#and variously queer
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getsemantic · 2 years ago
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Actually I am cool and sexy and aesthetically pleasing. Body fascism wants me to believe that my chubbiness is ugly, my shortness is embarrassing, and the mere suggestion that my body does normal-human-body-things (acne, snot, vomit, etc) is shameful and unacceptable.
However, this is a lie!
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millieindeed · 1 year ago
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I know the bigots don't exactly care about facts and logic. But like, why do they think so many countries specifically brought in laws against transition and against learning about being trans? Do they think lawmakers just make laws randomly outlawing things that don't exist? No. They did it to repress and to hide and to keep the truth away from people. Because they knew that people, kids adults everyone, would learn about being trans, and many would think "Huh, that sounds like how I feel".
So yeah, I didn't see anyone pre-2000 in my primary school explicitly question their gender (there are some who would've tried though). I did in high school though. and more again in University. As we grew old enough to find the things that were being hidden from us. And bold and strong enough to speak our truths aloud, even when we know there will be consequences.
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I graduated high school in 99.
There was a student at our school named Wayne.
Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.
Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.
The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.
Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.
He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.
Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.
So... no.
No one in my school talked about being trans.
Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.
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thenightfolknetwork · 9 months ago
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✨ Why you should listen to Monstrous Agonies! ✨
Monstrous Agonies is a fiction podcast created by @monstrousproductions that captures the weekly advice segment on the UK's only dedicated radio station for creatures of the night 👻🥰
Featuring:
A late-night radio advice show for monsters
A butter-voiced English narrator so soothing they have literally sent people to sleep (take care if listening while driving!)
Now complete at three seasons, there's over 100 episodes to binge, with additional bonus eps, bloopers and end-of-season Q&As
Full transcripts for every episode, linked in the show-notes
Average episode length of 10-15 minutes (can you tell it was made by someone with ADHD... 😉)
Monsters as a metaphor for marginalisation
Monsters as not-a-metaphor-at-all - sometimes a sentient tapeworm is just a sentient tapeworm
Asexual vampires! Gay werewolves! Trans lizard ladies! If it can be queer, by God it will be queer!
Funny ha-ha!
Also, funny like ‘wait, are they eating people?’
Variously described as, ‘eldritch late-night Radio Four’, ‘fun and full of love’, and ‘like a warm hug from a creature with one too many arms
'While the podcast is now finished, the world continues here on @thenightfolknetwork where you can send in your questions about life, love, and all things liminal 😎
If that sounds like your cup of tea, search for 'Monstrous Agonies' on your podcatcher of choice and give us a listen! ��💕
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daisychainsandbowties · 4 months ago
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Is there anything more beautiful and tragic than Lilith’s self-destructive longing to be loved?
i wrote a little something for this. a little bit of davy jones au
/// lullabies in salt
Lilith sings to her, sometimes, when the ship becomes a ghost and all of her crew are just specks of watery light. They move through the rigging, each one turning into what they really are.
Or what they long to be – Lilith has never been certain of this as she stands alone among them all, watching as eels curl around ropes dangling unattended, as crabs wander the deck with their claws scraping softly on soft wood.
Jellyfish strung like floating lanterns up above as thought trying to replace the night sky.
Her crew, to whom she is not gentle, and yet here they are in their simplest form; their wishful thinking that endures to this depth and makes light for her where there should be none. She has watched their bodies change, like hers, over the years.
(there is no need to admit to herself that she has lost count of them)
They are always so astonishingly alive in the beginning, and of course Lilith is just a ghoul to them. She has to be. Pacing by day in her coat that always drips cold water, her swords lending weight to her hips where flesh and fat and all her girlish ends of her have faded away.
She’s seen how they look at her – eyes bloodshot, gleaming in the candles her crew carry with them onto the wreckage of ships. Lilith wonders each time if this makes for a better ending, as she paces in front of the survivors where they kneel in their shallow saltwater graves, variously bloodied and always on the edge of death.
Her crew, who have all made the same poor choices, whisper that it is. Better.
“Why?” she asks them, her voice moving like water over sand.
Her crew, who she thinks of as beautiful because what else to think or to feel about them? Their faces cracked open by barnacles and occupied by every crawling thing that lives inside the ocean. A girl of seventeen (dead) who did not endure the crossing from England; her eyes replaced by the broad caps of jellyfish, who looked up from her whalebone dice and said, “It’s better to have a choice, I think.”
Even now, she is shy, though the sea has reclaimed all of her girlishness. Her forearms are chitin and her teeth are coral, and even as Lilith stood by, waiting for her to summon her voice again, a tiny krill crawled out of her left ear and settled on the lobe like an earring.
The girl touched it, smiling, as though a pretty boy (or another pretty girl, Lilith supposes) had set it there with bare hands. “I wasn’t ready to be dead,” she told Lilith, quiet but fierce, “And I don’t regret this.”
“You will.”
As the ship falls, passing out of sight of sunlight, Lilith searches for the marshlight of that girl in the strung-shadows, in the ghosts. There are a few she suspects.
