#and his badge

[apricotmiette]

currently working on a small town sheriff arthur (maybe-set-in-the-80’s???) x f!reader/au. my first work since YEARS and IT’S COMING OUT SPLEEEENDID.

IT MAYBE TAKE SOME TIME BUT AW I’M HELLA EXCITED PLEASE STAY TUNED :-))))))

[rendevok]

Act I ~ The Prince

A tapestry for Let No One Sleep by @azalawa-scroggs on ao3

[halloweenorangesoda]

HE HAS MY VOTE❗️❗️❗️❗️

[sabh0]

My roman empire is that custom-made badge Dazai has sewn inside Chuuya's jacket after the Lovecraft fight

[stankworth]

Soft spot

[crickit-song]

Ok they really are the gayest couple I've seen in a while huh

[spoopup]

dont cry. klapollo littlest pet shop. ok?

[hccupit]

harry du bois

[starscream-is-my-wife]

Pt 2 and the final part of LL Megatrons conversation with an aware G1 Starscream

this one wasn’t as dramatic as the first part but there’s only so much emotional vulnerability Screamer can do with his new free will heheh, thanks for all of the comments encouraging me! I’ve never drawn longer comics like these before and it’s pretty fun so hopefully I can improve with the next comic I make!

[spiders-and-swords]

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] — The lieutenant flashes you a smile that only you can see…

[icy-gendango]

park ranger sun,,

park mascot- ranger sun. he scares the staff, especially at night

[loveybirdlt]

Just know the 141 got these as a joke for Simon for a gift exchange or his birthday

Johnny about pissed himself when he and Kyle saw them while they were out and about. John just chuckled when they showed him and said he’d love em with a mischievous grin

Now Simon Ghost Riley wears them every time they all go out to the pub

[elodieunderglass]

I have two jockeyposting questions, if I may! 1. Killie has a delightful bear of a boyfriend. Is he out? Horseracing doesn't seem like it would be very queer-friendly but maybe I'm wrong about that. 2. Is the fact that people are generally getting taller a problem for finding tiny jockeys?

Of course thank you so much! I adore getting these thank you so much ☺️

1.) horse racing is not queer-friendly to jockeys.

There is one ☝️ out gay jockey in the Anglosphere/Europe/probably the world, Jack Duern. (1) Duern came out on Twitter and his career tanked, with trainers openly disapproving and no longer offering rides. Since no mounts = no pay, he left the field. Interestingly, he came back a few years later, with lots of inclusion campaigns in the UK promising that “horse racing is for everyone,” but it’s reasonable that nobody else has followed him out! Duern has said that of course there are other gay jockeys, and that the jockeys themselves are actually quite supportive of each other. But as disposable freelancers with no collective bargaining, who don’t hold power in the sport and get rides based on reputation, why risk what very much happened to Duern for no benefit? All the people who hold power in horse racing are ghastly Tories, and the rainbow capitalism clearly hasn’t created conditions of safety or trust in the real world.

Now Killie is of course a fictional jockey who lives in my head. Realistically, he is Not Out in the modern era. Him being out would be MASSIVE. He is barely out to himself. His emotional baggage requires a storage unit. Probably the biggest single piece of baggage was that his twin brother was thrown out (of family, home and sport) for dating men, and disappeared for several years; which broke several load-bearing things in Killie.

He will definitely have to come out of the closet, like a badger boiling furiously from a hole to bite your feet off, possibly in the end by simply bringing Derek as his plus-one to a black-tie event and then lunging at the first person to Have a Problem With It. Suspended jockey license for three months for biting, again.

Mind you, Killie is terrible queer representation. Can you imagine.

Pride is for everyone, even Killie. Pride is for everyone, even Killie. Pride is for -

The answer to question 2) has a trigger warning for discussion of size/weight, tap “keep reading” to keep reading

2.) the legendary tiny jockeys are indeed getting rarer, and their extinction has been claimed in the UK. There is no preference - no economic pressure - for short jockeys; the industry doesn’t care much if you’re a healthy short bastard or a starving lanky skeleton. But there’s two approaches to it at the moment: in the UK, they’ve raised weight limits across the profession. In the rest of the world, where jockey weights are still around 118lbs, jockeys just get recruited to wealthy countries.

Killie races in the UK and there’s a slight problem now. He was initially formed in the 1990s by a child who did NOT want him to have an eating disorder, and therefore, I waved my hand and said that he’s 4’10”, the same size as Julie Krone (Triple Crown winner) and Willie Shoemaker (said to be the best American jockey of all time). This was realistic then, but might be a problem now.

