#I like queer joy

[respectthepetty]

I FOLLOW THE TRASHY PATH BECAUSE I TOO HAVE TRASH TASTE PETTY but even though on every level except physical I am a radioactive possum swimming through the hazardous waste dumpster that is life, living in hardcore ignorance doesn’t sound half bad actually. I skipped right to Close to You after Trapped and that was definitely the move I loved Close to You so so so much. BLISSFUL IGNORANCE IT IS

Anon, I want to watch Absolute Zero, but I'm very afraid of how it will pan out, and Only Friends and I Feel You Linger in the Air are already staring at me each week ready to beat me up outside with bottles of Oishi green tea, so I completely understand skipping out on even the slightest hint of a painful experience. However, I'm completion-ist. Therefore, even if I see the pain coming, I must finish the series once I begin it.

I was very quiet watching Eternal Yesterday, Something in My Room, and Kissable Lips last year because I could feel the pain coming, yet I still finished them.

This is why I like trash.

Even if there is pain, at least it'll be a fun ride. HIStory 5: Love in the Future had the possibility of the leads being split up due to time traveling reasons, but there was a tiny man with UFOs on his suit who was trying to kill one of the second pair's guys by locking him in a freezer, and I secretly lived for it.

We all know Yi and Diao are going to end up together in Naughty Babe, but I'm loving this adventure so much more than Cutie Pie all because of a terrible CGI tiger.

I've watched and forgotten more tragic queer content than most people have even heard of, so when I sit down to enjoy my international BLs, I want pendejos. I want dramatics. I want trash.

AND NO PAIN!

I know sad stuff is some people's jam and butter. No hate and no shade. To each their own. Which is why I'm thrilled to exist in this era of BL riches. There is something for everyone, and there is plenty of happy trashy shows for me to enjoy weekly.

. . .

But know that if y'all could see my face sometimes watching this sad stuff, I'd look like Chadwick Boseman did at the 2019 Oscars when Green Book beat Black Panther for Best Picture because I think writers feel offering up queer trauma somehow legitimatizes their work in a way they believe queer joy doesn't because mainstream media has taught us we must detail the ways in which societal norms have harmed us in order to be accepted by the people who continue to uphold those norms.

But anywho,

I like trash.

[stil-lindigo]

warmth.

a comic about not being alone.

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creative notes:

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all my other comics

store

[meat--mutt]

To my fellow queers, in case you’ve lost sight of things a little bit like I had, I want you to watch this

This is why we create, this is why we don’t hide even in the face of great adversity. Our stories are beautiful, and moving, and remember how much it means to people. I love being queer, I love being a lesbian, I love being trans, I love us. I love our joy, our stories, our hearts. I love the way we love.

Don’t loose sight of that, in all the discourse, in all the inter community fighting, don’t loose sight of The Reason™️. Remember how far we’ve come.

Look at where we are, look at where we started. Your love, your joy, your story, your visibility MATTERS. The art you create matters.

I love us, I love our love, and nothing will ever change that

Happy 10 years Korrasami 💕🏳️‍🌈

[ridibulous]

Hey. Hey. You. Person with breasts who's considering mastectomy and feeling anxious that they'll regret it after. Consider the following:

- No longer having to accomodate your chest when wearing clothes

- Being able to publicly go topless (ex. for swimming)

- Don't have to worry about bras and other supports

- Back pain from a large chest? Who's that?

- Laying on your stomach just got easier

- Less worry about potential breast cancer, especially if you may be at risk (if you are, talk to a doctor about it, prophylactic mastectomy is awesome and reduces the chance of cancer way more than FTM top surgery)

- You could get rid of your nipples, if you wanted

- And you could just get them tattooed on... or have a blank slate for whatever art you wanted instead

- Being able to move around (running, going up/down stairs, etc) without feeling any jiggle

- And if you wanted the appearance of breasts? You can wear fake boobs as long as you want, and be able to take them on & off whenever you want. And they can be any size, too. It's a much safer option, as opposed to binding.

If you really want it, why are you hesitating? Be happier built in your own image, instead of the one other people want to paint on you.

[the-geeky-fangirl]

yes i know heartstopper is "cringe" and yes I know you think it's not that deep but you've endured years of cringe oversexualized shows about high schoolers where the gays are delegated to sub plots I'm sure a few hours of queer people being safe and happy and loved won't kill you so please shut the fuck up

[angel-armed]

Trigun Stampede director Kenji Muto is the man ever, thank you for my life popping bottles for Nonbinary Vash Canon

[stargirl230]

I’m so late to this but i started watching ofmd and jim has stolen my whole heart 🍊

(no reposts; reblogs appreciated)

[schwoobzilla]

i got him in my sights, sir. taking the shot.

*transgenderfication beam powers up*

[anoddrock]

Reminder: romantic love is not inherently greater than platonic love.

I always see it phrased the other way around, saying platonic love isn’t less valuable. That irks me a bit.

Believe me, both are amazing. But I Definitely feel platonic love more strongly than romantic love. If the romantic love isn’t an addon to preexisting platonic love, then personally I just don’t get it.

