#I don't necessarily think it was the intent

[powderpuff-divines]

pick a pile: when love finds you again, how do you wish to be held by it?

what kind of love does your heart yearn for? pick a pile to find out! this is a general reading so not everything may apply to you. only take what resonates and leave the rest. please excuse any grammatical errors or typos. happy reading!!

pile 1 ✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧

(TW: mentions of bullying, please exercise your own discretion.) seven of wands, queen of swords rev, nine of swords

oh pile one, when love finds you, you'll hiss at its hand the way a stray cat does when someone finally shows it some kindness after experiencing years of living alone on the streets.

people have been cruel to you by way of words and there are still cuts on your soul from that. i'm hearing death by a thousand cuts by taylor swift in my head, more specifically the line 'papercut stings from my paper thin plans.' maybe you made plans with loved ones (friends, family, lovers), went out of your way to do nice things for them and truly treasured them, but then had the gut-wrenching realization that it was not mutual. they could have mocked you for being so sensitive and taking things too seriously. ("oh that? don't tell me you actually thought i was being serious?"). some of you may have been victims of bullying in the past.

so when true, unconditional and kind love finds you, you will not be able to stomach it.

there's a deep level of mistrust and anxiety towards words of sweetness coming from anyone. but when love finds you again, you want do still want its words to be honeyed but true; not a coating of sugar covering rancid intentions.

you could still be beating yourself up for being swayed by other people's words and charms very easily in the past. please stop that. you cannot bully yourself into being better and being stronger. you live and you learn. you cannot be cruel to yourself for falling prey people who were actively trying to mislead you/ cause harm.

when love finds you again, you want its words, true and honest, to wrap you up and hold you in its warmth. to not need to worry about whether it's a ploy to get your trust only to break it again. you want a love so kind that it erases the pain from your past.

pile 2 ✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧

five of pentacles, seven of wands, knight of pentacles

someone dear to you could have betrayed your trust when it comes to money/finances/assets. for some of you, you do not even wish to acknowledge it or talk about it. 'it happened, i lived. it was miserable but i lived, and i'll never let that happen to me again.' is the type of energy i get from this pile. you could think that there's no point crying over spilled milk.

but that betrayal cut deep. so when love finds you again, you want someone who'll stand right by your side, especially if you go through a tough period like that again (some of you could have even been homeless for a while.)

the people who chose this pile do not necessarily want a flashy kind of love, with dates at the trendiest of places or elaborate gifts/ trips every month. you really want is someone to rely on, a shoulder to lean and cry on and someone who doesn't stab you in the back.

the type of scenario i'm seeing is someone having a breakdown in their dining room trying to balance their checkbook, but your person comes without you even calling for them, squeezes your shoulder, sits down next to you and starts helping you with it.

i feel like there's an emphasis on helping you with it rather than just doing it for you. you could be a very independent person, or maybe you just don't trust someone else to handle things for you again. you want a partner in the literal sense of the word.

(some of you could be thinking 'even if it's someone who doesn't contribute to helping me get back to a good place, i just want someone who won't make it worse. otherwise, i might as well just be alone, right?' and i just want to tell you that please hope for more. you deserve to be loved and taken care of. someone not harming you is just the barest of bare minimum. expect more from your loved ones)

what you really what is someone who'll tell you to hold your head high, put their reassuring hand to your back and guide you. they'll do the scut work with you, they'll make it easier for you to go through the murky waters and not complain about it.

i have a feeling that if someone like that were to actually appear, you would just stare at them for a few moments-- shocked and emotional, but grateful that you get to experience a love like this.

when love finds you again, you wish for it to be steady and unwavering, to hold your hand tight and not let go even once even as it knows that difficult times are ahead. to silently hold an umbrella over your head as it begins raining. to be as comforting as hot cocoa on a cold day. to stay. you want love to be loyal, kind and to stay.

pile 3 ✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧

(TW: mentions of sexual content. please exercise your own discretion.) ten of cups, page of swords, ten of swords

you want to find the love you've been dreaming of, to get your happy ending, to find the one. you're sick of meeting people who aren't your forever person.

