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#working on it) and lgbt history etc etc like I have read the shit I arrived at my current opinions by reading the shit
evilratfag · 1 year
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here’s all the useful/random things i’ve found on the internet in one place (i’ll also be updating this from time to time to add new stuff)
piracy:
(btw make sure to AT LEAST have a few ad blockers before u start pirating and if u can get a vpn)
nikfilecabinet — their entire account has a lot of useful shit ive just mostly used their piracy section
does the dog die — u can look up triggers that are in movies/tv shows (not directly related to piracy but though id throw it in here anyway)
books:
communist manifesto — it like 50 pages just read it
stone butch blues —
it is frequently discussed as a difficult yet essential work for LGBT communities, as it "never shies away from portraying the anti-Semitism, classism, homophobia, anti-butch animus, and trans-phobia that protagonist Jess Goldberg faced on a daily basis—but it also shows the healing power of love and political activism."
fucking trans women — (cw for lots of nudity obviously)
a zine by trans women, about the sex lives of trans women. It is an educational and instructional tool as much as it is a creative exploration of how we have sex.
all animorphs books — kids are able to morph into animals and have to save the planet or something idk i haven’t finished the first book yet
spanish for beginners — speaks for itself
an indigenous peoples history of the us —
it describes and analyzes a four-hundred-year span of complex Indigenous struggles against the colonization of the Americas
electronic furby manual — a l l h a i l f u r b y s
misc:
native languages — they have lots of reliable info on native things and links to tribal sites
scarleteen — they have articles on tons of important things relating to sex ed, including things on queer sex, stuff relating to being trans/intersex, having sex while disabled/having a disabled partner, safe sex, consent, u get the picture
mending/fixing/taking care of clothes — they also have stuff about “upgrading” clothes (remaking, resizing, etc.) (also i got this from this twt thread that has other stuff too if u wanna check it out)
breast cancer self exam patient education for post mastectomy trans patients — just in case twitter finally blows up here’s the pdf
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chaifootsteps · 4 months
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sorry to drama dump here, but it's kinda relevant to the stuff talked about? So Hbomb made a new video about cases of plagiarism and what surprised me was that the majority of it wasn't about Illuminaughtii as the initial patreon buzz suggested, but James Somerton. If you haven't heard of Somerton, he makes (made?) videos about queer content on YT. Some of it was better than others (his Helluva Boss video was so bad I never rewatched it) but I liked some of his stuff for helping me understand LGBT history and media better.
turns out he's a massive plagiarist, liar and was looking like he was implicating his co-writer who may or may not have known about this in order to preserve his own image. tbh I feel so dumb for having watched him for so long and not picked up on it - looking back it seems so obvious that the stuff I liked in his vids likely all came from various other books & articles and the judgemental, catty bits were very likely his own invention. what's worse is he complained about a lack of support before to the extent it threatened the continuation of the channel - either losing patrons or Youtube hiding his stuff due to its LGBT content and I believed him because it sounded plausible. but now I just don't know. I feel awful knowing how close I got to becoming his patreon a couple of times because I wanted to support what he was doing and I gave him the benefit of the doubt when I'd heard passing references to plagiarism before, assuming it was a small mistake anyone could make like forgetting to add a source - and not just reading huge passages nearly unchanged for minutes on end!
the whole time he was just ripping other people off. even by youtube plagiarism standards, the scale of it just staggers me
sorry for venting in your inbox. It just struck me watching Hbomb talk that Viv and James are kinda alike - they prop themselves up like pillars of the LBGT community for the services/art they provide while actively minimizing and ignoring other people working in the field or who came before them, then they make up shit when people call them out and just lie on the people taking them to task as harrassers & etc. I would hope someday there's an article or video that lays out the timeline of everyone Viv has hurt the way Hbomb does with JS here, but I think between Hazbin dropping and probably not getting critical acclaim and NDAs expiring next year, plus all the actually talented writers leaving or pulling away from her projects, it won't be the sharp decline suffered by Illuminaughtii or JS but a slow attrition into only her most dedicated fans still supporting her (assuming she doesn't get into yet more Twitter drama that derails whatever good will remains)
I was wondering why everyone was crossing their fingers for Hbomb to make a video about Vivzie.
All I can say is that if he wants to do so and needs the proof to back it up, there's my DMs.
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betaoctillery · 2 years
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oooops ive upset the "bi lesbians arent real/lesbians cant love men" crowd on twitter by providing documented history of the lesbian/wlw community definitively & unapologetically accepting bi lesbianism as an identity LOL. tbh its kinda concerning how many of them think it isnt relevant bcus the source is from the 70's, as if it being old automatically disqualified it as an actual source (one person literally qrt'd me to say was i gonna also bring up when lgbt was considered a sickness? as if that were a checkmate & history is just completely devoid of nuance lol) meanwhile, actively believing anything a random carrd (w/o actual sources) claims. no one listens when its described, sometimes incredibly broken down & simply for them, they just hear that someone disagreed with them & jump to attack attack attack instead of even at all considering the info being presented? which again, i do bother to source. like i have ppl calling me names & all sorts of stuff which like is so needlessly hostile & a really childish ad hominem. but anyways. i qrt'd this on what is at the moment a 12k+ queerphobic tweet made by a fucking 13 year old, in hopes that maybe they & others might read it & try to understand it, look up more info & form more of an opinion on it... rather than literally, word for word, parroting a decades old terf dogwhistle to an audience of tens of thousands if not more (bcus we know how the internet works, a viral tweet almost always ends up as a screenshot on fb groups, here on tumblr, reddit, etc.) this shit is so irresponsible in so many ways. why is a random queerphobic child the mouthpiece for an entire fucking community? what gives them the authority to attack ppl & call them names when someone disagrees? if you learn or internalize anything from me, let it be this: no one is allowed to tell you what your identity is. especially not rando teenagers who dont know shit about the queer community & our history & actively refuses to learn it. esp if they belligerently attack queers they find unpalatable.
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Lavender Woman. vol. 2, issue 5. august *1973*
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strawberrycola · 2 days
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hello. i made a very long, very indulgent addition to the sam and max subreddit post earlier, and decided to make it its own post because i had way too many thoughts for a reblog. and the idea of clogging notes was eating away at my brain like mice eat a cheese. this is mostly just train of thought, so i apologise if it's complete nonsense. i've just thought a lot about sam and max's relationship, and the connection lgbt (and neurodivergent, for that matter) fans have had to the series, from my perspective since i was like 8. obviously that's gonna be tinted thru a tumblr lens, because ftmp that's where i see The Good Stuff. and i'm gay as hell, so there's bias. ok read more time kiss kiss.
anyhoozles, coincidentally i've been back on my sam and max bullshit recently, as i finally got a chance to play "this time it's virtual". and discovered vr is not my thing.
so to start, listen...i don't think sam and max's relationship is quite as cut and dry as i believe myself and perhaps many others would imagine/hope. i'm eyeing the "susan" gag from the aformentioned ttiv, in particular. but as your resident specialist in "complex and obscure knowledge of three series total or so", the question of sam and max's relationship has been here since the very beginning of the official comics. like. this has been a thing. pretending it's new is foolhardy. and wrong. obviously there's "like butch and sundance", the wedding toppers, hell, the devs of the telltale game trilogy lampshade their relationship a very decent amount, both in the game itself and in the commentary. at the end of 209, "chariot of the dogs", they directly bring it up during the final cutscene tie straightening maneuver max does. one of the devs literally gets excited about it, iirc. and one of my personal favourite examples is "do you find my warmth...alarming, sam?" from 305, "the city that dares not sleep."
that, in particular, is one of several lines directly from MR. PURCELL HIMSELF, that he gave to the devs each game as lines that must be in the game.
and speaking of season 3, i'd like to mention 305, "they stole max's brain".
(i am now holding "noir sam" so close to my chest, jsyk. that trope means the world to me. it has influenced SO much of my work, and i still use napalm's playthrough on youtube as a sleep aid. REMASTER WHEN.)
of course i and many others latched onto that shit, are you kidding me???? that whole episode was RIPE for hurt/comfort. minor spoiler warning for those that would mind, it's a roaring rampage of revenge plot. at least for the first 30 minutes or so. it's part of a long history between the two of freaking the hell out the second they're separated from each other in a way that doesn't end in like, five minutes. (305. if you know, you know. fkin brutal, man.) sam, in the second act of the game, has been affected by an alternate reality plot, and fully believes he has carried max's brain in a jar his whole LIFE and seemingly has no plans to stop doing so!! it's part of a season where the WHOLE PLOT revolves around the nature of their relationship and how it could change. you don't have to be a shipper yourself to understand how that could be incredibly compelling to the people that fancy them as a couple.
and it's a fandom that i give a lot of credit to lgbt people for revitalising in the mid 2010s~ (i was already a fan by then, and i'm still really curious as to why it blew up so much, but hey, who's complaining?), as well as in 2021~ in response to skunkape's remaster of telltale's season one "save the world" installment, and the release of ttiv. (obviously the actual demographic spread across platform to platform is a varied thing, etc. etc. i'd like to stay firmly in my lane, and i don't wanna overstate any particular demos in my discussion here, or hyperbolise too much.)
Obviously, you don't have. to be a shipper. completely fine. pretty common. Who Give A Care. and we're not even gonna get into the "not suitable" content. i can't fault anyone for not being cool with the actual sexualisation of childhood stuff they like. that's something i'm pretty "ambivalent with a leaning towards discomfort" about for quite a few things myself. and it turns out there wasn't even any "unmentionable graphic imagery" to begin with. shocking. HOWEVER. i'm fascinated but not completely surprised by the blatant homophobia and disgust towards the fanart of the ship.
like, to be nuanced about things, and it's not like the admin is extending the same courtesy here, this is clearly an older fan. like i think from around the same timeframe i was first introduced to it, give or take. maybe they missed a lot of the tumblr mid-2010s activity, or maybe that's going in to their Burning Disgust towards Yaoi Sam and Max Kissing Not Clickbait. i know the fanart had some level of cross-posting, at least on youtube as dubs iirc. OR maybe i'm a fool who is actively tricking you with my words and none of the above is true at all. however...pal. again, in my opinion, we owe those lgbt and neurodivergent kids and adults our whole rights as a fan community. you don't have to like it, but you do have to be respectful, jerkbag.
i can't be the only one who was devastated by the drought of content post "the devil's playhouse". we had a [1] singular whole webcomic to tide us over, with the occasional sketch on purcell's social medias. of course, there was a small community of fans, and some incredible stuff they made, looking at you Sam Dies At The End. i weeped. but it was slow and steady. and then, out of seemingly nowhere, people en masse suddenly REALLY CARED ABOUT THE THING THAT BROUGHT ME SO MUCH JOY AS A LITTLE GUY. like, fuck man...i first found out what autism was when i was real young because max's character description on wikipedia contained speculation as to whether or not he has it. (jury's still out, ...but we all have our little comforts. okay? also speaking of, "is max gay?" is like. one of the longest ongoing bits. like cmon dude.) now granted, by 2021 i was a little old for the new wave of shipping that sprouted up. tiktok edits are Not Always My Thing. but that's okay!!!! it doesn't need to be my thing. i'm really glad they're having fun. :] and i don't want to come across as like. infantilising in my discussion of the younger fanbase, so i apologise if my tone has come across that way. it really is simply the comforting thought that kids like me can experience what i had.
i remember how much fun my friends and i used to have when we were 16! (hi xavier, if ur reading this. miss you, buddy. :]) we got silly with it! we got angsty about season 3!! we wrote fanfiction, hell, an amazing fic my friend wrote that i beta'd is still the most kudos'd shipping fic on ao3!! the fanartists i liked had such an INCREDIBLE grasp on how to write sam and max's banter. it was a good time! and knowing these characters are giving joy to a new generation makes me giddy, dude. hell yeah! get "feral" or whatever the hell it is these days. find comfort in characters that don't really care about anyone's opinion except each other's, who get to be as weird and annoying and gross as they want all the time. that tend to punch up. that show love differently than what's seen as conventional. that end up saving the day, not even because they have to, so much as they genuinely enjoy each adventure together. max was my personal opportunity to feel comfort in all my weird freaky mannerisms i kept safe behind the polished exterior i had to wear as a kid. i found solace in the thought that those two were practically made for each other, as i stumbled through my own gender and sexuality crises. i loved how dry and dark sam was allowed to be. the banjo bits, the phone jokes, the repartee. so much of this series has influenced me, and helped me become who i am, as a creator and as a functional guy who Does Things.
so that's a small bit of why i think sam and max had, and still has, a lot of appeal to people that grew up like me. there's a lot of rough stuff i went through that made the idea of a couple of anarchist detectives completely devoted to one another that go around the seedy underbelly of america saving the day ("almost on purpose!") really, really interesting. steve purcell is unapologetic about how gross america can be, especially in the comics. at the heart of it, sam and max do what they do both because they enjoy it, and they enjoy each other. and i think, to overlook that, is to miss some of the whole point of the franchise. oh, i'm sorry, giant cockroaches literally everywhere is fine, streets crusted in various goos, totally chill, but gay kissing is the thing that Absolutely Nauseates you? plugging your ears and screaming gross seems like...kind of a weak move here, ngl. a work that doesn't shy away from how confusing and wild life can be has a decent chance to be compelling to marginalised groups, who often have to put up with the more disgusting aspects of reality anyways. at least these two odd guys are having fun with it. sam and max understand each other, each of their strengths and flaws, and choose to be with each other every day because of and in spite of them. they choose to love where they are, because of and in spite of its many, many, many flaws. they choose to be who they are because they love what they do. there's something touching there, if you like to think about such things. there are some occasions i find myself wishing sam and max's relationship was more...concrete. i wish we had an answer to Does Sam And Max Is Gay? but at the same time, being vague and obtuse is like. their whole shtick. so maybe it's just right how it is. and uh. obviously this is a fictional series. in the end, it's all how we enjoy it that matters, and it's not the end of the world. and as a final cherry on top, nothing beats turning to my husband and asking, "is sam and max queerbait", before delighting in the 3 hr conversation that follows.
and to get to the point. as the old adage unfortunately goes, it's...okay. to not like...ships. and i can even somewhat understand being frustrated by a subreddit you created being "flooded" by a thing you're not into. only somewhat, because a: we've always been here, and b: because you can. just not look at it? idk if reddit has a filtering system, but. the scroll wheel is free. to throw a tantrum and ban topics because you're personally offended people think they're gay? you might be missing out on some of the most fun you can have outside the series, and you're spitting in the face of the people who held this fandom up on their shoulders like atlas.
and you're being a dick about it.