Because I am deeply in love with some of my friends. I forget it sometimes, and then I hang out with them and it’s just. Joy. Giddy. I’m me again. But it’s truly platonic! It’s not ‘Just Platonic’ - that’s undermining!! I legitimately feel this love to my core! It’s in my heart and soul and bones! But it just…isn’t romantic. To me, it’s much bigger, because romance is bonus content, not a standalone.

Romance fills out spaces that you didn’t know were there. It’s like having dessert. It’s connecting dots you might not have otherwise connected, but that aren’t essential to the story. It’s deciding to paint your nails this week instead of just trimming them.

I want to spend my life with the people I love, but romantic attraction isn’t its own book in my library of feelings. Romantic attraction is taking a well-worn copy of one of your favorite books, and filling it with annotations and sticky notes, double underlines and exclamation points. But the book itself isn’t romantic attraction, it’s the friendship that you have, familiar and well worn and deeply, deeply loved.

I couldn’t annotate a book I didn’t have. But I have a vast library around me full of books, and maybe I’ve tried annotating one or two, but as of right now, there’s only one book that’s felt right to have properly annotated.

But even if I’ve only annotated this one book, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop reading the others. No, I couldn’t ever stop reading. Sometimes there are new books that I end up not keeping, but there will always be a shelf of books that I could reread endlessly. The fact that I don’t annotate them doesn’t mean I don’t love them, and that they haven’t impacted me to my core. It just means I didn’t annotate them.

[tippenfunkaport]

That viral post that's going around about how people who write "book quality" mlm fic are too "normal" to publish and have real jobs so only "weird" people publish their "shitty" fanfic is so completely out of touch with reality and I am giving a massive side eye to everyone reblogging it.

Not only is it completely, easily verifiably untrue (you cannot enter any professional writing space without tripping over a dozen grizzled scifi writers who got their start by filing off the serial numbers and publishing their Star Trek fanfic even going back decades ago??? it's a whole thing?? plus how can you look at the mlm category on Amazon right now and say with a straight face that people aren't publishing shitty Spirk and Stucky fanfic??? Oh, honey...) it's also the perfect example of this kind of sneering elitism that true artists would never sully themselves by seeking profit, they do it only for the purity of the thing that always somehow leads back to, "no one should be paid to make art, actually."

The only reason you're seeing more published fanfic right now has nothing to do with the idealistic purity of your hypothetical government employee written smut of the past vs the debased scribbles of those awful straights of today and everything to do with the fact that a) self-publishing has created a voracious readership that wants a ton of content so it's become a viable, flexible income stream for many, especially disabled people b) anyone can publish now with self-publishing tools so there are less gatekeepers and c) lockdown got a lot of people into fandom and therefore writing who never tried it before.

And if you really think there's no "shitty" published mlm and no "book-quality" m/f writing out there that started as fanfic, then you are clearly not a reader so why are you even talking about this?

[radioactive-earthshine]

NGL I have STRONG opinions about digital releases omitting the letters to the editor section of older comics. I feel like the letters are a part of comic history and should be aggressively preserved.

[stil-lindigo]

bedside bouquet.

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a sapphic comic about a village girl and the fae she fell in love with.

creative notes:

[mintjeru]

companionship and understanding happy pride from my beloveds!!

open for better quality | no reposts

[plant-ago]

An Open Letter to Dan and Phil

Dear beloved nerds,

This was originally going to be an (even longer) actual letter that I was going to give to you at the tour, but my nonprofit-employed ass can’t afford a meet and greet, so we’re doing this instead. I promise it’s not just trauma dumping— mostly, it’s about saying thank you and trying to cultivate some hope for all of us.

I’ve been a big fan since around 2014, when I was a mentally ill neurotic deeply repressed loner egg (average phannie, let's be honest). Now I’m a whole adult who got therapy and HRT and has joined the legions of transmascs with the Dan Howell haircut! What a legacy.

I’m making jokes because the thing I actually want to talk about, and the reason I decided to make this an open letter, is kind of serious. But in light of the election, I feel like I need to share this, both with you and with all the other queers in this little corner of the internet.

Here’s the gist: I’m a paralegal at a non-profit organization that works to help queer migrants get asylum. Mostly what I do is sit them down in our nasty sterile office and try to be kind, and help them get through telling me all the most terrible things that have happened to them, and then turn around and pare it all down into legalese that is digestible to the government to make the case they should get asylum.

It’s a horrible job, really, and one that shouldn’t have to exist. Some parts are plainly wonderful, like meeting so many queer people from all walks of life. But it’s also heartrending and difficult, and burnout is always looming. My horrible banal work is often literally a matter of life and death for the client, and I’m fighting a broken system for a chance at giving them the happiness and safety is owed to them by international law and, really, by any decent human standard, should never have been in question.

