#and i think coming up with new terms for sexuality and gender identity is just not necessary we already have too many

[pjharvey]

sometimes i feel like i spend too much time thinking about my own relationship with gender when i literally like tried out different pronouns and a more androgynous name and all of that and didn't like it but the thing is that when ur so gnc af that your friend's transphobic brother STILL called you they by default and ur friends have a recurring joke one of your friends' boyfriends looks exactly like you and you call yourself a guy in conversations a lot it's like. well it raises some questions.

[ask-codeearasure]

So... About that shitty Cross take that one person made....

If you've been following certain creators, even this account, I'm sure you've spotted a specific idiot going around complaining about Cross being Trans-Coded and using Republican talking points to say that it's "forced" or "doesn't make sense" and whatever other bullshit that shouldn't even be looked at let alone acknowledged. HOWEVER, instead, we are gonna sit down and talk about how the Trans Experience is so versatile and why Cross (and similar characters) being Trans-Coded is actually extremely important.

Gender nonconformity is fucking terrifying to Republicans, this is why it's been one of this generation's favorite punching bags.

If you look at the women who are tied to the Republican Party, you see a lot of hyperfemininity, so much so it's easy to tell that Barbie is considering suing them for stealing all her plastic.

Jokes aside, gender affirming care is gender affirming care and they are using the same gender affirming care that trans people have been using for years. This isn't only about nail products and cosmetic surgery, but also breast reduction or implant surgeries.

Gender affirming care however, is demonized by the right because they don't get it nor do they acknowledge that there is a range to it.

I once read a story about how one person had realized they were trans because a friend of theirs pointed out that when they had the option of choosing the gender of their playable characters in gaming, they always went with the gender they were not assigned at a birth. Example being an AFAB person constantly choosing male characters.

Though I have not finished watching Underverse this is applicable of XFrisk and XChara shoving the name "Cross" onto... Cross. They are pointing out he is not Sans despite being assigned that name since creation. Their true intentions here had cruelty in mind, but Cross made the name his own.

He is in denial about it which is applicable to how a LOT of trans people are in denial about it sometimes. Hell I remember a Right Wing talking head on Twitter who had tried to transition, detransistioned due to pressure from their family and then stayed at their assigned gender because of it and falling for the Republican propaganda.

Denial isn't just a river. It never has been.

Some people are in denial about their gender identities and sexual orientation and with the coming presidency we are going to see a rampant uptick in that statistic. With that coming, characters like Cross are needed far more.

Cross's story, as far as I've seen, is rough and follows a lot of self-acceptance and self-advocating storylines. Even when it comes to the biggest things that anyone from the LGBTQIA+ has to face, one of these struggles being the fear of rejection and/or being rejected by one's peers.

From what I've seen when it comes to spoilers is that Cross does end up being rejected by those he was close to before meeting Ink, and thus has to come full circle and accept himself by saying "I am Cross". He has to deny the name he went by in the past. He has to because if he doesn't, he'd be giving in to living in denial of who he truly is and thus be living a life of suffering for no reason than to keep others comfortable, setting himself on fire to keep people who couldn't give a damn about him warm.

A lot of Trans people have to show their rejection of their past or even the acceptance of that past to come to terms with themselves. Each person is different when it comes down to finding who they are and accepting that. It depends on the individual.

Some treat their past and their deadname as though they're a completely different person or someone who died so they could live. Think of a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Others treat it like their past self was the caterpillar where their new and true self is the butterfly.

Is it perfect?

No.

Is Jakei a perfect writer?

No. Neither are a lot of my favorite writers and franchises (I'm looking at you Riot Games and your shitty centrist takes on the worst of human history's sins).

But some of the things that imperfect writers make are beautiful and Cross is one of them. He is one of the few characters that speaks for the writer when it comes to saying "I see you, I see your pain. I see your suffering. You are not alone. You deserve to live your life the way you want to. You are valid."

But there are a few questions that the more clueless of people are going to ask.

Why bring Politics into this? And why do Republicans like the media made by progressives?

The answers are FASCINATING.

I bring Politics into this because Republicans, specifically Cishet white people, have made everything political since the beginning of time. Everything they don't like, everything different from them, everything they don't understand, and everything that directly rebels against their patriarchal idea of "paradise" is now considered "Political".

I remember a Republican had argued the dumbest thing once, and I was so dumbfounded I had to take a step back because holy shit.

Their argument was that black people enslaved each other which made their enslavement by white people their own fault.

Now if your jaw is on the floor, you already know where the problem is. If you don't get where the problem, is let me ask you something.

If that is the case, who was the one who made it all about skin color?

I'll tell you.

It was the white people (who were Democrats before the massive party switch, which makes them modern day Republicans).

Who were the ones who made having jobs all about gender? It was the Cishet white men (99% of whom are Republicans).

Who constantly demonized the LGBTQIA+ community during the Stonewall Riots? Mostly Cishet White Republicans.

Who are demonizing Trans people right the fuck now? Republicans and Pick-Me Gay people who vote for Republicans and side with Republicans thinking that the Republicans will finally accept them when they know Republicans won't fucking do it.

Being LGBTQIA+, making non-white characters, making a character a woman, it makes that character "Political", and "Political" characters are always the ones put on the spot for accusations of "forced diversity" and "perversion" where anyone with a working sense of conscience will understand this is a talking point butthurt Republicans or those warped by Republicans pulled out of their assholes looking for a problem where there isn't one.

All art, be it animation, digital art, traditional art, singing, writing, is political. They've always been political.

Do you want to know why Republicans are always bitching about coffee orders? It's because the Enlightenment era thus leading to the Romantic Era of literature was started because of coffee shops it was where all the best writers hung out. The moment they met each other and started talking to each other, the Enlightenment and Romantic Eras started taking off in full force.

It is because of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era writers we don't have Child Labor anymore. A lot of their writing brought talks of nature and the horrors of Child Labor into question. You can't talk about the history of Child Labor without talking about William Blake's Chimney Sweeper and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Cry of the Children. You fucking can't. Without Blake and Browning we'd still have children in mines and on rooftops risking their lives to clean your fucking chimney.

And here is where we get to the why. Why Republicans LOVE progressive media.

Here is a little secret.

All shows and media made by Republicans are shit because it is all Propaganda.

I know. Shocker.

Look around.

Mr. Birchum, New Norm, Leo and Layla, it's all propaganda. It's all the same Republican talking points that they never shut up about and even then they don't know what they're talking about.

Ask a Republican what "intersex" means. Do it, I dare you.

They won't fucking know but they'll tell you that it's Satanic and shouldn't be allowed near children.

They'd never guess that it's a spectrum of natural gender nonconformity and mixed sexual/hormonal characteristics such as having PCOS or being AMAB and still having a functioning uterus. They don't care that their delusions about there only being "male" and "female" for reproductive sex options has led to medical malpractice, social abuse, murder, and erasure of intersex individuals, and the ones that do know about intersexuality diagnose it as a "Differential Sexual Development Disorder" as if just being born intersex makes someone's existence inherently wrong with an inherent need for surgical and hormonal "correcting".

Republicans like progressive media because it knows how to say something and still be well written. This is why Republicans LOVE Star Trek, Star Wars, My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, and Arcane.

It's all progressive media but it all knows how to build a world and say something. Good writers are progressive and know how to write.

Don't get me wrong there is a LOT of fucking garbage that tries to be progressive but that is a small outlier that Republicans LOVE to bring out and bash on to say that we're the ones who ruin media. They make false equivalences to try to make you stop thinking. They need stop-thinking clichés and talking points because it's all they have. But they are so fucking terrified of anything different from what is in their stupid bubble that saying "Oh yeah the champion Taliya is trans" will send them screaming and crying.

Yeah, Riot Games danced around the fact that one of their characters is Trans because they knew she'd scare off the entirety of the Republican player base. They had to hide it and use her magical girl skin to gently hint at it with "Yeah when I'm in this outfit I feel more like myself!" and the entire multi hour long Star Guardian album animation having the Trans Flag being the main pallet on everything.

I honestly wonder how many Republicans ran off when they saw THAT CaitVi scene in Arcane.

Republicans just hate anything that isn't Cis, isn't Hetero, isn't a man, and isn't white. This is why it's not uncommon to find that cishet white men are always found at Klan rallies or the modern Klan rallies which are called "Trump Rallies" these days.

This is why a lot of exhausted Democrats, Liberals, and BIPOC, Feminists, and LGBTQIA+ people have been laughing their asses off at the Pick-Mes who are getting fucked over now that they realize that surprise surprise, Project 2025 was the plan! We fucking told you so, dipshit!

This is what you asked for dumbass! We tried to warn you. You didn't listen. LESSON FUCKIN LEARNT!

Republicans like progressive shit because we make good media.

Republicans HATE anything that isn't CISHET and WHITE.

Now, am I saying all this to claim the person who made that anti-trans Cross post is a Republican, an abuser, or anything else that contributed to this systematic nonsense? Absolutely fucking not. That's an extreme statement to make and they're most likely just a very mislead kid who may or may not have been influenced by a couple of these problems, and them acting out the way they did is perhaps a reflection of how important it is to acknowledge these things even if our community is just fandom and the point is to have fun, to have a distraction from all the bad powers at play.

Either way, their actions pissed me off. Hope they learn.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Get the fuck out.

-- Ouija

[0w0tsuki]

My thing about the femboy discourse is that I don't think there's much value in trying to delineate whether femboys are "really TMA" because that's not my fucking problem with femboys. My problem is something even the other trans feminists who've talked about this have had to tip-toe around and I'm just going to outright say it.

A MAJORITY of self identified femboys/femboy attracted people (yeah because our problem is not with the identity in and of itself but how the attraction to the transfeminine body while denying the transfemininity is a core tenent to Femboy culture. This cis girl who's into femboys because she sees them as someone that she as a woman can have power over un the patriarchy is a part of this conversation too) in the WIDER online community (Tumblr is a bubble!) are OPEN transmisogynists. Open as in they loudly proclaim their view of transfems as men, their complete disrespect of transfems boundaries, and their fetishisation of all transfeminine bodies as their preferred male sex object. Open as in STEALING the identity of Transfem Sex workers for their sissy scam blogs. Open as in harassing anyone they can get their hands on about how transfemininity is shoved down their throats. Open as in they can get together and make entire social media sites unusable with their bitchfit crybaby tantrums about Transfem existence.

Everybody loves to come together and make fun of these cretins when they get together to rage about the newest Transfem confirmation as a way to virtue signal being to recognize obvious out and proud transmisogyny and then collectively snap their fingers to forget about them the instant they quite down. The instant they would have to recognize that people like this are ALWAYS this vocal about it in their personal lives they just aren't as organized. The instant they would have to recon that there is a large contingent of mspec transmisoginists who are obsessed with transfems and make it their life's goal to sexualize our existence as much as possible while denying us our femininity and humanity.

The instant that they would have to recon that perhaps femboy isn't a queer friendly catchall term for "feminine boy" and is actually a term with history. That in that history there is trauma, exploitation, and harrasment. That that history is happening daily. That there are transfems whose only history with the term IS THAT HISTORY. That there are transfems whose experience with femboys has been the most transmisogynistic hateful bile she's ever experienced.

The instance a transfem asserts that she might not be 100% comfortable being around self identified femboys. That she might not not take kindly to the assertion that they are essentially the same thing and that infact femboys are her closest ally in the queer community. She's told to put all that to the side because uwu soft bean tboys would self combust from sadness if they were forced to think for even a second that their new word for gender expression might not be the purest thing in the world and they would actually have to be considerate of how they interact with others.

Then she's an evil perisex bio essentialist who just hates men being feminine and gender nonconformity and is trying to pull the ladder up by denying eggs femboy culture. She's actually actually an anti-sex puritan whose having an autogynophilia based disgust reaction. She's a pickme trying to throw Transfem femboys under the bus.

If you want transfems to feel safe around femboys then stop attacking everyone who doesn't. Work on your own problems. Neither of you were responsible for burning this bridge but it's selfish of you to put it on her to fix it. Your going to have to put an effort into stopping those fires from being started. Do not blame her for being burned.