One, a dolphin turning loops around the mainmast. It is the pink kind that live out somewhere on the continent west of Europe – oh, Lilith can’t remember the names they put on maps. What she remembers, from the queer knowing of things that is her deathbed companion, is that this creature is a freshwater thing and does not belong here.
Its shape climbs and climbs, into the crow’s nest, and then the ship shudders. They are done descending.
The light vanishes.
Lilith steps away from the wheel, fingers unsticking reluctantly from the barnacle-choked wood. Maybe there is no wood left at all, she realises, taking in the twitching mass of creatures that have consumed every inch of what was once a clean and solid shape.
(what has she done to them?)
Her memory is cloth eaten by moths, and all of this is probably her fault, but she cannot remember why.
Sometimes, when she falls asleep (at last. Always at last) with the ship’s organ falling silent around her, she dreams of a rainswept shore. Scrawny palm trees and dried seaweed strewn along the sand.
Kneeling there like one of the flotsam she fetches out of the sea, face uptilted to taste the rain, to feel it run between her teeth. One last taste before her trembling hand raises something that makes her fist ache. She is shirtless in her dream, lurid in the shine off of drenched skin. Her scars all laid bare for that ruined island to see.
(did she burn them out of their little church on the hillside. did she paint the parish bell with blood and turn the neat little houses to cinders. did she-)
Perhaps the island was deserted when she came, rowing away from the Dutchman in the longboat with her crew watching in their silent way. Arms flung over the railings, hands fiddling with bits of wood or scraps of leather.
She went to where they could not witness her and stripped down. Laying her coat over a fallen tree and leaving her shirt as a smear of white on the sand, weighted by rain. She kept her pants (she has others) and knelt, placing every last letter into the box. A handful of flowers long turned dry and delicate as she shielded them from the rain, snapping the lid shut to protect them.
Turning instead to a smaller chest, all filigreed in the shape of sea creatures. Lilith didn’t make it herself. In the way of things, the ocean brought it to her in the ruins of a dying ship. It knows her mind and what she intends, and there is only a little mockery in the gifting of a chest.
(a locker)
 Sailors, among all types of men, are good at poetry because they see so little of it.
And so much.  
Lilith has seen so much and she remembers certain things with clarity like crystal – warped, but unashamed. Carrying light somewhere, if not where it needs to go, if not exactly all the way to the eye of the beholder.
She remembers kneeling, naked, and something in her hand (terrible) and tears tracking toward her mouth to make the freshwater taste of rain vanish. It was a knife, she thinks, that left hard welts in the flesh of her hand and made her bruise for days.
Her palm a cup of bluegrey turning green, turning yellow, turning on her as she walked unsteadily through the ship.
(and lilith is no fool)
She knows what she’s missing, and few besides her know that it is difficult to walk without a heartbeat – that there’s a rhythm to it. Stumbling like a drunk for days with the ship all run dry of rum.
“When do we make port?”
Her crew, as things crawled up on the deck.
They were afraid at first to become more like the sea, lashing out so she tipped more than one eviscerated body over the railing in that first week. Bodies weighted like anchors to their doom, since they could not sleep without serving her.
(she came back, later, and found them in their shallow graves alongside hidden reefs or close to islands they used to visit in passing, just to lay on the beaches and drink)
“Sorry captain.” Voices almost vanished into seawater and the soft rolling of waves across the ocean floor. “Glad you came back for me.”
(what else could she do? this is all her fault)
 It was cheating, but Lilith made deals and traded favours with other ships to get them supplies. “I’m a ghost, if anyone asks,” she’d tell their captains, who were always variously afraid of her. “Speak of this at all of your own volition and I will send her to find you.”
“Who?”
Only the daring ones asked, and sadly Lilith liked the daring ones. Their smiles and how their fingers lingered on her cold wet hands, fascinated instead of repulsed – give it time.
A hunger to them as they stepped a little closer – they met on her ship, and in their eyes it was because she preferred it this way, and not because her ship would not allow her to leave. “Who will you send?”
She’d smile, like a girl who did not need to keep secrets, “The sea.”
It was close enough to the truth. Lilith does not remember anything of how it came to this, but she sourced paint, canvas, charcoals and paper and anything her crew might need to remember for her. All of her kindest acts have been out of fear.
In their stumbling and then better and then beautiful attempts at painting, or sketching, Lilith has seen the bottom of the ocean as it changes over years. The crawl of objects along the ocean floor as the waves return. They are more loyal than the rest of the world together.
Sometimes she would be stupid and end up in her cabin with one of these odd little artists – her crew which is a collective and also individual. Individuals.
They were like anyone else to fuck – messy, and good, and quiet afterwards, tracing the mark of her own sword on some crewmember’s stomach.
Of course she is not so much of a fool as to say, “Who did this to you?” even in jest, but she wonders.
Who did this?
It doesn’t feel like her, but she remembers and it was and she left markings on her map at each place where she sent a panicked body over the railing.
All of them were right as they came at her with cutlass, saber, chunks of rotting wood.
