#So they think just having a queer character is way more radical than it actually is bc the grew up on like

[hypermascbishounen]

Ime It's pretty easy to tell when an author doesn't care about your experiences as a queer audience member, but about how they personally look telling your story for you to other people.

Like, it's on a scale. There's definitely stuff that's well intentioned if a bit clumsy, vs stuff that's deeply cynical "praise me for including u, faggot". And sometimes there's also people really just trying to tell their own story and struggling.

But overall, I think a lot of it comes from a really cowardly position of just fully ceding ground to bigots on media interpretation. Because the idea that queer things aren't canon or real unless you fully halt the story to spell it out to the audience in painstaking detail, is also the position of every homophobe who denies queer subtext/implications in any work they happen to think should be about them by default. (It's also basically the position of erasing queer people from history and treating cisheterosexuality as default, but that's a deeper topic).

I simply do not think looking at a work bleeding with queer subtext so dense there's no cisheterosexual explanation for parts of the plot, and then declaring it "not canon" and thus not "real" representation, compared to a work with what amounts to shallow tokenism, is a progressive stance actually! Sometimes shit is just gay, and not admitting that is asinine. I think at best, people who've internalized "queer subtext is invalid" often go into writing not knowing how to show and not tell, when it comes to character identity or relationships - things that often go poorly when *just* told.

If it's really that difficult, and you're personally lucky enough to not have to deal with censorship(reminder that ability to publish uncensored queer work is often more just privilege than being particularly brave or creative), you can put it in a character bio.

at a phase in my life where when i get the sense a book is trying to offer me Representation (TM) i hiss and scream and start kicking and ripping bricks out of the wall. this character's Coherent Identity And Articulation Of Their Issues had Better fit in with the rest of the worldbuilding (it won't)

[max1461]

I think that the average internet Marxist is actually not much of a materialist at all, in fact in their behavior and rhetoric they seem very concerned with moral purity, the redemptive power of suffering, and the ability of narrative to shape the actual world. As myriad as the senses of the word "materialist" have come to be, none of this would seem to comport well with any of them. This all feels very Christian.

In some cases I really do think there is a latent Christianity in it, but I think the stronger source of this trend is simply the leftist emphasis on sloganeering. Somewhere along the line, maybe with the Bolshevik policy of democratic centralism or maybe somewhere else, the importance of the slogan, the party line, the supreme power of the speech act seems to have been elevated for many leftists above all other concerns. From this follows the kind of disingenuous, obviously fallacious argument you so often see from the online ML left. The point is to say the magic words that have been carefully agreed upon, the magic incantation that will defeat all opposition.

Whether it's "I don't want to vote for a candidate who supports any amount of genocide" or "The Is-not-rael Zionist entity is on the edge of collapse!" or whatever else, a rational person can recognize the impotence of these words. They don't do anything. They're just words. But the feeling seems to be that once the perfect incantation is crafted—the incantation that makes your opponent sound maximally like a Nazi without engaging with their position in good faith, or the incantation which brushes aside all thoughts of defeat, or whatever else—once the perfect incantation is crafted, all that is left to do is say it and say it and say it, and make sure everyone else is saying it too.

This is not a materialist way of approaching politics. This is a mystical way of approaching politics.

I think it's also worth saying that this tendency in Marxism seems old, it certainly predates the internet. Lots of Marxists today are vocal critics of identity politics, of what they see as the liberal, insubstantive, and idealist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework. I share this criticism to a significant degree, but I'm not very eager to let Marxists off the hook here. The modern DEI framework evolved directly out of a liberal/capitalist appropriation of earlier academic ideas about social justice from such sources as Queer Studies, Black Studies, academic Feminism and so on. I say this as a neutral, factual description of its history which I believe to be essentially accurate. In turn, disciplines like Queer Studies, Black Studies, and academic Feminism each owe a great intellectual dept to academic Marxism, and likewise to the social movements of the 1960s (here in the Anglosphere), which themselves were strongly influenced by Marxism.

Obviously as the place of these fields in the academy was cemented, they lost much (most) of their radical character in practice. To a significant degree however, I think their rhetorical or performative radicalism was retained, and was further fostered by the cloistered environment of academia. In this environment the already-extant Marxist tendency to sloganeering seems in my impression to have metastasized greatly. And so I think the political right is not actually wrong, or not wholly wrong, when they attribute the speech-act-centrism of modern American (and therefore, online) politics, its obsession with saying things right above doing things right and its constantly shifting maze of appropriate forms of expression, at least in part to Marxism.

Now I should say that I don't think the right is correct about much else in this critique, and I also don't think this is wholly attributable to Marxism. But I think there's plainly an intellectual dept there.

More than anything else, this is my genuine frustration with both Marxism as it exists today and with its intellectual legacy as a whole. I fundamentally do not believe in the great transformative power of speech acts, I do not believe in the importance of holding the correct line, I do not believe that the specifics of what you say or how you say it matter nearly as much as what you do. I do not think there is much to be gained from playing the kind of language games that Marxists often like to play, and I do not think that playing language games and calling it "materialist analysis" is a very compelling means of argument.

[lycandrophile]

recently i’ve been embarking on the next leg of my gender exploration journey, and the hardest part of it has honestly been navigating the way people see manhood as at odds with any sort of complex gender experience.

because the thing is, i’ve seen myself as a man for years now, and that hasn’t changed! i still very much consider myself trans male, even as my understanding of my gender has continued to evolve. i’ve been exploring parts of me that feel more connected to gender neutrality and androgyny and fluidity and even womanhood than i’ve previously acknowledged, and none of those things contradict the fact that i am a man! all of those different pieces of my gender coexist perfectly well and don’t cancel out the fact that i want people to recognize me first and foremost as a trans man.

but other people don’t see it that way, and i know that. if i express any sort of relationship to those other aspects of gender — especially to womanhood — i know for a fact that people will view that as me saying i’m not “really” or fully a man. they’ll assume it means i’m just partially a man (which i’m not) or masculine but not a man (which i’m also not) or just living as a man on the outside when my “real” internal gender isn’t male (which i’m definitely not).

so even acknowledging that the more complex parts of my gender even exist at all has been an uphill battle, because i know what they mean for the way people see me if i express them. it’s already a herculean task to get people to see me as a man without that!

i recently told my boyfriend about some of these experiences i’d been exploring, and even then, i was terrified. it seems silly — if there’s any single person in the entire world who would support me no matter what, it’s my boyfriend — but it still felt like i was immediately taken back to the fear of the first time i ever came out to someone. honestly, even then, i watered down a lot of my thoughts more than i wanted to because i was afraid they could be taken as implying something about my gender that i never wanted to imply.

and i don’t want to be afraid of it! i want to be able to talk about experiences like revisiting the gender neutrality i identified with when i first came out and discovering androgyny through spirituality and seeing myself in genderfluid characters and finding new bits of gender euphoria in being seen as a woman now that i’m on t, and i want to be able to do that openly without fear that it’ll be used against me, that it’ll be seen as me giving people permission to ignore the manhood that’s still the backbone of my gender experience.