[gluion]

familiarity (it’s all sticky) ➵ lee seokmin

peter parker!lee seokmin x spiderman!reader

you’re not sure why you decide to show up at your ex’s place all wounded up from tonight’s battle.

genre/warnings ➵ exes (to sort of lovers?), angst, touch of fluff, afab reader (no gendered terms), hurt/comfort (both physical and emotional), discussions of wounds and depictions of blood, lowercase intended, ghost-spider au (though please don’t expect it to be accurate!), reader is obviously spiderman while dokyeom is peter parker i mean HELLO?? i am right, dokyeom is a lil a slob here, reader’s hair is long enough to be tucked behind their ear, based everything on google when it comes to patching up wounds omg, kissing fingertips, mentions of non-sexual stripping and showering (let him take care of you)

word count ➵ 4k words

playlist ➵ nonviolent communication by metro boomin, james blake, a$ap rocky, & 21 savage // hummingbird by metro boomin & james blake

a/n ➵ my svt writing debut <3 i thought this fic would also work really well for my silly dk and i wanted caratblr to have a chance to read this lil baby of mine <3 here's the original work if you're interested! and ofc, thank you to my cat @wuahae for betareading the original :’) you know how much i love you! don't forget to reblog and leave feedback!

want to be part of my taglist? send me an ask! want to request? check out my guidelines! masterlist

new york city never falls silent. the bustle of every new yorker can be heard through their footsteps,  the wheels that glide against the train tracks along with the beeps of taxis sound throughout the city. the metropolis stays alive in every street, every alleyway, every corner. no matter what hour it may be, each pavement is wide awake.

but the lights seem hazy tonight; the luminescence pours out of every building, the led boards are only blurs of silhouettes and illegible words. normally, you would warn against going out if someone could barely make sense of what these signs say, but you never seem to follow your own advice.

as you swing through the city, web clinging onto every building, blood continues to seep through the white spandex that covers you from head to toe. your body feels heavy, the pain in your lower abdomen continuing to spike with every movement—every swing—you make.

you bite on your lip, holding back the whimpers. your eyes dart through every street sign you pass. with every swing, you realize you’re nowhere close to where you should be. instead… 

you don’t allow yourself to think it over. maybe the loss of blood has you moving out of impulse, but for now, you can only think of getting rid of the pain.

you swing around the corner before landing down at the familiar fire escape, paint-chipped and rusted just like you remember. a hiss leaves your mouth as your hand reaches out to the spot where the blood continues to seep through, holding it down to keep pressure on the wound.

you’re face-to-face with the window; the reflection of you all suited up in some persona is a sight you’re accustomed to—but not on the glass of his window. you’re not sure why you came back here, injured in an identity he only knew of through word of mouth.

but the throbbing in your abdomen doesn’t give you enough time to think more about it. pushing the window up, you throw one leg over the edge into the apartment. your eyes quickly scan through the familiar space—a room you once treated as yours.

pillows scattered and bedsheets wrinkled, the walls are littered with the same posters of anime he swears to be the best of all time (which you agreed with), along with his desk, littered with trinkets you haven’t seen since the day you left him—ones that he talked about to you back then with so much joy.

as you attempt to get your other leg over the edge of the window, you yelp at the sharp pain that strikes. “fuck,” you whimper, gasping out a breath. another groan rips out from your throat as you force your leg over, head resting on the frame with closed eyes, bracing yourself through the wave of pain that follows.

as pants continue to leave your mouth, your senses tingle as your ears catch the sound of footsteps on the other side of the room. you attempt to stand up only for another groan to leave your lips, and you realize it’s too late—the door creaks open, revealing the man you haven’t been face-to-face with since you said your farewell months ago.

dressed in an oversized white tee and a pair of black shorts, dokyeom stands with a bag of chips in his hand and disheveled hair, eyes wide and gaping. you can only assume he was fresh from bed.  

“s-spiderman?!” he looks around, noticing the mess that you’re being exposed to. before you can register it, he rushes in, dropping the bag of chips somewhere near the doorway, and tries to tidy his bed. “w-what are you doing here? i think you might’ve entered the wrong room,” he stutters as he attempts to fix his pillows and bedsheets (poorly, if you may say). 

somehow, the sight of dokyeom all frazzled makes you smile behind your mask. the idea of your—no, you mean, this guy all worried about you seeing how untidy he lives makes you chuckle.

but as you laugh, pain shoots through your lower abdomen once more. you cough out before hissing, pressing onto the wound. it takes everything in you to keep your body upright until you feel a pair of hands rest on your shoulders. you look up only to be met with his worried expression.

and you spot the way his eyes trail down to where your hand rests. you’re thankful that the mask could hide the heat that rises to your cheeks.

“oh god, you need that treated,” dokyeom’s eyes snap back up to you, and your breath hitches. even after all these months, he still holds stars in his eyes.

it’s been a while since you last saw him up close. the bags on his under eyes have turned a few shades darker, and you notice an eyelash that rests on his cheek. you don’t think about what you do next, your free hand reaching out to his face, and his breath hitches. once you pick it out, you flick the strand off of your fingers, and that’s when you realize the mistake you committed.

“s-sorry,” you choke out. although you try to keep your voice as low and gruntled as possible, he frowns. he bites the inside of his cheek as his eyes flicker between your masked face and the wound.

“i-i don’t know how to help. i can call for an ambulan—”

you grab onto his arm before he can leave. as you shake your head, he gulps. “i can’t really help you,” he says, but your grip doesn’t falter. with that, he lets out a sigh before kneeling in front of you. his hands find themselves on the ledge, his arms now caging your frail figure. “do you have someone in mind who can help you?”

dokyeom’s question is innocent. you’re sure the last thing he meant was to mock your situation—showing up in a “stranger’s” room unannounced—but it strikes a chord in you.

you haven’t spoken to him since you broke up a few months back. when you’re outside of your suit, you avoid him like the plague. in the hallways of campus, you take any possible route to not cross his. but when you’re covered in your second skin, you find yourself on top of buildings watching him from far away. with the distance, you allow yourself to learn about what he’s been up to since you two last spoke. 

so you don’t know why you sit in front of him all injured and dressed up in white, black, and pink spandex, because you haven’t spoken to him since that day. shame bubbles within you all while reality slowly slips from your fingertips. and the way your body gets heavier with every second that passes has him mumbling profanities.

his hands hold onto you as he makes you lean your weight on the frame of the window. “wait,” he says as he stands up and walks into his bathroom. before you know it, he comes out with a box.

dokyeom finds his spot back in front of you and he opens what he retrieved. as he looks through the supplies of bandages, alcohol, gauze, and more, he says as his eyes flicker up towards you, “i don’t know how much this will help but it’ll do for now.”

and you should be thankful that someone is willing to bandage you up after the rough night you’ve had, but it feels like a lie to have dokyeom be the one to do it, especially when you haven’t told him the truth.

so when he grabs onto the supplies he needs to treat your wound, your free hand reaches for the underside of your mask. his eyes follow where it rests, and he freezes in his tracks. your fingertips curl on the fabric as you take a deep breath.

“you don’t—”

you shake your head, cutting him off, and you close your eyes before pulling off the mask.

you’re afraid to look at the boy kneeling in front of you, for you can only imagine the annoyance—the disgust—that will paint his features. it’s not like you had a choice to show up at his fire escape this one night, but it was your choice to reveal who spiderman really is behind the mask.

a beat passes.

you’re not sure what to do at this moment. what are you supposed to do after a vigilante reveals who they are?

but when you open your eyes, dokyeom looks back at you with an emotion you can’t pinpoint. he averts his eyes, trailing down to your wound. “let me see it,” he whispers.

you gulp, an attempt to clear your throat and thoughts, before letting your hand move away from the puncture. your hand grips the hem of the top of your suit, peeling it upwards to reveal a bloody wound. from the sight, it looks like you were stabbed, but it’s only a deep cut.

he pulls out a piece of cloth, reaching out and pressing it to your wound. you yelp, eyes squeezing shut at the contact.  “i’m sorry, but we need to stop the bleeding a bit more.” it takes everything in you to open your eyes. you’re met with the sight of dokyeom whose face holds a thousand emotions—you can’t identify any of them.

“can you keep pressure on it?” you only nod before you remove your gloves, afraid to touch the wound with fabric covered in grime. you dump your mask and gloves on the space beside you before letting your hand reach to where the cloth is held against. your hand brushes against his for a split second—you retract your hand immediately at the contact with his skin.

at the sudden motion, the cloth against your stomach drops with nothing left to hold it. dokyeom curses in a panic, hand shooting out in an attempt to save it, but you react faster. snatching it mid-fall, you grasp it tightly, placing the cloth back onto your wound. his eyes dart between where your hand rests and your face, a twinge of worry cast on his features, but he doesn’t give you an opportunity to say anything as he stands up quickly and walks back to his bathroom.

you hear the water run for a moment. the noises of the street fill your ears. the lights from outside cascade the floor, hues of yellow and purple filling the room. and then thunder rumbles; it shakes the floorboards. the sounds of raindrops follow, and you feel your back start to get wet from the storm that has entered new york city.

you try to push yourself off the ledge, a groan ripping out of your throat once more. and you’re finally on your feet. but at any moment, it feels like you may collapse.

“wait, wait! what are you doing?” dokyeom exclaims as he rushes out of the bathroom. he quickly grabs hold of you in an attempt to keep you steady. “don’t stand up or that wound might get worse.”

“i-it’s just the rain. i don’t want to leave the window open.” as you turn your torso, another spike strikes where your wound is. the yelp that leaves your mouth has dokyeom grip onto your arm tighter.

“no, just sit. i’ll take care of it,” he says as he brings you to his chair, his hand never leaves your arm. you let out a hiss until your bottom meets the cushion. as soon as your back rests on the chair, you close your eyes for a moment from the pain.

his hand leaves you. you hear the window shut; the car horns and barks from stray animals are now muffled.

when your eyes flutter open, dokyeom crouches in front of you with a wet towel in his hand. “i need to clean it.” you only nod before removing the cloth on your wound. he grabs it from you and places it on his lap.

as he raises the wet towel to your wound, you flinch at the contact. he quickly retracts it and asks, “does it hurt?”

“no, it’s just cold,” you mumble back. he only nods before attempting to clean the area around your wound. while he keeps his eyes on the puncture, your eyes remain on his face; hues of yellow cast upon him.

his skin glows under the city lights—did anyone know about the stars you once carved on it?

“is this why we broke up?” his eyes snap toward yours as he asks that question.

you cannot help but bite the inside of your cheek. “y-yeah,” you choke out.

he hums before his eyes go back down to your injury. “i’m guessing this is why you were distant then, right?”

you don’t bother to speak, letting the silence speak for itself.

he removes the wet towel; the white cloth is covered in patches of red. as he crumples it into a ball, you spot that his white shirt holds splotches of blood as well.

dokyeom stands up to drop the pieces of fabric on the table behind you. “your dad obviously doesn’t know,” he mutters to himself.

it’s a rhetorical question. of course, your father has no clue of your late-night rendezvous. you’re sure he could never look at you the same if he found out because to him, he would never understand what you do. he would see you only as a low-life criminal in the same way the nypd does. 

dokyeom then dabs a cotton ball soaked in betadine on your abdomen. you bite on your lip as a hiss leaves your mouth. “fuck,” you curse, and he only continues to clean up your wound.

silence takes over you two. as he bandages you up, you allow yourself to close your eyes. you were thankful to find rest in these small moments. but you don’t miss the warmth of his fingertips on your skin; they feel just like last time.

“why did you come here?” his question has your eyes snapping open, and you are met with a frown resting on his face.

you bite the inside of your cheek. “i-i don’t know.” it’s a lie—one you both know. you had every chance to change the route you were taking. instead, you chose to go to his place—even if it may be on the other side of where you live.

he lets out a sigh. it’s clear that he’s disappointed by your words, but all he says is “okay,” as he gets up. “you can stay here for the night.” he stands in front of you in a shirt covered in patches of blood—it’s proof that his heart still holds a spot for you.

despite the venom that was laced in your words the night you cut ties with him, he leaves you a space for you to fill. it’s another choice you can make, but one you’re not sure if you should take.

dokyeom walks to the desk behind you and flips the lamp on. you swivel the chair so that you’re face-to-face with his slouched figure. you would’ve scolded him, but you’re not in the place to do so—not after what you two had.

but a part of you wishes to chide those words—hey, keep slouching and your back will get worse—for old time’s sake. it takes everything in you to hold back from saying the reminder, but it takes nothing to let your hand grip the back of his shirt. his movements halt.

as you sit up, you let your face bury into the arch of his back. the scent of his laundry detergent (it’s still the same smell of lavender) fills your nose, and you let your hands trail around his torso until they find their home on his waist. even after all these months, your hands knew where to rest—your spidey senses knew who to go to.

you feel his hands rest on your arms, his thumb drawing circles on your forearm. you breathe at the same pace as him. whenever his shoulders move up, yours follow. and you allow yourself to cherish just this once the familiar warmth of dokyeom. you let your soul mesh with his once more.

with closed eyes, you whisper, “i still look for you.” his thumb stops moving, and a shaky breath leaves your mouth. “i’m here because all i know is you.”

it’s half of a lie, but still a lie nevertheless. you shake your head against his shirt. “no,” you rescind. “i know i shouldn’t be here, and i had every chance to go back home, but,” you take a deep breath. “would you let me, just this once, be honest with you?”

your question hangs in the air—it’s not for him but for you. all the choices you took led to this moment, from embracing the persona you were handed through a single spider bite all the way to removing the mask in front of him.

dokyeom spins to face you. he stands in front of you with the remnants of you covering him, his shirt coated in hues of red and your blood dried up on his hands. the light behind him causes a shadow to paint his face.

but when he kneels once more in front of you, you get a good look at his features. he still looks like the same boy you first met—the same one you fell in love with—but you wonder if he was still the one you knew?

that is until his hand reaches toward your face. you hold your breath as it finds its spot on your cheek. but as his thumb grazes your cheekbone, a trembling breath leaves you. you gulp everything down—your fears and anxieties—so that you can finally be honest with dokyeom.

