#and then the artist is absolutely *vitriolic* in the tags

[arithmonym]

if i had a nickel for every time TLT fans called people “freaks” for their shipping habits, i would have WAY too many nickels. knock it off.

[marypsue]

Ahh also as an addendum to my previous ask about the age swap (which I might’ve accidentally labeled as the body swap fic due to the foibles of being awake unexpectedly early ), I was curious what your criticisms are regarding Robin and Will’s treatments by the Duffers? I know you’ve alluded to being bothered by both but I’d be curious to hear more ( if you have the time/hankering!)

Hooboy. Okay. Buckle in. 

Obviously this is going to be a combination of actual literary analysis and Big Feelings That I Have, so like, please don’t take this as any kind of moral dictum on what to or not to watch, or how to or how not to interpret what you watch. Also, a lot of what makes me uneasy and unhappy about how canon deliberately handles queerness (as opposed to when it does queer things apparently by accident, which as you may have noticed, I have considerable amounts of fun with) has to do with behind-the-scenes context I’ve read about, so there’s a certain degree of Telephone involved. And I’m still only halfway through season four. There’s just so fucking much of it. 

With all that said. 

The behind-the-scenes context I’m most specifically concerned with are the season-one pitch bible(? I think that’s what it’s called) (which, it should be noted, ended up diverging in some quite significant ways from what ended up in the show) where the Duffers first raised the possibility that Will might be gay, and the anecdote that Joe Keery and Maya Hawke were the ones who decided Robin should be queer and had to really push for it and wrote and choreographed that scene in the bathroom. Put the two together, and it tells you that the Duffers planned that there would be One (potentially) Gay Character in their show. 

And that character was the one they spent an entire season directing violent, vicious, eventually outright murderous homophobic hatred at through the mouthpiece of a couple of bullies. You can say what you want about revenge narratives and those characters ultimately getting their comeuppance, but for Me Personally, it sucks all the fun and escapism out of season one to watch it thinking that those bullies only got punished when they aimed that vitriol at someone to whom it didn’t literally apply. Also I still have to sit through however many episodes of that vicious homophobia onscreen regardless, so, like, that’s a walk in the park anyway. /sarcasm 

And then there’s that whole bad business in season three, where it’s never been quite clear to me if we’re supposed to see Mike as having been in any way in the wrong. Kind of scuppers the argument, to me, that we’re supposed to be on Will’s side. And season four, which so far has had Will tagging along after people who are supposed to be his best friends but mostly don’t seem to give a single damn about him, doing absolutely nothing but looking morose and sullen and tragic and *coughcough* Artistic, and causing Problems for the nice straight couple. 

(Tangential to the point I’m coming to, but also, my son deserves better than to be reduced to a soggy cardboard standee with ‘GAY’ scrawled across it in magic marker the way season four seems to be angling toward. All the Byers, but especially the Byers boys, deserve better than season four seems interested in giving them. But I digress.) 

Also. I love Robin. If you follow me, you probably know that. I’m a hardcore, ride-or-die Robin girl. But. With Robin, from what I’ve heard of the context, the Duffers never intended for her to be queer. They wrote a girl who was smart and funny and sharp and talented and a little bit mean and a little bit insecure and a little bit weird but in an interesting, endearing way - as a love interest for Steve. 

And then, as soon as season four rolled around, once they’d been pushed into making her canonically, on-screen queer (in a beautiful, tender, heartfelt, true-feeling scene that they didn’t fucking write), suddenly she’s had a complete personality transplant. Suddenly, she’s an awkward, bumbling, annoying loser who’s only funny when she’s the butt of the joke, who’s no good at anything and who nobody really likes except maybe for Steve, an outcast even amongst the freaks. When she does do something smart or competent, everyone around her reacts with shock, like it’s wildly out of character instead of how her character was originally written. One of these versions of Robin was written with ‘gay person’ in mind, and it unfortunately wasn’t the one we were obviously supposed to like. 

In both cases, I get the feeling that the storytelling issues stem from this like...assumption that queerness equals isolation and misery and tragedy, and that there’s nothing to queerness outside of that. That there’s something inherent to queerness, something pitiable but repulsive, that causes the isolation and misery and tragedy (not that those things are imposed from outside, by, say, violent homophobia). That it would be absurd to imagine that queerness could ever be joyful, or playful, or that someone might ever, given the chance to choose, not choose to be straight instead. Or that there could be enormous friendship and community and heart and pride in queerness, or even that queer people might find friendship and community and strength in each other. Or even fucking talk to each other, ever. 

Which is especially infuriating, because the whole central theme of season one (besides surface appearances being deceiving) is that community and care between people who are very different but discover they have more in common than there is that separates them is what saves the day! That love comes in all kinds of forms, and they’re all important, and that love can be stronger than fear! 

But apparently, according to the Duffers, queer love doesn’t count and queer community doesn’t exist. It’s just isolation, misery, and tragedy, and I guess we the watchers are supposed to sit outside of it and pity Them for it (and be quietly, sneakily, a little bit nastily grateful that it’s not happening to Us). Because of course nobody watching the show is queer. Of course. This show is made for normal people. 

It’s part of the same attitude I’ve also seen play out with the Duffers’ inability to just let a white dude be bad. Oh, they want to talk a big game about how they’re on the side of the freaks, and bullies are bad, and everybody should be respected and appreciated for who they are. But when it cuts down to the bone, when applying that precept to a girl or a person of colour or a queer person makes a straight white guy come off as a monster, they keep trying to dodge it. 

The more antagonists they try desperately to rehab without ever acknowledging why they were antagonists in the first place, the more it starts to look like they simply don’t really believe that the people those antagonists hurt really matter. That, somewhere deep down where the assumptions that are so baked in you don’t even realise they’re assumptions live, they don’t really believe that girls, or Black kids, or queer people are as fundamentally human and deserving of respect and compassion as their beloved awful straight white men are. That what they really think about bullies is that bullies are bad because the bullies picked on them, instead of the kinds of people who deserved it.

(See also: that time a twelve- or thirteen-year-old Sadie Sink didn’t want to have to do a kiss in the Snow Ball scene, so the Duffers, who had just been joking about having her do it, actually made her do it. For multiple takes. Specifically because she didn’t want to. And then later related that anecdote to the press. Because they thought it was funny.)

Anyway. Personally, I’d prefer canon just never say anything definitive on the matter of Will’s sexuality and stop trying to push the narrative in that direction, so I don’t have to watch the Duffers spectacularly fumble yet another attempt at Writing About Marginalised Groups. 

(Also, this is absolutely not me saying Watch A Different Show - I’m here writing fanfic for this stupid show, it’d be pretty fucking rich of me to try to tell people to stop watching it. But I’d really love for many of its fans to get some more exposure to less-mainstream, more deliberately queer literature and film, so y’all can see what it really feels like to be seen and acknowledged and loved by a story, on purpose. I get it! I do! I too have wanted very badly to feel like something I loved, loved me back. 

But you don’t have to content yourselves with scraps. And you definitely don’t have to be so concerned with those scraps that you blame your friends, cousins, siblings, brothers in arms for ‘stealing’ some kind of ‘representation’ from you by asking to be seen and acknowledged and loved as well. The bastards who’ve been withholding that recognition from all of us would love nothing more than to watch with amusement, gorging themselves on a banquet, while we tear each other apart over a couple of discarded bones. Don’t give them the satisfaction. We don’t have to be isolated, pitiable, pathetic, miserable tragedies. Put the hollow promises of exclusionism and respectability down. There is queer art and literature and film and community and joy and love in abundance that you don’t have to beg anyone for, and you are invited to participate. This is me inviting you to participate. 

And cordially inviting the Duffers to meet me in the woods behind the 7-Eleven.)

...

tl;dr the way the Duffers treat queerness when they do it on purpose feels like a combination of othering, contempt, and misery porn, and I hate it. And that, in a nutshell, is the rant I’ve been sitting on for the last two-and-a-bit years. I’m getting down off the cafeteria table now. 

[sprnklersplashes]

#there's this one post talking about how the album announcement overshadowed an artist calling for a ceasefire in palestine#which yeah absolutely it sucks that important issues get overshadowed in these events- but that's more related to the structure of the award#shows themselves rather than the actions of one particular artist#but then every single reply is just straight up ''yeahhh taylor swift and anyone who enjoys her music should die'' like brooo what the#actual fuck. it's just one woman. what the fuck#like the vitriolic hatred people have towards her is sooooo gross like. why are you so so mad it's just one privileged woman#in the privileged people show. all of these people are out of touch shut upppp yes there's things to criticize god knows the woman is far#from perfect but god. the way people talk about her. madness#also ppl asking like it's her fault she was given an award. buddy that's not how this works!#taylor swift;

these tags honestly thank god I am not the only person rubbed the wrong way by the comments on that post.

I cannot stress enough how trying to blame massive systemic issues like the censoring of palestinians/pro-palestine voices on one person is one of the least helpful things you can do.

sorry but yall... need to learn how to have normal convos about taylor swift. and i mean EVERYONE.

haters will be like "taylor swift is the devil. evil woman. worst person alive."

and then stans will be like "actually she can do no wrong. she is always correct."

like shut up!!!! all of yall stfu please fr it's like watching the dumbest convo take place.

taylor swift is a flawed, extremely privileged person. she can both be a good person, and fuck up. she can have good intentions but be absolutely out of touch and cause harm. she can also quite frankly have the wrong opinions yall. she is a person. yall have GOT to digest that.

you can disagree with things she does and not think she's satan like my god did we all collectively graduate elementary school?? can we all have complex emotions??? let us try harder on that thank you so much.

[faranae]

Hello everyone!

Per my promise to involved parties, since Jirachi has pulled the charm design and issued a statement I am more than happy to respond in kind. Ecstatic, even, that we’ve managed to bring this to a peaceful resolution! 

The following is my account, not Spud’s. I need to make that very clear, as some folk have been implying I’m the potato Lorax and that’s less than ideal. Spud’s got her own voice; This is my post.

As Jirachi said in their own post: Please do not keep reading if you need to take a break from this. Take care of yourselves first. Desktop users, taping “J” will nyoom you to the next post on your feed. 

You may also block my #DISCOURSE tag if you don’t want to see this sort of thing, though as I understand it is a bit buggy right now. Please take care of yourselves!

To open: Hi. I’m Fara, that person who posted the ‘artists-beware’-styled post from a few days ago. The post has since been taken down as it’s no longer necessary. Massive thanks to Jirachi for doing the right thing so that I could do so in good conscience. I can’t say how much I appreciate how well they’re handling this considering the stress they’re under.

Jirachi is right that this should never have had to go public. It resulted in a mess of vitriolic discourse from the general public on both sides that should never have happened, and for that I apologize. There’s no point sugar-coating it: I shouldn’t have spoken on issues I was not directly involved in. No matter how much I wanted to defend Spud or how frustrated with how things were going, I was wrong.

However, and I know this usually invalidates an apology but hear me out for a moment: I’m very happy with the final resolution. My intent was always to protect Spud, and with the charms being redesigned (which I am very excited about and y’all should absolutely go preorder them when they’re ready) it completely solves the problem. This was never intended to be personal, it was always about the merch. 

I was asked to refrain from fueling the fire any more once our apologies are posted. I have nothing against Jirachi personally; I adore their work and sincerely hope the new charms sell like hotcakes. So long as this stays down, I don’t see the need to paint them in any sort of negative light and will refrain from doing so. They’re a good person, even if we don’t personally jive anymore. 

Thanks again Jirachi. It’s been a long weekend but I’m so happy this is coming to a close. 

I’m genuinely sorry all this happened in the midst of a family emergency. Please take care of yourself, and if any of my followers come your way being a jerk please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can give them a boot to the backside. 

