#and it’s my area of expertise

[sentientsky]

“i love thé archives i love being a historian i love the minutia of analysis” i say through gritted teeth as i translate yet another obscure document

[phleb0tomist]

happy disability pride month to people whose main mobility aid is an adjustable bed

people who need to lie flat all the time

people who only sit up to eat or use the bathroom

people who are too unwell to be transported anywhere, even within their own home

people who structure their whole week around recovering from a single planned trip out of bed

people who are technically wheelchair users because they can’t walk, but can’t tolerate being upright for long enough to use a chair either

people who can’t adapt activities to be accesible, and instead have to just miss out on 90% of life

i see you and i respect you and love you. if you feel limited, confined, sick, or bound to your bed, i see you.

[soleminisanction]

I got a bee in my bonnet and spent last night crunching these numbers to confirm a long-held suspicion of mine, and now I'm going to do something with them even if it's only interesting to me. So.

I went through and tallied up all of the fics AO3 currently (as of 3/27/24) has under the tags "Trans Tim Drake," "Nonbinary Tim Drake," "Genderfluid Tim Drake" and "Genderqueer Tim Drake," since I figured that cast a wide enough net without committing myself to reading every fic vaguely tagged Trans Character to figure out which character they were talking about.

I then did the same for Dick, Jason, Damian and Bruce and, after comparing those numbers against each other and against the total number of fics each character has under their general tag, followed up with Duke, Babs, Cass, Steph and Kate, and then Kon, Cassie, and Bart for good measure.

The results confirm the suspicions I was going into check and are really interesting, to me at least:

Despite having far fewer stories overall than Jason, Bruce or Dick, Tim has by far the most stories tagging him under the trans umbrella (653 out of 58,395) and is the only member of the Bats for whom at least one full percent of his stories fall under that category (1.12% to be exact.) He actually has more total trans stories than Jason and Damian combined (308 out of 71,120 and 255 out of 42,607, equaling 0.43% and 0.59%, respectively) and outstretches the 2nd place ranker, Dick, by over a hundred (who clocks in at 438 out of 79,057 -- 0.55%). Bruce amusingly has by far the most stories overall (90,305) but the fewest trans stories (185) for the lowest percentage among the boys (0.2%).

The only one who comes anywhere close to matching Tim percentage-wise is Bart, who has far fewer stories to his name but a ratio of 62 out of 5,717 for 1.08%. I was thinking maybe Young Justice might have a higher percentage than the Bats due to their strong queer fandom but that only really proved true for Bart, with both Cassie and Kon coming in at only 0.2% and 0.28% trans umbrella percentage respectively (actual count 6 out of 2,874 and 39 out of 13,746).

Cassie's numbers correspond with the fact that women just, do not get a lot of these stories, at all, even compared to the general lack of attention they're paid by fanfiction spheres in general. Steph and Kate both clocked in at falling 0.17% under the trans umbrella (29 out of 16,638 for Steph, 5 out of 2,897 for Kate); Cass got 0.13% (21 out of 15,769) and Babs only 0.07%, the lowest percentage out of anyone I calculated for (11 out of 15,785). Duke's showing was a respectable 0.55% (34 out of 6,166) which puts him about even with the rest of the boys.

All of which I just went through to confirm a gut instinct I've had for a while: even in light of the noticeable trend in fandom towards increased visibility for trans and other queer-gendered people over the last decade and a half or so, it's a notable Thing for the DC comics fandom to explore with Tim Drake in specific.

And that doesn't even take into account things like the over 200 "Tim Drake is Catlad | Stray" fics, which almost always have some element of queered gender or at least femme'd sexuality to them, far outstripping any of the other Robin boys' spins in that AU (those counts stand at, respectively: Damian - 11, Dick - 33, Jason - 79, Tim - 242). Or the 11 fics logged under the "Tim Drake is Batgirl" tag, a category that doesn't even exist for any of the other male Robins.

(What makes that last one extra hilarious to me that most people don't know one canonical version of Tim has been a member of the Batgirls.) Part of me wants to use that parenthetic detail as a segway to ramble about the various canon snippets I think probably contributed to this, from Tim being presented as "the pretty one" who most often gets the "looks like his mother" comments to the fact that he is the only male Robin who's ever cross-dressed for an undercover mission and even though it only happened once the Internet will never forget Caroline Hill.

But this post is long enough as it is and I don't really have a point beyond I think this is interesting and cool so I'm going to leave off here for now and put my numbers under a cut so people have the raw data to look at if they'd like to.

TL;DR - Based on the numbers, the internet believes Tim Drake is more likely to be trans than any other member of the Bat-family or Young Justice, and I think that has interesting implications about his character and fandom. It's neat.