“You did this to us.”
(and she did. she did)
It is not punishment enough, she knows, to have watched them change, one by one. Bodies she knew – fucked, cooked for, defended with her own – turned to bodies she only recognises because she never looked away. Afraid to blink, sometimes.
She gave them paper and paint so that they could remember, and there is a little booklet in the dry-store of her crew before, or halfway through. Her crew slowly undone as the Dutchman turns and turns around the ocean like a tiger in a cage.
And she is not brave enough to remember why she did it to them.
Lilith has no interest in drawing things, or putting smears of colour down to try, try, try and represent what happened to her. Lilith is a liar, and that should make her an artist too, but she takes what she has and puts it onto piano keys.
Happy, in the end, to remember little beyond her own naked chest. Nothing but a beach, a knife, a bloody shape in her hand.
(still beating)
It has been like this forever. Lilith with lichen growing out of her hairline and glassy teeth growing under the veins in her wrists. As a child she read about Moray eels and their teeth, and as usual her dreams have come back to infect her.
She is sick with longing, disfigured by it, and sometimes she wakes up with her arms bloody and soaking her bedsheets. Prongs of a glasslike substance sticking out of her wrists – and it is terrifying, but Lilith cannot die.
(and ‘cannot’ is a terrible thing, even when it is about death)
Tonight the ocean is calm and nothing has died, so Lilith moved through her crew. Oh, they are quiet sometimes especially when the stars come out. Night so clear you can feel it reaching for you.
Their voices all around her and their hands reaching out, sliding off her slick skin. Lilith, their fresh-drowned corpse, with new shapes sprouting now from her jawline. Following it all the way home into her mouth.
She loves their hands. She loves them.
The new ones as yet unbroken by the slow crawl of time, with their human faces. Almost, now, she finds their eyes unnerving – all simple shades of brown or blue or black or hazel or grey. There is so much weather in these living-dead things. So much of land.
As the sun fell she moved through them, listening, composing something in her head that sounded already as though it would be a sad song. She is good with only two emotions in music.
Anger, and this strange melancholy that falls over her crew when there are no bodies to collect. No limbs floating in the water and no blood in the seafoam.
No sharks.
“Let’s go down”
                                                      “Lilith”
                       “Captain”
    “Let’s go down”
Lilith has seen more of the ocean than anyone alive. Her body is spyglass, map, compass, and complicated in all the ways that saltwater is. There are no clean deaths out here.
Only drownings.
She took them down, waves rushing up the length of the ship to swallow their bodies one by one and how they floated for a while as the crushing took hold. Their bodies ignored it, and Lilith felt only the familiar ache in her wrists.
Here, at least, she cannot drip water onto the deck beneath her like a poor excuse for a heartbeat. Her crew were, at first, themselves.
She hates to find them beautiful, but there’s a helplessness to it; to Lilith and her long acquaintance with the sea.
I miss you.
The thought stepped out like a ghost to frighten her, and Lilith flinched against the wheel, but she did not let it go. Beach, knife, rainwater, and a bead of sharp pain somewhere on her chest.
Sand, blood, and the water catching up to catch her, and drinking it down.
“Are you thirsty, Lil?” (a voice she does not know)
Her crew are beautiful. They are the ocean and they are her and they float so perfectly as the ship descends, dragging their shapes out of sight. Light-swallowed and turning into light as they unravel.
(she will not describe them)
Only their ghosts, strung up into blurry wavelengths as the depths settle like an absent heartbeat around her. Quiet as her grave.
Lilith waits.
Her ship is lost now, barnacles loose in the water around her as they try to flee. (where? there is nowhere to go)
Catching one, she turns it over, watching as featherlike cirri tease from its tip, combing the water even now for food. It is not afraid of her, or it would have retreated into its shell, and Lilith lets its tiny appendages tease over her fingertips. There is plenty to eat on her skin.
She sets it on her forearm, feeling it secrete onto her skin, burrowing down among fine hairs and into flesh. There is a momentary bloom of blood in the water and then Lilith turns her attention out toward the ocean, to where a shape lurks now on the edge of seeing.
“Hello darling,” Lilith whispers, and a kraken’s arm punctures out of absolute darkness, easing toward her like a tongue parting lips, parting water. Easy as a knife parting flesh, carving out space for a ghost.
It moves through her crew, who scatter like wavelengths of light (that is all they are for now) from its path. The barnacle, newly apart of Lilith, quivers against her bones.
The arm stops, extended, a few inches from Lilith where she stands just shy of the ship’s wheel. It is cold at this depth, but Lilith cannot feel that any more than she can feel sunlight on her skin or the taste of food in her mouth.
She reaches out with her left hand so as not to scare the barnacle (who knows its place in the grand scheme even if Lilith does not) and lets the very tip of that unfathomable arm reach forward, curling all around her.
Her kraken hums and Lilith feels the reverberation of it mostly in her chest where there is plenty of room. She steps forward and the arms curls and curls – and Lilith is always dripping water but this creature is wet and she can feel it for once.
