#Completely unrelated but I just drew something REALLY gay

[smolldust]

anyone else ever draw something and then they sit back and look at what they’ve made and go “holy shit, that’s really fucking gay Jesus Christ these characters are fags” or is that just me

[bugtransport]

bitches be like "cant stand plotlines about the power of desire, they make me feel too much" and then watch OOO and donbros. okay OOO was an uninformed accident and donbros is bonkers and theres no way i could have possibly figured out a single plot point that happened before i actually started the show but [we irritating pic] we suffering 😂😂😂 if it wasnt fucking clear by that intro: im bitches (these are my thoughts for today under the cut)

look i'm approximately 60 years old on the inside. you might think i'm cool and fresh and in my mid twenties but that's all a ruse. nothing makes me feel older than watching someone navigate a crush for the first time (if anyone is going to bring up hongo i don't... i don't actually know what i'll do but it'll be something and it'll be drastic. don't look at me, look away actually, we're talking about sonoi here. and shut up as well.)

i hate sonoi so fucking much he haunts me. what is wrong with him. i say this but also i know exactly what's wrong with him and it's that he's never had a crush before and is acting up. I HATE THINKING ABOUT IT OH FGUCKIGN its like he's at that stage where you like someone a lot and you just cant look at them. at all. or is that a me thing and im embarrassing myself publicly again. i swear this is a common occurrence-

he's at that stage where he's overthinking everything that happens with tarou. he's both convinced that he should not be around tarou because he doesn't want his feelings to get in the way of his mission or whatever but also he's sending tarou a proxy with a message from him? and getting upset when it's delivered wrong?? my man is out here listening to sononi go off about a completely unrelated couple and internalizes fucking all of it and this is the man you're trying to tell me doesn't understand art? look buddy i'm not about to go off on a tangent about what art is and what makes art good in my opinion (i will some other time. ask me about clothespin. i will go off.) but i'm pretty fucking sure an unrelated thing causing you to feel an emotion or think about a situation in a different way is like. that's definitely what goes on with art. what the fuck. can't stand his ass.

nobody in this show is the least bit self aware and i know that's fucking rich coming from me mr. "oh yeah no i'm just ignoring this thing about myself because i'm too busy right now and can't deal with it." at least i'm aware i'm a dipshit if nothing else?!

might switch tracks a little bit here but ive said it before with tarou... lemme just fucking slurp the tweets actually come to think of it ive half typed this up already and i can totally save myself some time

yeah there we go that's better. sorry this is yet again me talking about The Subjectivity of Truth. i bamboozled you! i drew you in with promises of gay people! but instead it's me! i'm the gay person. i'm the gay person and i'm talking about the subjectivity of truth again. look we'll get there again i swear there's a thread i'm following here you'll just have to humor me for a bit because...

main point: if you couldn't tell, i don't trust sonoi. i mean okay yeah no that comes off a little harsh; i don't trust any of the nouto in the same way, but it's not like. it's not personal. i don't trust anyone in this fucking show i think they're all incredibly biased and it's been shown many times that things that a character believes to be true just can straight up not be.

sorry, like: we have the goddamn crane juuto. we have the goddamn crane juuto whose whole fucking Deal is that it creates stories. and haruka. and like fuck me i suppose but i think that having two characters Explicitly there to tell stories is a little much for me to take anything anyone says at face value.

[total sidebar here: holy shit i loved seeing natsumiho and haruka interact in this ep. girlbosses but also haruka following her around for inspiration was really funny considering what she is. i have more i could say about this but now is not the time!!]

what we've seen of ideon so far (which, i mean, is not a lot, it's really not a fucking lot) but their world is very much designed to not lead to cultivating a population who desires. maybe this is a nature vs. nurture debate. do the nouto not desire because at their core they are unable to or at least somewhat immune to it or do they not desire because they haven't been shown desires to have. it seems quite strongly that they believe the former but that the reality is the latter. if nothing else they seem to all have the desire to learn more about humanity. do i think this will ever be touched on? FUCK no i don't expect anything. i like it though.

man idk. i really don't buy sonoi saying (back in the cafe when he was all fucked up and red no less) that the nouto are unable to turn into hitotsuki. i don't trust like that half because i don't trust sonoi further than i could throw the man but also because [here is the gay shit i promised earlier i told you we'd come back to it i would never tell a joke] i think watching him get corrupted by his own desire for tarou would make me feel 10 million emotions and absolutely shatter like i'm a prop glass and the universe just smashed me over someone's head. i think i would legitimately have to take a day off work if that were the case. i think that would rule and whip and fuck and every single other word that you can possibly think of. i think that would chop my balls off. i want that to happen so bad i cannot put it into words and it's sure as shit not for a lack of trying. i'm doing my absolute best here.

do i think this will happen? absolutely not lol i just like the concept. although come to think of it i know that the don clan created the juuto but did they ever say what they created them... from? would be fucked up if that's what happens when a nouto gets infected with desire. do i believe that's what actually happened? who knows... i just think it would be fun. i am allowed to think about the idea for no reason but i think it would be fun :)

sorry for going off about the subjectivity of truth again! actually i'm not sorry that was really fun for me <3 i feel relatively more normal now but ugmghhhhmh i cannot wait for sonoshi to show up uh i know i'm gonna be really normal about him and if he tears himself out of my hand and onto my open and waiting csp canvas like you're just gonna have to be cool about this. you're gonna have to understand. some bitch showing up to fuck things up in the 3rd quarter is what i NEED okay actually there's already quite a lot of fucking things up in the third quarter that's happening right here but new blood. new blood! new blood!! and he's red!

[exhales really deeply] okay cool i got that out of my system. i'm not looking to workshop any of these ideas unless idk, you really want to. don't feel like you need to respond to anything that i'm saying here. i'm just making spaghetti, brother. sometimes you need to sit in your brain and sort things out and make a big pot of spaghetti. that's all this is. this is me trying to put my thoughts into words which i want to train myself to be better at again, and if longform donbrothers posting is how i must do it, so be it. this is you looking into my mind if you care to do so and saying "damn, bitch, you live like this?" and it's true, i do. every single fucking day of my life i am plagued with the capacity to think. god bless

[lollytea]

Fearless (part 2/3)

( PART ONE okokok some parts of this are pretty good. some not so good. but the important part is im tryin my goddamn best out here.)

[OCTOBER 22ND, 7:02PM] The sun had melted away beneath the distant hills and Louie had somewhat calmed himself down.

At least, he was no longer hyperventilating. The feathery tufts on his cheeks were not as fluffy as before, now clumped together from his waterworks earlier. 

He lit the last of his lights, drawing the match away and allowed the head of the flame to seize its last moments. It danced with delight, flickering as it devoured the thin strand of poplar wood.

Louie watched it too long, finding solace in the glow of gentle orange. Just as it was teasing to taste his fingertips, he snuffed it out, not nearly as interested in the arising string of pale smoke. Seven illuminated oil lamps circled his room, washing him in warm, yellow light. But still, It would breed an array of shadows, outlining everything with subtle pools of gloom. Shadows made Louie uneasy. They gave him the strangest feeling that he was being watched. Reminded him of people and powers that were best not to think about. But a shadowy room was preferable to pitch black. He was scared of the dark. Come to think of it, he was scared of a lot of things. Louie had a complicated relationship with fear. He was, by no means, the skittish kid from five years ago. He simply couldn't live with that mindset for long when thrust into the life of McDuck royalty and all the madness and danger attached. So, he adapted. His busiest days tended to fall in the order of breakfast, adventure, magic, certain doom, barely escaping with your life and then sleep. Rinse and repeat. Living like that didn't phase him much anymore. How could it when he was surrounded by the most courageous family put on this earth? And when you continue to survive when that was your Day-to-Day, it had a tendency to boost your confidence. He had gotten braver for sure. Much braver. And yet, he couldn't help but feel like he was lying to himself sometimes. Being afraid of the world around him had never quite faded, he just gotten much better at handling it. Recent years made things all the more messy. His brothers weren't as brave as they used to be these days. Not after what they went through. As a spot of hope, Huey was starting to rebuild a stronger, improved version of his old self. But Dewey still needed time. It made Louie wonder if his intrepid brothers could be broken like this, should he even bother trying to toughen up? He had never been like them. Not naturally, at least. He didn't stand a chance when his time came. He figured that with all he's experienced, he should've at least developed past his more irrational fears. But he didn't.  Deep down, silly stuff still unsettled him. Spiders, violence, surprises. The dark. Ty knew he was afraid of the dark. Ty knew most of the stuff he was afraid of. And despite teasing Louie for pretty much everything else, never his fears. He claimed his brother was the same so he didn't find it all that weird. Louie called bullshit on that one. From what little he knew about Ben, it was impossible to picture that guy being scared of the dark. Ty was most likely trying to ease his insecurity. It didn't work. He felt uncomfortable sometimes, being somebody scared of so much, being close with somebody like Ty. Fearless. It sorta made him wonder if he was inferior. As if standing alongside Ty just wasn't right. The balance didn't seem equal. Wow. Louie was never gonna be good enough, was he?   Wait, no, stop it. Fucking stop it. He had no right to be feeling all sorry for himself for the probability that he wasn't good enough for Ty. On the grounds that he wasn't brave enough? No. Of course Louie wasn't good enough for Ty. That was an irrefutable fact. But what mattered right now was that his carelessness had almost gotten Ty killed today and he couldn't, in good conscience, be focusing on anything else. He almost got Ty killed. He almost got Ty killed. He almost got Ty killed. That was a little more important than "Boohoo, cute bear boy is never gonna kiss me. I'm sad." To make matters worse, Louie had gone and chosen the perfect time to figure out he was in love with Ty. Sure, It had left him happily dopey at the time. But now, after everything that happened, it was like his imaginary little love letter left a paper cut on his heart and splashed it with lemon juice. Ty was going to resign as his retainer. The more Louie said this to himself, the easier it would be to accept it when he received the news. It was truly possible Ty was currently out of his life for good. As much as Louie was trying to talk himself into hunting the boy down right this minute and begging for forgiveness, there was a part of him speculating that Ty would prefer not to see his stupid royal face ever again. It hurt. It really did hurt. But if that's what Ty wanted, Louie would silently abide by the request. He hated to admit it but the spineless side of him didn't want to face Ty either. The last look at him had been his still body laying on an iron bedstead in the castle infirmary. Beakley had assured the stricken Louie that Ty was not dead but refused to divulge the details as she ushered him out and exiled him to his room for the rest of the night. He needed to see Ty conscious. He needed to see him alive. It would be one weight off his chest just to know his retainer had bounced back. But also.....he didn't want to know the damage he'd done. He want to know how badly Ty had been wounded nor how close he had brushed by death. It had been Louie's fault. And he knew that. But the thought of confronting it head-on was a difficult reality to swallow. Even though he should. He should. Completely unrelated but another dumb, embarrassing thing that made him jump out of his skin? Sudden noises. Still completely unrelated but there was a knock at his door.

___________

[OCTOBER 22ND, 11:24AM]

The sky was clear, the autumn air wasn't chilly but pleasantly crisp and there was a lively gathering in the forest. It was held in a wide clearing, bursting with happy people, milling around and chatting. Surrounding them was an almost perfect circle of tangled old oaks, their branches wreathed with strings of homemade lanterns and flower garlands. 

Ty and Louie were quick to turn on tunnel vision towards the table with a large arrangement of party food. They came away with armfuls of bread, cheese, fruits and two tankards of apple cider. They found a spot for themselves, hiding away behind a stack of bailed hay just on the outskirts of the festivities. They set up their little feast, which they wasted no time in devouring. 

There were minstrels playing a vibrant tune. But even with all their flutes, fiddles and practice, they fell short in comparison to the natural music of Ty Cloudkicker's laughter. Louie was talking fast. He was gravitating into Ty's space as he did so, lured in by the bubbling sound. He was eager, grinning deliriously as he spouted out more and more of his story to keep the laugh from fading.

As if it was a lifeline. Like the back of his mind was utterly terrified it would stop. Yet he was entranced with a flood with endorphins, so enamored with the resonance that he couldn't help but be elated as he rattled on to keep himself alive. "Okay, so nobody specifically told Uncle Donald that keeping snacks in your crown was not considered "Kingly" behavior. But see, he just saw it as an extra pocket. He didn't get what the big deal was." 