i love being trans! i love being genderqueer! i love all the gender complexity and playfulness that comes with that for me! and i was never afraid to express it before i started living as a man openly because before then, i knew that i could always count on other queer people to get it even if most people didn’t. but now, i know there are a lot of queer people who wish i would be anything other than a man, who see manhood as antithetical to gender complexity and think that’s a radical view somehow, and suddenly there are a lot less people i can count on for that support.

manhood can be neutral. manhood can be androgynous. manhood can be fluid. manhood can be womanhood. manhood can be all those things at once. manhood can be any of a vast array of other things. manhood can be fucking anything because gender in general can be fucking anything, and it really seems like a lot of people have no problem acknowledging that until it’s applied to men.

restricting manhood to nothing but the most limited, simplified, binary version of it is bad. expanding our concept of what a man can be is good. playing with gender and stretching its boundaries and showing that binarism is a lie because none of these experiences actually contradict each other is good.

it’d be great if people — especially people who pride themselves on fucking with gender and smashing the binary and all that — could realize that, because i’m really getting tired of feeling like i’m being shoved back into the closet after so many years just because y’all can’t wrap your minds around the idea that some of the people with the cool weird genders are dudes.

[kirkwallguy]

honestly I do think people forget that like, fandom (at least people actively involved online) and gay pairings are actually pretty niche. fan cultures are misogynistic and the misogyny against bi women is prevalent (often first thrown under bus when discussing m/f) but at the same time people on tumblr preferring a m/m relationship is not like, indicative of wider societal norms and again is a relatively small demographic. I’m always so torn on these discussions bc women in fan spaces and in the fiction being discussed are treated poorly yet I do think the language around gay characters/relationships gets borderline if not straight up homophobic. also, even if queerness WAS normalized in Thedas. we don’t live there. the writers don’t live there. it can still allude to real-world politics and resonate with an audience, intentional or not

no exactly, i wrote a much meaner post about this earlier then deleted it because i decided i want to live in peace but i fully agree - people DO forget that wanting to focus on queer relationships on the internet tends to come from the fact that this is very hard to do irl and seen as fairly radical if you don't exclusively hang out with queer people. maybe the tides are turning a little now but mainstream media has historically been extremely hesitant to even touch queerness let alone depict queer romance and this can feel deeply isolating when you just fully cannot relate to the concept of a man and a woman falling in love.

i do agree it's notable that bi women are the ones singled out when it comes to f/m relationships while men tend to be excused and there's definitely a history of people using wanting to see an m/m relationship as an excuse to be misogynistic. but seriously, recently i've been seeing a weird pushback against m/m shipping by saying centering men is misogynistic which is something i remember from early 2000s homophobia lol. f/m shipping is often just as misogynistic if we're being fully honest.

and yeah, the first three games all came out at a time when very few video games had queer characters and people were extremely homophobic about anders on release. thedas could be a queer utopia and that wouldn't make it any less impactful when the character starts talking about the oppression he's experienced in a way the real queer person who is playing the game might relate to.

even WITHIN fandom culture i think there's more heteronormativity than people will admit. look at the statistics on ao3. out of the ten most popular relationships, only two of them are explicitly queer and they both feature the series' only gay man. two more don't specify gender but have majority f/m ships (solas/lavellan and lucanis/rook) while the rest of them are explicitly f/m. there are literally more f/m ships than m/m and f/f put together.

out of all the bi men in the series, anders is the only one where the majority of his protag/companion fics are m/m. fenris and bull also have more m/m than f/m (once you filter out all the solavellan fic bull gets tagged in as a background character lol) but that's only because they're commonly shipped with anders / dorian.

looking at sera's ao3 demographics, the most popular ship she's tagged in is solavellan. so, like. lol.

so yeah there's misogyny there but i think acting as though focusing on queer experiences is inherently misogynistic is borderline homophobic, especially when it's queer people that are also writing f/f fics.

[theseerasures]

A Theory on the Periodization of Wicked: Part Four

ANOTHER CAVEAT

i have, at time of writing, not yet seen the newest Broadway company of Wicked helmed by Lencia Kebede and Allie Trimm. all my comments below are therefore only applicable to before they took over.

SEPT 2021 (Broadway Reopening) - PRESENT: POST-COVID

i'm just gonna assume i don't need to explain the significance of COVID here. you'd expect such an epochal event--one which uniquely impacted theatre--to offer an incontrovertible date for this period's beginning, but there's actually quite a bit of wiggle room because cast changeover was almost nonexistent between pre- and post-pandemic. the majority of Ginna Claire Mason's tenure on Broadway was pre-shutdown, to say nothing of the entirety of her career as Glinda. this is not true of her final Elphie Lindsay Heather Pearce, so one could argue this period really started on February 2022 when Brittney Johnson took over. but that opens the door too much imo for other later edge cases like Talia Suskauer, Alyssa Fox, Mary Kate Morrissey, and even Brittney herself; she had been IN Wicked since 2018, after all. so fuck it: other actors have left and come back to the show across period shifts before, and i'd never considered them exceptions.

which is probably the most intellectually honest way to think about Wicked coming back: that the entire cast left in March 2020, and (with the exception of Shoba Narayan) all just happened to come back at around the same time in September 2021. because much as the show promised this triumphant constancy--things being as they were--everything was different. returning actors were coming out of lockdown with no idea how to behave and having to do their jobs where they pretend to be other people who also don't know how to behave (but in a cool, scripted way); they were doing this for an audience which had no idea how to behave, and especially had forgotten how to behave in a theater. for Wicked specifically there was the movie, which finally seemed to be happening. the show was already taking flak for stagnation in the previous era, and now changing with the times felt more necessary than ever.

to Wicked's credit, it made some changes. no more direct pipeline from tour to Broadway--or at least a much less predictable one. an influx of Elphabas and Glindas who have never done the role (though never at the same time), and a particularly radical expansion in casting BIPOC and out queer folks as principals. in short order we got Brittney Johnson (first Black principal Glinda), Jordan Barrow (first Black Boq), Kimber Elayne Sprawl (first Black Nessa), Mary Kate Morrissey (first out queer Elphaba), Austen Danielle Bohmer (first out lesbian Glinda), and most recently Lencia Kebede (first Black principal Elphaba) and Jenna Bainbridge (first wheelchair user Nessa). these decisions garnered a great many exultant cries, many of which sounded like "jesus christ how did it take you THIS LONG," but hey! better late than never. incoming cast members both new and old were tacitly encouraged to innovate and really make their mark on these now iconique characters. all of this was clearly meant to foster a new period of flowering creativity for Wicked...

