#we don’t talk about that one

[magicfroggo]

my lesbian awakeningz as a kid

[leonscape]

sometimes i’m not sure if i can hype leon up when they release new art of him in new clothes because most of his outfits in the past were poorly received by the fandom if that makes sense

[vmkhoneyy]

“People are inherently terrible” no!!! Have you ever seen a child wait for their friend while they tie their shoelaces? Have you ever known someone who would bring hurt squirrels and rabbits and mice to the nearest vet just so it doesn’t suffer? Have you seen someone grieve? Have you ever read something that hit your heart like a freight train? Have you looked at the stars and felt an unexplainable joy? Have you ever baked bread? Have you shared a meal with a friend? Have you not seen it? All the love? All the good? I know it’s hard to see sometimes, I know there’s pain everywhere. But look, there’s a child helping another up after a hard fall. Look, there’s someone giving their umbrella to a stranger. Look, there’s someone admiring the spring flowers. Look, there’s good, there’s good, there’s good. Look!!!!

[thebaldursmouthgazette]

I’m sure Dumat being defeated the same year andraste was born means nothing

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that andrastes mother was part of a tribe who helped the grey wardens fight and defeat dumat the same year she was born, meaning that she could have been a fetus affected by the taint in the proximity of a dying arch demon

And the fact that nobody knows which grey warden killed dumat, as seven wardens died from injuries from his death throes, and therefore we cannot actually identify a warden who absorbed his soul, means nothing

And I’m sure it is a complete coincidence that andraste had dreams and visions of the being later referred to as the maker her whole life, and behaved strangely, talking about hearing lost voices and seeing strange auras. That absolutely doesn’t sound like anyone else we know

[vigilskeep]

one of my absolute favourite tiny details is cousland’s nan insisting the warden start the telling of a childhood story, and instead of, i don’t know, “once upon a time”, cousland’s cultural go-to is before our fathers’ fathers came down from the moutains. cousland has chantry tutors but at their nanny’s knee it was alamarri folk tales, not andraste and the wyvern. i think that’s so interesting and it’s one of the jumping-off points for my take that highever let andrastianism colour its culture and traditions more so than change them, in contrast to a centre of pilgrimage and of royalty like denerim, which is more closely interlinked with, and perceived by, andrastians outside ferelden’s borders. cousland to me is always saying some slightly off brand stuff they don’t realise is weird (read: heresy) while alistair and wynne raise eyebrows at each other

[ewwww-what]

Nobody is as excited about the preview as I am. I have paragraphs.

[sapphosboy]

I don’t think we talk enough about the fact that the tenth Doctor canonically tried to kill himself after losing Rose and he would’ve succeeded if Donna hadn’t stopped him

[bloobydabloob]

Holy shit I love your Dirk interpretations, it's so true and I could talk about this shit forever. I feel like another part of his character that people seem to forget (along with Roxy for some reason) is that he's from the future in solitude in an apocalyptic wasteland. I just see that part of his character always removed which is disappointing because I feel like that's a pretty big part, especially regarding his themes around technology, his brother's theme of Time, his own isolation, and how he plays in the vastness of the universe and spacetime.

Art I drew related to the subject because I like to respond to asks with art.

But absolutely. I certainly understand where the lack of discussion over his isolation + upbringing comes from, considering a majority of the fanbase that I have seen builds their ideas based on their own version of postcanon. I’m not entirely sure how that would be fixed, but certainly even in the somewhat recent past I would see a lot more content regarding his upbringing both literally and symbolically. I don’t have much to add regarding the things you’ve mentioned, because they just are what they are. Dirk being confined to a singular room left to him by a father figure he never met, in a future where the only other person left on the planet is someone he cannot pursue a relationship of because of himself, with purely 3 robots to keep him companion, one being an exact replica of his own brain who is *also* trapped inside a pair of glasses, is about as literal as it gets to me.

The contrast to me involving the flooded, organic world in comparison to the little speckle of Dirk’s apartment packed with the dude and his technics is not only a representation of his isolation and entrapment within himself, but also of his lack of control. I think his obsession with & themes of control are a direct product in the case of Dirk specifically *of* this kind of upbringing. His themes of technology are also related to his themes around control. So much of his character is actually revolved around this to me like so much. Dirk is so deeply disconnected from humanity in every way and so much of his character + symbolism is based around that.