To my followers: If I find out you’ve gone after Jirachi or anyone involved either during or after this, you will be permanently banned from all of my blogs. Don’t test me on this.

Since there is currently a version of my accountability post being spread with the proof/confirmation of deletion removed, I’m adding them to this post under the cut. 

Tumblr:

Twitter:

And while it was not my post, Instagram (receipt posted with permission):

[muppenthings]

“Frantically he tries to call out to them but his abused vocal cords betray him and all that comes out is a hoarse choked keen.” 

I got a little inspired by prplzorua’s ‘Missing you’ fic~ It’s absolutely amazing! 🌸

Tag list, gotta share the angst 

@justanotherpurplebutterfly @vitriolic-artist @sparrow-flightninggale @unsurepotatohooman @welovelogansanders @the-aroace-queen-in-the-quiver @lonelyanxiousbean @justanothernerdyfandomblog @luci-the-android @hiddendreamer67 @raccoonrabbit15 @theregoesmygpa @hikarisakurariver @thenaiads @secretlypansexualmango @infinitywarkilledmysoul @averykedavra @yalltookmyurlideas @iamdarknessiamdeath @nonbeenary-enbee @alexisthedevilsfox @agoddamnrayofsunshine @rainbowbowtie @feathersofbelle @firefox2215 @mynamehasbeenstolen @werewolfsonpage394 @pixelatedrose @sablesides @ncanspeak @killjoy-3000 @justagaygoose @bunny222 @linhammon-roll-bromance101 @star-crossed-shipper @fandomfan315 @hitmewiththatfanart33 @sparkleydoggy-main @amaris-the-panda  @franticfandomfanatic @anonwithagun @craz-ewaters @bluegreeninbtwn @riz-likes-tea @a-random-italian @just-your-typical-trans-guy @themarblefox09 @writingfeedsthedarkestones  @useless-gay-baby @neverrise @thatonea1ien @katthebookiestnerd @thatoneloudowl @lamsauce @mizuki-rin-reblogs

[xpouii]

Spit Take

Hey y’all! I really put my nose into this fic to get it finished. It was commissioned by (anonymous) and I hope you like it! The prompt was amazing!

Tags/Warnings: NSFW, Dukexiety, Prinxiety, full NSFW warnings below the cut!

Warnings: Spit kink, tentacle dick, cum play, rough, bulging (stomach and throat), deepthroating, gagging, choking, drooling, crying, masturbation, voyeurism/slight exhibitionism, toys

           “Kiddo!” Patton called as he stepped out of the kitchen. “We’re having a movie night… care to join us? I made cookies.”

           “Yes, Virgil,” Logan echoed. “You don’t have to wear a onesie if you don’t want to. Patton just has an affinity for them for some reason.”

           “Like you don’t?” Roman muttered, flipping through the menu of available movies. “Did we decide what we’re watching?”

           “March of the Penguins,” Logan said. “It’s the only possible compromise. There’s scientific information, aesthetically pleasing animals and it’s narrated by Morgan Freeman.”

           “Aww penguins!” Patton gasped.

           “I wanted to watch Aladdin, but…” Roman chewed the inside of his mouth, “You do have a point about Morgan Freeman. His voice is just so soothing!”

           Logan seemed pleased with himself as he picked up a cookie from the large plate of them. Virgil reminded himself to sneak back out later and help himself once the others had gone to bed. Patton clapped his hands together, “Great I’m so proud we agreed right away! I can’t wait to watch these adorable penguins with my best friends. So what do you say, Virgil? Penguins do wear a lot of black, and there’s an empty spot on the couch with your name on it! Not literally but if you give me five minutes and some glitter pens I could whip something up.”

           “You?” Roman scoffed. “What about me? You’re going to make an artistic gift for Virgil without me?”

           Patton smiled warmly at Roman and patted his knee, “Of course not, Roman. You’re my favorite artist!”

           “Uh… gee Pat that sounds great but I’ve got stuff to do,” Virgil said. They were all looking at him then, Logan with his cool, matter-of-fact interest and Roman with a look that Virgil still hadn’t decrypted. The Prince would catch his eyes sometimes, especially across the room or in the middle of a group conversation, and Virgil felt cold and hot, invited and accused all at once. It was hard not to slip into a sneer and snap like he used to. Old habits die hard, especially in frightened animals, but Virgil wanted to be the light side they had invited him to be. That just hadn’t quite extended to movie nights and cookies yet, so he ducked his head and hustled off to his room, kicking it shut behind himself. He’d left the kitchen on a mission after all.

           Virgil locked his door, pulling up his hood before walking over and sitting on the edge of his bed; he closed his eyes and smiled softly, his mind swimming with slow memories, nostalgia that skated like fingertips over his skin. His legs opened, an automatic response as he slid his hand down to palm himself through his jeans; tingling heat swam over him and he whined, his fingers quickly unbuttoning and unzipping his jeans. He moaned at the relief of pressure but it was short-lived as he hardened fully. Virgil pulled himself free of his underwear and spat into his hand. More memories, more heat as he wrapped his slick hand over his cock and stroked slowly, letting out a little chuckle of disbelief at just how good it felt. Virgil was usually much more interested in being with somebody than touching himself—it required a certain amount of self-interest that he struggled with—but he was in a bit of a transitional period, new friends and new… faces.

           Logan, Patton and Roman weren’t anything like the others, although Patton and Logan often wrestled for the top spot—at least that’s how it looked to Virgil when he was fresh from the subconscious, after he’d been accepted, but now he knew that Patton was in charge in a far different way than Deceit, especially considering Patton had little idea just how much sway he held over Thomas’ decisions. Then there was Roman, Remus’ parasitic twin—as they used to call him downstairs—but so completely different. Where Remus felt unshakable confidence, Roman was a ball of insecurity. Where Remus liked to sneak up on a conversation, Roman burst into the room like a confetti canon, scattering fanfare and nicknames. Where Virgil had found casual companionship in Remus, his feelings for about Roman were complicated at best, and terrifying at worst. When Roman had given his little speech of encouragement in Virgil’s room, it wasn’t his cock that twitched. It was his heart, and wasn’t that just the worst. At least with Remus, things were simple.

           An easy moan escaped his lips and he couldn’t help but rock up into his hand, a slow sustained rhythm that he stopped only to gather the precum from the head of his cock and spread it downward. It used to always be this easy, smiles and moans and letting go. Anxiety was Thomas’ problem, and Virgil had always been happy to let it choke Thomas rather than analyzing, tweaking and dealing with it. Back then, he’d been Deceit’s—and Remus’, and he’d been a simpler, saucier creature. Even when he would mess up and get caught up in his own web of panic, and when Deceit’s gentle petting and encouraging words weren’t enough, Remus knew exactly how to fix the problem. Virgil’s smart little mouth had always been good for more than spitting vitriol and sarcasm, and Remus knew exactly how to drag it out—or push it in—in the best ways. Virgil raised his free hand and slipped two fingers into his mouth, moaning around them as he pressed against his tongue, thrusting them back and forth until they started to tickle that fluttery feeling in his chest, caught between swallowing and coughing, gagging and moaning—just like old times.

 ---

           When Virgil came to him, Remus knew exactly what he wanted. His eyes were dark, red-rimmed and his lips were in a full pout, wet and reddened by chewing, absolutely begging, “What is it, Emo?”

           Virgil unzipped his hoodie and shrugged it off, pulling his shirt over his head; he knelt in front of Remus, a question in his eyes, spilling out in a throaty whisper, “Are you busy?”

           “Too busy for you? Never,” Remus said, sliding his fingers through Virgil’s hair, gathering it so he could take in Virgil’s face. He was pale, but a blush sat high on his cheeks, and his eyes were darker than usual, the black makeup smeared all the way down to his cheekbones and streaked down by a drying tear or two of frustration. Remus always thought this Virgil was the most beautiful, so true to himself, so overtaken by his purpose and his instincts that even Deceit couldn’t suppress him, and he was begging Remus to fuck his mouth and let the wild brambles of the anxious side’s mind grow uninhibited until Remus choked it all away.

           Virgil’s full lips twitched into the tiniest wisp of a smile as he reached for Remus’ pants. The creative side slapped his hand away gently, and lost his clothes via magic. He would rather be naked anyway—given the chance. His cock, so familiar to Virgil by now, was just as eldritch as anything else Remus had any kind of control over, a tentacle that—according to the creative side—had a mind all its own. Virgil was fairly convinced that Remus was perfectly in control of himself, cock and otherwise. It traced Virgil’s lips and the anxious side opened his mouth, closing his eyes as the first hints of the familiar taste touched his tongue. He opened wider to accommodate the tapered organ as it pushed further, heavy on his tongue and writhing against every surface of his mouth, exploring and giving Virgil that familiar stomach flutter.

           Remus’ hand at the back of his head made him calm, tension easing as Remus took control; all he had to do was be present. The taste of precum made him moan, and Remus pulled back, making Virgil lean forward to chase his cock. He was hungry for it, entirely tunnel-visioned, and Remus chuckled, “Impatient, Emo?”

           “Please,” Virgil whined, his mouth feeling achingly empty around every sound he made. “Please Remus, I want it. Pl-“

           His words were cut off when Remus thrust back in, and Virgil fought his gag reflex as Remus’ cock slid past the back of his tongue to bump against the back of his throat, one swift surprising movement. He opened his throat, eager to be filled, to be used. Remus’ cock squirmed in his throat and he relaxed more as he felt the skin of his throat stretch and bulge to accommodate the hot, heavy organ. He moaned as best he could, his voice warped and layered by the overwhelming juxtaposition of pleasure and humiliation. Virgil looked up at Remus with lust-heavy eyes, his cheeks hot and his eyes were burning with the promise of choked tears already.

           Remus backed up just enough to let Virgil breathe, and he could feel a mix of precum and drool sliding down his chin. He sucked in a breathe before Remus was inside again, and his eyes rolled back to stare up at Remus, glassy and grateful. It went on like this, drooling and gagging and the occasional hissed praise from Remus while Virgil spun out into the warm, safe headspace where he could forget himself.

Remus reached down and took a handful of Virgil’s hair, pulling him backward. Virgil whined in complaint, Remus’ cock sliding against his cheek as he slowly lifted his face; he knew what Remus wanted, and he opened his mouth, letting his tongue loll out as Remus spat into his mouth.

           “How’s it taste, Virgil?”

           “So fucking good. Thank you, thank you,” Virgil slurred open-mouthed. He made a show of swallowing, tossing his head back.

Remus leaned down to licked Virgil’s bottom lip before capturing his mouth in a deep, possessive kiss that left Virgil breathless. He broke it and stood back up and Virgil leaned back, opening his mouth again to beg silently, knowing he was already a mess of drool and tears, beautiful and destroyed.

           “Hungry tonight aren’t you, Emo?” Remus chuckled, his cock sliding back into Virgil’s mouth, sweet on his tongue as Remus made his first thrust, cutting off Virgil’s ability to breathe or even swallow. He looked down at Virgil, combing his hair back again. Virgil met his eyes, lost in Remus’ commanding gaze.

           The racing of his heart replaced any of the unpleasant tightness in his chest, and Virgil fully relaxed when Remus reached down to place his hand on the side of Virgil’s neck, pressing against the bulge from outside. Virgil’s eyes rolled back and he closed them, melting away into sensation and heat, more of a plaything for Remus than a functioning being—and that’s how Virgil wanted it for now. Forgetting everything outside of this room, the sounds and tastes and smells of sex were like a merciful smokescreen.

           And then Virgil felt the familiar signals, throbbing and lost rhythm, and he groaned in his chest, anticipating what was coming—literally. Remus always came so much, and Virgil could almost never swallow it all at once, but he always tried. After a few spurts Remus pulled back and shot across Virgil’s face while the anxious side eagerly swallowed what was in his mouth, “Yes Remus please give it to me, give me more, want to taste you!”