The thing is—and this is reason to hope—queer people really do exist everywhere, no matter how much repression and violence we face. In a tiny village in Colombia, there's a kid who’s all spit and vinegar, dresses like a boy and plays football and fights anyone who says that they can’t, who grows up wiry and gets black eyes because men still can’t handle getting their asses handed to them on the soccer field by a dyke. This client texts me at my work number sometimes to ask if I’ve eaten that day, because they wanted to check in on me. He asked me to call him by a boy’s name, recently. I don’t know that he’s told anyone else. I open every message I send him with "Hola, James."

Then there’s the sweet, babyfaced college freshman who got death threats when he was outed to his classmates back home, and whose parents kicked him out when he refused to marry a girl to protect the family's reputation, leaving him alone in a foreign country. He was couch surfing and just trying not to miss class so he could keep his student status and he was so conscientious I wanted to cry— he’s eighteen, guys. Eighteen. I’ll get him his papers or so help me fucking God I will kill for him. You know? You know. After that meeting I had to sit at my desk with my notebook and fill an entire blank page with the phrase “he’s just a kid,” over and over again, until I felt like I could breathe.

On a Friday morning recently I get up and open my laptop to interpret on a call with a soft-spoken older trans woman who's sat in the bleak phone room of the ICE detention facility because her immigration judge didn’t believe that she was really transgender. “An odor of mendacity pervades everything the respondent says,” the judge wrote in her ruling, where she determined the client wasn't "credible." To this day I’m still floored that she straight up ripped off Tennessee Williams—new frontiers in bigotry, truly. She didn’t even cite. In our meeting now, the client quietly tells us how hard it was when she came out but how happy she was the first time she wore makeup, and she'd rather stay in detention here for indeterminate years as proceedings spiral on than go back to Guatemala, where they'll kill her—boys, if I ever get within spitting distance of this fuckass judge, it is on SIGHT. Absolutely fucking ON SIGHT. For legal purposes, that was a JOKE.

So I finish the call and get up to get a snack. It’s only ten am but feel tired already because I’m angry, which is not unusual but also not something I want to hold onto, because it doesn't help anything. So I make some toast and look at my phone— two texts, which I ignore, a spam email, and, wouldn't you know it, a YouTube notification from Dan and Phil games! Jarring! That’s just sort of how life is though, isn’t it? Deathly serious and lighthearted in the same breath.

But regardless, seeing the notification makes me feel warm, so I have my toast and watch a little video of you two playing Roblox or dress up or whatever it is you do on that channel these days. I have a good giggle and I finish my toast and go back to my desk. It’s a crucial part of my diet really— the giggles, not the toast. I’m not angry anymore. I’ll be angry again, but for now my cortisol levels are manageable and I can put my head back into emails or whatever the fuck. Do you ever think about how plants make food for free out of sunlight but we sit around writing emails all day? And that’s if we’re lucky. Capitalism is hell.

Anyway, there is a point I am trying to make, and it’s not really about the banal horrors of neoliberal nation-state or capitalism or even homophobia. It’s to say thank you for coming back to make silly videos together, because I love them, and you never fail to make me happy. And yeah, maybe something about the story of that scared eighteen-year-old kid at the front of my mind makes it particularly sweet to watch you two goofing off and being openly queer. It reminds me why I’m doing what I’m doing, and it gives me the strength to send another fucking email because sometimes doing “important work that I value and believe in deeply” means having to send another fucking email. And sometimes I’ll rewatch your older videos, and then come back to the more recent ones, and my heart bruises, because you remind me what I’m fighting for and why. It’s nothing grandiose, it’s just— for queer people to get to have the ability to grow into themselves and be outrageous and silly and make mistakes and to love and be loved for who they are. To have the safety and support and security that no one should ever go without. That’s all.

So I am being dead serious when I say thank you for making top-tier light entertainment, and for coming back to a job that wasn’t always kind to you, and that it does actually matter. All this talk about terrible influences and legacies has made me think that sometimes you doubt whether you do good in the world, so let me be clear: you really, really do. I kind of get the sense that in order to accept sincerity Dan needs to be beat over the head with it, so if that’s the case, consider yourself coerced, you dickhead. You matter to me, and especially in times like these, I think I speak for all of us when I say that the joy you share is a precious and treasured gift. So please accept my gratitude in return.

All my love,

Jules

(I removed or changed all identifying information in this letter to protect privacy, but the stories are real).

[usertoxicyaoi]

"It's my first time laughing like this with a friend. This is ... kind of fun!"

SMELLS LIKE GREEN SPIRIT (2024). EPISODE TWO.

[psecho]

So, has the Bi Buck explosion completely fucked over anyone else's hyperfixation or is it just me?

I litteraly do not have enough content to satisfy my ADHD right now, no other fandom content gives me the good brain feel right now. All of my app games on my phone are useless. YouTube, TV and even rewatchin 911 doesn't work.

I just keep refreshing the AO3 Evan "Buck" Buckley tag and latching onto anything that fits the very specific need that my brain has as soon as it's posted and checking 911 spoiler/speculation accounts on TikTok.

I am litteraly going to go insane before Friday (when I can watch 911 in my time zone).