...

yeah, so there's a major issue with this all new all different all transgressive Wicked. in the plainest terms possible: you can't actually make transgression the norm.

from a theoretical standpoint, there has to BE a norm first for it to be transgressed. there's no practical reason to pine for the days when after every Popular every Glinda thought they were going to be fired and National Treasure Eden Espinosa was condemned to the Chateau D'If for doing too zesty a riff during TWAI, but they demonstrate the underlying point here, which is transgression isn't just doing something new. there's a unique thrill to doing something that isn't allowed. (it's a thrill live theatre is very suited to evoke, because live theatre is all about the tension between the rigidity of a scripted narrative and the idea that anything can happen when it's live.) we saw how limitation could shepherd creativity with the previous era's Glindas, who one way or another felt compelled to perform a lot of specific actions but built distinctive identities around those things anyway. a Wicked in which each actor can just perform as the spirit moves them sounds inventive and exciting but would, in actuality, be a hot mess.

it'd be a fun mess to talk about tho! but that's not what we got, because Wicked was obviously NOT going to throw out the entire rulebook when rules were what made it such an August Broadway Institution in the first place. last era it tried to balance Wicked-as-stable-marketable-product and Wicked-as-evolving-art by normalizing some previously transgressive elements. this time they brought in fresh blood, encouraged them to change things, loosened all these silly rules...except they didn't actually do that last part. the Eden Riff in TWAI experienced a few brief years of freedom before being once again outlawed, and the list of items either required or banned hasn't shortened at all. rather than lifting the restrictions, Wicked just moved the furniture a little bit. and while i'm sure there was sincere intent (perhaps even effort) behind encouraging incoming performers to shake things up, encouragement doesn't count for much when it only comes after a three day lecture on the importance of Wicked and preserving the show's legacy.

and the new incoming casts, which on paper feels like the perfect complement for new ideas, only ended up working against the show changing very much. recall that during the newborn stage of Wicked 2.0 just about every Gelphie performing had already done it before, a feat all the more impressive back then because there were FOUR separate Wickeds and the show was less than five years old. there were some (notable) exceptions, but on the whole Wicked 2.0 was helmed onstage by people who knew what had changed, and what could change. this time people were told "do whatever!" when they were still learning the show and its accumulated five billion layers of red tape. and if you're the first of a marginalized community to perform a role...that just compounds the pressure, doesn't it? good job being exemplary and exceptional outside the text! hope you weren't expecting to give solid-but-conventional performances like your more privileged peers tho, because now we're counting on you to change everything (but not too much! just the regulation amount).

it's tempting at this point to attribute Wicked's increasing over-legislation to a really good enemy; like, i wanna say this is all the fault of Joe Mantello or corporate interests or algorithms, except...well, just compare interviews done for the 20th anniversary with similar ones from the 10th. they were alternately cocky and reflective in the latter, but there was a degree of irreverence then that is almost completely absent in the former, which is all about the history and the legacy and the Importance. everyone doing the show nowadays is or has to perform being really REALLY into Wicked, like it's some kind of sacred artifact, and of course that's going to color the production itself. incoming actors might have never performed the role before, but they will have been steeped in The Wicked for decades through cultural osmosis if nothing else. the baggage of Wicked--its impact, its longevity, collective appraisals on what worked and what didn't--will increasingly dwarf the individual people who make the show happen, which means those people will, by and large, grow increasingly self-conscious and conservative in their own contributions to the show.

the Elphabas seem to have adjusted better to these shifts. i instinctively wanna say it's because Elphabas on the whole are coming in with more prior experience, but that would be doing folks like Lindsay Heather Pearce, Lissa deGuzman and Lauren Samuels a disservice. maybe they're more used to it since Broadway Elphabas were already so heavily scrutinized in the previous period, or maybe they're reacting against the indistinct constraint of those predecessors, but each Elphie has been bringing something coherently unique to the role. a Lindsay Elphie is markedly different from a Talia Elphie is markedly different from an Alyssa is markedly different from an MK, etc etc. they're not unaffected by the uptick in bureaucracy and shifting standards--hitting the INTG E3 is? optional now? maybe? and every Fiyero riff is basically the same--but they've been able to finesse compelling acting choices regardless, either within the restrictions or just by being naughty.

with the Glindas...i'm not sure what happened. we had a phenomenal start with Brittney who, by resuscitating some of the character's earlier elements and dynamically adding onto them with her own take, has a strong claim to being the most influential Glinda of this period. all her successors on tour and at the Gershwin, though, seemed to have a tough time carving out their own identity in the role, maybe BECAUSE they get so in their heads about how to make the part "their own." so what we get is this vacillation between being extremely referential and overthinking every possible new idea they have, all the while anxiously anticipating SOME kind of immediate feedback, be it positive (in the form of a pleased audience) or negative (via a slap on the wrist from management or a quiet house). there's very little to these Glindas outside of desperately trying to give people what they want, which a) makes for a very inconsistent character, and b) feels especially at odds with GLINDA, who is supposed to be so charismatic we let her decide what is good and what we want, for us.

nowadays Glinda might as well feel like an entirely separate person in each of her scenes, and at no time in the show does it become more obvious than during Thank Goodness. there was a little of this last period too, with Jenni Barber and Amanda Jane Cooper, but a confounding number of contemporary Glindas have pinned their hopes on Thank Goodness to be the showstopping lynchpin to cohere their characterizations. rationally it makes sense: Glinda has increasingly become a dramatic character and there are more and more Glinda actresses who clearly think Glinda is tragic and so sad u guys, so Thank Goodness gets bumped up in the priority list of things to Get Right. on an emotional level i empathize and i...THINK i respect the hustle? but that doesn't change the fact that Act Two Glinda is and always will be harder to pull off than her Act One counterpart, and focusing on her Saddest Song (tm) at the cost of all else weakens, not strengthens, Act Two Glinda, to say nothing of Glinda and Wicked as a whole. there's no foundation to this very weepy house you're trying to build, so Thank Goodness just becomes another version of Glinda unmoored from everything else.

am i being too harsh? probably! so i'll say on the whole i still enjoy this era of Wicked more than the very early days of the show, in Wicked 1.0. the highs are higher and the lows aren't as low, because the show's identity and the direction of its principal characters don't feel as precarious. and i'll reiterate that i truly do not think there has been some drastic decrease in the talent and care put into Wicked. everyone involved with the show currently is either here for it or VERY good at pretending they are. in a way that's what's so frustrating about this era, and why i decided to do this project in the first place: the academic in me knows expecting perpetual growth and progress is capitalist and heteronormative, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it anyway. i want the Wicked of today to be the gayest best it's ever been, and only getting better, because it's how my brain has been wired, and because precious few other things feel like they're trending in that direction right now. but that's just not how things go, and trapping myself in the same mindset as Wicked's creatives--always demanding instant palpable changes for the better--isn't going to improve either the show or my enjoyment of it.

[sword-wielding-sapphic]

1: Magic is a Metaphor > 2: Morgana is a Lesbian > 3: Merlin is Gay > 4: Arthur is Bi

Obviously, magic is a metaphor for being gay. It is something that you're born with, that you can't change, but that you have to hide because the society around you won't accept you. Both Merlin and Morgana are always saying that they've been made to feel like a monster, an outsider, and they just want to be accepted for who they really are. And it's no coincidence that they are the most queer coded characters in the whole show.