When Ty laughed hard enough, he started snorting. He attempted to control himself. Louie wished he wouldn't. "So imagine being one of those advisor buzzard dorks, right? And you're having this big, important royal audience with the new king. And then right in the middle of discussing warships or something, he reaches into his crown, (not breaking eye contact.) and starts munching on a fish sandwich. They looked at him like he just spat on their mothers' graves." The octave skyrocketed and Ty disintegrated into high pitched cackles, tightly clutching his side as if he would split in half. It swept away the narrative in Louie's head, fizzling the thought process as he continued to gaze at Ty as if he were channeling golden light. However, his brain did not send the memo to this mouth that it was time to stop talking. Which led to Louie stuttering out "And the--....He--...uh, he--,um...." a brainless smile slapped on his face all the while. He couldn't stop smiling. He was crashing and burning and he couldn't stop smiling. He was certain he would be humiliated over this blunder later but right now, it was pretty funny. Thankfully, his subconscious had mercy on him, cutting him off with a nervous, breathless giggle. Ty was oblivious to whatever kind of gay breakdown Louie was having as he was trying to regain composure from his own hysterics. He was beginning to calm down, occasional wheezy yet delighted noises still sputtering out of him. His shoulders relaxed and he leaned back with a shaky exhale, still stuck with that huge sunny smile. They fell into a silence in the aftermath, content to sit and just listen to the music. Ty picked up his cider and took a gulp. Louie mirrored him. Then Ty's entire frame bucked with a surprise hiccup and Louie nearly choked. He was pretty sure he saw his whole life flash before his eyes as he collapsed into a coughing fit, Ty thumping him firmly on the back. "I'll live, I'll live!" Louie gasped, regaining himself. "Stop hitting me, I bruise like a peach." "Sorry." He drew his hand away. Then he hiccuped again and Louie lost it. "It's not funny!" Ty insisted, a desperate crack to his voice. It was pretty hilarious, actually. Not just the ridiculous little noises, but the way his shoulders jumped and how he would blink in split second afterwards, startled and bewildered like a baby animal. Ty gave him a shove, Louie still snickering and flailing his hands to halfheartedly fend him off. "Hey, hey, what gives you the right to attack me? I nearly choked and died 'cause of you." "Sounds like a "you" problem." "Where'd those hiccups even come from? Your papa bear never teach you not to drink your cider so fast?" Ty's bottom lip jutted out, irritated. He shook his head "Nah, it's--" Hic. Louie snorted. "Shut up!" He snapped. Yeah, his face was definitely a darker shade of pink than usual. "Sometimes I get hiccups if I laugh too much." "Huh. that's a thing that can happen?" "Yeah. A thing I gotta live with." Hic. "Lemme guess, this hasn't happened in a while?" "Huh?" Ty turned to him, perplexed. "Nah, it happens all the time. And when I tell ya it's the most annoying thing--" "You can't be serious." Louie smiled with a disbelieving shake of the head. "You, like, barely laugh anymore." "What's that supposed to mean?" "What?" He shrugged. "You don't." Ty rolled his eyes and directed his vision elsewhere. "I usually do whenever I go back to the glen." "Are Ben and Lottie really that funny?" "They are the least funny people I know. Also they suck and they're cheaters and I hate them." Hic. Let's see. So, he was clearly pouting. Acting all petty about his siblings. The Glen. Laughing to the point of hiccups. "Lots of tickle fights, huh?" Louie deduced, a smirk playing across his beak. Ty considered him for a moment, as if he was thinking about decking him right then and there but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort. (Louie was offended.) He then looked off into the distance, an indescribably haunted look in his eye. "Soooo....I'm gonna guess you usually lose the tickle fi--?" "I do not!" Ty abruptly yelled, shooting him an indignant look. "Let's get this straight, if it's one-on-one, I win. I always win. You better not forget that, your highness." He jabbed Louie's chest with his forefinger. "I'm the best fighter out of the three of us. In fact, I probably got the potential to be the best fighter in the whole kingdom!" "Real modest." "It's just if they team up, then it's unfair! That's why they're--" Hic. Louie watched, delightfully entertained as Ty hissed "God. Damn. Hiccups." "And how often do they team up?" He didn't answer right away. Then reluctantly grumbled "Most of the time." "So what I'm hearing is--...." Louie casually leaned against Ty's side, propping his elbow on the latter's shoulder.  "You do lose most of the time?" "Shut up." "No." "Okay, so here's the thing. Let's say you're a big, strong brave knight. You're super cool and heroic and everybody respects you." Hic. "Then you go back home and then suddenly you're just someone else's baby brother and they see you just standing there, minding your business and they're just like "Well! Guess I gotta obliterate him!" And they do not hold back." "Ohhhhh, I get that, I totally get that." Said Louie. "Well, not the brave knight part. But y'know. Me and my brothers had to share a room. It was tiny. There was always a foot in your face or whatever. And sometimes when were bored, they started getting rowdy and throwing hands and it's not like I asked but I got dragged in too. When I was just trying to sleep, man! I wasn't asking for a spontaneous duel at 2am." Ty snorted. "Oh yeah, and sometimes Dewey calls me a little bitch." "He's right." Louie knocked his body against Ty's, making a sound of faux outrage. Ty only found that funnier. Huffing, Louie pawed around for the cluster of grapes at his side. He twisted one free and twirled it around his fingers for a moment. "Watch this. I can feel it. I'm gonna do it this time." "Are you now?" Said Ty in such a distinctly pleasant tone that Louie could not possibly interpret it any other way than "I do not believe that but I'm humoring you but I also want you to understand that my sweet voice is oh, so bitterly sarcastic. Fuck you." "I see you're doubting me." "Me? Doubt my liege? I could never." "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're a real court jester. Now shut up and observe." Louie wiped all expression from his face and inhaled deeply to obtain peak tranquility. He relaxed his whole frame. If he could pull this off, this would be his day for sure. Ty was watching. This moment would define his life. Thinking a hasty prayer to every known God, force and entity  that had ever favored the unlikely ones, he tossed the grape in the air, threw his head back and opened his beak. The grape finished rising and gravity took control. It fell. Down, down, down, down. Louie now understood the concept of meditation. He was so in the zone, he could've sworn the grape was descending in slow motion. Yes, yes, it was aligning directly below his beak. He was gonna catch it! Down, down, down, down. Then Ty snatched it right out of the air and swallowed it whole. Louie sat, slack jawed, attempting to process what had just happened. He slowly turned to Ty, completely blank. Huh. That moment really did define his life. "You bastard!" He squawked. "Me bastard!" Ty exclaimed, looking insufferably proud of himself. "How could you?! I know our allyship has been complicated but this is high treason!" "Sorry, sorry, I just--" He sat back a little, shaking with silent laughter. He then formed a square with his hands and hovered it before Louie, squinting one eye. "I just needed to see the face you would make and god, it was worth it. You think you could hold that face for a few hours to get a portrait made? I'd get it framed and hang it in my room." He was teasing him. Louie knew he was teasing him. And yet he still blushed bright red from the fragment of fondness blurred in the implication. "W-well, well I would--I'd--" He floundered, racking his brain for a retort. "You think there's any musical instruments that could replicate your dorky little hiccups? I'd hire minstrels just to have them play it for me! Y'know, for when I need a laugh." Ty's smug grin dropped and his eyes flicked about uncertainly. "I--..." He dragged the word out, face flushing at a rapid rate as he folded his knees up to curl in on himself. He crossed his arms. "I think they're gone now anyway." He mumbled. Hic. God, that never got old. "If you laugh one more time, I'm putting you in a tree and leaving you there." Louie laughed again, out of spite. "Nobody's fault but your own. Imagine you've just fought an epic battle and you think there's no more enemies to take on. But as soon as you say that out loud, boom! Second ambush! You would think a warrior like you would get that." "Your highness?" "Yeah?" "Shut your huge mouth." "No." "Okay. Dunno why I thought that would work. Never does." "Y'know I would offer to spook your hiccups away. But we both know that wouldn't work." "Yeah, probably not." Said Ty with a shake of his head. He perked up a bit. "Lottie gave it a shot once. Nothing." "Well, it's just like you said that one time." Louie shrugged, then faltered when the back of his mind took notice of the dimly glowing orange irises he was met with. His voice softened involuntarily. "You're fearless." He didn't know what he said wrong. Ty's face fell. He looked so utterly devastated that Louie, completely lost to why he was even upset, felt his own heart shatter to pieces. He wanted to start sobbing just from seeing him. "Oh..." Ty whispered. He clutched one of his hands with the other and began fidgeting with his fingers. "Well, see. Uh, the thing about that is--...." Concerned, Louie scooched in closer, peering at the face that had once again turned away from him. He hesitantly touched Ty's upper arm. "Hey. Ty. Are you--?" "HEY, LOOK AT THAT!" Ty blurted out, his voice nervously rising in pitch. He attempted to subtly clear his throat. Louie followed the direction of Ty's pointer finger which was gesturing out to the thick expanse of forestry. There was nothing there. But then he caught a flash of movement and noticed two figures tucked away in the shadows of the trees. A young man and woman, probably only a few years older than them. "The couple?" Louie asked, puzzled. "The what now?" Then Ty did a double take, then snapped to attention as if he had just noticed them. "Oh! Oh, yeah, them, sure. I mean, yeah, that's what I meant. Them. Uhhh....look at them!" "Uh. Okay? Why?" "Theeeyyyy're....cute? Gross? They're something. They're definitely something." Louie hummed, taking the two into consideration. The girl was letting out a peal of laughter and the guy was blabbing away animatedly, looking thrilled with himself that she was finding him funny. He was trying so hard.... Louie didn't know if he wanted to gag or coo out an "aww!" "Grossly cute." He decided. Ty snapped his fingers. "That's it!" "You know, I don't get why they're over there. There's tons of people around here. Why would you wanna show up to a party if you're just gonna hide away and hang out with one person the whole time?" "For real though." For the next few minutes, Ty and Louie observed the couple, keeping up a running commentary on the guy's obvious nerves and the girl's less than subtle advances. Ty and Louie learned a lot about themselves in those few minutes. Namely that they were both terrible at lip reading. "He said Pants." Ty was certain. "No, he said Nance." Louie countered. "Her name is probably Nancy." The girl clapped her hands together, nodding eagerly. "Then what's that for, huh? Clearly he just offered to tailor her a personalized pair of pants." "You are so dumb, that's not what's happening here at all." The guy took a dramatic step back and twirled his wrist an unnecessary amount of times before offering her his hand with a half-bow. She took it, giggling. The two them scampered off, out of the shadows and into the heart of the party, where other couples were twirling around as the minstrels played. He curled an arm around her waist, smiling as though this was his greatest honor and they spun into the motion, flowing so naturally amidst the other dancers as if they were simply another cogwheel in the world's most elegant clock. "Dance." Said Ty and Louie in unison. "Pretty sure we were close." "Pretty sure we're idiots." "Yeah, I know but just let me pretend." Ty suddenly snickered, his eyes glinting. "What was that thing he did with his hand anyway? And why did she eat it up?" "It's called flair, Tiberius." "Kinda dumb." "You're just mad that flair is not something you possess." "Bullshit, watch this!" Ty sat up straight and bent his arm into a perfect ninety-degree angle. "Prepare to be amazed." And then his entire forearm began to spin and spin and spin and spin and spin like a windmill in a hurricane. "Flair, flair, flair, flair," He was chanting and Louie had already collapsed in a giggle fit. It wasn't even remotely funny. It was dumb, it was so dumb. But Louie could admit to himself that dumb schticks get like ninety percent more humorous to him if there's a really cute boy performing them. He was easy like that. Ty was extremely committed to the joke as he kept spinning and spinning for over ten seconds. He kept shooting Louie glances and his grin got wider and wider every time he looked away. "FLAIR!" He let his arm go, throwing out an open palm and nearly knocked it against the side of Louie's head. "Hey!" He dodged. "Watch where you swing that thing, you could've whacked me!" "But I didn't!" Said Ty gleefully. He lowered his hand but did not withdraw. It remained unwavering and offered out to Louie. He took it. He didn't think, he just took it. It was only when they made contact that Louie woke up and his heart promptly spiked. But besides a light blush, he managed to keep his face neutral. "So, I guess it's not just that girl who's impressed by this stuff." Ty was nonchalant. His smile then twitched, as if aching to stretch wider but he was reigning it in. "You are too." They were still touching, which, by all accounts, should continue to fluster Louie. But as seconds ticked by, a sense of calm was settling over him. The very thing originally causing panic was now bringing him comfort. It was the weirdest thing, "I was laughing at you, not with you." He said evenly, catching Ty's contagious smile. "Ehh," He shrugged. "I'll take it." Louie would count this as a new domain for sure. Uncharted waters. As if he and Ty had stumbled in accidentally but now they were here, their curiosity was urging them to explore. Not to a dangerous extent, of course. But maybe just edge along the sidelines and see what they could discover. "Your hands are so tiny, it's crazy." Ty commented, tilting his head. Turning it over, he slid his thumb thoughtfully across Louie's palm. "How do you even hold anything?" Louie wasn't even eyeing their hands but was regarding Ty's pensive face. "It's kinda the worst. Whenever we find treasure and I get my cut, the fancy rings and bracelets are huge. I always gotta go to a jeweler and get them resized if I wanna wear them."' Ty was fiddling with Louie's fingers now, fixing him with a decisive nod. "I'll get you a ring for Christmas." "Woah, woah. For real?" "Yeah. I'll put it in one of those fancy boxes. But then you'll open it and see it's made out of grass and try to have me beheaded." As they were speaking, their hands continued to play around. Ty had flattened his own, aligning his palm against Louie's. Louie spread his fingers and Ty laced his through. "Uncle Donald says I'm not allowed to say "Off with his head" anymore or I'm grounded 'til I'm thirty-five. It "makes the people want to revolt."" Louie air-quoted with his free hand. "But I would fire you for sure." Ty snorted. "You would not and you know it." There would never be any proof that they held hands that day. Not a single eye witnesses, including themselves, as both boys had turned a blind eye to their own actions. They were afraid to look down, as that would be an acknowledgement. Louie had no mental image of the moment, fuschia fur intertwined with snow feathers, only a rush of heat and a hazy ponder if the dampness was his sweat or Ty's. And if the feel of Ty's touch was just an illusion of the mind, there was one poignant hint of the reality and that was how gentle their voices had gotten. "Oh, so, you're really gonna test me like that, Tiberius? Pushing me around, stealing grapes, calling me a little bitch. Is this any way to treat your liege? You don't think I'm at the end of my rope with you?" "Nahhhh...." Ty drew the word out, grinning. He twisted his muzzle into an exaggerated pout and batted his eyes. "You would never because I'm awesome and cool and smart and you love me." It was Ty's utter nerve that left Louie too astonished to even blush. Instead, he simply tilted his head, an eyebrow cocked. "Do I?" He challenged. To his credit, Ty did not relent either. However, the impishness gradually died from his eyes until he was left solemn. "Maybe?" He spoke softly, as though too much force would crack the delicate little word. He bore into Louie's eyes, like he was searching for an answer. Pleading for an answer. Louie felt his own hand squeeze Ty's. He inhaled. He knew he was going to say something, he was just leaving it up his own scattered subconscious to determine what. He would open his beak and whatever words wound up tumbling out would seal his fate. He didn't have a second to panic, to fret, as he was already speaking and he was petrified by how fast this was all going. "I--" Something shattered and a woman screamed in pain. Indistinct shouting and Ty cursed under his breath. Louie scrambled around to see the commotion and the last few things he registered were the gleam of sunlight catching unsheathed weapons, the girl he called Nancy with crimson pooling from her forehead, Ty demanding "Get down!" and knocking him stomach-down into the ground. 

“Stay there and don’t move.” Then Ty had rushed off and everything went to shit.

___________

[OCTOBER 22ND, 7:13PM] Louie was well acquainted with that knock. Firstly, one firm rap against wood, proceeded by two more rapid-fire. He associated it with a twinge of annoyance, high sun beams streaking in his window and somebody near, dear and insufferable to his heart, pestering him from the other side to rise and shine already or his breakfast would go stale. This usually occurred around 9:30AM. If given a say in the matter, Louie would sleep til noon. But he didn't have a say in the matter because every morning, without fail, there was a retainer banging down his door. Something was off this time. Once he knocked, Ty had fallen uncharacteristically silent. No continuation of drumming out an obnoxious little tune and and no insisting he open up. Louie was hesitant to do much of anything. It seemed his door was the only thing protecting him from facing repercussions right now. If he fell deep enough into denial, he could pretend Ty wasn't there. So long as he kept his door shut, he could pretend everything was alright. Ty didn't almost die. It was a tempting thought. It resounded in such an appealing voice inside his head that Louie seized his latch before he could give in. The brass shocked a chill to the pads of his fingers as he held on tight. He had to open up. He had to. His hand fidgeted, stalling the moment. He thumped his forehead against the door, heaving a steadying sigh. "You don't wanna see me, do you, your highness?" He heard Ty say in hushed tones, his voice startlingly close to where Louie had situated himself. "Ehh, if we're being honest....not really." "Oh...." "Do you wanna see me?" "I mean....I kinda don't? The idea of seeing you right now is making me nauseous." The statement skewered Louie's heart. He shook it off. "Why'd you knock?" "'Cause it doesn't matter what I want, I gotta see you right now. It's important." An prolonged pause hung in the air, buzzing with a mutual uncertainty. Louie tapped his fingers to the wood and after a second or two, Ty did the same. Their respective rhythms aligned. "But..." Ty continued, his voice faltering. "If you don't wanna see me, I can go--" "Convince me." Louie was blurting out before he thought twice about it. "Huh?" "I need to open this door but, like surprise surprise, I'm scared. You've done it before. I get scared and you talk me into stuff. Do your big strong hero magic and get me to suck it up. Please, I need it." "Oh, uh, I--" He could hear how flustered Ty had gotten suddenly being put on the spot. "Well, I--...I guess you don't have a choice 'cause if you don't open up, I'm strong enough to barricade the door down. So, I figure we should just do this the easy way." Despite the circumstances and the scruple wrung tense in his stomach, Louie felt the corner of his beak twitch at the tentative touch to Ty's tone. He felt his stiff shoulders relax. "Is that a threat, Tiberius?" "Uh, no." Ty admitted, sounding sheepish. "That was just a joke. See, it was the first thing that came into my head and then suddenly I was saying it. Sorry, I dunno for sure if now is "joke time" and I figured it'd be kinda weird to ask so--" He didn't get to finish rambling. His hair whipped to the side with the rush of air that came with the swift swing of the door. Louie fixed him with a hard look, processing the sight of his retainer standing there, alive and bright eyed. Ty's hand was still hovering awkwardly in the air, where he assumed it had been resting against the door. He blinked back at him, puzzled and a little alarmed, as if caught under a spotlight. He didn't look angry. But Louie knew better than to lull himself into thinking he was in the clear. Whatever resentment Ty was feeling would spill out in time. Louie braced himself. "Hey, Ty." He said stiffly. "Come on in."