“i wanted to tell you who i really am.” a flicker of confusion flashes through his eyes. “and i know i’m not doing it in the best state,” a chuckle leaves your mouth. “but with every day that passes, and every injury i need to endure, i didn’t know when i would be able to tell you what went wrong with us.” a beat passes. “what went wrong with me.”

he shakes his head. “nothing’s wrong with you. what are you talking about?” a frown takes over his face. “i mean, you’re spiderman, for god’s sake.” you weren’t able to hold back the giggle that slipped from your lips.

but it wouldn’t be fair to just accept his words as is, not after the damage you’ve caused.

you let a hand rest on his, the one that rests on your cheek, and you curl your fingers so that you hold it. “i’m sorry that this is me.” the whisper is loud enough to fill the silence of his room. “i’m sorry that i crashed here all injured and left you to deal with the mess,” your eyes flicker to his bed. “especially on a night when you were resting.”

as soon as your eyes go back to dokyeom, you notice that he’s biting the inside of his cheek. “why are you telling me this?” it’s an honest question, one he couldn’t figure out the answer to. “we haven’t seen each other since you broke up with me.”

and he has every right to be confused with your sudden appearance. after all the months spent avoiding him in the halls while still seeking him on top of buildings, dokyeom was left with no clue as to why you come to him first in such a dire situation. why is it that you chose to reveal such an intimate part of yourself months after you two have drifted?

“do i have to say it?” you ask.

and he looks back into your eyes before saying, “it’s the least you can do.”

so you grab onto his hand, moving it so that it rests in yours. the sight of his fingers and palms covered in splotches of you fills your heart with warmth. it’s proof of the time he spent to patch you up. no matter who you may be—spiderman or not—you will forever be at his mercy.

“we can’t be together. it will only be another cycle of pain.” for both of you. as your eyes land back on his face, you spot sorrow coating his features.

“but i still do.” it’s an unfinished thought on his end. despite the frown you show, all he does is flash you a bitter smile. “i always have and always will.”

and it clicks.

“n-no, dokyeom,” you shake your head. “you can’t.”

he brings your hand close to his lips, letting it linger for a moment. “but you do,” he whispers into your fingertips. “right?”

even after revealing who spiderman truly is behind the mask, you expect dokyeom to rethink everything he knows. the months spent away from you should be enough reason to reconsider how much he knows of you now. but even if you two were to spend years apart, he would still read you as well as he does now. 

“i can’t,” you choke out. “i can only offer so much, and you deserve so much more.”

he smiles at you—the same one you used to see every day, no matter what time of the day it may be—as his free hand reaches for your hair, tucking it behind your ear.

“i couldn’t care any less.”

you shake your head. it’s clear he doesn’t understand the gravity of it all; to be with you means to remain in constant danger. “no, dokyeom. you don’t understand. i broke up with you because i’m batshit scared of what will happen to you.”

because it seems to always occur—anyone you come close to becomes another target for your enemies. it’s already hard enough to handle the responsibility of being a masked hero, but you don’t think you could handle a possibility where dokyeom’s death would be on your hands.

but all he does is shake his head and says, “i don’t care. i still love you.”

you haven’t heard him say that to you in months. such a simple phrase causes warmth to fill your limbs and heat to rise to your cheeks. he still has the same effect on you after so long.

there are consequences that this conversation bears. you should have stood up and left as soon as he patched you up. it should’ve been obvious that the longer you stayed, the more you would pour out sentiments that you tried to keep under wraps—under the mask—and it seemed that dokyeom knew how to undo them even better than he did then.

and hearing dokyeom say those words has you falling into a perpetual cycle of torment, one that makes every day intolerable for you can only watch him from afar. but aren’t you already living it the more you deny what’s in front of you two?

so you only nod, and bring his hand close so you can feel his fingertips on your lips. with closed eyes, you whisper, “okay.”

it’s a testament to everything—one to his offer to let you sleep in this very room you once treated as yours, one to his confession that tilted your world’s axis, one to the very situation you’re in—and you’re sure he knows it, too.

he smiles as soon as your eyes flutter open. “let’s go to sleep.”

you know that sleep meant to be wrapped in his arms all while he would leave kisses on your temple. you don’t remember the last time you got enough rest, but you remember that the last time you slept in dokyeom’s arms was the last one you were able to fall into slumber at ease.

so you nod, allowing him to help you out of the chair. and he helps you through it all—shedding the suit off of you, cleaning you of all the grime from tonight’s adventure, and getting dressed in fresh clothes—until you two find your place on his bed.

nothing is said for the rest of the night. for once, you drift into slumber without any secrets stashed away.

taglist ➵ @kflixnet @blankjournal

[nuka]

I think what makes Our Flag Means Death so remarkable in terms of representation is not just the broadness of it, but the depth.

We have an indigenous lead character, but he's not only that. He's also queer. He's a romantic interest. He's middle-aged. His arc portrays surviving trauma and abuse. It also portrays mental illness. And it portrays breaking free from toxic masculinity. And it never tries to put him in a box when he explores his masculinity and femininity.

We have a non-binary character, played by a Puerto Rican NB actor, but their arc is not about their gender identity and their coming out is simply a case of "Just keep calling me Jim". They have a romantic/sexual relationship with a black character, and never is this relationship or either of their sexual orientations or Olu's sex appeal as a fat person or "who even is the man in this relationship hahaha" questioned. When they get into a poly relationship, it's just accepted, instead of questioned or even defined.

These are just a couple of examples. It's not that Our Flag Means Death is the only or the first show with queer/BIPOC/disabled representation, because it's not. What makes the show remarkable is the unique combination of queerness, ethnicity, age, disabilities, life experiences, etc. that each character carries within themselves, yet none of these characters exist solely to appear as representation of any minority on screen. Their identities are not glued onto them, they're ingrained, but in the end, they're just people. Just like in real life. Identities do not work as plot points. Being queer is not a plot point. Being non-binary is not a plot point. It's just a small part of the whole complex experience of life.

OFMD is a perfect example of telling a queer story that doesn't focus on telling a story directly about the queerness itself. Because we have stories about queerness already. We have so many of them that it just feels like tokenism at this point to see yet another story about coming out or forbidden love or anything like that, even if it's well made.

This show took me by surprise with every new way of representation it offered, because each time it did the total opposite of what I expected. It took all the tired tropes and said, "Yeah, see these? We're not gonna do any of that." It delivered something I never thought I'd see on screen.

It never explains the characters' identities to the audience. It simply shows them exactly the way they are and lets you decide whether you see yourself in them, and I think that also allows the audience to question their own identities, to explore gender and sexuality freely without immediately putting labels on things.

People who never thought they might be trans or non-binary or queer in any way discovered their identities through the show. People who struggle with mental illness or trauma saw someone like themselves portrayed with kindness and respect on screen and were finally able to extend the same kindness to themselves. People who are always left out of romantic stories because of their age or body shape or the color of their skin finally saw themselves portrayed as desirable and worthy of love and romance.

That is why so many of us feel that, in the words of Ruibo Qian: "OFMD woke me up."

[jbaileyfansite]

Interview with NBC News (2024)

Jonathan Bailey admits he’s still grieving the loss of Tim Laughlin, the wide-eyed congressional staffer turned fervent gay rights activist he played in Showtime’s groundbreaking limited series “Fellow Travelers.”

“Playing a character who is always searching for truth and has something to fight for that is meaningful and important made me really think, ‘How do you want to leave the world behind?’” Bailey told NBC News. “It’s a tiring thing for everyone to be like, ‘I want to make the world a better place.’ But Tim is an example of someone who’s a normal guy. He didn’t come from wealth, and he lived life to its fullest, including loving in a way that was just spellbinding.”

That love is the animating force of “Fellow Travelers,” which chronicles the decades-spanning romance between Bailey’s Tim and Matt Bomer’s Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller against the backdrop of key moments in queer history. After falling in love at the height of the Lavender Scare in 1950s Washington, D.C., Hawk and Tim weave in and out of each other’s lives for years at a time, unable to sever their bond. But after learning of Tim’s terminal AIDS diagnosis in the ’80s, Hawk drops everything to take care of Tim in San Francisco, where the former lovers are forced to address the true nature of their volatile relationship.

“Fellow Travelers” was nominated for three Emmys in limited series categories last month: Bailey (who also won a Critics Choice Award) for supporting actor, Bomer for lead actor and creator Ron Nyswaner for writing.

Following the success of Netflix’s romantic drama “Bridgerton,” in which he played a rakish viscount looking for his viscountess, Bailey expressed a desire to tell a sweeping gay love story. He booked the coveted role in “Fellow Travelers” six weeks before the start of filming in Toronto, following an electric Zoom chemistry read with Bomer — one of the most prominent openly gay actors working today — that even brought one of the executives to tears.

While he said he inherited the “inherent shame” of the AIDS crisis as a gay man who came of age in the early aughts, Bailey, who is English, knew very little about the Lavender Scare. He credited the writing of Nyswaner for helping him capture the spirit of Tim, a devout Catholic struggling to reconcile his faith with his growing infatuation with the emotionally unavailable Hawk, who is adept at playing the system to avoid getting outed.

“There’s something so childlike and full of wonder and unadulterated kindness about Tim that never leaves him,” Bailey noted. “When you see the huge effects of the societal pressure and control on gay people and how it affects Tim, I thought, ‘How do you tell a story of someone who’s bruised, battered and frayed by relentless, unforgiving control?’ I think the older he gets, the more painful it is for him.”

Bailey, like many queer people, has had a complicated relationship with religion. He attended a Church of England school and, at 11, was a scholarship student at his local Catholic school, where he “was completely aware of the lack of education around sexuality and gender identity.” Like Tim, he began to question his own “inherited beliefs” in his 20s, when he came to terms with his own identity.

While Tim’s religion makes him believe that something is innately wrong with him, it also gives him the capacity to believe in a love that he has felt but cannot always see with Hawk, who complements him in a way that is both “beautiful” and “painful,” Bailey said. “I think to say that they broke up a few times somehow assimilates it to a heteronormative relationship — they were completely not afforded that.”

“What Tim realizes is that the act of loving is the thing that you want to survive with and live alongside and to die with, and to be the more loving one is sometimes easier,” added Bailey, who thinks “there was no other” man whom Tim loved as deeply as Hawk. “I think the power of their dynamic — the brilliance — is that they met at that time, and it’s just a genius way of discovering and exploring how political and social attitudes really can’t kill love.”

Bailey and Bomer, who have both acknowledged that a show like this might not have even been made a few years ago, see “Fellow Travelers” as a kind of love letter to the queer actors who came before them.

“The way we look at each other is also about the opportunity that we’ve got that wasn’t there before,” Bailey said of his and Bomer’s palpable on-screen connection, which has evolved into a close off-screen friendship. “There’s a weight that comes to telling your own story or other people’s story that are similar or shares elements of your identity.”

On the day of the Emmy nominations, Bailey was in Malta — where he has been shooting the new “Jurassic World” film — with one of his best friends. They had already planned to find somewhere to grab a celebratory drink together in the late afternoon. But by the time they had settled in and tuned in to the livestream announcing the nominees, Bailey’s phone began to ring off the hook.

“The thing that was special, if a little ridiculous, is that we took a little selfie, and I realized there was just a pride flag that was in the distance,” Bailey recalled. “Having now spent a lot of time in Malta, you realize there’s only a few.”

