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Another thing fandom needs to start doing more of is projecting on tops.

There are delicious amounts of psychological distress you can inflict on that guy once you get into his head. The brainworms of forcing agency and initiative on someone who genuinely is Not Fucking Ready For It are exquisite.

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Fundamentally I believe that writing about the rich and varied human existence is so important, and authors who do this end up seeming prescient in ways that naive analysis often rejects.

Two examples. First; a lot of people ship Frodo/Sam or Legolas/Gimli (or more obscure gay ships like Maedhros/Fingon), and some people say stuff like “well, Tolkien was catholic, he clearly didn’t intend for these characters to be gay.” But Tolkien himself says that he doesn’t write Christian allegory, in fact he despises all allegory. What he does is write about the rich and varied human existence, and when he did so he drew on the experiences of the likely closeted gay and bisexual men he had met over his life! And he synthesized this as just a way people behave, not as ‘representation’ but reality. And we can recognize that while in the early twentieth century, the 15% of people that identify as bisexual in the current generation (gen Z) would likely have married people of the opposite gender, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have same-gender relationships that had romantic elements even if they were never consummated.

A second example; in Tamora Pierce’s the Song of the Lioness Quartet, Alanna, the main character, dresses as a boy and trains to be a knight. As she grows up, she has to re-learn to connect with her femininity in secret with the few people who know who she is (thus making her a paradoxically-apt role model for both trans men and trans women, depending on which parts of the narrative one projects oneself onto). But Alanna never feels truly comfortable as a woman, either, and constantly has to assert both her masculinity and femininity to different people once she becomes a knight and reveals the secret. Tamora Pierce has since stated that if Alanna were born in the modern day, she would likely identify as genderfluid. But these books were written in the 1980s, and while there were people in that time period who were exploring the language of nonbinary and genderfluid identities, it wasn’t really a widespread notion, and while I can’t be sure Tamora Pierce didn’t encounter that language I sort of doubt Alanna was intended from the beginning to fit that identity. Instead, Pierce wrote a character based on the people she knew in life, who perhaps uncomfortably chafed at their assigned gender, and wrote a character who really believably would be genderfluid today, despite (plausibly) not knowing what ‘genderfluid’ was!

And I think that’s beautiful. There’s not really a point to this but just to highlight a perspective in literary analysis that you can lose if you focus too much on the biographical details of the author.

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Man I think there are two Great Tragedies of Tim Drake, and the second is how hard fandom refuses to engage with the first in favor of their own made-up fanon version of angst. There's plenty of angst in the actual text!

Like the thing about Tim -- actual, pre-Robin, training-to-be-Robin, start-of-his-Robin-run Tim -- is that he sets out on his vigilante journey with two things literally no other batfam member has had before. Tim is normal, and he is happy.

Early Tim, you'll hear a lot in some circles, is meant to be a bland self-insert: look at this kid, he's a Batman fan, just like you! Only he's got more money AND more freedom than you, which means that he gets to have the coolest hobby ever, and when Batman gets in trouble this kid can actually help him out. So cool!

Dick, Jason, Cass, Damian -- they all come to vigilantehood after backgrounds that're various levels of implausible, tragic, and traumatizing. Batman, and their ability to don a cape beside him, rescues them. Their lives get better when they put the uniform on.

Tim's doesn't. Through coincidence or fate or force of plot, Tim agrees to be Robin and his life immediately gets worse. Tim's mom (who canonically loves him and he loves dearly, who's gone more than maybe she should be but a good mom when she's there) dies. Tim's dad's in a coma. Tim's life is upended.

Tim gets strangled by Azbats. Tim almost dies of the Clench. Tim gets all the typical vigilante/sidekick suffering stuff. Tim gets fucked with and fucked over by an increasingly paranoid Bruce.

Tim tries to leave to go back to his normal civilian life but he can't any more, because he is the Normal One, he's been the Normal One for so long that he's missed how much he's changed until he has to fit all of himself inside one single box of normalcy. He tries to leave and it follows him. It haunts him. It stalks him. It kills his friend. It kills his girlfriend. It kills his dad.

(That's the Tim that Jason runs into in Titan's Tower, for fucksake. The orphan living alone in Bludhaven, who's been Robin for years, who left it and then came back because nobody else could live up to him, who's been taking care of himself for ages. The one with half his life and identity pinned not on being granted the opportunity to playact as impostor-syndrome Robin -- that's Tim of two or three or four years ago, just starting out, before he started accumulating loss -- but on being Robin, and being damn fucking good at it. Jason thinks Tim stole his job. Tim thinks he's been doing this goddamn job for four years and if one more person tells him that it's not his, he's going to show them why he doesn't need to turn into Gun Batman to be scary.)

His best friend dies. His other best friend dies. 16- to 17-year-old Tim McFucking Loses It, even before Bruce also dies and pushes him right over the edge, but the tragedy of the Red Robin run isn't just Tim's general sense of self-worth and belief in his ability to be loved. It's stepping back, looking at it in context, and realizing that this was all preventable.

