, not just in terms of Posting about it but also in terms of Not Posting about it is funny to me. people dance around it like they’re waltzing with the demon core but also are baffled when i say i’m just not into it.

the oil fire sexposting isn’t about “lol they’re fucking”. there was already plenty of that. the joke is that it’s not a big deal that they’re fucking - it’s not dramatic or cathartic or even erotic. they’re bad at it, they get distracted, they’re not really thinking things through; fail sex with her cringe wife. it’s sexual in the way that a Tom and Jerry sketch is violent - stepping back from the artifice around it to say “you know, whatever else this is, it’s pretty goofy”. to me at least, that’s more of a repudiation of horny character exaggeration than simply ignoring it is.

(there’s also a false equivalence to me in the general notion of “it’s just hornyposting”, between hornyposting by straight men and that of queer women and/or the gender blender, when the characters involved are both women - especially in light of the reasonably consistent depiction of one or both as transgender in oil fire posting. there’s better people than me and my none gender with leftist beef to effortpost on that side of things.)

“tsukasa is manipulating sanae” I’d add a single phrase here - she’s trying to. The big thing with a lot of how I look at Sanae and this is no exception is that while she can be naive, she’s not stupid. There’s a difference between being trusting and being easily deceived. She’s not a master manipulator, but she lives with Kanako, she knows a bit of how the game is played.

I think this kind of echoes the last bit of the last segment, in that how the characters are portrayed in the context matters a lot. Oil Fire Sanae is, at least within the spheres I see here, heavily coded as if not explicitly autistic. A lot of the content is being written by autistic people, myself included.

Autistic adults are, in my anecdotal experience, pretty conscious of being manipulative or manipulated, because we have to learn deliberately where that line is drawn and how to act around it.

To get into explicitly personal experiences, I often think of myself as being “manipulative” because I have to deliberately strategise a lot of social cues and how I present myself and information I know, and still haven’t really shook that perspective internally despite the intellectual knowledge of several therapists and psychiatrists that no, that’s just an autism thing, most people do all that stuff without thinking about it.

Now obviously simply Being Autistic is not an unassailable fortress against manipulation, nor does it prevent you from being actually manipulative in your own right, but it does tilt the pinball table a bit, again especially in terms of awareness. And that awareness helps control a response - again, even if you’re not always quite sure how to respond.

Sanae’s way of cutting that Gordian knot is what a friend of mine calls the Bishop Myriel Method: how can someone steal what is freely given? She has her lines, but the stuff Tsukasa is leaning on her to get - protection, shelter, and an in-group - are all things Sanae doesn’t see an issue with giving to her. Tsukasa for her part doesn’t really understand this, being more used to dealing with power-broker types where everything has a quid-pro-quo, and from a position of pretty notable inferiority (just look at how any of the stronger youkai talk to her in UDoALG) at that - so she looks at all the leverage that Sanae now has over her (leverage which Sanae doesn’t really understand she has), and doubles down on trying to be manipulative because she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t have to.

in conclusion obviously I’m not thinking about all this wall of text every time I post something, for the same reason that I’m not thinking about how my house’s foundations are designed every time I go up or down the stairs - the general idea is there in the background and actually needing to go check it out usually means that I won’t be doing whatever I was going up the stairs for in the first place. but these are The Thoughts, upon which the lower effort thoughts stand as they heckle each other. there are many like them but these are mine

[thisismisogynoir]

If i may hope into your inbox rq to rant,i think there's a special kind of masculinazation queer black women go through specifically.There's this weird thing white cis wlw have where they automatically assume 'black women with a queer gender/orientation=masculine presentation' even if the bw in question is blatantly femme(remember the tomboy Megan Thee Stallion allegations💀)and it's highkey insane how they can't wrap their heads around the fact that black women can be girlypops and softgirls as much as any other queer women and i can only imagine how much worse it is for femme black trans women

Like for me i'm bigender and genderfluid along with being bi so i understand why people would assume i want to be masc on first meeting but a quick look at my blog or talking with me will make it very obvious i'm a dude but not the slightest bit masculine and that's absolutely influenced by my black womanhood but white woman fragility makes the idea of unlearning misogynoir 'scary'🙄Ntm my white trans girl friends have been way more normal about me and guys like me than cis girls so that adds to my opinion that transfem and black woman friendships are almost inherent and the overlap between transmisogyny and misogynoir.They think it's 'allyship' but the thing is almost no black woman ever asks to be masculineized

All of this is so true!!!