But building off of that subtext, I think that you can read the different way that Merlin and Morgana go about trying to achieve equal rights as being an allegory for queer identity politics, where Merlin embodies this homonationalist assimilation strategy. He believes that if he stays closeted and conforms to the status quo, then eventually he will prove that sorcerers are good, moral, normal people and therefore worthy of rights. But over time, he internalises all of this shame and self-hatred and becomes increasingly obsessed with Arthur and dependent on his validation until he becomes complicit in his own oppression.

Meanwhile, Morgana represents a radical rebellion ideology. Even though she comes from a place of privilege, she quickly realises that she can't achieve meaningful change through constitutional methods and therefore resorts to violent protest. But her downfall is that she's more motivated by personal vengeance than a genuine desire for equality. So she creates a lot of infighting within the community by shunning anyone whose ideas aren't as extreme as her own, and she inadvertently confirms all of the negative stereotypes about 'angry witches' that she has been trying to fight against.

Obviously I don't think that all of this political commentary is intentional, but the basic idea of magic being gay is definitely intentional. As evidenced by this quote from the executive producer of the show, where he says very sarcastically, "some people say that (magic) is a metaphor for his sexuality, but that's just read in by them, isn't it? On no level is magic metaphorical in this show." And then Katie McGrath says, "it's funny because I don't actually think you're being sincere." And then she says directly to the audience, "Julian is lying right now."

[nebmia]

Reviewing every rpg book on my shelf: 5, Flying Circus

Flying Circus is a a game by Erika Chappell where you fly planes, have messy dramatic relationships, and find out who you are. Sometimes all at the same time. More specifically you fly *rickety planes from the dawn of aviation* and have messy, dramatic relationships, and find out who you are *in an essentially queer way*.

The first thing I love about Flying Circus is it's sheer audacity in taking pbta (usually deployed for low crunch storygame-y titles) and twisting it into a highly detailed and technical system for running dogfights. I think its really clever how Erika has taken the idea of a detailed combat system are re-appraised it from the ground up in the context of dogfighting.

There is no grid based movement here, it simply is not useful in the three dimensional world that planes inhabit. Instead your positioning is modelled through altitude and air speed, with each being tradeable for the other and spend able to perform maneuvers.

Honestly the whole system is rather intimidating (a fact the book freely admits). Each plane requires a little personal instrument panel sheet (and a few extra side sheets) that resemble somthing you would expect in a euro-game boardgame more than an rpg. The system goes as far as modelling how your plane performs as you use up your modelling fuel and with varying altitude. There are also a lot of fairly involved moves that it feels would be a little tricky to keep aware of while running a dogfight. However, from what I hear, the system works well and, once you understand it, isn't /that/ tricky to run. I think this isn't actually that crunchy when compared to your standard tactical battlers, it's just completely new (and working in a zone most people have less of an intuitive understanding of [although its worth noting that most peoples intuitive understanding of medieval style combat is dead wrong]) so we are unably to draw upon our preexisting assumptions.

You will notice I have to fall back on reports and intiitions here because I am yet to be able to play the game, which is honestly my biggest problem with it: it carves such a specific niche that I think I will really struggle to ever bring it to the table. Anyone I have talked to about the game has always responded to the effect of 'I don't think I'm into planes enough for this'.

I am also not half as into planes specifically as Erika Chappell is. But what I am into is getting deep into things in general, and this whole system excels at letting you get incredibly technical and nerdy about your plane (as far as things like exactly what radiator fluid it has, if you use the advanced rules) and making those choices actually matter in play.

ok, that's probably enough about planes (a phrase I anticipate has never once been uttered by the author of this book), what are you doing when you get out of the planes?

The game follows a cycle of mission and downtime, which you spend relieving stress (in healthy or unhealthy ways) and running upkeep on your company. This is where you do a lot of the character work and bring into focus the 'coming of age' narrative that the game intends.

Which seems a good lead in to talking about the playbooks. Each playbook is focused around a particular thematic idea or experience, which is helpfully spelled out directly in a 'themes' section for each one. This isn't a game where you play as a fighter because you want to solve problems by hitting them but rather one where you play as a Fisher because you want to engage with "a queer reclamation of the monstous", or a scion because you want to engage with "privilege and power, and what obligations come with it", or a believer because you want to engage with "a mindset that thrives on radicalism", or a survivor because you want to engage with "a metaphor for what it feels like to be a transgender person escaping an unwelcome or abusive situation".

Obviously, alongside themes you do also get a load of cool abilities to use.

Of the many games that claim to be ghibli-esque but I think Flying Circus hews closest on account of two things: understanding miyazaki's perspective on war and also due to being absolutely unhinged about planes.

[kiwiweewee]

Like a Prayer

It's wild to me that Madonna's Like a Prayer has become this superhero genre, intense, emotional song. Mainly because the song's history. I've been on tiktok and I've seen the choir version of the song played for edits of Batman and various other heroes and while I'm glad the song is popular, it's kinda crazy that it is being applied the way it is. The song was really controversial upon its release. I only learned about this because I had a young high school teacher who was writing his own curriculum and decided to talk about it one day, so shout out to Mr. Challinor. Like a Prayer was considered controversial not only due to its religious theming/language in an otherwise sexual song but also because of the music video. The song itself. As said above, there's a lot of religious language that serves as a double entendre to sex. It's worth mentioning that the setting of the music video is a church, so Madonna sings this while surrounded by religious imagery. "I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there" "In the midnight hour, I can feel your power" "I close my eyes, Oh God I think I'm fallin" But this isn't the only thing to get her in trouble. The music video got her into hot water as well. While less sexual than the lyrics, it was a reflection of America and its politics. Madonna's character witnesses the brutal robbery and possible sexual assault of another woman by a group of white men. These men also kill the woman. A black man tries to come to the woman's rescue as the men leave, but when the police arrive, he is arrested for the murder. Madonna's character hides in a church and reflects on what she witnessed. Nearby, there is a statue of a saint who resembles the black man from earlier. Madonna falls asleep and has a dream, where she is kissed by this saint. She awakes and decides to go to the police to give her account of what happened. There are several depictions of burning crosses, something the kkk would often do. The audience knows the black man is innocent, so his arrest is suggested to be more than a wrong place at the wrong time scenario. He, like many black people in America, is considered a criminal/suspect out of prejudice. This whole plot may not seem radical now, but at the time, Madonna received a lot of hate. The Vatican condemned the video, several religious and family groups protested its broadcast, and she lost her Pepsi sponsorship after they used the song in an add and a boycott on the soft drink began. So you can see why I think it's wild how such a controversial song turned around to be a new superhero anthem. I actually like Deadpool and Wolverine's use of the song. The music video's message and subject of minority treatment is something that connects well to the X-Men canon. It's also a spoof on masculinity in a sense, with these big muscular men having this emotional handholding moment while Madonna, a notable queer icon, plays. I have no qualms with its usage in the film and I think it's inclusion is very deliberate. I'm actually not against the usage of it now. I guess that I'm just in awe at the massive turnaround this song has had in the way it's viewed. And hey, a bop's a bop, right?