[cinnonym]

christmas magic's brought this tale (to a very happy ending)

Written for Day 10 - Game Night / Movie Night of 12 Days of Christmas @supercorpbb

Read on AO3

***

r/relationship_advice – posted by u/anonymous1000 – 13 hours ago

My (25f) crush and best friend (27f) chose a lesbian classic for movie night, how do I react?

Disclaimer ahead: I haven’t used reddit before and am thus not very fluent in etiquette and formatting, but please bear with me because I am seriously overwhelmed by the current situation and would appreciate all forms of help. I’m also typing this in a hurry, because I’m supposed to be in the bathroom, so please excuse typos or inaccuracies. I’ll try my best. But now, without further ado, here goes:

I (25f) have been crushing on my best friend (27f) pretty much since the day we met. For context, that was two years ago, and while we started out on a business relationship, it evolved into a close friendship almost right away. This is mostly due to her, I must admit. She’s the most open-minded person I know and simply couldn’t be “scared away” by my bad reputation (which I inherited). Needless to say, I’m very grateful for her. She’s not only my best, but has also been my only friend for quite a while, before she introduced me to her inner circle. I unironically owe her my happiness (and my life, several times over, but that’s unrelated to this story).

I’d fallen in love before I realised what was happening. Usually, trust and affection come slowly to me, but her I loved almost right away. That’s simply who she is, a person one cannot help loving. Also, she’s very attractive, side note. I used to flirt with her sometimes, in the beginning, before I became aware of the depth of my feelings (this is awkward to talk about, btw, thank goodness for anonymity online), and back then, it seemed like she wasn’t all unresponsive to my advances. Then again, she isn’t very good at saying no to anyone, because of who she is as a person, so maybe she was only being polite? I’m not sure.

Anyway, she had a boyfriend then, and I had to come to terms with my feelings, so I sort of drew back a little. I’d been with women before, so that was never an issue, but I’m uncertain whether she has ever considered women. Her sister is gay, and she is very supportive of her, but we’ve never talked about how she feels. As far as I know, she’s only ever been with men though. Either way, I’m not in the business of making moves on taken people, so I mostly focused on fostering our friendship.

The thing is, as long as I can be close with her, I am sort of okay with being “just friends”. I mean, isn’t close friendship like a romantic relationship, just minus the romance? And minus the physical advantages (although she is a very cuddly person, so that’s nice). And, like, of course, I’d like to mean more to her. Of course I’d like to take care of her every day when she comes home, cook her dinner, listen to her worries, massage her neck, kiss her goodnight. Of course I’d like to be The One to her, just like she is The One to me. But considering that she’s probably straight and not interested in me in that way, I’m mostly okay with just being her best friend.

Or, I was mostly okay with it. But recently she’s… been acting differently towards me. She’s giving me these long glances when she thinks I don’t notice (I do). She’s going out of her way to make sure I’m fine and don’t work too much (it’s a tendency I have, especially pre-Christmas). She’s told me she’s been working on my Christmas gift almost all month (and I can’t for the hell of it guess what it could be). She’s even invited me for Christmas with her family (since I don’t celebrate with mine).

And now today, she chose the film Carol for movie night (movie night is a weekly thing we do, I should have mentioned that earlier, maybe), which is, as you might know, about a lesbian relationship. And I don’t know what to do.

She claims to have chosen the film because it was on a list of Christmas films (and I suppose it does have christmassy vibes), and because it “sounded fitting”. Sounded fitting?? What is that even supposed to mean? She doesn’t know I’m gay, so it can’t be that, unless she somehow figured out. Is she gay and this is her way of telling me? And if so, how do I react? Is this her letting me know she’s interested in me, or am I reading too much into this? Did she even realise this was a lesbian film??

Anyway, she’s calling from the living room, so I need to go. I’ll try to take another bathroom break halfway into the movie, and I’d appreciate it A Lot if I had some reactions in by then, because I’m panicking a little here. Thank you all!

Tl;dr: my supposedly straight friend chose a lesbian film for movie night, and I don’t understand her intentions behind that.

(P.S. She and her boyfriend have broken up months ago. She’s currently single.)

***

r/relationship_advice – posted by u/anonymous1000 – 11 hours ago

UPDATE to this post

First of all, thank you all so much for your quick replies, they’re really helpful. As you might have guessed, I managed to negotiate another bathroom break mid-film (though my friend is currently sulking on the couch, she didn’t want to let me go? :) ?) and am, once again, typing as fast as my fingers will allow. Much has happened.

I’ve mentioned that my friend is a very cuddly person. Today was no difference – as soon as she’d pressed play on the film, she’d already enveloped me in one of her bone-crushing hugs (she’s very strong). Normally, I let myself sink into these embraces, because she really is a phenomenal hugger, but today my speculations were so prevalent in my mind that I could hardly breathe when our bodies touched.

(She noticed my reaction right away, and immediately asked if I’d rather not hug (to which I replied a vehement no), and this really isn’t very important to the story, but I wanted to let you know.)

As the film progressed (largely unregarded by me, I must admit), I noticed several things about her behaviour that seemed odd, though:

One, her heartbeat became considerably faster as soon as Carol and Therese had met on-screen and it became clear that their relationship would be the focus of the film.

Two, she’s been side-eyeing me a lot more frequently than usual (she tends to watch me watch films if she knows the plot already, but considering she probably hasn’t seen Carol before, this seems out of character for her).

Three, and this is… I don’t even know how to feel about this, but… how do I formulate this best…  When the sex scene was playing, I swear she looked at my cleavage and blushed.

I’m sort of ecstatic (because those are hints, right? I can’t be the only one to think that those are hints?) but also very very VERY worried that I’ve totally misinterpreted the entire situation. Then again, all of your comments sound incredibly hopeful and affirming, so I guess I’m not entirely wrong in my assumptions?

I need to go back now (I’ve been here way too long already), but I will definitely keep you updated. It’s so heart-warming to see how invested all of you are!

@everyone who told me to kiss her already: if she keeps this up, I just might :)

***

r/relationship_advice – posted by u/anonymous1000 – 1 hour ago

UPDATE! All’s well that ends well!

Hey everyone, I am so sorry for the late update. I ended up being… somewhat busy last night.

:) :) :)

So, long story short, we’re dating now. And yes, I did kiss her (or she kissed me, I can’t remember exactly. We somehow kissed each other simultaneously).

Long story slightly less short, because I see you hungering for details in the comments (and my now-girlfriend said you deserved to know), here is how it went down:

We didn’t even finish the film. We didn’t even resume the film, after I returned from the bathroom. Because when I did, giddy and ready to Do This, she wasn’t even looking at me. No, she was looking at her phone.

Now, I’ve never seen a person look at their phone with an expression quite as shocked as hers. She was, I’m not kidding, completely frozen (and if you knew her, you’d know that doesn’t happen often).

So naturally I rush over to her, worried as can be, thinking something bad happened, a catastrophe or maybe an accident in her family. And as I kneel by her side, and she still hasn’t moved, I happen to see what she’s been reading on her phone screen.

And it’s reddit.

I’m not gonna lie, for a second I thought it was all over. I mean, she’d obviously recognised us in my post (so much for anonymity everyone, the internet is treacherous), and judging by her expression, well… I assumed the worst.

But then she turns around and she fixes me with this incredibly cute stern stare she has, and she goes: “[My full name]. Have you browsed the relationship tag even once?”

And I shake my head, completely dumbfounded of course, because what does that have to do with anything. But apparently it plays a crucial role, because apparently you all know my girlfriend.

Her username is @supergirlssupercurls and she’s been posting the entire journey of our friendship/romance on this platform. Turns out she loves me too.

:)

She’s also told me to end this with: and they lived happily ever after.

(Let’s hope we do).

[citrineghost]

100 Humans on Netflix

So there’s this neat Netflix Original show called 100 Humans. I immediately got interested in it because they take this group of various humans from different backgrounds, age groups, and so on, and they use them to conduct experiments to get answers to interesting questions.

So, right away I had concerns about this show because

If you know anything about data and statistical research, you know 100 people is a very small sample size and does not breed accurate results

However, I’m very curious and wanted to see what they came up with anyway. I watched all 8 episodes and, honestly, I enjoyed watching it for the most part. However, I have a LOT of issues with the show and how it was conducted and I want to list them out here.

If you’re interested in watching 100 Humans or have already watched it, please consider the following before taking any of the show’s data as fact.

100 people is a very small sample size. This is because, the more people you have, the more weight each increment in your percentages has. With 100 people, each person represents 1 entire percent. That’s a lot. That means even a few people giving incorrect answers, having off-days, or giving ridiculous results (such as you can see in the spiders georg meme), can sway the entire result of an experiment into unreasonable territory. This is why most scientific studies attempt to get data from many hundreds or even thousands of people. The bigger the sample size, the more accurate it is to the entirety of the world.

I’ll put the rest under the cut because it gets long

The 3 hosts, who I’ll refer to as the scientists (regardless of if they actually are, because I’m not sure and don’t feel like googling it) repeatedly make false statements. For example, in one episode, they told their humans to “raise your hand if you believe you’re less bigoted than the average person here,” to which 94 people raised their hands. One of the scientists then made the statement, “If that were true, it would mean only 6% of Americans are bigoted.” This statement is entirely false. The only way to actually determine a true meaning to that would be to determine at what percentage of bigotry you are considered a real bigot. You also must consider that believing you’re more bigoted than other people in a small group, who you already have an impression of, is not necessarily indicative of how you feel you measure up to America as a whole. Anyway, I could go on and on. The only way to accurately summarize the results of that question would be to say that 44% of the humans had an inflated sense of righteousness or something of the sort.

The 3 scientists, both in person and in narration, for the sake of entertainment (if that’s what you call it) continually made “jokes” that poked fun at different groups, implied men are shit, etc. Maybe that’s fun for some people, but the kind of jokes they were making to amp up the hilarity of their host personas was genuinely just uncomfortable and made me feel even more like they couldn’t be trusted to go about unbiased research.

The scientists continually drew conclusions where the results should have been labeled inconclusive

The scientists made blanket statements about certain groups based on 1 element of research that would not stand up to further evaluation. For example, when explaining that ~93% (i think it was about that number) of Americans have access to clean, drinkable, tap water and yet some large number of single use bottled waters are sold every year, one scientist said it was because people believe bottled water is safer and cleaner than tap water. I am going to do my next survey on this to see if my own perception is flawed, but I simply don’t believe that all of the people who buy bottled water do so because they think its cleaner than “tap” (as if all tap is the same.) I know there have been studies about people drinking unlabeled bottled water and tap water and not being able to tell the difference, but this neglects to account for the fact that different houses pipes can affect the taste of the tap water running through them, people can use disposable bottles of water for certain activities or events too far away from tap for people to refill their reusable bottles easily, and so so so much more. Anyway, it just really bothers me to see “scientists” making these kinds of generalizations when they’re the ones whose results we’re supposed to trust.

The show was incredibly cisnormative. There was an entire episode based on comparing men and women that made me extremely uncomfortable with its division of people by men and women. There was the implication that all men have penises and all women have vaginas. There were implications that reproduction is a necessity in picking a partner. It was just a shitshow. There was one comment by one subject who asked, when being told to separate by men and women, “What if I’m transgender?” Obviously I can’t say for sure, but this person didn’t appear to be transgender and the sort of tone it was asked in makes me think it was literally something they asked him to say in order to get inclusivity points with the viewers and to “prove” that they’re not transphobic by having them divide up, because they said to go to the side you identify with. This whole thing is a) harmful to nb folks who would not have had a side to go to and b) completely negating the fact that the way we were socialized can have an effect on our social responses. That means that for a social experiment, a trans person could sway the results of one side due to their upbringing and the pressures society put on them before/if they don’t pass. This is all assuming they had any trans people there, which is potentially debatable.  I also take issue with this entire fucking episode because just, the amount of toxicity in proving one sex is better than the others is really gross and actually counterproductive to everything feminist and progressive. Not to mention, them implying that they’re trying to support trans people only to reinforce the notion that a trans man is inherently lesser for being a man when even prior to hatching, he would have also been force fed propaganda and societal pressure implying he’s less than for supposedly being a woman is really gross and makes me angry. The point of what I’m saying is that it’s actually not woke to hate men as a way of bringing women up because there are men who are minorities who are being hurt by the rise of aggression being directed at them for their gender. Anyway enough about that.

The tests drew false conclusions because they did not account for how minorities adapt to a world that’s not made for them. This is specifically directed at the episode where subjects were asked to match up 6 people into couples. There were 3 women and 3 men and the humans were asked to put them together into pairs. they could ask the people 1 question each but then had to match them up with only that information. The truth is, the people brought in were 3 real life couples already, which the humans didn’t know until after they matched them. The couples were m/f, m/m, and f/f. I think that’s great, but the problem is, literally none of the humans asked any of them their sexuality as their question and most people didn’t even consider they could match up same-sex people. One girl even thought that they had told her to make m/f pairings, even though they didn’t.  The scientists concluded from the experiment that the humans have a societal bias toward people, and assume they’re all straight, even if they, themselves, are not straight. I personally believe that was the wrong conclusion to draw. You could see some of the queer humans were shocked that they hadn’t considered some of the pairings might be gay. But, I don’t think it’s because they believe everyone they meet is straight, I believe this says more about what they expected from the scientists themselves. If someone is in a minority and they go to do something organized, like a set of experiments, they are going to be judging the quality and setup of the experiments by those designing them. I feel that the lack of consideration that the couples might be gay has a lot more to do with queer people having adapted to a world where queers are rarely involved or included in equal volume to the cishets. The queer humans taking part in the experiment and failing to guess gay couples shows that they have adapted to a world where they are excluded rather than a belief that every random person that they meet is straight. My point is further supported by an expert they had on the show who explained that, statistically, it was entirely likely that they were all straight and that even queers will account for being minorities by going with what’s most likely. The truth is, we are surrounded by a whole lot of straight people. It makes sense to assume only 6 people are all straight and that, if any aren’t, they may be bi.