you, out of all three piles, dream of domestic bliss the most. a happy home, a happy family with pets and/or kids. but with the way things have been going, you've become mentally resistant to this dream after so many failed tries and ,if you're aware of it, you hate that. because you never wants to be the type of person who doesn't like love or runs away from love, not after you've spent so long yearning for it.

this could be the pile that daydreams about a soft and romantic love.

the type of love where you're in the kitchen, baking something, and your partner comes behind you, wraps their arms around your waist and kisses your neck as they mutter something that makes your heart skip a beat.

you want someone who won't shut down your ideas, and wants to do fun (and tbh chaotic) stuff with you. you want to go on adventures with this person. (like the way the old couple from Up did when they were young.)

and also really good sex where by the end of it, you're exhausted and completely sated; after which, you lie in your lover's embrace, mindlessly drawing patterns on their skin (they could also do the same for you) with some pillowtalk.

you could also really want to travel to other places with this person and make a lot of memories.

when love finds you again, you wish for it to be in the form of a person in whom you see home. a home for your love, for your joy and smiles. a home that will accept all of it, nurture it and multiply it tenfold. whether it be now, a year later or even decades down the line, you wish to be held in its loving embrace. one could even say you wish to be held by it throughout the ages. you want a love that will transmute the bad days into something easier; a love that will stay forever soft and young as you and your lover grow old and develop wrinkles on your faces (from laughing and having so much joy in your lives.)

i recently decided to join tumblr and was surprised when i discovered that there was a pac community here. it's been super fun going through all the readings here so i thought maybe it would be fun to dip my own toe into it. i had a ton of fun editing the images and this post!! tumblr's so cool. i hope the reading resonated at least a little bit and it was fun to read!

[simplepotatofarmer]

Something I noticed recently is that Dream punches Techno in the prison when Techno first comes to visit him and he’s upset that Techno fell into the trap. And Dream also punches Techno when Techno is making fun of him being homeless and places the bed, suggesting Dream could use it to sleep under a tree.

In fanfics and stuff I haven’t necessarily seen much of Dream physically hurting Techno when annoyed or whatever like maybe a little shoving or punching playfully on the shoulder rarely but not like actually really punching him ya know. But I did notice in some fics including your fics that you have Dream giving him the finger so I was wondering if that was kinda your replacement for it, or if it was kinda derived from that behavior. I mean it makes a lot of sense whether or not it is related, like that is the kinda dynamic between them anyways so it is fitting. But I don’t know it’s just something I’ve been thinking about and was curious on your thoughts.

(Also the image of Dream socking Techno in the face and breaking his nose when upset is just kinda funny to me. I did notice too that Techno never punches back and just kinda lets it happen which is pretty wholesome)

i think it's because i don't tend to translate minecraft behaviors as a one-to-one exactly but more looking towards the situation and context surrounding it.

so like, obviously when c!techno is teasing c!dream about being homeless in a generally good-natured way that dream is clearly amused by, he's not actually hauling off and punching techno in the face. like. not only does techno not react like that's what happened, it doesn't make sense, and in minecraft rp culture, that's just not what that action would mean in that scenario. punching is usually a playful thing that kind of situation so it translates more to a light, joking shove or smack on the shoulder. OR maybe being flipped off (which i generally use post-prison because dream is hyper aware of his situation and not wanting to upset the balance but i have written dream shoving or otherwise smacking techno playfully as well!)

in the prison, that's a completely different context though and clearly not playful but again, i don't read it as dream cold-clocking techno either. he's frustrated and upset and scared. that read more like someone desperately shouting at the other while shoving them. and i think that was kind of the intent when you watch. he's almost hitting/shoving him back. i can perfectly visualize dream shouting those things at techno while shoving at him and techno is standing there like ???? calm down, man, it's fine, i had to come see you. like, there's probably a reason that techno doesn't physically react because what he's seeing is a starved, scared and angry dream shoving him in a panic, thinking his one chance at getting out is gone.

basically, i really look towards the context and what makes sense as well as how the other characters react and refer to it to determine what's actually going on.

