#because we've always been here

[kabretoss]

dinosaur kid in the 90s, never accused of being a tomboy and used to love dresses until I went 180 and rejected them when I realized they were compulsory Girl Formalwear

blissfully don't think about gender throughout most of my teens

straight because boyfriend? have a minor panic when said boyfriend comes out to me as bi. have a Homophobic Moment(tm) when I think about my boyfriend leaving me for a boy

promptly eat my words about a year later when I'm having a sleepover with my bestie at the time and the thought occurs, unbidden, "if she were down I'd have sex with her"

(never made a move on that one. though later I'll find out a couple of my Girl Crushes at the time were queer)

cautiously and tentatively start thinking of myself as bi

start discovering I enjoy wearing masculine fashion

the hammer comes down hard on that one from my mom

for the next 10+ years I dress almost exclusively in baggy pants and hoodies. i am still undoing this damage.

BUT: the next time I end up with a Bestie Crush, I make a move and it goes well (hi @cherrehc!) (I end up marrying her. like 15 years later) (we like to take our time with things)

20s are an occasional sexuality buffet (with Cherry's thumbs-up) and I confirm that yes I do enjoy sex, and yes I do enjoy it with multiple genders

still not thinking about gender: am aware by this age of Transgender People and am cool with them but I've never felt like a boy so that's not what I am, right?

(Even if, when puberty really took hold, I felt completely alienated from my secondary sex characteristics? that's normal, feeling like your body isn't yours but is a barbie's, right? I'm hot and I like being hot, so I'm a cis girl, right??? people like my tits and I like that so I must be a cis girl, right????)

at the same time find myself playing nonbinary characters in RP situations before they are in vogue in the wider community.

(reading some of my old RP logs is wild. it is all RIGHT. THERE. in text from when I was 20 and had never heard the word nonbinary.)

(I have avoided RPing men up until about this point because "I don't know how to play a guy". women are already strange to me: men must be aliens.)

(then a particular character occurs and something clicks.)

fast forward to my early thirties. one of my best college friends is on T, has been calling himself a male name for years, and comes out first as nonbinary and then as a man.

wait.

wait.

wait.

if I'm not a girl I don't have to be a boy? I don't have to be a boy to not be a girl? well that's closer, but what does that leave me?

I hear the word agender.

grief.

the loss of so much time. looking back on this timeline of events and feeling the most profound sense of something gained, late, not too late but still so late. It's never too late to know yourself, but you lose time. You lose the ability to experience parts of your life, ones you can never relive, as your genuine self. In my case, I also may have lost the window in which I can safely medically transition, as other health issues have cropped up since I was young.

I will never get to be a young nonbinary person: I never was, because I was never allowed to imagine myself that was.

I was a "girl". I was an alienated, lonely girl, who didn't understand why she felt, even when invited, that female spaces were wrong and strange. There are other reasons for that too, but I think a huge part is gender. I was invited repeatedly into the world of the feminine by good women in my life, but I never went there. I didn't feel the pull of it, even when I wanted the friendship and companionship that seemed to live there.

I lived in limbo. I felt like -- not a gender failure, but a kind of nothing. An empty space. a void. I didn't have something missing, I was something missing.

it's a big grief. It's ameliorated by getting to see young people living as the people they are, watching others grow up with the self-knowledge I was never allowed to come to.

I don't know where all the agender people my age are: odds are good that attrition bore them into silence or suicide, or that life has not yet introduced the opportunity for them to learn better than how they were raised, or they're (like me) just so very fucking tired and unable to build community themselves. I know a few of y'all here fall into that category and I'm quietly collectively rooting for us, here; I know one or two others from my union and animation work.

But it brings me so much joy to see younger queer communities embracing gender diversity. Treasure it. It may still be an uphill struggle, and newly dangerous in a different way to be visible, but at least you're not lost alone and blind in the dark woods thinking that sight is a myth: you have each other, and you know what you are.

LGBTQ+ folk what was your gender/sexuality pipeline?

[souenkun]

Is anyone ever curious about why the house that takashi's parents owned was never taken over by any youkai, even when it has been abandoned for years, when this series has given us plenty examples of youkai inhabiting a human's dwelling, whether there were still humans living there or not (and either because they like the house, or they just want to mess with humans)? I do wonder if this is relevant to the main plot in some way (like the natsume family name being a ward on its own, hence youkai naturally avoided takashi's parents' house as a result, or if someone had set up wards when the house was built that are still up and functioning to this date, in which case, the question is who would go to that length to protect the natsume family)?