           Remus growled as he thrust back into Virgil’s mouth and down his throat. Once. Twice, and then he pulled out, connected by a line of thick spit to Virgil’s wet lips. He knelt then, reaching to wrap his hand to palm Virgil through his pants. Virgil groaned and humped against Remus’ hand while the creative side cleaned his face, licking away the hot stripes of his spend. Remus captured his lips in a commanding kiss and Virgil got another mouthful of cum. He jerked in Remus’ grip as he came, choking as he swallowed and cried out at the same time. Remus muttered gentle nonsense as he rubbed Virgil through his orgasm and beyond, toying with the wet spot on Virgil’s jeans.

           “Th-thank-“ Virgil stammered.

           Remus stood and pulled Virgil to his feet, helping him to the bed where he was nestled in a pile of abandoned vellum and leather and silk. Remus kissed him on the nose and then gently stripped Virgil, “How about a nice hot springs full of demon octopi? Doesn’t that sound nice?”

           “More demon octopi?” Virgil hummed with a smile. “I’d love that.”

           Remus swept him up and sunk out, reappearing in one of his little corners of the imagination where the air was heavy with steam. Virgil sighed as he was lowered into hot water, muscles he didn’t know were tense melted into warm butter. “Anything else, Emo? A drink?”

           Virgil stretched, “I wouldn’t say no to a pineapple juice.”

           “Good idea, keep tasting sweet for me,” Remus mused, conjuring a glass and handing it to Virgil.

           Virgil sank into the sensation as several red tentacles found his legs, waist and chest in a deep—astoundingly innocent—massage. He let his head fall back, “Thank you, Remus, so much.”

           “For you, anything.”

 ---

           Virgil squirmed when his hand alone wasn’t enough, frustrating and disappointing as he rutted in his bed, mussing his black sheets. The memory of a thousand touches only made him want more, and he grabbed his sweaty pillow and threw it across the room, not comforted in the least by his little outburst. He kicked off his shoes, struggling with his jeans and underwear but not bothering with his hoodie. He was pulled so perfectly between arousal and frustration that his hand moved of its own volition, squeezing and twisting in hopes of finding some sensation that would push past the plateau where he hovered in sensual agony.

           Finally Virgil made himself stop just long enough to reach for the nightstand and yank open the drawer, fetching the toy he kept there. It was tapered, but it couldn’t compare to Remus’ size—or dexterity. He set it on his stomach and reached back for the lube, popping it open. He arched his back to get two slicked fingers into himself. The prep was quick, unceremonious and then he lubed up the toy, rolling onto his side and moaning involuntarily at the feel of it pressed at his entrance. He rocked down against it, deeper each time until it breached him, and he moved it manually then, in and out a few times before he got it positioned just right, turning on the vibrations. It was almost a relief to feel something, although it would never be enough. He cranked it up and his mouth fell open in a silent moan, his hips working as if he could get it deeper by will alone.

           The toy was nowhere near as big as Remus, but when he rocked just right it nudged his prostate in a familiar way, and his body remembered as much as his mind—unfortunately his body remembered all too well exactly what it was missing. The girth, the weight and the heat. He wondered what Remus would say, watching him whine and writhe like an emptyheaded—and empty-assed—slut. He’d no doubt have a comment, and Virgil was almost glad the creative side wasn’t there to see him. There was no way—horny and even a little homesick in a super fucked up way—that he’d be able to resist Remus’ offers even though Deceit had made it very clear that Remus was on his side of the line in the sand.  

           Pushing bad memories away, Virgil let himself think about Remus’ cock, and the cold jab of Deceit faded—for the night, at least. The anxious side had always been a size queen; Remus wasn’t just enough to bulge his throat, and memories of the tight tug inside made him chew his bottom lip. He slipped his free hand down to his stomach where he would be able to feel Remus pushing, bumping into his palm with every thrust, knocking the breath—and several filthy words—out of him. He gasped now as if he could feel it, and his body shook, his eyes burning as he squeezed them shut, pressing a fist to his mouth. He wanted to be shamelessly loud, but shameless was never really Virgil’s specialty, even back then.          

 ---

           Virgil glanced around in the dim light as Remus tugged him along by his hand; they had snuck upstairs into the livingroom where Deceit forbade them to go. The sharp jaws of adrenaline had him by the throat, and fight or flight melted into nothing when Remus turned to face him, “Clothes off, Emo.”

           Virgil shed his clothes tossing them in a pile on the floor as Remus magicked his own away, pulling Virgil in by the back of his neck. The kiss was feral, teeth and tongues and Virgil dug his blunt nails into Remus’ chest. When Remus pushed him to the couch, Virgil stammered, “H-how long do you think we have?”

           Remus shrugged, “Deceit won’t be looking for us until tomorrow if we’re lucky.”

           “I mean… the others.”

           “You mean those light sides?” Remus purred. “Why? Want them to watch?”

           Virgil blushed and the humiliation sent a pleasant spark through his body, but the time for talking was over—temporarily anyway. He moved into position on his knees, arms crossed to brace him against the arm of the couch. He relaxed into the position, trying to calm his racing heart until the touch of Remus’ hand on his back calmed him. Remus’ cock moved up against his own, a reminder of just how big he was, and Virgil reached down to stroke it lazily as Remus prepped him. Tentacles had never appealed to Virgil before he’d started things with Remus, but now the way it pressed into his touches and writhed like a sentient being—perhaps it was—was more than sexy, it was endearing, and Virgil couldn’t help the soft smile that stretched his lips. Remus was leaking precum already, much wetter than Virgil could get without at least a little assplay, and it made Virgil’s hand slick and sticky.  

           Remus pulled back then and Virgil almost complained, but then Remus’ cock was stretching him open and he let out a low, shuddering moan as he wrapped his hand around his own cock. The heavy member was undulating, writhing, massaging Virgil in all of the right ways, and he moaned into the couch arm, stroking himself slowly. It was more habit and comfort than out of a need to cum; when Remus was splitting him, there was no chance that he wouldn’t have an orgasm, sometimes multiple and often without much substantial warning. Then Remus was bottoming out, and Virgil could feel him so deep that he lowered his hand to his stomach where a familiar bulge was, crawling underneath his skin, “Fuck, Remus.”

           “Isn’t it nice?” Remus purred. “Stretching you, filling you up like the hungry little slut you are. How’s it feel, Emo?”

           “It’s… it’s—good!” Virgil hiccupped as Remus moved, drawing almost all the way out before snapping his hips forward and sinking back in, and the bulge retreated and returned, sending another ache of arousal through Virgil’s cock. “You know it’s good.”

           “I like when you say it,” Remus said, settling into a staggered rhythm to keep Virgil guessing. “Besides, what else are we going to talk about?”

           Virgil’s eyes rolled back and he bit his lip, letting out a nervous giggle, “The w-weather?”

           “Too boring,” Remus said, smacking Virgil’s ass. “Unless you want me to conjure a tornado or something. I think we should talk about getting caught, don’t you? Those sticks in the mud won’t know what to do, seeing me fuck you in their space like this. I bet Patton will just fucking die right then and there. My brother will be jealous because he’ll never get close to anything as gorgeous as you, isn’t that right, Emo?”

           Virgil yelped at a particularly deep thrust and the words spilled from him, “Remus we’re gonna… gonna get caught.”

           “Telling me you wouldn’t like that? The looks on their faces?” Remus growled, tangling his fingers in Virgil’s hair and yanking his head back.

           “I… I don’t know,” Virgil panted, too ashamed of the real answer.

           Remus ran the nails of his free hand down Virgil’s back, “That’s what I thought. You like being my pretty little whore, don’t you? You’d love for me to show you off.”

           “Shit,” Virgil growled, because it was true, and sometimes it terrified Virgil just how easily Remus could read him.

           “You never disappoint, Emo,” Remus said. “And you always say all of my favorite words.”

           “I haven’t said twatwaffle one time,” Virgil said, a smile on his lips.

           Remus laughed, leaning down to kiss the back of Virgil’s neck, then up behind his ear; Remus got sweet when Virgil made him laugh. Deceit had told Virgil once it was the way to his heart—but that wasn’t where Virgil was aiming, so he shivered and pushed himself back into Remus’ thrusts. “Somebody’s impatient.”

           “Come on, Remus,” Virgil said, as sweet and subby as he’d ever been. “Please give me your cock, please fuck me hard. It’s so good I want more, want everything.”

           Remus growled in his throat and took Virgil’s bait, though he was far from trapped; he shoved Virgil’s face into the arm of the couch roughly and fucked into him with a renewed domination that made Virgil’s cock jump and leak and ache with arousal. “Is this what you want?”

           “Yes,” Virgil muttered into the fabric. Remus’ nails were back in his back and he choked out a cry, “Yes! Yes please!”      

           Remus bit into Virgil’s shoulder as he came, and Virgil could feel it, hot and thick and there was a lot, filling him up like he’d begged for. He sobbed and barely had time to process the sensation before he himself was cumming, dirtying the couch under them and managing to milk more from Remus in the process until they were both rutting and growling like animals—and maybe animals is what they were. Remus pulled out and Virgil could feel the spend tickling down his inner thigh before Remus nudged him forward and he lifted his ass higher into the air, lowering his face into the couch cushions.

           Remus’ tongue was hot and probably longer than it should be, but the way it felt had Virgil rocking back while the creative side sucked the cum out of him. When Remus pulled back Virgil whimpered, but soon he was being pushed onto his back and his mouth fell open. He looked up into Remus’ eyes, lolling out his tongue. Remus’ eyes darkened and he let the cum drool down into Virgil’s waiting mouth. Virgil’s eyes rolled back as the sensation fought against his own refractory period, and his cock gave a lazy twitch. Once he’d taken everything Remus offered, he rolled it around his mouth, curling his tongue at the corner of his mouth before finally closing and swallowing.            

           “Such a good boy”, Remus cooed, swiping his thumb through the cum that had escaped at the corner of Virgil’s mouth. He pressed his thumb into Virgil’s mouth and the anxious side eagerly sucked it clean, floating on the cloud of praise.

           “Thank you,” Virgil said again, softer and with a deeper, warmer meaning. He stretched then reached up for Remus.

           Remus lowered himself to kiss Virgil, quick and chaste—if anything they did could be called chaste. Virgil melted into the affection and let himself be held. The couch wasn’t particularly deep, but Remus managed to maneuver them into a comfortable spooning position, pulling Virgil against his chest. The beating of Remus’ heart and the sound of their breathing as it slowed to normal brought Virgil down gently, and when he’d had enough, he squirmed in Remus’ arms, turning onto his back as much as he could without falling off of the couch.

           Remus watched Virgil’s face, prompting the anxious side to smile, “I’m good, just gonna take another second. You should go make sure Deceit’s not looking for us.”

           “Perish the thought,” Remus said sarcastically, but he smiled as he climbed over Virgil to stand. “I’ll go make sure Snake Daddy is none the wiser.”

           Virgil stretched out, licking his lips clean for the final time as Remus sank out. He sat up slowly, careful to wave away the wet spot before he grabbed his pants, pulling them on. Dressing wasn’t easy on shaky legs, but that made it more satisfying, especially layered with the possibility of getting caught.

           As if on cue, Virgil’s ears caught the smallest drag of a shoe on the carpet. He spun around, eyes searching the darkness around him for a threat. Roman stood in the darkened doorway, hand on the hilt of his sword; his hair and eyes made it clear he’d probably been asleep—maybe at his desk the way Remus did sometimes. He was pretty, Virgil couldn’t deny that—dashing, maybe, but a poor imitation of Remus. The prince met Virgil’s eyes and Virgil hesitated, staring at the other side before pulling up his hood and sinking into the floor.