The UK has some of the highest permitted jockey weights in the world, and is the stronghold of steeplechasing (jump racing) which allows the highest weights of all. In 2025 a UK jump jockey can now be 160 lbs, with a minimum floor of 140 (including gear) meaning that a jump jockey needs a minimum riding weight of around 133 lbs(this can include as much lead weight as they need.) Underweight jockeys make up their weight to the assigned number by adding lead weights in the weight cloth, which is absolutely normal, although less desirable than living weight; and handicapping adds extra dimensions; but Killie could realistically jump at close to an average weight, and no longer needs to be extra-tiny to be a flat-and-jump jockey.

The last two UK lightweight jockeys of the old school both just retired Autumn 2024. They were quite successful until the end, and it’s clear that there’s an advantage to their frames - even now and even in the UK - but you can see that at their retirements they had gone from archetypal-jockey-type to outlier-among-the-young-bloods. Killie was intended to have the same build: if he was a person aging at normal rates, he would have been in his 20s when created by a dumb kid in the 90s, and exactly this age (50s) now. Instead, if he’s in his 30s now, he was now probably born around 1990 - and would be the short outlier!

(The UK’s “last lightweight jockeys”, born in the 1970s. Left, Jimmy Quinn (centre, yellow silk) Irish flat jockey with colleagues; centre photo Franny Norton, English flat jockey with sports physiologists; right, Franny Norton, having also been a boxer, showing a child how to box. Jimmy and Franny both retired Autumn 2024, hailed as “the last of the UK’s great lightweight jockeys.” They were both very short, very muscular, very successful and rode healthily into their fifties. The younger jockeys on the left would be considered smaller than average people, but are noticeably in the lankier-framed modern style.)

However. That’s the UK, and its heavier jockeys, higher weight limits and its overarching steeplechase obsession. The rest of the world prefers flat racing, and is stuck firmly on basically the same weight limit as the 1990s, of about 118 lbs. Killie might now be well-below-average for UK steeplechasers; but to ride the most famous flat races in the world, he’s comfortable. He could easily and healthily do the big famous flat races - Japan Cup! Kentucky Derby! - where steeplechasers are limited to very few races.

So given that the UK steeplechasing has pulled away from the rest of the world, we might have to either make Killie a bit taller to keep up with that, or let him focus on international flat racing. ANYWAY, that’s just to say that that’s the immediate impact of rising average heights on Killie as a character.

So how do the flat-racing nations manage to get their tiny jockeys?

Japan pulls from a population that, statistically, has more people who are able to match the weight requirements.

France seems to naturally produce enough little guys to export excesses to the USA. Flavien Prat, who is 5’1” and wins a lot, is one of those.

For better or worse, the USA relies heavily on jockeys from other countries, particularly Latin America. You can draw your own conclusions about colonial power and land justice from this. But on the personal level there is significant representation from Puerto Rico (Irad Ortiz Jr, John R Velasquez) and countries like Panama, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Mexico. When you subtract French and LatAm riders from the top lists in the USA, you’re left with a few American generational jockeys.

Australian horse racing annoys me so much I don’t even want to touch on them or acknowledge them!! There is a problem with indentured child jockeys around the world, but Australia really kicked this up a notch.

Aotearoa / NZ is not a prominent racing nation, but you know how in the LotR films, most of the Riders of Rohan were women because that’s who the most competent local equestrians were? 40% of their jockeys are women, apparently!

Today, the UAE tends to operate through the UK training system, recruiting UK/EU jockeys. In the past they had widely-reported child jockey and kidnapping scandals.

Ireland is known for producing generational jockeys (Killie’s from a fictional “racing dynasty.”) By nature and nurture or both, they’ll probably keep doing this. Small parents don’t necessarily produce small people, of course, but horse-obsessed families tend to produce horse-obsessed people.

So it’s hard to say! Setting higher weight limits like the UK would offer more talent, but then again, Extracting Immigrant Labour is the system working as intended. the sport itself is declining in most countries, with millennials and everyone after being pretty uninterested.

Killie’s a special little guy, staring into the distance while “Last of My Kind” by Shaboozey plays

(1) There are only a handful of horse-racing countries outside of the Anglosphere and France, where Duern is the only out gay jockey. Japan - whose racing association is famously controlling of the public image of its jockeys - doesn’t have any English-language gossip about them being LGBTQ. I don’t know much about the Hong Kong racing scenes ditto; homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates. The other nations of the world produce jockeys, and occasionally horses, but don’t host the grade 1 world famous cups that make them major players.

[doctorsiren]

I’ve had this thought in my brain for a while of like

their engagement rings are their respective attorney’s badges and they don’t acknowledge that they wear the opposite one now (they do trade back eventually)

[ask-the-attorneys]

[The next day, you and Arle are outside the courthouse, Carbuncle held in her hands]

[Coda]

...Ready for this one?

(I know damn well this'll be a long one...)

[pinacoladamatata]

save me disgruntled attending solas....save me....