[suckinitup]

This is going on my tiny jrwi blog idgaf hi gang y'all get to hear my murderbot casting opinions because I don't wanna bother but I Do wanna talk about it.

Basic issue fandom is pissed about: murderbot is an INCREDIBLY queer and diverse series and is close to a lot of people's hearts because of it (also because it's just a DAMN good series) read murderbot. Anyway Murderbot the Character has been cast to be played by a white man, and fandom is upset.

But I think. The fact that they're upset. Actually makes alexander skarsgård perfect for the role? BECAUSE white cis man is the media default. BECAUSE white cis men are at the top of the patriarchy. BECAUSE. to everyone else. they are the enemy.

Murderbot is a secunit created by a company to stand guard over mining installations and ensure the people working there did their jobs and followed the rules through incredibly horrible positions. Murderbot's literal, actual purpose was to *enforce oppression.* it was a security unit. A cop. And even after it broke free of its govner module (the thing that would punish/kill it if it didnt participate in the system), it did its job for almost four entire years. And I just. God. Do you see it? The patriarchal ideas of aggression and enforcement and disposing those who aren't strong enough (secunits are meant to be disposable) and even being seen as a THREAT. the world of murderbot isn't OUR world. Their world is QUEER. The majority of the cast are non-white (or at least have non-white names). Murderbot, who looks like a man, who looks like an oppressor, makes people *afraid* wherever it goes. That just fucking kills me because I see the same thing happening with masculinity in queer spaces. There's this idea of men and maleness as something abhorrent or undesirable. Trans men attacked, radfems radicalizing around the IDEA of evil penises, butches cast aside, "women and nonbinary" and just. Crazy ass gender essentionalism that's "okay" because it's cast the other way. Murderbot LOOKS like the very picture of a goddamn cop. White and blond and rugged. Full of weapons. Extremely deadly. Literally a tool for the companies who cause all of this bullshit. But. despite that. It's still a person. It looks like an "enemy" it was made to BE an enemy but it's an individual who has made mistakes and fucked up and is MORE than the system it was created to uphold. Sometimes the enemy IS the enemy (the combat unit who kept using the system to hurt others, even when given the option not to), but sometimes it just seems like there's no other way out? There's just. There's a lot. Murderbot broke out of that system because it didn't want to kill people. It was freed from that system because it was so determined to *save* people. It is a good person, but everything about it is steeped with reminders of the system and the cruelties they commit. This is someone who looks like a cis white man and is saying NO to participating in that anymore, even when they're still met with fear by the people they helped to oppress. That's fucking crazy !!! It makes me want to eat glass!!!

Also we've got a white man unironically playing a BELOVED character who has no gender, uses it/its pronouns, is ace, and readily and immediately uses neopronouns for everyone it meets who uses them. Its appearance has no basis on its actual identity, and as a queer person that's what hits as special to me. But also fuckin Suck It default media.

I was thrown off by the casting at first too but. Man. The systemic symbolism won me right the fuck over I'm ngl

[woman-respecter]

eh, I'm kind of tired of the relentless promotion of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood as feminist when all those female characters exist in relation to men, and that was the message I felt it sent to me: women are great but only if they don't forget their place. Those women are just better written than most because the original mangaka is a woman, but I've read a lot of Arakawa's stuff and it feels like she's really into this kind of promotion of traditional women in a way that has its pluses in showing how fully-faceted those women are, but never seems to really question those roles in a larger sense. I get why it appeals to people but I wouldn't exactly call it "feminist."

(I also have longstanding beef of how people use that to excuse the really fucked up messages about race in that show/manga, especially to dump on the original FMA anime which does that aspect much much better and whose female characters felt a lot more genuinely independent to me, but whatever. Neither is a bastion of feminism lol and don't want to make this about fandom beef)

It's also not necessary because there are a lot of anime that are outspokenly feminist and center women. Revolutionary Girl Utena being the obvious one, and got me through the 2016 election aftermath with episodes like when Utena beats Touga after he defeats her the first time, showing how women can triumph eventually even when the odds are wholly stacked against us. And it has a really probing analysis of the patriarchy and heteronormativity woven throughout the whole show.

A whole bunch of magical girl anime (not the entire genre, some suck and are made for gross dudes, but a lot of them, especially the 90s ones are aimed at women - Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura etc). Sayo Yamamoto's stuff that isn't Yuri on Ice - not that that show isn't great and gay and cute and doesn't say interesting things in its occasional one-off subplots about women, but it's obviously focused on men. But people who liked it who want great women-centric stuff should watch her Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine and Michiko and Hatchin, both centered on women and very feminist in their themes, albeit in a way that requires you to pay attention and think and watch the whole show so you occasionally get Tumblrites without reading comprehension missing the point of them. I was really surprised, given the kind of trashy title, by the anime Maria the Virgin Witch, which is all about fighting patriarchal ideas about sex in fantasy medieval Europe. Also, Yurikuma Arashi by the same creator as Utena is a really good analysis of the ways that lesbians are portrayed in Japanese media and by the broader patriarchy.

For as much misogyny as there is in anime, the stuff that does engage with feminism can often be pretty radical and smart and does it better than you'll see in a lot of other media. It's like having that low hum of misogyny in the medium as a whole builds up a rage in some of its creators that just explodes in the stuff they make. Same with how it often engages with queer themes, tbh.

And then there's just that anime has a lot more female-character-centered stuff even if it isn't "feminist" exactly. Like stuff about women where the story and world is centered on women that you can just put on as a comfort watch. Love Live or something lol

you do bring up a good point about fma, i kinda forgot about that bc i watched it like a decade ago. rgu is really great and i defo recommend it even tho it was directed by a man. yurikuma is actually my fave anime of all time but does seem sexist and fan servicey on the surface. and i love love live and the other cgdct anime but it feels like there is always an underlying misogyny of that genre, knowing how the male fans and creators are. if i were to recommend a comfort watch i would go with k-on bc it has a female director.

thanks for the recs!