Lilith closes her eyes, feels her feet lift away from the deck and she is free, finally, of all that wood and tar, of a million nails and a thousand tiny chips in once-beautiful wood. She feels her barnacle rush toward the inside of her elbow where it burrows into the vein, opening her wide.
A blood trail follows them through the water as the kraken brings her close, away until the ship is just a mirage. Its mouth opens to show her rows of pretty teeth. Lilith has one on a leather cord around her neck, gifted accidentally by a shipwreck she visited one.
“Liar. A shipwreck you made.” (says a voice she does not know)
Its breath is only warmth here as the kraken lazes at this depth, letting faint currents shift her from side to side. They are still far from the bottom of the ocean, but this dark is preternatural anyway. This place hardly even exists.
Lilith, who has been granted space to move in the safety of the kraken’s grip, runs her hand over the suckers on its arm. It tastes her blood.
“Have you been well, dear one?” She asks this through the murk so her voice does not really travel, but the kraken hears her. She feels it twirling her lightly in place, humming more serenely as they dance farther from the ship, together.
Lilith kisses its wet flesh and looks toward her creature, her kraken, her ocean. “It is all I have, to hear that.”
It sends a small shockwave through the water in response – enough to make the barnacle shiver where it sits sipping at Lilith’s blood.
“Do you want me to sing for you?” Lilith spreads her palm over what passes for a kraken’s hand, sliding her fingers fully around the thinnest part, the very tip of its arm.
There’s a plea in its voiceless rhythm as the kraken twists in the water. There is so much of it that Lilith cannot follow every arm to its ending. Her creature is vast and it swallows the ocean around them. Everything, instead, is her.
(they are the same thing)
(ocean and kraken. ocean and girl)
Lilith sings.
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fanhackers · 1 year ago
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An Intimate Sound–Podfic and Confluence
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about podfic, i.e.., audio versions of fanfic, read out aloud. Podfic, as an audio-based medium, sits at the confluence of disability accessibility, performance, and of course, simply being a new form of narrative text.
In the first ever published article on podfic, Olivia Riley states:
“Audiobooks, another auditory predecessor of podfic, share podfic's emphasis on fictional narrative and vocal performance as well as other qualities typical to all the audio mediums so far discussed, including portability and ease of access. The comparison of podfic to audiobooks is particularly important because in my investigation I ran across numerous instances of listeners explicitly comparing the podfic experience to that of an audiobook, while only one referenced podcasts in relation to these audio narratives; thus, we must take into account how fans theorize their own texts and experiences.”
This particular comparison between audiobooks and podfics interests me; podcasts, whether fictional or non-fictional, arguably may be more intimate, in so much as we may get to listen to the speakers’ personal opinions, thoughts, ideas, etc. And yet, podfic finds itself standing more with audiobooks, despite sharing half its name with podcasts. I’d like to complicate this further, drawing from my own experience of both running zines with audio components, as well as interacting with fellow fans who make podfic, and who have had podfic made off their own work: fans are sometimes hesitant to provide permission to have their work read out aloud, concerned about the voice and audio work “exposing” perceived flaws in their written texts.
There’s a certain intimacy involved in the process, certainly, more than just that of getting a work beta-ed, or proof-read. It’s similar to the collaborative nature of fanart for fanfic, except fanart is welcomed with a lot less hesitance.
In the same article, Riley further goes on to explore this very intimacy:
“The audio performances of podfic produce a queer network of relations between the performer, the text, and the listener. To begin with, the text itself is an actor in podfic. All the podfics examined for this article were explicitly queer in their content, featuring queer(ed) characters, queer themes, romance, and often explicit sexuality. The characters in these podfics carry variously transformed and reimagined genders and sexualities. These podfics are palimpsests of many texts and authors, including the fan fic being read aloud, the source text the fan fic was inspired by, the contemporary fanon and fan community that shaped the fic's production, the various music and sound effects often used in these recordings, and the labor of all the creators who made these media. Further, through the reader's performance, listeners receive a unique interpretation of the fan fic being read, conveyed through the intonations and other subtleties that emphasize and elide various textual significances. This profusion of overlapping and sometimes contradictory layers of meaning impact how a listener understands a character's gender and sexuality, refusing the simplicity of heteronormative binaries.” RILEY, OLIVIA JOHNSTON. 2020. “PODFIC: QUEER STRUCTURES OF SOUND.” TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS AND CULTURES, NO. 34. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.3983/TWC.2020.1933.
There is, then, a definite sense of vulnerability in getting podfic made off one’s work. But podfic, I’d argue, is almost the most celebratory fan-object fandom has ever produced—it sits again on a confluence, not just of medium and accessibility, but of multiple creatives, all of whom have a singular contribution in making the final product. Podfic is, in many ways, a community object, more so than most fan-objects, simply by its nature of needing multiple inputs. 
What are your thoughts on podfic?