Now on the precipice of superstardom with his roles in “Wicked” and “Jurassic World,” Bailey is redefining what is possible for an out gay actor in Hollywood, becoming a heartthrob to male and female audiences alike — even if he doesn’t often think about that label. “I’m excited to play more roles the older I get, and we will see what the heartthrob status is when I’m in my 50s,” he said cheekily.

As his profile has risen, Bailey has wrestled with which parts of himself he is willing to share publicly. His Olivier Award-winning turn in a gender-swapped West End revival of “Company” gave him an opportunity to speak openly about his sexuality — something he didn’t feel the need to reveal unless it was tied to his work. Now, he feels much more confident in interviews to volunteer certain stories about himself, including a harrowing experience in which a Pennsylvania man called him an anti-gay slur and threatened his life in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop.

For Bailey, who is still adjusting to the privilege of being able to choose his next projects, the company he keeps going forward is just as important as the material he is given to work with. He will return to the stage next year in Nicholas Hytner’s London production of “Richard II” and will reprise his role as eldest sibling Anthony in the next season of “Bridgerton.” He will next be seen as Jack Maddox, a charming academic and celebrity crush of protagonist Charlie Spring (Joe Locke), in the sixth episode of the third season of “Heartstopper,” which premieres in October.

“I recognized in the show something that I obviously didn’t have growing up, which is aspirational, generous storytelling about queer identity and gender identity that wasn’t necessarily a gay [show],” Bailey said of his initial reaction to watching “Heartstopper,” which, like many older queer viewers, made him feel slightly melancholic. “There’s so many people of that generation who just love it, because it’s brilliant and so well-performed by such an incredibly talented young cast.”

But truth be told, Bailey doesn’t think he will ever be able to let go of Tim Laughlin, who he likes to believe had “a very happy end of his life” fighting for AIDS awareness with the ACT UP movement without Hawk by his side. After having spent a year unpacking the life-changing experience of playing the character in post-screening Q&As and media interviews, Bailey has grown to feel the power of his work “more than [he’d] ever known.”

When playing a character who is confronting his own mortality, “you just think about how life is futile and quick,” Bailey said, “and if I can live a life as front-footed and as curious as Tim, then I’ll be a lucky man.”

Source

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

I know that X-Men 97 Morph now has the silly-putty clay form that is meant to be their "real" form, but I headcanon that Morph still considers their human face to also be their "real" self, like both are equally them.

This is very much in contrast to Exiles Morph, who always seemed to treat his "human" appearance like a mask he had to wear to fit in, and seems to have dropped it completely when he joined the New Mutants at around 13. He never really goes "full human" unless he has to hide in a crowd or impersonate someone.

TAS Morph pretty much always uses the same face in human form, unless they have some specific reason not to (like impersonating someone else, or hiding from Wolverine). They always default to it when revealing themself, and even in X-Men 97 they use the glowed-up version of that face when going out to a club. It's possible that Morph is still getting used to using their "real" mutant form (the silly putty look), just like they are still gradually coming out of the closet in terms of gender identity and sexuality. But I think there's a reason they still use the same human face, like maybe it's the face they always used growing up (and if their X-gene didn't manifest until teens, maybe it's what they previously looked like), maybe their features are a combination of their parents' features (in another post I've noted that Exiles Morph's parents have features that could easily combine to look like Changeling/TAS Morph). Maybe the silly-putty look feels the most natural to Morph, but I think they still see their human face as "themself," just another version of themself.

(Bear in mind this is all just speculation and headcanon from me, I know some people also see Morph's human form as basically a mask they used to wear, and that's fine, too, we've all got our own interpretations.)

[sykeboy]

It's time to talk about the moms

With last week's and today's episode we got a good look at the different ways in which the moms reacted to the news that their daughters are in love w each other so lets take a peek shall we

I will start with this picture of our lovely lady Uang

On patriarcal societies the women are in charge of the reproductive labor which not only means giving birth but also to educate children on how to fall in line with the satus quo, women serve the patriarchy by teaching their children to follow it's rules. We are social engineers, we take care of the social events, the family gatherings, home related issues, etc.

We can see this throughout the series, the women are preparing the food, the ceremonies, they're taking care of their children, their husbands and each other. AND they're making sure the men's wishes are fullfilled: mostly we've seen this in terms of preparing their daughters to be married off to whomever their fathers or another man (Kuea for example) wishes

This is alienating for women because we reproduct a social order that causes us direct harm so in a way we are taught to hate ourselves

Now on to the moms

Patt reacts in an a very violent way, she lashes out at Pin for not abstaining herself from her dessires cause a woman is not suppossed to act on her own wishes according to Patt and to society

Aunt Patt has a lot of internalized shame and she thinks Pin should too. This is related to 3 factors: class, gender and sexuality

The one that seem to be closer to the surface for her is the one related to class. Patt is also adopted, she is the og Loyal Pin, she feels overly indebted to the royal family. She is also literally their servant, she serves them with her reproductive labor (as I explained it before), she is the beacon of womanhood, and she has taught Pin to be the same as her

So when Pin falls out of line this triggers her own unresolved issues. Patt must have been really troubled by her feelings towards Im, they go against all she believes in. She has learned that she is inferior, that she should be grateful for what she has and not to wish for more

Patt believes -as Pin does cause she thaught her- that sacrifice is the way in which a woman can gain some sense of control in a society that takes away our right to choose. This is a self fullfilling prophecy, one gives up on one's destiny and that gives you a false sense of control

Alissa on the other hand is not so present on Anin's life (and her father doesn't seem to be either), I would argue that this is one of the reasons why Anin is not so lady like, cause she's been said to be raised by her brother so she didn't have such a prevalent feminine role model

Anyways, this might have actually given her a little advantage in the sense that she had more freedom to figure her own identity out

Alissa is very surprised and afraid when Anin comes out, she is adamant on sticking to thai customs and rules. And she reminds Anin that her marrying another woman simply has no place in their context AND she reminds her that se must marry someone OF HER OWN RANK, just like Patt reminded Pin

Alissa isn't rude to Anin, she seems to tackle the issue in a very matter of factly manner, she even goes to keep her company every night after Anin moves back to the palace

Alissa also seems to be particularly worried about mantaining the monarchy intact and therefore, the social and cultural structure. She even tells Anin what worries her most is her potentially giving up her title

Once again, the moms roles in all of this are mainly related to those dictated by the reproductive labor that they must perform for the patriarchy, and today's episode is a constant reminder of that, not just for the moms but for all of our girls 😢

[enneamage]

i remember your really great essay on the fandom's tendency to hope ccs are queer due to, in part, the uneasy relationship between male streamers and women. now seeing wilbur's exploration into famously queer media (i have never met a dude into tyler the creator who was not bi unless he himself believed tyler wasn't queer), i was wondering, do you think male ccs in the community are aware that being bi makes them appear more safe towards women? i don't doubt anyone's sexuality btw

For starters, I think that Wilbur is throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks in terms of a new public persona. What you’re looking at is still an indie softboy variant, just spiced a bit differently. Art Guy and Bisexual can be related but as I said in the other post, sticking morality, sexuality and aesthetics together as a package deal is a quick way to be misled. The thing I want to linger on is the evolution of the idea of a softboy, which was actually a fandom-esque tumblr term that was a term of endearment to fictional / irl boys before it became an ironic nickname to call out a particular kind of wolf in sheep's clothing. I think that concept cycle happens a lot. 

In the straight sense, men do have a motivation to try to get women to like them. While some people are remarkably bad at this or have no clue how to achieve it, others are a bit better at following the trail of an appealing persona and trying to fit themselves into it. Some of it is a genuine self-image desire as well, you want to think of yourself as an appealing person even without an audience, so you take the temperature of the culture and try to follow the path that seems to work best for your desires and interests.

Softboy / golden retriever boyfriend / himbo and the like tends to come from the imagination of women online when collectively brainstorming what kind of person would be seen as a breath of fresh air in the current Dude Climate. The issue with it being translated IRL is that once it becomes clear that people really do find these tropes attractive, people want to lean into the strategy a bit either as an exaggeration of their own personalities or an active choice to Not Be Like Other Guys, inviting inevitable disappointment when they have the ups and downs of a real person with traits, or are revealed to be straight up frauds. 

In terms of leaning into persona or aesthetics aside from sexuality, I want to bump this post by someone on the mcyt snark reddit that takes a tour through personas that consistently appear and reappear in post-2020 MCYT circles. I think the people love a persona (or imago perhaps) and a package deal of traits, we tend to hand them out for free when we’re forming our impressions of people even if they don’t mean to create one. 

Wilbur in particular has a lot of reasons to try and dress himself up as ‘safe’ for the time being, but you asked about the bi swatch of MCYT and I think the answer to the safety part is unconsciously, yes. I think that having an aspect of their experience being removed from mainstream straight culture really does put them in a different headspace than straight peers, but whether that headspace is actually kinder and safer in practice isn’t guaranteed in the way that I think both parties might hope. They probably notice that people treat them better or differently when they lean into the mlm part of their identity, leading them to do it more over time.

Again, especially with CCS, I think a lot of people hope that the bisexuality will lead to a long term partnership with a man or that their attraction to women would be softened into something less hormonally or culturally straight. People actively leaning into post-2020 queer culture aesthetics (because we’re not talking leather bars here) may also seem more safe or appealing by breaking down the dyadic “let me define myself by being completely opposed to you” aspects of really rigid gender performance relationships. Ironically this may also make them seem more appealing as partners in the platonic and romantic sense because it feels less like you’re dealing with a rigid diametric opposite. You feel closer to them by being under the LGBTQ+ umbrella with them, which also adds some motivation to parasocial attachment. 

[utilitycaster]

I kinda felt disappointed and kinda disheartening in the discussion surrounded taash being non-binary and people just framing their gender identity discussion as just baby first queer meetup it just I've been out for several years as non-binary and I still don't have access to these kind of outlets I don't know but I guess people forget that everyone journey is different.

and also like it does make sense for taash experience to be like that since its literally their first time exploring new gender identities?

Hey anon! I think that's exactly it - this isn't at all limited to people talking about Taash or the Veilguard fandom (or people who played and didn't like it) but on some level Taash actually seems to me to exactly play out the (explicitly canon scenario) of "what if you felt like something was weird or off about how you experience yourself but didn't know what and it had been going on so long that you'd internalized it and thought it was normal for everyone and this also got caught up with your complicated relationship with your mother and you blew up at your coworker for walking around in a kinda low cut shirt on her own personal time and instead of being like WELL FUCK YOU TOO she was like 'interesting. why are you doing this because I don't think I'm the problem.' " Like, I was on a lot of feminist websites aimed at young women in the early 2000s as a teen and so lesbianism and bisexuality were both talked about a lot but no one was like, bringing up Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg and actual THEORY until college. Like, truly, until maybe 15 years ago, when social media with an anonymous angle started blowing up? You had your gender and sexuality discovery through doing and living and talking to other queer people irl or by finding a library or bookstore that had what you needed, if you even knew what you needed beyond "I'm weird and feel wrong." You had to go to a group. You can literally read Alison Bechdel's account of doing this for lesbianism in the 80s. Taash is actually just acting like someone who can't privately learn all of this from a carrd and has to actually talk to people and take notes. And as for the actual term...you know how people always mock historians for being like "these two people were close friends" and they're like OH MY GOD THEY WERE FRIENDS WHO WANTED TO BE BURIED TOGETHER? Well, have you considered Taash is referred to as nonbinary and has the whole pronouns discussion because if you go with more euphemistic language, again, someone will be like "no this is just representative of gender nonconformity" and call Taash a tomboy.

I don't want to derail the above but I do feel a lot of people online, especially who have been on social media from a very young age, just...struggle to comprehend the following three things to a degree I find worrying.

perspectives, opinions, and experiences that are different than yours are good things to experience regularly; you should expand your mind and comfort zone

representation does not mean "people who had the same exact experience with the same exact outcomes as you for the same exact gender/sexuality/race/ethnicity/gender" and is just as much to show people not of those demographics the inner life of characters who are

You do not need to like a character as a person to find them interesting or well-written/acted.

and i feel a lot of weirdness towards Taash coming from people who are nb or queer themselves lands in those categories.

[morlock-holmes]

Part of my confusion about "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" is that it's really just... not a good term? It doesn't really reflect what it's supposed to, which is the idea that some teenagers essentially take on a trans identity as a sort of social role spurred on by friend groups.

I think that this is likely to be actually true in at least some sense, so I was amazed at how unconvincing the Littman paper which coined the term actually is. The parental narratives advanced in that paper are just unbelievable on their face.