[redjennies]

i see you sometimes in different dragon age tags like "oh yeah the lae'zel fan with the redjenny url. who also likes oghren. extreme good taste" and then as an anders girlie i see your "anti"-anders post and im like "yeah they even have good taste in the way they hate my guy"

aw I really appreciate this! I'm really glad people like my takes on Oghren. I almost posted this long ass meta about him while doing my Brosca playthrough but ended up saving it to the drafts because I was like "girl you are the only person going to bat for this man and everyone else is just tolerating your right to be ornery about disliked characters." I just think about him at the Temple of Sacred Ashes a lot. to anyone reading this, if you've never brought him there, you are truly missing out on some fucking wild character work. he is a gem.

truthfully I'm not even really that anti-Anders when I'm not actively in a mood about how much this fandom annoys me. I'm extremely critical of him as a person and full disclosure, without trauma-dumping too much, I do have a personal history that makes it hard for me to not see him as very manipulative if not outright abusive. but I actually quite enjoy him as a character. I think he's got a lot of flaws and strengths that are really interesting to examine how they coincide with Hawke's larger story. how Anders and Hawke are arguably more intrinsically linked to each other than Varric and Hawke are. it might surprise people but I intentionally max out his friendship every time with my main Hawke because I think their particular story is more tragic if she has fully drunk the Anders kool-aid because he's the first unapologetic apostate she's met outside of her family and because he saved Carver in the Deep Roads and she feels like she owes him. even more of a surprise possibly, I love Sebastian and don't like Anders, but my canon ending is Hawke sparing him one last time and asking him to leave because I think that's the best ending for how I play their relationship. like "no, you have asked so much of me and I have done it for you over and over but I'm not going to give you this, even at the expense of my other friendships. you don't get the easy way out. you have to live with this and you have to do it far away from me." like fuck man! the drama! the poetry! the divorce!

honestly most of my vitriol towards him comes from over a decade now of having an extremely negative experience with what I fully recognize are not all his fans but a vocal group of people who plague the Bioware fandom who are just as bigoted as your average fanboy but in a way they can dress up as "social justice." I've said a lot about how I think the Circle and apostates is just straight up a bad metaphor for systemic oppression (see also: any setting with supers and/or legitimately dangerous monsters as stand-in for oppressed people.) and I won't get into it too much here, but it's worth mentioning because I believe the mage rights discourse and Anders particularly attracts this crowd because you know he's a cute queer whiteboy with legitimate problems and pseudo-radical politics. but I was in the DA Tumblr fandom when Inquisition dropped I remember what group of fans on Tumblr who were particularly rabid in their hatred towards characters like Vivienne and Sera (who are both critical of mage freedom, mind.) 'Twas not primarily the Cullenites calling Vivienne an Uncle Tom, no matter what people will tell you now.

and I also get that there's this way Anders haters talk about him that makes even more otherwise reasonable fans dig their heels in about him. like any critique of him that boils down to "Anders bad because he did a terrorism and terrorism bad" is not really useful to me because yeah, I'm not super keen on bombings as the best course of political action, but terrorism is a very politically loaded and at this point somewhat meaningless term that is mostly used to justify extreme violence against a person or group by the state. I don't need to bring up real life examples because the politics of who is and isn't labeled a terrorist being shorthand for who is and isn't a person deserving of basic human rights has become so obvious over the last three decades that everyone knows at least one example of what I'm talking about. on top of that, I'm a big believer that fiction does not and should not exist in a vacuum and good art should provoke discussions about how we view people who do similar things that these fictional characters do. who are we being asked to give empathy to and who are we not? who are we naturally extending empathy to and who are we not? how do we immediately feel about these things? are we outraged? disgusted? moved? does sympathizing with these characters change our understanding of our personal ethical lines? are certain actions justified under dire circumstances or are there certain lines that should never be crossed? are people forever defined by it when they cross said lines? etc etc. none of these questions can be meaningfully answered by "no, thing bad because thing bad."

that being said, I still come down on the side of Anders is a shitty person at the end of the day. not because he blew up that church or even because he tried to kill that girl, but because there's a consistent lack of compassion for the suffering and/or oppression of others the second someone doesn't fit his mold. because he's honestly pretty sexist and racist in universe. because his romance plot is just a series of progressively worsening red flags in a way that's in my opinion, less sexy and more like he's gonna start punching holes in the wall right next to you. because he's lowkey a tankie. and I've said it before and I'll say it til the day I die, we can have a discussion about how ableism influenced his writing, but at the end of the day, as a mentally ill anarchist, I know buckets and buckets of mentally ill leftist whiteboys who act like this. shit I know women and nonbinary people who act like this too. while I can understand that Bioware wasn't necessarily coming from the same perspective I am and think people are right to call his overarching storyline a tired centrist liberal take on the dangers of radicalism, his character writing still feels not only coherent as a character but very true to a particular type of ain't shit anarchist boy I have encountered over and over. i cannot dismiss his flaws and worst moments as bad writing because I feel like I personally know this asshole.

for example, I once made a post about Dissent years and years ago where I was talking about Anders/Justice/Vengeance/whoever we're calling him depending on what's most useful in the moment's outburst of violence towards Ella through the lens of male entitlement even in leftist circles and like yeah I was being a little tongue in cheek about it because a) I'm pretty tongue in cheek in general, b) I have a tendency to get even more tongue in cheek when I'm talking about things that hit a little too close to home to me, and c) that quest is frankly terrifying if you've lived a life that makes you relate more to Ella in that scene than to Anders. I think it was something along the lines of "people can call Anders a revolutionary all they want but when a mage girl was afraid of him instead of grateful for his rescue, he tried to kill her. [insert anarcho-feminist ranting here]" and I remember someone arguing with me about how that's not what happened at all and how even though I was being pithy, their take on the situation was so utterly removed from what occurs that I had to go back and watch the scene to make sure I wasn't the one completely misremembering it which made me realize just how much Anders has been completely rewritten in parts of the fandom consciousness.

which in and of itself is not really a problem. I know some people just don't care for interacting with fanon at all and want to stay as true to canon as possible and I'm like that sometimes, but there are lots of characters I'm like "oh, I don't like how their story went in canon or think the writer had a neat idea but is too misogynistic to handle her in a way I like and I'm going to basically put them in an AU where they developed their traits in a different way and I can recognize this is more or less my version of them." there's characters I don't care for in canon but I love someone else's fanon version of them. I'm even fine with people doing this with Anders, if they want. I've read really good fic with him that is not my take but hey you do you, this is what transformative fandom is for after all. but I do get more than a little prickly when I'm interacting with my reading of canon that is of course informed by my experiences but still discussing something that just literally happens and someone tells me I'm wrong because of what basically amounts to their fanfics, you know?

anyway that's my very long post about my complicated and extremely nuanced Anders feelings. great character, shitty person, his fans are either really cool or really fucking not. also it's been almost fifteen years, and I still think we should've had Jowan in DA2 as a familiar face helping out in the mage underground to both flesh them out more and to serve as a middle ground between the more circle-aligned Orsino and the initially representing the mage underground before getting progressively more Kaczynski-esque, Anders, instead of Cullen just kind of hanging out in the templars not really doing anything.

[olderthannetfic]

/728571347409731584

Firstly, the person you're replying to only describe in-person experiences. Secondly, I've been to two universities in the US as a result of getting a scholarship midway through. At one, I was discouraged from attending the queer club on campus by the head of it, as I wasn't queer, I wasn't "really" aroace, I was just "a late bloomer". She informed me that everyone wants romance and sex sometimes. Aro and ace people want it less, she explained, to my face, standing ten feet from me, but they still want it.

No, it's not "only in online spaces". Queer people who use the queer segments of the internet do not only exist in darkened cellars they never emerge from. Teenagers and young adults go to college. It isn't 1998 anymore, pretending the internet and the physical world have zero overlap and what you read online cannot impact or shape your views is ridiculous.

