#I've been through enough already

[breezypunk]

.

[halorvic]

[beebfreeb]

I got curious about the difference between the English dub and original Japanese voice acting...

[eddiezpaghetti]

It has come to my attention that SOME OF YOU who read my last Byler post remain UNCONVINCED. So I'm gonna tack onto it this:

I'm older than fucking God and air, and I've been out and proud since 2007. Yes, I know what homophobia is, and yes, I know what queerbaiting is. I know about Supernatural and Teen Wolf and Sherlock and blahdyblahdyblah. No new ground is being covered here. I thought I made that clear in the original post, but, clearly, I did not.

I am aware of queerbaiting and homophobia, and I'm still wholeheartedly certain in Byler being canon anyway.

Okay, so there are three types of relationship I want to discuss when it comes to queerbaiting. They're all, like, "queer relationships that could have happened, but didn't".

First off, queer-coding. This isn't really a thing so much anymore, but it still crops up every once in a while. I'd argue it probably happens most with male-male relationships in family shows these days. First example that comes to mind is Mr. Smiley and Mr. Frowny from Steven Universe. You can't make a relationship canon because some shitty overhead bastard overhead said no, so you get as close as you can without compromising the show. Can't make someone gay? Well, now their comedy routine is a blatant allegory for a romantic relationship. Boom-shaka-laka. This is something I don't see being a problem with regards to Stranger Things, but I want it to be there as contrast, a demonstration of one of many things queerbaiting is not. However, one could argue that, thus far, Will Byers is, canonically, queer-coded. It's pretty fucking heavily implied in the show, and the creators have confirmed it, and you're gonna be able to see it if you're not FUCKING BLIND, but word of god is not technically canon which means that interviews don't technically make something canon, blahdyblahdyblahdyblah, technicalities, Robin has been explicitly stated in the text to be queer while Will has, thus far, not, outside of good ol' Show-Don't-Tell. Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell that that's going to change by the end of Season 5, but, hey, for what it's worth, I'm throwing this out there.

Alrighty, Thingamajingama Number Two: "Oops, I accidentally made the greatest love story known to man." AKA, a genuine, honest-to-goodness mistake. Unfortunately, we do live in a heteronormative society. Sometimes people who don't think about being gay much write a friendship that's incredibly compelling and don't even consider the possibility that it could have been read as romantic. Something something Top Gun something. This is, again, not queerbaiting. This is Steddie, this is Ronance, this is Elmax, this is your favorite flavor of non-canon ship this week, this is not Byler. The creators know DAMN well what they're doing. They've talked about it. We know this. Nothing new here.

Which brings us to the topic of discussion here. Actual queerbaiting. This usually starts out as an "accidental greatest love story", and then reacts to fan response. And when I say "reacts", I mean like a goddamn chemical reaction. Like bleach and ammonia, bitch. It's noxious and it's gonna kick your fucking ass without mercy. This is when a creator is like, "Hey, let's get our queer audience invested, but we're not actually going to give them what they want because our straight audience isn't here for that/we personally think it's gross/we don't give enough of a shit to want to research a goddamn thing to write a real gay character," blah blah blah whatever excuse they want to come up with this time.

And when you think "queerbaiting", I want you to think "bullying". Because that's what it is. It's lucrative bullying, like beating us up and taking our lunch money, but it's bullying all the same. And it's a real goddamn thing, even if people misuse the word a lot, often when they mean one of the two above, sometimes when they mean "bury your gays", which is another homophobic thing entirely that I'm not going to get into here. Queerbaiting is the thing we're focused on, and it's real, and it's bullying. And here's the reason I want you to think of it as bullying:

They

Think

It's

Funny.

They are actively making fun of us.

That's why Dean had the "Cas, get out of my ass," line in Supernatural. It's why the "Do you like boys?" line happened in Teen Wolf. It's why "Lie with me, Watson," happened in the RDJ Sherlock Holmes movies. Because "It's just a joke, mate." "It was just a prank, bro." "You didn't really think it would happen, did you?" "You should see your face."

