#(no we're not)

[pretend-i-don-t-exist]

OK SO STROKE OF INSPIRATION

author!sy. can you see it. can you feel me

author!sy who has written some of the best novels known to media, who is gradually approaching global levels of fame. he just has the best world-building and plots! his characters are fully fleshed out and have backstories of their own that make it so difficult to hate any of them, because you can just understand where they're coming from, but they also did some very bad things, y'know?

except... all of his novels are tagged as danmei.

sy just doesn't understand why. he wasn't writing with these characters being together (in fact, he's sworn off romance in writing his novels, bc he thinks they make everything complicated) but somehow,,, his readers think the characters are together? why are his novels tagged as danmei?

so he goes down the rabbit hole and reads gay fanfiction to understand. it's not like he's gay, this is a just very author thing to do! you just want to understand what your readers think and what they want, right?

cue gay panic. he's stubbornly holding on. he fails. so he announces that he's taking a break (to maybe find out what the hell is going with him) and starts to read other novels.

enter pidw. sy absolutely loves the first few chapters. they were so good and the world-building looks so complex! then everything went to shit. he yells at airplane in the comments. he roasts the novel so hard it came out of the oven burnt from the outside in.

airplane only responds with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ secretly, he's loving this new reader who had a history of critiquing novels very harshly, and creating theories that sometimes keeps the fandom alive through dying times

they chat privately, sometimes. there's a convention or smth, and both sy and sqh are invited. sy tells airplane that he's going to find him and yell at him irl. that, of course, happens but not after sqh finds out that /peerless cucumber/, pidw's no. 1 hater, is also the one of the world's top danmei writers.

sqh is like ??? a pretty boy is walking up to him angrily and is that-- oh no, oh no, oh no that is sqh's type

idk where i'm going with this but when they transmigrate sy absolutely writes xianxia versions of his novels and sqh finds out and now they have a competitive write off where they try to find who on earth is the better writer (sqh, now that he's not financially restricted, thinks he can do better than pidw) (sy, now able to shove his issues so far down they crawled out of the other side of the earth, thinks he can do better in general)

anyway svsss becomes less tragic bc sy and sqh are too busy writing gay ass novels to follow the plot, and liu mingyan absolutely writes fanfiction of their novels

[nic-coughlan]

...and if you look to your left you'll see the symbrock fandom in various stages of never-ending grief and fury...

[kelluinox]

I feel like a lot of misunderstandings come from the simple fact that people try to put a situation into comfortable or familiar settings and terms for themselves in order to understand foreign conflicts. For example, if we take the American leftists, they clearly project the unique history of the US and US racial politics onto the Middle East in order to simplify the Israel Palestine conflict, or to make it more understandable for themselves, turn it into something familiar, i.e a struggle against European colonialism. It's just easier to understand that way. You don't have to exert any energy. You don't get headaches trying to puzzle out a conflict and setting completely unfamiliar to you.

This kind of behavior is a mistake. It is an incorrect approach. Not only when it comes to understanding I/P, but understanding other world conflicts as well. You have to take into account the unique geopolitical history of every region. You cannot just project the history you know and are familiar with on a completely different area in the world. You have to be able to open your mind and to educate yourself, you have to abandon the urge to stick to the familiar and be able to learn. Otherwise, you're just being ignorant and completely unhelpful

[sternutaries]

What I love most about aftg is just how you get into it, hatelove the whole thing because wow that was some damage but it's sooo good, then you immediately start to obsess over it and with time passing it just. gets. worse.

Anyways, welcome to the rabbit hole, we're all perfectly fine.

[pollywiltse]

god help me i can't believe i'm about to defend benedict arnold but actually irl Peggy does seem to have been pretty in love with him even though everyone including Flexner wants to believe she wasn't. (Actually my big reason for believing this is Flexner insisting she wasn't but then turning around and quoting, for example, someone refuting stories about her having affairs by saying that "her uncommon affection for the general renders [them] very improbable". I do think she thought he was kind of incompetent in business though.)