You know how I know this? At my incredibly liberal university, where I live in a gender-inclusive nearly all queer dorm, not only have I heard two separate conversations at floor events about this where it was repeated by other queer students, including ace people, that ace people have sex and ace people do romance, with NO utterance of the word "sometimes", but today? Today, guys, gals and enbies, this Friday, this very fucking Shabbat, I heard it from a professor.

My Social Stratification professor said that asexuality is "a usually treatable condition" and "doesn't mean someone doesn't have sex, just that they have a low sex drive" and when I said some people don't have sex, she said "therapy can help" and topped it off with, "and of course they still masturbate frequently, so they're really not as different as people like to stereotype them as".

I don't. I don't masturbate, it's not fun for me. I don't long to fuck fictional characters or real people. I don't need therapy. I'm not traumatized. I don't have sex. I don't want romance. I don't find reading about it compelling most of the time, either. I don't need therapy for that, because you go to therapy for things that are negatively impacting my life, and actually?

I am aroace in the "wrong" way, a zero-sex, zero-romance, zero-masturbating person, and I'm happy. I like who I am. I like how I am. I have a good life at my dream university, with good friends, a nice room, roommates I like, a mostly walkable part of town, and I'm working on my dream degree to reach my dream career. I'm not huddled in the corner in the fetal position sobbing about the sex I secretly want or on my bed furiously masturbating to anything. I am not lying about my identity, my experiences, my thoughts or my feelings.

This professor is young, roughly 30. That means it's feasible she's been using tumblr for years, as it was popular during her teenage years, or she has been in the company of people who, via tumblr, Instagram, Amino, etc., have this idea of asexuality. And does that idea stay locked inside a computer somewhere? No, because the person who reads them doesn't. The people who read, internalize as truth and believe shitty online takes also exist in the real world. They have physical bodies they take to physical places and they open their mouth and say things, which are then passed onto other people who exist in the offline world.

"The only thing that [they] are seeing is internet wank" NO! The only thing you are seeing is internet wank, but there is not a mass conspiracy of college students across the USA to lie and say we're experiencing things we aren't, which would be the only explanation for so, so many ace people I know online talking in private on Discord servers, tumblr, in YouTube comments and in person having this same shared experience.

I genuinely don't know how people think no one could possibly have the same bad take offline that they do online. Q-Anon exists. January 6th happened. People get radicalized into beliefs much more absurd than this and act on those beliefs constantly and "no you just need to touch grass" is what you arrived at as a conclusion instead of "sometimes people are wrong"?

Though I say this with love, I mean it when I say that you don't just need to touch grass, you need to hug a whole hay bale.

--

[monsterblogging]

So this post I reblogged has got me thinking about humanity loss as a trope and the way it's treated. And just to clear things up for anyone who might be confused, I'm talking about stories that involve some amount of physical transformation (with possibly some amount of mental transformation), not just "losing your humanity" in the moral sense. (Though the idea that compassion = human is itself incredibly flawed, but we're not getting into that right now.)

So like, there is media where portraying loss of humanity as a bad thing actually makes sense - specifically, where it's a metaphor for something that's actually bad. The first example that comes to mind is where turning people into robots or cyborgs is used as a metaphor for the dehumanization of laborers. Rich fucks in real life want to treat workers like machines, so it's kind of a natural step to write fiction where it's presented a bit more literally. Or there's stories like Resident Evil 4, where transformation is an allegory for religious radicalization, because the bummer truth is that people who've been radicalized are more often than not impossible to reason with and either want to make you one of them or kill you. When the major bad guys turn into giant monsters, it's an allegory for wielding corrupt power.

(And for those of you out there going, "but people can be deradicalized???", I am with you! And this is why I think a lot of these narratives need to lighten up on the "oh no once you hit Certain Stage of Change there's no going back!!!" stuff.)

But then there's like... the people who miss the metaphor or have very chauvinist views, and oop - there is no allegory now (or at least, not much of one), and we get stories that effectively inform us that becoming too Other means we're no longer deserving of compassion, respect, autonomy, or even life. Like, you can tell that you're dealing with the kind of person who just doesn't really believe in universal human rights, or in people exercising too much autonomy. And I think it's very natural to have an "oh, fuck you" kind of response to this kind of thing.

And then sometimes there is an allegory, and the author is targeting queer people, communists, foreigners, or anybody the establishment isn't really a fan of. Once you realize that the author is just bullshitting, I think it's only natural to think that there could be another side to this story.

And I think it's also fair to ask ourselves if transformation into Something Else could be an allegory for something that isn't actually bad. Maybe getting in tune with some aspect of nature triggers changes; like you grow gills and fins after hanging out in the water for so long. Maybe this upsets the sensibilities of the people back home, but quite frankly it's none of their business where you choose to spend your time and what you allow to happen to your body. Or maybe the cult leader turned you into their perfect weapon, and maybe that process was traumatic, but what happens when you regain your autonomy? Are the abilities you gained inherently bad, or does it come down to what you choose to do with them? Do you really deserve to die just because your body has a different shape now and there's no way to undo it?

And sometimes transformations brings on various forms of disability, or the experiences the characters go through are very similar to the experience of being disabled in some way, which can make them very relatable to some people. When you see something about yourself in these characters, it's only natural to want them treated as a person who deserves compassion and accommodation, rather than nothing more than a dangerous monster.

Add into this that nonhuman characters in general are constantly given characteristics associated with autism, ADHD, and even trauma. Factor in that the temptation of turning into a creature who isn't expected to act "human" (read: neurotypical) so you can be released from burdening expectations. Factor in the desire to be free from anything considered "human," period. And don't forget the whole otherkin/alterhuman thing. Then of course there's the thrill of the idea of experiencing a novel form, of seeing how it feels to move in a differently-shaped body and exploring what you can do with it. And the temptation of stimming with a tail. And also the fact that people's bodies and minds will change throughout their lives and that's fine, actually. Nobody owes it to you or anyone to be the same forever.

So yeah, works of fiction that depict "losing your humanity," as in changing your physical body and rewiring your brain in a way that people find strange as inherently bad and morally wrong are crap. Change is nature, and if somebody wants try out life as a dragon that should be none of anybody else's fucking business.

[hylianengineer]

Brilliant Minds Episode 8 is also excellent.

Something something pathologization of unusual sexuality and Wolf resisting that to help his patient be the version of herself that makes her happy. The pathologization of June's hypersexuality is making me think of how asexuality is also pathologized in young people - it's not the sex drive or lack of it that's considered wrong, it's contextual and cultural, because sexuality in youth is normalized and in old age it's stigmatized. Most of the Western medical system will attack anything that challenges accepted social norms, but Wolf is a beautiful example of the opposite impulse - radical acceptance of his patients and their wants and needs, even if they're weird. He doesn't judge people for being weird - possibly because he is also weird, as in queer and autistic. We need more diversity in the medical field so badly for this and many other reasons.