TO CONCLUDE:
wah wah they're gay gay homosexual gay and they don't pay taxes. deal or die, fake fan.
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sunstonez · 1 year
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I live in such an awkward inbetween when it comes to my autism. I feel like I can't relate to anyone.
I had early therapeutic intervention from childhood, but no concrete diagnosis until adulthood due to the misogyny of the health care system in my province. I wasn't able to be in any specialized program at school (they just didn't exist due to lack of funding, or I couldn't apply due to lack of diagnosis), but I was sat at the back of the class with special headphones and teacher supervision, otherwise I actively wandered the halls at random, caused disruptions, or straight up left the building and walked home/got lost. I could socialize with my peers at a stunted level, but constantly lost friends because I was too much of a "spaz", I was unable to understand them, and/or their parents didn't like dealing with my meltdowns. I loved math and constantly aced all related courses, I read books beyond my education level, but dropped out of highschool with a shit GPA before the end of grade 10 because I couldn't reliably feed myself or keep myself clean, let alone keep track of 6 separate classes. I ran away from home/was kicked out due to violent behaviour on top of being lgbt, and wound up homeless for a period until the local LGBT/disability community stepped up, and housed me through the kindness of their hearts.
Now I'm an adult. I've been out of my parents house for nearly a decade, but I've always lived with full time care from my friends or my spouse; otherwise I revert back to homelessness. I can work, but I need hyperspecific accommodations, and 1:1 help from my spouse throughout the workday. It's a miracle I still have my current job, I've lost so many others because I would meltdown constantly without support. Even with these supports, with the permission to work from home and with the help of my spouse, I have at least one violent meltdown a day when I work, if not several. I can cook dinner on a semi-reliable basis, but I always need some kind of help; and other meals I always need prepared for me. I can go out independently to specific locations, and anywhere else with 1:1 aid, but if anything deviates from the plan I have a full on violent meltdown in public. I can understand complex medical history, philosophy, and political theory; but I still can't understand people's basic feelings or social nuances. I desperately want to make more friends, but I am terrified that they will infantalize me due to my blatantly obvious problems, find me annoying, etc.
I just. I can't relate to other people who have low support needs, and/or diagnosed later in life. I can't relate to the concept of masking. I can't relate to needing some accommodation at work, but largely being independent. At the same time I can't relate to being someone with high support needs, because I don't have those needs myself. The intervention I had was daily, but not nearly as intense as my peers with higher support needs. I can do a lot of things on my own as an adult. I do have a full time job. I live in my own apartment and keep my own finances, with 1:1 daily help.
I feel terribly isolated. No one I meet seems to understand.
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graylinesspam · 2 years
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In honor of Ace week, I think we should have some hard truths.
I've been exploring my sexuality since I was probably about 7. When my parents explained what lesbians were (to explain why my aunt had a wife) and I started asking myself if I thought the girls I saw on TV we're pretty.
I had decided no I didn't think they were especially pretty and that was that until puberty hit. At which point I realised that there wasn't really any difference in the way I saw girls and boys. I came out as Bi in the 7th grade. I never experienced so much as a scoff. Even living in the very conservative town I was I found a whole slew of other queer kids to support me. My parents didn't even blink at the news.
I have been very lucky to have never experienced biphobia.
When I went through my gender crisis. Twice technically. The first time in the 8th grade when I started experiencing dysphoria and talked with my parents about it. My very straight very cis parents suggested I might be trans and should look into it. I was really intimidated by the thought but "tried it on" for a weekend. I used anboys name, dressed masculinity and out on fake facial hair. (I was 12 and a half cut me some slack) but I didn't feel like a boy so I chalked it up to body insecurities and started working on my self esteem. Again my parents were very helpful.
By the time I was a junior with the self-esteem of a bitch in a manic episode I realized that I still didn't feel connected with my body. That things besides sexist stereotypes still made me feel gross and I really didn't like a lot of things about being female. So I did the gender crisis thing all over again but this time with a supportive lgbt+ society to hold my hand. I came out as nonbinary (agender) and I received all of one dipshit remark from some redneck biitch in my history class. To which I very seriously responded "chick or not your girlfriends still sucked my face off during prom". That was before they were together for the record.
But being ace. That I ignored for a long time. I had some grasp of the fact that I just wasn't motivated to do anything with anyone else. I had been out for 5 years and had two very temporary girlfriends. I never had the knee jerk sexual thoughts that everyone esplee talked about. I wasn't interested in dating really. I made a shit partner. And both my girlfriends told be they didn't feel like I was attracted to them. The first suggested I might be straight.
I wasn't against s*x but high schoolers always want to do it in the most convoluted way. Before their of legal age, or somewhere on campus, or in someone's car, or literally out in front of their friends. In their parents house when their parents were very against it. I thought all of that was pretty stupid. I didn't want to get in trouble over something as dumb as having sex some way I shouldn't. So I just didn't. And if confused a lot of people when i asked why they would. "Because I wanted to have sex/ I didn't care if we got caught/ it was worth getting in trouble" etc.
I tried to force myself to date/get intimate with people but it always just felt kind of gross. Like tbh other people's mouths are like /wet/ and I just feel like I'm getting a messy cheek kiss from my grandma with her dentures out.
But I didn't want to look into asexual. I didn't want to read about it or consider it because it felt like giving up. I wanted to date and get married and fall in love and have sex and everything you're supposed to do to find someone you want to spend the rest of your life with. Admitting that I was ace (and aro) felt like submitting myself to isolation. And honestly, it kind of was.
I've received some pretty nasty comments from lesbians about my sexuality. I've been asked to leave queer spaces that I occupied for more than six years. I've had someone ask about my gender identity and only admit I'm part of the community because I'm trans. I've been called inhumane. I've had people tell me it's just nerves from being a virgin. I've had people offer to "treat me real nice" so I wouldn't be scared anymore. And I've received minimuml support from the community.
A few kind bi and trans people go out of their way to insist we are part of the community but when it comes to actually talking about the queer experience or looking for comfort when my queerness makes me feel alone I've had all of 1 other ace reach out to help me. They were younger than me.
I have found more ace people (here on Tumblr and very much by accident) but I feel jaded by the comments I've been afraid to reach out unless someone else does it first. I think we as the Ace community need to do better. I think we need to become more active with each other and talk about our experiences more. I know it's scary. I know I'm not the only one who's been bitched at by others in the community. But I'm tired of feeling alone and I know the baby aces are too. We can ask the larger community to do better till we're blue in the face but we need to do it first. We need to support each other. Our sister aros too
Thank you.
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abanomath · 4 years
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Retconning Sexuality vs New Characters
One of the usual comments whenever a comic character comes out is “But why don’t they just make new LGBT characters instead of changing old ones” and figured I’d kind of explain why, at least, I support changing old characters. 
(For this discussion I’m going to use Marvel examples because I spent hours doing the pictures for Marvel and don’t want to spend time doing DC too).
The overarching reasons essentially come down to this: Comic characters ride on their old popularity more than people seem to think. And it needs to be acknowledged the role nostalgia plays in comic sales. If it didn’t Marvel wouldn’t go to great lengths to keep bringing back dead characters from the silver age to the 90s, create a timescale specifically to avoid aging their characters, or continually hearken back to old events regularly. DC wouldn’t force Batman into every book under the sun because he has the name recognition. 
For every new character that succeeds, such as Kamala or Miles, dozens disappear into the annals of small Marvel wikia pages. And even those, most really build upon legacies of those mainline heroes. 
With that acknowledgement also comes the problem - most of these characters are white, heterosexual, Christian (and occasionally Jewish). And have been for decades upon decades. Over the past twenty years, there has been a lot of work done to try and rectify this and have even a semblance of representation for the various groups that read comics. 
Someone on Reddit put it best “Marvel/DC are fundamentally about fanfics of fanfics of fanfics”. And like fanfic writers, they are constantly making changes to keep up with the audience. A lot of comic stories are very outdated, and writers update them. 
We see this in all aspects of characters, not just their sexual orientation and race. If Reed Richard’s was written like Stan Lee wrote him, accusations of sexism would be commonplace. Deadpool was basically Slade Wilson, but Marvel, until a new writer came along and changed his personality. The X-men are going through a dramatic shift, a rejuvenation, as they are reinvented after years of being shit on. Cates has recently retconned tons of Symbiote lore and his run is great.
Comic characters are constantly being reinvented to keep stories fresh and interesting to the audience. The difference for what is a central aspect of a character and “forcing change” is time. Northstar wasn’t always gay. He wasn’t allowed to be gay, no character was at Marvel for a long time. He was retconned. Rictor was retconned. Shatterstar was retconned. 
These are some of the oldest, most high profile gay characters at Marvel. And they were retcons. But since it has been some time since the retcons (Northstar now 30 years), they are just parts of the characters. 
I want to use a visual. This is art by the wonder Luciano Vecchio. It's fanart, but it’ll serve the purpose of an example. It's not a complete drawing of every LGBT character in marvel, but it has enough to illustrate the point.
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Now I’m going to grey out all the character’s that weren’t originally gay. This means, the characters that either weren’t allowed to be gay (because of Marvel editorials), or were reinvented as LGBT by later writers. You’ll notice immediately how so many of the big recognizable LGBT characters are greyed out. Deadpool, Valkyrie, MAC, Loki, Rictor & Shatterstar, Northstar, Moondragon, etc. Even poor little Tong was retconned in by Fraction. Nor was Karma established as a lesbian for many years after her debut. Mystique and Destiny, despite having subtext, were only confirmed to be lovers in 2019. 
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Now I’m going to take out the alternate universe versions and “implied characters” (aka, characters that were implied to be LGBT but not confirmed till much later). Herc is gone (despite being historically bisexual, Marvel insists he is straight in 616), Jessica Drew is gone, Colossus (who is hard to see), is also gone. Daken is really the big “implied” character. Despite kissing a man in his initial run as part of a ploy (and then killing him), Daken’s sexuality wasn’t more explicit for several years until Dark Wolverine, and wasn’t confirmed until 2011. 
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Next I’m going to illustrate the “new character” problem. I’m going to grey out all the characters that have less than 40 main appearances. Why 40? It is arbitrary, but the idea is that its enough appearances that means the character has probably been used by multiple writers (though not always the case, such as Vivsector who was basically used almost exclusively by Peter Milligan).
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And you see that almost all the characters are now grey. Even this list of 15 characters (Billy, Teddy, Karolina, Bling, Morph, Phylla Vell, POD, Toni Ho, Angela, Anole, Victoria Hand, Graymalkin, Vivsector, Striker and Doop) come with their own caveats. 
Striker, despite meeting the threshold, hasn’t made an actual comic appearance in 5 years, and almost all his appearances were in Avengers Academy (with cameos in other series like Young Avengers). Doop is a complete joke character. Victoria Hand was a Dark Reign character that died 8 years ago and will likely never return. Angela, if you count her real-world circumstances with spawn, is technically a retcon. Even Anole, who has the most appearances of any LGBT character that started LGBTA, has basically been a cameo in recent years. 
And this is the inherent problem with the “well just make new characters”. They have. Several times. What happens to the majority of them is that the second the writer is done with them, they are tossed aside. Why?
Because they don’t have the history to propel them forward. The history that Marvel and DC have based their entire business model around. 
