#bitty talks discourse

[bittybuttersliceontoast]

age discourse on tumblr gives me a fucking headache BUT i will say this.

I keep my age in my bio because i am an adult who likes to have adult mutuals that know I am not a child.

if you ARE a child, keep your age out of your bio PLEASE.

I know, people are giving you mixed signals on this app, saying they block all ageless blogs etc etc but PLEASE do not let everyone know exactly how old you are. Those are exactly the kind of landmarks groomers look for.

I am looking at YOU, sixteen year old with a complex, or twelve year old looking for fanart. ik its tempting but I'm literally begging you.

[minthe-lover]

I think the only part about the criticism for LO I can't agree with entirely is the size proportion between Persephone and Hades. Like, I don't know why, but there has been a huge discourse about how these tall men dating short women are somehow groomers and creepers?

I agree Persephone is infantilized but leave the HEIGHT out of it. I'm around 4"6' - 4"9' dating a guy who is 6"2' and three years older than me and I'm getting really tired of the critique "tall man dating shorter than average woman = creepy predator". Persephone is absolutely written like a toddler throwing a tantrum but as a short woman who expresses her inner child a lot and happens to be dating a taller, older guy, I'm getting tired of people infantalizing women who are not the average height or boob size. (Yes I've seen antis scream that women who are flat chested are minor coded!)

I can understand where you coming from and like I mainly agree. Though the main problem that I have is more so her proportions not simply her height... there is a really good post on this that I just can't find cause tumblr is shit for searching about that. Plus how her height is talked about.

Also I agree, I really don't like when critics of people rely on any physical part of their appearance.. alot of it is just borderline body shaming and infantalizaing. Most of the shit people try to pull is just.. really dumb and is often just trying to hide how people try to sanitize the sexuality of women and remove their choices by adding just unnecessary rules.

As for with lore olympus it's again more so the proportions (if anyone finds that post please tell me) and how her height is often heavily sexualized and tied to how she's presented as 'small and innocent'. It's conversations like Zeus asking how they would have sex when she's so 'itty bitty'.

I feel like I'm not explaining this as best as possible haufke but my point is that in lore olympus persephone infantiliztion and sexualization is closely tied at least at the beginning of the story to her height in just.. a really weird way. It's a problem I have with like.. how most of persephone physical traits are presented. She isn't allowed to just be a short women.. she needs to be sexualized for it both by characters and the story, along with her big boobs and nativity etc etc.

I will say that it's definitely more a problem with the beginning of the story and shows up very little now but lo definitely tried to play into this wrong idea that short women are inherently more naive and childish to play up persephone infantiliztion.

[nanoohno]

I think we need an OUNCE more critical thinking in the ongoing discourse.

Specifically, I don't think anyone has looked up the cost of a yacht.

$1.4 million is not going to buy much of a yacht. It's certainly not going to hold the entirety of HQ. Oh, sure, you'll maybe get a little putt-putt that might as well be a rowboat that's being called a yacht on Boat International, but I assume people aren't thinking of a bitty 22m Sanlorenzo when they're talking about Grant's yacht.

$2.4 mil? Now that's more like it. That'll get you something custom made that's got room for the staff, a few select mods and MLs, and a dungeon special brig downstairs for Reasons™.

Assuming, however, that all prior donations have been spent in accordance with the Annual Reports...

...oh no, wait, we haven't had one of those since 2019.

Have we?

Well, anyway, if you're someone who gets the communications from HQ and are able to update Wikiwrimo with information about Annual Reports post-2019, jump on in there.

And if you're one of the (currently) 274 donors who've donated $7,658 in whatever time period the dashboard shows, which I can't look up because the site keeps crashing and coyly saying, "Oops, something went wrong!", maybe ask for a refund so nobody buys any lifejackets.

[icecreampotluck]

fic stats meme

twas tagged by @jeeyuns

rules: give us the links to your fic with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the least words.