Data Taken: 3/27/24

Tim Drake: 58,395 Trans Tim Drake: 513 Nonbinary Tim Drake: 46 Genderfluid Tim Drake: 89 Genderqueer Tim Drake: 5

Dick Grayson: 79,057 Trans Dick Grayson: 399 Nonbinary Dick Grayson: 15 Genderfluid Dick Grayson: 23 Genderqueer Dick Grayson: 1

Jason Todd: 71,120 Trans Jason Todd: 286 Nonbinary Jason Todd: 17 Genderqueer/Genderfluid Jason Todd: 5 (4 have both tags and are the only ones tagged Genderqueer Jason Todd)

Damian Wayne: 42,607 Trans Damian Wayne: 215  Nonbinary Damian Wayne: 37 Genderfluid Damian Wayne: 3 Genderqueer Damian Wayne: 0

Bruce Wayne: 90,305 Trans Bruce Wayne: 180 Nonbinary Bruce Wayne: 5 (2 also tagged Trans Bruce Wayne) Genderfluid Bruce Wayne: 1 Genderqueer Bruce Wayne: 1

-

Total Trans Umbrella Tim Drake: 653 Total Trans Umbrella Dick Grayson: 438 Total Trans Umbrella Jason Todd: 308 (313 if you count the GQ tag separately) Total Trans Umbrella Damian Wayne: 255 Total Trans Umbrella Bruce Wayne: 185 (187)

Percentage Trans Umbrella Tim Drake: 1.12% (1.11825) Percentage Trans Umbrella Dick Grayson: 0.55% (0.55403) Percentage Trans Umbrella Jason Todd: 0.43% (0.43307 or 0.44010) Percentage Trans Umbrella Damian Wayne: 0.59% (0.59849) Percentage Trans Umbrella Bruce Wayne: 0.2% (0.20466)

----

Duke Thomas: 6,166 Trans Duke Thomas: 20 Nonbinary Duke Thomas: 14 Genderfluid Duke Thomas: 0 Genderqueer Duke Thomas: 0

Barbara Gordon: 15,785 Trans Barbara Gordon: 11 Nonbinary Barbara Gordon: 0 Genderfluid Barbara Gordon: 0 Genderqueer Barbara Gordon: 0

Cassandra Cain: 15,769 Trans Cassandra Cain: 15 Nonbinary Cassandra Cain: 6 Genderfluid Cassandra Cain: 0 Genderqueer Cassandra Cain: 0

Stephanie Brown: 16,638 Trans Stephanie Brown: 27 Nonbinary Stephanie Brown: 2 Genderfluid Stephanie Brown: 0 Genderqueer Stephanie Brown: 0

Kate Kane (DCU): 2,897 Trans Kate Kane: 4 Nonbinary Kate Kane: 0 Genderfluid Kate Kane: 1 Genderqueer Kate Kane: 0

-

Total Trans Umbrella Duke Thomas: 34 Total Trans Umbrella Barbara Gordon: 11 Total Trans Umbrella Cassandra Cain: 21 Total Trans Umbrella Stephanie Brown: 29 Total Trans Umbrella Kate Kane: 5

Percentage Trans Umbrella Duke Thomas: 0.55% (0.55141) Percentage Trans Umbrella Barbara Gordon: 0.07% (0.06968) Percentage Trans Umbrella Cassandra Cain: 0.13% (0.13317) Percentage Trans Umbrella Stephanie Brown: 0.17% (0.17429) Percentage Trans Umbrella Kate Kane: 0.17% (0.17259)

----

Kon-El | Conner Kent: 13,746 Trans Kon-El | Conner Kent: 19 Nonbinary Kon-El | Conner Kent: 19 Genderfluid Kon-El | Conner Kent: 1 Genderqueer Kon-El | Conner Kent: 0

Bart Allen: 5,717 Trans Bart Allen: 40 Nonbinary Bart Allen: 20 Genderfluid Bart Allen: 1 Genderqueer Bart Allen: 1

Cassie Sandsmark: 2,874 Trans Cassie Sandsmark: 4 Nonbinary Cassie Sandsmark: 2 Genderfluid Cassie Sandsmark: 0 Genderqueer Cassie Sandsmark: 0

-

Total Trans Umbrella Kon-El: 39 Total Trans Umbrella Bart Allen: 62 Total Trans Umbrella Cassie Sandsmark: 6

Percentage Trans Umbrella Kon-El: 0.28% (0.28371)  Percentage Trans Umbrella Bart Allen: 1.08% (1.08448) Percentage Trans Umbrella Cassie Sandsmark: 0.2% (0.20876)

[dragonpropaganda]

you should talk about your thoughts on rw fanon (looking with huge eyes)

Oh god, there's a lot of major misconceptions have concreted into fanon, mostly around ancient society and ascension.