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piratemadi · 3 years
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please make your critical post of supernatural those are literally the only posts about supernatural i care about, especially since i side eye the heck out of the many people who give supernatural a pass because they ship two boring white dudes (dean and castiel) PLEASE
omg ok nobody make fun of me for posting an earnest criticism of this show i enjoy critical analysis and being a hater
i think most of why this show sucks has already been covered pretty thoroughly but these r the main things abt it that piss ME off.
the racism runs so SO deep. supernatural is supposed to be an exploration of americana thru horror (and i’ll give them that. like the idea of deconstructing america and all its fallacies thru horror is genius and in competent hands it would be absolutely incredible. but anyway) but it only really scrapes the surface of what is inherently horrific about americana! something like that is supposed to be an INTERROGATION of monstrosity and how america (and western society more broadly) creates monsters out of human beings and how white christian morals are established as the ONLY acceptable morals and how anyone who falls outside of those norms (non christian, non white, lgbt, people with substance use disorders, prisoners, the poor, indigenous people/cultures etc) are monsterized, so to speak, because of an oppressive and unloving colonial society. like u cannot have a horror narrative abt monsters attacking family values and white suburban life without invoking some very old and racist conventions! but instead of subverting that supernatural just reinforces it! it consistently fails to make any kind of real statement because the most demonized parts of society are the people who are also treated the WORST in canon! native american beliefs are stolen and turned into stupid bogeymen without the show ever featuring a native character or seriously grappling with the inherent violence of america as a colonial state, black men are consistently portrayed as angry and evil while black women are treated like shit (dean’s happy ending at the end of s5 is with a white woman he fucked one time instead of with the black woman who he was in love with??), impoverished people are mostly ignored and when they’re not theyre monsters (theres one episode centered around a poor rural family that commits murder and cannibalism. no supernatural stuff or monsters. just poor people. thats the scare).
theres this consistent fixation on preserving american suburbia, on saving “normal” (read: white middle class) people and it sets up this dynamic of like. the “real world” is the white middle class and then there’s hunters including our mains who defend that “real world” against monsters and demons, which is just Everything Else. and the writers PRETEND to struggle w the question of monsters and what makes one but they just toss it around without ever actually committing to answering that question with compassion or narrative coherency. they have multiple episodes about characters who were raised human, who want to be human, but have to be killed because of an inherent evil nature. there’s a plot in the early seasons about how one of the main characters has demonic powers, and instead of saying that doesnt make him inherently bad and he’s allowed to fully access all parts of himself without being fundamentally evil, they consistently frame intrinsically neutral traits as inherently evil specifically because they go against a christian ideal of morality! and eventually he learns to suppress these powers and that’s that!
and then it establishes christianity as the guiding principle of america, not in a way of like “american culture and history is deeply steeped in white supremacist protestantism that has led to incredibly fucked up views on god and love and morality and thats what we have to deal with as people who live here”, but in a way of like “the christian god is real and he’s a white guy who fucking hates you.” which like. Ok. they bastardize and trivialize any religions that arent christian while building the entire series on christianity. Ok. like i guess its possible to write stories about white christianity without implying that every other religion is full of shit but supernatural did not do that on any level
its also just. really poorly written. i genuinely loved the first season i thought it was really well paced and that the characters were introduced really well like the first season is a GOOD horror story in terms of family as horror and the inherent terror of americana. but the pacing and the character development started tripping up in s2. by s3 they started raising the stakes Exponentially which honestly is such a kiss of death for good fiction like every season mounting a bigger badder antagonist than the last one is the surest way to kill a story bc it means the earlier entries in that story become basically meaningless in the face of the new bad guy. u dont need to raise the stakes to write a good story! a well written story abt the horror and drama of a close knit and unhealthy family caught up in something they don’t really understand isn’t Less emotionally resonant than, like, having to stop the world from ending, because at the end of the day its Fiction and none of it matters beyond what u can make the audience really Feel. im not gonna feel sorrow if 7 billion fake little people die. i didnt cry when the death star blew up whatever planet it blew up. what DOES make me feel sorrow is a few truly well written characters whose relationships are complicated and tragic and whose motivations i can understand and whose inner lives i can imagine. raising the stakes destroys a good story and thats exactly what happened to supernatural (not that the racism and misogyny and american protestant moralizing wasn’t killing it already)
also, the misogyny makes the female characters basically impossible to watch. like not a single person on that show is a good actor (except sterling k brown love u king u were the best actor that show ever saw) but they didnt even give any of the women anything to work with. its literally so cringey to watch any woman onscreen except maybe like. bela talbot and she was treated like utter shit.
god. you know that expression dont fall in love with potential? i dont do that w people i do it w fiction. i came off black sails and the untamed and frankenstein and i watched the first couple seasons of supernatural with my friend and it was like...there was so much room for it to SAY something about monsters and how society creates them thru violence and how deeply horrific american protestantism is. like theres so many questions and concepts that it brought up that it never actually SAID something about. shithole of wasted potential. and yeah dean and castiel is stupid there i said it
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voxofthevoid · 4 years
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Taking It Up The Ass Isn’t Character Growth - A Rant
So, in response to an ask a while back, I said I had a rant brewing on fandom and sex positions, and well, a lot of you wanted to see it, so here you go. You literally asked for it.
Disclaimer: This is going to talk a lot about top/bottom roles in slash fic and fandom attitude towards them and is heavily filtered through the lens of my own tastes and experiences with fandom. I’d also like to be upfront that I am 100% in favor of people writing whatever fictional content they want, and it’s not what fandom does with characters that bothers me but rather how that translates into attitudes towards real, live people. Also, this is the essay version of a slow burn AU because I regurgitate my entire fandom history before getting to the point. Beware.
I discovered fan-fiction around a decade ago, had no clue what the hell it was, got hooked and dived deeper. I started participating in fandom circa 2013, and I was fairly young and also completely inexperienced both sexually and romantically. The fandom in question was Hannibal and my ship of choice was Hannibal/Will. It was/is a very chill fandom in general, but we had our drama. And chief among the contentious topics was—you guessed it—the top/bottom debate. I can’t actually remember any other topic that was discussed and argued for so ardently in that fandom, at least in those days. Even after I drifted away, I came across a few posts on the matter.
Generally, you had two camps—people who supported strict roles and those who were in favor of switching*. And because we’re a society plagued by illogical assumptions, the strict role camp mostly had people who thought Mr. Big Bad Cannibal in the Fancy Suits wouldn’t take it up the ass because he’s older, more experienced, more mentally stable, and of course, more ‘dominant’ in personality. Yes, that sentence is chock full of problematic shit. I am aware. Lots of people were aware and argued strongly against attributing top/bottom roles to personality. I don’t remember anyone arguing as enthusiastically for Top Will, but those voices were also there. But the general idea was that assigning strict top/bottom roles to a male/male couple was casting them in a heterosexual mold and thus, the progressive option was to make them switch. Strict roles also garnered comparisons to “yaoi” and uke/seme stereotypes, which was of course bad and fetishizing and we, the Western media fans, of course had to do better. Stealth racism is fun to untangle.
Anyway, I lapped up the woke juice. Partly because I was a baby queer from Buttfuck Nowhere, Asia, who had zero exposure to LGBT+ communities and what queer folks did with each other. Partly because it was the stance taken by most of my favorite writers so it seemed like a good position to emulate.
Emulate it I did. Most discussions I had about this happened in private with the handful of close friends I had in fandom. Where it really showed was in my writing. I made sure to write switching—maybe not in every fic, but then I alternated between fics. Thing is though, I did have a preference. I liked Top Will. I created and consumed a ton of Top Hannibal, and sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was not, but I couldn’t pinpoint why it made me uncomfortable. Back then, I thought I was a cis questioning/bi girl and once again, the impression I got was that not being MLM, having a preference was automatic fetishization. So I tried my best to justify my preferences, to my friends at least. I think what I said was that fandom was skewed towards Top Hannibal, and I liked the opposite because I’m a contrary fuck. Which I am, to be fair, but this was just me desperately trying to figure shit out without being offensive.
That’s the line I touted all the way until 2018, which was when I fucked off to grad school in A City, finally freed of Buttfuck Nowhere and able to actually date. At this point, I was settled in my sexuality (girls only) and questioning my gender (non-binary or trans guy). I had also tentatively figured out during undergrad that I’m an exclusive top and a Dom. Actual attempts at dating cemented that, yes, those are my preferences, about as flexible as a steel rod. Cue motherfucking epiphany over my fanfic tastes.
And see, over these years, I was engaging intermittently with fandom. I dutifully wrote switch couples. I also continued to have rigid tastes and continued to explain it away as being a contrary fuck—to be fair, until Steve/Bucky, my preference did seem to be the opposite of the larger fandom preference. But correlation, as we know, isn’t causation. Until Steve/Bucky, I continued to write versatile couples because I honestly didn’t have the guts to just say I liked it just one way. I do now but even then, I feel compelled to add that it’s because I want to see my own taste reflected in fic, so I write/read the character I relate to as a top, it's not that deep etc. Would I be as forthright if I didn’t have that reason? Would I have such strict preferences in fic if I didn’t have strict preferences IRL? The latter’s a mystery, but the former isn’t—I wouldn’t be because fandom is still entrenched in the same ideas that got me to this point to begin with.
In every fandom I’ve been in, I’ve seen some version of this debate go around. Sometimes, it’s one party saying “why would you write Character X as a bottom, he’s so Reason A” and a reblog chain that insults the OP and/or extols the virtues of switching. Sometimes, it’s a general-ish message that says they don’t understand why people have strict preferences when we all know real gay couples switch. Sometimes, it’s blanket statements that accuse anyone with preferences of fetishizing. Sometimes, it’s the same reasoning that gets you “Character Y is a top because of Reason B” transposed on versatile couples except this takes the form of “they switch because they’re equals.”
Ya’ll, I’m fucking tired.
I have long since lost count of the number of stories I’ve seen where an exclusive top learning bottom and liking it is character growth. Where a character who prefers to bottom taking a turn on top is empowering.
Isolated, these are fine. But I’ve seen enough of such stories that it’s distinctly discomfiting and a major squick. Sometimes a trigger, if I'm too immersed in the story. I’m not going to try and burn an author at the stake because they pissed me off. I am just going to close that window and quietly handle my shit. People can write whatever they want. But this one theme hits too close to home, as you can see from this 1.6k rant.
My friend (also my ex-girlfriend) and I had an all-out bitching session about this the other day. Both of us are kinky fuckers who have rigid, complementary roles we prefer and we have both had our grueling days of struggling to reconcile our sexual tastes with our ideologies precisely because of how these things are frowned upon in conservative and progressive circles. Seeing that in fandom, of all places, is both insulting and exhausting. Topping and bottoming aren’t personality traits. Neither is D/s. It’s sexual preference and power play. It really does not have to be that deep. I am not exorcising childhood trauma using the bodies of women. My partners, former and current, have not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. We will not become better, more complete individuals once I magically stop being a stone top and my partners embrace the joys of a strap-on.
I have, with my own two eyes, seen someone say that in a really committed relationship, of course the couple will switch.
Bullshit.
It’s transparent bullshit. This does not get attributed to cisgender M/F couples. Even when the automatic assumptions of woman = bottom and man = top get addressed, switching isn't presented as the default. No one’s saying “oh, if you really love your husband, you’ll peg him”. I do know butch/femme sapphic couples get their own share of shit. Because it’s all heteronormativity, right? Can’t have any other reason for top/bottom roles.
You have two extremes with “so who’s the woman” on one end and “it’s woke only if they switch” on the other, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re equally damaging. There shouldn’t be a pressure, however subtle, to conform your taste in fiction to some arbitrary idea of progressiveness. People are going to like whatever they want anyway; all this does is create an atmosphere where those likes can’t always be freely expressed without a lot of mental gymnastics. We’re seeing so many versions of this in the pushback against so-called problematic content, but smaller, subtler versions exist too.
Fictional characters aren’t real. They can be whatever you want them to be. And yes, other people will often want them to be the exact opposite of your ideas, but that’s just how things work. Meanwhile, the people behind these usernames? They’re real. No one should be throwing real people under the bus to ‘protect’ characters that don’t exist. Hannibal Lecter doesn’t care whether he gets fucked or dismembered in Author B’s fanfiction, but the discourse that surrounds the dick up his ass? That does affect flesh and blood people.
I am not claiming that this is the only attitude in fandom. Middlegrounds do exist. Plenty of people abide by fic and let fic and there are folks who pipe up to say not every RL queer couple switches. But it’s often the extremes that reach most people. That was certainly my experience, and I’m not the only one.
I don’t really know how to end this post. It is 100% a rant and one that’s been building up for a while. Bottom line is that people’s sexual behavior varies wildly and whenever you attack sexual tastes in fanfic by saying it’s unrealistic - or worse because let’s be real, that’s a very tame word choice - please remember that there’s likely someone out there who practices it.
* I’m using switch and versatile synonymously in this post. It’s mostly concerned with top/bottom debates. A lot of what I’m saying is also echoed in portrayals of and discussions surrounding D/s dynamics, but I’m not addressing that as much for now.  