And then there's the fact that whenever you see Black wlw rep in media, they are almost always butch/stud or on the androgynous/masculine side, and while that does deserve rep, you hardly see femme Black wlw nearly as much, especially when they're paired with a non-Black or lighter-skinned Black girl who will almost always be the femme to their butch, it feels like Black wlw almost never get to be the feminine one.

A lot of white wlw I've seen tend to assume that Black wlw must be masculine, often so that they can be the more feminine one and it's unfair. Plus I feel like Black femme lesbians in particular face a DOUBLE form of femme invisibility that other femmes do not, because while femmes in general are read as straight or seen as having straight-passing privilege(which we do not), Black femmes often face both where we are assumed to be straight feminine girls or we are seen as not being "lesbian" enough because we're femme when Black lesbians must be studs. And it's unfair. And also I wish there was a term specifically for Black femme lesbians the way Black masc lesbians have stud, that was common and widespread, but I also just know that if a term like that did exist, then it would just be co-opted by non-Black femmes anyway, just like non-Black mascs try to do with stud.

I feel too that my femmeness is def influenced by my Black womanhood as well so I see where you're coming from. And I also agree that Black girls and trans girls(esp Black trans girls) should be friends because our oppression, although not identical, has a lot in common on the grounds that we are both denied womanhood by the white gender binarist society.

I wish this was a thing people talked about more, a lot of people act like femmes don't have any unique problems or that we are privileged for being straight-"passing" or having "so much representation" in media, when that is not the case and especially ignores the reality of being a femme of color, especially a Black femme who has to fight to be allowed to embrace her femininity and not be seen as man-lite due to white supremacy. I feel like only other femmes and butch lesbians care about our struggles but that the wider non-lesbian/non-wlw society doesn't? Especially with a lot of lgbt men/male-aligned people saying that the lgbt community has a "fear of/aversion to" masculinity which is complete bullshit(unless you're referring to butch/masc/stud women of course). But we need to start having this conversation! So thank you for bringing it to my attention!

[gender-trash]

okay i AM going to turn reblogs off for this one --

i think we need to talk more about the collective trauma of being part of an online community that a different online community is directing coordinated, nonstop harassment towards. this is the part of the post i am so close to deleting or leaving in the drafts, because i'm (still!) anticipating anon asks like, how dare YOU, an asexual, compare YOUR experience to that of REAL queer people -- and i have no experience of being a transfeminine person on tumblr but i get the impression it is way way worse than aphobia was at its height. but like -- the experience of having your queer subcommunity harassed sucks! hardcore sucks! and has a variety of shitty knock-on effects on the health of the community! and i wanna commiserate with other people who've had that experience!

(also, i can't stand the sj "how dare you compare bad thing A to bad thing B when B is clearly much worse" rhetorical move. sometimes bad things are bad in similar ways and it's useful to talk about that similarity without necessarily making any claims about relative severity.)

i also think we need better tools and mental models for thinking of harassment as not just a one-to-one relationship, but a many-to-many relationship -- "moderation" as a concept seems to exclusively deal with individual posts or at best individual accounts, when, like. the social graph exists; clustering algorithms exist; i don't trust their reliability enough to want to bring down the website banhammer on anyone in a particular cluster, but i would absolutely fucking love a "block this blog and everyone within three degrees of separation of them" button. or something along those lines -- hey, i'm just spitballing here. a mental model of bad actors on a website as not just individual bad actors, but badly-acting communities with internal dynamics.

in every community of recreational bullies i've ever closely observed on tumblr (terfs, truscum, aphobes, various flavors of shipping drama), the following dynamics are present:

members of the community socially reward other members for engaging in harassment, and encourage new members to engage in harassment

members of the community screenshot and pass around often-equally-rude responses from the people they're harassing, as "proof" that these people are Incredibly Harmful and therefore the harassment is Morally Good, even Important, and that the harassing community are actually embattled victims valiantly fighting the oppressor

usually an Opposition Community forms, with the mission of harassing the bully community and exactly the same group dynamics, and the "original" bullies + opposition bullies become a self-sustaining feedback loop of harassment, because each group is constantly giving the other one more material to pass around and rile themselves up with

each community forms an incredibly specific and characteristic dialect of shorthand language that updates frequently as the community they're harassing gets wise and starts blacklisting keywords (when i was most recently on a terf blocking spree, "febfem", "TiM", and "moid" were big ones). engaged community members rapidly become unable to interact with anyone who is not Very Online, isolating them so that the community is now their main social circle

eventually the community comes up with some chain of reasoning, no matter how strained, for calling the objects of their hatred pedophiles

occasionally someone in the community will actually Go Too Far and bring down the banhammer on themselves. they remake their blog within days or weeks (due to the profit incentives of running a social media website, users are sucked into becoming hopelessly addicted -- especially users who are in so deep that they can no longer figure out how talk to people who aren't up on the Incredibly Specific Group Vocabulary). they are promptly passed around as a martyr

you'll notice that the main forces that keep the feedback loop going are a feeling of victimization -- if you feel like you're a righteous, oppressed victim, then you can justify little a death threat as a treat against the evil outgroup who is oppressing you, right? -- a community that rewards its members socially both for harassing others and for being harassed, and isolationist tendencies that make it difficult for community members to get social reward anywhere other than within the community.