Also. That conversation between Wolf and his mom, where she reveals she sent Tom the medical student away to protect him, because of the difference in age and life stage, not because she was against him dating a man. And Wolf's affronted "Then why didn't you say that? Because by saying nothing you implied that there was something about me that you didn't like. I felt rejected for years."

Hello, this is an exact parallel of my own Biggest Ever Misunderstanding with my mom. Okay, well, not in the sense that I thought my mom didn't like my queerness - it's a long and rather private story involving me getting hurt and thinking she blamed me for it. But just like Oliver's mom, she didn't talk to me and made me feel like she was ashamed of me, when in reality she felt nothing of the sort. She just didn't know how to fucking talk about emotions when stuff goes wrong. Hello, emotionally incompetent parenting! It fucks you up, even decades later. At least me and my mom are still on speaking terms, but I do envy a little that Oliver got to have an actual conversation about it and figure out what really happened. I should maybe do that but I'm a chicken.

And Oliver's mom says: "I didn't say anything... or ask anything, because... I didn't want to know."

I can't know my mom's motivation because of the aforementioned being too chicken to ask, but I would bet money this was at least part of it. You ever just see a character going through something and go "holy shit, this is me?" I feel so fucking seen right now.

And then the show goes and makes me feel sorry for Oliver's mother, because she was a doctor in New York City during the 1990s. You know, AIDs epidemic era. And she just found out her son was interested in men. She saw him kiss a man. And she wondered if they had sex, and knew that if they did, if he got HIV, there wasn't a damn thing she could do to save him. The first drug approved to treat AIDs (Zidovudine) came out in 1987, but it only slowed it down, and antiretrovirals (much more effective and still in use today - people can have essentially normal lives thanks to these medications) didn't become available until 1996. PEP wasn't available except for occupational exposure until 2005. So. I can see why she freaked out.

I also love that Wolf does not stop being angry just because she had an understandable reason. "You are my mother." The way he said that line, so hurt and angry and devastated, is more than a little relatable. I have wanted to say that to my mom - that it is a parent's duty to take care of their kid even if they're uncomfortable or scared or whatever else. They signed up for raising a human, and if they screw up, as mine and Oliver's both did, those consequences do not go away just because the mistake was understandable. We, their kids, have to live with them, sometimes for our entire lives, and we have the right to be upset about it even if they were doing their best.

[post-punk-revival]

See the thing about all the misanthropy stuff is. I've always related to computers, monsters and aliens more than human characters in sci-fi stories. But specifically i've always related to computers, monsters and aliens who like and love humans. Who admire humans and who have hope for them and who take inspiration from them.

Sci-fi likes to do a certain trope a lot where they have the nonhuman robot/computer or alien or Etc. character hate humans, find them repulsive or pathetic or crude or etc. etc. I'm not even talking about stories where nonhuman characters lash out in response to mistreatment by humans. I won't lie and say i never relate to those characters too. Because i do, because i get it. But ones where they look down on humans for being human? Robots or AI who find humans laughable because they can't do things as quickly or because they bleed when they're hurt. Aliens, somehow always overly logical geniuses, who patronize human characters for not being an "advanced society" or for being prone to frivolous emotions. Werewolves who feel condescending disgust at humans simply because they aren't as physically strong; vampires or elves smugly laughing at the pitiful lifespan; dare I even start on tropes of angels and demons.

At the point you feel superior for the sole reason that they are human and you aren't— why is this better, how is this radical? These tropes involve the same feelings that a lot of humans have toward other beings, projected ideas of how every sapient thing would probably feel if they were in some way physically or intellectually superior... feelings about the very idea of superiority and inferiority that have been used to hurt me, in actual real life, when my disabilities or ethnicity or sexuality designate me inferior. I am not going to feel "superior" to anybody after growing up as a queer autistic Jew—and the Jewish part of all this is essential here, I think, considering everybody reading this is probably queer and autistic—knowing that superior and inferior are not things that even exist, especially when applied to people. They can't be and shouldn't be.

IDK where i'm going with this. You can feel whichever way you want. I'd rather misanthropy be rampant in the community than for everybody to feel like they're required to have or voice some sort of saccharine optimist-approved hopepunk "faith in humanity." G-d knows i'm not an optimist, let alone faithful. This is all just stream of consciousness now but i guess i'm saying in a way not only do I relate to fictional nonhumans who care about humanity, that's just kind of what I literally am. I'm not human and i admire humans for what they are. Not just that. I recognize what they are; a completely neutral type of being without inherent moral or ontological significance, just like everything else. I don't think i would go as far as to wish I was human like narratives for these characters often do, but I just can't vibe with misanthropy. Humans started naming all the animals they saw. Humans came up with music and tea and made bananas really good. Humans wrote down all the things that happened to them so the future could know about it. Humans wrote stories where computers and animals and aliens are their friends just so they could feel less alone. How in the universe could you ever decline the offer?

[denimbex1986]

"Sorry about your mom, sorry to hear that. Grief is such, um, it's such a difficult thing to quantify and to categorise in some ways, um, and I don't think necessarily grief, um, is always related to death or the loss of life. I think we experience grief much more than we can recognise actually. I think, you know, um, the end of a relationship or the end of a phase of your life or just something where you think: 'I don't have that anymore and I can never get it back.' I think that's how I would quantify grief, qu - over sadness."

"But at the time that we were filming, my mum, I found out that she'd become quite sick. It was - it's so interesting now looking back; I wasn't able to process it at the time, but my body was processing it. Something that I've learnt about grief is that it's a physical thing and it's actually has nothing to do - you can say that you're fine in your head, but it has to manifest itself."

"It's that expression 'The body keeps the score.' I think that's so brilliant. It's like you can say whatever you want, but your body will tell you the truth."

"I think for so many people, particularly uh, queer people, uh, you can feel estranged from your own family; you can feel like a stranger in your own family, even if they haven't direct - you know - rejected you outwardly; you just feel slightly different perhaps. Um, and I think that's really the case for both of them. Um, I, I think had they had maybe a bit more support from their families, they might be in different situations."

"I think what's going on with Harry's family is actually slightly more insidious. They, like he's come out to his family, how lucky is he that his family are still there in comparison to Adam's - but they may as well be ghosts and dead, because they don't exist because they're not there for him in actuality. I think it's just really - that, that part for me is really upsetting because you think the world has come further down the track - I think what the film is saying is that yes that has happened, but if you look at isolated members of the queer community, that's not the true experience."

“There’s no big sweeping romantic gestures and yet I think the film is absolutely romantic. Like, all these characters do is listen to each other and are there for each other. To love with courage sounds so simple on paper, but I think it's utterly radical, and requires a huge amount of bravery, so I think what they give to each other is their total focus and attention.”

"Some of the most pleasurable things to shoot were actually stuff within a, I suppose for want of a better word, a montage sequence, where you see them - where you see them just actually enjoying the small things, life, or you know, just having a shower or being asleep or - all the tiny things in life that are so beautiful and wonderful to experience. And I think that's particularly - it's, it's even more of a balm for them because they haven't had it before."