 ---

           Suddenly the deep vibrations were too much, and Virgil cried out, reaching back to turn it off and take it out. He was shaking, unsure whether it was the memory of Remus or Roman that had caused the sudden spike. Virgil huffed in frustration, and his straining cock regained his attention. He couldn’t stop now just because he was trying to deny a possible partial crush on his old fuck buddy’s twin brother. Wrapping his hand back around himself, Virgil tried to slip away, find another memory to turn himself on just that last little bit. After three minutes of desperate self-searching, Virgil sighed, “Fuck.”

           He let that little mental block fade away, and the memory turned to fantasy, and the thrill of it zinged up into his chest and down to his toes, making them curl. He worked himself a bit slower, letting things play out.

---

           Virgil locked eyes with Roman, in the dark, and Roman’s nose wrinkled, just a little, because he knew. The prince unsheathed his sword, stepping forward and holding it to Virgil’s throat, “Care to explain yourself, foul fiend?”

           Virgil took a half-step back and sank to his knees; Roman looked pleased with himself, but his mouth fell open in surprise when Virgil nuzzled his cock through his pants. He tensed, but rather than taking a step back, he sheathed his sword and rested his hand on the back of Virgil’s head. Virgil undid Roman’s pants easily, pulling his cock free and covering it in kisses and kitten licks until the Prince was fully hard and pushing at the back of Virgil’s head. Virgil hummed and took Roman into his mouth and down his throat. He tasted nothing like Remus, none of the tingling magic eldritch qualities, but more like a man with impeccable hygiene who also spends the better part of his days trapesing through enchanted forests, earthy and spiced and—for lack of a better term—masculine.

           Roman growled, and Virgil gagged when he thrust forward, holding Virgil in place. Whether it was warped hate, or Roman was just naturally rough, Virgil was lost in it. He managed to pull back when Roman allowed him to breathe, “Fuck!”

           Roman smirked, “What’s the matter, Anxiety? Too big?”

           Virgil laughed breathlessly, rocking back onto his heels and standing. He stripped off his clothes and moved to the couch, reaching to brace himself on the couch arm. Strong hands took his hips and moved him like he was weightless, and before Virgil knew it he was on his back with Roman slotted between his legs. He closed his eyes tightly and turned his face away. “What are you looking at?”

           Roman snorted, and lips on Virgil’s collarbone made his bottom lip tremble, “Where’d that brave little monster go?”

           Virgil bristled and leaned up, capturing Roman’s lips in a rough kiss and biting down on his bottom lip. Roman tangled his fingers into Virgil’s hair and pulled. Virgil gasped when Roman broke the kiss and looked down to line himself up. “Fuck yeah give it to me,” Virgil whispered, following the Prince’s actions with eager eyes.

           Roman hesitated for a moment, spitting in his palm and running it hastily over his cock before slipping inside. Virgil threw his head back as it spun, Roman’s cock pushing in while he was still slicked up inside. He met Roman’s eyes, and groaned, “That’s his… it’s your brother’s cum. You know that right? Can you feel it?”

Roman’s nose wrinkled, but more in anger than disgust, and he spat in Virgil’s face, making Virgil moan like a shameless whore as he arched his back. Roman’s first proper thrust was rough, fast and it knocked him out of the fantasy completely.

           ----

           The orgasm was heavy and sudden, like a punch to the chest and Virgil panted as he wrung himself out, his free hand fisting in the sheets, “Jesus, Princey,” Virgil muttered into the stillness.

           Well and truly overstimulated, his nerves singing like they always did, but without the comforting warmth and weight of another body. He ran his fingers through the spend on his stomach, savoring the sight as yet another wave of nostalgia rolled over him, weaker than the others, but undeniably present as Virgil sucked his fingers clean, sighing at the rapidly-fading sex high.

Virgil heard a familiar sound and turned his head to look at the door, opened just a crack, “You just gonna watch again?”

           Roman moved forward, pushing the door open further with his foot. He was of course more put together than the night they saw one another in the dark living room. Not quite the picture of smirking valiance Virgil imagined, not a hero looking to dominate a villain. Nonetheless, the Prince looked willing, and Virgil was ready to move on and make new memories, as painful as it could be to accept change. What did he have to lose?

[chibisquirt]

fandom bitching under the cut

I was in the MCU during CW.  That’s, uh...  That’s why I’m not really in the MCU anymore.   About the only Stony fic I’m interested in reading these days is Sineala’s, and she’s very specifically comics-verse only.  There were a lot people during and after CW posting fic, headcanons, rants, character posts, etc that I found... hurtful?  

But they weren’t hurtful because they were attacks-- or at least, they were never attacking me.  They were never attacking real people.  They were about the characters.  And it’s no one else’s fault if I identify too much with both trying-to-do-the-right-thing Steve Rogers and privileged-but-vulnerable, kind-but-flawed Tony Stark.  

So if I was hurt by CW--and Endgame--which I was, for sure--but it wasn’t anybody else’s fault.  The fandom was bad for me, and I left it--but it wasn’t attacking me, it was just not healthy.  And from where I was, at least, it was like that for all the real, actual people involved--not characters, characters don’t count.  

If folks got heated about CW, well--they were heated about CW, not about Sabre, or Kuro, or what-have-you.  

Someone should tell that to the person going postal in the mdzs fandom.

I’m not going to name them, because they are vindictive and crazy.  They will, guaranteed, come after me with vitriol if they hear about this post--and that’s this version of this post, which does not name them.  (I mostly just don’t want to risk it ending up in the tags.)  I will link second-hand to Fail Fandom Anon, though:  here and here, and here.  

That’s all from the first round of wank, back in July.  Since then, they have:

made their own big bang, only a) it doesn’t require a large wordcount and isn’t published all at once and therefore is neither big nor bang, and b) it’s the “Chinese Fandom Big Bang,” wherein all of China is apparently one big fandom--because that’s not racist as fuck. 

(If I write a fic for the award-winning 1993 film Farewell My Concubine, you gonna cough me up some art???  yeah, I didn’t think so, because artists are not actually machines!  China actually has a lot of aspects to its culture, and you can do fanstuff for many of them.  I know!  There’s more to it than BL novels!  It’s totally shocking!!!)

Harassed people just for participating in the MDZS BB (citation here, which is admittedly anon hearsay, but I 100% buy it based on Everything Else)

And now....  Subtweeted a fucking SIXTEEN YEAR OLD for *daring* to run a fandom exchange... while being sixteen?  And participating in the big bang?  Both of which are perfectly reasonable things to do?

(Full disclosure:  I don’t really Twitter, so I’m not 100% sure what a subtweet is, but I am reasonably certain it’s something you shouldn’t do to a fucking kid!)

Like, I know fandom has its share of bad actors--it’s a collection of humans, so of course it does.  And I’ve seen people get really upset about fandom things before, hence the way I opened this post.  But this is the first time I’ve seen someone in fandom do quite this vivid an impression of a rabid dog, going after anyone and everyone and biting absolutely anything that comes into range, and it’s just... really disturbing.

So anyway, I wanna take a few minutes to give thanks to the people who aren’t like that:  Sabremom, in particular, stands out as a sterling example of a magnificent human being.  Jelenedra, who has been very calm and grown-up in everything I’ve ever seen them do.  Sineala, who weathered the storm of MCU-Stonies flooding her blog recently (I’m so sorry, Sine).  Fucking Copperbadge, jesus, he deals with a lot!  

I’m not tagging anyone in this because I don’t want them to have to read this mess to get to the reason they’re tagged, but... Yeah.  Sometimes, it’s good to remember the positive examples.  Remember the people you want to emulate.... not so much the people you want to smack. :)  Thanks to the cool fans for being the cool fans, and keep on being you <3

[thedragonofthecastle]

tagging everyone who followed me before cause it’s calming

if you want to follow me here please do, if you don’t want to no pressure

(from @primaryyblogg incase ya forget)

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@crying-blizzards

[drowningcomicart]

time to wrestle with the pigs i guess, because this has got to end right the fuck now

content warnings for this post include pedophilia mentions, abuse mentions, suicide/suicide baiting, and csa mentions, and to everyone not involved hi, this has been my life for almost a year, it’s a lot of bullshit so tread with caution i guess. (and no i’m not putting it under a read more because this is important.)

with that out of the way, i want to make it very explicitly clear that i’m not writing this post as an apology, nor am i going to ‘justify’ myself because there’s nothing to fucking justify. but i’m addressing it because we’ve officially hit november, and that means that for nine fucking months, i have heard every disingenuous opinion on this mess there is to hear, whether i wanted it or not. and i am tired, and i am done, but y’all wanna keep beating this horse, so here i am.

for those who are unaware, in february of this year someone in the fantroll circle--or at least the one i’m part of--was being unjustly harassed by some dumbass teenagers with a chip on their shoulders and nothing better to do. and because no one else was saying or doing anything, i made a post calling out the stupidity of bothering someone over an art style and if they were blown, they should just block and move on. i never mentioned the harasser’s usernames, not even in the tags. but i guess the ringleader’s guilty conscience took over, because they came crytyping at me in a dm to take the post down and how it wasn’t faaaaiiirrr. and when i gave no sympathy, saying i had not mentioned them by name and if they felt guilty, maybe they shouldn’t be a vicious asshole to people, magically they weren’t sad and anxious about how people would treat them (ha) anymore; they got mad. mad enough that they started a smear campaign against me under the guise of Protecting The Community and horribly twisting one of my characters into something he’s not so they could call me a pedophile.

he is a csa survivor. he has bad coping mechanisms for that trauma, and yes, it is dark. it is uhealthy and sad and tragic and awful. but it is still part of his story, and i am not going to shy away from telling it. and since that entire blog always had nsfw tagged, and unless tumblr was fucking around should not have been accessible to anyone under 18 in the first place, the abusive little shits who made it their personal goal to drive me out of the community, off of tumblr, and apparently hopefully into killing myself, should not have been able to see that content at all. unless they chose to, and again as mentioned above, it was definitely a choice. a choice born of spite and violence, because it was ONLY to have “dirt” on me when i called them on their shit behavior. because, i cannot stress this enough, it was never ever about pedophilia. it was about a power struggle. a made up stupid power struggle they felt the need to ‘win’ at any and all costs, including making a wildly serious accusation with no substance, altering screenshots to serve their purpose, and taking everything out of context to suit their narrative. and this is how it is for literally every single anti-based argument out there.

now we all know how i feel about the purity crusade happening on this dumpsterfire of a website, but in case you don’t THERE IS NO CASE WHATSOEVER IN WHICH DARKFIC IS THE SAME THING AS REAL LIFE CRIMES. if you disagree with that, please block me. please. literally right now. block me. block me and go away and i only pray you learn to separate fiction from reality and don’t turn into what these demons are. because i don’t care how much you disagree with someone, i don’t care how much you don’t like them, i do not care about any of it. your presence in those spaces is your choice. because despite what antis will have you believe, people writing and drawing this stuff always--and i will say always knowing you’re smart enough to not give me The One Exception as your airtight strawman to render every other argument invalid--tag it, keep it in adult-only spaces, and are responsible enough to know what ‘i understand and wish to continue’ buttons mean.