it seems that, if you want to be able to deal with a group like this, you need to have some strategy for countering those forces -- whereas conventional moderation efforts mostly feed into the victimization mindset. maybe you need to somehow wall off the harassing community and the responding opposition harassers from each other, so that as far as each group is concerned the other one doesn't exist. maybe you need better tools so users with the characteristics that the harassing community targets can block the entire harassing community all at once. i don't actually know! but i doubt we're going to get anywhere without at least a basic understanding of system dynamics!!

[readingsquotes]

...As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me,

“You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

...we need to understand that “Indigenous”—always capitalized—is an intrinsically political term, created in response to colonization.

In a place that has never known colonization, there’s no need for a concept like “Indigenous.” Before the Europeans came to Abya Yala, we were simply “people.”

Then the colonizers invaded, destroyed our traditional governance structures, killed our people, stole our lands. In this part of the world, they called us “Indians” to distinguish us from them, and they made laws to codify our inferiority. “Indian” became a social and legal reality.

But “Indian” was a colonial term specific to the Americas. In other places, colonizers used terms like “aboriginal” or “native,” along with a wide variety of (other) slurs.

The umbrella term “Indigenous peoples” was adopted by the nascent Indigenous peoples movement of the 1970s as an explicitly internationalist term to highlight the commonality of experience between disparate peoples around the world. It was also, in part, a radical act of self-naming meant to repudiate the othering implicit in received names like “Indian.”

That is, resistance to colonization was always part of the definition and the intent. This is part of why attempts at precise technical definitions like “the first people to live in a place” always fall short.

As Sámi scholar Troy Storfjell says,“Indigeneity is an analytic, not an identity. … Indigeneity describes a certain set of relationships to colonialism, anticolonialism, and specific lands and places.”

Put another way: the onset of colonization creates the categories of Indigenous people and colonizers (or “settlers”). The persistence of colonial structures maintains them.

That’s why it’s pretty much only fascists who say things like “Germans are the Indigenous people of Germany.” The term is nonsensical in that context, and using it that way only detracts from the intent—and therefore potency—of the word.

It’s also important to note that within Indigenous and Decolonization studies, “colonialism” refers to particular systems of domination that emerged after 1491.

... But “Indigenous” isn’t a badge you win for life; it’s a description of your relationship, as Storfjell says, “with specific lands and places.”

...What about Jews in North America? Remember, the form of colonialism still underway in North America is not primarily exploitation colonialism (like that practiced by the British in India), but settler colonialism. Under settler colonialism, foreign colonists (settlers) attempt to replace Indigenous people, taking control of the land and imposing their own cultural systems by killing, expelling, or forcibly assimilating the original inhabitants. 

Under the racial apartheid laws of the antebellum US, Jews were legally defined as white and therefore allowed to own property in the form of enslaved Africans and stolen Native land (and they did both). They were settlers from the get-go.

What about those later Jewish immigrants who came to the US and Canada fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire? Certainly, they left Europe as refugees. But why, precisely, was this the Land of Opportunity for them? Why did their children and grandchildren largely Make It?

Because they weren’t Native or Black, of course. They were settlers. And like many generations of settlers before them, they faced persecution and marginalization … until they learned how to act like the Europeans who had arrived earlier.

None of this means that Jews don’t face antisemitism in North America, or anywhere else. What we’re talking about is a particular positionality in a colonialist system. Jews, Muslims, queer and trans people, disabled people—many, many types of people are marginalized and threatened by the oppressive power structures of colonial states. And many of those people still wield settler power, nevertheless.

...

There’s a reason that by and large, when Indigenous people look at what’s happened in Palestine since 1948, we know whose experience looks the most like ours. Hint: It’s not the Israeli Jews.

We too, have been told that our lands were empty when the settlers arrived (“A land without a people…”); subjected to forced removal; murdered by armies hand-in-hand with settler posses; slandered as uncivilized, backwards, intrinsically violent; told that the elimination of our villages, towns, and cities was an accident, regrettable, inevitable—then had them rebuilt, filled with settlers, and renamed in a foreign language. We’ve had our sacred sites destroyed; our cultures criminalized; our very existence labeled an obstacle to peace and security. 