The scientists frequently broke an already small sample size into even smaller groups. The group was very frequently broken in half, in thirds, or into sets of 10 people. These sample sizes tell us almost nothing actually conclusive. 

The experiments/tests frequently were affected by peoples abilities, unrelated to what was being tested. For example, one test that was broken down into 6 people and 6 control people competing at jenga was meant to show whether needing to pee helps or hurts your focus. first of all, sample sizes of 6 are a fucking joke. Second, this completely ignores these 6 people’s actual ability to play Jenga. If someone sucks at jenga with or without needing to pee, them losing Jenga when they need to pee says exactly fuck all about whether needing to pee affected their focus. They should have tested people’s Jenga skills beforehand, counted the amount of moves they made before the tower fell, and then did it again after hours of not peeing to compare their results. This test made no logical sense at all.

The scientists ignored the social effect of subjects knowing each other as well as duration of events during their last experiment. They were testing to see if people with last names near the end of the alphabet get a shittier deal because they go last in everything where things are done by name order. They tested this by doing a fake awards ceremony where they gave out some 30 awards to people, gauging the applause to see whether the people at the end got less hype and therefore felt worse about themselves than those in the beginning who got the fresh enthusiasm of the audience. the results showed that the applause remained fairly consistent throughout the awards. The issues with this test are numerous, but here are the three I take most issue with. 1) the people here all got to know each other very well over the week it took to make the show. People who know each other and have become friends are much more likely to cheer for each other with enthusiasm, regardless of how long it’s been. On the other hand, polite applause from a crowd at, say, a graduation, where you are applauding people you don’t know, WILL start off more raucous and grow very quiet except for individual families near the end. 2) the duration of the test was a half hour, which is not very long at all and doesn’t say much to test the limits of enthusiasm. Try testing the audience at a graduation with a couple hundred graduates that also involves the time it takes to walk all the way up to a stage a hundred feet away, accept a diploma, and then wait for the next person. These kinds of events take hours and nobody keeps up their enthusiasm that long unless they’re rooting for someone in particular. 3) this study tested only one of many many ways name order affects a person. Cheering and applause is only one factor. It does not take into account people having their resumes looked at in alphabetical order and therefore people at the beginning of the alphabet being picked before anyone ever looks at a W name’s resume. It doesn’t take into account a small child’s show and tell day being at the very end of the school year, after 6 other people have brought in the same thing they planned to. No one cares about their really cool trinket because they’ve seen a bunch like it already. This test doesn’t take into account how many end-of-the-alphabet people just get straight up told, “we ran out of time. maybe next time,” when next time doesn’t really exist. I feel genuinely bad for the girl who suggested this experiment because the scientists straight up said something akin to, “lmao her theory was bs ig /shrug” even though it was their own shitty research abilities that led to their results.

They did one experiment intending to see how many people have what it takes to be a “hero.” The request for this test was made by someone curious about the effect of adrenaline and if it really works how some people say. The scientists thought it an adequate method to determine an answer by testing their reflexes with a weird crying baby sound and then dropping a doll from above while they were distracted with answering questions. The scientists looked up before the doll dropped to indicate a direction of attention. While this does give some answers about peoples intuition, reflexes, and ability to use context clues, its entirely an unusual situation, makes no sense in reality, fails to take adrenaline into consideration literally at all, and has a lot more to do with chance. The person dropping the doll literally couldn’t even drop it in the same place from person to person. Some got it dropped into their lap and others almost out of arm’s reach. This, like a few of the other mentioned experiments, was during the last episode, which felt lazy and thrown together last minute, with very little scientific basis to any of the results. The last episode was weak and disappointing overall. 

One of the big issues I have with this show is actually their repeated use of the same group. They said at the end that they had done over 40 tests. Part of doing studies is getting varied samples of people in order to get more widespread results. Using the same 100 or less people (already a tiny sample) repeatedly is a terrible research method. You’re no longer studying humans at large. You’re studying these specific humans. You can’t take the same group with the same set of inadequacies, the same set of skills, and the same set of biases and then study them extensively and in many different ways like this. Your results are inherently skewed toward these specific people and their abilities. I expected them to at least get a new group each episode - every 5 or so studies - but no. They keep the same group all week, which makes the entire season. This is inexcusable in research imo.

The next issue is contestant familiarity. The humans all getting to know each other is great, socially, but it also destroys the legitimacy of many of the studies that involve working together or comparing yourselves and your beliefs

Many tests had issues with subject dependency. One study, meant to compare age groups and their ability to work together to complete the task of putting together a piece of ready to assemble furniture had each group with members they relied on entirely. A few people built the furniture while one person sat across the room, looking at instructions with their back to the others. They had to relay the instructions through a walkie talkie to another contestant and that other contestant had to relay it to the people they’re watching build the chair. You cannot study a group’s ability to build something with instructions by the ability of one single person to communicate. You’re testing that individual and the rest of them on two completely different capabilities. One person fails at being able to communicate and everyone else becomes unable to build the furniture. Even if everyone else in the group is more effective than all the other groups at building ready to assemble furniture, they might end up falling in last because of their shitty communicator who is literally not able to convey simple instructions. (yes, this actually happened in the test)

One test judged the subjects at their speed of getting ready, to see if men or women are faster at getting ready. While most elements of this test were just fine, the part I took issue with was that they did this test without regard to social convention. They told the subjects they were going on a field trip and to get ready by a certain time. Then, they gave them many things to get distracted by, like refreshments to pack with them, a menu to preorder lunch from, and so on.  The part that upsets me about this test is that they ignored social convention entirely, to the point that subjects were judged based on their conventional actions and expectations more than their actual speed at getting ready. The buses promptly shut their doors and left at the time they were supposed to but there was no final call to get on the buses. In general, when a group is to be taken somewhere by bus, there will be an announcement to load up and leave. You could clearly see many of the subjects were ready to go and were just standing around talking while they waited for fellow subjects to finish getting ready. I have no doubt that, if given a final call, most of them would have loaded up within a couple minutes. However, they were relying on the social convention of announcing departure and were therefore, left behind entirely (for a nonexistent field trip). These people who were left behind were counted as being late and not making the time cutoff. If one were to look at the social element of this situation, if everyone there believed there would be a warning before departure, the fact that 24 to 14 women to men were loaded onto the buses at departure doesn’t necessarily indicate the women were faster to get ready. It seems to me that it’s more likely to indicate anxiety at being late and a belief that they need not impede on anything lest they be reprimanded or have social consequences for taking too long - something women are frequently bullied for. There’s also the chance that many who boarded without final call are more introverted or antisocial. Plus, we can’t forget to include the people who have anxiety about seating. If someone is overweight, has joint pain, or has social anxiety, they will be more likely to board early to get a seat they feel comfortable in. If they had counted up all of the people socializing and waiting on the sidewalks nearby, they may have found that there were more men who were ready to board up at a moment’s notice. I’m not saying I think men are faster to get ready, I’m just saying that we can’t know based on who boarded without a final call. If people believe they will have a last minute chance to board, a large number of them will take the last few minutes to socialize with their new friends until they’re told they have to board. Therefore, this test cannot be considered conclusive without counting and including the people who were ready and not boarded as a third subset.

Honestly, I could go on and on about how sensationalist and unscientific this show is, but I just don’t have 6 more hours to contribute to digging up every single flaw with it. There’s A Lot.

My point is, if you feel like watching this show, which I don’t necessarily discourage inherently, I just beg you to go into it with a critical eye. Enjoy the fun of it and the social aspects, but please don’t rely on the information provided and please don’t spread it as fact, because it’s not.

It’s entertainment, not science.

[pseudoneiiric]

meta post: lili and her gender

let me go on the record to say that i fucking love lilian eyler with my whole heart, like, i typed all this out and im so fucking emotional about her! in the past, i've written things about hello charlotte and how the lgbt representation is... lacking, let's call it, and i've also made a few headcanon posts here and there about lilian's transition and her relationship with gender. so i thought, you know, let's actually write a whole ass thing about it. so here it is.

content warnings: gender dysphoria, suicide attempts, homophobia/transphobia in the original source material

PART 1: ETHERANE'S BAD TAKES so... etherane did not handle lgbt stuff well, like, in the slightest. lili is canonically genderfluid, as seen in one of those little profile things that etherane drew that doesn't actually show up in any of the games. but her genderfluid identity isn't handled well at all in the actual source material. actually, in general, hello charlotte is pretty transphobic. to cite one example, there’s this journal entry in hello charlotte 3 talking about “defective” charlotte vessels, and one of the things that can make a charlotte vessel “defective” is for them to be born amab or intersex. this already has some really bad vibes, but then we remember also that one of the big functions of charlottes is apparently for them to be sexualized (yikes!!!!!) and so we also get this weird kind of like, “trans people aren’t hot” kind of take?

but anyway. when it comes to lilian specifically, she never actually states in canon that she’s genderfluid or otherwise trans, not even in the spinoff visual novel, which, by the way, would have been the perfect place to address her gender identity, and she consistently uses he/him pronouns. we don’t actually get to see any of her thought processes about her gender at all — like at this point, i can’t even say it’s a non-issue because that would imply that they even mentioned her gender in canon. the only time we can potentially extrapolate from canon that lili might not be cis is when anri mentions that charlotte is lili’s self-insert oc. that’s kind of heavy-handed with the whole “charlotte being the female name for charles”, but that’s another matter. the point is, with the lack of any canon basis that lilian’s even vaguely questioned her gender, the reveal that she’s actually genderfluid with like, two pieces of artwork that are detached from the actual game feels very pxrfxrmxtxvxly xnclxsxvx (performatively inclusive) especially considering how.... etherane talked about lilian’s gender in particular within the actual canon material.

after all, the story behind lilian is effectively that, after she was born, her mother was forced to abort her second child, a daughter that she would name scarlett. doing so plunged her into a really deep depression that eventually took on delusional qualities. so ever since lilian was about three years old, her mother has been referring to her exclusively as scarlett, asking her to ‘ be a good girl ’ and similarly raising her as a girl. we can see here that etherane seems to have implied that genderfluidity is something that happens because other people make it so, and isn’t an identity and lived experience. (bad take!) although, albeit unintentionally, i think etherane did lay some groundwork to talk about lilian’s relationship with her gender, specifically with regards to her projection onto her oc, charlotte. in high school, when she’s more active on the internet, we see that she’s going by charlotte and using she/her pronouns. anri, her irl friend, is pretty openly critical of that, but she sort of brushes off anri’s complaints and continues to present as feminine online. now, there’s this fanfic writer who goes by the pseudonym “c”, and lilian very quickly takes an interest in him. the way she talks to c, who doesn’t know her irl, compared anri, who does, is just like flat-out like they’re completely different people.

compare, her with c:

to her with anri:

i also wanted to mention that lili does occasionally act more “femininely” with anri, but it’s never to the extent that she does with c, and in general, affectionate banter is sort of... outright ridiculed in their friendship both ways. see this one exchange:

anri: >:) always up for some roasting lili: right? <3 <3 anri: now you’re the one being gross

unrelated but it fucking kills me that anri was like “ily <3” and lili went “gross” so she went “kys” and lili deadass goes “that’s better” like that’s what anri is referencing when she says “now you’re the one being gross” and im like... please just be healthy friends who don’t wish death on each other???

it’s also worth noting that c doesn’t know that she’s not “actually” a girl, and literally when they meet, she goes like, “it’s you who should be disappointed in me. charlotte turned out to be charles, whoops! i bet you were hoping that i’d be a cute girl.” and that’s... really depressing, like, she ended up really leaning into that cutesy side of her when she was talking to c and now she feels the need to be a lot more... sarcastic and bitter, like how she is with anri, because now c “knows the truth about her”, that she’s “actually been a guy all along”.

in any case, i think the intent that etherane was going for with this was kind of like... “lilian’s actually a repressed cis gay man!” which is . not great. it gives off this really gross vibes where it’s implied that since lili was raised as a girl and is into men, she got “confused” and started going by she/her online because she couldn’t come to terms with her sexuality or whatever. and that’s just such a bad take!!!

not to mention that a really important part of lili’s backstory is... her germaphobia. she has persistent delusions accompanied by visual hallucinations where she sees people as “parasites”, which visually manifests as them rotting or decomposing. because of that, she wears gloves all the time and is repulsed by physical touch. but when she meets c (whose real name is vincent) in person, she pretty much instantly goes for skin-to-skin contact with him, where she takes off her glove and holds his hand. and like, sure, that’s sweet, but that’s really not how mental illness... works. in the slightest. she doesn’t react at all when his hand touches hers, despite the fact that she has literally had panic attacks in canon from touching things without her gloves. and it gives off this implication that mental illness can be cured with romance somehow, and that’s a really bad take!

this feeds into fandom understanding that like, well, if lilian sees vincent as pure and allows him to touch her, then Obviously she’d let him kiss her, they could probably have sex, etc. and like... she’s canonically asexual though! and that brings us to the other implication, that asexuality is somehow... caused by something. like, there’s nothing in canon to state that lilian experiences sexual attraction (or even really romantic attraction, like i know etherane went off in heaven’s gate and did a lot of ship tease, but she never really outright says she’s crushing on anyone), but judging from the way etherane handled lilian’s gender identity, i have a sneaking suspicion that she established lilian’s asexuality with her mental illnesses specifically in mind. lilian’s autistic, germaphobic, has severe ocd, and she’s been sexually assaulted in the past. therefore, she must be asexual! that’s the sort of vibes i get from the game, and im not here for it. similarly to how her genderfluidity was handled, she makes no actual statement in canon that she doesn’t experience sexual attraction. the closest she’s ever come to this is when she says to anri in heaven’s gate that she is just straight up not interested in kissing (to which anri is like, “well what if it were vincent owo??” which. ugh. anyway). it just seems really strange to me to design a character with severe mental health issues with regards to physical touch and then just sort of treat it as a given that she’s asexual. it’s another example of etherane implying that lgbt identities are results of traumatic experiences or symptoms of mental illness and not an identity or lived experience. you can be sex-repulsed and not be asexual, and while i understand that many people do identify as ace due to trauma and other such things, it still feels like really bad rep when taken with the way lilian’s genderfluidity was portrayed.