First things first! Ascension is not death! They are entirely separate things treated entirely separately by the text of the game. I can see where the interpretation is coming from, but it doesn't really align with how the text treats either subject. Five Pebbles may want to remove the self destruction taboo, but from his reaction to the rot it's clear that he doesn't want to die. Conflation of ascension and death only comes up as an offhand possibility that pebbs makes on iterator 4chan, when he's going into the possibilities of scenarios that even the other sliverists are doubtful of! (let me make clear that I am not a sliverist by any means)

Ascension is more of talked about as a form of transcendence, yeah? A Bell, Eighteen Amber Beads talks about their sitution as being "To have grasped at the boundless infinites of the cosmic void…", not as them seeking an end to life.

The beta dialogue goes into more detail, mentioning the "infinities of time and space" and the "boundless fractal planes of spirit and reality...", though this dialogue was cut and it's hard to tell how much it reflects the concept as in the released game.

As for the cultural misconceptions... there's A Lot to talk about, but the first that comes to mind is the common conflation of the five natural urges and the christian concept of sin.

It is true that the negation of urges is mentioned by moon as an alternative method of ascension, but much of what we know about the culture of the people who the fandom calls the ancients (which makes discussion of the depths a mess but that's something for another post entirely) points towards the urges not being seen as shameful.

Even the first urge does not seem to be particularly scorned! Being a warrior is presented as a cause for bragging in the Shaded Citadel pearl, being comparable with being an artist and a fashion legend. The second urge, also does not seem to be suppressed. Multiple sources attribute some level of honour to parenthood! The aforementioned pearl also mentions Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel as being a "Mother, Father and Spouse" without any hint of shamefulness. Nineteen Spades, Endless Reflections expresses pride about having progeny, mentioning it alongside their owned land and esteem among their peers.

After some peer review, an esteemed friend has told me to add a section on purposed organisms as well! This is not so much my area, so I might be a bit off on some things.

As moon says, the majority of purposed organisms were tubes in boxes, and that the primal fauna of the world are almost entirely extinct. A lot of the fandom seems to ignore the first part, and i can't say I blame them, but the evolution of the creatures is so much weirder than people think.

Concept art for the creatures has this interesting quality to it, where the organic parts of the creatures have an almost... melty quality to them.

In the concept art, the flesh appears as if it's almost defying the machinery to form an animal shape. It's as if it's conquering its own artificiality the way the foliage grows over the (stone, brick and concrete, not mostly metal as some think!) ruins.

Of course, it's hard to really tell how much of this reflects the finalised concept, most of the integration is much smoother in the game, in line with a seamless kind of biomechanical design. There was always an intention of biomechanical strangeness, as shown in this screenshot of the devlog before the term "slugcat" even existed!

That said, the melty nature of the concept art shows a level of wild change inherent the biomechanical nature of the creatures, as if they truly are the result of these "tubes in boxes" almost revolting against their own boxes.

and considering centipedes... some tubes may not have had boxes in the first place!

[chissgender]

Been getting really into Disco Elysium lately, so here’s my attempt at painting Tami in the style

[amygdalae]

I'm working on a Halloween party playlist teehee

[johnsspacesuittight]

discovered the Sherlock and Co. podcast randomly on Spotify yesterday (hey sometimes the algorithm’s not so bad) and my god is it beautiful perfect everything to me, I mean Sherlock is my one definite special interest so it’s hard to go wrong with anything even adjacent to that, but when you then have Sherlock pretty immediately list all his diagnoses importantly including ADHD and Autism I was pretty much as happy as I can be, literally spent a good chunk of my final year of uni being frustrated at all the ways people elect to just not acknowledge Sherlock’s autism/variable diagnoses nor sexuality despite like clearly making choices about how to portray him/writing some very undeniable traits for him, so I don’t think I can even express just how much I enjoy canonically autistic Sherlock

[beary-eyed]

Cowboy Fabian! I was experimenting a bit more with a sketchy style here and honestly forwards the end just got sick of it and kinda gave up

[moonriselabyrinth]

“We aren’t seeing Helaena go mad” yeah people don’t generally “go mad” the way history books suggest! It’s usually a spiral and it’s fucking painful and sometimes it isn’t obvious to people on the outside until it’s too late.

[ihatebrainstorm]

Was thinking about the idea of conjunx endurae:

Is the reason why it’s so rare for bots to find a conjunx bc of the war? Or more-so the fact they live so long, there’s the extra pressure of when choosing, to find someone you’d be potentially willing to spend millions of years with? Or both? (But then again I can’t remember the exact line, although I feel it might’ve been rare back before the war and everything too? Unless ur Chromedome ig)

[aster-aspera]

Penelope's weaving

aka I, an archeologist, am here to review the accuracy Penelope's loom in the 2024 movie 'The Return' because I want to avoid thinking about all my papers due next week. For context, I am currently writing my bachelor paper on Minoan textiles, and while I am definitely not an expert, I do know a thing or two about bronze age textile technology

So first point of pedantry: that is not at all a bronze ago loom.