SIDE NOTE: i have not published 911 fic!!!! trust me i am also mad at me for this!!!!! i am working on it!!! so instead everyone gets a look into the history on my ao3 profile that hasn't had anything updated since 2021 and my most written for fandom. (i am not going to publish anything in 911 fandom until it's fully written to avoid the unfinished fate of a lot of these works dw) but I WANT TO PARTICIPATE!!!! so here goes!!

most hits: i've tried goodbye a hundred times (not one of them true)

Check, Please! (Webcomic), Derek "Nursey" Nurse/William "Dex" Poindexter

The first time it happens, it’s daisies. Seven year old William watches in fascination as the flowers appear, line by line, around his wrist and up his arm. They’re just black outlines, with little yellow dots in the middle, but they fascinate him, and he watches as they grow all the way up to his elbow. And then Mitch slams his desk.

yeah i'll be real with you besties. this will probably never be updated again. which is so sad because apparently it's my work with the most hits. but i'm a polyfrogs bitch now!!!! people change!!!!! i don't even remember where the plot was going. this is not the target audience of this apology but you're the ones who get it.

second most kudos: Amy Parson Takes No Shit

Check, Please! (Webcomic), Kent "Parse" Parson/Original Character(s)

She hates this. She hates knowing that for all the talk of acceptance and anyone being able to play, it doesn’t matter. If she told the team, she can’t imagine what they’d think. And God, management would be a nightmare. She shouldn’t have to pick between hockey and being herself but she does and she’s made her choice. Someday, she’s gonna find a way to have her cake and eat it, too.

oh my god so. okay. the tag "im tired of cis bullshit" on this work is so funny. 1) the "cis bullshit" in question was genderbends which is the most 2017 discourse imaginable. 2) when i wrote that tag I identified as cis. LMAOOOOO. i thought i was being such a good ally writing this fic. and then somewhere along the way i was like "goddamm why do i relate so much to Amy's choosing to ruthlessly be herself and why am i jealous of it." and here we are. so this work holds a special place in my heart and i will finish it if it kills me and also probably rewrite the early chapters because they are SIX YEARS OLD oh my god i was FIFTEEN. they could be better, and they will be.

third most comments: all the gun fights, and the lime lights, and the holy sick divine nights

Check, Please! (Webcomic), Derek "Nursey" Nurse/Kent "Parse" Parson

Nursey rolls over in bed the morning after Epikegster, and finds himself face to face with Kent Parson. Kent is drooling, and still asleep, so Nursery takes a moment to assess the situation. Kent has all the covers and is kind of hogging whatever bed they’re in, which appears to be in a hotel room. Nursey is naked, and a quick inventory of the floor leads him to believe that most if not all of his clothing is there. He glances down at himself, and notices a not insignificant number of mouth sized bruises littering his torso. His therapist has been teaching him about not jumping to conclusions, but he’s starting to think he hooked up with Kent Parson.

you won't get it unless you Get It but this is the funniest possible rairpair. i'd love to finish this someday and fix the haphazard characterization. the plot was good as shit i just have to hope i get inspiration back after *checks notes* five years! we'll see!

fourth most bookmarks: i've got you (and you've got me)

Check, Please! (Webcomic), Eric "Bitty" Bittle/Jack Zimmermann

    He’s done it.     He’s graduated, and he’s got his degree, and he’s got an internship lined up, and he can’t wait to get on with the rest of his life.     And he’s got Jack. Oh, lordy, how could he forget Jack?     Jack who is currently waving at him from across the quad, waiting by the lake. Bitty has been saying his goodbyes to his parents, and now, he turns and heads over to him.     “Hey, you.”

yeah i don't have a lot to say about this one! it was okay! least words: would you love me less (if you knew the beds that i've been in)

Check, Please! (Webcomic), Eric "Bitty" Bittle/Kent "Parse" Parson/Jack Zimmermann

Eric Bittle, struggling baker, runner of a not so struggling premium snapchat, frequenter of the Seattle Fitness Center. Jack Zimmermann, history teacher, boyfriend of Kent Parson, frequenter of the Seattle Fitness Center. Kent Parson, part-time wedding planner, allosexual who's demisexual boyfriend has approved his porn habits but has no interest in partaking, frequenter of some blond twink's premium snapchat.

ZERO words baby!!!! that's what happens on the archive's backend when a fic is told ENTIRELY THROUGH FAKED SCREENSHOTS (and some gym membership cards)!!!!!! i wanna redo some of the things in here and also. you know. finish the entire fic. trust me it's GLORIOUS. if you click on nothing else in this post because you aren't into check please click on this and be proud of some of the edits. (not the reddit one i like. quarter assed that one rather than find a template) this is the fanwork of mine im most proud of i love it so much PLEASE ask me about it even if you haven't read check please i'll happily gush about the plot.

that is all sorry that this is literally NO wee woo content. tagging @evcndiaz @lucydonato @shitouttabuck @housewifebuck and anyone else who wants to do this!