PART 2: HOW “CHARLES” IS DIFFERENT FROM “LILIAN”

throughout hello charlotte, lilian identifies herself as a passive observer, someone who doesn’t directly interfere in events. this applies mostly to her existence in false realm, where she’s like... a god, and doesn’t want to interfere in the balance of the world. but i believe she also has always seen herself as an observer. in her very first scene, the one where she and anri are watching someone get bullied, she’s the one who tells anri that there’s no point in getting help. because her role is just to observe. to take pictures for anri, to be a good girl, to say yes to everything and to never express her opinions, feelings, thoughts.

and honestly, i think the main reason for that is that she’s dysphoric. whenever she talks about herself, she’s really self-deprecating, especially compared to when she talks about charlotte. i feel like the main reason why lilian detaches herself from the world and refuses to really perceive herself is because she’s fundamentally disgusted with her gender presentation. and like, we can see in the two times that she’s presented femininely (with c and in that one comic) that lili is just so much happier and more bubbly when she’s presenting as feminine. you can literally see her stop dissociating and becoming more present in the moment because she’s just. so much more comfortable in her skin. compare:

these pictures with this one:

it’s funny i was going to say that there is a picture where she’s presenting as masculine and actually smiles like a person, but guess what! she’s texting c! so she’s actually performing femininity!

but the point is, like... when she’s presenting as masculine, especially in the canon pictures rather than etherane’s art, she just doesn’t look... happy. and then we compare that to how much more present she seems when she’s presenting as feminine, and how much more comfortable she seems in being, like, happy! and cute! but there is a downside to this. and that is...

PART 3: DIFFICULTIES IN LILI’S TRANSITION

in my sort of... “main verse” for lili, i have it so that her suicide attempt failed and that she was somehow... saved from drowning. mother passes away and she starts to... soul search a little bit and find a reason to live, and somewhere along the line she starts to transition socially. that means she starts transitioning at a pretty... extremely vulnerable point in her life. in the year between 18-19 years old, she’d be a wreck. she’s growing her hair out, but she feels insecure about it. she starts to wear skirts, but only at home. she buys makeup and never wears it. it’s a long process for her, because it’s one thing to go by she/her online or to claim she’s just a gender-confused gay boy and a completely different thing to come out as a trans woman and to actually see herself as a woman and not some kind of imposter. considering that she was raised as a girl, she would have a large amount of guilt over transitioning, feeling like she’s going to be seen as confused, or that her gender identity is a direct result of her childhood trauma. but she’s not just worried that others will see her that way: she’s worried that she’s going to see herself that way.

and for a long time, she probably does see herself that way. for a long time, scarlett would probably treat her transition as some kind of attempt to personify her unborn sister and comply with perceived expectations rather than an attempt to feel comfortable in her own skin. she’d get nervous that she’s somehow becoming scarlett, because though she’s always thought it would be easier if she’d just been her sister, she’s never really wanted to be scarlett. she’d be scared to wear mid-length skirts, scared to put her hair up in a bun, probably even scared to wear red for a time, all because she’s scared of somehow losing herself and becoming her alter.

because of her caution and concern with identifying as a trans woman and not as the “safer“ gender identity of genderfluidity (where she can say she’s trans but never actually have to “push boundaries” by wearing feminine clothing or using any pronouns besides he/him), it would likely take her a very long time to take the step to medically transition. she’d likely never get any gender affirmation surgeries just because of how invasive the procedure is, but hormones would probably be something she’d look into once she’s much older and has a more stable income.

i mentioned before that before her transition, she uses dissociation and observation as a way to cope with her gender dysphoria. she saw herself as someone who didn’t really participate in the world, was a class ghost, invisible to everyone and a minuscule part of a vast universe. but upon transitioning, she’d feel much more actively self-conscious. once she starts to present in a feminine way, she’d feel like she’s being seen, like she’s actually participating in the world, and that’s both a blessing and a curse.

she’d be much more prone to stammering, especially when saying her name, and would blush far more often. she’d be afraid of saying the wrong thing or messing up somehow. and on top of that, she’d likely feel predatory for talking to others, always wondering if others find her cute or repulsive, always wondering if someone will perceive her and harm her in some way.

she’d very likely also feel really guilty about her own emotional experience. because she’s so used to being a passive observer, a puppet that only does what others want, she would feel like it’s selfish to be just... content. she’s so actively disgusted with herself before she transitions that she’s never allowed herself to be mentally present for a happy moment in her entire life. she always second-guesses, always dismisses positive things as a mere coincidence, and after she transitions, when she starts being more present in her life, she’d feel so guilty for just allowing herself to be happy.

because of that, she has some trouble with presenting as feminine consistently — she’d vary the “level” of her feminine presentation from day-to-day, where she might go full femme one day and another day stick with a beanie and a pair of slacks. she’s much more comfortable with presenting as more traditionally feminine when she’s at home or with trusted friends in a private space, but around 19 years old, she makes a vested effort to remain in public spaces. she’d time herself, saying, “for one hour, i’ll stay in this café while wearing a skirt, and then i can leave,” and she’d gradually increase the amount of time she spends in public spaces. and eventually, eventually she does end up feeling really comfortable with her gender presentation and falls into a more static sense of style. she really likes clothing design, so she ends up wearing a lot more dynamic outfits when she’s more comfortable with herself, and she probably also mildly gets into cosplay.

i also like to think that she reconnects with anri during her young adult years. either it’s like, right after her suicide attempt (i’ve written before that she’d had anri listed as her emergency contact and forgot to change it when she moved), or it’s at some point after she starts transitioning socially. i think it’d be really sweet for them to be friends in a more real way, and the sheer concept of anri teaching lili how to properly apply makeup and to set her hair is just so fucking sweet i might die. they both deserve to have friends so i think this is just a step up from hello charlotte canon.

[sophiemi]

A Response to Hate + Wisdom, I Suggest Everyone Reads.

This is a pretty long post replying to some hate I got from a recent post I made about Mirajane Strauss and Laxus Dreyar, I linked it at the bottom of this if you would like to read it. I think everyone should read this post not only because its some piping hot tea, but there’s also a lot of other things I talk about in this that I feel like everyone should hear. Totally understand if you don’t want to read it though. Let me know what you think!  

First here is what they/you said (in order):

Hi I just liked to start with I blocked you from send me anymore ask, but I’m letting you know if you change devices you can still ask me things or messages, if you DM (off anon) ill take your request seriously, but since you’re on anon I’m not gonna take you seriously, sorry. Especially after you were actually mean to me when I did nothing wrong, which is why I’m making this post even though I’d normally ignore it.

Lets start with the general Miraxus stuff, that post WAS NOT hate. You have to be delusional and overly obsessed to believe that was a hate post, or that I was spreading “false information.” In the post I literally said they had good development and linked a master list of ALL their interactions. The entire post was about how even though I don’t ACTIVELY ship them (meaning they are cute and I agree they would be a good couple, but I just don’t get that feeling where I’m like “oh okay yes them” and I feel the need to stalk them, ((not everyone hates what threatens their ships)), and I’m not denying they are very cute, and have a lot of cute art and moments, it just doesn’t hype me up the same way other ships do.) So, this post was pro-miraxus, I’m literally saying they honestly deserved to become canon/canon-ish like a lot of the other ships did, so it was not “cross tagged” the post was about mira and laxus and thats what I tagged it, if you are talking about the part where i tagged “#I feel sorry for anyone who ships miraxus” that is literally me validating anyone hurt over the ending.  Again, I’m not following the Miraxus tag or any account solely dedicated to that ship so I didn’t even know he drew a kid or them, that’s super cool, good for you. I wasn’t being “biased” because I’m not neck deep in any ship for Laxus or Mira, yes i think CanaJane is cute but I know its very unrealistic, this is why I was able to form this opinion that they deserved better. The post was about how Mashima baited Miraxus the entire series, then said “Never!!!!” even if it was Lucy’s inner thoughts, Mashima knew what he was doing. I was saying, “wow that probably sucked if you really liked them! I’m sorry!” If you believe my post was to degrade Mira x Laxus and hype Cana x Mira, then you need to take a step back and re-evaluate yourself, I understand you are probably like 13-14 but that’s still not okay to attack people because they don’t agree with you, and if you are older that 13 or 14 that’s just embarrassing. I also believe that Freed x Laxus deserved a better ending and I also don’t actively ship that either, Freed spent the whole series wanting to protect and be by the side of Laxus and they had no interaction in the finale.

 Next, lets go to the part about you saying I’m a “slash fetishizer shipper” (also i literally had to look up what this meant) I can only assume you canajane because i said they “hit different” right? Let me just re insert what you said to make sure I reply correctly

Yes I think Cana and Mira are very attractive, and I think they are hot together too. Hi i’m into girls. I am the woke points. I agree people make lgbt people into a fetish and don’t actually respect them, but that’s mostly males thinking lesbians are hot while being gross out by gay men, I may be naive but you don’t often see that on anime tumblr where half the people are gay anyway, not to mention most are female. This next part may be controversial I’m not sure, but people don’t need a reason to ship characters and no one can tell them who they can and can’t ship (this does not apply to shipping a child with an adult), so you can’t say only gay people can ship to people of the same gender, sorry that’s not how it works, i understand you’re trying to get those “woke points” but you just look like a fool. But then next you said this:

Actual author content? Oh you mean like the post I linked that showed EVERY SINGLE interaction/moment/hints that Miraxus had? Like I said, they had good development, and my post was about how the AUTHOR should’ve given them a better ending. I’d just like to add there are many moments that the AUTHOR wrote between Cana and Mira that made me ship them, if the AUTHOR never wrote anything to where they interacted, I wouldn’t ship them?  This post is not about that though so I’m not gonna go anymore into them. 

“false information” girl what? where? I’m genuinely curious, I used screenshots of the manga to present to idea that Miraxus deserved better and that’s all I talked about so I’m confused what you been by this:

So I can tell you took the one line where i said I like CanaJane more than Miraxus and in your mind twisted my entire PRO-miraxus argument into and anti post, this kind of behavior is toxic, and “its not a good look sir” 

Let also clarify something, cross tagging is posting about something and tagging things completely unrelated, this post was about mira and laxus and thats what it was tagged about. Cross tagging is often used in shipping wars, but my post was pro-miraxus so it makes no sense for you to repeatedly say I was cross tagging and that’s why you were mad, it’s very clear you were just mad because I said I shipped CanaJane and that clouded your judgement when reading everything else. If you wanna see real cross tagging look up any naruto ship and scroll for about 3 seconds. So, no I won’t be removing the tags because that makes no sense, but if it’s important enough for you to message me off anon then we’ll talk.

My final section of this response is how hypocritical you were. Like with he part, “I don’t hate you” To quote tiktok and nicki minaj, “don’t be tryna double back, I already despise you” 

As you can see you repeatedly said I was mean, but no where in my post did I say anything like “Mira x Laxus is gross, its toxic, its dumb, its...idk...forced!”, i literally never said anything like that because like I’ve said in this post and in that one, they’re cute and they had good development. You were the mean one in your response telling me i had “no reading skills whatsoever”, that i had a “lack of respect”,  said I’m “more than pitiful” and this isn’t mentioning all of your back handed pettiness throughout every single message you sent, you think you “look cool” but “hun”...”sweetie”...you just look dumb, but at least you are on anon!

Educate myself? girl this isn’t politics, you’re pressed over a post saying your ship deserved better than it got??? What am I supposed to do watch the anime, read the manga, well good thing I did. GUESS WHAT THEY HAD GOOD DEVELOPMENT i can see why you ship them. 

The only rude person here is you, you came into my asks and attacked me because you were blinded for reasons I can’t figure out, and you hid behind the anonymous setting which clearly means you don’t care that much about Miraxus, you just wanted to be mean. 

If you’re reading this, and you sent me the messages, message me off anonymous, then we can realistically talk about me taking off my so called cross tagging, I really don’t care that much, I’m just baffled you had to audacity to come for me so hard then “nicely” ask me to remove the tags. 

If you’re reading this and you didn’t send me these messages, thanks for reading, maybe share this so people understand that this behavior is not okay. I know what I got was mostly just petty ranting, but there are people who send way worse to others and its just not okay. Just because these aren’t are real accounts like these are fandom accounts doesn’t make it okay. Thanks! 

Here is the post in reference:

https://emillyjacksonn.tumblr.com/post/617804123843280896/miraxus-shippers-really-got-played

[transkieran]

anyway, guarma & colm-odriscoll-is-my-daddy (& friends) think abusive ships are a funny way to get under someone’s skin

JUST FYI: I woulda had this conversation in private, but @guarma keeps calling Erin a bitch with a god-complex, even though everything she accuses Erin of is something I did, and she refuses to acknowledge me. So no more private, she called me a pussy for not confronting her. Well here's the confront ig!

background context: people decided to start shitting on the Yehaw Function server again in another server (let’s say ‘A’ bc I do not wish to drag the owner into this, they were rarely online). @ssupeck21 thought it was perfectly fine to mock the gender and race of a two-spirited native trans guy. nice transphobia and racism there! 

considering i remarked on it, they realized i knew him and suspected me of leaking the above screenshot to the YF server. i had already left this server at the end of february over several reasons, including erin’s server becoming my main one. i’m also reasonably sure i have mentioned no longer being in YF at some point. damage done: kate (guarma) and pongo ( @colm-odriscoll-is-my-daddy ) now think i’m “a spy” for YF. (ironic because @ssupeck21 let @jennyxbeans into erin’s server bc she was spying for jenn. and more irony later)

as proven in DM to someone later (oh no, a spied image?), they had the amazing idea to bait me and erin with something that is a massive trigger for me (bully/victim ships). some weirdness: by that time, i’d only made about 2 b/k posts on my blog, neither of which mentioned my trauma i’m pretty sure. erin meanwhile, wasn’t even in the original convi from the first screenshot, though she has mentioned she finds b/k gross. 

so whilst this in its entirety is already immature in itself (really? you think someone is sending screenshots and wanna get ‘revenge’ when you constantly rely on getting screenshots yourself? yes i know someone leaked you screenshots of YF, kate). but also: for someone who talked about being abused and having anxiety, she should know better than use an abusive ship to get back at someone. because i’m 99% sure she knows b/k is a trigger for me; whilst not on my blog, i have had plenty of rants and vents in servers about how b/k is not good for my mental health and that it will make me panic. 

conversation #1 (i do not have screenshots of this): someone asked what everyone’s ships are in rdr2. bill/kieran gets mentioned, at some point i put rooWut (a disgusted looking emote) and remark something about abusive gay ships being cute to them. it gets glossed over, i leave. 

conversation #2. the conversation moves to the nsfw channel, where they pin the message in the above screenshot. ha ha , bully/victim ships are a funny joke! conversation moves on to arthur and other things until Pongo clearly feels like she wants to force a reaction out of me and/or erin. (living dead girl is erin, i am dan’s achy breaky heart).