Ever since the gay rights movement I've felt that our vocabulary for talking about this stuff is deliberately incredibly stupid, for reasons I haven't quite been able to suss out.

In the gay rights battles, everybody got together and agreed that there were exactly two possibilities:

Gay people are born that way

Gay people made a choice to be gay

I think this is really dumb because those are really obviously not the only two options, and also because there's lots of biological "born this way" things we still treat or try to eliminate, and lots of choices that are still incredibly important to protect.

But also, like, okay, think about sexual fetishes. Say you have a guy with a cheerleader fetish. Cheerleaders are a contingent social phenomenon; no 12th century Breton had a cheerleader fetish. The possibility of such a fetish arose with the invention of the cheerleader.

But it's just as obvious that people do not choose their fetishes the way that they choose, say, a new car. Nobody says, "After listing out the pros and cons, I felt that having a cheerleader fetish was the best choice, because it combines a little bit of exotic spice while still being mainstream enough that it can't be used as blackmail if people find out about it."

No, one day you just realize that you think cheerleaders are really hot.

I do tend to think that gender identity is, for most people, a lot less immediately set in stone than sexual orientation is. My personal impression is that the vast majority of people start to understand very quickly whether they are attracted to men, women, or both, and that they only tell themselves differently because they fear social censure.

I'm not really convinced that the same is true of gender identity; I think that for an extremely large number of people it does function a bit more like a fetish, in that there are people who encounter the idea for the first time, go, "Huh, yeah that's cool or whatever" and after repeated encounters come to think, "Actually I am really into this."

I'm very, very suspicious of the tendency to then assert that this must inherently, then, be a discovery of something that always existed within the person since birth.

There's also the fact that gender roles exist, and people want to be legible to people around them.

For a lot of people, dressing up as a vampire on Halloween is fun, but dressing up as a vampire to go grocery shopping in June would be deeply embarrassing. Because on Halloween all the people around you understand why you're dressed that way and your dress makes you part of a larger social whole; in June you're going against the grain, marking yourself out from the people around you, probably drawing stares and hidden smiles.

Because sex roles in our society are so set in stone, there is a certain extreme dissatisfaction with not following them, even when allowed to do so.

I can wear chokers and frills and pretty hair ribbons if I want, but the women around me can do that anywhere in the country and have people think of it as normal, as obvious, rather than *a statement*.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, from reading the Littman paper, seems to refer to a parental conviction that their child essentially got the idea to be trans from a peer group who convinced them they were trans despite a lack of gender dysphoria in childhood.

Like I said, the general narrative is really, really hard to believe at face value, for example:

A total of 63.8% of the parents have been called “transphobic” or “bigoted” by their children for one or more reasons, the most common being for: disagreeing with the child about the child’s self-assessment of being transgender (51.2%); recommending that the child take more time to figure out if their feelings of gender dysphoria persist or go away (44.6%); expressing concerns for the child’s future if they take hormones and/or have surgery (40.4%); calling their child by the pronouns they used to use (37.9%); telling the child they thought that hormones or surgery would not help them (37.5%); recommending that their child work on other mental health issues first to determine if they are the cause of the dysphoria (33.3%); calling the child by their birth name (33.3%); or recommending a comprehensive mental health evaluation before starting hormones and/or surgery (20.8%)

So, like, the whole tenor of the paper is that these are basically very liberal parents who are sort of being cut off by their kids for no reason, but like...

This is typical of the general weasel wording used by Littman. Are the third of parents who called their kids by pronouns they used to use going, "She - Oops, he, I'm sorry" one time and getting blasted? Do they claim to be trying but just get it wrong literally every single time? Or do they just flat out refuse to call their child by their preferred pronouns?

When my brother was first entering high school, he joined the Sea Scouts, a division of the Boy Scouts dedicated to learning about sailing. He later entered a maritime college and has had a succession of maritime jobs, which will likely be his career for the rest of his life.

Is that the result of social contagion or was he born that way?

I think the question is obviously both absurd and irrelevant.

[pinchinschlimbah]

On "Coming Out" and Noel Fielding

I mentioned forever ago that I had this post in mind and then never got around to it, but now with the new interview quote I was yelling about recently it feels like a particularly good time to get it out of my brain and onto the page! tl;dr: musings on the concept of "coming out" as it has evolved over time, whether it's something that should continue to be necessary or expected of queer people, and why Noel is particularly inspirational to me in that regard since this is, after all, my brainrot blog. This may be extremely long and a bit disjointed but I hope some of y'all will enjoy it!

So a while ago myself and several friends were discussing the concept of coming out. All of us are some flavor of queer both in gender and orientation, but each is in a different place along their self discovery and identity journey, with some being long since out and proud, and others just starting to dip their toes into exploration past the expected cishet.

This discussion actually was prompted by a different discussion about Noel, spurred by comments we'd come across slamming him as being homophobic/transphobic on Bakeoff for making comments suggesting he has romantic or sexual attraction towards Paul, referring to himself with female-centric terms, playing female characters in the skits, and a particular moment where he brings up Old Gregg while talking to KimJoy and says "he was a sea transsexual....quite a demanding role for me" while laughing to indicate that that last part was said in jest. Hey fellas, is it homophobic/transphobic to be a little bit gay and trans? This got us talking about how the current culture of queer identity has evolved to the point where "coming out" feels more like something the public feels they're owed in order for them to view one's expression as valid, rather than its original purpose as something one does for themself in order to live most authentically. I don't think I need to go into detail about how many artists have been harassed by their "fans" into coming out before they were ready because people wouldn't accept the validity of that person's work without knowing exactly how that person identified, there've been plenty of articles and video essays and better written tumblr posts about that, but it's definitely a concerning trend. It can be particularly dangerous when it comes to people who aren't feeling confident or safe enough to come out, who end up being criticized and shunned by the queer community as being somehow problematic for not being able to fully articulate to a group of strangers the ways in which they're experiencing their identity. In this situation, the people who are struggling the most end up with the least support. Forcing people to either declare an identity or get out just leads to more people staying closeted out of fear of doing it "wrong" and never getting the chance to explore the most authentic and joyful versions of themselves, or even worse, feeling the need to out themselves before they're in a safe place to do so and suffering the resulting consequences. Questioning or cautious people deserve space in the community to experiment even if they haven't yet or maybe never will come out! My high school's Gay Straight Alliance was comprised entirely of "straight allies" when I was there. There was not a single "out" person in the school at the time. Nearly all of us in the GSA ended up being some flavor of queer or trans years later after graduation. But whether it was intentional closeting or just feeling an innate affinity towards something we couldn't quite pinpoint at the time, we all knew we belonged there and made that space for ourselves and others like us. Back when "coming out" first became a concept in the public consciousness, it was during a time where cishet identity was not just considered the default, but the only option. By coming out, queer people were giving genuinely revolutionary representation for themselves and others like them by telling the world that, as the old saying goes, we're here, we're queer, get used to it! Nowadays, we're lucky to live in a culture that is much more cognizant of queer identities being a thing, so in many cases coming out has become less about having to explain to those around you the basic concept of queerness existing, and moreso about which specific identity you fall under, and that's where things get messy.

My friends and I shared our own thoughts and experiences. One is currently identifying as "unlabeled" because they haven't found a term that feels correct yet, and therefore hasn't come out because they wouldn't know what to say. One spoke about how when they first came out they were much more insistent on what terms or pronouns people used for them but as time has gone on they've grown to find joy in being inscrutable and letting others wonder what they're perceiving. One expressed that given the state of the world they've been retreating somewhat back into the closet for safety reasons rather than being super outward with their queerness like they used to and is working on learning to embrace those parts of themself again. One said they felt like they'd already been existing as queer and expressing that queerness "before I even had the terms to come out to myself" and is now working on catching up on the conscious end of figuring out what's what. I myself never really had an official "coming out", I just became increasingly visually/socially/vocally queer as I became more and more confident in who I was and what I wanted to be and who I had on some level always been, and decided if people didn't get the hint that's their own problem. I came into consciousness of my queerness during the early 2010s original tumblr MOGAI microlabel boom, where there was a ton of focus on figuring out the hyper specific identity labels that exactly described what you were experiencing. I did a lot of digging and soul searching and experienced a lot of unnecessary stress trying and failing to find my perfect labels and landed on clumsy terms like "full time drag queen" because it was the closest I could get to what I was feeling about my gender, only to be told it was problematic for me to call myself that as an AFAB person because drag "belongs to cis gay men" (don't get me started on that statement, that's a whole other essay lol) It was a real wake up call once I distanced from these aggressively labeled and segmented online spaces and made my way into real world queer communities where I was relieved to find that in fact no one there asks to check your membership card before letting you in, if you feel like you belong there you're welcome no questions asked.

I had other people in these communities referring to me as "queer" and "fag" and "gay" and "queen" before I felt comfortable doing so myself based on online Discourse I'd experienced over who is Allowed to use certain terms, and having these community leaders I respected recognizing those things in me and welcoming me in like that gave me the confidence to really find my own footing in ways that attempting to find my exact correct identity label so that I could officially proclaim it never did. Once I could answer the question of what I was with a shrug and "queer I guess!" things became so much easier. Microlabels can be incredibly helpful and liberating for some, don't get me wrong if it works for you that's great, but let's not pretend that everyone is going to have the same experiences.

So anyway, back to Noel. Noel has never, to my knowledge, ever had any sort of official “coming out” or explicitly referred to himself as queer. So I know there are people out there who will disagree with me considering him to be queer. But so much of what he’s said and done throughout his several decades long career has indicated to me that this is clearly someone of queer experience navigating the world as such, and just as the queers in my local community welcomed me as one of them before I knew to do it myself, I extend that welcome forward. 

Let’s take a look at some of the facts. In the public span of his career, Noel has.....(in no particular order, also if anyone wants to add additional instances of note in the reblogs or comments please feel free, this is by no means a fully comprehensive list) -repeatedly called himself "the woman of the Boosh" or Julian's/Howard's "wife" in ways that suggest that's how he actually felt about it rather than it just being a punchline that he was mistaken for female in the show [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] -referred to himself at the GQ "Man of the Year" awards as "never been a man" and "a sort of girl, he/she" -been referred to by Sandi Toksvig as being "on the cusp" in regards to gender, to which he reacts with amusement and acceptance -consistently expressed excitement and appreciation when others refer to him with feminine terms or say he looks like a girl [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] -said "I love being a man-woman, it's much more interesting than being one or the other" and expressed that the loved shooting the Boosh Electro episode for this reason -referred to Vince Noir (a character who he's been pretty open about being based on himself) as "wasn't seemingly one gender or the other" -expressed that he felt most free and happy when presenting femininely [2] -had Julian, one of the people closest to him, express that Noel and Sandi (an out lesbian) may have "real sexual chemistry" because Noel is "all over the shop, he's a different sex" -used the "Confuser" line of "Is it a boy? Is it a girl? I'm not sure I mind" to refer to himself rather than Vince, and express that he's had to work to find new ways to feel as androgynous as he'd like now that he's older -referred to himself as a lesbian [2] -said that he "sometimes looks in the mirror and sees a woman", in the same interview that Julian implies that Noel is in fact a girl -referred to himself as a "girl/boy" -consistently referred to himself with feminine terms on panel shows and bakeoff -made a joke on bakeoff about not being a testosterone-based person -responded positively when asked about the ways Boosh had influenced queer and nonbinary youth -has said he's "quite obsessed with the man/woman mixup thing" -has said if he was an animal he'd want to be a seahorse because the males get pregnant -Had Lee Mack, who Noel used to live with, refer to him as "the little transsexual one, yeah I think she's fantastic" in a Boosh documentary and "a young lady who came out here happy to be herself" in response to Noel's Wuthering Heights drag performance -had his own mother refer to him as "the daughter I always wanted" -described his own appearance as that of a "transsexual witch" and when an interviewer attempted to make fun of him for calling himself "a transgender witch" by showing Noel a drawing the interviewer clearly found repulsive, Noel responded that the interviewer was "holding up a mirror" and called the image his passport photo

And I'm not even going to bother citing sources on the countless times he's made comments suggesting romantic or sexual attraction towards men. Literally just watch any non-character appearance he's ever done, it's kind of his whole thing??? Not to mention his penchant for picking up explicitly queer and gnc character roles, and also just [gestures vaguely to everything Noel and Julian have said about each other suggesting romantic and sexual tension between them and how they used their characters as an excuse to explore those feelings in a less scary way, again that could be a whole other essay on its own but ooh boy] I also think there's something interesting to explore in the idea of Noel repeatedly referring to his appearance as transgender or transsexual rather than identifying himself as such- at what point does the appearance of something become reality?