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morningflames · 4 years
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a word of warning
well here’s a post i never thought i’d be making
it’s come to my attention that a Certain Someone is planning on making a comeback to WrA soon and it fills me with nothing short of dread. i spent the day yesterday warning people he terrorized and manipulated that this was happening. you know it’s bad when there’s a literal network of people who share an abuser that have remained in contact for years in the event this happened again.
i am not going to lie and say that making this post does not terrify me but i cannot in good conscience sit back and let him worm his way into the rp scene again and do what he did to me and at least half a dozen others all over again.
to summarize: tarcanus aka tarcanus frostborne is a manipulative, emotionally abusive and predatory individual that should be avoided at all costs.
i am the player behind lyrinel, a former officer of his and someone who was on the receiving end of nearly a years worth of abuse and manipulation. my experiences pale in comparison to those of others who dealt with him and came forward to me after i left his guild, and i cannot speak for anyone who does not feel comfortable coming forward. if you do want to let your voice be heard, feel free to reblog and add your own anecdotes.
my story below the cut.
tw: manipulation, emotional abuse, gaslighting, coercion, grooming
i first joined coram populo in early 2014 after my best friend and fellow survivor (i will refer to her by her character’s name of thradia from here on out) joined the raid team in december of the previous year. we were both just looking for a social place to park our characters and maybe start role playing again, as we hadn’t had a guild or dedicated rp group in a while. things were fine and friendly for the first couple of months, though it’s worth noting that a large part of the office corps had just left or was in the process of leaving when thradia and i joined. we were both 18 at the time.
i made the mistake of reaching out to tarc in the spring, when i noticed him posting to his tumblr about how busy he was. i offered to be an IC assistant of sorts to his character and he was more than happy to toss me into an absolute whirlwind. we still didn’t know much about each other, but in the span of a couple weeks we went from casual contact in guild chat to immensely long (sometimes between 10 and 12 hours) skype calls, constant DMing, and an almost uninterrupted stream of conversation. i was struggling to finish high school at this time (spoiler: i failed to graduate) and found myself suddenly caught in an all-consuming relationship with this man and his guild. from the moment i woke up to the moment i finally hung up and crawled into bed, my time was taken up by tarc and the guild and the game.
i was promoted to officer less than five months after joining the guild. this was overwhelming for a number of reasons, chief among them being the fact that i had never been an officer in a guild like this before and i was very quickly escalated to tarc’s “inner circle.” this was a circle that he evidently didn’t even include his most senior officers in, as he didn’t seem to communicate with them to the extent or abundance that he did with me - and later, when she was ALSO promoted to officer, thradia. 
within a few weeks i found myself at the center of dozens of micro-confrontations and venting from tarc about other members of the guild, raid team, and even fellow officers. every time, i would tell him he needed to take it to his co-gm and talk it through with her. she, like him, was a grown woman with a lot more experience and better people skills than me, a teenager barely out of high school, but tarc insisted on beating me over the head with his frustrations and then proceeding to guilt me and tell me i was a terrible friend when i didn’t agree with him or expressed i was uncomfortable being in the center of a vent session that i felt was unwarranted. 
tarc was never wrong. he did not apologize. the words “i’m sorry” did not exist in his vocabulary, and if they did, they were almost always followed up with the word “but.” constantly he would be sending multiple messages to me or thradia while we were running events and raids for the guild, ranting about a few particular members that he disliked at the time regardless of how we felt about said members. thradia and i would both be reduced to tears and/or anxiety attacks by his outbursts that all but demanded we take his side even if we didn’t. his feelings and circumstances were paramount. everyone else’s were just inconveniences. 
tarc was always the victim. no matter what was going on, no matter who had instigated whatever vein of conversation we were on that had gone awry, he had a way of making you feel like utter shit until you grovelled for his forgiveness, which he rarely gave. instead he would move on without giving any closure or allowing you to discuss your feelings at length. if you tried, you were the insensitive one who he couldn’t go to with his “unfiltered emotions,” which was the entire purpose of his inner circle to hear him say it. i was not allowed to just be his friend or just be an officer, i had to be both and neither at the same time, and it still was not the right course of action. nothing ever was.
tarc was openly manipulative and antagonistic, always citing it as an “inside joke” when called on it. i opened up to him once about my father’s alcoholism and how i was uncomfortable with alcohol culture and being around drunk people. regardless, he would constantly call while drunk (or maybe he was pretending to be to get a rise out of me, i honestly do not know what was genuine and what was put on with him) and make me stay on the call with him for hours. when he was (allegedly) diagnosed with an inability to process certain alcohols that could be life threatening, he continued to drink (or claimed he was drinking) dangerous amounts, which lead to me begging him to stop as i feared for his life. one of the worst anxiety attacks i have ever had was over him endangering his health and me believing i was going to see a friend die. he knew how much this upset me and he did not stop. he held me as a captive audience to his self destruction (or the playacting of it) and let me cry and beg and plead with him to take care of himself.
tarc loves to promote a clean, “family friendly” persona online. he will go on and on about the positive atmosphere his guild provides and how progress and accepting he and his “safe spaces” are. as soon as you are inducted to his inner circle, however, you learn otherwise. he will gladly engage in sexually charged conversation with you, even if you are ten years younger than him as thradia and i were. we were both legal adults, yes, but just barely. i can’t count the inappropriate remarks and jokes made about us, our friends, and even minors all in the spirit of joking “what if” conversation. he has a history of making young LGBT+ people uncomfortable, making their sexualities and identities about him and how he can relate to them. 
tarc was the most two-faced and divisive guild leader i’ve ever seen. he would rant to me mercilessly about wanting to kick one of the junior officers and raid team members in private while never saying a word to their face or bringing it up with the co-gm. he would start schisms between people, telling each what they wanted to hear and encouraging both parties not to confront each other about it, allowing the resentment and distrust to grow as he fanned the flames on both sides. he wanted people to stay in the guild and continue to basically work for him while also putting him above anyone else in their friend circles. he told straight up lies to thradia and i, claiming one of us had said things about the other that we never did, driving a wedge and distrust between us.
tarc treats his guild(s) like a business. he is entirely capitalist-minded even in an MMORPG that people play for fun, churning out “content” and keeping up appearances like a machine. he treats his officers and guild members like employees, not people. any time irl would demand attention away from the game, forcing someone to miss or cancel an event, he would subtly guilt them about it until they apologized, even if it was a dire situation or a family emergency. 
when tarc wanted to start a wow roleplaying podcast, he approached me about cohosting. he wanted a female voice, and since i was out of school and had no job lined up due to not graduating i was the perfect candidate. i came on to narrate and research the lore segment of the looking for roleplay podcast, which was little more than me paraphrasing a wowwiki article, but i was held to a “professional” standard. i had to have my research done by a certain day, my recording done in advance, etc. 
the podcast was a spot of contention for several reasons, one being the mysterious emails tarc would allegedly receive about it. the podcast had a shared email account that all three of us could access and look at, but tarc claimed that people sent emails directly to him since “everything’s under his email.” he would use these strawman emails as indirect criticism of turwinkle and i, reading them aloud or typing up what they supposedly said but NEVER producing a real screenshot or address to verify them. i’m convinced he only did this as a way to make turwinkle and i feel badly and work harder “for the listeners” to appease things tarc didn’t like about our segments. he also insinuated he got inappropriate emails about me specifically at this account but, again, i was never allowed to see them with my own eyes, just hear about them secondhand, which is why i believe they did not exist.
around this time, tarc began recording conversations without mine or thradias consent. he would start recording random sections of calls and taunt us, playing back out-of-context lines and joking that he would make “podcast commercials” out of them. they were often embarrassing, personal, or just wildly out of context lines that we didn’t want played to the public, and i heard only a fraction of what he possibly recorded of me. i have no idea what kind of material he has of me and thradia that was recorded without us knowing or consenting. it felt like blackmail. it still does.
i internalized all of this. i thought this was normal. i thought he was an excellent guild leader and a role model for leadership. i had begun to treat world of fucking warcraft like a goddamn job and i thought that was fine. my life revolved around coddling and entertaining him, socializing and promoting and recruiting for the guild, raiding, running pvp entirely on my own, keeping up IC connections and attending events, recording for the podcast, all of it. i ate, breathed, and slept wow and coram. it was insane. i had been talked into having no boundaries for myself and my time, and any time i tried to correct that and build a boundary i was attacked for it until i backed down. i have never felt worse about myself than i did while i was in this guild. i trusted no one. i was worn thin.
i finally had enough early 2015. at this point this man was trying to get me to come live with him hundreds of miles from my family so that i could attend a technical school in his area. i am still 18. he was 28. i had been trying to step down from my position as an officer, citing if i was going to be LIVING WITH HIM that it was going to give me an unfair bias in my standing in the guild. this set him all the way off. he was planning a trip to atlantic city for me, himself, and thradia, who i had a ticket to visit for my birthday. he was getting frantic because he had been pursuing thradia for months, and i was no longer cooperating. 
when i threw this wrench in everything, our relationship devolved in the span of a few hours. within the day i left the guild on all of my characters and pulled myself out of all of his projects. within the month i had frantically faction changed several characters and eventually unsubscribed from the game for two years because i lived in fear of him. he had always alluded to “knowing people” who could hack and track IP addresses and kept tabs on everyone who visited his blogs and websites. i didn’t know what i thought he was going to do - all i knew was his thinly veiled brags and threats were at the forefront of my mind. i have played this game since 2006, but for the first time in my life i couldn’t enjoy it out of fear and exhaustion caused by him. he had ruined my favorite game in less than a year and made me paranoid about my entire online presence, to the point where this blog was abandoned for months before i turned it into what it is today. 
and the thing is, tarc’s not a creepy or abrasive guy when you first meet him. he’s funny and charismatic and outgoing. he loves to tell you about his world travels and show you pictures of him petting baby tigers at rescues in southeast asia and go on about these crazy winnings he would have in vegas. he’s larger than life - at least online. he came to visit me twice in the year that we knew each other. the first time was also the first time i had ever met thradia in person, and we had been friends for six years at that point. he has met my family, and that of several other members (both my age and older). no one ever questions why he’s there. no one ever thought it was odd that for a week he hung out with three teenage girls exclusively. 
this horrifies me to this day. 
thradia and i are still best friends. we compared notes and were sickened at how we were played against each other. slowly, i returned to the game. i reached out to people who had left or been on their way out when i first joined the guild, curious to see if there was a common thread. there was. everyone i spoke with had similar stories: being made to feel like shit, nothing they ever did for the guild was enough, they weren’t allowed to miss events or raids no matter what the reason, they were questioned and joked about inappropriately and made to feel uncomfortable and preyed upon, etc. i was not the only one. thradia was not the only one. at least half a dozen other former members and/or officers had these stories, and tarc just kept getting away with it.
he cannot keep getting away with it.
i am being open with this for the first time in six years because i don’t want to see it happen again. because i don’t want to know that, had i said something sooner, more people could have been protected. i was 18 when this was going on. i had no real world experience. i had no standard for how i should be treated, much less by someone almost ten years my senior and who claimed to be my friend. but he knew better. he should have had boundaries and space and lines he refused to cross. he did not. he crippled my trust in people for a very long time. i have only become comfortable playing wow on horde side again in the past year or so. i finally stopped looking over my shoulder, /who’ing him and his guild, avoiding rp hubs. but now i feel like i can’t do that anymore. the safety i have worked so hard to achieve for myself is now threatened.
i understand my experiences are mild in comparison to what some offenders on this server have done. but at the end of the day, this year was the worst year of my life. to this day, the skype ringtone literally triggers me because i associated it with him and his endless calls that i never knew what to expect from or how to get out of. i can’t look at certain parts of the game without feeling fear. for months i held my breath going online or logging into wow because i was waiting for him to pop up and start accusing me of things or trying to guilt me into coming back.
tarc ran coram populo, a guild that, as far as i know, still staggers along with a few members who can’t be bothered to leave. whether or not he’s planning to return there, i don’t know. he organizes and runs (from what i can tell) the azerothian trade federation (whatever the fuck that is). i don’t know what his plans are. i don’t know what his online presence looks or will look like when he comes crawling back. but i beseech you, do not give him the time of day. do not give him a platform, no matter how nice and “woke” he makes himself out to be. he lures you in with humanist ideals and then sucks the absolute life out of you- and that’s if he doesn’t want to pressure you into a relationship on top of it.
to tarc: if somehow you’re reading this, stay away from me. keep my name out of your mouth. i do not want an apology and a string of half-assed, gaslighting excuses. i have records of past conversations. i have screenshots. i know what you fucking did to me and to my friends. i do not want you back. i do not want you here. i do not want to share space with you. i want you to go away and never come back. 
you alone made it so hard to trust myself and other people. thradia and i both have had to seek therapy due to you. and now, you have the audacity to come riding back into the scene on a white horse, being self righteous about abuse and predatory behavior online, and have the utter gall to condemn behaviors you yourself emulated without apology or second thought. i know you think you’re a good guy. that’s what makes you so fucking dangerous. you genuinely don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, and if you do, you’ve buried it and squirreled it away and have covered it up to the point where you can turn any accusation back on the claimant. 
do not attempt to contact me. do not try to threaten or appease me. go back where you were. i am finally at home again, and you will not take that from me. go. away.
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bitch-in-a-bag · 3 years
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can we talk about how the LGBT movement has changed in the past 15 years?
in the light of the events surrounding Chris chan, and people prioritizing pronouns over the rape of a woman with dementia, I think it displays just how... different things are.
i personally feel like it's been co-opted by the more loud and entitled mtfs/ males/penis-havers/whatever pc term exists for the XY chromosome'd, who go too far and aren't reasonably kept in check. I think terf no longer has meaning anymore because it's just become a word we use to silence anyone that disagrees with a trans woman. immediately you're going to call me a terf, I accept that, but please continue reading. I may suprise you. calling someone who's transgender a terf is kinda messed up anyway, and that's exactly why im writing this.
