#tried 2 do two interpretations of all the statements said abt my art

[urdreamgirls-dreamgirl]

I'm a cis het female, but I'm always trying to learn and be an ally. My lesbian niece is a Gaylor, so I'm at least passingly familiar with some of the ways people thought her music was queer coded.

But I'm interested in why you personally feel betrayed by Taylor.

(It might seem obvious from someone with your subject position, but I'm confused as an outsider. A debunked theory doesn't seem to be enough... Has she been actively homophobic? Tried googling and it was a shitshow.)

gonna preface this by saying sorry to my mutuals and followers who hate t*ylor sw*ft--i already lost like ten followers for posting about this lol

for anyone curious, this is the nyt article i'm referencing and this is the response planted in cnn.

if you're at all familiar with the online fandom, then you know that there's a stark divide between fans that consider themselves "hetlors" and fans that consider themselves "gaylors." the gaylor camp is focused on queer readings of her music, uncovering what they consider to be queer flagging, and making references and connections between taylor and other gay artists. the hetlor camp is focused on spreading violent homophobia in gaylor's comments. i personally consider myself a part of the gaylor community because of my interest in doing queer readings of mainstream media, even though i personally don't believe that t*ylor sw*ft herself is gay and i don't really care one way or another--her personal identity doesn't affect the way i choose to interpret and read her music.

HOWEVER, it's important to point out that t*ylor has made many, many, many overt references to queer artists and queer culture--whether she's gay or not, it's dishonest and a rejection of her work to deny that she's made these references. here are some examples:

the song "ivy." many fans have speculated about the references of the album evermore to the themes of dickinson's poetry, specifically the song "ivy." this has been a long-time fan theory, doubly fueled by the fact that evermore dropped on dickinson's birthday. t*ylor seems to have confirmed this theory by allowing the use of the song in the show dickinson, when emily and sue reunite after a big fight and the publication of one of emily's poems (i don't watch the show, so sorry abt some narrative details here lol).

2. dedicating a performance to loie fuller. during the rep tour, taylor dedicated her performance of the song "dress"--largely consider one of her queerest songs--to fuller, a gay choreographer and dancer.

3. on the eras tour, she plays dusty springfield's "you don't own me" directly before she comes on stage. springfield was pretty openly bisexual for the 1960s and made quite a few statements about being with women. in 1990, she released her thirteenth studio album titled reputation, with black and white cover art. there are also some 1989 tv/dusty springfield color references in the cds.

4. she references the lakes poets. she published the song "the lakes" as a bonus track on folklore, which is a clear reference to the lakes poets, especially wordsworth, who was gay.

5. she made herself the gay sheriff of gay town.

6. she posted a picture to her own insta with a friendship bracelet that very clearly said "PROUD" with the colors of the bi flag. she wears the bi flag in her hair in the YNTCD music video where, again, she makes herself the gay sheriff of gay town.

7. she explicitly states "gay pride makes me, me" in the making of the ME! music video (i want to say this is in the Miss Americana documentary, but i honestly don't remember)

8. she has used the phrase "hairpin drop" in two separate songs. the phrasing first appears in "rwylm," a bonus track on evermore, where she sings "i swear you could hear a hairpin drop"--"dropping hairpins" is a historical phrase in the queer community that means dropping hints that you're a part of the community. now this one i've always been iffy on, but i think the intention is undeniable when we get to the midnights 3am track "the great war" where she returns to this phrasing. the lyrics in "the great war" is "finger on my hairpin trigger"--there's no way this is a mistake with the way that the fandom went so crazy over the phrasing in "rwylm." she herself has repeatedly referenced the online community and she's very aware of the conversations her fans are having--there's no way she didn't know we were talking about this. using the phrasing a second time by changing the traditional phrase ("hair trigger" and "you could hear a pin drop" are the traditional phrases) is undeniably intentional.

ok so. these are JUST the references that have been overt, explicit, and very clearly intentionally reference queer culture, queer history, and established queer flagging.

what's really important here is that the nyt article outlines these references, which are confirmed, among others made in taylor swift's public performances and published artwork, including lyrics and album ephemera. no where in the article does the author speculate on individual muses of any song or posit an opinion about her personal relationships. the article is focused on the gay fans and the ways we have built a community with each other through lyrical analysis and interpretation.

the important thing to note about t*ylor sw*ft is that she very rarely makes explicit public statements about anything published about her or any rumors about her in the press. that's why there was so much uproar about tree paine (her publicist) directly addressing the rumors that deuxmoi is perpetuating about a marriage to joe alwyn--because it's not normal. instead, she tends to speak more covertly through showing up places with people (for example, she went to dinner with sophie turner after the news of their divorce broke), making references through her style (wearing the color of a current era or the next era coming up), releasing new music (she addressed the matty healy scandal by releasing a song with ice spice and having her join the tour for one night!).

so with that being said, unless and until taylor or tree comments openly about either of these articles, we have to understand the cnn response as her opinion and coming from her camp. (i currently think this came from her father, as he's been very heavy handed in her pr lately.)