at this point, my anxiety spikes and i put something along the lines of “my fist up your ass would look cute” in the vent chat of Erin’s server. NSFW with b/k is not good for me, at all. it made me flashback to something, i’m basically just trying to not have a panic attack. but ! ofc , why stop now. 

pongo makes another comment, now not under a spoiler tag and clearly with the context of the DM to get another reaction out of me. erin puts a completely unrelated image to try and divert the conversation, because i’m like entirely losing it at this point---but kate and pongo think it’s hilarious to talk about actually shipping it and kate (micah bell’s dumb hair in the screenshots) is all “omg i wanna write a smut now for them”. 

also: my nickname in this server includes ‘trans kieran’ at this point , either as just my url or like “lion ♡ trans kieran”. they all know i am a gay trans guy, even if some of them currently like to pretend they don’t know me. (hi, @morlawny who doesn’t even wanna say my name at this point despite being all nice in erin’s server.)

i can’t entirely remember my own message, nor do i have screenshots of it because i send it and left and they deleted it like straight after it seems (because an older screenshot, from the day itself, also didn’t have my message anymore). i left because at that point, i lost all ability to think straight. because someone can remark on b/k before and they’ll still be all “ha ha funny!”

at this point, in erin’s server, two things happen. one friend of kate, who isn’t in the server this happened in, asks if she ships bill/kieran and kate admits her plan to just trigger me. because of this, kate starts acting like the victim and making me out like the bad guy who’s shittalking her and refuses to talk to her--which, during a panic attack and with my feelings very clear, i don’t need to. 

secondly, another friend of kate decides my trauma is funny and starts to send kate (on request) screenshots of the vent conversation in erin’s server, starting from the goddamn my fist up your ass comment. the conversation also includes details of my trauma. my trauma is being send around like gossip. 

also this happens in the server i left and i get send it: 

i dunno what planet anyone is living on but, apparently my melt down was only good for one thing: getting mocked. “kieran’s coochie” is transphobic as fuck when you’re laughing at a trans guy getting upset over bill/kieran. especially when it’s very clear i hc kieran as trans. yet, pongo, wolfy ( @soulheartthewolf ) and kate seem to think it’s fucking hilarious. 

kate and pongo then try to play the “we were just joking!” card. when everyone i’ve had read those screenshots agrees nothing about it reads as a joke, and we’re now very sure they weren’t joking about, they were being vile and malicious. (but hey, what’s to expect from someone who says they’d fuck a fictional racist if he was real! that’s ... excusing racism, kate).  

(guarma is micah bell? you mean my husband ;; pongo is arthur morgan is an incel. the other person is the artist who drew young micah, idk their url anymore)

“my mocking of the Bill/Kieran ship” I’m so sorry, Kate, but nothing about nsfw b/k and wanting to write a fic about it, reads as mocking. This entire “it’s just a joke!” doesn’t diminish the fact that you triggered a panic attack. Yes, I shittalked you, because I felt like it was goddamn deserved for "joking” about an abusive ship in a way that didn’t read as a joke. because after I left neither of you got the damn hint and just went straight for the transphobia. It’s not get together and hate guarma, it’s “lion has a panic attack and will actually react insanely aggressively about the things that upset him”. You can turn and twist this into you being the victim all you want, but you ain’t. You’re a pathetic example of a 19 year old who thinks it’s funny to trigger flashbacks and panic attacks. I didn’t talk to you, because at the time the only thing I would’ve probably said, which is also what I’m saying now, is: go shove an entire cactus up your ass, you pathetic cunt of a human being. 

Leave Erin out of this, it’s goddamn hilarious you keep going after a cis bi woman instead of after me, a gay trans guy, and god I fucking wonder why. 

You interact with people who think they can just be racist and transphobic towards anyone they like ( @ssupeck21 ), with people who’ll willing send you all the screenshots you want, with people who send anon hate ( @jennyxbeans ), you’re treating trauma and abuse like a joke and then have the gal to be all “i’d never because i have anxiety!” No. Own up to your shit. 

(I could go on in this post about how she’s just as bad a shittalking, leaked screenshot-wanting piece of shit but hey, the post is very long already so whatever). 

edit: i have deleted screenshot leaking accusations towards morlawny bc i can’t actually prove them but i’m keeping up the thing where you decided to be all nice to me in servers, but then turned around and were all “idk kate didn’t say any of that” (i literally know u were there for those conversations, your name in screenshots!) and tried to defend her constantly in a DM with someone. 

[the-amazing-spider-bi]

the coffeeshop au no one asked for (now with a part 2)

“So, May, what do you want?” Madison asks the customer.

“That’s not even close to my name,” the other girl says, but she grins anyway. Weirdo. “One Iced Coffee for Zoe, with a little caramel twirl thingie, please.”

“Sure, Zack,” Madison says, and grabs her cup with a little more strength than necessary. Zoe snorts. She probably has some sort of insult kink. She and Kyle are going to have the worst sex ever.

(In which Madison does not have a crush on the cute hipster girl who keeps coming to the coffee shop, she and Kyle are definitely not competing for the girl’s attention, Cordelia thinks they are all model employees, and all of the above is a lie.)

Read on ao3 I Following prompts by origami-teacup 

october.

“He fucking folded her napkin as a rose, and then gave her to her and said, I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to buy you flowers,” Madison groans before she kicks an unfortunate plastic cup which has absolutely nothing to do with this.

“Wow, the guy has got so much more game than you,” Queenie says, and Madison snarls at her, the bitch.

They’re sitting in the back alley behind the coffee shop, Madison being on trash duty again. (At Coven Café, waitresses get to throw the trash out every time they’re uncivil to a customer. Obviously, that means Madison gets stuck with it every night.)

(She should have stayed at fucking Starbucks.)

Anyway, they’re sitting on the bench in the smelly, gross back alley. Like every bit of having a service job when you hate pretty much everyone you meet, it sucks, but at least here no one is bothering them. It’s not even six p.m. yet, and already the sun is setting behind the city buildings and lamp posts are lighting out all over town. Queenie tightens up her coat while texting whoever she’s dating this week. Madison is smoking through a pack of cigarettes she only got yesterday to keep warm, because she wore her sluttiest skirt to work today, for reasons totally unrelated to the cute quiet girl who keeps coming back to the coffee shop every afternoon, of course. (According to Queenie, if Madison quit smoking, she could probably leave C.C. altogether and survive on her acting gigs, but what do you want, a girl loves her bad decisions.)

“He’s so fucking lame. How long do you think he spent last night watching Youtube napkin-folding tutorials? Like, god, Kyle, way to show her how gay you are.”

“Yeah sure, Madison. Hey, by the way, I like your new outfit, how much money did you spend on that?” Queenie asks.

“Shut up, it’s completely different,” Madison says. She did not buy these clothes to impress the cute girl, because that would be ridiculous and pathetic, just like she does not think about how the girl’s hair looks like liquid honey when the sun shines on it through the window, or how pretty her dimples are when she laughs open-mouthed at one of Kyle’s bad lines, or how much better her lips look when she smirks at Madison’s snide comments.

“Of course.”

Madison keeps up the sullen silence though, before Queenie sighs, finally pockets her phone and says, “You know what would help your situation?”

“Hum, hello, did I ask for your dumb advice?”

“If you actually showed her how gay you are,” Queenie says. “Also maybe - maybe -  stop insulting her.”

“Hard pass,” Madisons says, and she throws her cigarette butt to the ground, crushes it under her heel, and leaves with a brisk pace.

“Bitch, just because you’re Los Angeles trash doesn’t mean the street is too!” Queenie yells at her retreating back. Madison doesn’t even turn around when she gives her the finger.

Queenie sighs.

november.

When she clocks in today, Kyle is already here, leaning on his elbows pressed against the wooden counter, flirting with her. Her, who leans on her elbows too, close to him, chuckles and blushes and hides her face behind chestnut brown hair.

Madison rolls her eyes and hip checks him as she goes by. “Go away, you’re not even paid for these extra hours.”

“Maybe I just really love making coffee,” he says. “Model employee, three months running, yay.”

When the girl smiles up at him, she crinkles her eyes. Madison pretends to gag.

“What a nerd,” she complains when his back is turned to fiddle with the coffee machine or whatever. “I swear to god, it’s like working with an overexcited puppy. He’s that close to pissing all over our hardwoods.”

“I think he’s nice,” the cute girl says. “I mean, isn’t that the whole point of independent coffee shops? Having friendly waiters, not being rushed by twenty people who want their Venti Caramel Macchiato?”

“Nah, the whole point is attracting all of you lame hipsters who want the Starbucks experience but not, like, to support capitalism or whatever,” Madison replies. “By the way, the homeless guy up front called, he wants his twenty layers of jackets back.”

The girl looks at her like she shot her puppy. Madison shrugs. “What? I’m just being honest!”

“Madison, stop bullying our best customer,” Kyle jokes, trying to come back to the counter. (She sneers at him. He is wise enough to be afraid of her and stay back. So he is not completely stupid then.)

“So, May, what do you want?” she asks the other girl.

“That’s not even close to my name,” she says, but she grins anyway. Weirdo. “One Iced Coffee for Zoe, with a little caramel twirl thingie, please.”

“Sure, Zack,” Madison says, and grabs her cup with a little more strength than necessary. Zoe snorts. She probably has some sort of insult kink. She and Kyle are going to have the worst sex ever.

She’s already onto the next customer when Zoe sees the shape of the caramel twirl on her order, laughs, and shouts thanks, Madison! from the other end of the room. Madison rolls her eyes at her and totally doesn’t blush.

(Kyle pesters her for an entire hour the next time their shift coincide for her to tell him what she drew on that poor girl’s cup because something you’ve probably never seen in your entire, pathetic life was not clear enough for him. It’s only when Zoe comes up to her and says her thanks for the capussyno that he gets it, and no, Madison does not laugh at that terrible, terrible pun.)

december.

“Hi Madison, did you have a nice Christmas?” Zoe asks as Madison is crouched under the counter looking for vanilla extract to serve that twink who only drinks decaf half-soy half-low fat milk extra whip cream double shot vanilla lattes.

She stands up so fast she hits her head against the cabinet and lets out a slew of swear words that would make her mother ashamed. (Or proud. Madison’s family isn’t exactly filled with role models. She’s a chainsmoking wannabe actress who works at the only coffee shop whose owner pities her enough to accept her constantly insulting customers. Of course she’s got mommy issues.) Her head hurts, and her dignity too.

“Madison, are you hurt?” the other girl asks, with real worry in her voice, because she’s a saint. Kyle and her sure deserve each other.

“No, everything is fine, I’m peachy,” Madison bites back with as much venom as she can muster.

It takes a few seconds for her vision to work again, once the blurriness of tears passes. When that happens, Madison discovers that sometimes in the last minute or so, Zoe bent over the counter to look at her closer. She puts her hand on top of Madison’s head, fingers ghosting over the spot where she hit herself, digging into her hair slightly. Her face is so close now, brown eyes blown wide open, pink lips slightly parted, thin eyebrows raised, and this is usually the point at which Madison finds something disparaging to say about her, like how measly her face looks, but her brain shortcuts again, thanks for that, and the only sound to get past her is a shrill whine.

“Shit, do you have a concussion or something?” she says, and steps back, wriggling her hand. As Zoe moves away, Madison’s big sapphic meltdown stops. Mostly. “I don’t know anything about medicine, I’m a History major, I should look for a doctor-”

She suddenly remembers that she’s Madison Montgomery and doesn’t get tongue-tied around anyone, ever. “Stop, you weirdo! I’m fine, god, you’re not my mom.”

“Oh,” Zoe says.

“Yeah,” Madison says. There’s a very awkward pause before she speaks up again. “So, I’m gonna serve this guy his stupid drink.”

“Yeah, sure.”

She gives her one last look as she walks away, and Zoe is tugging her sleeves above her pale hands, looking down in a way that makes silky hair cover most of her face. Madison finally makes that decaf half-soy half-low fat milk - something, calls for Behold, what kind of a name is that, ugh, who looks at her like he’s deeply unimpressed.

“Oh honey,” he says. “That was physically painful.”

“Excuse me, I don’t take advice from people who wear cardigans,” Madison snarks. “So shoo, Doctor Love.”

He scoffs at her and rolls his eyes but leaves anyway. When she gets back to the front, Zoe is gone already, taken care of by Queenie, who’s very unapologetic about it all. Madison bangs her head against the wooden counter.

january.

This time, Madison doesn’t even try to intercede when Kyle rushes to serve Zoe the instant she appears with a friendly expression, a gush of cold wind and a few snowflakes. She is done with this whole crush affair. Done. She is not going to embarrass herself striving to get Zoe’s attention anymore. New year, new her. She got the number of this very hot guy during a New Year’s Eve party, with long blonde hair and a smile like a shark’s, so she has no reason to pine anymore when she’s got herself a regular booty call. Queenie told her she was an idiot, but what does Queenie know about anything, really?

She watches as Kyle scribbles down a pick-up line on her to-go cup in a way he thinks is subtle and passes it to Zoe. She fully expects her to chuckle, again, as she always does when he uses one of his dork moves. It would make for a perfect picture: seven a.m., the sun rising, the snow falling softly out their window, your classic boy-meets-girl story.

Instead, Zoe says, “Oh, Kyle, that’s very flattering, but uh, you know,” and bites her lip.

Kyle looks at her blankly. “Uh, what do I know? I don’t know anything.”

“It’s true,” Madison calls from where she’s sitting at one of their booths. “He knows nothing.”

(So, yes, she was supposed to stay silent and let it be. How can she let opportunities like that pass her by though? She has a reputation. A reputation as a queen bitch.)

Zoe jolts at the sound of her voice, and Kyle glares, which, kudos to him, Madison didn’t think he was capable of that. The other girl moves a bit closer to him and speaks softly like that doesn’t make Madison lean closer to listen, which once again is not a desperate move, alright, she might have given up on Zoe, but she still feeds on drama.

“I’m gay, Kyle,” Zoe says. She gives him a small, pitying smile.

Kyle’s mouth falls apart on a silent oooh. Madison’s brain goes blank. Again.

She probably did get a concussion from that hitting-the-counter thing after all.

“Oooh,” Kyle finally lets out. “I see.” To his credit, he is back to his normal, cheerful persona already. “Do you want Madison’s number then?”

Madison chokes on her coffee and starts coughing desperately. Zoe turns back to look at her like a deer caught in the headlights, then at Kyle, then at her again. They both start to shake their heads no, but Kyle grins at them like he’s the Chester cat and he caught a canary and that canary happens to be Madison and she doesn’t know where the fuck she is going with that metaphor but he jots her number down on a napkin anyway.

When Zoe runs away with her to-go cup and Madison can process words again, she stomps towards Kyle, intent on saying something scathing to destroy his ego, but instead asks, “How did you even get my number?”

february.