and so, knowing that fiction does not equal reality, and that the spaces these fictions are written in are inherently designed to make it so only people who say yes i wanna see it can access it, or hell even knowing basic fucking human decency, there is NO reason to suicide bait someone. ever. period. do not tell people to die you actual fucking monsters. people HAVE killed themselves. and if you’re okay with that, if you are really seriously willing to say someone deserved to die over fiction, block me. i don’t want to see anything from you until you find your humanity again. and yet here i am, again 9 months after the fact, and people are STILL messaging me about it. even my would be supporters, the ones who claim they’re only concerned for my reputation or whatever, are being disingenuous and victim blaming. all i have heard is “you should prove your innocence cos you’re making people uncomfortable otherwise”. it belies their stance on these things; that they secretly agree it’s ok to harass content creators so long as they can pretend to themselves it’s justified in some small way. that if someone doesn’t want to give their abusers--and internet harassment IS abuse do not @ me on this one--a platform, it’s the same as admitting they’re correct, no matter how absurd the lie. Yet they do nothing to show support for people being harassed because they’re too concerned with living in their comfortable bubble to make even the smallest effort to oust abusive jackasses from their own community, and then go on to bellyache that the fandom “isn’t what it used to be” and wonder “where everyone went”.

with any luck, they’re like me and they “went” to doctors and got medicated for the depression and anxiety this sort of shit exacerbates, and blocked all involved for their own sanity and because they don’t owe anyone shit. but more likely, from what i’ve seen? they’re dead. and if that makes you sick, if that makes you uncomfortable, it fucking should. people are fucking dead because of fictional characters, from a source that in and of itself deals with very upsetting and adult themes using child protagonists. regardless if they’re survivors of abuse themselves, or just like to explore anxieties and fears in the very VERY safe environment of fiction, where there are no real life consequences, it doesn’t matter. there’s no such thing as people who are “allowed” to write these subjects and people who are not. no one needs to put their life and vulnerabilities on the table for complete strangers to judge and deem worthy or unworthy of basic decency. to say otherwise is despicably transparent in their motives to exploit already vulnerable people for their personal entertainment or self gratification, and yet people fall for it every goddamned time.

i’m not going to make an argument that i’m not a pedophile because i shouldn’t have to. y’all should be able to use your fucking brains well enough to know that someone drawing fictional scenarios is not the same as a real adult abusing real children with very real world consequences. if it is personally upsetting to you, or makes you feel uncomfortable, or even triggers ptsd please for the love of god leave the blog.  why would you put yourself through that? why would you, if you are so against it, actively seek it out and harass people who make it? i would never call people outright liars about what does and does not trigger them. but it seems to me the only people who would behave in this way are either not as bothered as they have convinced themselves and everyone else they are, or they have some seriously bad coping mechanisms for their own trauma that are in no way the fault of the authors and artists at the receiving end of their vitriol. but as someone who was horribly abused, emotionally and psychologically, for the majority of my life, i know an abusive power trip when i see one.

if y’all have been supporting these people without thinking about it, i don’t want your apologies and shame, and likely no one else you’ve let get trampled with no help does either. but you have to do better. WE have to do better. even something as small as blocking people you know to be abusive jerks in the community can make a world of difference because they can’t have power if you don’t let them have a platform.

and as for the people in the community who started this mess, cos i know you still look up my posts in the tags--i’m not afraid of you. i’m not fucking going anywhere. i am here to enjoy my characters, enjoy my writing, enjoy making art and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. you are not going to silence me because you got mad that i called you out for being an abusive asshole. and anyone who listens to your bullshit deserves better than to be manipulated and frightened of you. fucking grow up and get some help, because lying about wanting to protect people by causing active harm to others is more morally bankrupt than any darkfic could ever be.

[elamae56]

Reblogging this because this is something that needs awareness.

I’m not sure I can put into words how horrified and upset it makes me feel that this type of behaviour continues to be exhibited in this fandom. There will always be trolls and fandom ‘wars’ and differences of opinions that never get sorted but the sheer level of vitriol that has been shown to authors, artists and members of this fandom in the short few months it has existed is despicable.

I’ve stayed on the fringes of the discourse as it makes me anxious and I love fandom, I love slash and I want my experience to be the safe space it always has been. The safe space it should be for everyone. But even so, I’ve seen some of dialogue that has occurred and the evidence as posted by those such as the op, regarding the interaction they have received. Some of it has been at the hands of what has been suggested as a troll but, as evidenced here and by others, not all.

It’s insidious this belief that one character is better than the other, that a sexual position can be determined as racist whereas the bullying of a poc is not, where the mockery of another actor’s looks or accent is seen as acceptable because they’re white. It’s not acceptable for ANYONE.

These characters, this pairing gave us so much, a canon representation of a gay, interracial, interfaith relationship that has spanned c e n t u r i e s. CENTURIES. Immortal to boot so less chance (though not completely immune) of ‘kill your gays’ syndrome. So please, stop pitting one character against the other. If you are a fan of one character you would not spit on the love that they so obviously share by degrading the other. To mock an actual actor is even worse. Take a good hard look in the mirror. We got this wonderful representation and people have used it to create toxicity.

The bullying of people in this fandom needs to stop. It’s not fun or play. Just because you’re behind a pc screen. It has real world consequences which I’m not sure those behind the bullying are ready to face. As op states, racism in fandom exists. Of course it does, people make up fandom and unfortunately many people are racist. We absolutely needs to check our bias and thinking and always strive to be better. But what I’ve seen in this fandom so far has been counterproductive to the extreme. There are some very useful, informative and valid resources that people have put together which is excellent, but all of this hard work is being drowned out under (using op’s terminology) a toxic atmosphere which has overtaken it, being peddled by those who either don’t really understand, who are so fervent in their desire not to be racist that they swing it so far in the opposite direction that they become the exact opposite of what they want to be, or by those who are deliberately using it to further their own beliefs and tropes/likes and who simply enjoy being harmful to others. Please, before you interact with someone think about what you have read, been told and examine it rather than just regurgitate what others have opinioned which is what seems to have happened with both the person in ops DM box and the anon commenting their fic.

I’m sorry to my followers as I know the discourse is something they and I try to avoid (I’m using the tags so hopefully you’ve blocked if you need to) but I just felt this needed to be reblogged and then I had thoughts which I needed to add. I LOVE these two characters, they have taken over my life for the last five months and to see people using them to harass, bully, threaten and intimidate people is upsetting.

Bullying, Racism, and Hypocrisy in The Old Guard Fandom

I’ve tried to get out of this fandom on tumblr due to how… harsh it can be.  I only follow a few people by this point, because I want my fandom experience to be enjoyable. However I’ve been noticing something that really puts a sour taste in my mouth, and have been noting it since my first foray into TOG fandom in August (Aug. 8th, to be exact!).  I ended up browsing through blogs/the tag/etc… last night to see if I was being crazy or not, but don’t think I was.  

People in this fandom  seem to care more about Joe than they do about real, living breathing people.

Biases affect fandom and affect reality.  Racism in fandom is ABSOLUTELY real.  Fiction can have an affect on reality (though there are so many other factors to that). PoC can themselves be racist.  But none of that is a reason to bully human beings, or stand by and pretend this bullying isn’t happening.  People go HARD in their defense of Joe. But a real human being being harassed and bullied?? Literally ignored. What the heck guys?

TL;DR: stop acting like you are morally correct for defending Joe, then go and either bully/harass people in the fandom OR ignore when this bullying and harassment is taking place. It’s creating a horrible atmosphere for everyone.

Keep reading

[the-cryptographer]

Creator 2017 Tag                                                                                              

I was tagged by @miranova23 HERE

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works you’ve created this year (fics, art, edits, etc!) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you’ve brought into the world in 2017. Tag as many writers/artists/etc as you want (fan or original!) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works.

Ah, it seems I completed nine oneshots (including four ficlets) in 2017. Mostly for ygo fandom, but I also did something for pkmn and something for utena. I also wrote one chapter of Terminal Projections, and two parts of Lottery Ticket. Ah, well, I don’t really feel I can judge my long projects on the same scale as my shorter ones. I guess kind of assume they’re my faves because they have to be for me to suffer longfic effort for, lol. Other than that-

I AM NOT GOOD AT ARTING AT ALL, LOL, BUT I SOMETIMES LOOK AT MY MAI/VIVIAN SCRIBBLE AND SMILE

Something about Mai’s shy kind of look, and Vivian’s  >:)  look, and the painted fingernails, and the fact that hardly anyone produces content for this ship makes me appreciate it. It came out way better than it might have, lol.

BIOPHILIA

Not the best received thing I’ve produced, and probably not the best at wrapping up its ideas neatly, but somehow it’s grown on me. Not unlike a plant, heh. I think more than anything, I was working with a lot of characters and ideas that I hadn’t had entirely too much space to work on before - Shizuka’s POV, crushing on the older ladies, an angry clusterfuck of characters talking over each other in the same room, Malik and his dissociative identities, hospital background, high aesthetic, Ryou and Shizuka being pals, etc. etc. I felt there were a lot of things I could have botched terribly. So perhaps I’m surprised by how satisfied I was by how it came out. As a kind of introductory exercise into exploring some Ishtar-related headcanons and Shizuka as POV character, I think I communicated things rather well given the length of the thing. And everyone’s rough edges and honest affection are really cute to me.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO KEMOKET

For what started out as a joke concept - Jounouchi and Kaiba are furries - I am... kind of blown away by how incredibly high tension and emotionally cathartic I found the final product. The entire fic is absolutely covered in furry fandom dialogue and Jounouchi drawing vile porn, and a lot of the conflicts and conversations happen through that vector and yet... I feel I can confidently say that’s not what the story is about. There’s a point in the story between Yuugi and Kaiba at the end of the story that... I think really kind of strips everything down. There’s something on all sides of the triangle that’s incentivising the connection and friendship between the three of them and, by some miracle, that connection happens. The story really communicated a lot of what I wanted to say about wishshipping - really loving and affectionate and expectation and self worth and not on the same page at all, lol - and JouKai friendship - vitriolic and angry and undeniably hitting common ground. Also I got to include Mai teasing Jou, and Shizuka being wonderful, so I was pleased, heh.

ah, tagging @nolifepoints. I’m not sure I know anyone else who’s created 5+ things in 2017, but please feel free to share and tag me if you have :’)

[schpiedehl]