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brucequeensteen · 11 months ago
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losing my entire mind at this paragraph from Beyond blood brothers: queer Bruce Springsteen by Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel. im so emotional
[Image text: At 6'4" and of sturdy build, he towers over Bruce and the other members of E Sreet, who are all several inches shorter (Springsteen is 5' 8"). Clemons was also older than the rest of the band, and it is no small matter that he was African American in a group that is otherwise mostly Jewish and Italian American. Wielding his powerful (and phallic) saxophone, the Big Man is the only one who ever gets to be a bit more 'boss' than the Boss. Throughout his performances Springsteen supplicates himself to Clemons: he variously leans into him for comfort, prances around him like a puppy in love, and elevates him with introductory titles such as 'King of the World' and 'Master of the Universe', whose name should not even need to be pronounced. Bruce worships Clarence and invites the audience to do the same. Photographs from concerts throughout the early 1970s show the same unabashed gaze of adoration that was so carefully constructed on the cover of Born to Run. /end ID.]
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howlsofbloodhounds · 3 months ago
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Oh oh! uhh do you have any songs you haven't mentioned yet (or haven't in awhile) that you associate with color or killer (or both)? :3
Oh I have a bit so hang with me here.
1. Color and Killer, with enemy fire. I shift on if I think this fits Stage 1 & Color, or oddly enough, Stage 3 and Color.
2. Wicked Game is definitely them (“what a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you.” “What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way.” “What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way.” “This world will break your heart, nobody’s falling in love.” “The world was on fire, and no one could save me but you.” “Its strange what desire will make foolish people do.” “I never dreamed that id meet somebody like you, and I never dreamed that id lose somebody like you.” This is definitely Color and Stage 2.
And another is War of Hearts and andromeda and Take on the World (Color’s POV)
This Night has Opened my Eyes for all off Killer Stages & all just variously finding themselves wishing for what they with Chara at their lowest points in life, if only because they don’t know who they are if they aren’t in pain or if they aren’t theirs.
Please please let me get what I want but I think it’s actually stage 2. He rarely wants anything as much as he wants color.
Change but it’s Chara’s POV and watching Sans become something else. Decode is Chara & ST1 so much. Numb is very Chara & ST2 leading up to his betrayal and 25 to life. That one could also work with Killer and Nightmare.
Thank you for hating me and Hope It Haunts You fits Stage 2 with Chara/the player (& nightmare in a way) in my opinion. What Could Have Been is definitely Stage 2 with the Player. Brutus is Stage 2 & Chara. Breaking the Habit for st2. Going Under for Stage 1.
Don’t You Dare Forget The Sun makes me think of Killer in a way, although I’m still figuring out how.
Hurts Like Hell but its color because the poor man has likely lost killer many times and hardly anyone is going to understand or empathize because of who killer is. Look After You but its color & killer with eachother.
How to Save a Life and Leave the Light On is definitely Color.
You Found Me is definitely st1, but like, id imagine he’s talking to someone from his past. Papyrus, or in my opinion, Gaster—with the, “where were you?” parts. Color is the “her” who is mentioned to be lost.
Somewhere Only We Know is definitely Color and Killer. And Die For You but especially Color with Killer in the beginning, but then it becomes Killer.
I Found makes me think of them.
Paralyzed is Stage 1 or Sans when things were really getting bad. I’ll Be Good makes me think of stage 1.
Two makes me think of Color. Francis Forever after losing Killer once again.
This is getting long and a lot of these are based on scenarios I can picture happening so I will try to end it with one more, ah..one that definitely leans more into a queer and a bit suggestive undertone with Rule #34 because that is definitely Stage 2 being a little freak to Color. I need to stop myself here or I’ll keep going
( @toffeebrew ).
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theladyragnell · 6 months ago
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Speaking of queerness in Bridgerton, what did you think of that scene where Benedict was dancing with his random woman of the season and she deliberately turned him around so that he was leading from the side where all the women were standing in the couples around them? I think that had to be intentional, and I’m curious to see if it will end up meaning anything.
I hadn't noticed that, that's cool! I am always so distracted by the choreography being What It Is (never over the first season and the big climactic dance when they explicitly discuss waltzing and THEN THEY POLKA) that I rarely clock things like that.
However, without watching again, my immediate guesses are that reasons were twofold:
a) To show Lady Arnold's character of being strong, independent, and in charge (and particularly in charge of their relationship) and that Benedict is willing to go along with that. This is likely the larger reason! And then there's
b) simple visual contrast! It can be hard, in a dance scene, to make your main couple stand out from the others, when the men are usually a sea of dark suits and the women a sea of variously-toned long dresses. Pride & Prejudice (2005), for instance, solved this problem by having the dancers alone but still going through the group dance steps. This is another neat way of doing it, especially because it's also shorthand for Lady Arnold's character, as above!
So I guess my read is that this isn't implying that Benedict is queer so much as it's implying that he gets pegged.
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mylordshesacactus · 10 months ago
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Genuinely shoutout (?) to Elisabeth Durst for being so overwhelmingly unpleasant that a whole-ass party of variously kinky "I support women's wrongs" queers have just universally gone oh no, nonono, she is the Unfun kind of evil, this bitch needs to die.