[bayetea]

seeing non-black people critique rick's portrayal of black characters is interesting sometimes. only like 30% of the critiques I see make any sense to me to be honest

[ananke-xiii]

I've written somewhere that Team Free Will is actually Team Dean's Will but it wasn't, like, a criticism or something like that, it was what I personally got once the show was over (and I still have very legit concerns about Dean's choice during the last episode).

I don't think Chuck won in the end because he, as a character, wouldn't have wanted for Dean to die. As far as polysemy goes, Chuck does represent many things but, to be really honest, I don't really think he represents John Winchester on a cosmic level. Like, yeah, OF COURSE, we can definitely put them together in the "Shitty Fathers" box but when Chuck tells Dean that he's not like his father I think he's not that wrong after all. Chuck is much worse and not because he's a John Winchester on a gigantic scale, it's not about quantity. He's worse because he just is.

Leaving aside the many problematic aspects of their relationship, Mary and John can be totally seen as Amara and Chuck (the show does go there and I think it's interesting for many reasons) but it's also true that the one who lied in the couple was Mary, not John. Even if we know why she had to lie and it can be understandable, it's also true that both Sam and Mary are willing to omit a Very Important Thing about themselves that, eventually, gets their partners killed. But, unlike Chuck who's to blame for his omissions, lies and manipulations, both Sam and Mary are two characters that, even more than Amara, are ALWAYS stripped of any choice. So it's almost like no matter what they do, they can only fight for their free will but never fully live it (SPN final thesis: you can never get what you want).

So yeah, if we consider John as a person and, more specifically, as a partner (therefore not in his paternal role), Chuck's not like him at all. Chuck's in control of his narrative, John couldn't even choose his own car at the dealership (btw, in my fantasy John has a love/hate relationship with the whole album "Boys for Pele" by Tori Amos that he keeps hidden like Bobby's passion for Tori Spelling). John is very much mainly narrated by other characters, in this respect he's just like Mary, to be honest. We don't 100% know who he is because he's a character described by absence. So much so that Sam and Dean didn't even know he had a fucking SECRET family!!!

Chuck is portrayed to be less enigmatic. We know he lies because we are shown that multiple times even before "Moriah". He's a character without much depth and that bothers him So. Much. He's a God who wants to be like Keith Richards. LOL!

However, even if Chuck, to me, objectively doesn't win (I also have my own "Billie won theory"), he neverthless does represent the Dictorial Power of Shitty Fathers that some might call The Patriarchy (not me. I would NEVER!). In this way, yes, he sort of wins because, as I've said, the natural order wins in the end and, in SPN, the natural order is Absent, Shitty Fathers. The sugarcoated version of the bygone days, the bittersweet nostalgia for a golden past that inevitably leads to death.

And who, the show tells us, represents all of the above? The absence of John Winchester via the presence of his journal. A man who's become so powerful he's been morphed into a myth. Maybe he is the real tulpa of this story, after all.

What does this have to do with Team Dean's Will? I find that saying that what Dean did in the end is a "choice" is very troublesome. To me personally. But the show does imply that, not strongly enough because it leaves some room for doubt but it ultimately does that. So okay, I'll bite and will consider it to be a Real Choice out of Dean's Free Will. Fine. What about Sam, though?

S15 starts with Sam and Rowena and ends with Sam and Dean. Rowena and Dean both commit suicide that's not 100% framed as suicide. Among other things, it is framed as a sacrifice. And Sam's there with them and he doesn't want that. He says so. He tells Rowena to "screw the books" and he tells Dean that he doesn't want what Dean is asking for.

Rowena's act is framed as being done out of her own agency because she believes in prophecy and magic. To which I say bullshit, not to Rowena but to the show because this is a cop-out. Since S13 Rowena couldn't do what she wanted to do because it wasn't possible. Fine. But how come that prophecy seems to be working only for her? How come the "rules are rules" mindset only applies to her? Why do other characters' books change and hers alone doesn't? How come her sacrifice is both destined and out of her own free will? It means that it can happen then! That destiny and free will can coincide! This change in thinking about the question is so packed with possibilities that they could've done another 15 seasons about it. Unfortunately, destiny and free will seem to meet in Definite Death which meh. Story over.

And Sam? He's still there. Participating and not participating. Against his will.