It all begs the question- is it even a joke anymore if it's that consistent? Either it's not a joke and it's an authentic expression of his real feelings and experiences, or he for some reason really really wants everyone to believe that he's queer when he's not, with this behavior spanning back to a time before the concept of queerbaiting was on anyone's minds and when being publicly queer could mean the end of your career. Which scenario do you think is more likely? And, does someone who’s been conducting themself like this for their entire career really NEED to come out? Honestly, I find this level of simultaneous authenticity and inscrutability aspirational.

In this Velvet Onion interview from 2012, Noel compares his penchant for dresses to both Grayson Perry and Eddie Izzard. This is interesting because those two people represent pretty opposite intentions behind their presentation- Grayson identifies solidly as cis male, and for him the shock value of crossdressing is the point, saying “I signed up for a gender and I want them to be very clearly delineated so I know I’m dressing up in the wrong clothes.” This doesn't seem particularly in line with where Noel is coming from given him famously referring to himself as "the Confuser" and stating in that same Velvet Onion interview that he "never even bothered giving it a label, I never went oh I'm a transvestite, I just went yeah if I fancy wearing a dress I do, never really thought about it really" Eddie on the other hand has famously said "They're not women's clothes. They're my clothes, I bought them." indicating that they were a genuine part of her authentic expression rather than a crossdressing costume, and has subsequently over the years identified more and more solidly as transfemme. I find Eddie's trajectory particularly fascinating because it's been so non-linear. In the 90s when the language for transness was much less public knowledge, she referred to herself consistently as a transvestite- a cishet man who enjoyed dressing as a woman, as well as using terms like "male tomboy" and "male lesbian" and "a full boy plus extra girl". Despite doing most of her standup shows in femme looks, most of her acting jobs were male-presenting, and there was a period of time in the 2010s where she dropped the femme presentation entirely in an attempt to be taken more seriously as the "crossdressing" was seen by many as a gimmick. Swinging back around more recently, Eddie has been explicitly identifying as genderfluid and transfemme, and in recent years has made the decision to "be based in girl mode from now on", and use primarily she/her pronouns. Since this announcement, in her trans advocacy work Eddie has described herself as being "out" as trans since the 1980s despite all of the above. She always knew who she was, it's just she's gotten access to more accurate terms over time to describe what she was experiencing, as well as feeling more safe to do so the more that transness became a known and accepted concept in the public eye.

The interview I mentioned at the very start of this post isn't really a coming out from Noel. And I don't think we'll ever really get one from him. In my opinion Noel has spent the past several decades conducting himself as someone who is in fact already out- it’s pretty clear Noel knows and is proud of who he is regardless of how he chooses to describe that identity. At this point, making some sort of official statement would just be for the benefit of others looking for clarification on their own perception of him and people who want to be able to put him in one box or another, and that’s not what coming out should be. The statement in the new interview is not "I am genderfluid", its "I've always been genderfluid", simply putting an accurate name to what's always been publicly visibly true now that he's got the terms to do so.

[v88sy]

i think the thing with buck fucking strangers came only from oliver stark. the canon narrative did not, at least so far, explicitly say that this is what buck will do or wants to do imo. the implications of saying "your first cannot be your last" to a guy who has fucked around a lot and already learned that he wants a long-term relationship and was in multiple relationships are kinda icky to me, though. it feels like it says that none of it counts because buck's experiences are only with women and until he has had all of the same experiences with men, he isn't ready for "his last" or whatever tf. even if he doesn't fuck around, we are once again at the same point where we have been for 7 seasons with buck. maybe he won't devolve, but the stagnation is really unbearable at this point. especially after seeing this incredible potential of a love interest that finally checks all the boxes (!) being tossed aside so carelessly, i am personally done with it all.

I don't think Oliver said "strangers", but I will agree when you look at just his quote about texting Tim ideas about what he wants for Buck, in a vacuum, it reads shitty. And when someone brought that to his attention, he clarified.

Now that his character is single, he would like to have Buck going out and, basically, having a healthy relationship with sex. He said he would also suggest the same if his character were just coming out of a relationship with a woman too, so I don't feel it has anything to do with a certain sexual identity, and more so just Oliver wanting an arc for his character where he grows into having a good and healthy relationship with sex, instead of what he had in season 1. I think he's just trying to go with the story that Tim has given him and make the best of the situation. Oliver said he's constantly texting Tim ideas, to which he usually says "that's why you're the actor and I'm the writer" so who knows if that's actually something we'll see on screen, but I can tell you it's not anything I'm interested in.

I do get what you're saying about Tommy's reasoning, and I had a whole spiel about it too. I absolutely agree it should have been worded better, but I think Tommy was coming from a place of personal experience. All relationships have this new, shiny, honeymoon phase. Buck has already been putting Tommy up on this pedestal, and there is the added "newness" of it being his first same gender relationship. It's not that Tommy thinks Buck has no experience with relationships or that he doesn't know what he wants, it's that Buck is still seeing Tommy with these rose tinted glasses and Tommy knows what will happen once they come off, because it has before. Maybe more than once, with him on both ends of it. At least that's how it reads to me.

Tommy doesn't feel he can live up to this idealized version that Buck has of him in his head, and he thinks it's better to bow out now before he falls too deep, but I think he already has.

[leikeliscomet]

(Longgg post incoming) So I've grown tired of 'non fiction sex media' if it that's the official name and i mean that some media, usually a video or article on sex in society, usually sex positive or tries to be, that swears its gonna 'change the way we think about sex' and 'broaden the conversation' and 'address the taboo of sex' and in 9 times out of 10 the asexuality section isn't good. And that's assuming asexuality is even mentioned in the first place.

First of all some of these articles and videos don't even get the definition right. I know the ace community's argued what the real definition is since day but 'little to no sexual attraction' is the mainstream definition and it's literally 5 words so I'm confused at how something so basic keeps getting fumbled. It's not celibacy. It's not abstinence. Why do we have to keep saying this mannnnn

I've watched The Leftist Cooks' video, Sex and The Revolution after it was in my recs and I wasn't sure if I should because of reasons I just stated but I had free time and I saw someone say it mentions asexuality so i was like, 'why not?' and watched it in full. The asexuality section mentioned how ace people are erased from conversations about sex but their own video aids that erasure because the ace section barely has the theory of the group they're addressing and it comes across as so underdeveloped. They can pick apart and dissect and enjoy parts of TERF theory (not to say this makes them bad people or whatever bc u can agree with someone's opinion but not their philosophy and critique patriarchy and gender roles without being a TERF) but like, you could engage with fascist text before asexual text...? It brings up allonormativity and amatonormativity which is good but then conflates them. Love and sex get equated so it makes sense to bring up romance in a sex video and aces do experience amatonormativity and aros experience compulsory sexuality, but why are we focusing on aces' experience of relationships when the other sections are about sex? Why isn't the ace section specifically talking about ace people's navigation of sex? 'The label is new' This just isn't true. Define 'new' because if you mean within the past 10 years then no because the little to no sexual attraction definition can go back to 2000s AVEN but even further when you look at the Asexual Manfiesto and that was in the 1970s. If you mean not within 100 years then no again, because there's texts going back to 1800s (first coined by Emma Trosse to be exact) using the term asexual to mean someone who didn't have sex, had no libido, had no children, no partner or no sexual attraction and even though we know now these things aren't inherently ace it's most likely some of the people described with the old definition would be seen as ace today and that those sexless people would've included asexuals. And that's not even getting into the dozens of other terms used to refer to ace people in the past like autosexual, nonsexual, monosexual, group x etc. If you mean not within 100 years then you can easily say the same for the rest of the lgbt community so why draw the line at asexuality?

'Anything I say will be immediately dated' If any basic research was done they would've found decades worth of studies they could've included that are still relevant. The video came out in 2024 they could've added Ace by Angela Chen or Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda J Brown! The TERF theory you just read out is outdated hello?? Again if they bothered to read it, yes the ace community has loads of disagreements and yes, the actual rights that aces do and don't need has been long debated, but the fundementals have been pretty much the same; sexual autonomy for aces centering the right to have and not to participate in sex and sexual activities, legal representation alongside other lgbtq+ identities in healthcare, education and the workplace, including asexuality in sex ed and lgbtq+ activism to make people more aware, increased asexual characters in fiction and to end compulsory sexuality. The asexuals section goes on to contradict the anti-born this way arguments right at the start of the video. I'll save my thoughts on 'born this way' for a different post but in the video itself, it's addressed that if sex wasn't used as a measurement of humanity and if patriarchal expectations of sex didn't exist we wouldn't need an asexual or allosexual label but 'that's not the world we live in'. Asexuality or at least, frigidity in humans, has been medicalised for centuries. Asexuals that see themselves as born ace aren't doing it to cling to some medical validation it's because asexuality has never been seen as medically valid in the first place which is why it was in the DSM. Which is why ace activists fought to stop medical stigma and still are. It's why we have 'we are not broken'. Whether you're a born ace or made ace, asexuality just isn't seen as real, which is why we have a label and community (or at least should) for the people that fall outside what society calls the 'right' amount of sexual attraction. If LC can understand this nuance for why some people need asexual as a label then where is this grace for other identities? In a society that stigmatises attraction to the same gender there's value in the term 'gay'. When this overlaps with patriarchy there's value in 'lesbian'. When you look at the stigma of attraction to multiple genders we have 'bisexual' and 'pansexual' When that society has rigid rules of gender and sex we have 'trans' and 'non-binary' and 'intersex' and so on.

It rightfully calls out the harms of treating sex as inherent but then does this for other intimacies. It reaffirms human sexuality is varied and that labels can be limiting but then asserts a bunch of other categories to broadly sum up the human experience... whilst telling us we shouldn't do that? Sarah reads up a passage from a feminist on the importance of touch which I have no issue with because the feminist was talking about herself but she says in the text that wanting to be touched makes us feel human. There are loads of contexts where a human might not want to be touched (sensory issues, trauma, not wanting 'romantic' touch, not wanting 'sexual' touch). Neil says humans are social creatures and again we could make arguments there's contexts of trauma and what is acceptable socialising in the context of introversion and neurodivergence. The video asserts that we should let go of all these labels but there seems to be contexts where the big labels actually do come in handy.

Ending the video saying you wanted to argue that good sex could be a form of praxis when by definition that is the compulsory sexuality and allonormativity you just name dropped 30 minutes before. By definition sex repulsed and averse leftists both ace and non ace can't carry this out regardless of 'goodness'. What is 'good sex'? Because if it's defined under compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity which many other 'sex positive' media does where it 'must' include an inherent romantic and sexual attraction then that leaves sex favourable aces and aroallos out of the running too. Conservatives, puritans and TERFs are having good heterosexual sex they're enjoying very much and still enacting violence on everyone else. Maybe I shouldn't have been expecting some in depth ace analysis when they joked about sexless trans lesbians sleeping in separate beds at the start of the video as the 'perfect' ideal of puritan queerness, as if the issue is the sexlessness and not the control of sexuality including sexless people's and when that image of queerness applies to a lot of asexual and sexless queer people participating in romance and when the perfect ideal of puritan queerness isn't an acceptance of sexless queer people in a house witha white picket fence but wanting queer people violently corrected or fucking dead.

It reminded me of Rowan Ellis' asexual discourse video which I already have a draft post about and essentially it has the same problems as LC's section and the handling of asexuality in sexual social commentary. The misrepresentation of the ace inclusionist movement is used to 'both sides' the argument. Plenty of ace inclus will say trauma, neurodivergent and celibacy can be grounds for being asexual. If the video actually unpacked the real harm within the ace community like the homophobia and racism not just in passing but depth maybe I'd rate it more but no she equates the harm of rape culture, ableism, misogyny and homophobia of ace exclusionists with *checks notes* asexual inclusionists having a less than perfect definition of asexuality? She says 'both sides' have poor argument techniques even tho whilst it can be true for them, ace inclusionists arguments, that asexuals face discrimination and asexuals have been a part of lgbtq+ spaces before 2014 was correct because we have various studies and primary sources proving this (The National LGBT Survey and the works of Lisa Orlando, Emma Trosse and Magnus Hirshfeld) whilst exclus claims of aces 'stealing resources' and 'making up labels to be oppressed' are just that... claims.... 'She keeps mentioning harm of the discourse but what 'harm'? What is the harm and to who? Because if we're talking asexuality in an asexuality video and the impacts on asexual community, you're not convincing me that aces imperfectly defending the community with anecdotal evidence holds the same weight as using rape culture, ableism, homophobia and misogyny to claim humans can never permanently say no to sex and never not have sexual attraction is an issue of 'both sides'. Wild cus this video had various theorists and activists like Yasmin Benoit, Marshall Blount and Canton Winer and *still* reached this conclusion.