When we see an Israeli state friendly with settler colonial powers like the US, Canada, and South Africa, a state happy to massacre Indigenous Guatemalans to serve its own goals, there’s a reason we don’t feel like we’re looking at Indigenous governance. 

It’s not what we created the word to mean.

...

We know whose experience looks the most like ours.

Remember what I said about how it’s the conditions of colonialism that create the categories of settler and Indigenous? Because “Indigenous” and “settler” are not identities or awards or punishments—they’re labels describing relationships within positionalities of power.

[halojalex]

Lets hear that essay

oh man i kind of wasn’t expecting to get any replies to this LMAO bUt here we go. strap urselves in this is gonna be a long one

i won’t share the whole document i wrote bc it’s really long and i go off on a lot of tangents but here’s the general idea

for starters, i believe g&c is absolutely about jalex. we already know it's about a gay couple, so with this in mind, alex telling jack that it's about him is enough to at least consider what that means. granted, i know many believe that he was joking, but i've always thought his tone and general demeanour seemed far too sincere for him to be joking; we've seen how alex acts when he jokes around with jack, and this was different.

furthermore, it's also worth pointing out that jack and alex specifically wrote this one song on their own in a cabin (?) away from everyone else; i know this may not seem important on its own, but it's always worth keeping in mind. ie why would two friends go off to write a song about a queer relationship on their own?

adding onto this, there was that interview with kerrang where alex talked about wake up sunshine as a whole and how it’s about discovering yourself and coming to terms with who you are (i’m paraphrasing but that’s the general idea), so to have a song about a gay couple on an album that’s all about alex discovering who he is seems to me like he wrote it from personal experience.

secondly, i feel like it's important to note that, while jack and alex have always been closer than the average friendship, always bordering on acting like a couple, this closeness was especially apparent during the time that alex was separated from lisa and was living with/near jack. people have commented before on how 'dependent' they were on each other back then, so it's clear that the bond between them was especially strong at that time. of course, i'm sure many will say that it could've been bc alex needed jack's support/bc he was living close by so spent more time with him/whatever, however i feel like there's more to it than that, given all the other reasons. i think they were more than friends.

i'd also like to bring people's attention to one particular incident - that photo of them spooning on a beach. frankly, i've always been a little surprised that so many people have skipped over this without blinking, bc that photo to me has always seemed so intimate and domestic, i find it really hard to believe that many friends would casually sit like that.

and of course how can i forget to mention alex's bday post for jack in 2021? that caption haunts me. "what's there to say that isn't already tremendously obvious? you're a bright light in this weird world my dude. love you times a million" how does that not scream a bday post for a partner? "love you times a million"??? bye they ruin me. all of it just seems so,,, romantic?? idk but i feel like if my closest friend wrote something like that about me i'd find it just a little too much. but maybe that's just me. but also i've seen/heard people say that that caption sounded a lot like something they would write/have written for their partner so,,,,,,, make of that what you will.

ofc honourable mention of the time they went to a gay bar together and karaoke. i realise it’s only from word of mouth that we know that it was a gay bar, but it seems a well-enough-known fact that i feel like i should include it.

i’m sure there’s more i could say, it’s just hard to keep track of everything, especially without making this ten pages long. but another thing i believe is that jack has always had feelings for alex, long before they ever got together. granted, that on its own doesn’t necessarily mean that he and alex dated, however it’s important to note. one thing that sticks out to me with regard to this is how andie once made a post commenting on how jack never looked at her the way he looked at alex. this is interesting to me bc it just seemed like she was implying that she was competing with alex in a way. maybe it’s just me, but i can’t really see that post any other way than that tbh. i mean why else would she have said it? if jack didn’t have feelings for alex, then why would it matter how he looked at him?

furthermore the fact that jack wasn’t alex’s best man at his wedding fr keeps me up at night (i mean not literally but u get the idea). like everyone knows how close they are, alex has literally called jack his “best friend in the whole world” (brb while i cry over that), so why wouldn’t he choose jack, his closest friend, to be his best man at his wedding? i always feel like he did that intentionally to spare jack’s feelings. as if he’s always known that jack has feelings for him, and as such he knew he couldn’t put jack through that, as presumably the best man would have had to give a speech etc. just something else i think about a lot.

anyway, all of this was probably very confused, i hope it makes sense as i have a tendency to waffle sksjsksj but yeah, this is my general idea! lmk if anything doesn’t make sense djskdjsk

[blazingstar29]

Top Gun and War

I just wanted to touch on something in the Top Gun fandom quickly.