“Madison Montgomery, are you the one drawing dicks on the chalkboard? The chalkboard outside the shop? The chalkboard outside the shop that we installed yesterday to promote our seasonal drinks?” Cordelia asks.

“What? No,” Madisons scoffs. “Why are you asking me this? Is this some kind of profiling issue? This is clearly biphobia. We’re not sex-obsessed skanks, you know.”

Misty snorts, because she’s a terrible manager.

“Madison,” Cordelia warns and does that thing when she looks at you and you feel like she sees all the dark, terrible secrets you’re hiding.

“What? It’s not me! Do you even have proof? Are you going around asking people-”

“Hi guys,” Zoe says as she comes in, her face almost entirely covered with scarf and beanie and hair except for her reddish nose. Cordelia smiles at her more warmly than she ever smiled at Madison, which is bullshit, since she’s been Madison’s boss for months and she’s known Zoe all of three weeks. (Although, maybe being Madison’s boss for months is reason enough to look disapproving all the time.)

She steps up to the counter and the other waitress on duty starts making her usual order without any prompting. It's still an Iced Coffee, despite it being freezing cold outside, and Madison doesn’t know how she didn’t figure out the whole lesbian thing sooner.

Then again, maybe she’s not the brightest bulb around her. Yesterday, when Zoe smiled at her as she carried a tray full of empty cups to the counter (seriously, it’s so easy to bring them when you’re done drinking, why are people like this), she tripped and almost broke it all. Queenie is still giving her shit about that.

“Hey, that’s a nice dress, Zoe!” Misty says and smiles her special Misty Day smile that is like staring directly into the sun.

“Oh, thanks! I got it on sale at a…” Zoe hesitates and glances at Madison worriedly. “A thrift shop.”

Madison cackles at that because Zoe is making it all too easy for her to mock her (the others waiters call it flirting, which is why they are all single and desperate). Misty speaks up before she has an opportunity to talk though. “It looks good on you! Doesn’t it, Madison?”

Her mouth opens and closes without a sound. She lets out: “It doesn’t come from the Gap, so, it’s always an improvement.”

“Aw, thanks, Madison, that’s very big of you,” Zoe says with fake cheer. “Really liked your penmanship from this morning out here too. Obviously the proportions were kind of wrong, but self-portraits are tough, aren’t they?”

Cordelia twirls around to face Madison with an I knew it expression on her face, Misty cracks up, and Zoe slips away from the shop with a winning smile. Well played, Benson.

(Later, the waitress will harass her about sexual tension and nonsense, and Madison will stomp and say why are you obsessed with me, and the staff will find something else to yammer on about.)

march.

Zoe is back in the corner booth at C.C., reading some boring History book with a ridiculously long title about witches, whose name Madison would usually never remember since she’s not a nerd, yet somehow knows because Zoe is really passionate about it and keeps calling it Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials instead of That Nerdy Salem Book Thing like a normal person, and unfortunately, Madison listens to her. It takes three hours before Madison can clock out, and feels like three years. This is not unusual, as she always hated service jobs. What is unusual is how, even though it is only two p.m., she doesn’t hurry out of the shop to go literally anywhere else and instead slides next to the other girl and peers over her shoulder.

“Ooh, gory shit,” she says, and Zoe doesn’t even turn around, which is ungrateful since Madison looks fucking stunning today, just leans backward on Madison and hums.

Madison finds herself with a shoulder full of chestnut hair and mango shampoo smell. Her heart starts beating like a drill. It’s really annoying. She can’t even be angry properly, though. The other day Queenie told her she got almost tolerable now that she’s in lesbians with someone, which, no.

She sighs dramatically until Zoe is done with her chapter and lays down her book to pay full attention to her. By which she means roll her eyes at her and makeout. When Queenie hurls napkins at them so that they stop being so fucking disgusting, ugh, Zoe traps Madison’s hand between her thigh so she doesn’t give her coworkers the finger.

When her boss Cordelia comes in to kick them out, they have sex at Zoe’s place (twice) and talk about her next audition around Thaï takeout afterward. They even agree to watch The Tudors so Zoe can complain about historical inaccuracies and Madison can get turned on by the hot people and shut Zoe up accordingly.

All in all, it’s not so bad.

Now with a part 2!

[gaslightgatekeepgodot]

A (sizeable) rant/essay concerning my experiences in the Tumblr JJBA fandom.

None of you asked to hear this, but I’m getting pretty pissed off at some people in particular (I will not name names, though I may heavily implicate some people) and it’s finally started to kinda spill over. So I’m letting it spill; take it or leave it.

I’m... Fairly irate at the moment, and writing out my feelings does tend to help me calm down in situations like this, so if I was going to put this anywhere the best place for it is probably on the public internet. Again, take it or leave it: this is the internet, you don’t have to interact with me if this concerns you or your ideals. Just click that handy little block button on my profile and you never have to see little Nat mouthing off again.

If you want me to summarise (I know not everyone wants/is able to read a fluffed-up pillar of text) or explain my reasoning behind anything I’ve said below the cut, feel free to direct message me here or on Discord @nati bati yi#1462. Once I get this off my chest I’ll be more than willing to chat to people about it. <3

(Before I say anything else, this is not intended to be a callout in any way, shape or form. I don’t mention the specific names of anybody, and the actions I do mention here will only point to specific people if you know them too. Anyone on the outside should have zero idea of who anyone I bring up is; I do not want anyone to get harassed over this, and I very much do not want to start drama - that’s what inspired me to go off and write this hunk of garbage in the first place. I’m just... Sick to death of the fandom as a whole.)

Anyway. Here we go.

From what I’ve been able to tell, being in this fandom for just under a year now, there are two main halves to it: the gay-hating, stale-meme-parroting dudebro side, who seem to mostly congregate around YouTube and Reddit, and... Whatever the side based on Tumblr (and probably now Twitter) is. I don’t spend a lot of time on Reddit, so naturally I’ve been more exposed to the Tumblr side of the fandom, and after experiencing the ideals some people here want to force on other people I’ve come to the conclusion I’d almost rather be immersed in the bigoted dudebro side. And I say this as an ace-spec/gay trans man.

I’ll start with the blocklist.

I think most of us on Tumblr came to the conclusion that the blocklist was utter bullshit, but I did see a few people in a Discord server I have since left (I will expand on this later) defending the reasoning behind some ships being on there, citing the fact they had been abused in a relationship with a similar age gap. I can definitely see why that would bother a person, and I do not want to erase the fact that people have been and will be abused in similar relationships, but you can’t project your singular experience onto every fictional, non-canon character relationship and every person who ships it. For one, not every relationship is going to turn out the same just because it meets this one criteria of “the age gap is too big”, and, also, you don’t have to write fiction to totally reflect reality. You are in full creative control. Maybe if the characters were real people they wouldn’t click, but if you’re drawing a picture or writing a fanfic you don’t have to go along with that. You can write them so that they’re good to each other, while still keeping it in character. Araki has said that Jotaro and Kakyoin’s personalities don’t work together very well, and that they wouldn’t have become friends or even spoken to each other if Jotaro wasn’t a Stand user... But Jotaro/Kakyoin just happens to be the most-written about JJBA ship on AO3. Me? I love Jotakak. It’s about the only thing I do ship. And I’ve read some quite frankly amazing fanfiction where the two boys are paired and they work together, and it’s still very much in character. Of course, I’m very much against loli/shota content or content depicting characters who don’t look very old- if someone drew Koichi in a sexual situation I would be pissed as all hell, but I don’t have to engage with that content any further. I can just filter out the tag/block the OP and move on. You don’t need to make a fuss and tell/imply to people that they are paedophilic for enjoying well-written content where a 17-year-old is in a healthy relationship with a 22-year-old, platonic or otherwise.

My second point brings in some of the things I’ve learned while studying media this past year. My main point here: not everyone in an audience is the same. There is a reason differential decoding and the uses and gratifications theory exist. The uses and gratifications theory states, at its most basic, that the audience of a media text is active, not passive; i.e. they are not just absorbing every piece of data thrown at them by the text they are consuming, and they are consuming different media to satisfy a need- for JJBA, that need could be entertainment, escapism, identifying with a character similar to yourself or to give you something to talk about with your friends. Differential decoding arises when someone consuming a piece of the media does not entirely go along with the creator’s preferred reading of it- an example might be how a sizeable amount of people enjoy villainous or “disgusting” characters such as Dio, Cioccolata, Stroheim or Melone, when they were clearly written in canon to be abhorrent, unlikable people for varying reasons. I can also say that, because the audience is active, and consume media based on their personal needs, that somebody writing fanfic of a ship you don’t like isn’t going to make incest or paedophilia more socially acceptable. I don’t consume that content, because I don’t feel the need to. Sure, real paedos might, but they’re a minority. Just because a couple hundred people or so read a fanfic on the free web where a grown adult does the dirty with a little kid, doesn’t mean to say everyone in the world will suddenly start thinking it’s ok. Mention it to any sane person in real life and they will not like that idea any more than you do.

And my third point is more a personal thing than anything else, but there is a community I used to be part of (and was part of almost from the beginning) where I didn’t feel welcome because of people causing drama over things like what I mentioned above. I started multiple discourses entirely by accident by saying I didn’t understand why everyone though X ship was horribly problematic and worth getting mad at people over. I still don’t feel like anyone deserves to be harassed over characters and ships they enjoy, but that doesn’t mean to say I support all of it. Along with generally feeling ignored by a lot of the moderators of that server, as well as their friends, I was just sick to death of how they seemed to single out some certain people to say, “hey, don’t do this” when other people seemed exempt. I was verbally warned for posting innuendos in a general chat (but it’s not like I could anywhere else on the server, because I’m not 18 yet), but at least once every day I would see two people flirting in-character in whatever channel they happened to meet in, and it never seemed to be in a roleplay channel- I couldn’t see into NSFW to check if they did it there too, but the fact it would leak out into gen concerned me. They would throw innuendo after innuendo at each other, and they never seemed to stop, or be told to stop. Yes, I could have messaged the moderators to say it made me uncomfy, but one of them was a moderator themselves, so I felt a little out my element doing so. 

Another thing that bothered me is when I tried to join an offshoot of that server for kin, and the admin - I assume - of said offshoot server messaged me (with some other conversation concerning it in between) that, despite the fact I only wanted in to help me figure out what it meant to me, I wasn’t allowed in because somebody was uncomfy with doubles. I completely understand that, but I had spoken to the only person it could have been (I wasn’t given a name, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out who it was) multiple times about that character and how similar we were- hell, we had even roleplayed together as doubles of that character and no problems were ever expressed to me. If anything it seemed like we left off in a spot we could have carried on from later. It might not have been intended that way, but being told I wasn’t allowed in there made me feel excluded from the community nonetheless, especially because I’d had a few people tell me the night before that they wanted more people in there and that I’d be totally welcome. I was also told, before any of this happened, that the same person blocked a friend of mine in another server for going on a small rant about how they didn’t like the way Josuke acted in the episode where he plays dice with Rohan and ends up burning his house down, because they kin Josuke..? At least, that’s what was relayed to me.

But, hey ho, it’s all behind me now. I won’t lie; I don’t really plan on ever going back. I don’t want to engage anymore, because it makes me uncomfortable and anxious thinking about it, so I most likely will unfollow most (if not all) of the blogs pertaining to that community tonight. I do have a few people still there who I miss speaking to, but I’ve DM’d all of them on Discord at least once since I’ve left and talked to them about either how I miss them or something entirely unrelated to the server. I’d like to talk more with them, but DMs are always awkward for me to begin with... I have a feeling they might not want to talk after reading this, and I think I’m ready to accept that? Might be difficult not being able to scream about fanfic as much, but I won’t impose on anyone if my presence makes them uncomfy. I don’t want to be that guy.

I’ll say it again: now that I’ve got this off my chest and subsequently calmed down a lot, I’m more than willing to talk about any of it. Just shoot me a message on Discord and I’ll reply when I’m able and feeling up to talking about it again. For now I’m probably just going to go back to pissing about on Flight Rising or play Smash or something

[sakaar-wheretherestendsup]

Completely unrelated:

The whole Scarlett Johansson thing happening right now.... (I’m not talking about Ghost In the Shell- that should’ve gone to an Asian woman, not a white one), but for her being cast as a Trans man: I understand the need for representation and the fact that trans people need to be shown properly in the way that they are in society in true form, but what about all those times where a straight actor played a gay man/woman, what about all those times where a straight man played the role of a trans woman, what about all those times a gay individual played a straight person???? I mean, it’s called acting for a reason, is it not? I’m not trying to be callous or ignorant here, don’t get me wrong, nor am I trying to hurt anyone’s feelings. I understand the argument that if trans actors got the chance to play non-trans roles, this wouldn’t be that big of a problem, but the thing is, in most of the comments and reactions I’ve been reading on this situation, very few people are using that as their argument. Most of it is just the fact that straight or non-trans people shouldn’t be playing trans people. I just don’t understand why? It’s a role? Acting is about becoming someone you are not. It’s about leaving your comfort zone, it’s about adopting a different persona, a different personality, a different individuality.

Let’s talk about the race card. I’m sure some (a lot) of people would say, “according to that logic, a white actor playing a person of another race or color shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is and Hollywood is starting to acknowledge that”. Here’s the thing though, there’s a lot of history surrounding the introduction of race into the industry. At the beginning it would be a major thing if there even was a character of color included in a script! And then, IF there was, they would have a white actor play him/her. What that implied and outright said, was that “we don’t find person’s of color attractive enough to put in films, or make films about them. Gradually, when the issue of race started sweeping the whole country, they started including more people of color in films. Then, the issue became more about proper representation, and having more important roles with more people of color (and different from just black and white at that) rather than just having them in the first place. The issue was, and still is, about having people in films that mirror the way society is. If you have a white man playing a black, Asian, or Indian one, then the message that’s being sent out is “we think white people are more attractive than the actual type of person we are trying to portray.” It’s also saying, that “we don’t actually believe society should be the way it is and have all these different people live and work cohesively”.