I also think of Anthony Padilla's ace videos and their sensationalist thumbnail text like 'THEY HATE SEX' and 'IT'S LIKE KISSING A WALL' to generate clicks. I've watched Anthony's videos and they're actually alright but still, I can't help but think why does he need to use these phrases to engage people if it's really about highlighting the community? Ik he's an OG Youtuber so they usually do things like this but his rebrand was amount moving on from that. I also think about articles that do the same, using titles like 'GEN Z HATES SEX' 'WHY WON'T GEN Z HAVE SEX??' 'NO ONE FUCKS ANYMORE!11' (The Leftist Cooks put a screenshot doing this exact technique when discussing puritanism) just to actually mention that asexuality and aromanticism have got visibility but how meaningful is it address ace and aros whilst using the same compulsory sexuality that has left us so unaddressed in the first place?

Already made a post saying this but yeah we get this compulsory sexuality in what's supposed to be sex positive media when you have no asexual or aromantic politic. When non-ace allies try to speak without engaging in our theory and when aces centre their content in explaining asexuality to non-ace people in a palatable fashion instead of centering our own community and it's most marginalised. This isn't some post slagging of the Leftist Cooks, Rowan Ellis or Anthony Padilla specifically but to use their work as examples. And yeah, I'll admit my criticism is harsh but why shouldn't it be? When people both ace and non ace learn about asexuality, it's their media that people will go to over people that are actually asexual firstly, but asexuals that experience multiple marginalised experiences and the least palatable. I can't help but notice it's aces of colour and/or trans aces picking up the slack. Refusing Compulsory Sexuality isn't a perfect ace book (to be specific Black trans aces have critiques for the use of 'socialised as women' and lack of analysis of transmisogyny & transmisogynoir) at the same time it's managed to summarise the aims of asexual activism (asexual visibility, representation and freedom and abolishing compulsory sexuality), what's harming asexual people (compulsory sexuality, capitalism and allocisheterosexual patriarchy) and steps we can take to do it (asexuality in legal, medical and psychological definitions, asexual stories and fiction, supporting ace victims/survivors, asexual community and coalition with other lgbtq+ labels and more) in it's first 2 chapters, basically 10 minutes to read in what it's taking Breadtube hours and journalists months just say 'labels bad' 'humans sexualitites are different' and 'everyone's valid'...well... yes! What else?

There's SO much sexual analysis written by asexual and aromantic people engaging in ace and aro theory, giving me the depth i want from what mainstream sex positive media is severely lacking. And speaking for my Black acey asexual self, I'd spend my time on non fiction sexual media that will productively include my experiences and correctly engage me instead of alienating me.

I get enough of this from sex *negative* media already.

[gluion]

familiarity (it’s all sticky) ➵ kim sunwoo

peter parker!kim sunwoo x spiderman!reader

you're not sure why you decide to show up at your ex's place all wounded up from tonight's battle.

genre/warnings ➵ exes (to sort of lovers?), angst, touch of fluff, afab reader (no-gendered terms), hurt/comfort (both physical and emotional), discussions of wounds and depictions of blood, lowercase intended, ghost-spider au (though please don't expect it to be accurate!), reader is obviously spiderman while sunwoo is peter parker i mean HELLO?? i am right, sunwoo is such a slob here, reader's hair is long enough to be tucked behind their ear, i also based everything on google when it comes to patching up wounds omg please don't follow me at all, kissing fingertips, mentions of non-sexual stripping and showering (let him take care of you)

word count ➵ 4k words

taglist ➵ @deoboyznet @kflixnet @blankjournal @winterchimez @miusgirl @jenoscafe @sweet-unicorn-world @vernyangel @mosviqu

playlist ➵ nonviolent communication by metro boomin, james blake, a$ap rocky, & 21 savage // hummingbird by metro boomin & james blake

a/n ➵ i've had this idea for the longest time in my drafts. i'm pretty sure it came to me as i was writing of linked arms and bruised hearts, but i'm glad i took some time to sit down (even in my busy and hell midterms season) to write it :') thank you to my lovely cat @wuahae for beta reading <3 this work is only a fraction of what our friendship truly is, and proof of the care we have for each other. i love you! i also thought it would be in theme to get songs from across the spiderverse ost for the playlist </3 please don't forget to reblog (even if it's in your tbr!)

want to be part of my taglist? send me an ask! want to request? check out my guidelines! masterlist

new york city never falls silent. the bustle of every new yorker can be heard through their footsteps,  the wheels that glide against the train tracks along with the beeps of taxis sound throughout the city. the metropolis stays alive in every street, every alleyway, every corner. no matter what hour it may be, each pavement is wide awake.

but the lights seem hazy tonight; the luminescence pours out of every building, the led boards are only blurs of silhouettes and illegible words. normally, you would warn against going out if someone could barely make sense of what these signs say, but you never seem to follow your own advice.

as you swing through the city, web clinging onto every building, blood continues to seep through the white spandex that covers you from head to toe. your body feels heavy, the pain in your lower abdomen continuing to spike with every movement—every swing—you make.

you bite on your lip, holding back the whimpers. your eyes dart through every street sign you pass. with every swing, you realize you’re nowhere close to where you should be. instead… 

you don’t allow yourself to think it over. maybe the loss of blood has you moving out of impulse, but for now, you can only think of getting rid of the pain.

you swing around the corner before landing down at the familiar fire escape, paint-chipped and rusted just like you remember. a hiss leaves your mouth as your hand reaches out to the spot where the blood continues to seep through, holding it down to keep pressure on the wound.

you’re face-to-face with the window; the reflection of you all suited up in some persona is a sight you’re accustomed to—but not on the glass of his window. you’re not sure why you came back here, injured in an identity he only knew of through word of mouth.

but the throbbing in your abdomen doesn’t give you enough time to think more about it. pushing the window up, you throw one leg over the edge into the apartment. your eyes quickly scan through the familiar space—a room you once treated as yours.

pillows scattered and bedsheets wrinkled, the walls are littered with the same posters of anime he swears to be the best of all time (though you’d always disagreed), along with his desk, littered with trinkets you haven’t seen since the day you left him—ones that he talked about to you back then with so much joy.

as you attempt to get your other leg over the edge of the window, you yelp at the sharp pain that strikes. “fuck,” you whimper, gasping out a breath. another groan rips out from your throat as you force your leg over, head resting on the frame with closed eyes, bracing yourself through the wave of pain that follows.

as pants continue to leave your mouth, your senses tingle as your ears catch the sound of footsteps on the other side of the room. you attempt to stand up only for another groan to leave your lips, and you realize it’s too late—the door creaks open, revealing the man you haven’t been face-to-face with since you said your farewell months ago.

dressed in an oversized white tee and a pair of black shorts, sunwoo stands with a bag of chips in his hand and disheveled hair, eyes wide and gaping. you can only assume he was fresh from bed.  

“s-spiderman?!” he looks around, noticing the mess that you’re being exposed to. before you can register it, he rushes in, dropping the bag of chips somewhere near the doorway, and tries to tidy his bed. “w-what are you doing here? i think you might’ve entered the wrong room,” he stutters as he attempts to fix his pillows and bedsheets (poorly, if you may say). 

somehow, the sight of sunwoo all frazzled makes you smile behind your mask. the idea of your—no, you mean, this guy all worried about you seeing how untidy he lives makes you chuckle.

but as you laugh, pain shoots through your lower abdomen once more. you cough out before hissing, pressing onto the wound. it takes everything in you to keep your body upright until you feel a pair of hands rest on your shoulders. you look up only to be met with his worried expression.

and you spot the way his eyes trail down to where your hand rests. you’re thankful that the mask could hide the heat that rises to your cheeks.

“oh god, you need that treated,” sunwoo’s eyes snap back up to you, and your breath hitches. even after all these months, he still holds stars in his eyes.

it’s been a while since you last saw him up close. the bags on his under eyes have turned a few shades darker, and you notice an eyelash that rests on his cheek. you don’t think about what you do next, your free hand reaching out to his face, and his breath hitches. once you pick it out, you flick the strand off of your fingers, and that’s when you realize the mistake you committed.

“s-sorry,” you choke out. although you try to keep your voice as low and gruntled as possible, he frowns. he bites the inside of his cheek as his eyes flicker between your masked face and the wound.

“i-i don’t know how to help. i can call for an ambulan—”

you grab onto his arm before he can leave. as you shake your head, he gulps. “i can’t really help you,” he says, but your grip doesn’t falter. with that, he lets out a sigh before kneeling in front of you. his hands find themselves on the ledge, his arms now caging your frail figure. “do you have someone in mind who can help you?”

sunwoo’s question is innocent. you’re sure the last thing he meant was to mock your situation—showing up in a “stranger’s” room unannounced—but it strikes a chord in you.

you haven’t spoken to him since you broke up a few months back. when you’re outside of your suit, you avoid him like the plague. in the hallways of campus, you take any possible route to not cross his. but when you’re covered in your second skin, you find yourself on top of buildings watching him from far away. with the distance, you allow yourself to learn about what he’s been up to since you two last spoke. 

so you don’t know why you sit in front of him all injured and dressed up in white, black, and pink spandex, because you haven’t spoken to him since that day. shame bubbles within you all while reality slowly slips from your fingertips. and the way your body gets heavier with every second that passes has him mumbling profanities.

his hands hold onto you as he makes you lean your weight on the frame of the window. “wait,” he says as he stands up and walks into his bathroom. before you know it, he comes out with a box.

sunwoo finds his spot back in front of you and he opens what he retrieved. as he looks through the supplies of bandages, alcohol, gauze, and more, he says as his eyes flicker up towards you, “i don’t know how much this will help but it’ll do for now.”

and you should be thankful that someone is willing to bandage you up after the rough night you’ve had, but it feels like a lie to have sunwoo be the one to do it, especially when you haven’t told him the truth.

so when he grabs onto the supplies he needs to treat your wound, your free hand reaches for the underside of your mask. his eyes follow where it rests, and he freezes in his tracks. your fingertips curl on the fabric as you take a deep breath.

“you don’t—”

you shake your head, cutting him off, and you close your eyes before pulling off the mask.

you’re afraid to look at the boy kneeling in front of you, for you can only imagine the annoyance—the disgust—that will paint his features. it’s not like you had a choice to show up at his fire escape this one night, but it was your choice to reveal who spiderman really is behind the mask.

a beat passes.

you’re not sure what to do at this moment. what are you supposed to do after a vigilante reveals who they are?

but when you open your eyes, sunwoo looks back at you with an emotion you can’t pinpoint. he averts his eyes, trailing down to your wound. “let me see it,” he whispers.

you gulp, an attempt to clear your throat and thoughts, before letting your hand move away from the puncture. your hand grips the hem of the top of your suit, peeling it upwards to reveal a bloody wound. from the sight, it looks like you were stabbed, but it’s only a deep cut.

he pulls out a piece of cloth, reaching out and pressing it to your wound. you yelp, eyes squeezing shut at the contact.  “i’m sorry, but we need to stop the bleeding a bit more.” it takes everything in you to open your eyes. you’re met with the sight of sunwoo whose face holds a thousand emotions—you can’t identify any of them.

“can you keep pressure on it?” you only nod before you remove your gloves, afraid to touch the wound with fabric covered in grime. you dump your mask and gloves on the space beside you before letting your hand reach to where the cloth is held against. your hand brushes against his for a split second—you retract your hand immediately at the contact with his skin.

at the sudden motion, the cloth against your stomach drops with nothing left to hold it. sunwoo curses in a panic, hand shooting out in an attempt to save it, but you react faster. snatching it mid-fall, you grasp it tightly, placing the cloth back onto your wound. his eyes dart between where your hand rests and your face, a twinge of worry cast on his features, but he doesn’t give you an opportunity to say anything as he stands up quickly and walks back to his bathroom.

you hear the water run for a moment. the noises of the street fill your ears. the lights from outside cascade the floor, hues of yellow and purple filling the room. and then thunder rumbles; it shakes the floorboards. the sounds of raindrops follow, and you feel your back start to get wet from the storm that has entered new york city.

you try to push yourself off the ledge, a groan ripping out of your throat once more. and you’re finally on your feet. but at any moment, it feels like you may collapse.