Dick Grayson was never going to be normal, before or after his parents died. Jason was never going to be fine. Cass was doomed long before Bruce ever got to her. But Tim chose this shit. Twelve years old, looking at Batman, too smart for his own damn good but in a way that never once stopped him from making friends and fitting in just fine before -- Tim chose. And he kept choosing, until long after it stopped actually being a choice, until it became all he had, all he had left. Tim made himself into the sort of creature of power and grief that most of his teammates and family had no choice but to be.

What a cool story. (What a very Barbara Gordon story, but that's a conversation for another day.) What a goddamn shame fandom would rather give him the UwU Tragic Backstory and comically terrible parents than tell it.

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I respect the Blue Prince and the other people playing it too much to spoil it on tumblr but I will say, the ending/Room 46 cutscene still makes me fucking cry.

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Happy Pride!

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Why does writing cover letters somehow get harder the more qualified you are

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Only two ADHD tasks

1) this task will take me five minutes but I couldn’t possibly do it because I have an appointment in six hours

2) this task will take five hours but I’ll just do it first thing in the morning before I leave

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j'adore le franglish content le code switching c'est tellement fun je sautille from a language to another like a gazelle et toi aussi tant que tu voudras :)

OUAIS baby we are so fucking back. franglais est parfait parce que americans get mad AND it sends evil psychic vibes à l’académie française. The phrase “qu’est-ce qu’y’all doing aujourd’hui” came out of my mouth this evening and i think that might be the pinnacle of human language. i love being annoying

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I don't have any cat photos, but perhaps these sheep and alpacas will make up for it!

I was prompted to upload 4 pics that aren't selfies 💜

Passing the prompt along to… @harlett-o-scara @teasyblondie @gigglesoup @sillysadi @blackmagixsblog @vex-switch @tinydancer1112

Thank you @blushedgiggles 🥰

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Don't worry, kid, my gay atheist ass tricked the school into thinking I was a good math teacher via the scurrilous deception of being good at teaching math. It's incredible how easy it is to convince someone you do something via doing the thing. People will believe anything these days.

So I'm doing a new temporary permanent sub gig at a Catholic middle school through the end of the school year (don't ask) (my gay atheist ass doing Catholic drag like it's 2002 and I'm still in church three days a week), and it is so, so funny how clearly everybody, especially the one kid in question, thinks this kid is Conning Me.

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It's so obvious this kid thinks he's getting away with something, and I'm definitely aware that he's a Problem Kid for a ton of the other teachers. And the rest of the faculty keep warning me about him playing nice, which he clearly is, but it's like --

Alas, I have been Bamboozled! by this student's smarmy charm and *checks notes* polite hand-raising in class, relatively accurate and pertinent answers when I call on him, really obviously fake excuses for his lack of homework, and general not starting chaos! He has used these dastardly techniques to con me into *checks notes again* calling on him on class, giving him a zero on the homework anyway, and also not yelling at him or sending him to the office for bad behavior! Whatever shall I do in the face of this betrayal?

Like everybody is waiting for the other shoe to drop and meanwhile I'm over here like, aha, little does this kid know but he's secretly activated my trap card of Not Giving A Shit So Long As I Can Still Teach Math. You have convinced me that you're doing what I want you to do via actively doing the only thing I actually want you to do. The shock. The horror. How will I ever survive, knowing you deceived me by allowing me to teach your classmates function notation uninterrupted?

So I'm doing a new temporary permanent sub gig at a Catholic middle school through the end of the school year (don't ask) (my gay atheist ass doing Catholic drag like it's 2002 and I'm still in church three days a week), and it is so, so funny how clearly everybody, especially the one kid in question, thinks this kid is Conning Me.

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So I'm doing a new temporary permanent sub gig at a Catholic middle school through the end of the school year (don't ask) (my gay atheist ass doing Catholic drag like it's 2002 and I'm still in church three days a week), and it is so, so funny how clearly everybody, especially the one kid in question, thinks this kid is Conning Me.

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Look it's about the mystery of an unwritten woman who only shows up in her absence. It's about a woman who's entire role in the narrative is mother, who dares do something else except we literally never find out what or why because mother is the only relationship she has with the people the story is actually about.

She is trapped by the contradiction between what a kid would deserve as a human (love, attention, affection, an adult to stop them from the terrors and dangers of their narrative) and what they must have for the story to be possible (they cannot be stopped). She is set free by those narrative demands to live her own life under the tradeoff that the audience will absolutely never see it. She is a mother who somewhere, some-why, is something else first.

Fandom says she's either an evil neglectful monster or a sanctified victim or both but my god she's so much more interesting if she's neither. What if she's neither? What if she made actual choices for reasons other than selfish greed or the force of theoretical sexualized violence? What if she chose to be something other than a mom and was okay at it? God and heaven forfend, what if she loves her son anyway?

(Of course he's a son. It's always a son.)

Oh I'm just literally never going to stop spawning elaborate headcanons about the life and times of variably absent mother-characters who had to be removed from the narrative so their kids could have wacky/traumatizing teen adventures, am I?