I also think that everyone else (allies, ftms, etc) have followed suit because they've written this messed up narrative that EvErYoNe iS VaLiD. except for trans penis-havers, bc they're the most oppressed and the most valid, actually, regardless of their experiences.
I never used to believe the above because it was always written off as terf shit, and ignoring it kinda benefitted me, but between seeing ftms getting bashed for refusing to follow new "TME" rules as if they aren't trans too, and seeing outrage around Chris chans pronouns, I think it's time to start saying things that may make people uncomfortable. innocent people are already getting hurt by this, and we need to do better. it's time to get uncomfortable.
I want to remind you that perception is both the relying factor, and also the downfall of newer lgbt theory. if my profile were mtf coded, maybe it currently is, you'd call me a self hating trans and I wouldn't be that big of a deal. terfs would probably target me.
if my profile was ftm coded, I would be absolutely skewered for daring to speak out about these issues, even though they do actually affect ftms disproportionately. terfs would try to convince me that being trans is a plague and a mental illness, and to just ~be a cis woman~!
and if assumed cis, I would 100% be assumed radfem terf, and everything I say would immediately be dismissed because of the genuine damage terfs have done. but terfs would still probably flock to this post and berate me for daring to validate trans people At All, because to them, being transgender is a mental illness akin to an eating disorder, and "giving in" to it is "self harm". clearly I don't believe that, so hopefully you'll give me at least some benefit of the doubt.
so, does my identity matter? i have a feeling you'll say yes, because it gives us a good idea of experiences I do and don't have expertise in, and thus room to talk about. but I refuse to directly identify what I actually am because I want the focus of any resulting conversation to be my message and not my self identification. if you read between the lines and figure it out that's just fine, but I would like to be heard first and foremost.
my profile is thus an attempt at being cis female coded, somewhat out of comfort, and that is likely what I'll be assumed to be due to the beliefs I am expressing, even though there is a substantial risk of getting misgendered and dismissed, no matter what my birth sex may actually be. i will give you a hint about my identity: I am transgender, on HRT and everything, and I have been personally affected by all of this. rest assured, this is well within my lane to speak about, and it does matter if you misgender me.
I want you to really think about that. before you respond, really think about if someone saying words on tumblr, talking about their OWN experiences and their take on recent history that applies to themself, really more worthy of being misgendered and harassed than... someone who said they transitioned so they could date lesbians, and then raped their own mother with dementia.
is that fair or just? or is this just a new way of letting people with penises do whatever they want? I personally think it's the latter. we need to hold people like Chris chan accountable without getting caught up on something as minor **in comparison** as misgendering and self identification. Is it sad and confusing that someone who self IDs as transgender became 1:1 with the most dangerous stereotypes that exist for trans women? Of course it is. But it doesn't mean that self identification is suddenly more important than a literal crime being committed.
I would normally dismiss it as a fluke or outright trolling if the evidence weren't so damning that this is in fact a real event that happened. If I hadn't seen this happen to other people, and if I didn't literally know another mtf person who used their dysphoria as an excuse for date rape on multiple occasions and never got any consequences for it.
It's not a one time thing, it's a developing problem that we need to stop before more people have their lives ruined. I can't even imagine how traumatizing and messed up it is for an FTM person to be date raped, by another transgender person no less. When I, an abuse survivor, told people of this MTFs red flags, people violently silenced me. People who didn't know I was trans called me a terf and transphobic. We, as a community, could've protected someone from getting date raped, and we didn't. Trans women can be awful, horrible fucking people, because they are people. Protecting them at all costs is wrong. Protecting them from transphobia is what we should be doing.
That being said, misgendering is still skeevy, and I haven't done anything like raped a disabled woman who is no longer able to consent, or date raped my own partner. if you give a shit about respecting my identity, please use they/them for me. if not, use visual perception and make assumptions that will most likely be incorrect, skew your own argument, and put me on the same level as a rapist, and arguably a fetishist. And I do need to remind you that calling someone transgender a rapist and a fetishist without evidence is still definitely classic transphobia, to the letter, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that.
as someone who is same sex attracted, I also want to bring this up as well.
in the US in the past 15 years, the movement as a whole pretty much went "YEAH BORN THIS WAY" with Lady Gaga, and then jumped ship to prioritize mostly mtfs at every angle. do mtfs need support? absolutely. but they don't need misguided toxic positivity, and that's what it's turned into.
it's gotten genuinely homophobic to the point where actually homosexual people are constantly being erased and demonized via "genital preferences are a fetish uwu", and vulva havers, especially the trans ones, are constantly being told to shut up about their experiences.
as much as you want to deny bioessentialism, its still very much well and alive with newer trans movement sentiments when we classify ftms as not worthy of speaking about their own issues with terms like "TME". it's also incredibly ignorant towards FTMs who pass, but dress feminine for comfort, and get mistaken for MTF, and treated like garbage because of it. They are not remotely exempt from misogyny, transphobia, or the intersection of the two, and it is not anyone's job to tell them they don't ever experience that when they do. Turning ftms and biological homosexuals into our enemies-- especially when the actual cause is transphobia and harmful gender stereotypes-- does nothing good or healthy for our movement.
Dont be mistaken, though, passing isn't the focus or end all be all here, it's the perception of others that ends up drastically effecting your experiences. There are words like misogyny that imply treatment via birth sex, however this too can be reliant on external perception. If an MTF individual either transitions very young, has an abundance of resources to transition, or just gets lucky and passes well, chances are she will experience a lot more misogyny than people may give credit to. inversely, someone who just started questioning yesterday, but lived as a male their whole life up until then, they genuinely cannot speak about misogyny with that much room because they simply haven't experienced it at an accurate enough angle or for enough time to understand it as a repeated and sociological force.
It works the other way as well, though; someone who's known that they're trans for a long time and haven't had the resources to transition, or do not or cannot pass in the eyes of society; these people suffer pain that we don't neccesarily have a word for yet, imo. It makes dysphoria worse and it makes living seem hopeless. And as a community, we deal with this is in a really messed up way by over-validating them instead of solving the core issue at hand. and people who suffer from this, but also acknowledge they can't claim what they haven't experienced, are left with nowhere to go.
And its important to acknowledge these things because they're integral to the over-encompassing trans experience. Instead of lying to everyone and telling everyone they pass/giving out unconditional positive regard, our focus should be making it so that it **doesn't matter if you pass**. that you're still worth respect and dignity if you're transgender, no matter what passing is or what it means to you, and no matter how you present. But also, if you do something awful, you still need to be held accountable, especially if you use yourself, your body, or your trans status to contribute to other axi of oppression.
Transphobia is a word that encompasses and addresses all of that, regardless of birth sex. "TME" shuts that down in favor of only letting MTF's speak. Which is still very bio-essentialist, and I can't help but feel like we've gone full circle.
Once upon a time you couldn't even get married if your partner had the same genitals as you. in the US, this was less than 7 years ago. and if you care about human rights activism, you know damn well that legal modification is not the end all be all. people who are genuinely homosexual are still oppressed, but the trans movement has started stepping on them to make ground we don't deserve. homosexuals are ok and valid. it's not a genital preference, and the prescence of trans people doesn't make conversion therapy sentiments ok, ever.
we've gone full circle, and it's not right.
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marcilled · 3 years
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5 years
It was 5 years ago today that a humble little minecraft server first opened its gates. 5 years ago, I started @quixol​ with a team of 8 friends. Today, only 4 of those original friends are still on our Staff team, and the server is a shadow of its former self.
There’s a lot I could talk about with Quixol, but before I get into it, I just want it to be known that this is a highly personal post from me. This isn’t an official announcement, but seeing as I’m an admin, it’s definitely of pertinence if you are someone who is a part of the Quixol community.
If you’re new to following me, or just don’t know what I’m talking about: Quixol is a trans-friendly minecraft server started by me and a few pals back on November 16, 2015. It’s primarily populated by folks from here on Tumblr, and is an LGBT+ only community. Over its 5 years, it’s gotten over 1600 unique players. And... Well, there’s a lot of history that took place during and after that, I can’t hope to summarize it here. You can see more on the about page on our blog.
So, yeah. Today is the 5-year anniversary of Quixol. Pretty big deal! And... we have nothing in store for today to celebrate that huge milestone. Pretty big bummer. The prior 4 years, the anniversary was the single biggest celebration of the year. We typically tried to schedule large server updates to coincide with the anniversary, just to make it feel that much more special. So, on the day that marks a whole half-decade of being online, why do we have no plans? It’s a long, complicated story. I’ll only be able to tell you my side of it. Everything written below is from my perspective, and doesn’t necessarily reflect how others think or feel.
Regardless of the lonely feeling on the server now, I just want to say, I’m really glad I could host such a fantastic community for so many years. Thank you everyone who has made the past half decade so special.
Long retrospective below (plus, discussion about Quixol’s future):
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Where to begin... All I can say at the start here is, don’t expect anything coherent, I typed this up while sleep deprived just the night before posting this, without much forethought of what I’d say in it. I just feel I need to get these feelings off my chest before I can mentally move on, you know.
Before I delve into this, I just want to put this sort of disclaimer at the top here: Despite how gloomy I make things sound throughout this post, Quixol is and was an amazing place, that I’m so glad to say I got to play such a pivotal role in. I wouldn’t trade my time here for anything. It’s been an honor to serve as an Admin over such an incredible community. I’ve seen countless new friendships forged, plenty of laughs and fun times to be had... I’ve even known several couples that met through their time on Quixol, I’ve known several people that came out or discovered more about their identity/gender/sexuality while on Quixol. It’s a great community, despite its flaws, and what we did over these past 5 years is nothing short of spectacular. I’m forever thankful for everyone who helped make this place as special as it is- you’ve all been such great friends. Thank you.
While I may speak a great deal about some of the lowest lows that happened on Quixol, you better believe it had some of the highest highs as well. Keep that in mind, so you know why I’m spending this much time and effort to commemorate this server that I’ve called home for so long.
I’ll start here with a rough timeline of Quixol... I’ll even include some screenshots for you all.
Old World (Nov. 2015 - Mar. 2017, mc 1.8 - 1.9)
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Quixol began back in 2015 like I mentioned- whitelisted at first, but moved on to being unwhitelisted at a later date (I believe it was summer of 2016). Hundreds of people joined after the whitelist was removed, in just the first month or so. We owe that initial success to how much our blog post about the server got shared around, it served as a nice advertisement for the server. It was only posted to tumblr, so everybody who joined then was from the same sort of social sphere of 2016 tumblr. It was pretty lively, and we made lots of friends very quickly. A lot never logged in again after the first initial burst, but a fair amount stuck around.
The server started on minecraft version 1.8, which was before the end update that introduced elytra & all the controversial combat changes. Most people never even saw the server on this version, though, since it was still whitelisted when we updated to 1.9. The world we used back in 2015-2016 eventually got deleted at a later date, however we did provide an archive of this old world to download, it’s... somewhere on our blog, you can go find it if you poke around a bit. (Assuming the download hasn’t been removed from the website I uploaded it to, which would make sense since it’s just 20 gb sitting on some server doing nothing).
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While there was plenty of merriment, there was also the fair share of drama. I can’t even hope to recall all the drama that happened in 2016, but one of our og mods got banned completely after the rest of the staff sort of woke up to the realization they were incredibly abusive. There’s lots of other stuff that happened then- I wish I could tell the “full tale” as it were, but it would be so long-winded that almost nobody would bother to read. Plus, my memory isn’t very good, so I would need to dig through old blog posts, discord messages, screenshots, etc etc to jog my memory... way too much work.
Protos (Mar. 2017 - Nov. 2018, mc 1.11 - 1.12)
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2017 came around, and that’s when we updated the server to 1.11 and created a new world (Protos). That update happened on March 26, 2017- I remember because march 26th is my birthday, and the other staff made a cute little celebration for me on that day and I literally cried from how happy I was. It was the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a long time. (God, I miss those times.)
A lot more happened during this time period, and honestly I’d consider the period in which Protos was our main, active world to be the most consistently active the server has ever been. It wasn’t always exploding with activity, but the people who joined and played during this time were consistent. And we had a relatively consistent influx of new players.
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There was a lot more drama that happened during this time... More staff members left, mostly of their own accord (but never on a wholly positive note). Drama amongst some of the veteran/long-time players, arguments over how to interpret and enforce our rules.
Regardless of the troubles, I’d say this period was overall quite positive for Quixol. We even brought in our first batch of new staff members during this period.
Ghalea (Nov. 2018 - Present, mc 1.13 - 1.15)
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I believe late 2018 was when we updated the server from 1.12 to 1.13. We rushed the update to this version quite a lot, which was a shame since it ensured the server had an egregious amount of bugs to work out, and lots of missing plugins/functionality. With this update, we made another new world (and, our current main world): Ghalea.