Also like I know everyone is like "bUt hE wAs sO mUcH oLdEr tHaN hEr hOw cOuLd sHe pOsSiBlY hAvE bEeN iNtO hIm", but I remember when I was in junior and senior year of high school, everyone in my class had a giant crush on the tiny acting teacher with a ponytail who was also in his late thirties (who actually come to think of it might have played Benedict Arnold one of the years I was in his class). So it's not actually that weird for an 18-year-old to be attracted to a short guy in his late 30s. (It would have been skeevy if he had ever reciprocated, but he was happily married so that never happened.)

Also I know Arnold had a nasty temper and the meme is that he also treated his wives badly, but actually the impression I keep getting from Flexner is that he was desperately worried about making them happy (and the first one really wasn't having it).

[selamat-linting]

this might just be me growing up in a super conservative region (58% prabowo voters SWEEP) but im really frustrated over how aimless queer rights organizing seems to be in indonesia. like, i appreciate ppl who make alternative schools, shelters, halfway homes, and advocate for free health insurance and financial assistance aids because its a resources that most of us should have had by the law but doesnt because community stigma. but there must something to be done outside of that.

three years ago, a woman died from a lynch mob. with the way the political climate were going, i was hoping our issues will start to be considered in mainstream conciousness. there were a few memorials, and i thought that girl i dont know would be a reminder for other ppl to fight harder. activist groups and queer rights NGO's were making zoom calls, meet-ups, i sat in one of the online meetings and turns out the org is linked to a broader international movement with actual funding. it really seems like something.

but three years later they are still making the same zoom meetings, basic instagram posts about transitioning positivity (but no mention of diy hrt), movie recs filled with disney slop, the same listless meetups with no material gain to show for it. the incremental fight for queer rights by all means, is a failure. there are no effort to link back our struggle with other forms of oppression. we are not represented by anyone in the government, there are no laws codified to protect us, even the media is growing increasingly hostile to us. and fyi another trans girl died recently from a hate crime and all she get is a few memorial instagram posts. five years ago this should incite online outrage at least. we are circling down the drain and all of those community resources will slowly gets overburdened with diminished funding and more and more trans people gets abandoned by society.

and dont get me started on how those community resources and events seem to exist only in java. not to be resentful but its like kalimantan, papua, sulawesi, and all the surrounding regions are just there to be java's cellar and pantry. and they expect us to be just as developed politically and intellectually.

[ac-liveblogs]

is it just me bothered by the fact that you're 'the trailblazer'?

a trailblazer being someone that leads the way along a new path, a beacon for others to follow. we are traveling along train tracks that someone else laid down, explicitly tracing a prior expedition to places already visited. we are not leading the way nor discovering new places. we are in absolutely no way a trailblazer.

AKIVILI would've been a trailblazer. WE are tourists

[missbonekitty]

Are any of us adults?

[god-sent-gender-bent]

Are we surprised the "pregnant 8 year olds should carry to term" and "12 year old in a hoodie is a grown man" party thinks a 5 year old brown child is an adult?

https://x.com/trtworld/status/1785959608168731091

[victusinveritas]

All of these are by @mattxiv on Instagram.

Here's to all the shockingly single bachelor uncles or the two very close friends who just happened to be girls and are only living together until one of them finds a man (they lived together for forty two years).

[riacte]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[shenarilends]

Buzz up your protection! 👿🧿

HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY GET BACK WITH YOUR EX

✔️ Anger the town’s witch. ✔️ Be chased by her possessed killers. ✔️ Run for your lives.

[annabelle--cane]

vampirism poses the question "what if there was a fundamental, horrible, unending well of want in your soul that, if truly satisfied, would lead to great pain for all those you hold closest and, in turn, their absolute and total revilement of you?" and naturally as a person with no problems I don't relate to this in any way at all.

[pouletpourri]

"You just have to look closely."