also sorry, i love minecraft rp body language and i LOVE interrupting it. things like dream jumping up and down when techno is teasing him and he's amused/annoyed, i tend to read as him stomping his foot or things like that. zoomies can be both pacing in worry or excitement or fidgeting/shifting back and forth. it really depends on a lot of things and it's a lot of fun to me to sit down and try to break it down and i do put a lot of that into my fics! <3 <3 <3

[thedragonagelesbian]

@hexblooddruid replied to your post “obviously not every single one of davg's problems...”:

This is what drives me wild when I see people try to say that Rook HAS to be that way because of their position and goal. Like there are so many different ways to attack a problem, even in the limited space of an RPG made ten years ago. Like it could’ve been done if it was a priority.

i've drafted like five different responses to this but the long & short of each of them is 'Y E A H'

most often when i've seen defenses of why rook has to be Like That (GoodTM, nice, helpful, agreeable, unopinionated) it's more in the Macro scale of, say, caring about the companions' personal struggles, or wanting to keep the veil up, or not agreeing with solas. the other major defense is pointing to the bad ending as evidence of sufficient rp flexibility because the game does in fact let you ignore everything else and just focus on the main quest and lose out on hours and hours and hours of content and doom yourself/your factions/your companions.

but is that meaningful rp? or finger waggling at players for not playing the game the One and Only way it was supposed to be played (in much the same way that bg3 locks you out of tons of content if you don't do the grove Just Right [not necessarily even siding with the goblins but by trying to kill kagha prematurely])?

and like. I dont know if i necessarily need or want an Evil rook path, i dont think veilguard would've remotely thematically benefited for having Even More Vague Ontological Evil. But my god if rook's unassailable Goodness is purportedly the load bearing structure in veilguard's story, i sure would've liked to have had some meaningful ways to engage with what goodness is and what it might mean to different rooks who have different methods and different personal/ethical/political lines.

But we were never going to get that!!! because as you said, that was never the development priority for veilguard because it was incompatible with the direction inherited from morrison and the nightmarish release date pushback timeline devs were working on. fandom reverse engineering a purity of authorial intent & creative vision is what we call in academia a Generous Reading, but the material/labor/industrial confines under which the game was produced remain, and if the schreier article is any indication, those were the stronger determining factors in rook's personality & the broader lack of rp.

[grison-in-space]

I was hoping you would comment! As usual, this is excellent. I suspect there was at least some gene flow between many of the Southern hound breeds, particularly given the multiple references to crosses between the highly prized, rare-ish Cuban Bloodhounds and more easily abundant local foxhounds and coonhounds being used, especially with eyes to speed over ferocity; in general, the Cuban Bloodhound seemed to have been prized as much or more for its ferocity than for its hunting. I would also not be surprised to see involvement/gene flow between these dogs and American bulldogs and curs.

I think I also go back and forth about how much weight I give to creator intent relative to more recent history re: how the animals are actually being used. Part of that is just because I feel really strongly about honesty in dog breed history, not least because dog people have a long tradition of treating breed history very lightly and with a lot of euphemism or even outright lies--and taking a descriptive tack seems to me to be the fairest way to approach history. I also think more breed historians need to understand that historical research involves corroborating statements across primary sources and other lines of information available to us like genetic mapping.

If I was pointing more fingers, Presa Canario, Alano Espanol, and Ca de Bou are almost certainly descended from the Spanish mastiff strains that first entered the New World and were used as instruments of genocide against indigenous people--just from the dogs that didn't leave. I'm sure there are more: whenever you have a repressive regime and a culture that keeps dogs, you find dogs being used as weapons.

The Russian context (they of the Moscow Water Dog savaging its drowning clients) is an interesting one because it's so strongly divorced from colonial efforts using dogs in the new world, and yet dogs were an incredibly important tool for inciting terror--you can see that by looking at what Russian strains of these dogs actually produced: mostly bigger, scarier, more aggressive versions of other breeds, with the possible exception of the Black Russian Terrier.

Of course many breeds have histories of various levels of unsavoriness. The comparison to pit bulls is perhaps unfair simply because pit bulls are so much more common and popular, but it does seem instructive to me that we have rated dogfighting as a worse sin to carry in the ethics of whether a breed is "worth" preserving than, say, the German Shepherd's use to subjugate and terrorize actual human people. This isn't necessarily an argument against keeping and maintaining them, but I think GSDs by simple merit of being the central military/policing dog have found a number of functions that don't relate to its more unsavory periods of history.