Like it takes a LOT for US to not even be going "this could have been solved with a threesome" because like first of all that would Not have solved whatever is wrong with this woman
and second of all, Get Away From Her Actually
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three--rings · 1 year ago
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You know what the OFMD fandom experience reminds me of?
My Hannibal fandom experience.
A show I really, deeply love, but reading other fans meta takes on it made me want to fucking throw things.
Hannibal fandom was the reason I joined tumblr in 2013, and I left six months later in a fit of rage when tumblr decided the show was homophobic for having a queer woman (not lesbian, unspecifically queer) sleep with a man once in order to get pregnant. Also when they pretended to kill a female character and people were ranting about the show's misogyny and I was like you idiots she's gonna be alive next week and then she was, cause that happens like 20 times in that show.
I spent the rest of the show's run on twitter, following only cast and crew accounts and like 2 RL friends and only using twitter to liveblog the show.
The way it shook out was all the inane discourse topics of Hannibal fandom were forgotten after the show was finished mostly because people didn't need to make up things to be angry about for a week between episodes and could just focus on fic and stuff. And the angry people moved on to some other show, probably.
And that's what ofmd fandom feels like for me. Do you know how tired I am reading about who is really to blame for Izzy's toe being cut off: him or the man who did it? How tired I am of arguments about morality that totally ignore that the characters under discussion are pirates who have killed like, a lot of people? The arguments with clear ax grinding agendas?
I'm dreading the discussions that are coming and to some extent already happening. I feel like we need a trigger warning for arguing about who is Evil Actually In This Situation. #toegate?
But I'm far too invested in tumblr to ragequit again. And fuck twitter. It's not better there, even if I don't follow anyone.
But yeah, morally complicated shows have shitty meta discussion. And that's too bad because that's what I ENJOY. I desperately wanted people to analyze Hannibal with because god there was so much to talk about, but then people would just pull out some shit like "that queer female character is homophobic because she's too pretty." Yes this is a take I read.
Hannibal is also the fandom where I learned about the curse of S2 in fandom, where fandom declares a new show PERFECTION based on S1 and then S2 comes along and doesn't live up the the perfection they've built up in their mind and then they get mad and tear it apart for everything they can possibly twist into a flaw.
If anything I have a little hope that that won't exactly happen with ofmd because of how toxic the fandom has already been in variously attacking most main characters for their Low Moral Fiber or whatever. Just gotta hope no one's unproblematic faves get complicated, though, or the hell to pay will be epic.
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justforbooks · 19 days ago
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Letters by Oliver Sacks
The kaleidoscopic world and polymathic interests of a great neurologist brought to life in his correspondence
In 1960, Oliver Sacks, a 27-year-old University of Oxford graduate, arrived in San Francisco by Greyhound bus. Born in Cricklewood, London, Sacks spent the better part of his 20s training to be a doctor, but came to feel that English academic medicine was stifling and stratified. A “tight and tedious” professional ladder, he thought, was the only one available to aspiring neurologists like him.
A young queer man with a growing interest in motorcycle leather, Sacks had other reasons to leave. The revelation of his sexuality had caused a family rift: his mother felt it made him an “abomination”. And so he looked for escape across the Atlantic. America, for him, was the wide open west of Ansel Adams photographs; California was Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The new world promised “space, freedom, interstices in which I could live and work”. This is how we meet Oliver Sacks in Letters: as an immigrant undertaking an internship at Mount Zion hospital, the first step in a career on US soil that would span another five decades.
Sacks’s San Francisco years also marked the beginning of his life as a writer. The city wasn’t an arbitrary choice. As he eagerly confessed to a one-time lover, Jenö Vincze, his true motivation for travelling to California was to force a meeting with an artistic idol, the British-turned-Haight Ashbury poet, Thom Gunn. Gunn’s The Sense of Movement (1957) spoke to and stirred Sacks’s predilection for motorbikes. Moreover, it performed on Sacks the kind of private miracle only poetry can: it helped decode “the babble” of his emotional life. “There is a queer, colossally big London Jew called Wolf,” Gunn wrote to his partner in 1961, after first meeting Sacks (who used his middle name, Wolf, as a nom de guerre when frequenting the city’s gay bars, wise to its lycanthropic resonances). “[He] came out to be a doctor here because I live here.” Sacks shared his writing with Gunn, whom he found a ruthless but tender critic, later crediting the poet with first impressing on him that he had real literary talent; a pivotal moment for a man who would go on to publish a dozen books.
“I am not a good correspondent,” Sacks wrote to his parents in 1961, “because I speak and write at people rather than to them.” This is an apt summation of Letters: 52 years of outgoing mail sent (or left unsent) to family, friends, scientists, writers and later, fans and celebrities, a panoply of addressees as diverse as the subjects Sacks writes “at” them about. Unleashed in a self-described “volcanic logorrhoea” that typifies his writing style, these letters variously consider botany, etymology, entomology, geology, neurology, and literature; the tussle between xenophobia and xeniality in Star Trek; the “phantasmagoric-comic unconscious” of actor Robin Williams. Edited by Kate Edgar, who worked as Sacks’s editorial assistant for over 20 years, Letters represents a mere fraction of the total in his archives, which runs to more than 200,000 pages.