Reasons I hate the Hamilton fandom

Disclaimer: I’m a mod of one Hamilton fb group, an admin of another much smaller group, have seen the show twice, and a huge fan of many of the actors and creatives, not just the original cast. I am entrenched in the Hamilton fandom and have been for nearly 2 years so all of this comes from personal experiences with the fandom. I do not hate the actual musical and having talked to many folks and made friends through this fandom, I can confirm that it has had a positive effect on many people, especially aspiring actors of color. I had criticisms of the actual musical (reductive view of American history, perpetrates American exceptionalism, bootstraps narrative, not as feminist as fans insist, etc) but I’m mostly just addressing the issues within the fandom not within the media. The problems with the fandom is nebulous and manifold so I’m gonna try to be as thorough as possible here: - for those that don’t know, Hamilton is a show made by POC creatives for actors of color. The casting is not “color blind” it is racially conscious. All leads always, aside from the silly, villainous King George, are intended to be played by actors of color and the much of the fandom absolutely REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE THIS. It ranges from the benign-seeing assertions that Hamilton is colorblind and therefore race of the actor doesn’t matter as much as talent (false, with the underlying belief that a white actor will somehow be better suited/more talented in a role that is literally not written for them) to petulant assertions that one white fan or another will be the first white actor to play x role, to erasing the racial identities of light-skinned black, latinx, and asian actors to fit the manufactured narrative that white actors can and have played principal roles and the show is therefore colorblind. Fans are quick to point out the ambiguous wording of “America then told by America now,” intended to subtly indicate POC, as meaning white folk, despite the continuous assertions by the creatives that this is simply not the case. - whitewashing in fan art. Hand in hand with the refusal by many white fans to acknowledge the fact that Hamilton the Musical is intended for POC, white fan artist almost universally draw the actors-as-characters with lighter skin, lighter eyes, and more typically European features. Lin, who played Hamilton in the original cast, is a Latino man of mixed race heritage with tan skin, black hair, and dark eyes yet fan art of him as Hamilton is nearly always pale, red haired, and sometimes even blue-eyed. Artists will defend this as interpretation and some will even indicate that Hamilton was white irl so this is more accurate but Hamilton irl and Lin were nothing alike and he presence of a goatee in Hamilton Fan art is an indisputable sign that the artist is drawing Lin, not the real life, baby faced Hamilton. Dark skinned actors like Okieriete Onaodowan (Hercules Mulligan in the original cast) are rarely drawn and when they are they tend to be heavily lightened. - characters deemed queer by the fandom - notably John Laurens who was thought to be gay or bi in real life by many historians - is often heavily feminized in fan art, despite the fact neither the character nor the actual figure are ever noted as being particularly effeminate. This is of course fetishization symptomatic of applying heteronormativity to gay relationships. - fans often reject and demonize female characters. This is not universal but many fans have negative reactions to Hamilton’s wife, Eliza (and ignore and/or demonize her in regards to the gay ship of Hamilton/Laurens, despite Laurens having died shortly after Hamilton married Eliza. Hamilton fans believe almost universally that Hamilton was bi irl, which is supported by historical consensus, but the notion of him actually being with a woman repulses much of the fandom. - basically standard biphobia). Fans are also extremely gross about Maria Reynolds. - a separate part of the fandom refuses to acknowledge both the historical consensus of the Hamilton/Laurens relationship and the fact that that musical contains several intentional references to it. I’ve been told many times to keep that “gay shit” out of the fandom. - shipping wars of course. - blind worship of the characters either without regard to their historical counterparts or including their historical counterparts. - slavery apologism. Comparing slaves to modern consumer items and/or farm animals to demonstrate the ubiquity of slavery and/or people’s mindset regarding it. While it is true that people are the product of their time, “everyone owned slaves” and “you cannot judge them by the Norms of our culture” are common silencing/apologist techniques which both lack nuance and perpetuate racist ideals. It also erases the fact that abolitionism and moral opposition to slavery existed not only in post-revolution society but also within the very people who owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson wrote that slavery was the worst evil while simultaneously owning and raping slaves. - I’ve encountered at least one person with a bona fide slavery fetish. That’s not the fandom as a whole but it is worth noting. - abhorrent beliefs are common re: Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. - this has basically been covered above but rampant racism is not uncommon in this fandom. You get the distinct feeling that a sizeable portion has never once interacted with a person of color before, based on the ways they claim ownership over the actors, portray the characters, talk about racial issues, etc - speaking of the actors: fans are very gross toward the actors in a variety of different ways. - fans fetishize the fuck out of Daveed Diggs, who played Jefferson in the original cast. Diggs, for reference is a biracial black Jewish man, a rapper, actor, and activist best known outside of Hamilton for his work with clipping., which includes an extremely politically charged afrofuturist space rap opera. Fans tend to do a couple things in regards to Diggs. One, they conflate him with irl Jefferson leading so some really and truly bizarre headcanons and fan interpretations. Diggs himself has no love for irl Jefferson and has - along with the rest of the cast - cautioned fans against romanticizing the real figures, apparently to limited success. More heinously, however, I have seen people claiming ownership of Digg’s body and hair (claiming they would be upset if his cut it, or would stop being his fan even), made comments about keeping him as a sex slave, fetishizing his ethnic features, or even denying his blackness in favor of fetishizing his white, Jewish heritage. I’ve even seen a white woman comment that she wanted to kill diggs’ black girlfriend, skin her, and wear her as a suit to attract Diggs. No fucking joke. Diggs work as a musician is loved by many fans but others reject it as “scary black music.” - this happens with other actors tho not as much as Diggs. Fans have made plenty of comments about Okieriete Onaodowan’s “big black spy on the inside,” for instance, showing further capacity to fetishize black bodies. - for many fans, the original cast can do no wrong. They will go out of their way to justify and forgive anything that can be seen as problematic rather than acknowledging that they can still like a person that has problematic aspects. - or conversely, they gang up on actors on twitter, or tag them in hate/undeservedly negative critique. - replacements and non-OBC casts are largely ignored and several of the actors have been trolled or sent hate simply because they are not the originals. There is also the mindset that no one could ever be better than the original and the show is not worth seeing without the originals which is extremely disrespectful toward the replacement actors. - a large portion of the fandom claims that Hamilton is the only rap they like, or that they don’t like hip hop at all. When the Hamilton mixtape - and album featuring inspired-bys and covers of Hamilton songs by contemporary singers and rappers, was released fans HATED IT, many pointed out that they hated the hip hop sound and the “bastardization” of the music. Many of the songs on the Mixtape were by artists which inspired Hamilton in the first place. - a lot of the fans are just plain cringey. Bad head canons which become more ubiquitous than the actual canon portrayals, extremely forceful when it comes to trying to “convert” people, extremely adverse to any kind of criticism of the musical, history, or the actors, obnoxious at cons, etc. - art theft is rampant - extreme classism re: bootlegs especially - older fans have a tendency to be extremely abusive toward younger fans. Not all young fans are bad but bad memes and stupid references are met with extreme, quick, and unwarranted vitriol.

[channelnewswire-blog]

The Artist America Constructed: Daniel Joseph Martinez Goes To Other Places and Other Histories in His Continuous Review of These United States -ARTnews.

Daniel Joseph Martinez photographed outside his studio in Los Angeles on September 23, 2018.

KATHERINE MCMAHON/ARTNEWS

It’s a sight that no one who attended the 1993 Whitney Biennial is likely to forget, one that came to stand for the Biennial itself, with its provocative emphasis on politics: ordinary people of all colors walking around wearing pins that collectively read, “I can’t. Imagine. Ever Wanting. To Be. White.”  If you wanted to see the show, you couldn’t not wear them; they were the museum’s admission badges, designed for the Biennial as a project by the artist Daniel Joseph Martinez.

Coming at the height of the culture wars, the exhibition was widely reviled and vilified. New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman leveled a portion of his fury at Martinez’s commission, titled Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members). “[A]s if the people who go to the Whitney are so witless and backward that they need to be told that sexual abuse and racism and violence are bad. . . .,” he wrote. “Or as if a Neanderthal would change his mind after being forced, like a penitent, to don one of the infamous admission badges.” (Kimmelman didn’t mention Martinez by name.)

“People went hyperbolic on it,” said David Ross, who was director of the Whitney at the time. “I remember even former Mayor Koch, who had a radio show, accused the museum of fascism because he said we forced people to wear badges that declared that being white was no good. People just had completely bizarre readings of that piece. That piece became a real lightning rod.”

Museum Tags couldn’t win. When it wasn’t being castigated as racist and antiwhite, it was blamed for setting back equality for people of color. The project’s notoriety canonized it. “People used that work to illustrate their own thesis,” Ross added. “The fortunate part about that is that it kept the work alive and made it even more emblematic of a show that was so controversial and contentious.”

Looking back on Museum Tags, Martinez told me he remembers it as “an atom bomb that went off in the museum. Everything that everyone wants to do right now in terms of identification, this was the foundation for that. It’s taken 25 years for those efforts to see any traction. What started then took until now to finally have a social and cultural critical mass. Look at how slowly it moves.” Martinez, however, was just getting started—and he hasn’t slowed down.

Admission tags to the Whitney Museum, 1993, including one from Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Museum Tags project.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

Martinez’s studio in the Crenshaw neighborhood in South Los Angeles is a nondescript ground-floor space that is slightly unkempt and littered with well-worn, dog-eared books. The artist himself, whose arms are covered with tattoos from the year he spent with the Maori in New Zealand, has hair dyed platinum blond and a commanding voice, and does not mince words when talking about art, especially his own. No artwork in the history of art, he told me, has ever been self-explanatory.

“The notion of the simplification of a self-describing image contemporarily is false,” Martinez said. “Everything in art history, you have to have some piece of text to help you understand what you’re looking at.”

“I absolutely demand that people think when they look at my work,” he continued. “If they don’t want to think about the work, then they can fuck off. I’m expected to lower the rigor of my work to fit that contemporary model? I don’t think so.”

Martinez doesn’t work in a distinct style or medium. Each series is a radical break from the one that came before. “I privilege experimentation over everything else,” he said.

He starts with ideas, drawing from art history, philosophy, theory, pop culture, and science, and uses them to produce conversations around the resulting work, and inevitably, about identity. “I need to put all the questions of identity secondary to the production of ideas,” he said. “The rigor of ideas must come first.” His restless practice can make him hard to pin down. “It’s not about creating one new genre,” he told me. “It’s about creating one after another after another after another. It’s about completely reinventing it over and over again.”

When I visited in late August, Martinez had just returned from a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, where he’d begun work on a new series. Beyond Flesh: Gray Obtuse Dangerous, or Our Will for Liberation Is Their Terror! To Resist Means to Breathe Together is a group of black-and-white photographs showing Martinez striking lyrical poses in a variety of zombie masks, with a text-filled chalkboard hung from his neck.

Each discrete body of work Martinez creates points to three specific references. In this case, he’s drawing on the histories of the Italian film director and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered after completing his explicit film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which was censored in Italy; that country’s autonomous movements in the 1970s, as personified by the philosopher and sociologist Antonio Negri; and the 1920s American phenomenon of zombie-ism, a form of xenophobia that became a horror subgenre.

“Zombie-ism has always been a metaphor for the ‘other’: minorities, women, LGBT people,” Martinez said. “If Donna Haraway in 1985 writes the Cyborg Manifesto to completely retool feminism, what I’m doing is retooling zombie-ism as the most radical form of critical thinking and art making, as a means by which to completely rethink the concept of race in America.”

Martinez also used black-and-white photographs of his own body in a series begun in 2016 that was shown this past summer in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial. Shot against the starkness of a German winter, I am Ulrike Meinhof or (someone once told me time is a flat circle) shows him traversing the 103-mile border that once divided East and West Berlin. In each photograph, he holds up a different portrait of Meinhof, the German left-wing militant and cofounder of the Red Army Faction.

The movement of bodies, and by extension peoples, across borders has long been a central concern in Martinez’s work. A project he did at Cornell University in the fall of 1993—part of the “Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence” exhibition at the college’s Johnson Museum—followed shortly after the controversy around his Whitney Museum tags. In the center of Cornell’s quad, he placed a large-scale set of tar-painted walls evocative of borders. The installation caused an uproar: some students defaced it with racial epithets; others, predominantly Latinx, tried to defend it by forming a human chain; they eventually took over the president’s office for a weekend.

“Revelaciones/Revelations” curator Chon Noriega, who is now director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and adjunct curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, thinks the Cornell piece and the Meinhof series resonate today, in an era of vitriol around building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. “The use of his own body, the performative element of being in a particular space and mapping what is ostensibly a historical boundary as an act of remembering a particular history,” Noriega said, “as a fact of retracing something that really isn’t over—the political struggles, arbitrary boundaries. It’s by no means a done and over history.”

Daniel Joseph Martinez, This was a tiny valley floor at the “Rudower Höhe”. The park is located in the districts of Rudow and Alt-Glienicke. The Rudower Höhe was created from a 70-meter-high mountain of rubble in the 1950s. Further east, the Wall ran before the turnaround. Approximately 400 meters of the Wall can still be seen in the original. Since 2001, these remains have been declared a Historic Monument., 2017.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

Martinez’s preference for working outside the white cube—his desire, as he puts it, to “reformat the field of art, as opposed to just make another object to go in a gallery”—comes from his artistic training at California Institute of the Arts in Southern California. He was born in 1957 in Inglewood, a city in Los Angeles County’s South Bay region, and arrived at CalArts in the mid-1970s, during the height of institutional critique. Among his professors were artists Michael Asher, John Baldessari, and Douglas Huebler.