Regardless of buggy behavior, we managed to hit what I believe is the all-time peak concurrent player count we have ever gotten, which is something like 54-56 players playing at the same time. The server chugged so hard, I’m surprised it didn’t crash. All of those parties were so stressful to put on, but at the same time, incredibly fun and fulfilling to see when lots of people showed up and had a good time.
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Funny, though: despite the success of the server, 2018 and early 2019 are the closest the server has ever gotten to absolutely tearing itself apart from internal staff drama. By early-mid 2019, several staff members ended up getting banned one after the other. So that left us with very few staff by that point (only 6 active staff, myself included, if I remember correctly).
2019 should have been a great year for Quixol, seeing as it was what many people referred to as the “minecraft renaissance”, “the great minecraft revival”, etc etc etc. However, the drama amongst the staff, coupled with drama in our personal lives, and just an all around lack of staff members to kick things into gear, resulted in a pretty lackluster year compared to the previous 4 years.
Despite all of that, we worked tirelessly to complete our greatest project yet, Chroma Park, just before our 4th anniversary on Nov 16th, 2019. It took a whole team of builders to complete, and several months in preparation/building.
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With such a grand project completed, you would expect it would result in a flurry of new activity on the server... unfortunately, it ended up being almost the opposite. Because we called upon our “build team” to help with it, (several talented veteran players who volunteered their building skills), nearly all of our active players suffered some serious burnout after the major project they just completed. Lots of people just weren’t feelin’ up to minecraft anymore... And, that spelled the beginning of the end, really.
The culmination of this was that, going into 2020, activity on the server just... plummeted. Then, we all know what a shit year 2020 turned into. That just furthered feelings of burnout. I made another personal post about this, back in April- explaining why I had been relatively absent from the server for a while. It goes into more detail about the “hiatus” at that time, what caused it, why it continued so long, and how my personal feelings were at that time. Give it a read if you want. It even goes more in-depth about some of Quixol’s former staff, and how toxic behavior from them may have negatively impacted the community (especially in 2018-2019).
So, basically nothing has happened on Quixol in 2020... I took the time to update the server from 1.14 to 1.15 back in July, just so that the server was on a more stable version of minecraft- but all the effort poured into that resulted in basically nothing happening. Barely anyone even noticed, because it was such a minor update focusing on bug fixes. I hoped it would get the ball rolling again, but it just wasn’t enough.
While I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet, I decided it was for the best if I put any plans on the backburner for a while, and focus more attention on building infrastructure back up again. I spent some time researching sysadmin stuff, and looking into upgrading my PC. I set up a new discord bot that we’re currently using on Quixol, & have in a few other discord servers I’m active in.
Then, I got tossed one of the most difficult months of my life in a long time pretty recently. It’s very recent/fresh, but suffice it to say, a decent chunk of what made it such a horrible month was related to drama within the Quixol friend group, particularly... me being a shitty friend. I made another post about this a while back, but I won’t link it since it’s a bit vague and not super relevant to what I’m talking about here. Just know, September this year pretty much demolished any feelings of hope I had for continuing work on Quixol.
So, that leads us to... Today. The 5th anniversary of Quixol.
Where did it all go wrong?
Now that I’ve laid out as quick a summary of the past 5 years as I could, I want to talk about some of the mistakes we made along the way. The people that made Quixol what it is, and how that history always seems to tie me down.
To tell you the truth, saying that “it all went wrong” sounds horribly pessimistic to me. Sure, I felt pessimistic going into writing this, but... Just looking back on everything we’ve accomplished, there’s never really a point where it “went wrong”. Moreso, Quixol has had its fair share of flaws baked in from the very beginning. But, perhaps those flaws are what made it what it really is. I can’t go back and change the past, and neither can you. Perhaps the best we can do is just accept Quixol for what it is, and acknowledge its shortcomings while allowing ourselves to feel happy about the good memories we do have.
While I’m not going to cast away every pleasant memory I have of Quixol, I must admit I find so many of them tainted and forever changed, just because of how many people entered this community, made their stay known, then left or were cast away on a sour note. There are countless people that were a huge part of Quixol, of my life, my friends, that I don’t speak to anymore. People that hate me. Maybe even some that I hate.
If I go back and think fondly of those times, I remember how the people in those memories largely don’t think fondly of me anymore. I remember all of my mistakes, all of the ways I could have avoided that outcome. All the ways I could have worked with those friends, to work out our differences, to just fucking communicate. Sure... some of those friends, there was nothing I could do for them. Nothing I could do to make things work. But, all the same... it stings, thinking of everyone I used to know. Not knowing who is still a friend, or who simply has no need for me anymore...
So much of Quixol’s history is tied up in knots this way. Complicated webs of emotion, suffocating in the tethers to its past. So many things built on the server, just wasting away, never to be touched again... New players won’t even know it. They don’t know, can’t know the history behind those blocks that were placed. It sounds a bit silly talking about it this way, but that’s how it feels to me. There’s real history behind each of these blocks, all of the little farms and structures and silly signs. So much of it, nobody even knows. But it wears on my heart, knowing all of that history, and feeling so disconnected from it. Feeling cast away by the people who forged those memories.
It’s a disconnect that’s always hurt, to me. Maybe I’m just too sentimental, nostalgic. Maybe I cling to the past too much. But it feels impossible to ignore... So much of what made Quixol what it is today was left there by people who want nothing to do with me, us, anymore. What does that say about Quixol? About me...? About our group?
There’s a lot I could say about this, but it’s stuff I’ve mentioned before. I hang on too tightly to the past, and am often too critical of my own mistakes. But, sometimes the past is just the way it is, and there’s not much that can be done about it. Regardless, I find myself feeling regrets about every little thing that went wrong, and thinking about where all those people are now... Maybe one of them is even reading this right now. If you’re out there, hey. We can still talk. I’m not going to hold a grudge on you forever. It’s ok.
My influence
Since Quixol began in 2015, I’ve tried my best to be nothing more than an “Admin” of Quixol... not the “owner” or “lead admin” or “founder”, just “admin”. I hoped I could encourage the other admins to be leaders in their own rights. While each of the admins we’ve had has been great leaders in their own respect, I feel that every one of them has been, unfortunately, tied down by my influence to some extent.
In most aspects of life, I’m a very timid, indecisive person. I’m incredibly anxious, and lack confidence to a worrying degree. However, a different side of me can be seen in the safe, comfortable environment that Quixol provided for me. Surrounded by friends and people who I felt really got me, I became comfortable enough to show some level of confidence in myself... In all honesty, for a long time, I was never able to recognize this self confidence for what it was. I really was not, and mostly still am not, used to feeling confident in myself or my own abilities. Like, at all. So when I actually feel good about myself, like I actually know what I’m doing... Well, for a really long time, I didn’t even process it as such. I just felt like I knew the right answers, and that was it.
On Quixol, this often manifested in a specific way... Being proud of my own knowledge & skills with minecraft, I would insert myself into any discussion about Minecraft, the server, or just anywhere I could, and offer up my knowledge, opinions & help. This hardly sounds like a problem, but... The problem was just in my unwavering presence. I was everywhere on Quixol, you couldn’t escape me. I dominated the space with my presence. Not that I interrupted people (usually...?), I just would try to put myself anywhere a conversation was happening, assuming it was, like, appropriate for me to do so on some level.
Whenever I chimed in with my thoughts, eventually there became this sort of air of almost... superiority about it. This feeling that my word was “final”, or that I had some layer of expertise on everything, and that if I said what you said was right, that was a pretty good indicator you were on the right track. I didn’t pretend like I was infallible, and I don’t think anyone ever saw me as that. But the perception was generally that if Vivian says it, that holds weight to it. Perhaps this is somewhat unavoidable of a staff member, but... it was this way even amongst the staff.
I never really realized that I was creating this environment within the community, because it happened rather slowly. But as things moved along, other staff began to pick up on this (perhaps subconsciously). Including even the other admins. Quickly, my own insistence on doing things a Specific Way, became “the Right Way” to do things on Quixol... Whether I intended it or not.
Now, this is something I didn’t know until quite recently, but I actually have OCD (undiagnosed, but it’s glaringly obvious to me at this point). My ocd comes out in minecraft, and specifically Quixol, quite a lot. I have very ritualistic ways of doing things, whether it be while building a project in-game, to managing specific parts of the server- we have a very detailed format in which update logs are written, and I have very specific rituals related to updating plugins on the server, taking backups, etc. Even just the way I play survival minecraft has sorts of rituals in a way, like specific patterns in which I place torches. I’m not too educated on ocd, so excuse me if I’m using some terminology of this wrong, or if I’m spreading some sort of misinformation about it. This is just my experience.
Anyhow, with the extremely regimented way I manage things on the server, coupled with my constant presence in things, you can understand how this might lead to other admins, who have their own mental illness issues, to become very averse to doing a lot of admin-related duties. After months and months, years, even, of this sort of stuff... and... yeah. That leads to where we are now.
With my selfish behavior in the past, I’ve unintentionally created this staff environment where people are reluctant to make their own decisions, show their own creativity, etc. And that must feel incredibly frustrating if you actually want to do something to make a difference on Quixol...
I’m not even accounting for all the times I’ve butted heads with the other staff before, either. While much less frequent, I’ve definitely had arguments with folks in the past. And with the great amount of influence I hold over the server, it takes a lot of courage to stand up to what I say.
I’ve always resented that I hold this position of power over everyone else, and tried many times to address it. However, I don’t think I ever quite had a full picture of why things were this way. Now, I think I understand it better. Sadly, it feels too little, too late to make any significant changes without uprooting pretty much everything we have set in place already. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m being too pessimistic here... But, this is how I feel at the present moment.
I’m sincerely sorry to any current or former staff members, who have wanted to do something great for Quixol, but felt they could never convince me to go through with your idea... Or who felt pushed away from doing something they otherwise would’ve liked to, just because the attitude I gave, the environment my presence created, made you feel like you weren’t good enough or qualified enough to do it. You are good enough. I’m so sorry that my actions made you convinced otherwise...
I will say, this sort of mindset of mine, that I have to be the Most Right about anything relating to minecraft, or any hyperfixation/special interest of mine, has caused problems elsewhere, too. I talked about this in another post I made. I’ve only really come to realize all this stuff within the past few months, but I’ve been a really terrible friend to a lot of people. I never even realized until recently just how often I struggle with empathy, and how that’s colored so many of my friendships. Needless to say, it’s affected things on Quixol before, sometimes without me even realizing it.
My influence over the community also means if anybody’s relations with me in particular ever become marred, it must inevitably result in them leaving the community because there’s simply no escaping me. There’s not really anything I can do about this, though, aside from doing whatever I can to become a kinder, more
I’m far from a perfect person, and my imperfections seeped into so much of what made Quixol what it is. However, it’d be silly to suggest that I’m the singular reason that Quixol is flawed, if anything, that would be another form of arrogance- assuming that I singlehandedly shaped the way Quixol took form. No, it was always a team effort, and every single staff and community member held great influence of their own.
The Future
This part is probably why many of you clicked on this post... You want to know what’s going to happen to Quixol. You likely noticed I’ve been referring to Quixol in the past tense a lot in this post. Honestly, I’m not sure why I did that, it just felt the most natural to type it that way. But, I will be honest- the future of Quixol right now isn’t looking very bright.
This is a personal post, so I don’t want to deliver any sort of formal announcement about plans for Quixol here, especially since I haven’t run this post by the other staff before posting it.
For the past 2 and a half months, I’ve been taking a very long break from Quixol. Much greater than any previous break of mine... I’ve neglected to even log in for weeks at a time. I still keep an eye on the discord server, and check the mc <-> discord bridge channel to see which players have been logging in. But I have little to no motivation to play, even just casually.
While I’d love to give you some fun cool news about how this hiatus is ending soon and I have a million and one projects planned, that simply isn’t the case. I’ve gotten to this point where I’m rethinking everything about myself, who I am, and what I’m doing with my life. Surely, I can’t dedicate all my time and energy to running a minecraft server for the rest of my life, even though I do care deeply about this community. But at the same time, it’s not really my call to shut down Quixol, and I’d hate to pull the plug just because of my own lack of motivation.
So, for the time being at least, you can probably consider Quixol to be on a sort of “indefinite hiatus”. I am generally the one to update plugins, do major server updates, etc., and I likely won’t be doing any of that any time soon. I fully entrust the other staff to handle that stuff if they really want to, and I’ve expressed that to them already. But as things stand, nobody else seems to want to pick up the torch right now. Shit is rough for pretty much everyone, and we’re all equally burnt out. We’ve all grown up quite a lot since Quixol began, too. So... Don’t expect anything anytime soon.
If there are any updates, they’ll come in our Discord server first.
As for me, personally... I just need time away from all of this. It’s clearer than ever to me that I have a lot of personal problems I need to work on, and I think that the cozy safe environment provided by Quixol didn’t challenge me enough to really address those issues. I need time to focus on myself & my own growth. At the same time, I also feel like I need more experience being a part of a team, instead of just running the show. I’m not getting the kind of enrichment I need from running Quixol, so I’m trying to turn my attention elsewhere.