Many of the included letters are incomplete, with ellipses denoting gaps whose editorial logic we must take on faith, even when they occasionally appear to interrupt tantalising trains of thought. In a 1984 letter to Lawrence Weschler, for instance, Sacks’s conflicted reflections on strike action in hospitals that might put vulnerable patients at risk feel prematurely curtailed. Despite these excisions, Letters leaves one with the overwhelming impression of a brilliant and vivid mind, a man whose intellectual appetite was vast, and whose professional and creative passions – far from being the self-absorbed obsessions of a pedant – were first and foremost an act of reaching out, the means through which he sought to communicate with others, a “love affair with the world”.
Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse – and the organisation of Letters, separated into broadly thematic, chronological chapters with concise editorial introductions, provides narrative momentum. The resulting book is far more engaging than the unwieldy reference text for Sacks specialists it could have been. It might, in fact, serve as a more affecting autobiography than his On the Move (2015), which occasionally slides into sentimentality. Letters is crammed with off-the-cuff profundities, moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects of human nature. Here he is on grief, after the passing of his mother in 1972, an emotive state he deems “so unlike depression: it is so filling and real and expanding and uniting and – (it sounds an almost blasphemous word) – nourishing”.
Letters also draws an illuminating line from Sacks’s neurological career to his unlikely emergence as a bestselling author. In the late 60s, having relocated to New York, Sacks treated a group of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, also known as “sleeping sickness”, with an experimental drug, L-dopa. This experience informed his second book, Awakenings (1973), which married scientific research with storytelling through case studies of his patients’ lives and their responses to the treatment – a hybrid genre that irritated his colleagues just as it struck a chord with general readers. The literary attention Awakenings received set Sacks on a course to public renown.
“Brevity has never been a quality of mine,” he wrote to Mrs Miller, a physical therapist who helped him regain mobility after a leg injury in 1974. Indeed superabundance – the instinct toward excess – is everywhere in these letters. As a man of 30, dallying with powerlifting, Sacks routinely bragged to his parents about his weight, how much he could lift, the amount he ate – “I love to shake the pavement as I walk, to part crowds like the prow of a ship.” At Mount Zion, special scrubs had to be made to accommodate his bulk, and he found himself in disfavour with his superiors for stealing patients’ food.
But his overconsumption wasn’t always dietary. During the following 10 years or so, Sacks took a prodigious amount of amphetamines and psychotropics – “every dose an overdose” – with one trip producing visions of the “neurological heavens” so intense it inspired him to write his first book, Migraine (1970). By the 80s, following Awakenings and an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show that boosted his profile, pumping iron and popping pills had been replaced by correspondence. “I receive at least fifty or sixty letters and phone-calls a day,” he told his father with the same pride he formerly felt after squatting 575lb, “and, if anything, this number is increasing!”
What was Sacks trying to satiate? His substance abuse, the workaholism that eventually displaced it, speaks of the addict’s need to fill or stuff a void, an effort to forestall the unbearable loneliness that might accompany a moment’s rest. And loneliness certainly runs through these pages. Sacks once felt that his very existence was only made tolerable by rejecting intimacy and becoming “impersonal or supra-personal”; relationships, he said, were a forbidden area for him.
Late in life, he cited internalised homophobia as the driving force behind this isolation, a heart-rending admission, given that he temporarily felt liberated from this oppressive “social matrix” during that short-lived 1965 love affair with Jenö. It wasn’t until 2008, after 30-odd years’ celibacy, that an epistolary meet-cute with the writer Bill Hayes precipitated a loving, intimate companionship, one that would last the remainder of Sacks’s life. It’s a touching if bittersweet moment that arrives towards the end of Letters, the coda to this portrait of a man who, half a century earlier, had travelled across the world hoping to meet a poet who might truly understand him.
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?
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post-punk-post-twink · 1 month ago
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The globally popular video game franchise “Tetris” (originally released in 1984) has been variously interpreted as a metaphor for queer experience, specifically as a mode of deviance (Durkheim 1899) in heteronormative society. In the game, a player must attempt to align tetrominic graphical pieces—most of which are “bent” and therefore not “straight”—into perfectly straight rows as they fall toward the bottom the onscreen play area. When rows are completed, they vanish, pointing to the erasure of ego in the queer subject as they continually reorient their behavior to conform to heteronormative expectations. Once enough rows are completed, the player progresses to a new stage where tetrominoes appear and fall faster than the previous stage. The affective consideration thereof is the increase in anxiety the player experiences. In other words, the better and longer they are able to arrange tetrominoes in rows, the more their affective tension increases, not unlike effete gay male minors bluffing their way through a physical education class. Furthermore—though it is effectively impossible to accomplish—after completing 255 stages one would expect the game to end (annihilation of the queer self) but instead the game returns to stage zero, creating an endless loop.