It doesn’t even have to be about the symbolism or anything though. It’s just pretty *interesting* in the literal sense that he lives in the middle of the ocean in the future. There’s not only a lot to theorise on to do with his young life there, but on how it might affect him in the way he acts for the rest of his life. The latter part is probably what I see mentioned the most by people talking about Dirk regarding this, I’m surprised I don’t see more discussion on the former too though. I really ought to actually talk more about Homestuck stuff on here. I will do it myself.

Roxy & Dirk’s relationship is largely ignored though because there is a narrative a certain demographic spreads that Dirk resented and blamed Roxy for her interest in him, and thus too many people believe that their relationship was or would continue to be an abusive one. Realistically, I believe it’s important to acknowledge that the way Roxy treated Dirk regarding his homosexuality wasn’t right while still acknowledging the obvious amount of respect and admiration Dirk had for Roxy. I mean we have a huge piece of dialogue from their post trickster mode conversations on the quest beds from Dirk purely stating how he feels about Roxy that people completely ignore somehow. I think this usually happens to characters that are women though. I know everyone says it, but it is true. Jane gets the exact same treatment of boiling her down to solely her negative aspects. The things I see completely mischaracterising both of them are horrific.

I mean how much more explicit can it get that their relationship is obviously very important to Dirk? But I digress. I think the best or I should say “most interesting” interpretations of their relationship usually come from DirkRoxy shippers actually.

I would be interested to hear about Dirk’s relation to his brother’s theme of time though. I don’t have any thoughts on this and I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about it before. If you or anyone else would be willing to enlighten me I’d be thrilled.

[napping-sapphic]

I just want to fall in love with someone who makes me feel safe like even when we’re angry or sad or upset i just want to know that both of us are still going to be okay

[starry-kittens]

Some drawings I’ve made!

[hamable]

I need Brennan to win an award. I need the world to know how exceptional a storyteller he is. How do you plan something like this?

I’m suddenly seeing the rat grinders as a sort of self insert for him. Not character-wise, but as tools for writing a mystery. Usually you start with the solution and work backwards. Brennan had to concoct this solution and prepare for every possible thing that the best DnD players he’s ever known might do to crack his story wide open. He needed an entire party of character foils whose primary goal was to cover their tracks and account for periphery details to outsmart The Bad Kids. An unfathomable amount of work to be able to tell this story at the pace it’s being told.

I found myself remarking earlier in the season how much planning and foreknowledge he had to have to have the variety of dome projections from @caitmayart he does and now I realize that’s just scratching the surface.

[transmascissues]

it's silly but the biggest reason why im not into t yet is bc im so afraid of losing my hair. do you have any solutions/tips for it?

first of all, i don’t think it’s silly — it’s natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as like…one of the worst results of aging for men. listening to my dad talk about how much he hates balding definitely did not make me feel particularly good about the knowledge that i may very well be joining him someday. i’m not saying the fear is right, because i don’t think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but it’s an understandable fear given the beauty standards we’re working with, and it’s one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.

one thing that’s helped me is just…paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. i’ve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. i’d say it’s much harder to find an adult man who isn’t balding at all than it is to find one who’s completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything you’ve been told about how bad hair loss is, you’ll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesn’t ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isn’t really even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. we put so much weight on it but it’s really just not that big of a deal. i’ll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didn’t even notice a difference last time i saw them. it’s one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because you’ve been taught that you’re supposed to care about it.

this isn’t something i’ve done personally, but if you really want to desensitize yourself to the idea of it, embrace the time-honored queer tradition of just shaving your whole damn head! find out what you’d look like without hair, find out how you feel about it and what you can do that makes you feel good about your appearance without hair, test the waters while it’s still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it won’t feel like this big scary unknown, and you’ll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that you’ll inevitably hate it. if you don’t want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.

oh, and if you’re attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, there’s no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasn’t helped me with. just off the top of my head, i can think of a couple actors who i think are absolutely fucking gorgeous who have helped me get over my fears about losing my hair. despite what our anti-aging-obsessed world might want you to think, there is no such thing as a physical feature that automatically makes someone less attractive, and while making attractiveness less of a priority in your life is good, it can’t hurt to also give yourself some proof that actually, you might lose your hair and look hot as hell doing it.