“There was a categorical rejection of studio art making,” Martinez said of his time at CalArts. “We were anti-capital because that’s what Asher believed. It was all a project-based making of art, as an intellectual and experimental model, that was privileged above all other things. Nothing else mattered.”

After CalArts, Martinez, whose family traces its roots to Mexico, briefly joined the Chicano art collective Asco, which had been staging avant-garde performances throughout the city’s Eastside since 1971. It’s an episode in his life that he’s disinclined to talk about at length. He parted company with Asco, and he also broke with any identification with Chicano art. He wanted to interrogate ways in which he could expand art as a whole and decided that working in that vein could only move the discourse about race and identity so far. To this day, he doesn’t claim Chicano identity. If necessary, he will say he is Mexican-American, but first and foremost, he’s an American artist.

“One of my ambitions is attempting to dislocate myself from a particular trajectory and reinsert myself into one that is unknown, which gives me the freedom to make the kinds of critical commentaries that I would like to make with the work itself,” he said.

Around the same time as his involvement with Asco, Martinez became an assistant for the German artist Klaus Rinke, who spent two years in Los Angeles preparing for an exhibition at the Flow Ace Gallery in West Hollywood. Rinke was a protégé of Joseph Beuys and it was through him that Martinez first encountered Beuys’s theory of social sculpture as a means to transform society, as well as Beuys’s practice of pedagogy as art. “Beuys never saw a difference between teaching and making work and I come from exactly that tradition,” said Martinez, who is a distinguished professor of art at University of California, Irvine, where he has trained nearly three decades of artists since the early 1990s. “Teaching is like breathing.”

Martinez sees his teaching as a way to continue to evolve his own ideas, positionality, and practice as a whole. “Young people hold me accountable to the discourse of their time and their age,” he said. “They expect me to know what they are concerned about. I have to have some understanding of them, otherwise I cannot engage in discourse with them.”

Alongside his teaching, he was developing the uncompromising aesthetic approach he maintains today. “I want to have the force of a tsunami and the precision of a laser,” he told me. “That’s why my position is tricky for people, because I want to reformat social identity. I don’t want to allow us to just be something that is merely an image of the self that we see in the mirror that can be replicated.”

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members), at the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

Martinez conceived Museum Tags on a cold day in the early ’90s, while he was standing outside the Art Institute of Chicago, in the shadow of the lions that guard the museum’s entrance. He came up with the words as “a response to the conditions of the society that I found myself living in. . . . I must have heard a million times people saying how they didn’t want to be minorities. Well, why do you think we want to be you? Why do you think that whiteness is the pinnacle of success?”

“What happens if you [don’t] want to be white, if you categorically reject that? The only strategy that made sense to me was to flip whiteness back on itself,” he continued.

“That was the power of the tags,” said Juli Carson, a professor at University of California Irvine and an art historian who has written about Martinez’s more recent work. “It placed white as a construct. No tribe—no race, no ethnicity, no gender, nobody—gets out of those tags alive.”

It still irks Martinez that no one seemed to understand the complexities of the piece, beyond the words printed on the metal pins. For him, more than anything, it was a way of examining the nature of language itself, and how its context, when it begins to be arranged and mutated, can fall apart—or create new meanings. To that end, he split the sentence into five parts to print separately on the tags: I can’t. Imagine. Ever Wanting. To Be. White. He instructed clerks at the admissions desk to make a judgment as to which tag to give each patron. (He’s not sure how closely that was followed.) But the gesture of the work was to see the phrase intervene throughout the museum, on various bodies, white and nonwhite alike. He points to one image that captures a racially ambiguous woman wearing a T-shirt that reads “GAY BOYS MAKE ME HARD,” with the “Imagine” tag clipped to her shirt’s neckband. He finds that juxtaposition hilarious to this day.

“At that exact moment of recognition, you realize that any previous interpretation of how we construct our identity is gone,” he said. “It’s been erased because a new proposition is in place, which suggests that all of these things are moving all the time. It suggests a completely new paradigm by which to see.”

The artist Glenn Kaino, who studied with Martinez at UC Irvine, sees Museum Tags as a breakthrough—and not just for Martinez. “Daniel helped shape and inspire a generation of artists because he was able to show the world that that type of work and that type of art making was possible,” Kaino said. “Before Daniel, no one had challenged the system in quite that way. The arc and the history of art is a story of challenging certain systems, but Daniel’s challenges came with a certain level of sacrifice.”

That sacrifice took the form of a kind of alienation. Prior to that Biennial, Martinez felt his career was on an upward trajectory. (Paintings of his were also included in that year’s “Aperto” section of the Venice Biennale.) Afterward, he couldn’t get a show in New York for five years. (His art would appear in the city again only when art dealer Christian Haye opened his short-lived Project gallery in Harlem in 1998.) “Everybody wants freedom,” Martinez said. “The problem is there’s a price for it. Freedom has never been free. It always comes at a cost. The price to tear this down and rebuild it means everyone has to give up their luxury. I have lived the politics that I say I am . . . and I’ve paid a consequence for standing up for those rights. It did not come free.”

It may have been partly out of disillusionment with an art world that claimed meritocracy in name only that Martinez turned to collaboration. In 1997 he cofounded, with Kaino, Rolo Castillo, and Tracey Shiffman, the artist-run space Deep River in Downtown L.A. That neighborhood is now packed with galleries, but back then Deep River was on its own. The project, which from the outset was to have a finite run of five years, was Martinez extending his inquiry into Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. For Kaino, it was a “symbolic access point to an unseen group of artists that existed in the city,” as a way to “provide and create opportunity.”

“The logic was the logic of inclusion,” Kaino said. “The artists we collaborated with, we felt, created work that was important and needed. Most of them, if not all . . . , were not being represented in the institutions around the city.” Mark Bradford and Ken Gonzales-Day are among the artists who got early support from Deep River, and it drew the attention of a mentor. “The only time I got a compliment ever in my life from Michael Asher is when he came down for a show once,” Martinez said. “He said, ‘Daniel, this project is perfect.’ That’s all he said.”

The ideology of Deep River and its commitment to artists served as the inspiration for another nonprofit space that would open in the city a few years later: when Lauri Firstenberg founded LAXART in 2005, she saw Martinez as a collaborator, and asked him to create an exhibition inaugurating the space. (When LAXART moved from Culver City to Hollywood in 2015, it christened its new space with an archival exhibition on Deep River.)

“Through teaching and his artistic production and through opening a space like Deep River, there’s such a generosity,” Firstenberg said. “Something fundamental to him was artists supporting other artists. There is a generosity in spirit, and I see so much of his work and his teachings when I go to artists’ studios. I see Daniel’s influence everywhere.”

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Self Portrait #9: Fifth attempt to clone mental disorder; or, How one philosophizes with a hammer, (Nietzsche) after Gustave Moreau, “Prometheus,” 1868, and David Cronenberg, “Videodrome,” 1981, 2004, from the series “Coyote: I Like Mexico and Mexico Likes Me (More Human Than Human).”

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

Social sculpture in the form of Deep River wasn’t the only way in which Martinez was channeling Beuys. In the late ’90s, his work took a dark turn. For a 1999–2002 photographic series titled “Coyote: I Like Mexico and Mexico Likes Me (More Human Than Human),” after Beuys’s famous “I Like America and America Likes Me,” Martinez created a series of self-portraits using prosthetic makeup that visualize his body in various forms of dismemberment. One triptych shows a deep gash in his abdomen. Over the course of the series, Martinez reaches into the wound, finally pulling out his entrails. Other images show a cut-out tongue, a freshly slashed throat, and the top of his skull stitched together as if following some ghastly surgery. An additional entry reimagines the Biblical scene of Salome receiving the decapitated head of John the Baptist from Herod; here, Martinez receives his own head from an unnamed woman. (His image flips the composition of Caravaggio’s famous painting of the story.)

Next came two sets of animatronic self-portraits. In To Make a Blind Man Murder for the Things He’s Seen (or Happiness is Over-rated), completed in 2002, Martinez, wearing a navy worker’s uniform, attempts to slit his wrists. The piece is meant to be displayed in the corner of a white room, facing away from the viewer. Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, his commission for the U.S. Pavilion in the 2006 Cairo Biennale, features Martinez again, this time clad in white with a silver belt buckle reading “Ishmael.” The figure convulses at random intervals, drawing on the climactic scene in Blade Runner where the tough-as-nails replicant Pris, played by Daryl Hannah, short-circuits after being shot.

“To put my brown body constantly in the work,” Martinez said of those pieces, “to transgress the body, to dismember the body, by constantly reusing the body, I am in effect, politicizing my body.”

“He’s always drawn our attention to these really hard issues of, especially, the complicit nature of the state in violence, genocide, and the mechanisms and systems of power,” said Pilar Tompkins Rivas, director of the Vincent Price Art Museum. “He’s not one to offer the how-to in the work. I don’t think he necessarily offers a strategy out. He offers it for you to look and form your own opinion about.”

Violence continued to interest Martinez in the mid-2000s. In 2004 he completed his installation The House America Built. The work is simple on its surface, a brightly colored wood cabin that is split down the middle, Gordon Matta-Clark style. The cabin, however, is uniquely American, a replica of the one that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, built in rural Montana, modeling it on Thoreau’s in Walden Pond. The colors Martinez used are that season’s palette from Martha Stewart’s interior paints collection. There’s a conspiracy theory logic here: both Stewart and the Unabomber are Polish-Americans, born within a year of each other, and both were eventually arrested (Stewart on charges of lying to investigators in an insider trading case). The ideological extremes they represent, Martinez said, become “an implication of the normalization of politics and hyper-capitalists, even terrorist positions, within the United States itself.”

“Across all of those references, he’s run the gamut of all these different directions that the country could have taken or has taken,” said Tompkins Rivas, who included The House America Built in the recent “Home—So Different, So Appealing” exhibition at LACMA that she co-curated. “When he does something like that and says, ‘This is the house America built,’ it’s poking at all these different areas and saying, ‘we have a tendency to think about ourselves as one thing, but here’s what the country has actually produced.’ Within one work, he’s synthesizing all these complex questions of what it means to be American.”

“How do you comment on the time that we live in?” Martinez asked me. He says that most artists might opt to focus on “what is happening in the United States itself,” but that ultimately leads to work that begins to look identical, “where people have the same conversation.”

“When I talk about Italy or Berlin in my work, I’m not talking about Italy or Berlin,” he said. “I’m talking about America. These are scathing critiques of America, but I use history and . . . other places to build on political and aesthetic trajectories.”

Daniel Joseph Martinez, The House That America Built, 2004, installation view in “Home—So Different, So Appealing,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

In 2008 Martinez was invited back to the Whitney Biennial, to which he contributed a room-size installation of text-based canvases called Divine Violence. The 172 paintings draw from a list of more than 1,700 groups that use violence to enforce their politics. Each canvas lists one organization in black letters on a gold background. He places groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Blackwater, and the KGB on the same level as the Black Panthers, the Jewish Defense League, and the CIA. “Somebody that you think is good, next to somebody you think is bad,” Martinez explained, “reveals the binary there, the flaw in the thinking. You don’t get to say one person’s violence is acceptable, and another person’s violence is not acceptable. That’s hypocritical.”

Martinez’s work is more visible now than it has been since Museum Tags. The Whitney acquired Divine Violence and put it back on display in their recent “An Incomplete History of Protest” collection show. This past August, the Hammer Museum gave Martinez its $25,000 Career Achievement Award for the Meinhof series, his contribution to “Made in L.A. 2018.” History has conspired to make his work newly relevant. “There’s so much going on politically right now,” said painter Julie Mehretu, who first met Martinez when he was a visiting artist during her M.F.A. program at the Rhode Island School of Design in the ’90s. “There’s a real need for a different type of rigorous thinking, and Daniel has been doing that from the beginning. Young people and artists are looking for work that deals with these issues in complex and complicated ways that are not reductive or expected.”

