angstyteeninthegayscene

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currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883

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I had an interesting night last night

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Every day, you heal a little bit more. Then one morning, you wake up and losing her isn't the first thing you think about.

BOBBY NASH and EDDIE DIAZ for @wernerherzogs

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In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer��defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

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Buck's first serious relationship with a woman ended because Abby didn't want something serious with him and "forgot" to tell him.

Buck's first serious relationship with a man ended because Tommy didn't want something serious with him and "forgot" to tell him.

Abby and Tommy were engaged.

Eddie Diaz where are you. You need to save this man, it's getting ridiculous.

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i’m crashing out right now are FUCKING kidding me

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Buck, after briefing another one of his insane plans: Thoughts? Eddie: And prayers. Holy shit.

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characters who are absolutely convinced down to their bones that they are unlovable being subjected to the mortifying ideal of being wholly and unconditionally loved. that’s the good stuff. never get tired of it.

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feeling very unwell because eddie has never called buck his best friend before in all years he has known him (hanging out with his buck today. christopher’s buck) and the first time he does, the one time we see him say it, sees him claim buck as someone who is something to him, it’s in a confessional, and he hesitates. he pauses.

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follow forthefuns for more funny stuff

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ok enough is enough. whichever one of you virgins invented instagram starbucks recipes, die 1000 deaths. I had a customer come in today holding out their phone (full brightness) and looking all shy and Im immediately like 🙄 fine ok, what does the instagram user want me to make for them this time. well this time it's a cringe harry potter themed frappucino. excuse me??? "can you make this for me?" I said excuse me??? -- I mean *customer service voice* "yeah it looks like I have all the ingredients, haha sure!"

ok cringe instagram harry potter frappucino drinker. ok. die. "Ive never had this drink before" yeah I can tell due to the fact that it didnt exist until someone posted a #aesthetic photo of it to instagram 14 hours ago ok. ok,

but whatever, Im paid to put up with this shit. so I add the ingredients all up on my computer and congrats! ur harry potter cringe social media drink has $10 worth of syrup in it. are you happy??? is this what you wanted??? a $10 frappucino??? $10. for a drink. you doubled the price of this drink for ur off-brand "harry potter and the legend of the overpriced starbucks drink" drink. you doubled the price!!! is this how u imagined spending ur day? is this what u wanted to do when u woke up this morning? $10 for a 24oz drink?

and u know, you KNOW the influencer making this recipe doesn't even work at a starbucks cause when it was all said and done the drink looked like shit. my blender was straining against the weight of your sins (and syrups) and Im sweating, Im an animal, Im losing my mind and my blender is getting watered down frappucino syrups everywhere -- u put so much shit liquid in this blender it doesnt even fit in the cup btw. it's making a huge mess. but is it instagramable? no, its fucking ugly. #trending #foryoupage #cringe $10 harold potter drink for adult children,

so are you happy? is ur social media influencer bestie happy? I made ur stupid $10 drink for u. does it taste good? no? well I hope instagram shuts down tomorrow. I hope you read a different book. I hope I never get sober. there is no sign of land. I hope you die. I hope we both die.

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i genuinely don’t get cishet monsterfuckers. for context, in the wake of shape of water i participated in this loving-the-monstrous type discussion event slash publishing party wherein i debuted a short story about a woman who “befriends” a cave monster—but that isnt the point. the point is i had to hear straight women talk for hours about how the appeal of monsters is some kind of weird “taming the beast” fantasy—loving a monster until it loves you back, sounding like every bad beauty and the beast take ever.

And there’s my queer ass being like literally none of you get it. this isn’t about power, this is about love and alienation and acceptance. you dumbasses, I’m the monster. this isn’t a metaphor for your shitty boyfriend, this is a metaphor for my own alienation from a society that tells me a the way i am and the way I love are grotesque. this is a fantasy of love free of judgement, separate from societal standards that I’ll never live up to anyway. that ghoul doesn’t care if I’m fat, they think it’s hot that I eat well. that immortal fae creature doesn’t care if the gender on my birth certificate matches the one I use now, they barely have a concept of gender in the first place. that tentacle monster doesn’t care if I shave, they don’t have eyes

monsterfucking is queer culture, everyone else go home

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FOUND family??? you think i just found them like this??? babes this is FORGED family. Me & the bros were scrap metal in a junkyard (very valuable, very sharp, very dangerous, uncared for) and we GOT IN THE FUCKING FIRE TOGETHER. WE did this. we said I AM NOT LEAVING YOU and melted into each other for better or for worse (it’s for better) and we are A FUNCTIONAL UNIT now. DO NOT SEPARATE. BATTERIES FUCKING INCLUDED. FOUND family my ass, we built this non-nuclear family unit from the ground up, don’t devalue this!!! it was is and will be a labour of love!!!

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The thing I keep coming back to, with all the *gestures expansively* is that real life doesn't have peaceful epilogues.

Every single win has to be defended. Forever. I'm sorry. It sucks. The Nazis lost until they stopped losing. The US had abortion rights, and then 50 years later it didn't. Empires fall, and then they invade other countries again. Oppressive regimes are overthrown and replaced with other oppressive regimes. You will never finish the work etc etc etc. Which is why it's so fucking important to be able to acknowledge and celebrate progress, when it happens. The people who came before you didn't put in all that work for nothing, and you aren't, either. You can't save it all for the Ultimate Victory because there is never going to be an Ultimate Victory. There's no such thing as a time when everything is good, and ours shall not be the commune of Heaven.

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there is so much about modern queer discourse that could be fixed simply by understanding "straightness" to be a socio-political classification & reward for conformity rather than just a personal identity.