I don't necessarily think the answer for any of these dog breeds is to wipe them off the planet--for one thing, I think that dogs serve as living memories and connection to our own histories for many of us, and those histories get real complex real fast. But I do think that being honest about the worst uses of dogs in history--and how our familiar modern dogs played into that history--helps to reduce the tendency to flinch away from attempts to reckon with our worse histories.

found this really cool article this morning about the history of the use of dogs to oppress BIPOC and particularly the use of the breed referred to variously as slave hounds and Cuban bloodhounds at the time, which was deliberately selected and trained as a weapon of terror. it's a horrifying history, but I think it's worth reading especially for American dog people as we face down a summer of police brutality that will come with the inevitable use of police dogs to perform the same terrorizing function—albeit with more in the way of fine grained, if often theoretical, control over the dog.

I still need to dig out sources to document the relationship between the Cuban Bloodhound and today's Fila Brasilero, because they are strong influences indeed. I am always thinking: what is the ethical underpinning of making the choice to preserve these dogs for the present day? Would it be better or worse to acknowledge their well documented history of colonial violence? We often keep dogs to preserve the parts of our culture and history we want to remember: what role does that play in the case of such a blood soaked, painful history of colonial terror?

Is the rebrand enough to justify keeping the dogs? How about breeds with Cuban bloodhound influence without being the modern form of the strain, such as Rhodesian Ridgebacks? How do the stories we tell about how dogs came to be help us form narratives about our own history?

[indecisiveavocado]

1. To be fair it's not like all lifestyle changes were being made. the big change was that there was significantly less use of personal transportation vehicles. And while my spatial sense is horrible, it looks like we'd need to reduce it by about one 2020/year to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming (in 2021)

3. it's what's most widely used, so i used that. however, other sources don't seem better. according to crippa et al 2021, over one-third of global emissions are food-related. clark et al concur on meat being the primary cause: "Higher impact Aisles [they used grocery store aisles] with an average estimated score from 5 to 10 included nuts, sweet and savory spreads, cheese, fish, and some meats (pork and poultry). The highest impact Aisles with estimated scores >10 primarily contained beef and lamb products".

Looking at the more detailed breakdown in Appendix 1, of the top 10 worst scoring food categories, 4/10 were meat, 1/10 was unclassifiable ('counters' -- they were doing food), 1/10 was an animal product (cheese) and the other four were coffee, tea, hot drinks, and hot chocolate. so I suppose you could argue that Greta should also be arguing against tea and coffee.

notably, dairy and meat alternatives both ranked in the top 15 least emissions heavy food categories. (Also: food alone could push us over 1.5 degrees.)

also, while it's true we use other parts of the animal, your comparison to almonds is disingenuous. a better comparison would be cheese vs. almonds - both can be produced while the animal/plant is still alive. incidentally, the category containing nuts in clark's study is at #28.

and i'm not saying (and i don't think greta is saying) that we should eat only nuts and drink only coffee. but meat is a generally high-emissions product that is reasonably easy to cut out of your diet--there isn't really a 'nut-free' alternative to almonds. (also, if you google 'nut free' you're likely to get quite, uh, different results than if you google 'meat free')

4. yeah that's what I'm saying? but you ascribe a sort of malicious intent and knowledge of what they're doing to the people in this slide, when in reality I don't think that's necessarily supported.

but thank you! I was forgetting what it was like to have the fun challenge of researching this sort of thing without it being antisemitic!

I’ve seen a few of the antisemitic blogs make statements like “Greta was Times person of the year a few years ago, but since she linked climate change to colonialism they dropped her” or some variation thereupon.

And here’s the thing.

That’s not the reason.

Everyone dropped Greta because she offered nothing to the climate change problem.

She was a novelty as she was a child who was so singularly focused on climate change that it distressed her to the point of going mute. It distressed her so much that she dropped out of school. It distressed her so much that when she stopped being mute she started yelling at adults and it became her sole thing.

And that got her attention.

Here was a child who gave up being a child in order to bring attention to climate change.