He still hasn’t had a mid-career survey in the United States, though a show of his photographic work was held in 2001 in Mexico City. And in 2009, Hatje Cantz published a monograph, A life of disobedience, that featured his best-known works. Now he and Carson, the UC Irvine art historian, are at work on a new book called Leaves for Burning: Transpositions of a Past Not Worth Living (Reflections on Daniel Joseph Martinez) that deconstructs the very idea of a monograph by presenting three “case studies” of recent work: the zombie Beyond Flesh work, the Meinhof series, and a 2016 sculptural installation in which Martinez has reimagined himself in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting The Death of Marat as both victim and killer. To be published by the Miami-based press [NAME] Publications in 2020, the book, Carson said, is a way to “consider the means by which we might live our lives in a curative present vis-à-vis our collective imaginary relationship to poisonous past events.” The text (by Carson) and the images respond to, and reflect back on, each other as a way to “resist the hierarchical structure—latent within many art monographs—in which art historical narrative either subjugates itself as a mere description of an artwork or, to the opposite effect, dominates the artwork as its final word.”

For better or worse, Martinez may forever be notorious as the artist who created those museum tags. For many in the art world they resonate today in ways they didn’t 25 years ago. “I think it continues to feed subsequent generations about the possibilities inherent in art,” said Phoenix Art Museum chief curator Gilbert Vicario, who curated the 2006 Cairo Biennale pavilion, “either for social change or to even begin to establish a conversation for how that can be achieved.”

Martinez has moved on, pondering what to make next. “There’s timing to ideas,” he said. “There are moments when ideas have an opportunity and moments when they don’t. It’s about listening and looking and being sensitive to these moments and understanding history. Then the necessity of the work lays itself bare.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 62 under the title “The Artist America Built.”

[themarsupials]

100 Best Albums of 2017, pt. 4

25. Fever Ray – Plunge

Karin Dreijer is half of The Knife, but the tone for her second album as Fever Ray is vastly more immediate and inviting than her band with her brother; all restless rhythms, dense electronic beats and nervous energy, it’s not exactly dance music, but it certainly can’t sit still. Most surprising, though, is the unbridled lust in her lyrics, making this perhaps the horniest album of the year.

 24. Protomartyr – Relatives in Descent

This Detroit band’s fourth album is a masterclass in restraint and release, in using moments of peace and patience to skillfully maximize the impact when the noise kicks in. Anchored by the mighty voice of Joe Casey – who spits his lyrics with all the vitriol of Nick Cave in the 80s – it’s a thrillingly dark listen.

 23. Vagabon – Infinite Worlds

A recurring theme in music this year was the passing of the guard between indie rock generations; where big-name comebacks were often underwhelming (many notable by their absence from this list) in favour of thrilling debuts from voices often overlooked in the genre. Case in point, Laetitia Tamko, the woman behind Vagabon, an American born in Cameroon; with Infinite Worlds, she achieved the kind of debut other artists only dream of; tight, direct, unnervingly raw and honest, and downright unforgettable.

 22. Oumou Sangare – Mogoya

Oumou Sangare turns fifty next year, and has been performing since she was five; for Mogoya, though, the Malian music icon hardly rests on her laurels. She’s managed to dance a fine line in successfully creating a contemporary update on her traditional Wassoulou sound, for a thoroughly empowering and danceable record that’s at once instantly recognizable as Malian, without being bound the “world music” tag.

 21. Cable Ties – Cable Ties

There were a lot of great punk and post-punk records in 2017; few, however, hit with the power of this Melbourne band’s debut LP. Every track grabs you within seconds, and the tightness of the band’s performance keeps you hooked throughout. They’re playing Laneway next month, and if they’re not huge afterwards, there is no justice in the world.

 20. Oddisee – The Iceberg

My second-favourite hip-hop album (after the obvious), this is the best release yet from the impressively prolific rapper; his words, delivered with clarity and eloquence, don’t beat around the bush; and paired with the organic, live-band sound, this record is an absolute breath of fresh air.

 19. Jens Lekman – Life Will See You Now

Whilst Jens Lekman has never played the singer-songwriter aesthetic straight, his fourth album totally dismisses the tag, finding musical inspiration in disco and calypso. It makes for a real treat of a literary pop record, especially with his none-more-idiosyncratic lyrics, touching on everything from dinner dates to models of tumours to the Cambrian explosion.

 18. Downtown Boys – Cost of Living

A bigger budget and a bigger audience helped the Rhode Island punks broaden their sound on their second album, allowing for longer and bigger songs. Their firepower, however, hasn’t dimmed a bit; like their debut, the impact of these bilingual, saxophone-fuelled songs of rage make Downtown Boys one of the most exhilarating bands working today.

 17. Flamingosis – A Groovy Thing

A year after his last great album, Bright Moments, Flamingosis presented his greatest, most fully-realised work yet in A Groovy Thing. Like a slightly-less-whimsical Avalanches, this all-samples album unfolds as impossibly inviting, pastel-toned jazz-funk; every track establishing a warm, fuzzy groove you’ll want to inhabit for as long as possible.

 16. Naomi Keyte – Melaleuca

The best South Australian LP of 2017, Naomi Keyte’s debut LP consists of gorgeously expansive pop-folk, with songs that evoke the rolling, golden hills and windswept beaches of the Adelaide region. An album of songs to lose yourself in, and to make you ache for home.

 15. Broken Social Scene – Hug of Thunder

Wikipedia describes Broken Social Scene’s lineup as varying between six and nineteen members; for Hug of Thunder, their comeback record after seven years away, they managed to distill the potential of such an enormous sound into laser-like focus, resulting in a thrillingly joyous indie-rock success.

 14. King Krule – The Ooz

I always hate it when young people are intimidatingly talented, a point proven by the astonishing creativity of Archy Marshall, aka King Krule. At just 23, he’s created, for the second King Krule album, a sound so unique, so immersive, that it essentially inhabits its own musical universe. Seamlessly crossing ideas across blues, trip-hop, rap, dub, dirty jazz and garage punk, this is a rich, complex and challenging listen, bountiful with tricks and treasures to discover for years to come.

 13. Kendrick Lamar – DAMN.

Kendrick Lamar’s conquering of popular music culture is now so complete that he barely warrants any further justification. Let’s just say his flow and wordplay are unparalleled, and the raw sound of DAMN., after the elaborate To Pimp a Butterfly, continues to surprise.

 12. Sheer Mag – Need To Feel Your Love

Sheer Mag’s debut LP is probably the most purely lovable rock album of the year; there’s no messing about with high concept ideas, just song after song of kickarse riffs and vocals. Drawing inspiration from wildly unfashionable sources – 1970s hard rock and 1980s power pop among them – Tina Halladay proves an absolute powerhouse of a singer, providing enough grit to temper the sugar rush of the music itself.

 11. Kelela – Take Me Apart

After a number of EPs and countless guest appearances, Kelela’s debut LP finally appeared, and it was a revelation. In somewhat similar territory to fka Twigs, she twists contemporary R&B sounds into strange new shapes, with a near-impossible attention to detail in the production of every song, making this record a treasure for the body and the brain in equal measure.

 10. Sampha – Process

Sampha Sisay has spent a few year playing guest vocalist, for Solange, SBTRKT and Drake to name a few. When his own LP finally arrived, it proved remarkably complex, deep and rewarding for a debut; fully fleshed-out and well-considered progressive soul music, it’s clear that Sampha’s been meditating on and distilling the sound of these songs for a while, resulting in a beautiful, thoughtful and moving album.

 9. Fleet Foxes – Crack-Up

Even among a near-flawless discography, Fleet Foxes’ first record in six years managed to be their grandest achievement. A tour de force of complex majesty, these massive, multi-sectioned songs hit every note of aural pleasure, even with the immediacy of a single like “White Winter Hymnal.”

 8. Lorde – Melodrama

Classic pop albums – not indie-pop, not art-pop, just straight pop – are a rare beast, especially those that a greater than the sum of their singles, and particularly those that follow world-conquering teenage debuts. Melodrama completely blows Pure Heroine away, cementing Lorde’s position as one the world’s great pop songwriters.

 7. Feist – Pleasure

At the time, and following her surprise hit “1234,” Feist’s Metals album seemed shockingly raw; now, it sounds downright opulent, such is the stark, unpolished nature of Pleasure. Here, Feist drifts ever further from the mainstream, pushing her vocals low in the mix, and letting the songs breathe with an uncluttered, unrefined, downright dirty sound.

 6. The Smith Street Band – More Scared Of You Than You Are Of Me

Hitting full throttle within seconds, then barely letting up for another moment, this album catapulted the Smith Street Band into Australian music’s big leagues. Its core is Wil Wagner’s voice and lyrics, which split some critics between disarmingly honest and direct on the one hand, and mere bogan rantings on the other. For my part, I found his soppy romanticism and vulnerable realisations utterly gripping throughout.

 5. Jay Som – Everybody Works

This album, from a woman otherwise named Melina Duterte, is the very epitome of not just indie rock in 2017, but independent music of any genre. Written, performed and produced entirely on her own, this is an album of intimacy, honesty, directness and identity-formation. Most importantly, despite the easy tags, there are no ballads or anthems here; rather, despite drifting from subtle bedroom pop to fuzzed-out noise, Duterte’s compositions are all about shades of grey, a true sign of a gifted songwriter with a bright future.

 4. LCD Soundsystem – American Dream

The fourth official LCD Soundsystem LP builds on the dance-punk template of three perfect previous records, taking it into stranger, hitherto-unexplored places; the wigged-out guitar frenzy of “Emotional Haircut,” and the apocalyptic rhythms of “How Do You Sleep?” among them. It’s all representative of James Murphys’ increasingly no-fucks-given approach, allowing himself to take ever-greater risks than before.

Or, for a shorter review: James Murphy makes another amazing record – no one is surprised.

 3. Thundercat – Drunk

Drunk feels like the album Thundercat has been teasing his whole career; after some false starts, EPs, great singles, great collaborations, Drunk is, finally, the bass virtuoso’s masterpiece. Over twenty-three tracks – none of which surpass four minutes – it’s a funk album made of small moments, intricate ideas and quirky humour. Whimsical, self-deprecating, and a whole lot of fun, it’s an endlessly loveable funk odyssey.

 2. Priests – Nothing Feels Natural

Coming from Washington, D.C., this is undoubtedly the most exhilarating rock record I’ve heard in years. From a post-punk template, Priests keep you guessing with elements of surf, garage, goth and even jazz (check out the jazzy breakdown in the opener, “Appropriate”). With Katie Alice Greer’s howls and sneers accompanying ideas of identity, intersectionalism, democracy and general disappointment with the state of the world, Priests have provided the perfect soundtrack for 2017.

 1.    Perfume Genius – No Shape

2017 was, of course, a landmark year for Australia’s LGBTIQ community, with the long-overdue legislation of marriage equality. The path to get there was tortuous, damaging and painful; yet, in the aftermath of the campaign’s success, the time is right to celebrate what should be the mundaneness same-sex monogamy. It’s in this context, then, that we receive Mike Hadreas’ fourth Perfume Genius record; a thoughtful pop album that’s at once vibrant, decadent, tender, sentimental and celebratory. A lot has changed for Hadreas between records; on his previous, Too Bright, he looked upon himself with disgust, and approached his queerness confrontationally; for No Shape, however, he has nothing left to fear, no reason to retreat. As a result, this album – 2017’s greatest – is all celebration and acceptance of self, all odes to devotion and redemption, and, at the end of the day, sheer reverence for his lucky boyfriend, Alan Wyffels.