In an alternative interpretation, Tetris is an abstraction of homoerotic male desire because it involves repeatedly stacking oblong, arguably phallic objects on top of each other ad infinitum and/or sticking them in tight little holes, which is really fucking sus if you think about it even for a little bit 🤔
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anjellynajolie · 1 year ago
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FASCINATED by Anita Mui’s queer presence in HK films, where she has been cast variously as a masculine /cross-dressing woman; a pansexual woman; a woman acting as a man; and a straight-up man. 
Rouge (1987) 
Kawashima Yoshiko (1990)
Fight Back to School III (1993)
Who’s the Man Who’s the Woman (1996)
Emperor Qi-Wu Yuen (2001) 
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unclewarwick · 2 years ago
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ehahhhhh my variouse. batmans art from october of 2021 - october of 2022. . ... . (click for full view etc etc)
Okay i have to add this here: if you're a radfem or terf, fuck off? i am a trans man and the versions i draw of batman and joker are both trans men. i cannot emphasise enough how much you do not belong here. you do not get to post things all the time about how trans men are ruining society for lesbians and everyone else just by existing, how men in general are the cause of everything bad in the world and should all die, how gay men are so whiny and privileged and have no real problems, and ALSO casually interact with a queer trans man's art of queer trans men. grow the fuck up and leave me alone
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connyscomics · 1 year ago
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Rain by Jocelyn C. DiDomenick 😺
Trans rep: 10/10
General enjoyment: 9/10
Age rating: 10+
Okay so I finally finished this one and... OHMYGODIMINLOVE. Rain is a webcomic with over 40 chapters (7 print volumes I think) and is seriously one of the best comics I've ever read. I could go on an on about all of the things I love about this one, but for yall's sanity as well as my own, I'm just going to talk about a couple things. Oh and a quick plot description: The comic follows a trans girl named rain as she attends a religious high school and meets other queer people. A lot of stuff happens in the many chapters of this comic, and it variously touches on pretty much everything that one might encounter as a young queer person, both positive and negative.
Okay, so the first highlight for me is the main character herself. I really like her character and as a young trans person navigating being transfem in high school I really connected with a lot of her story. In particular I appreciated the representation of a character who is mostly cis-passing BUT has to go to great lengths to make this happen (at least from the not-so-supportive people in her life). I feel like with trans rep you either get like people who have an uncharacteristically easy time passing or you have people who are portrayed as like a grotesque caricature of trans people (not to say that non-passing trans women are gross or that passing is needs the goal for everyone, but the visual of the like hyper-masculine figure with messy makeup and a dress isn't usually benign). Anyways, Rain is a great main character.
Another character I want to talk about is Ky/Kylie, they are genderfluid and in my opinion done really well. I honestly related to their character a lot because even though I'm technically not genderfluid, I have very fluid desires as far as presenting. I Ky/Kylie starts out not really understanding their own identity and just being like "idk I'm a girl but sometimes I dress up like a guy" and then as the story progresses becomes more confident in their identity as a genderfluid person. The story also considers the struggles of dating for genderfluid people, with a love interest liking them more for one gender identity than another but eventually growing to understand that he can't pick and choose which gender identity he wants Ky/Kylie to have at any moment.
I should probably wrap this up before I start going into every character I love. In general, what makes this story so great is that there is a character for pretty much anyone to connect with (yes, even cishet allies), and all of the characters are done pretty well. I do have a couple minor considerations though. First, the author changed a lot as a person while writing this (I mean she started writing in 2010 and finished literally this year) so the beginning of the comic is definitely a bit outdated with some of its narratives. Though, I think it ends up working out because it generally reads as the characters learning and developing as people, which is something that comics don't always show because of a fear of saying things that are now seen as insensitive. The only other thing is that there are kind a disproportionate number of queer people in Rains community, which at times feels a bit unrealistic given that shes literally at a catholic school, but honestly I can't complain that much cause all of the characters are so much fun!!! Sorry for the extra long review yall, I just had so much to say about this one! 😺
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devilboycomic · 8 months ago
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I absolutely love your comic. As a trans & mentally ill person who often struggles with my past abuse and internalized moralistic transphobia & ableism that has hindered my ability to accept myself and my found family it's been nice to see a bunch of trans & variously disabled characters do their best to care for eachother in the ways that they can.
As a bigender person who experiences delusions, I absolutely adore Thorn and I love how you use color to depict their multiplicity. Green & Pink are actually the colors I use to depict which of my genders I'm trying to express most prominently and I love seeing that, or at least something like it, in a fictional character.
Thank u so much for the love <3 as a disabled mentally ill queer person it means so much to me when my comic finds my people (lol).
Thorn's colors do represent their gender as Thorn is Genderfluid, Pink is for when he's feeling more masc, Green is for when he's feeling more fem, A combination of both is for everything in between and i use grey/blank Thorn for either Thorn in the flashbacks (pre-queer awakening) or whenever Thorn is going Through It™. 🐇
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