Except we’d already had people who have been doing that for years. Again, it was just that she was a novelty because of how young she was.

Her “solutions” were also nothing new or novel.

Reduce your personal carbon footprint, switch to a vegetarian/vegan/vegetable heavy diet, contact your local politicians, etc…

These are all things that climate activists have said for years, and many of them are not actually solutions.

The whole claim that the individual civilian reducing their carbon footprint en masse will help reduce emissions was debunked during the pandemic when everyone’s footprint went down due to us all being stuck at home and it did almost nothing.

That’s when we all realized that the main emitters were massive corporations, businesses, and the energy sector and that the whole “reduce your footprint” narrative was coming from them in order to avoid responsibility. And the activists had been eating that up for years and spreading it around like gospel. They had been duped.

The whole thing about switching to a plant based diet makes no sense when animal agriculture is maybe 50% in total of the entire agricultural sector which is between 10-20% of global emissions. This one is particularly maddening because a lot of these activists like to blame Animal Agriculture as the number one emitter and/or the worst thing ever. Except it’s a percentage of one of the smallest sectors and literally does not have, and cannot have, as big an impact as the energy sector. Furthermore, all the alternatives to products that are made from the animal sector are much worse for the environment (e.g. plant based leathers need to be paired with petroleum/plastic based products and are not sustainable). These are the same people who scream that, typically, scream that GMOs and conventional Ag is bad while organic is the greatest thing ever, all the while they ignore the limited yields and increased inputs of organic.

Essentially they’re asking you to believe that a percentage of one of the smallest sectors has a bigger impact than it actually does and that you the consumer can fix it.

It makes no sense, and people have caught on to that.

And everyone has been contacting their politicians about this stuff for years.

The reality is that activists like Greta offer no actual solutions.

If she had actually gone to college and decided to pursue a career in climate science and relevant fields in order to bolster her work and develop solutions then maybe she’d be taken seriously. But she has a high school education and offers nothing more than an ignorant juvenile take on problems. Her solutions are not solutions, they’re just what ignorant activists shriek about because they don’t know what to actually do. They can’t actually understand the science, the mechanisms, and the methods because that takes years of education and experience.

If at most you have is a high school degree and you’re not furthering your education in any way then there is no way you’re going to actually provide an answer that the experts aren’t already working on.

The solutions to the issues are developed by experts with years of education and experience who are trying to address specific problems. Animal Agriculture scientists specifically are developing feeds to reduce methane emissions, Agricultural scientists specifically see certain inputs and outputs and want to improve yields while decreasing problematic outputs, ecological scientists are working on solutions to address the Ag/Wild environmental interchange. Scientists and experts work for years on a singular problem or set of problems in their particular field as it relates to climate change and develop a solution or way to reduce the impact of the issue.

It’s never an activist screaming that something needs to be done that fixes the issue, because it’s already being worked on. The activist is only coming from a place of passionate ignorance that they think is informed, but we’ve known about this stuff for years and it’s honestly wearing thin.

That’s why Greta is no longer the “darling of the Liberals” or whatever else you want to say as a tongue in-cheek barb.

She was a novelty that eventually lost its novelty and everyone saw her activism for what it really was: the same recycled fear mongering we’ve heard before.

That’s why she’s jumped ship from climate change to the anti-Israel crowd. The climate change community wants you to actually be educated on the topic and provide solutions, her new group does not. They want you to say the same canned lines, cliches, and catechisms. They don’t want a peaceful solution, but a violent one. They don’t want to provide a narrative based upon the vast nuances of the historical fact, but one that is steeped in antisemitic propaganda that trivializes and reduces everything to a black and white perspective.

That’s much easier than being educated and providing hard fixes that are incremental and occur over time. Much easier to scream about the omnicause and that there’s one “final solution”.

[bbuzz28]

Fiddleford is a liar.

He contextualizes his lies as being for the greater good-but he still lies.

I think people sometimes overlook this trait. Outside of calling him a two timer on his wife (Emma-May, I would treat you so much better, run away with me), it’s all pretty much treated as a joke. "Silly little banjo playing Fiddleford who goes crazy by scrambling his brains like eggs in a skillet after a monster attack." It's a very convenient compartment to slide him into without digging much deeper.