if you actually read the nyt article, there's literally nothing wrong with it. so to frame this opinion piece as "dismaying," "invasive," and "inappropriate" is capitalizing on established homophobic tropes about the queer community. why is it "dismaying" to be mistaken for a gay person? why is it invasive to read someone's work and say "hmm, there's a blatant queer reference here, i wonder if she's trying to tell us something." "i wonder if this person is gay" is a morally neutral statement. this response in cnn has given her straight fans license to go after her gay fans even harder than they did before. some of my mutuals and friends have been getting death threats, one has been doxxed previously and i'm worried it will happen again, and our comments are being inundated with slurs.

the reason i feel personally betrayed by taylor is because she has repeatedly capitalized off of my community as outlined above (and again, these are only the references that have been confirmed--there are plenty more ("dear reader," "paris," "hits different," "cowboy like me," "dress," "seven," "this is me trying," "high infidelity," "maroon," i could literally go on and on) and then allows the media and her fans to drag us through the mud and frame our community as aggressive, invasive, and repeatedly sexualize us by insisting that our sexuality and community is solely about who we fuck. if i get called gross, disgusting, or invasive one more time for stating that "bet i could still melt your world, argumentative antithetical dream girl" is gay, i will literally fucking lose it.

you cannot repeatedly and routinely reference openly gay artists in your work and then become "dismayed" when your gay fans recognize those references and begin to make connections. if you're a real ally, you would see nothing wrong with being perceived as gay. because there's nothing wrong with being gay! she has built her career off of autobiographical, confessional style writing and the interactions of fans speculating on who songs might be about. i'm old enough to remember the liner notes that revealed who each song was about! you can't foster that type of relationship with your fans and then turn around and get upset with them for caring about this stuff and recognizing patterns.

so i'm just kind of over it. and i'm over her being a billionaire climate criminal who emits 1900x the global average of carbon in tons and getting away with it. i'm over her remaining silent on palestine and allowing her film to be shown in israel. she cannot simultaneously be a mastermind genius business woman and also a billionaire bound by contracts and lyrical phrasing that she has no control over. the fandom sucks and she sucks for not defending us despite using her "allyship" for monetary gain, regardless of her personal identity. the gay community has taken enough hits from her and her fans, i'm done and i'm out.

ETA: i know this reads as angry in some places and that's because i am angry, but totally not at you, anon. i know you were asking this question in good faith, i'm just still in my feelings about this and dodging so much hate on tiktok.

[inner---demons]

The eyes.

sorry for takin so long w this small art style change thingy! ive been super tired recently :"))

eyestrain warning under cut, i gots a second piece of art

[zenosanalytic]

Breaking The Wheel

A Summarized Analysis of the first three books of HoxPoX: House of X #1&2, and Powers of X #1

Ok so, I’ve been working on/thinking about this for awhile now, mostly because life just keeps interrupting and so I haven’t had the time to just sit down and finish it, but also partially cuz I’ve been struggling with the form I want to put it in. Honestly you could write multipage analyses of EACH of these books, as well as the Stuff they share and conflict over, but I’m going for something more condensed than that so that I can FINALLY move on to just reading the rest of the series! In later posts I’ll be getting into specific themes and instances of symbolism, but first I just want to get my basic observations&guesses abt the series(which everyone else has already read X|) down. So here we go:

Resurrection/Rebirth:

HoX#1 opens with the XMen emerging from some sort of plant-eggs. My guess(which is p much confirmed for me since I’ve read Excalibur #1) was that this is a resurrection. There’s a heavy cthonic tone to the whole Deal, and Xavier is visually placed in an ambiguously parental/godly role to the XMen as they emerge. Of course, in our culture resurrection and rebirth are heavily conflated and so the symbols INVOKING resurrection here --egg shapes, trees, chrysalises, golden light-- are all ALSO symbolic of fertility and rebirth and, as I love puns&multiple meanings, I absolutely think that’s important too. Beyond informing the action of the page, on a meta level this is obvsl also a powerful thesis & statement of intent for X Men, a long-running and hugely popular comic book property: a declaration of both reviving a moribund past, and the intention to do something new with it. The decision to bring back old costumes and classic art styles, and to center it on long-forgotten locations, plot points(like Krakoa itself), and typically overlooked or underwritten characters(like Moira McTaggart and Mystique’s supporting cast), absolutely suggests a dedication to this task, and the intention to accomplish it moving forward.

Cycles:

Related to this is the importance of repeating, “inescapable” Cycles to the work. HoX 1 moves from this scene of resurrection to scenes of planting and plant growth which cycle through both seasonal phases and phases of the day. HoX 1 then carries this forward by taking place over the COURSE of a single day.