CW: Discussion of WW2, Holocaust/Shoah, the Cold War, Vietnam War. Mentions of the AID's cris and WW2 related generational trauma

Preface/disclaimer: I'm no historian. I have studied 21st century history from causes of ww1, causes of ww2 and politics, up to the causes and consequences of Vietnam and American politics in the 60's. I am not an expert. However, I care about history/historical accuracy and have found this century to be of particular interest despite the horrifics that occured. (Any jokes about 'why do you like ww2' are not invited. What happened is real and it still hurts people.) I also say 'we', this is because I'm not targeting any specific person or fandom trope/trend. We includes me. But I also know people are writing these topics so please know i’m not pointing fingers saying that no one is doing this.

Some quick numbers.

Top Gun is set in 1986. Forty one years after World War 2 ended, twenty one years since the Vietnam War ended and the closing act of the Cold War. These are not entire life times. Even today, this is very recent history. Older family members, teachers, professors, bosses remember this time. I own a protect and survive pamphlet from the 70's that has remained in my family. It has only traveled one generation since it was distributed.

Maverick's family history with Vietnam is covered - to an extent. We as writers tend to look at his father, and rightfully so, his father is a massive part of his characters motivations.

But I believe we need to be more conscious of the era in which we right in. I am not saying you need to become a historical expert and make politics a central part of your story. But maybe we need to be aware of it. Even within yourself, even if the fic has nothing to do with politics and it's icemav rawdogging it in the locker rooms. Even if we acknowledge it and don't write about it, I just feel that we need to do that at the very least.

The character that's most obvious when it comes to this, is Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky. It's not rare to see the Jewish Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky tag, or to see him written with immigrant grandparents or great grandparents. He was born 14/15 years after WW2. That is no time at all. Do you look back remember how young you were at 14/15? That's how little time has passed. I cannot even begin to express how pain like that doesn't go away within a decade and a half, and how it affects multiple generations. But that is a topic where my voice is not the one to amplify. Please listen to Jewish voices.

This isn't even accounting for what it was like living post Vietnam and the Cold War. I know someone who grew up horses riding across Salisbury Plain in the UK and had Hercule's planes flying over and military drills. It was still real. This is still recent and in effect during the events of Top Gun.

I know that queer issues and the AIDS crisis are frequent fic topics because it is occuring at the time. And of course these topics deserve to be represented. I am not for one second saying that one issue must be diminished in order to amplify another. As a queer person I know it's also easy to write about them. It's where I'm comfortable because I'm more knowledgeable. Writing things we don't know about is intimidating. I'm drafting an icemav fic where Ice is Jewish and which more significance to the fic than what i've ever written before and it is intimidating because I'm scared of doing it wrong. But so long as I educate myself and discuss the fic with Jewish people who are willing to have that conversation, I can try and do the right thing in my writing.

Write what you wish, it's not for me to say what that is. Every fic is a gift to read and we have the choice to read what we like and the topics we like in such a big fandom. But after reading a phenomenal fic I became aware that I don't really see how the characters, particular Jewish characters like Iceman are affected by the post war era they live in. I am guilty of this. I have written 97 top gun fics and not once have I addressed the global political climate of the 1980's in any real depth.

These topics are hard to write responsibly and tactfully as well as with your own emotional capacity. I'm not trying to guilt anyone for not writing fics about war and politics. Writing is an escape and I don't want to change that for anyone. I am in a privileged position that I do have the mental capacity every so often to think about the harder topics when I write. I love history and studying it, but there are topics I can't wrap my head around, so I do understand when things don't make sense in your head.

You don't have to write it. But let's be aware of it. Let's talk about. Even the smallest of references to a Cold War conflict or post WW2 can add valuable context. Just some food for thought ig, i hope i'm not saying anything outrageous or offensive.

Amplify minority voices, listen, respect, reflect.

[anghraine]

stripedroseandsketchpads replied to this post:

1) I’m very sorry to hear about the fandom sexists (god are they everywhere—“nasty woman” much? They sound like Andrew Tate, jfc!)

Thanks! Certain parts of Austen fandom are fairly conservative and very gender-normative and that's definitely come up in response to that particular fic before. First Impressions was my most popular Austen fic on AO3 for years, but other parts of fandom struggled more with the idea of a f!Darcy who does pretty much everything that canon Darcy does being desirable to a man, or appealing to anyone at all.