So here's probably the biggest reason I don't think it's specifically queerbaiting in this specific instance of Will Byers and Mike Wheeler.

Stranger Things has never, not once, made a gay joke. Ever.

Every single time queerness comes up, it's dead serious.

Lonnie calls Will a fag, and the show is not at all reluctant to show what a goddamn horrible person he is. And when Hopper latches onto that, it's not as "Hahah, is he gay, though?" It's because he's trying to determine a potential motive for Will's disappearance, and even if someone had interpreted it as a joke, Joyce immediately has a line that functions as snapping her fingers in front of the audience's face and yelling "FOCUS" when she says "He's MISSING." Basically outright saying "This isn't funny!"

Troy calls him a fairy, along with targeting Lucas and Dustin for their skin color and disability respectively, and Mike gets damn near murderous. Troy is portrayed as a goddamn monster and the show portrays it as justice when El makes him piss his pants and later breaks his arm.

Steve calls Jonathan "queer" as a slur and gets the shit beat out of him for it.

Billy's father is revealed to be homophobic and abusive in the same breath.

Mike says "It's not my fault you don't like girls!" and we're shown how devastated Will is and Mike immediately follows him to beg for forgiveness.

There is a joke in Robin's coming-out scene, but it's not at Robin's expense. It's at Steve's. Specifically for being heteronormative.

Jonathan has multiple scenes where he's trying so hard to tell Will that he's always going to love him as he is, whether he's gay or not, without pressuring him to come out before he's ready.

Even when there's a little bit of ribbing at Robin's expense, it's always because she's an awkward nerd who's nervous around pretty girls, just the same as Lucas and Dustin are teased when they both first develop crushes on Max, and even then, even then, it always comes as a package deal where they make fun of Steve's girl problems at the same time.

Stranger Things is an emphatically pro-gay show. It may not be the core point of the show the way it is in, say, Our Flag Means Death, but there is nothing less than respect for its queer characters. Its queer characters are always taken completely seriously. No one is making fun of us. They never have. That's why I have serious doubts that this is queerbaiting. It would come completely out of left field for the bullying to start in Stranger Things' final season.

So it's not at all likely to be queerbaiting because queerness is taken completely seriously. The creators have talked about Will's queerness, at least, so it's not an accident. And queer-coding would be silly to expect from this show when it's already on its final season. Like, what is Netflix gonna do? Cancel it? Not to mention all the explicit queerness that's in there already. And no one's gonna "What about the children?" a show that's had sex scenes in it since the first season.

There's no fakeout here. It's gonna happen. Breathe.

[youremyonlyhope]

Living with Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors

Me: *Is super stressed over life.*

Trichotillomania: Time to pull some hair! C'mon. You won't even notice you're doing it. It'll make you feel better.

Me: NO. *Spends 4 days putting hair in a mini twist protective style* There.

Dermatillomania: Hey. Your hands are free. And restless. And dry... Pick your skin. Bleed. Bleed.

Me: Stop! *Starts up a new crochet project to keep hands busy.* Ok cool.

Onychophagia: Hi hi. Your nails are.... perfect biting length... you should do that.

Me: Noooooooooooo *Paints nails.*

Dermatillomania: Oh look, you got some nail polish on your skin. Pick it off... now pick some more...

Me: SDJAKFDSJFKLDKAFDJKLAFJDKSAKLFDASL

[dont-offend-the-bees]

Fuck I hate being an adult. I need a more adult adult to help with the volatile emotional situation.

[fedoraspooky]

I haven’t been here long. What irritating changes have been made?

Credit where it's due, some changes have been good, like polls and stuff! But the big recent changes thus far that I would classify as irritating are:

- The UI change. This one may be less irritating for newcomers because it's basically the same layout as twitter and instagram, but for a lot of folks who've been here a long time, it feels cramped and like a loss of identity for the site. For many, the appeal of tumblr is that it ISN'T an algorithm hell like twitter or insta. Also, there's the annoyance of having to relearn where everything is, because it all got moved around.