PoX 1 repeats this with cycles of Time and information gathering: Mystique delivering the usb from Damage Control in (Year 10); Rasputin and Cardinal retrieving & delivering information from The Nexus in Year 100; The Librarian trying to recover information from Cylobel(a mutant bred, rebelled, then captured by the sentinels), now part of the Mutant Library, in Year 1000. This is supported subtly in the art of all three books(but made explicit in the opening scenes of PoX 1 where Moira meets Xavier) through cycles of color: Green/Teal, Gold, and Purple. The symbolic meaning of the colors are various and contextual, I’ll get more into it later, but the basic foundation seems to be Green=Naivety/Beginnings/Ambiguity, Gold=Power/Knowledge, Purple=Death/Endings/Rebirths. PoX 1 ends with Beginnings: The Librarian fondly regards an Eden-like Zoo for what remains of “pure-strain” homo sapiens, and Rasputin(a mutant freedom fighter in Year 100) delivers her information just as Mystique did in the first section after the introduction of the book.

Hox 2 continues and solidifies the pattern of cycles. It ends were PoX 1 began: with Moira and Xavier’s meeting at the fair(a mobius double helix reach around, perhaps :p). It begins with Moira’s birth and a recounting of her first, entirely human, life. It continues through the cycles of her lives and deaths as she grapples with her Groundhog Day existence(a personal struggle which parallels and microcosms the larger struggle within humanity over mutation), which in a tenuous way seems to be narratively structured around the stages of grief. First she isn’t aware&trying to understand what’s happening(denial), then out of resentment of what she has lost from her first life, she rejects mutation and tries to “cure” it(anger), then seeks coexistence, and increasingly tenuous proposition over lifetimes(bargaining), before giving up in despair and wallowing in mutually destructive conflict(depression). The color symbolism is retained: The sickbed where her resurrection powers manifest is bathed in gold light, her first human childhood surrounded by naive greens, with the death/rebirth of her 2nd life gestated in wombly fuschias, and continued with a pink-purple dress in her 2nd toddlerhood. The sentinels, the mechanical agents of death throughout her lives, are purple, as ever.

However, HoX 2 ultimately struggles against, and seeks to subvert, the cycles even as it repeats them, suggesting to me that Escape is the ultimate endpoint of the series. While HoX&PoX 1 are told from within the cycles, HoX 2 is an outside recounting of them. At least one of Moira’s lives seems to be missing, likely hidden, and the end of another is obscured in eternal war. Moira breaks the 4th wall to discuss her mutation, and it’s impact directly with the audience; literally displaying her ability and desire to break out of the cycles. Her actions within each cycle are either to carry information between them, or motivated by what she’s learned from previous ones, thereby breaking the boundaries btw them and flattening out the cycles into a single linear narrative. In fact by the time of the series, by her 10th life, ending the violent cycles of her lives and deaths(and thus, the cycles of intrahuman conflict over mutation) is Moira’s declared and explicit goal(and HoX2 presents the series as the story of Moira). Her 10th life is canonically either her last or second to last life. In the “stages of grief” model, the last stage is “acceptance”; synthesizing and integrate one’s grief and loss into a new, healthy life. Both narratively and thematically, HoX 2 positions HoXPoX as a Dune-scaled epic narrative; not as the story of a particular conflict, but as a Historical narrative; as the story of structural patterns of behavior reinforced by instinctive dispositions, repeated throughout time, and one attempt to escape them for something better.

Ambiguity:

The narrative takes the point of view, and thus also the side, of the mutants, but that isnt to say it presents the mutants as unquestionably the “good guys”, or the human-AI alliance as necessarily the “bad guys”. While the forces of ~Human Purity~ and supremacy, those rejecting the shared humanity of mutants(Orchis: a mega organization of Marvel’s secret societies&black-ops orgs), are clearly presented as fascist, both visually and narratively, supremacist talk ALSO abounds on the mutant side which, when combined with trophically sinister visual cues suggests the mutant-nationalist sepratist project contains its own dangerous contradictions(further lampshaded by setting one of the major plots of HoX 1 in Israel, thus drawing parallels btw the two). Meanwhile the AIs, who carry out the Purists’  genocidal campaign, are presented as a sort of blameless technological inevitability; aware of the wrongness of what they do, and yet unable to stop doing it due to their programming. In this way, I suspect, they are meant to act as a commentary on the mutant-non-mutant conflict itself; on the way in which humans(both mutant and non) are primed to reject each other as fully human by both instinctive impulse and cultural structures emphasizing competition-based interpretations of evolution. I suspect this is even further and more directly lampshaded in the series at two points: In HoX#1 with discussion of  “the cro-magnon problem”, and in HoX#2 through Moira’s off-hand reference to this idea in her 4th life(when she first decides to give Xavier and coexistence a shot). The idea both times that other homo species were “wiped out” by competition with Homo sapiens because they SEEM to no longer exist, but this is a false conclusion. In rreality genetic studies show significant admixture of the other homo branches within the sapiens line. The reality of pre-historical hominid interaction wasn’t genocide, but synthesis. The inability to conceive of this(in other words, the inability to conceive of all homo sapiens as equally human, and mutants as a new evolutionary stage; the drive to cling to “ethnic purity”) is, I believe, the core problem the series will posit drives human&mutant conflict, which needs to be gotten past in someway. Obvsl this guess could be wrong.

Alright that’s the first post on my read through of the first 3 books. Like I said I’ll be posting more detailed analysis later.