I understand that you can say that gender identity and sexual orientation should be treated the same way, but what these two topics and issues really need are awareness and acceptance. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have proper representation, but you also have to be practical about some things. The main issue surrounding gender identity is most people’s’ lack of acceptance or “believability” of/in it. What these big Hollywood films do by making biopics and storylines surrounding gender identity issues and casting star studded names in and as those people is bring awareness to real people that went through real, painful facets of life to become who they really were/are. I get that in an ideal world, everyone would like to say that by casting trans people in such roles would be the thing that would really be making a statement and really be enforcing awareness, but frankly that’s not going to happen. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but while it is undoubtedly true that a lot of lgbtq+ people would flock to theatres and fill some seats and watch those movies, the overwhelming majority of people won’t, and those percentage of people that won’t are the ones that need educating, not the people who already know and accept and appreciate trans people! The people who don’t aren’t going to go watch a movie with some person they couldn’t care less about playing another person they don’t particularly care much about knowing. Those movies in those cases would tank. “What about Love, Simon, and Wonder Woman, and Black Panther, and other such movies that represented minorities in a correct manner and did so well!! Look at that! That’s what proper representation does. The right way will prevail!” Yeah. No. Black Panther? Look at how fucking long that took. A whole black cast with black superheroes and black super villains and black music and various “black” cultures. Very. Fucking long. and it did well for various reasons: 1. They started introducing some of the characters earlier to get audiences used to them, 2. They used some big house names in the cast to kickstart a few things (Lupita (big before BP-Oscar winner), Michael B. Jordan, Forest Whittaker, Angela Basset), 3. it was a MARVEL STUDIOS, Disney film. It had ALOT of backing and fandom support, and 4. Finally, yes of course one of the biggest reasons for its success and impact and influence was the fact that it was an all black cast and a black superhero done all in the right way, but all those people that filled those seats?? They had been waiting for this for ages! Ages. It was way past time for something like this! And again we’re back to the race card. WONDER WOMAN. Let’s talk WW, it did great! It even didn’t have a huge name actress! But it did have a huge name character. Wonder Woman herself drew a huge part of her audience. And the fact that it was a female directed film. Again, another group of people, who had never been given an opportunity like this. LOVE, SIMON. Love, Simon did really well for a movie solely surrounding a gay kid. In fact, it’s the biggest “blockbuster” for such a “genre”. 8, even 4 years ago? It would’ve tanked. With a pretty much “no-name” cast besides Jennifer Garner (who is not the center of the storyline), it would’ve gotten nothing, but it did. Why? Because for the past couple of decades, Hollywood has been “experimenting” various times with gay concepts and storylines and characters. It’s not a “new” thing. It’s not something people haven’t heard of. It’s not something only a handful of people accept or recognize and appreciate. It’s still a battle and gay acceptance has a long way to go with the public, but it’s not “strange” (mostly) for someone to see a gay character on screen because it’s no longer considered “strange” (mostly) to interact with, and associate with, and live lives with, and develop relationships with gay individuals in the real world.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the trans community. Of course none of that is their/our fault. It’s the world, and the media, and Hollywood, and people who refuse to accept. But the thing is that while, I’m sure the trans community has been suffering and waiting for ages as well, the truth of the matter is, that a majority of the public is not recognizing that. They’ve barely begun to accept the l, g, and b parts of “lgbtq+”, so on the cycle of awareness, recognition, acceptance, and complete normalcy of these things, the trans community, unfortunately, is still put on awareness. Even now, this last month, with all the pride parades across the country, the amount of non-lgbtq+ persons toting signs of awareness and accceptance for those first 3 and last letter were bigger than those for trans. We’re still stuck on awareness. When Trump pulled his shit about the military and trans people, people stood up and fought back but it was all surface level. It was all “we stand with trans people”, “trans people are people too”, “we recognize and accept trans” and things like that. It hasn’t gone beyond that yet. We’re still at the point where we need all the help we can get in awareness. And the fact of the matter is that that means getting Hollywood to make films about trans people. Successful trans people, not successful trans people, good trans people, bad trans people, trans people of all colors, races, shapes, and sizes. Just like they did and are doing with gay, and lesbian, and bisexual people. And we need this films to gain awareness. BIG AWARENESS. Not just theatres with seats filled only by lgbtq+ and some supporters, but more people than that. People that will go to watch their favorite actor or actress. Or a certain director or production house. That means getting and letting big stars be cast as iconic trans people, so that the public will start recognizing and accepting them/us.

Also, back to the acting thing. Where do we draw the line? Of what people are allowed to play and what they aren’t? Race makes sense, on a fundamental level it just makes sense, there’s not much acting experience you can learn or earn by playing another race in an official capacity. You can learn by playing character types. And I’m sorry, but sexual orientation definitely falls under character type. So does gender identity, in a sense. Just like religion. If you extend the line to gender identity, then will you extend it to sexual orientation? And then after that, to religion? What’s the point of acting then? I get that some of you will say there’s a lot you can don by just staying in your lane, but for people and actors who have done so much of that, what about them? Some of the most iconic and award winning roles and movies have centered around sexual orientation and some gender identity issues. It gives the actors a challenging and emotionally charged role. How is that disparaging or improper representation? Will you eventually start getting offended over the fact that a Jewish individual might play a Hindu, or vice versa? Or whatever variation with religion that could come up? Shouldn’t there be , with that logic, “proper” representation there then too?

Also, again, I apologize, but what if the actual trans actors that are auditioning for the role just aren’t what the studio wants? That’s just show business. You have to get over that. Basically what you’re saying is that if it fits your bill and works properly somehow in your mind, it’s fine, but if it doesn’t it’s not? That’s not for you to decide.

The ScarJo thing: frankly, her non-marvel movies recently haven’t done that well and a lot of that is simply on the stories of the films she’s been in and some of it is also because of the controversy surrounding her (but not too much - the money depends on the entertainment factor, sorry). Personally, I love her as Natasha/Black Widow, I think her acting chemistry with her co-stars is fantastic. She plays really well off of other actors, and she’s a good actress. should she have thought GitS through? Yes. But she didn’t. Actors make idiotic choices all the time. The trans role she’s taking on, if she does a good job, I’ll like her performance, if she doesn’t, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. A lot of that also lies on the directors and story-writers shoulders as well so there’s that. There’s a lot of crap with her and Woody Allen that I don’t condone, but I’m also trying to come to terms with the fact that there are quite a few actors who I love who had said nice things about him in the past (Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Javier Bardem, etc.). So there. That’s my bit. Thanks for listening. I apologize if I offended people, I’m trying to simultaneously understand and explain what I’m thinking/feeling. I’ve never written such a long post about anything in my life. I promise I don’t hate trans people. Or any people really. Actually, I hate neo -nazis, and those that are explicitly trump followers (not simply republicans but trump followers, there’s a difference- you know who you are). Anyways. I don’t. I’m a liberal, minority colored woman myself, (not that that means anything), but yeah I get it. But it’s confusing.

[quatrepourtoiglencoco]

A semi-old fart and her fandom pet peeves...

1) Over-tagging. Say, for example, your post concerns one character and/or the actor who plays him/her/them. It makes sense to tag the character (if the post is about the character). It makes sense to tag the actor (if the post is about another project that the actor is involved in that is not the character they are most known for). It makes sense to tag the project associated with the post. If the post is about one specific character and/or one specific actor from a show, there is no need to tag every single actor and character from the show.

For example, if you are making a post about Chris Colfer meeting your little nephew who comes to one of his book signings dressed up as Kurt Hummel, it makes sense to tag Chris's name, the title of Chris's book, and Kurt Hummel (because the little kid is dressed like Kurt). You don't need to tag Lea Michele, Darren Criss, Naya Rivera, etc. unless they are in the picture as well. It's not going to get you more notes on tumblr, it's going to get your post blocked because people are sick of seeing unrelated posts in the tags for their favorites. People who have certain characters/actors blacklisted through Tumblr Savior or XKit might also miss out on your perfectly innocent post because you tagged that actor even though they aren’t in the picture. For example, say there is someone who is a big fan of Chris and Kurt, but they have Naya’s name blacklisted because she’s most famous for playing Santana, and the fan found Santana’s treatment of Kurt objectionable and gets sad whenever they see her face. If you tag the whole cast, that person is not going to see your precious nephew meeting Chris because your post got lost in their blacklist. The same thing goes for characters who are played by multiple people. Davey Jacobs is my favorite character in Newsies. If you're making a gifset of all the actors who played him, it makes sense to tag "Davey Jacobs" and the names of all the actors who played him in the various iterations of the movie/show. If your gifset or post exclusively features/discusses Ben Fankhauser and/or his particular portrayal of Davey, you do not need to tag Jeremy (Greenbaum), Jacob or Stephen in the post.

2) Tagging multiple characters/actors/ships in a controversial post just to get a rise out of people. There is a bit of an overlap with the overtagging here as the offenders tend to be the same. My examples here are the "Marvin discourse" in Falsettos and the identity discourse in Newsies. Marvin is written as gay and is referred to by other characters in the show as "homosexual." He divorces his wife because he wants to be with a man (who, technically, he was already with if Trina's account in "I'm Breaking Down" is correct). However, the character description on a few different character breakdown sites claims he is bisexual. These sites are not "gospel" and are generally not written by the creators of the projects themselves. While sexuality can certainly be fluid, Marvin's marriage to a woman and successful conception of a child seems to be a result of closeted behavior rather than bisexuality. The majority of the Falsettos fandom seems to accept that Marvin is gay, but occasionally there will be someone who INSISTS he's bi (not that there's anything wrong with being bisexual) and fills EVERY SINGLE FALSETTOS-RELATED TAG with it for attention.

With Newsies, there's a strong contingent of people who headcanon the less-developed background newsies (and sometimes the lead newsies and their friends and siblings) as LGBT. I haven't seen the movie in probably 20 years (I thought it was boring which is why I had no intention of seeing it live until one of my dearest friends booked the tour) so the characters in the movie-verse might have done something that was very clearly gay that I missed when I was in sixth grade, but I didn't catch anything particularly "gay" in the stage version although if the writers had gone the Jack/Crutchie route I could sort of understand it based on their interactions. That being said, unless someone is blatantly making stuff up or ripping Katherine or Sarah apart for the tiniest little flaw to blow a hole in Jack/Katherine or Jack/Sarah to justify why they ship Jack/Davey or Jack/Crutchie or Jack/Race or whatever, headcanoning characters as gay really isn't hurting anyone. If some gay kid in the middle of nowhere sees a lot of himself in Crutchie and wants to imagine a world where Crutchie is EXACTLY like him (well, apart from being born in a different century), it's not a bad thing.

I'm younger than most film-Newsies fans but I'm a lot older than most stage-Newsies fans. I was well into my twenties before I joined ANY fandom, and while there are characters I share some similarities with, I can enjoy them and identify with them without needing them to be exactly like me and filling holes in their descriptions with my personal identity traits or with traits I know the actor behind them has but that haven't been specified for their character. That being said, I know that there are other people who do feel more connected to a character they like if they see the character's canon struggles through the lens of a not-necessarily-canon identity (in the case of gender/sexuality/ethnicity) or diagnosis (in terms of a mental illness or developmental disorder). Like, OK, yeah, MOST of the newsboys in 1899 New York were probably cishet neurotypical males and a lot of them were white-passing if not outright white. The thing is, people KNOW that. Posting that and then tagging every single character and actor in the show, even if it's historically accurate, is just going to make you look like a dick (because these are literally just FICTIONAL CHARACTERS and you're screaming "MINE, NOT YOURS!" in people's faces), whereas the people who have headcanons of Jack as mixed race or Davey as autistic or Spot as transgender aren't posting their headcanons to be dicks. That being said, I don't know how many people (I'd wager most, but not all) of the people who headcanon characters with not-explicitly-canon identities actually belong to the identity communities themselves. I don't think it's wrong for a gay autistic trans kid to see Spot Conlon and go "ooh, what if he was gay and autistic and trans like me?" but if it's a straight neurotypical person (and by a straight person, I mean, an actual straight person, not someone who is questioning or closeted gay/lesbian/bi/pan) going "ALL YOUR FAVES ARE GAY! AND TRANS! AND AUTISTIC!" and tagging every single fandom they are in, it reads as a little fetishistic but that's just me.

3) "Rares" blogs posting pictures that aren't rares. If an actor posts an in-costume selfie with his castmates to his instagram during the process of creating a show or after the show is finished, it's not a "rare," even if the first time YOU'VE particularly seen it is two years after the show goes off the air and five years after he posted it. The same goes for someone who is involved in the project from a production aspect (like, for example, Joaquin or Kalen from Glee). A rare would be something that a friend-of-a-celebrity or a fan posted on a public social media account (like Twitter or Instagram) of the celebrity at a party or involved in something they did before their "big break." For example, I think if someone were to be like "hey, oh crap, I just remembered I went to see NLT years ago and I have a selfie with Kevin McHale when he was a teenager that I've never posted," THAT would be a rare. If someone posted a picture of Darren from his study abroad in Italy, that would be a rare. Posting a picture from the Glee set that's been tweeted or Instagrammed (sometimes multiple times) by the actors themselves is not "posting a rare."

4) This sort of could be combined with number 1, but it's more about Instagram/Twitter than Tumblr. It's one thing to make a cool edit of a character or an actor and tag them in it. Like, for example, Stephanie Styles and Drew Gehling were just in a stage production of Roman Holiday. Photoshopping their faces onto the film actors' bodies on the movie poster is a cool edit and I'm sure they would love to be tagged in something like that. Maybe you drew a picture of Brittana from Glee having a picnic and giving each other flowers; there's nothing wrong with tagging Heather and Naya in that. Maybe you identify a lot with Evan Hansen and make an "Evan Hansen aesthetic post" and want Ben Platt to see. Whatever, that's fine. What is overkill is when people literally just post screenshots from a TV show/movie/Broadway bootleg or steal pictures from actors' Instagrams or OTHER PEOPLE'S EDITS and have a completely unrelated caption like "uggggggggh I have so much math homework" or "my stepdad is being a dick and says I can't go see (insert movie here)" and tag the actors just because they happen to be in the picture. Sometimes people look in the actor tags on Instagram for news on their fave that might not be announced yet (for example, someone else from a project an actor is working on tagging them in a BTS picture) but it gets swamped under the same screenshot of the Newsies seizing the day or Klaine kissing or Andrew Rannells standing over Christian Borle with what appears to be a boner or Ben Cook doing the splits while Josh Burrage makes a goofy face in the background OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. Sometimes a fan is having a hard time and all they want is to be noticed by their favorite cast member of a show, but their friends' post petitioning the actor to wish them a happy birthday is swamped under 900 notifications of the same unedited screenshot. I have a friend who will sometimes post an old Newsies photo and go on an unrelated rant underneath, but she doesn't tag the actors or the show, so it's fine. If you didn't make the edit, don't post the edit (like, even if you credit whoever made it, someone else might steal it from you and they won't). If you HAVE to post a picture from a show with an unrelated caption, don't tag the actors. It's annoying as hell, and I suspect it contributes a lot to why a lot of them pull away from Instagram.

5) Roleplay blogs clogging up the tags, and then people creating blogs specifically to ADVERTISE their roleplay blogs when they know the actual blogs themselves are getting blocked. Also, FACEBOOK ROLEPLAYS. Facebook won't even let a lot of trans people change their name without a shit load of documentation, but it seems fine with people pretending to be fictional characters and celebrities and changing their FB handles to (insert first name) (insert embarrassing RPF ship portmanteau). Facebook is for real people and businesses, and I can SORT of see making a FB profile for a baby or a pet to have a place where only certain people can access photos and information (since most people have FB but not everyone has Instagram). Also, some of the roleplay scenarios people have are seriously fucked up and racist/ableist/both. YIKES.