“wait, wait! what are you doing?” sunwoo exclaims as he rushes out of the bathroom. he quickly grabs hold of you in an attempt to keep you steady. “don’t stand up or that wound might get worse.”

“i-it’s just the rain. i don’t want to leave the window open.” as you turn your torso, another spike strikes where your wound is. the yelp that leaves your mouth has sunwoo grip onto your arm tighter.

“no, just sit. i’ll take care of it,” he says as he brings you to his chair, his hand never leaves your arm. you let out a hiss until your bottom meets the cushion. as soon as your back rests on the chair, you close your eyes for a moment from the pain.

his hand leaves you. you hear the window shut; the car horns and barks from stray animals are now muffled.

when your eyes flutter open, sunwoo crouches in front of you with a wet towel in his hand. “i need to clean it.” you only nod before removing the cloth on your wound. he grabs it from you and places it on his lap.

as he raises the wet towel to your wound, you flinch at the contact. he quickly retracts it and asks, “does it hurt?”

“no, it’s just cold,” you mumble back. he only nods before attempting to clean the area around your wound. while he keeps his eyes on the puncture, your eyes remain on his face; hues of yellow cast upon him.

his skin glows under the city lights—did anyone know about the stars you once carved on it?

“is this why we broke up?” his eyes snap toward yours as he asks that question.

you cannot help but bite the inside of your cheek. “y-yeah,” you choke out.

he hums before his eyes go back down to your injury. “i’m guessing this is why you were distant then, right?”

you don’t bother to speak, letting the silence speak for itself.

he removes the wet towel; the white cloth is covered in patches of red. as he crumples it into a ball, you spot that his white shirt holds splotches of blood as well.

sunwoo stands up to drop the pieces of fabric on the table behind you. “your dad obviously doesn’t know,” he mutters to himself.

it’s a rhetorical question. of course, your father has no clue of your late-night rendezvous. you’re sure he could never look at you the same if he found out because to him, he would never understand what you do. he would see you only as a low-life criminal in the same way the nypd does. 

sunwoo then dabs a cotton ball soaked in betadine on your abdomen. you bite on your lip as a hiss leaves your mouth. “fuck,” you curse, and he only continues to clean up your wound.

silence takes over you two. as he bandages you up, you allow yourself to close your eyes. you were thankful to find rest in these small moments. but you don’t miss the warmth of his fingertips on your skin; they feel just like last time.

“why did you come here?” his question has your eyes snapping open, and you are met with a frown resting on his face.

you bite the inside of your cheek. “i-i don’t know.” it’s a lie—one you both know. you had every chance to change the route you were taking. instead, you chose to go to his place—even if it may be on the other side of where you live.

he lets out a sigh. it’s clear that he’s disappointed by your words, but all he says is “okay,” as he gets up. “you can stay here for the night.” he stands in front of you in a shirt covered in patches of blood—it’s proof that his heart still holds a spot for you.

despite the venom that was laced in your words the night you cut ties with him, he leaves you a space for you to fill. it’s another choice you can make, but one you’re not sure if you should take.

sunwoo walks to the desk behind you and flips the lamp on. you swivel the chair so that you’re face-to-face with his slouched figure. you would’ve scolded him, but you’re not in the place to do so—not after what you two had.

but a part of you wishes to chide those words—hey, keep slouching and your back will get worse—for old time’s sake. it takes everything in you to hold back from saying the reminder, but it takes nothing to let your hand grip the back of his shirt. his movements halt.

as you sit up, you let your face bury into the arch of his back. the scent of his laundry detergent (it’s still the same smell of lavender) fills your nose, and you let your hands trail around his torso until they find their home on his waist. even after all these months, your hands knew where to rest—your spidey senses knew who to go to.

you feel his hands rest on your arms, his thumb drawing circles on your forearm. you breathe at the same pace as him. whenever his shoulders move up, yours follow. and you allow yourself to cherish just this once the familiar warmth of sunwoo. you let your soul mesh with his once more.

with closed eyes, you whisper, “i still look for you.” his thumb stops moving, and a shaky breath leaves your mouth. “i’m here because all i know is you.”

it’s half of a lie, but still a lie nevertheless. you shake your head against his shirt. “no,” you rescind. “i know i shouldn’t be here, and i had every chance to go back home, but,” you take a deep breath. “would you let me, just this once, be honest with you?”

your question hangs in the air—it’s not for him but for you. all the choices you took led to this moment, from embracing the persona you were handed through a single spider bite all the way to removing the mask in front of him.

sunwoo spins to face you. he stands in front of you with the remnants of you covering him, his shirt coated in hues of red and your blood dried up on his hands. the light behind him causes a shadow to paint his face.

but when he kneels once more in front of you, you get a good look at his features. he still looks like the same boy you first met—the same one you fell in love with—but you wonder if he was still the one you knew?

that is until his hand reaches toward your face. you hold your breath as it finds its spot on your cheek. but as his thumb grazes your cheekbone, a trembling breath leaves you. you gulp everything down—your fears and anxieties—so that you can finally be honest with sunwoo.

“i wanted to tell you who i really am.” a flicker of confusion flashes through his eyes. “and i know i’m not doing it in the best state,” a chuckle leaves your mouth. “but with every day that passes, and every injury i need to endure, i didn’t know when i would be able to tell you what went wrong with us.” a beat passes. “what went wrong with me.”

he shakes his head. “nothing’s wrong with you. what are you talking about?” a frown takes over his face. “i mean, you’re spiderman, for god’s sake.” you weren’t able to hold back the giggle that slipped from your lips.

but it wouldn’t be fair to just accept his words as is, not after the damage you’ve caused.

you let a hand rest on his, the one that rests on your cheek, and you curl your fingers so that you hold it. “i’m sorry that this is me.” the whisper is loud enough to fill the silence of his room. “i’m sorry that i crashed here all injured and left you to deal with the mess,” your eyes flicker to his bed. “especially on a night when you were resting.”

as soon as your eyes go back to sunwoo, you notice that he’s biting the inside of his cheek. “why are you telling me this?” it’s an honest question, one he couldn’t figure out the answer to. “we haven’t seen each other since you broke up with me.”

and he has every right to be confused with your sudden appearance. after all the months spent avoiding him in the halls while still seeking him on top of buildings, sunwoo was left with no clue as to why you come to him first in such a dire situation. why is it that you chose to reveal such an intimate part of yourself months after you two have drifted?

“do i have to say it?” you ask.

and he looks back into your eyes before saying, “it’s the least you can do.”

so you grab onto his hand, moving it so that it rests in yours. the sight of his fingers and palms covered in splotches of you fills your heart with warmth. it’s proof of the time he spent to patch you up. no matter who you may be—spiderman or not—you will forever be at his mercy.

“we can’t be together. it will only be another cycle of pain.” for both of you. as your eyes land back on his face, you spot sorrow coating his features.

“but i still do.” it’s an unfinished thought on his end. despite the frown you show, all he does is flash you a bitter smile. “i always have and always will.”

and it clicks.

“n-no, sunwoo,” you shake your head. “you can’t.”

he brings your hand close to his lips, letting it linger for a moment. “but you do,” he whispers into your fingertips. “right?”

even after revealing who spiderman truly is behind the mask, you expect sunwoo to rethink everything he knows. the months spent away from you should be enough reason to reconsider how much he knows of you now. but even if you two were to spend years apart, he would still read you as well as he does now. 

“i can’t,” you choke out. “i can only offer so much, and you deserve so much more.”

he smiles at you—the same one you used to see every day, no matter what time of the day it may be—as his free hand reaches for your hair, tucking it behind your ear.

“i couldn’t care any less.”

you shake your head. it’s clear he doesn’t understand the gravity of it all; to be with you means to remain in constant danger. “no, sunwoo. you don’t understand. i broke up with you because i’m batshit scared of what will happen to you.”

because it seems to always occur—anyone you come close to becomes another target for your enemies. it’s already hard enough to handle the responsibility of being a masked hero, but you don’t think you could handle a possibility where sunwoo’s death would be on your hands.

but all he does is shake his head and says, “i don’t care. i still love you.”

you haven’t heard him say that to you in months. such a simple phrase causes warmth to fill your limbs and heat to rise to your cheeks. he still has the same effect on you after so long.

there are consequences that this conversation bears. you should have stood up and left as soon as he patched you up. it should’ve been obvious that the longer you stayed, the more you would pour out sentiments that you tried to keep under wraps—under the mask—and it seemed that sunwoo knew how to undo them even better than he did then.

and hearing sunwoo say those words has you falling into a perpetual cycle of torment, one that makes every day intolerable for you can only watch him from afar. but aren’t you already living it the more you deny what’s in front of you two?

so you only nod, and bring his hand close so you can feel his fingertips on your lips. with closed eyes, you whisper, “okay.”

it’s a testament to everything—one to his offer to let you sleep in this very room you once treated as yours, one to his confession that tilted your world’s axis, one to the very situation you’re in—and you’re sure he knows it, too.

he smiles as soon as your eyes flutter open. “let’s go to sleep.”

you know that sleep meant to be wrapped in his arms all while he would leave kisses on your temple. you don’t remember the last time you got enough rest, but you remember that the last time you slept in sunwoo’s arms was the last one you were able to fall into slumber at ease.

so you nod, allowing him to help you out of the chair. and he helps you through it all—shedding the suit off of you, cleaning you of all the grime from tonight’s adventure, and getting dressed in fresh clothes—until you two find your place on his bed.

nothing is said for the rest of the night. for once, you drift into slumber without any secrets stashed away.

if you enjoyed reading this, please do reblog!

[megabuild]

so you like transfem etho right? how do you think she figured it out?

did pause call her a girl once and etho decided she liked it or was there more thought involved

i don't think she ever "figured it out" in the way most people would but that's mainly because i see etho as having a very weird upbringing. she was very lonely as a child and didn't really start meeting people from wider society who treated her like a human but also would inflict gender roles on her until mindcrack when she was like... mid 20s. and yeah there definitely was a bit of teasing there but i don't think it really awakened anything in her more just confused her. if you pushed him about a bit and called him a girl insultingly he'd be like ? No I'm not. Because he has lived so far detached from society he can't even conceptualise the idea of feminity being a "weakness" yet #feminist but also he was raised to play very particular roles and wear very particular masks and girl is not and never has been one of them, he is a Guy, theres no questioning that.

But then yeah of course there is because she leaves mindcrack on pretty bad terms and spends some short time alone before she gets pulled onto hermitcraft and while she's sitting alone she does eventually realise oh, people can do that, people can change. And that fucking terrifies her, so much, because she already has horrible identity issues and doesn't really fully understand it so to her it's an all or nothing 100% change of self, and that's sort of awesome in a way but also really scary because that means rejecting literally everything about herself both past and present and she goes AHHHH FUCK and puts that back in the box and then xisuma recruits her like at the end of iron man when they were setting up the avengers movie. And she goes to hermitcraft and doesn't think about any of that for a really long time despite the never ending horrors happening all the time.

In my head he sort of. Doesn't Get Over It but he comes to terms with all the weird shit that happened to him when he was younger re: 404 and the LP between HC 5 and 7 like he was away on a soul searching mission. And then HC7 has its own fresh nightmares as he comes to terms with HC5 because that was a can of worms itself but this time the difference is that he has friends around him who gets it and can help him. And this is roundabout the time she starts to think about it more because she gets quite close to grian post-mycelium resistance and grian is a trans girl who takes estrogen and everything which is like, everything etho was terrified of, and they have some very clumsy and candid conversations where grian is definitely Not the best person to talk to because she's like well you're fucking stupid. But after talking to her and maybe cleo a bit too though idk if they would have been close enough at that point and bdubs too because while he doesn't know anything about this he knows a lot about etho, she eventually realises wow this doesn't have to be a new mask or a massive upheaval this is just something i can try out on the side if i like it. And so she does! Originally just with her absolute closest friends using she/her sometimes (she ends up using he/she alternately, because she doesn't really have any problem with he/him) and while she never formally Comes Out because that's not her style it spreads until most people use it.

Etho is very much a character of certainty imo, he likes rigid ideas when it comes to himself so he knows what to live up to, so i think not making her label her gender (or sexuality except that's. A different can of worms albeit a slightly less complicated one) is a bit of a character growth thing as much as it is a personal decision. Learning he can not constantly stress over the finer details or try to live up to what others decide he should be whether that's a man or a woman or something else entirely and just accepting that she's herself, and that's her own choice, is a Big Thing for her. though i don't know if she recognises that .