basically, entertain the possibility that it won’t be a bad thing at all! whether that’s just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, it’s not an inherently bad thing. i’ve ended up liking a lot of things that were “supposed to” be bad effects of t — i love the weight i’ve gained and the new shape it gives my body, i get a lot of gender euphoria from the fact that my acne is now on parts of my face that i saw a lot of guys in high school get it and i’m not complaining about the scars i get from it either because i’ve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think there’s a lot of joy to be had in the changes we’re taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.

but if it’s something you really don’t want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, it’s not like there’s nothing you can do! products like finasteride (oral) and minoxidil (usually topical but i think there might also be oral versions) are pretty commonly used among trans guys, for the purpose of avoiding hair loss and for other reasons, and there are plenty of other anti-hair loss products out there (though i don’t know how effective any one of them might be). if it’s a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that you’ll go off of t if/when you start noticing signs of it, since no longer having higher t levels would stop the process in its tracks. and if you don’t find prevention options that work for you so it ends up happening, you can always explore different hair styles (judging by the pattern of hair loss i see in my family, i suspect that keeping my hair long would make it less obvious if i started losing mine), find your preferred method of covering it when you don’t feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didn’t have hair to worry about because my main complaint is the way they press my hair onto my neck), or just shave it all off if you don’t like the look of the partial balding but don’t mind a shaved head. the point being — you have options!

at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, you’re going to see your body change as you age in ways that aren’t always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. that’s just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, you’d get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you don’t bald, you’ll see your skin start to wrinkle and sag in places that used to be smooth, your metabolism might slow or your body fat might start to gather in new places; hell, you might lose your hair for a totally different reason and end up in the same place but without the benefits of having been on t that whole time. life is full of bodily changes like that. transphobes will fearmonger about the permanent changes of testosterone all day long but the truth is, there is no escaping permanent bodily changes. whether or not you go on t, your body now isn’t the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isn’t the same as it was at any point in your life before now. our bodies are never supposed to stop growing and aging and changing throughout our lives. there’s no guaranteeing that we’ll love every single change our bodies go through, but that’s okay! there are so many things in life that are more important than the way our bodies look. even if you go on t and lose your hair and don’t like how it looks, your life won’t be ruined; plenty of other things will bring you joy and more than make up for the insecurities.

just think about the gender euphoria and relief from dysphoria that t could give you. would losing your hair be bad enough to outweigh all of that? or is it just the pressure of a society that decided balding is bad that’s making you fear one single change despite how much joy you could have if you let that fear go? only you can decide if going on t is worth the potential downsides for you, but i suspect that for most of us, the benefits of going on t far outweigh the possibility of side effects like hair loss happening down the line.

[whoosh-whoosh-tardis-noises]

I want RTD to come back and say stuff like this again

[justwannabecat]

The one where having a secret lab in the basement is not as much of a red flag as it should be.

Because somehow, EVERY. SINGLE. ADULT. IN ALL OF AMITY. Have “secret” basements.

Sure, MOST of them have refitted them to act as emergency bunkers in case there’s another large-scale ghost attack, with rations and shields and blankets and all that, BUT. Even BEFORE the portal opened up, they were there.

Some of them were laboratories dedicated to one of many sciences. Some of them were just storage for the more concerning family heirlooms. At least one person kept the taxidermied bodies of each and every pet they had over their lifetime. Really, it was more odd for someone to not have some weird secret in their basement.

So when Danny ran from Amity and learned just how many people didn’t have strange, niche basements for their hobbies, he was a little put off. When he was eventually asked to stay with the Wayne family in Gotham, well, maybe he could have phrased it better.

How was he supposed to know that asking if they had a “super-secret basement either for your job, your personal life, or disaster prevention” would lead to them thinking he knew about their nightlife?

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 251

Danny is tired and annoyed. On one hand, his parents took the whole ‘so I might be slightly dead’ pretty well! Which is good! On the other, they decided to send him and his sisters to their uncle while they take care of the Guys in White and refurbish the house to be, well, him safe. Which meant a ridiculously long flight all the way to New Jersey. 

A flight he was pretty sure happened to be illegal what with the fact that neither of them were asked for their IDs or anything despite having them with them. Hm. Y’know he’s not going to question it, he’s getting a nap the moment they get to Uncle Harvey’s. 

[ameamedraws]

Lovingly tucking your rival’s hair behind his ear and telling him you hate him: Akechi’s attempt to make sense of his contradicting feelings