However, I think it runs so much deeper than that. To lie so effortlessly and all the time, it takes practice. I think he has been lying probably for his entire life-so much so that he doesn't even consider it to be lying. The entire foundation on what he eventually builds his cult is "helping" the townsfolk by "protecting" them from the "terrible" truths that surround them in Gravity Falls.

Only a practiced liar would invent something like the memory gun. Because at the end of the day, when you are lying all the time, you are able to convince yourself of the lies for a little while-but not forever. (If you are not a narcissist, which of all the things Fiddleford is, he is not that.) You will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and remember what you did or what you are trying to cover up. The aspect of control over what at the time seemed controllable with a few false words now causing your heart to race, your breath to hitch, your head to ache. So, then you lie more, to cover up all the loose threads that would lead to what you've done. Eventually, you have dug a hole so deep, there is no end in sight.

The answer is simple-tell the truth, right? It would be the "right" thing to do...and it would shatter everyone's interpretation of you. Possibly dissolving any of the relationships you've built. Relinquishing control of the scenario you created. Because when you tell the truth, it turns into the "well, why would you do this?" conversation. Who wants to hear "because I wanted you to like me", "I didn't want to disappoint you", "I didn't want to make you angry" or "I wanted to be useful" in response? To see that look of utter disenchantment in their eyes as all your lies are revealed.

But....what if you could e r a s e the truth from your own memory? And not only your memory, but the memory of whomever you lied to. They would never have to know what you did. You would never have to face it. And you would never again be overcome with the feelings of inadequacies that triggered you to lie in the first place.

You wouldn't have to disappoint anyone, or yourself, ever again.

The Memory Gun started as a clever band aid to the trauma of the Gremloblin incident, yes. But it turned into something much more dangerous in the hands of an established and practiced liar.

[ethanscrocs]

Sailor Moon Design Musings!

i've been thinking a lot about shape design in sailor moon, specifically because i noticed that when i draw usagi, i emphasize these little details quite a bit. now, i don't feel entirely certain that all of these were intentional, but it does get me thinking. sailor moon's design in the early seasons of the 90s anime is very clear-cut and sharp, and it's cultivated in something quite iconic. yeah, it's generally the same costume as the manga, but there are elements of the design that feel... intentional? what i wouldn't give to ask people who worked on the anime if they were aware of these details or if they were added to her design purposefully...

edit: and omg, her compact brooch follows the same logic as the rubies on her buns in that it's a circular shape with a smaller circle inside that abstracts the shape of a crescent moon, kind of? ALSO. the tiaras on the sailor senshi follow this logic and in some art it seems more intentional than others.

if you count all of these details, plus the already obvious shapes, there would be 14? different moon shapes in her design!

(16 in this image)

you just can't beat her! to me, this is clearly a character design that was already gorgeous but is more than perfected for animation. i love it! 🌙

bonus - usagi's anime concept art:

maybe i'm just imagining things but (and god do i wish i had a higher quality and translated version of this image) this is feeding my brainworms. maybe i'm right about a thing or two, a couple of the elements i mentioned above seem even further emphasized here... hm... 🔍

[viscasi]

I definitely was not trying state tht we should divide allinity because women's masculinity is a watered-down form of men's masculinity" [...]

Oh, of course not! I wasn't trying to imply you were. I was bringing it up as a concern of the effect it may have, not the original intent.

[...] it's often loadbering for why gnc trans men aren't "just women" and gnc trans women aren't "just men".

I'm having a bit of a difficult time interpreting what you're saying there; here are my thoughts:

If allinity identity is separate from gender identity, a feminine man (cis or trans) does not share a whole identity with a feminine woman, even if they do have one aspect of their identity in common. If we package allinity with gender, I think that's when things could get misconstrued. I don't think separating allinity from gender (and allowing it to be the same entity across/independent from gender) would mean that trans men are "just women," like:

I conceptualize it this way because often intrafeminine people tend to feel a sort of resonance/comradery with other feminine people (regardless of gender), and vice versa for intramasculine people— while still not identifying as that gender, and being distinct from them by gender identity but similar by allinity identity.

That said, I mean, we could leave the internal conception of the categories up to each individual if they feel differently?