I’m doing this not because I want to abandon you guys, or because I feel like I want/need to move on from this community. It’s just... Something I need to do, for myself. And I’ll still be around, I’m still gonna be posting to my tumblr & twitter and stuff, and you can still reach me on discord. I’m just focusing my time elsewhere for once.
What does that mean for the future of Quixol? I don’t really know yet. But, for now, it’s not going anywhere. It’s just... also not changing anytime soon. Not even a little bit. I’m sorry to give you this disappointing news, but I hope you all understand.
I miss the good times on Quixol, too. I really do. Maybe we can share them again sometime? Who knows...
For now, that’s all.
It breaks my heart that we don’t have anything glitzy and glamorous to do to celebrate Quixol’s 5th anniversary... But it would be asking far too much of the staff to set anything like that up right now. Maybe we can have some sort of celebration later...? I dunno.
I hope you’re all staying safe & healthy out there. Thank you so much for reading this. I love all of you.
Happy birthday, Quixol.
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sagemoderocklee · 3 years
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Reiteration ❤️ A (but not GaaLee :p) P T
A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)
oof. okay so aside from GaaLee:
1) ShikaTema 2) NejiTen 3) Kakagai
i think these are the only like three ships i could say i feel strongly enough about that i’d classify them as OTPs. GaaLee honestly gets its own category anyways. im not really active in any other fandoms, and the only other ship I’ve ever felt as strongly about as i have gaalee was really Harry/Draco and well... ya know. Although if i were still super active in CLAMP fandom KuroFai and DouWata would 100000% be up there. And of course the forever and unbeatable Sakura/Shaoran but specifically CCS SakuShao because I think TRC isn’t quite as good with their romance
P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)
oh. that’s. okay we’re answering hard questions tonight i see.
something niche for you and me: new member of your MLM/communist/leftist reading group is Very Cute but very new to MLM/etc and needs extra help to understand the complicated history, theories, etc.
T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending, about anything at all (gender identity, sexual or romantic orientation, extended family, sexual preferences like top/bottom/switch, relationship with poetry, seriously anything).
oh god. this is really opening a can of worms lmao and also.... i may have to put this under a cut because god i have so fucking many and some of them may need elaboration.
1. Gaara doesn’t ever take up sleeping/napping post Shukaku
this is something that I know a lot of ppl don’t like/want because everyone wants Gaara to be happy and like big same! but i do think that Gaara’s physiology is entirely altered from Shukaku and the lack of sleep. I feel like having it ingrained in him that he couldn’t sleep, knowing the devastation it would cause, plus all the trauma he has--he’d be plagued by nightmares first of all, and no shinobi is gonna wanna take a sleep aid or something to help them sleep more easily because that would just be a huge opening for someone to attack you. but the other thing is i think it would genuinely make him feel sick. like i know that when i get too little sleep i feel sick because my body needs a certain amount. BUT i also know that those days where im too depressed and don’t get out of bed and sleep too much i ALSO feel like shit. Gaara has lived his entire life without sleep--barring specific instances of forced sleep to release Shukaku--and his body has to have adapted to that. fifteen years of not sleeping there’s no way his body would know what to do with that. his body is so used to subsisting (and this is my own like explanation for how Gaara survived pre and post Shukaku) off of massive quantities of food and by funneling his own chakra into his brain to act as rest, healing, etc.  like i think at this point it’s so unconscious that he isn’t even aware he’s doing it anymore--like breathing. His chakra--which is already another physiological system in their bodies--is just taking up the job of the rest portion of his brain.
that all being said, i do still think this will have an overall affect on his lifespan, but not necessarily his physical or mental health in the immediate sense.
2. Kankuro is straight.
this goes for like all the characters i see as straight, and like i hate like putting this in the like “die defending” category, but there’s this sort of.... sense that when you’re LGBT in fandom you’re gonna see every character as gay and you’re sus/someone’s gonna side eye you if you don’t. like i get the whole ‘well obviously everything is straight and cis IRL, and im sick of it’ reasoning behind “everyone is gay/trans” but the thing is.... I wanna see cis and straight people who support their gay/trans friends and family. I don’t need to live in a world where no one is straight and cis. I need to live in a world where people who are straight and cis actually support and love LGBT people. i personally don’t get anything out of the fantasy of no straight cis people because what does that solve? and what does that say about the homophobia and transphobia within the series? It doesn’t solve or say anything. And quite frankly a series like Naruto is inherently homophobic and transphobic (especially trans misogynistic), and i think brushing that aside with an “everyone’s gay/trans” is more insulting than helpful because it’s not addressing the issue. I’m more invested in seeing the characters who aren’t LGBT supporting and loving and working to make the world better for their LGBT friends, family, and community.
like i know not everyone is writing/reading fanfiction or art or what have you in fandom for like realism or whatever, i get the whole escapism of it all, but i approach it this way because for me I just don’t get anything out of pretending that the -isms and -phobias within the series don’t exist.
also straight trans people exist?????
i could go on about this--like some characters are just... not good and i don’t wanna claim that as LGBT because of that--but like i think this is the biggest thing for me at the end of the day: seeing ppl who aren’t LGBT supporting LGBT ppl.
3. Gaara is a polyglot. Also, he’s self-taught in just about everything. He spent most of his youth in the Suna library for obvious reasons, so reading, writing, language, poetry, history, politics, arts, etc he learned there on his own.
4. Shikamaru and Temari live in Suna 6 months out of the year, and Konoha the other 6. Temari does NOT give up her job to be a nagging wife, and Shikamaru is 100% a wife man.
5. Lee is not originally from Konoha or Fire. He doesn’t remember his parents or how he wound up at a Konoha orphanage because trauma. Also his first language isn’t Japanese.
I have more specific HCs about who Lee’s parents are, where he came from, and what happened to his parents, but that’s like spoilers for a fic.
6. Tenten is not an outright orphan. She actually comes from a clan of weapons masters and smiths.
I think it’s fairly common for ppl to assume Tenten is an orphan because we obviously never see her family--granted we just don’t see much of her to begin with--but I personally fell in love with the idea of her having a clan with the focus being weapons. Her parents are still dead, but she lives with her grandmother, who’s renowned for her weapons.
7. Lee has a HUGE amount of chakra. Like obnoxiously huge stores of it that he just doesn’t know how to manipulate--not quite Kisame levels, but definitely a LOT. He gets as far as walking on water and walls, but he absolutely has to be focused to accomplish those feats and prefers just going really fast so he doesn’t fall in/off.
8. Sage mode!Rock Lee.
I have talked about this before(x, x), but you can absolutely pry this from my cold dead hands--actually, you couldn’t. I’d still hold on to this even in death.
9. Lee has like a photographic memory which is why he always writes things down that people tell him.
10. Gaara will be the last Kazekage--whoever comes after him (and i do have a HC for that) will be Kazekage only in the sense that they’re like the figurehead maybe, but ultimately Gaara is working to completely change the shinobi way of life and the Kage system will be dismantled starting with Suna/Gaara.
11. In a modern AU context, Lee is a HUGE fan of Queen and Bruce Lee.
12. Lee definitely grows his hair out later on in life and changes up his attire and becomes his own person.
13. The Kazekage Estate is a generation home--most households in Suna are, and in fact, it’s really fucking weird for someone not to live in a generational home--so Gaara lives there with his siblings. When Temari gets married, she and Shikamaru live there, and continue to do so when they have kids. If Kankuro has a kid (and a spouse), they’ll live there too. Lee eventually moves in. The house is always filled with love. When Gai visits with Kakashi, or when Tenten and Neji visit, they stay there too.
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shipping1addict · 4 years
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(HEY. It's me from the end of this post! I realised it got a bit long and wanted to warn you. I'm on mobile and can't cut it away. Sorry!)
It's one thing to simply clarify that a ship won't be endgame. That it won't happen because of whatever reasons. But it's a totally different thing to act like the whole fandom consists of bullies and is delusional.
While I read a few things on Twitter, researched on the writers Twitter page etc. it really stood out to me, that there is a common misinformation(?) - if you can call it that - that we [sc] as a fandom just want the show to make changes solely because we want it to. But as we all know, that's not the case.
I could just list all the things we pointed out for years now, but I don't want to talk about that. I think if someone doesn't recognise their own work and what potential it beholds, what subtext (intentional or not) it has, it's safe to say, that they don't want to see it.
No. I'm talking about the fact, that with behaviour like that, they actively evaporate a whole bunch of the fandom by simply saying and supporting those things.
-
There was one tweet the writer "liked", that said something about how even queer women should be able to be friends without it turning into something more. And while the message and the base of this post is true, it means a whole 'nother thing when it comes to media.
We have a TV history full of tropes that makes a man and a woman only to be friends a rarity. But we have REAL history with people stating, that two women are "best friends" or "life long friends" when there is evidence, that they were in fact lovers.
When we say "a man and a woman should be able to be just friends" it's a different thing than "two women should be able to be just friends." And you can't compare these two statements with each other, because one trope is tiring and washed out and the other hasn't even began to grow.
- that said: we all know two queer women can be just friends. But the fact that there are only so many queer women on TV is sad and it's not unusual to ship these two, when we are used to only get max two LGBTs per show.
-
Holding an argument like that in our faces and acting like it's a criminal offense to want better representation - in quality and quantity - is not only damaging but feels also entitled on their behalf.
I've said it a bunch of times now but: supercorp started out as a funny thing. We saw the chemistry between two actresses, the plot fit perfectly for fanfics and imagination and it was all fun and games.
Until shit hit the fan. Since 2017 - when supercorp was publicly recognised at the SDCC it got worse. And in the last year even actors and writers got into arguments with fans.
Supercorp suddenly turned into more than just a ship. It went viral.
And what happens with viral things? They gain fans that are more problematic and those are the ones with the loudest voices. And since then, anti-sc held the whole fandom accountable for those toxic fans. And I think, that was a turning point that we cant recover from.
It's sad to say, but with the excitement for season 6 and the release of content (ex.g. deleted scenes) there is always backlash from others. And while I'm fairly certain, that I will indeed watch the show, it brings me everytime to the edge and I'm close to never enter the fanbase again.
Why has a fanship turned into a war?
Why do some people act, like the idea of supercorp is so absurd?
Why do we need to harass and insult each other?
And why the hell can noone communicate with each other?!
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comradeclown · 4 years
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OK, so in honour of my top posts now being me saying at various degrees of length that Arthur is gay (hashtag mylegacy, lmao…), I thought I should just go for it and actually dive in a bit a lot into why I read the character as gay. Now, usually all the justification I need to read a character as gay is “wouldn’t it be cool if this character I like/relate to/etc were gay like me?” and “it’s OK, officer, I do what I want”, and I’m well aware that 99% of the time it’s me using my own creativity to do a resistant reading + the film/book/whatever bumbling into subtext entirely by accident. And while I definitely don’t think there’s ever any more justification needed for any kind of LGBT reading, lol, as it comes to Arthur, obviously feel free to disagree with me, but I honestly think my read of him as a gay man is entirely textually supported, however unwitting and accidental that might have been on the part of the filmmakers (mind you, I don’t think it was Todd Phillips’ conscious intent, but I’m like… 85% sure Joaquin Phoenix knew exactly what he was doing).
(ETA that this is extremely long, so I’ve put it all under a cut.)
First of all, there’s of course… pretty much the entirety of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance (a very, very small sample can be found in my he gay son tag and just generally in my arthur fleck tag, ha), from his mannerisms to his physicality to the way he interacts with other characters. I know part of it is a function of wanting to go back to the character’s campy roots (which are themselves… you know…), and I know I’m relying on stereotypes to some extent, but first of all, you can’t divorce either camp or gender non-conformity from LGBT history and existence, and secondly this is literally how characters have been coded as gay throughout the entire history of cinema. What I’m saying here is that you can’t have a character who acts like Arthur does, literal limp wrist and all, or says “come on, Muuuurrrayyy, do I look like the kind of girl clown who could start a movement” the way he does, to pick one of many, many examples, and not evoke the long history of cinematic wink emojis at People Like Me.
That in itself would… honestly be plenty, lol, but it could be chalked up to, idk, Joaquin Phoenix doing his own thing, were it not for the fact that it’s completely reinforced at every turn by the filmmaking language, even down to his wardrobe choices, and it’s worth noting at this point that the framing is always one of empathy — albeit with nuance — and affording the character subjectivity, rather than being “ew, look at this gross [homophobic slur]”. Like, the very first time we see Arthur, literally our first impression of the character, he’s at a mirror, putting on make-up and then ruining it by crying, and while the make-up is of course part of his job, this is just not how the inner crises of straight male characters are expressed in the language of cinema. Of note too is the fact that he’s clearly visually separated from his co-workers in all the scenes at Ha-Ha’s, indicating his alienation from them, and while this could be chalked up purely to his disabilities, I don’t buy that that’s the only reason, given that Gary gets shit due to his dwarfism, sure, but at the end of the day he’s clearly “one of the boys” in a way Arthur (can’t be) isn’t.