I can't say exactly say what kind of loom this is, as I've only studied bronze ago looms. Whatever kind of horizontal/draw/treadle loom this is, I can confidently state that this would not have been used in Mycenaean times. I'd say that we only see these kinds of looms in Europe from the medieval period, somewhere around the 11th century.

In the bronze age, there are three types of looms in use (as far as we know). The horizontal ground loom, the two beam loom, and the warp-weighted loom. Most traditionally, we see iconography depict Penelope weaving on a warp-weighted loom, like this beautiful vase does.

We can clearly recognize this as a warp weighted loom, because we can see the weights: they're the little triangles at the ends of the vertical threads (the warp). The warp-weighted loom is also the only loom we can find archeological remains of, as the loom weights were often made of clay (sometimes pebbles), while the other types of looms were purely wooden.

Furthermore, I have genuinely no clue what she is supposed to be doing with her weaving in this short clip. There is no visible shed, which is the separation between the warp yarns, through which you pull the weft, so that you can actually weave something.

Here's a picture of the shed, as you can see, every other thread is pulled up, and the shed can then be switched around to create a woven pattern.

In the short clip we see, she seems to just be drawing some threads through the warp, which is more than a little nonsensical. If one was weaving a smaller fabric or a tapestry, one could perhaps use a pin or sword beater to pick up individual threads of the warp to pass your horizontal thread (the weft) under, and create patterns that way. That is still not what she is doing here. Additionally, she is weaving a solid red fabric, which would not make it a very interesting tapestry.

Perhaps she's undoing her weaving in this scene? It would make a little more sense if that was what she was doing, as no one would ever be actively weaving at night! It required a lot of light to be able to see what you were doing. Candle light just did not suffice. It still looks a little strange to me, as I don't actually see any woven fabric on the loom that she could be undoing. It's all just loose warp threads.

Honestly, it kind of looks like they picked up a loom from the nearest interactive history museum and plunked it into their movie without doing any research. I think it's a little sad that when adapting a work that centers weaving as much as the Odyssey does, the filmmakers did not do any research into bronze age weaving. You really don't need to be writing a paper on this stuff to find sources for this!

I'll just leave you all with this: a beautiful reconstruction of a warp-weighted loom, with the beginnings of a tapestry as Penelope would have woven it. You can see the loom weights at the bottom, and the sticks in the middle called the heddles, which were used to create the shed I discussed earlier. This is part of the Penelope project.

[vanweezer]

jancyweek day 4 → au: 2000s

jonathan is a good for nothing emo & nancy is a #prep1!1!1! in the style of daria (it counts shhh), tdi, & gorillaz/00s era jamie hewlett. the playlist is something i think jonathan would make for her, and nancy would appreciate the effort even if the music wasn't her exact taste. she definitely makes him listen to michelle branch though

my favorite parts of the page ^^

[totheidiot]

L. is so mosquito to me. do you get me? do you understand? light is the human being of course, just the parasitism of it… the casual nuisance that never leaves you alone. draws on your blood because it is in its nature. and all you want to do is reach forward and kill it right between your hands. you strike it down and in your palms, its blood sticks, all red and gross. you have to kill it. if you don't, it'll kill you first with its disease.

[alacants]

"#not to be a heretic but#fedal......." omg heresy fr... but also i'm intrigued, pls say more!! many pennis for ur heretic thoughts.

heeheehee how apropos.

MY MOST CONTROVERSIAL OPINION…. i mean the classic take is fun. i don't not ship it. i just think the essence of the post—"it's weirder if they DON'T want to fuck"—is right on the money. 

like what if we did take the relationship exactly at face value. they do all these things, they say all these things, they have this incredible intensity of feeling and it's totally divorced from a romantic/sexual context. but no one does that, not fandom and not ""normal"" tennis fans—they slip into shipping language as easy as anyone else. because society has no other way for us to explain it to ourselves or each other. like that fucking letter! it's way EASIER to explain the letter if they're in love. there are very defined conventions for that. we don't have easy words for the other thing. for what if the person who in so many ways defined your life, who in so many ways defined your self, wasn't your family or your partner or your lover or even your best friend.

i think it's extremely difficult for most of us to wrap our heads around what that means and what that feels like. and that makes it interesting.

uh basically the answer is that in general i'm fascinated by Big and Weird platonic relationships. (no, as a sports fan? really?)

(there is a meta consideration as well—as you have astutely noted, narratives are about making sense of chaos and they adapt to the line of best fit as the scatterplot of the chaos changes. the line of best fit is very defined now but it wasn't always and i have just enough memory of when #fedalinlove wasn't a given to find that take especially intriguing. but that's not quite what the post was saying.)

[bloodyrib]

terrifier gif makers thank you for your service 🫡

[funuya]

happy gakuryuu day