(In fairness to them, some of those spaces ended up actually having conversations about why Catherine registered as colder and more unpleasant than Darcy even when doing exactly the same things, interrogating their own double standards, etc.)

This isn't the only reason to dislike the fic or Catherine, of course—I made my other post late last night when I was tired and forgot to clarify that! It's from 2010 and definitely has flaws. It's just that there was (and apparently still is) a very glaring divide between the responses from the more progressive and queerer side of fandom and the more conservative and heteronormative side, wrt Catherine in that fic specifically (even though it's a het fic!).

2) Your fic concepts are impeccable, I followed you for genderbend blogging and I really need to spend sone time trawling your AO3

Thanks! I have written a ton of fic over the years, so some are definitely weaker than others, but I have fun with them.

Also, my experience is that most people are very much not here for genderbending, so that's really nice to hear!

Also tbh as a lesbian often writing lesbians… “step on me” any time a woman is the tiniest bit not-nice or does anything perceived as “mannish” (including being the tiniest bit not-nice) doesn’t feel much better…

it feels like ppl think femdom is “taking the most toxic possible iteration of misogyny in D/s dynamics w a male dom & female sub (bc obv male dom/female sub can be perfectly fine!) and flipping it so the man is in the ‘girl role’ and the woman is in the ‘male role’” and. Heavy sigh. A lot of AO3 comments give off the vibes of “She’s totally a bitch but I can say that bc I like it and think it’s hot. Feminism!” RIP.

Hmm. It really depends on context for me. My experience with it has come pretty overwhelmingly from other queer people, primarily queer women—that may reflect my social circle!—and that feels very different to me than an environment overwhelmingly dominated by straight women being like "ew, a woman acting like Darcy is so awful."

Like, sometimes it does definitely give a "me finding anything between slight assertiveness and mass murder in a woman hot is totally praxis" vibe that's annoying. But annoying in a very different way!

I will also say, in fairness to the AO3 First Impressions commentariat, that they did not literally say "step on me, Catherine," lol. I was just quickly characterizing the sort of vibe there—it was more like "I'm gay for Catherine" "you managed a female Darcy without making it feel like she's being punished, awesome" "Miss Darcy is a gem" "one of my favorite versions of Darcy" "I have a crush on Miss Darcy" "fem!Darcy 4ever and ever amen" etc. So the contrast with the "I don't get what Henry sees in her???" "I guess he wants to be dominated because he's weak" "Darcy could never be a woman" etc is just very sharp.

[khalemchurstcomics]

TRIGGERED - Page 216

Trevor was trying to do something nice for us by driving us down to a nature spot, showing us a peaceful place we might enjoy. I could recognise that. But in my freshly triggered state, still recovering from my massive flashback, my brain did not feel safe. Sitting in the back of his car, watching the scenery become more desolate as we left civilisation behind, my brain was transported back to when I was 23 and stuck in the back of a different car, with different men, having no control over where we went or what happened. 

TRIGGERED is supported by my generous Patrons. To become a patron and gain access to hundreds of additional comic pages, head on over here.

Next page

Previous page

From the beginning

-----------

I feel like I need to make a clarification about the story I am telling here. ‘TRIGGERED’ is an autobiographical comic. It tells the very personal story of my treatment for cPTSD, and my experiences with gendered violence. I am someone who been significantly harmed throughout my life, mostly by men, and those experiences have shaped who I am and what situations I feel comfortable in. 

You have probably noticed that when I am talking about my discomfort around men, I often specify ‘cis’ and/or ‘straight’ men. This is not because I think that gendered violence only comes from certain kinds of men, nor does it mean that I think all cis and/or straight men are predators (they are not). I know that there are an abundance of kind, gentle cis men who are allies to people like me. 

The reason I specify cis and/or straight men in my descriptions is because it is a key part of my experience. I am a queer person who appears female to most. I have almost always felt unsafe in straight spaces in which men are present, but I have never felt unsafe in queer spaces. I do not experience the same fear around men whom I know are queer, because the power imbalance is not the same as it is with a man who is cis and straight. The power dynamics that created the environments in which I was abused and assaulted often existed because I was a small girl/woman and the other person was a cis straight man who benefited from their place of power in society. 

I am not trying to tell a story about all men (I do not have any kind of authority to do that). I am also not trying to tell a story about all gendered violence. This comic is one small person’s story. It is about my personal experiences, and my personal experience is this: the men who have hurt me are those who took full advantage of their place in patriarchy to overpower me. These experiences have left me deeply traumatised, something which I have to deal with every day, and they have led to very specific triggers. One of those triggers is: cis, straight men (Flannelette sheets are also one of my triggers. I do not think that flannelette sheets are bad or that no one should ever use them, obviously. I just can’t touch them because they are a trigger).

