nerdsandbabyteeth

[nerdsandbabyteeth]

Tongued 😛

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Well I am not a rat.

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Misc from tiny sketchbook

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More Objects (now with blood and decoration)

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hickey being an annoying boyfriend and bothering billy at work when he takes that knife is sooo important to me

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Sketches by A.K. MacDonald, 1932

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maaaaan if you put the youth of today into some kind of old style situation they would struggle but adapt over time much like those of the past.

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hear me out cake, but instead of ppl i want to fuck it’s songs that kind of fit The Character if you squint and tilt your head just right and have a beautiful mind

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mm somewhat obsessed with the hickey/gibson break-up and how they both weaponise the way queer folk are perceived in order to wound one another.

how gibson first plays into homophobic attitudes by painting hickey as predatory to jirv, manipulating his prejudices against queerness in the way most likely to appeal to his religiosity: hickey as tempter, as 'devious seducer', much in the vein of sin or satan himself.

the way hickey calls gibson his 'wife', mobilising the stereotype that someone must be 'the woman' in a male/male dynamic to emasculate him; to subjugate him, in a misogynistic conceptualisation of victorian marriage, and so to claw back some control.

gibson's reactionary attack on hickey's queerness itself, performed not quite by rejecting his own, but by implying hickey is more queer than him (strictly homosexual in 'tastes', instead of whatever gibson perceives himself as); his implication that hickey is thus worse than him, and more dependent on their relationship.

hickey further targeting gibson's masculinity with his comment on having seen 'more of [his] postern than [his] face' over the winter; a reminder that gibson is also dependent on hickey's companionship and, as fucking is stereotypically perceived as masculinising while being fucked is emasculating (especially for a man), reducing his masculinity and power alike in their dynamic.

gibson then likening hickey to a rat, ultimately denying him even his humanity by equating his sexuality to that of vermin: diseased, dirty, invasive, unwanted. with no other recourse, hickey's response is to embrace this: he accepts the animalism gibson projects on him, literally shitting his bed so that they're both left resting in filth, like the rats gibson's made them out to be.

their relationship is already mediated by existing hierarchies (naval plus social alike), and every single point of this exchange features an escalating series of attacks rooted in them. there is love there. there's tenderness, too. but it's this intersection of class/rank with sexuality that backs them into a corner, where they are doomed to use those same hierarchies to protect themselves, injuring each other in the process. it's a desperate tool, but one of few they have access to.

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hickey v stewards

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I think that’s everything, Maud Madsen

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1 month of myself (haircut included)

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jirv really spent 7 episodes getting jostled around by everybody on the boat including the monkey

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love how jop's hallucination epitomises his dynamic with crozier — not only the perceived abandonment of the present, but his invisibility leading up to it.

I mean, how many times has he been in this position?

stewardship grants him access to command (and a face of crozier) that others are denied, yet it comes at the requisite of servitude. he's close enough to see, but too low to touch; allowed to listen, but not to speak. he's a background piece; a half-thing with a decanter while the real people talk. he's communicated at (rather than with) using a nod or shake of the head, a 'yes' or 'no' to whatever he's offering, in brief asides to conversation — which he can witness but not partake in.

then there's the fact that, when jopson confides in crozier about his mother, it's completely unknown to his captain. it's the first time he's confiding in him (according to garrigan), likely the first personal thing crozier learns about him. and crozier has to prompt him to talk about it, since he doesn't raise the subject or elaborate of his own volition.

when crozier tells him a story, though, jopson is already familiar. he knows how it ends, remembers its details (like names). he's probably heard it countless times before, around those tables, unseen but still listening to words meant for other people. and when crozier asks if he wants to hear it, he says yes anyway, because it's the first time he's performing it for him — talking with (not to) him, looking at him, touching him. he is his sole audience member now.

all that to say: jopson's role as steward positions him as watcher/listener (passive) and carer/informant (active) to crozier. the power differential there says that he may touch, but only in servitude — to attach epaulettes, to sew cuffs. he may share a story, but only when invited to speak. he may act if it's for someone else. but, for himself, he cannot even ask, let alone have.

so jopson crawling on that table, that's not just him crawling to a man he thinks has abandoned him. that's all the time he's spent watching someone who's looking away. that's him abandoning the silence of servitude and asking for himself. it's more or less his only request.

and it goes unheard.

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