- The users being lab rats for various tests the devs wanna pull out of nowhere without consenting to beta testing new site features- like the one that took away user icons on the dash for like half the site. They finally put them back after getting enough feedback that said NO, but users were so used to their feedback being disregarded that they were half expecting the change to be pushed through anyway.

- The Netflix tie-in advertising being pushed even to people who had PAID tumblr for a no-ads experience. Complete with them somehow thinking it would be a good idea to put an unescapable-by-scrolling spooky clown on peoples' dashboards that u had to use ublock to get rid of. While I'm not scared of clowns and often find them quite charming, it sucks that staff didn't take coulrophobia being a common fear into account.

- A wave of fully sfw trans posts being wrongfully marked Mature and staff doing little to nothing about it. Not sure if this is still ongoing, but it destroyed a lot of trust and good will. (LGBT+ users have been having to fight a constant war against censorship ever since the adult content ban on tumblr, so yeah... Nevar 4get the list of banned search words that would bring back no results, like 'girl')

- The site gradually moving away from customization. Tumblr is a BLOGGING site. But it seems to have lost sight of that fact, because most new users don't even know you can fully customize your blogs with css and stuff (an option that is now off by default for new accounts!), because of the in-dash viewer giving you only how blogs look on mobile, which is a lot more uniform. There, it's more like every other site- you get a banner and icon. Oh, but you can change colors and fonts from a drop-down list too, that's cool I guess. Though they recently took away custom color schemes on Message windows, just another little bit of personalization taken away.

- TUMBLR. LIVE. Basically tumblr teamed up with a skeevy dating app partner to allow for livestreams- but not the cool kinda livestreams like on twitch where you can draw or play games, no- to a site full of people who value anonymity, they decided to push phone cam only livestreams. Not only that but by agreeing to the terms, you're giving out tons of personal data including your location to said skeevy dating app partner and all of THEIR third-party ad partners. Needless to say, most people didn't wanna use it, so instead of users it's flooded by p*rn bots (which is ANOTHER issue we've been dealing with for a long time and have been getting an even bigger influx of FROM tumblr live) and scammers. And thus, since tumblr likes to put a carousel of current streams on people's dashes, you often get softcore p*rn thumbnails from the bot streams with no way to avoid it except for toggling off tumblr live entirely.

- Oh wait. That's right. You CAN'T toggle it off. Because you can only snooze it for a while until BAM, you're jumpscared by a carousel of ladies licking your screen again! But hey, at least they made the snooze 30 days instead of the 7 it used to be, right? Yeah, except for the fact that you can't get rid of the tumblr live button itself on the app anymore, and now it's front and center with a NEW notification tag on it, overlapping your dash and cramming useful stuff like the search button out of the way.

NOW- A lot of this stuff CAN be at least mostly fixed on desktop by installing ublock and xkit and tampermonkey + dashboard unfucker... But that's a lot of stuff just to make the site usable, you know?

[suddencolds]

personal //

[witheredbouquet]

drawn for the dragonyule gift exchange on twt, so glad that i could join this year! thank you for hosting, saint starfall ♥

i hope that everyone has a wonderful dragonyule & a happy new year!

[laundrybiscuits]

(wait for the season to come back to me tag)

It gets less strange, as time goes by. Eddie doesn’t make any kind of noise about him moving out at some point, and neither do Steve and Robin. Turns out they don't need to store any bodily fluids in the fridge, and in fact if Steve didn't know better, he wouldn't be able to tell that Eddie's drinking blood at all. Steve assumes he's getting animal blood from somewhere on a regular basis, but as far as either Steve or Robin can tell, he never takes it inside the apartment.

Anyway, it turns out Eddie can still technically eat human food, but about half of it tends to come back up afterwards. They’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Robin made a little chart with smiley-face and frowny-face stickers, which Eddie has been gleefully filling out. He’s drawn little fangs onto the stickers with a Sharpie.

That’s another thing: to Steve’s mild surprise, Eddie and Robin have been getting along like a house on fire.

