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Another.

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anyone else looking for beautiful girls stuck on the ice?

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I just found a gender swap face app pic I took, and it looked so much like a John Irving Grindr profile pic. Transition goals I guess?

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I checked out Weekend after Dave K mentioned in the Q&A that it was one of Irving's favourite films.

It's about two guys, Russel and Glen, who have what is meant to be a one night stand right as one of them is on the cusp of making a significant life change, but turns into them spending most of the weekend together.

I can definitely see the connection, I think Russel is very much what a modern day Irving would be like, without the colonialism and severe religious indoctrination.

I really love this shot (apologies for absolutely shittass crunchy look)

Russel isn't comfortable with affection in public, and this feels a half step into the unknown for him, kissing in the window. Private but public, intimate and revealed, liminal.

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you may think it took the terror fandom a lot of effort and dedication to become the #1 producer of erectile dysfunction fics but let me tell u. it wasn't hard

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There are things about the world of Gethen I would love to see explored, for example what is life like for people who are in permanent kemmer? How would someone from Gethen conceptualise being trans or being intersex? Can people on Gethen be trans or intersex?

But I think there are couple of reasons it would be hard for it to take off as a wide reaching trope. For one thing the concept of kemmer is so deeply integrated with all other aspects of the world it would be hard to lift it out and place it in our world without major flow on effects to social structures, economy, politics, everything really.

Also it's a system deliberately designed for stability and lack of conflict, and stories (mostly) thrive on conflict. Humans on Gethen are much more self contained than us; for example keeping kemmer is a much looser commitment than marriage. Passion, jealousy, yearning, seduction, forbidden romance, breaking gender roles, all these things and more would be present to a lesser extent in a world with kemmer. Also I think the tropes are most fun when each new set of characters introduces a new wrinkle, a new and slightly different way for the trope to play out, and I think there aren't a lot of different ways for personality to play into the experience of kemmer. Compared to, idk, dom/sub, where each characters background, their personality, their interests, their capabilities, their fears, etc colours the experience to give a slightly different take while engaging with the same basic elements.

I am surprised though that Omegaverse took off to the exclusion of anything else. There are endless biological models to base things on, and also loads of stories with interesting systems of gender and/or sex. I read a couple of Greg Egan short stories that had some pretty unhinged ones. In one of them each time a couple courted their bodies would start to change until they had complimentary genitals. A different shape for every couple. Which is prescriptive in that you had to know someone for a while before it was physically possible to have sex, and you could only have one sexual relationship at a time, but in this world humans were biologically engineered, clearly with an agenda, so you could do some interesting stories about how people worked around those constraints.

There was another one where each time you had sex the penis (and I guess the inside of the vaginal canal?) l would detach and reattach to the other person. So like a biologically enforced system of taking turns with what genitals you had. Which apart from the comp het, it cannot feel great to have a penis that you do not know how many people have had before you.

So I don't know, why not get more weird with it y'know?

I am re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness and unfortunately, my brain is too rotten for this, because all I can think about is an alternate timeline where the girlies got absolutely sauced on this book and instead of inventing the Omegaverse, people just wrote Kemmering AUs instead.

to be clear, Ursula K. LeGuin would hate this

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One of Irving's favourite movies.

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I have the autism where you listen to the same three tracks for months at a time so playlists are a bit beyond me, but I wanted to share a couple of songs:

James Fitzjames (w/o HRT)

James Ross (w/ yearning)

There's a certain kind of grief to never knowing for sure what happened.

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I woke up from a nap with some thoughts that felt really urgent and important to get down. This is what i brought back from a dream:

octopus architecture

Hickey but severed

Which I guess means that at this point my subconscious is a mashup of Tumblr, but also I stand behind both of those thoughts. A species that doesn't have bones and fits through the tiniest holes, is an expert mimic, communicates through body language and colours, and is extremely solitary would make some fascinating contributions to architecture.

And severance I feel like could become one of those fandom tropes that you could put any character through, and come up something different but interesting every time.

Hickey in particular - we know nothing about his background except what we can infer from his actions, and that negative space haunts everything he does. Would Hickey respond differently if his first time in hell was as an adult, if his relevant beliefs and responses hadn't formed when he was very young?

Who hasn't thought, what would I be without some part of my childhood? Mark severed himself to escape grief he is actively going through, but what about the experiences so old that they have calcified into the jagged edges of our personality, and seem impossible to disentangle from the core of who we are?

Severance: an objective answer to nature vs nurture.

I mean, it would be if it worked which of course it doesn't.

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The day after the inauguration I give myself my hormone shot.

Every Tuesday since I have done so again

in spite

of blowhards’ orders for two sexes and impermeable borders.

Hrt — dear dermal border crosser — pays no mind  to the blustering of fools who know nothing

of what it is to sew oneself  into one’s body with a needle

pierced through thigh muscle; stitches across  the chest; new names spun by fumbling fingers into the threads that stretch heartstring to heart- string. What could they who sever heartstrings know

of the transtemporal tapestry that interweaves our unnumbered stories, our numberless ways to be?

Even now, they try

to tear our truth out of all legal records, to blot us out from history and medical texts —

but we suffuse humanity’s warp and weft: cut us out, mere tatters will be left.

And it may be they’ll pry

our protections and passports, our vials and blue pills from our still-warm, still-alive, still-trans and intersex hands —

but our tapestry is stronger than their will, twined tighter than chromosomes, and

we’ll give them hell for every sundered string. We’ll fight like hell until their bitter end.

For now, it is Tuesday again

and my hand, with its wedding ring and thickened skin,

is steady as I plunge the needle in.

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So Ms Casey is very different from Gemma in a way that is unlike the innie/ outie divide for the other characters. And also different from Gemma's other innies, who don't seem very different from Gemma as she is at this point in time. Is the Ms Casey personality part of what they're experimenting on her with? Currently innies only exist in a very controlled environment, and it still takes monumental effort to keep them in check, methods they couldn't use publicly, and the process is full of violent failures of the system. If they want to make severance a general, universal thing for all the unpleasant parts of the human experience as is strongly implied, they wouldn't be able to do that now - it would be far too dangerous and unpredictable. However if the innies also had a more docile personality... Maybe they're refining all the negative emotions Gemma experiences in the torture rooms so they can then remove them?

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Severance (2022)

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Look, this one guy made a lil pig to bring to Carnival! Unclear on what his costume is, he's maybe wearing wings? Or maybe they brought the lil pig along with them, packed in the costume trunks. Did the men pass it around in secret, when they needed something to hug?

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and killing yourself is not an option.

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The next episode of Severance is called Chikhai Bardo. In some schools of Buddhism this is known as the Bardo of the Moment of Death; when a person exists between two realms.

Are we getting a Severance reintegration mind palace episode? So psyched. Irving's dream during the ORTBO was gorgeous, an episode of Mark's interiority during reintegration would be amazing.

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On a show full of unhinged reactions that include Blanky covering himself in forks and Hodge's eucharist/ cannibalism monologue, the most unhinged reaction of them all is when Gibson gets that soft little smile after Hickey proposes. No one is doing it like her.