Please understand, I am not on a mission with this comic to attack men. Certain men being a trigger for my cPTSD doesn’t men that I think those men are in any way bad. What I am attacking is patriarchy - the system of power which enables SOME men to oppress others, and SOME men to demonstrate violence towards those they view as less than. 

This comic will always be about one person’s experience. I am afraid of men, specifically cis, straight men, because while I have never been made to feel unsafe in queer spaces with queer men, I have very much been made to feel unsafe by other kinds of men. I am sorry if this feels like a personal judgement on any cis, straight men. It’s not. It does not mean that I think any particular cis straight men are bad. I don’t.  It is only relevant because this is a specific group of people whom society favours with a power dynamic, which is why there is opportunity for violence (an opportunity which the vast majority of cis, straight men would NEVER act on). 

I know there is an inherent risk in sharing this explanation because this is The Internet, but my approach in my comics is always to try to be as honest as possible. I am deeply sorry if I have caused anyone offense through the way in which I talk about my very specific experiences. I hope you will attempt to understand why I have made these choices. 

I am also really, really not open to discussing this further. Please, if you don’t like my comic, don’t bother reading it. No story is ever going to resonate with everyone. I am just one person telling a very personal story. I would ask that you please not comment on this post because I really don’t feel like I need any more attention on this issue. 

I am doing my best, and I know you all are too. Thank you for understanding. 

[talenlee]

Pride Month 2024!

It’s the introduction of another theme month, and this time around it’s the month of Corporations Conspicuously Caring About Queer People, and people showing their ass about how good or bad they are about publically presenting information about types of queerness. I’m sure I’ve said something aphobic on a June, but also, my hand has been stabbed, you know I’m from inside the city and I’m not doing these things out of a desire to support the structure and you know, watching, listening, learning and growing, apology video on my Patreon. Joking aside, point is, you know what kind of person I am and why I might say ‘faggotry.’

Anyway, time to talk about what to expect in Pride Month and what it means. And I need to do it without just pointing directly to the article I wrote on this from last year that I honestly think is kind of perfect for summarising my feelings about why we need Pride Month and why I do Pride Month content in Pride Month.

I think I’ve softened a lot on ‘queer media’ in the month. Not as that implies – I’m not about to act like Fire Emblem or Persona series games are games to talk about in this period in the way to promote them. I know that ‘Queer Media’ was an umbrella opened up over things that were in many cases actively awful about and to queer readings, and that used to drive me nuts. I’d put out the call like ‘hey, does anyone know media with this [trait]’ and despite media of that trait existing I’d get someone popping up to talk to me about something horrendously not an answer to the problem and then someone else well-meaning would take this as a conversation about that thing and not about my initial question and suddenly I was dealing with people babbling about something that was actively irritating me.

Originally I had some pretty stringent views on queer media. It was something in the vein that the work needed to explicitly have at least one queer character who was specifically and correctly defined by the narrative, rather than it being impressions and vibes. The idea I think I had was something to the effect of trying to forward media created for queer purposes rather than just relying on fan media to build up the queerness around it.

This particular position softened, of all things, because of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. And make no mistake: I don’t actually think that highly of the bulk of a series about a religious motivated dad leading a specialist religious movement where the whole story farts out at the end. It’s the 90s, it’s a Star Trek, they’re all a bit rough and ropy, whatever. But for a time there I kinda had a negative view of the Garak/Bashir relationship that was treated as a element of the show’s queer representation. And like, that was interesting but it was also very much not text – we get to see Garak even establish a relationship with… a really creepy young lady, but whatever whatever that’s not important.

The point is that I thought that that was basically something like fanon. It seemed a kind of compromise, and I think I didn’t need that kind of compromise was acceptable. I wanted to platform queer media and that meant indulging in smaller and more indie work in an attempt to platform people.

Low key, this was a way in which I acted as if the creator of a work is a person who even exists, and that’s just not true.

And then we got to see interviews, now, decades later, with the actors – both of them – who played those characters, who made it very, very clear: Garak is trying to get Bashir into bed. This relationship is not straight. It has that tension, it’s not a thing we’re imagining, it’s a thing they tried to put into the story. And sure, they are, at this point, the same as fans, but they’re fans who had the choice to actually influence the making of the work. By discarding Deep Space 9 from ‘Queer Media’ because it’s not Queer enough I’m creating the impression that queer creators don’t get to be included because they might have been filtering their work through other lenses. It reminds me of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, where again, they said in response to the request for lesbian content, ‘I was on stage the whole time.’