There are honestly so many examples of the framing working to separate Arthur from conventional masculinity and heterosexuality that I’m just going to pick some highlights, such as: obviously, the way he expresses himself emotionally through dancing (to the point that one of his coworkers explicitly ribs him about it, “if your dancing doesn’t do the trick”), which again is not something that straight male characters do in the language of cinema. The fact that all the media we see him consume is musicals, classic comedies and a talk show he’s obsessively fannish about and watches with his mother — and we know he’s a fan of the show as a whole, not just Murray, hence him saying “I love Dr Sally” (and the way he says it…). Or, speaking of his media habits, when he’s dancing with the gun while watching Shall We Dance, this could have so, so easily been about him ~regaining his lost masculinity~ through, say, fantasies of revenge or badassery, but instead it’s about him being acknowledged as a great dancer and punishing bad dancers, and it all ends in slapstick anyway.
Also, while I’m on this topic, I want to address the nature of Arthur’s dissociative fantasies about Sophie. Honestly, I don’t read them as indicative of genuine romantic/sexual interest at all, because the film frames them as identical to Arthur’s more deliberate daydreams about Murray. I mean, not that I’m adverse to gay readings of that if that’s what you want to do, lmao, but to me they’re both very clearly post-traumatic fantasies of having another person look after you for once, of having someone value and cherish you and take care of you emotionally (which obviously has massive appeal if you’ve been dealing with the after-effects of catastrophic trauma all your life but nobody has given a shit about your suffering and you’ve had to be the one to look after other people to boot). Note that after the get-together with Sophie — which is clearly patterned after all those old comedies and musicals Arthur watches — the Sophie fantasies are incredibly platonic and involve things like having another person be there for you in a crisis, telling you something supportive, getting you a hot drink (in contrast with the reality of the hospital scene, in which Arthur is alone and he’s the one trying to comfort someone else, i.e., holding Penny’s hand), essentially no different from fantasy!Murray hugging Arthur and knowing exactly what to say to make him feel good about himself. Also note that both fantasies involve being the object of someone else’s affection, Murray picks Arthur out of the audience and Sophie comes to him, it’s a pillow princess Cinderella fantasy, more than someone loving you it’s about being loved. (And, once more, this could easily have all been v. v. different, the Murray fantasy could have been the much more conventionally masculine fantasy of being a famous comedian and being invited on Murray’s show, the Sophie fantasies could have had an undeniable sexual component, etc.)
Anyway, to get back to the general point of cinematic framing, again if the movie didn’t want me to read Artie as gay, it shouldn’t have had a pivotal moment in his character arc be him sitting at his mother’s vanity table, doing a new make-up look which involves using her lipstick, and then having a Moment while he’s literally holding a quasi-glamour shot of her.
And the thing is, all these reams of stuff aren’t even the key piece of the puzzle for me, which is the way in which the film as a whole can be read as a gay narrative. I’ve posted before about how part of the emotional catharsis of the film is about Arthur finally shamelessly embracing and even revelling in all his freakishness and socially-despised traits, a big one of which being what is arguably his effeminacy and… honestly I don’t need to explain how that’s a classic gay (and more generally LGBT) narrative, do I? Like, there’s a reason why a pivotal scene is Arthur having his hair-dyeing underwear rave in a flat that’s suddenly incredibly bright and sunny for the first time, it’s about reclaiming the pain and ugliness of your life and your circumstances into a space of potential liberation, which is honestly why this movie is always going to be incredibly personally meaningful to me for so many reasons, but definitely meaningful to me as a gay woman. (Again, this could so, so easily have been about him becoming some stone-cold badass or whatever, but instead the film has him dye his hair, put on a super garish new outfit and new make-up look, dance shamelessly in the street, and be incredibly campy on national television.)
More generally, there’s other aspects of the narrative arc that tie into this general theme and which also serve to continually distance Arthur from the conventional cinematic narratives of heterosexual manhood: for instance, once he starts fully embracing the Joker persona — which is… just Arthur, the crucial difference is in how others perceive him and how he perceives himself — any attraction to women, feigned or real, goes completely out the window and the only genuinely affectionate interaction he has with another human being is with Gary (I know we all love to joke about his first kiss being with Dr Sally, but it’s obviously Comedy Jokes and he doesn’t even kiss her for real, his make-up is completely intact; Arthur’s only real kiss in the movie is when he kisses Gary). Or, when Arthur’s personal narrative finally intersects completely with the larger social narrative — which is itself about upheaval, reclamation and potential liberation — the big triumphant moment is him once again dancing, this time for a cheering crowd, and using blood like lipstick to redraw his smile.
Or even, to a lesser extent, his whole sub-plot with his mother, before I watched the film I was worried that this was going to be the usual narrative about the henpecked guy who finally puts the bitch in her place as part of becoming a Real Man, and it’s not at all, quite the opposite, Arthur is not henpecked and is clearly in charge of the household, he genuinely loves Penny — and is confident she loves him back — and enjoys doing at least some things with her (them watching the Murray Franklin Show together), and up until the reveal any issues he has with her are largely the product of having to look after an ill person with zero social support and while working a physically and emotionally demanding job and dealing with his own disabilities. When he kills her, it’s a deeply sad and self-destructive scene and it’s the result of his profound anguish and sense of betrayal and he frames it as the bitter, trauma-haunted dark half of self-actualisation and self-acceptance (“that’s the real me”, “I haven’t been happy one minute of my entire fucking life”, “now I realise… it’s a fucking comedy”).
Or, at a more meta-textual level, the way the film is unabashedly both a pulpy thriller and a melodrama, just shamelessly embracing all its emotions, its pain and catharsis, without a trace of irony. Like, yeah, part of this is the immense sincerity and compassion Joaquin Phoenix brings to his performance, but it really is the movie’s approach as a whole, and when there is humour — and I do think there’s quite a lot of humour in the movie — it’s not the distancing, let’s-not-feel-anything-too-deeply-bro humour of your typical MCU movie, it’s the camp sensibility of laughing with and at your own tragedy. (Myriad examples down to the use of certain songs in the soundtrack.)
On a final note, you guys know how much I don’t care about authorial intent, but I feel compelled to point out that in his director’s commentary, Todd Phillips says, while discussing Arthur’s journey into becoming Joker, that he reads the larger pop-cultural character of the Joker as someone who doesn’t want women, and like… Again, it’s not like I think that he was deliberately making a gay narrative in any way, it’s just that if you’re creating this journey of a man who eventually becomes a character who’s not interested in women in that sense, you’ve also just ended up stumbling into a gay narrative accidentally on purpose, lmao, what’s the real difference between “at the end of the story, Arthur doesn’t want women because he’s ~da Joker now, baby, he doesn’t want anything~” and “at the end of the story, Arthur doesn’t want women because he’s gay and he’s no longer deeply repressed and closeted”?
Anyway, like I said, feel free to disagree, he’s a fictional character, lol, but this is where I’m coming from, and the reason why if everyone involved in the movie decided to make a statement tomorrow about how much Arthur Fleck wants to bone women I’d just say “shit, idc, I’m afraid you made a gay movie about Arthur Fleck, a gay man, it’s a little too late to retcon this bitch now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. Also this is over 2,000 words long what the fuck I am so sorry
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kravitzz · 5 years
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Podcast Recs 2019
Hey there! I’ve updated my list of podcast recommendations for 2019. This includes anything from my top favorites to stuff I haven’t gotten around to listening to yet! For a more up to date version of this list, please go here. 
 * = Favorite! ! = Caught Up # = In progress + = Need to listen
Fiction: *! Wolf 359: Starts off as a goofy space station slice-of-life comedy and spirals into something way, way deeper. Great characters, fantastic plot, and a really great concept overall. *# The Penumbra Podcast: A couple different plots, but primarily a futuristic space noir story. Really cheesy but in the best way, also super LGBT and fantastic and it just makes me so happy. # Beef and Dairy Network Podcast: Just a completely normal podcast about the inner workings of the beef and dairy industry. Nothing weird here, not at all. # Hello From The Magic Tavern: A podcast transmitted from the magical land of Foon! Really chill and funny improvised stuff # King Falls AM: A fun paranormal radio show sort of deal. I’m not far in enough to describe it better. # EOS 10: Doctors in space! It’s gay and funny and suspenseful, I adore the hell out of the writing.  # The Bright Sessions: Superhero therapy! Incredible character building, really cool show. # Within the Wires: I’m only an ep in and uh. I have no fucking clue what’s happening but it’s cool as shit so far.  # Everything Is Alive: A podcast where a guy interviews inanimate objects! It’s interesting and fun. *# Welcome to Nightvale: A classic! A radio show in a desert town that’s much odder than it seems.  # Done Disappeared: A parody of true-crime investigation podcasts. Dumb and funny.
+ Jim Robbie and the Wanderers + Dopple Avenue Hurt + The Thrilling Adventure Hour + Wooden Overcoats + Ars Paradoxica + The Far Meridian + The Strange Case of Starship Iris + Girl In Space + Inkwyrm + Immunities + Mission to Zixx +Kaleidotrope +Midnight Radio
Horror: *# The Magnus Archives: Jonathan Sims, head archivist of a paranormal research institute in London, reads the statements of people who have experienced horrifying things. Things go south very quickly for him and his assistants. HEAVY trigger warning, since it includes lots of the typical horror things such as gore, bugs, cannibalism, etc, but if you can handle it, I highly recommend this show. The writing and characters are so good. *! SCP Archives: Performed readings of different SCP stories. If you like SCP, this show is really good! # Alice Isn’t Dead: A fantastic spooky adventure with a gal trucking across the U.S. to find her missing wife! Made by the Nightvale folks, and it’s really intriguing and well produced. # The NoSleep Podcast: Different horror stories from r/nosleep, acted and read aloud. Varies in quality, but is generally pretty good! Gets better in the later seasons. # Limetown: A well-known faux-journalism horror story. The first season is very good, I haven’t listened to the second yet. # Mabel: It’s been a while since I listened to this one, so I don’t remember much other than it being very, very spooky. # The Black Tapes: The ending isn’t good, but the rest was great. They’re apparently continuing, so hopefully the ending will be fixed.
+ The Blood Crow Stories + The Alexandria Archive + TANIS + Rabbits D&D/Actual Play: *! The Adventure Zone: Look. You know this one. An actual-play podcast that starts off slow and picks up really quickly. 80% comedy, 20% plot, and 100% amazing. Balance is the first campaign and is D&D and a mix of fantasy and sci-fi. *# Critical Role: I’ve been riding with this show for years now, but I haven’t actually listened to the podcast format of it! The show itself is fantastic though, so I’m still recommending it. Follow the in-progress D&D adventure of a bunch of great voice actors. Sorta the flip of TAZ, in that it’s like 80% plot and 20% comedy. Also 100% crying. Their first campaign is complete, and they’re currently partially through their second. # Godsfall: A pretty rules-heavy DND podcast. Really really well produced. # Friends At The Table: Not really far in enough to make much judgement! + Heroes and Halfwits + Tabletop Champions + Join the Party + Dames & Dragons + Bombarded + The Mortal Path + Dnduet + The Venture Maidens + The Broad Swords + Six Feats Under
Nonfiction: # Wonderful!: Happy and pure, Griffin and Rachel Mcelroy talk about things that make them happy. I enjoy listening to random episodes when I need a pick-me-up. # Oh No, Ross and Carrie!: Ross and Carrie go around and investigate different fringe science, paranormal, and spiritual things. They’re super fun to listen to! + The Worst Bestsellers + Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men + Mysterious Universe + Bunker Buddies + Imaginary Worlds + Conversations With People Who Hate Me + Dead Pilots Society + Harry Potter and the Sacred Text + Storybreak + Shmanners + Positiviteeny! + Still Buffering + The Supermega Podcast Comedy: *# My Brother, My Brother, and Me: Really good goofs and advice from the Mcelroy brothers. It’s so good. # Sawbones: Medical history with Sydnee and Justin Mcelroy! Sydnee is an actual doctor, so it’s a wonderful combo of dumb humor and really good information. # My Dad Wrote A Porno: Title kind of says it all. Very, very funny. + What Should We Draw? + Revisionist History + Hardcore History + More Perfect + Making a Podcast with Myself True Crime/Supernatural: *# My Favorite Murder: True crime and murder stories, as told by some very cool and funny ladies. They’re like my goth comedian moms. # Heaven’s Gate: A podcast about the cult Heaven’s Gate. Only 10 episodes, really interesting and well produced. # Lore: I listened to this forever ago and loved it! Really good paranormal and spooky stories. # And That’s Why We Drink: Em and Christine talk about the paranormal and true crime while getting drunk and chatting about their lives! They have a great dynamic and it’s just a fun comfy show to listen to. + Judge John Hodgman +Spirits + Blurry Photos + Expanded Perspectives + Wine and Crime + Cabinet of Curiosities Journalism:
*# 99% Invisible: Beautifully written and edited journalism about design and life. I love the hell out of this podcast. *# Reply All: Journalism and weird stories about technology and the different ways it affects us. I highly recommend listening to episode #102 and #103, Long Distance, if you want an incredibly interesting story about spam callers and trying to hunt them down. # Ear Hustle: Stories about the life of prisoners, made by a prisoner! Really interesting journalism. # Setting the Record Queer: A queer interview show. Pretty new but really fun! # Twenty Thousand Hertz: A podcast about sound design and things relating to it. Very well produced and interesting. + Family Ghosts + Ologies
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