With Dean things are a bit different because we do know that Chuck is obsessed with him. Once Chuck is out of the picture, we could imply, Dean's finally "free" to choose what he wants. Which is such a naive thought because if it were only the absence and/or presence of things/persons to determine our lives we, perhaps, wouldn't need therapy.

But, as I've said, I'll be good and keep my promise: let's say Dean chooses out of his own free will. It should be cool for us, right? This is what Dean wants. The Big Big Bad is not dead but he's not the man behind the curtains anymore so hurrah! Free/Dean's Will wins. We should feel like we must respect that. And yet, it doesn't feel right.

And Sam? He's still there. Participating and not participating. Against his will.

It doesn't feel very "Free Willy" if the people just let the orca free. It's not very Free Will for Sam if the show tells us that it's Dean literally getting out of the picture that will "free" Sam. Brrrrrrr.

So what does this tell me? That the "destiny vs free will" discourse seems to be working only when there's a villain on the horizon, a commanding power that wants to tell you what to do, someone actually stronger than you whose actions can alter your life's story.

If you take that power out, what's left? Only people with their choices. And your absent, dead father's journal radiating The Real Power (the idea of power inside your mind that controls you). Is free will still in the room with us? Cause it starts to look like somebody's supposedly "free" will might be somebody's else constraint. As far as Sam is concerned, it seems to say: it doesn't matter whether there's a God, Death or that prophecy is real or not. What matters is that you can only stand there, participating and not participating. You don't want that? Too bad, 'cause that's what you got.

Maybe the finale really took the worst from my "Billie won theory" and the worst from the "Chuck won theory", i.e. an idea of natural order that upholds patriarchy. Or, since I can and will go there, that the natural order is the patriarchy.

So what about Free Will, is it an illusion? If it applies to only a few it certainly doesn't seem like something worth fighting for. And the natural order is indeed restored in the end. I don't think the show gives a real answer to that, by the end of S15 there are so many things that simultaneously mean 100 other things that everybody can take what they want from the show.

If you ask me, I think it was a moot question, to be honest. It made sense in S4-5 but once SPN goes full meta in S15 it becomes very superficial. Of course I know they're fictional characters and literally don't have free will, the premises were interesting because I wanted to see how these characters would react to stuff happening in the story. Once the story is revelead to be a bluff, though, what am I left with? Characters spiralling into crisis after crisis. This could be interesting in a novel but in a 15-seasons-long series you have to give me something ELSE as well, the "all die more or less happily" last-minute finale (knowing Heaven is a scam, by the way) is just... not having to deal with the consequences of the narrative choices that were made.

Or, perhaps, Supernatural is a show where one of its themes is "destiny vs free will" that ultimately tells you that there's no destiny but there's also no free will, there's only John's journal aka the Power of the Dominant Narrative. Which is the power of the people who write that narrative for us to believe in it. Perhaps, not even the people making the show were free to do what they would've liked to do. They were also there, like Sam, participating and not participating. Finding ways to cope.

[jrueships]

zesty lowkey just another way for str8 ppl to say faggot / faggy and get away with it

[widowshill]

— But it's almost midnight. — Oh, that's the point! At the stroke of twelve, he turns into Dracula. C'mon, Vicki – he won't bite.

pose ref.

[ir-abelas-vhenan]

Oh cool you're a gamer? Normally I'd claim such a chill and nebulous label for myself, but thanks to a helpful anon I now know instead that the proper term is "piece of shit"

[solradguy]

The hell's up with all these anti-trans men/masc memes lately because I'm getting real sick of it real quick. It's not cute and it was never funny.

[peniscat]

i miss succession and the community it gave me </3

[dreamyintersexouppy]

transmascs stop pretending that transfems are untrustworthy sources for transfeminism challenge impos- fuck i didn't even finish and you already complained about our terminology

[blujayonthewing]

IN MY DOVE FUCKING PROMISES???

[mons7errr]

am i the only one that doesn't understand the 4B movement

specifically the western wing of it. it makes sense in a place like korea but i don't get why it's a thing in the states now

[learn-and-accept]

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[theirloveisgross]

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[street-corner-felines]

Zero Day Director commentary - With actor Andre Keuck

[hxzelwallflower]

ooc.♡ˎˊ˗ Gentle mention that I am the worst when it comes to keeping track of people. My attention span is wild these days but, I try to send starters and interact with those I can outside my drafts. If we're mutuals you're more than welcome to tag me in random starters or send memes, just because I don't write with you daily doesn't mean I don't care. I'm just slow,, and old.