“I really wish I’d known him in high school,” says Robin, slicing bell peppers for dinner.  “I think it would’ve made Hawkins a lot more bearable.”

Steve doesn’t really remember Eddie at all from school, which is probably a really good thing.

He can’t imagine the guy he was back then being this obsessed with Eddie. Well, no, that’s not true. He can imagine it, but he’d have been such a jackass about it. Probably would’ve fucked a few girls about it. Maybe would’ve even bullied Eddie about it.

“Did you come out to him yet?” Steve asks Robin.

Robin leans all the way out the kitchen door, practically horizontal. Steve grabs the back of her belt so she doesn’t overbalance. “Hey! Hey, Eddie!” she yells.

“What, Buckley!” he yells back.

“I’m gay!”

“Cool, me too!”

She lets Steve’s grip swing her back in, grinning. “Your turn, dingus.”

Steve’s going to. He is. The longer he waits, the more awkward it gets. He’s got nothing to lose. He—

Robin takes him by the shoulders, spins him around, and pushes him out into the living room.

“Uh,” he says. “I’m—bisexual.”

Eddie actually does, like, a full-body twitch; his eyebrows climb practically to his hairline for a second, and he sets down his book.

“I’m…very proud of you? Thank you for telling me?”

“Why are you being weirder about me than Robin,” says Steve, annoyed.

“Because you’re being weirder about it than Robin was! I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of practice with, uh, this. Also, Robin was a band geek who dressed like Annie Hall, and you were—popular.” He draws out popular like it’s got three key changes in it, waving his hands in the air.

“Yeah, okay,” Steve huffs. “Sorry I wasn’t, like, alternative enough to be a real queer.”

“No, c’mon, Steve, I didn’t mean it like that. I accept you! Buckley, get in here and accept Steve with me.”

“Ste-eve Harrington,” Robin sings out, wandering out of the kitchen to wrap her arms around Steve’s waist. “We accept you and your beautiful bisexual soul.”

“Thanks,” says Steve dryly.

Eddie points at him. “Feel accepted.”

“I feel accepted,” Steve says; daring, he holds out an arm, and Eddie hops up to let Steve pull him into the hug too.

“Good,” says Eddie into Steve’s shoulder. “You should be.”

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

the amount of effort that goes into figuring out what to cook and eat every day is RIDICULOUS. i used to think people were so weird and boring for eating the same thing every single day but it truly does make life so much easier

[somecunttookmyurl]

just stopped in at morrisons to get cigarettes and the old lady behind the counter looked at me, started to say "do you have any ID?", looked at me again, and said "oh nah you're alright" without finishing the question like. ouch? i mean i'm glad you don't wanna see my ID because i absolutely do not have any on me my passport is.... in a different bag.... somewhere. but still. come on, man.

[kyouka-supremacy]

Failed a social interaction 0 injured 1 killed (me)

[dawdlecentric]

Man, this doujin isn't fucking around

Meanwhile, Seikuri in the background...

Doujin: Flashbackers by Totobe

[bodywhorror]

it is hilarious to me that i didn't really vibe with my first watch of the whole evil dead trilogy and now months later i'm in campbell hell

[anotherhumanpet]

Your boyfriend is awfully violent. What if he loses it on you like that?

((Anon, I'm going to assume you genuinely mean well and just want to poke fun at the thread I'm having with Fox via my Shiro blog, especially since I'm writing/tagging Dennis in that thread alongside them. I don't want to believe that you're acting maliciously, stupidly, or some combination of the two at once. But I need to take this ask you've sent and create a moment to remind everyone:

If there's any kind of confusion on what exactly these types of abuses are and-or what they mean, please feel free to google them before approaching me with questions. I don't mind elaborating on my own needs around them because my personal and specific triggers are not a google-able thing (for a variety of reasons), but I'm also not agreeable to the idea of explaining the bare bone basics of these types of abuse to people who are perfectly capable of researching the topics for themselves. Like, genuinely, it's not hard and I shouldn't have to put myself in a vulnerable position and do your homework on this. Seriously.))