[...] letting those who are doing it as a form of communication be able to distinguish themselves, too is also useful. mostly just mean that often there is a fair bit of overlap [...]

Absolutely! I should have clarified that "gender transgression" versus "gender nonconformity" are not mutually exclusive, nor are they necessarily identity labels on their own. They're more meant as terms to be applied to a person's actions, and if a situation entails both things, as you said, then both terms can be used in conjunction to describe the situation.

IMPORTANT : Terminology Discussion

Note: PLEASE read this even though it is long 😂 I think this foundational work is really important for the growth and maintaining of our community and it can't be put off any longer than it has been!

In the background, I’ve been chatting with Anibelle (@viragoposting), Holly (@hollycantkeeptrackofthedaze) and Zuno (@prof-zunoshade) about the use of the words Virago and hetGNC, and what situations each would cover, versus what still needs separate terminology. We haven’t quite come to a solid, concrete, all-comprehensive answer yet, but I have been thinking it’s time to at least go public with the brainstorming so that maybe we can all figure it out together.

It’s so exciting that our little community has grown so much so quickly! But I think that also means that it’s time: we really need to have some productive conversations about our community and language, so that we can communicate more effectively in the long term.

Here’s the thought process so far:

The Needs

Anibelle (@viragoposting) coined the label Virago a while ago, and she has a post here describing its intended meaning and use. In summary, a Virago is a woman who is one or more of these things: Attracted to feminine men, dominant, and/or masculine.

"Virago" works well as a broad term— but, because it includes women who are technically GNC but still feminine-aligned (e.g., femdom, etc.), that means “Virago” doesn’t work as an identity label to explicitly convey having an “internal sense of masculinity”, which is an important distinction a lot of us are looking for. So that’s where my thought process is: Virago works great as an umbrella term, but we’re gonna need some additional ways to get more specific (for the people who want to.)

If I say “I’m a Virago,” I want to be able to differentiate myself from feminine Viragos, and they probably want a way to differentiate themselves from masc Viragos like me. Also, we're going to need an equivalent label for feminine men. (After this was written, the term “Mollis” has since been proposed— not necessarily as an equivalent/inverse to Virago, but as a nickname of sorts. You can find the discussion about it here!)

I think Virago is a great label and we should absolutely use it. I also think that to describe us all, we are going to need more than one word.

The Reasons

I’ve been thinking about the concept of one’s masculinity/femininity, versus gender identity, versus gender presentation. I think gender nonconformity, in the textbook sense of the word, is separate from masculine(/feminine) identity.

For example: Being muscular is considered gender nonconforming for women. But, still, there are feminine buff women and there are masculine buff women. So, being muscular isn’t actually masculine, even if it is considered gender nonconforming.

So, how do we communicate the difference in identity between these two hypothetical types of people? We can’t say that one of them is GNC and the other is not, because both are technically not conforming to gender norms. So how do we convey the distinction between women who are masculine in identity, versus feminine-identifying women who defy gender roles? (And vice versa for men?)

Additionally, everyone will define masculinity differently. Tale as old as time. For the sake of this conversation, to save breath, assume 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are defined by the person using the label.

The (Proposed) Solutions

Here are my thoughts on what language we can use (and how), in order to include all of these experiences while still being able to differentiate between them:

(It's not pretty but it's also just a rough draft haha)

(Info about the asterisks:

* Virascian and Gynascian (Latin meanings: masculine essence, and feminine essence, respectively) -- These are a couple of proposals for alternative terminology for intramasculine women/intrafeminine men. They could be used as a “sapphic/achillean” equivalent for hetGNC people.

* Unnamed section for men, equivalent to Virago: Currently, this identity hasn't been officially coined or named. Given the historical origin of the word Virago, I'm not quite sure how to go about making an equivalent for men. If anyone has ideas, voice them!)

(Bonus info: the Latin in “Intrafeminine/Intramasculine” about translates to “inner feminine / inner masculine”, in case anyone is wondering where I got that from too. And my justification for the etymology/necessity of the word “Allinity” can be found in this post.)

What do you guys think?

This is the most important part: Community discussion.

Do you have any questions/concerns about the propositions outlined here?