Plus, I mean, most of the media I make, the books and the games and the TTRPG stuff, that’s all queer content but you’ll find surprisingly few directions of who sucks or fucks what or does not ever suck or fuck. One Stone doesn’t have a seriously straight character in the entire dialogue and I’ve written about how Cobrin’Seil is a world where ‘queer identities’ don’t even come up because the idea of queerness you exist with is a modern construct and if nobody wrote a book about how it was messed up in the modernist era, then there might be a wholly different set of values about that. The main way stuff I make ‘is queer’ is as a byproduct of me being the one who made it, which is to say I’ve gotten my queer cooties all over things, and if that’s the case then I kinda gotta be a little more giving to the work that is even aggressively heterosexual because it’s still art by queer artists working within constraints that were ultimately, not ideal.

Anyway, point is that that means that I was willing to approach the Pride Month media with a slightly wider arm, to grab in stuff that may have more of these transient properties, more work that’s made to highlight someone who is or has that queer element, someone bringing something to the forefront that isn’t necessarily as nakedly, tangibly obvious as like, the gag at the end of Paranorman. I got to watch a bunch of youths watch The Matrix for the first time last month and it was a trip watching as people who grew up in the world it shaped who had no idea how freaking queer it was.

The bricks the flower breaks to bloom are part of why and how it blossoms.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[velvetvexations]

Discussing race and my flailing at how to handle it in my writing. I don't mean to constantly just outsource my praxis but if anyone wants to comment or has suggestions they would be appreciated. I'm really hoping this is taken in the intended spirit of "I'm a white dumbass and fully admit I don't know what I'm doing". The point of this post is that I'm painfully aware of how inadequate my knowledge and ability to deal with these subjects is.

I'm gonna break down the racial makeup of the main cast of the current stage of my project:

C - White, which is critical because the entire work pretty much revolves around issues of praxis and him being white is a part of that even though I try very hard to mostly go around race and only really speak to queer issues I can more confidently address.

Z - White, and being white specifically is not especially critical but a big part of her whole thing is that she is much, much poorer and had a much worse home life than everyone else, so I am nervous having her be anything else even though, obviously, poor PoC with bad home lives exist.

J - I made the first inkling of J waaaaay back when I was a kid, as with every other character in this post, but J was the only one who had a defined race until the past two years. His original concept was an Asian martial artist who's a very devout Christian and while I've dropped the kung fu (he knows French kickboxing for complicated reasons but he's not any better at CQB than the other brawlers) he is still very spiritual and reserved and humble etc. and I'm like ahhhhh is this a stereotype? This is a stereotype right? Ahhhhh.

A - I've ran into SO MANY PROBLEMS with A where I keep having to change her race. I wanted her to be Mongolian but then I discovered the song Genghis Khan, really loved it, and was like "oh fuck this fits her too well, it would cause me physical pain to not include it on her playlist." So I said, okay, how about a quarter Black? Not for any particular reason, it just kinna came to me like a lot of stuff does, but then I was like, well, actually maybe she should just be Black? Not that quarter-Black people don't also need representation...so it was between those two until I realized an absolutely insane coincidence that made her being Black potentially offensive, so I switched her race with Z, but then Z being Black looked way worse and for way, way more obvious reasons, so I was like "okay that coincidence is bullshit and I'm probably the only person that would have even thought of that, I'm just going to commit to her being Black." but I'm still not entirely sure.

(That coincidence is that my writing adapts the Cthulhu Mythos and has a lot of really obscure references to Lovecraft, and since A is an albino whose mother was from Tanzania it suddenly struck me that people could see that as having been an intentional nod to The White Ape, which deals with someone's ancestor having been an albino literal ape-person from Africa. This would not be an issue if not for the tiny Easter eggs to super obscure Lovecraft Circle stuff I do in fact pepper everywhere.)

W - W was a biologically artificial creation that mixed the DNA of a white woman and her Native wife, but I changed that an outright clone of one of the latter to bump of the number of PoC who aren't half-white, but everyone would still be pretending that they're their white mother's biological child which could maybe be more fucked up than if I just let them be half-white? Is this just the progressive version of being anti-miscegenation?

I'm worried I'm overthinking it but idk! I have a lot of half-white characters it feels like, because my writing spans over a century with some ancestors rooted in canonical Lovecraftian texts and some of my own devising that require positions of privilege in white society, so have only been able to introduce more color in the work's "present day". But like I said, I know mixed-race people also exist and I don't want to erase them or act like they're less PoC or something, which I'm afraid is what I'm overcorrecting into.