Do you like the new words, or should we keep looking for different ones? (Specify which ones?)

Should anything be changed or added?

Any other comments/ideas?

[andiv3r]

Having to block everyone who has "wincest dni" in their bio not because I ship wincest (because I have come to the conclusion that I actually don't) but because I do think it'd be fun to poke around at the very real weirdness of their relationship that I've noticed in the show so far. And I'm 99% sure that my poking around will get seen as shipping.

[aromantic-and-aromatic]

I'll shut up abt jenova one day, but the idea that hojo is so proud of himself for having created sephiroth bc his will is so strong he can become a god using jenova just for sephiroth to have actually been influenced by jenova bc his mind wasn't strong enough to withstand jenova's control from how hojo raised him will not leave my mind

[clownowo]

questions...

[ceramicbeetle]

know there’s a lot of fandom appeal in hawkeye returning home after the war and getting “proper” psychiatric treatment for [pre-existing] mental illness but frankly rewatching Dr Pierce and Mr Hyde and Give 'Em Hell Hawkeye back to back makes me feel like hawkeye returns and becomes embroiled in the antipsychiatry movement instead

because the disparity between Trapper’s fond “He’s just unstable” that ties Directly to the war’s impact on Hawkeye’s sense of empathy and morality and BJ’s derisive “I'd say there was no point in letting this drive you crazy, but I can see I'm too late” that more explicitly dismisses his behavior as being baselessly irrational and pathetic is enormous, and I think with hindsight it wouldn’t escape Hawkeye’s notice. He is a character who remained relatively unchanged over the seasons — it was the way that people began to respond to, dismiss, and pathologize* his behavior that shifted dramatically enough to make him go from being “the sanest person [Sidney] knows” to being considered “Crazy”.

*"Pathologize" doing a lot of heavy lifting here. this isn't to say that Hawkeye isn't experiencing a break in reality in GFA, he absolutely is, the Point is that there's a horror story in the insistence that his psychosis in GFA is part of a history of unstable behavior, something Internal, something Individual, something caused by His Brain, rather than being a 'reasonable' response to an utterly unreasonably horrific situation, leading to him being forced into a treatment like heavy medications or ECT because it's more Convenient to label him as an already unstable Outlier than acknowledging the political, military, and traumatic situations that he was forced into that Directly Caused his behavior, you know?

[unproduciblesmackdown]

trying to say things about the bsol finale & how it has these little twists about what you don't necessarily expect for these roles but would you believe it i'm like i can't use my [just saying some shit] ability i'm pressed about wanting it to be more coherent & verbalizing doesn't even really happen if i don't have the [just saying some shit] wind in my sails But trying to say One Thing, how about the little twist like the miracle banana gets being that he himself lives, vs his emotional resolution that he would have died to help the musician, even as the musician is like no bestie you're good, even as the audience may expect & approve of even dying from funny little second banana guy who may even be supposedly taken as Superfluous now that thee man & thee woman have reunited (but it was always queerer than that) like. more resolution to our themes that that very second banana is doing just fine vs that the hero is, more classic iconisiquisms

[underscore-jude]

i take back any and all narrative critiques i had of firebringer when i was a bougie 14 year old thinking i knew my shit. this is par for the course in terms of starkid's narrative cohesiveness and the chorn twist is the funniest fucking thing ive ever seen

[uncanny-tranny]

Maybe it's just me, but part of why I never really felt completely secure in being public about my own artistic endeavors was how... being proud of yourself in any capacity for any reason is almost a faux pas, if that makes sense.

I've noticed how it's almost expected to perform the air of humility, but is that humility? Is it humility to say, "Oh, I'm sorry for clogging your feed with my awful art" or anything to the effect of self-deprecation?

I think that's why I so often gravitate toward those who make "bad art." There's a sense of freedom that is only achieved with the level of hubris that being unashamed in the number of people who hate your art. I wonder, though, how many people don't hate the art as much as they hate that they can't chastise the artist into humility, into recognizing how "terrible" an artist they "actually" are?

[chaos-has-theories]

FUCK

solar eclipse this black like his soul that do you know what ELSE John's eyes kinda look like?

The fucking 8 ball.