[bitty-bits]

A Jolly SineTrismas

It surely was another year. Let's look back at some stuff, and forward to other stuff, in the final Bitty Bits edition of 2022.

First of all, happy holidays to all who celebrate. Yeah it is a bit late on the "more famous holiday" side of things, but there are still others going on, and... in general it's probably never wrong to be festive during all of December. (It's also not wrong to NOT be festive! Just pointing that out!)

Many things happened in this late half of the year, controversial things, stupid things, all things. Here I will talk about some that mattered to me, to some extent.

(Also, RIP bozo...naro! Good riddance!)

This issue is dedicated to @rick-666, friend and avid newsletter enthusiast who encouraged me to try to fix the broken ass email form thingy that should actually send these posts as newsletter things but just isn't working! I'll have it fixed next year, I promise!!!!

My Work - Where To Next?

So I've made and tried to make many things through the years, but as someone who pretty much does anything all the time, I'm finding myself often doing... nothing at the end of it.

In 2020 I basically started work on Ketchup Dreams by making its first characters, Bitty and Lake, with more to follow the coming years... but still nothing too substantial. Pondered with which medium to present these characters in. Comics? Animation? In the end I'd just continue adding some things here and there to the overall project, but it still doesn't seem like enough. I really want to build a good universe for these guys to live in.

So at the moment I feel kinda directionless. But hopefully that will change. I guess I won't know what sticks until I actually do stuff.

From Bitty also came the entire aesthetic, motif, symbol, meaning AND name for, I guess you can call my "indie" studio/group/label thing... which my future creative works will be released under, and who knows maybe even friends' creations. The "ᑎᐱ" thing was kind of accidental, but I liked it enough that I wanted it to mean something for me. Not to sound corny and dumb, but to me "ᑎᐱ" is kinda like another representation of the polarity we have in life, much like black and white, but in this case it would be something like... smooth and sharp. Yeah I'm not gonna try to give too much meaning to it, it's just for fun, mostly. Bitty's ears initially were meant to just be bunny + kitty ears (hence the incredibly original name) for an asymmetrical design, but that basically spiraled into everything else.

All that said I'm still doing stuff every now and then, I even have been experimenting with tweaking Lake's design slightly, you can even see a little bit of that in the header art here. More on that some other time...

You can check the current "roadmap" for Studio SineTri projects on the pinned tweet.

Why not "TriSine" instead? Because that just... sounds too normal. "Tri" is an existing and common prefix. Also the order matters.

The Tesla In The Room

I don't think I need to talk much about the whole thing with Elon Musk buying Twitter and everything that came with it. Mostly I'm just tired of it all. Billionaires, other than beings that shouldn't exist, are Boring and not even in a funny kind of way (except for Bill Gates, his mere existence is comedic to me probably thanks to early internet culture) I wish I just didn't have to hear about 'em. But I guess we can't.

Anyways this entire situation practically got me back into being on Tumblr daily, after I had left it in favor of Twitter in like 2015, and now... the opposite is happening, that's just how sick I am of Twitter. Not just the website itself but the people in it and the energy that usually comes out of there these days. Musk was simply a final nail in the coffin. The problem is... he just keeps adding more nails. Here's hoping Elon doesn't ruin the very last thing that made Twitter "fun" to me - TweetDeck, but chances it'll survive are slim.

I'm also on Mastodon btw. Juuust in case.

AI Art Discourse - What's Happening?!

"A Still of Klonoa in The Simpsons"

Speaking of Twitter, probably one of the least pleasing topics to witness over there lately will be this.

No doubt, "AI art" as a concept pretty much exploded into popularity in 2022, while it already existed in concept years before, this was pretty much the one year that, 5 years ago, we'd look at machine learning attempting art and say "now just think about how that'll be 5 years from now", and well, that time IS now. Kinda.

There's legitimate worry about whether or not the computer would be able to replace artists, but... personally I don't think it will ever BECAUSE... there will still always be a demand for humanity and human-created content no matter how good any sort of AI gets, and well, currently AI still struggles with "drawing" many things. But it's fine, earlier this year people were mostly memeing with AI generators, being impressed, confused, having a laugh, or everything all at once.

Until computers making drawings suddenly were no longer seen as cool but rather, bad!!! evil!!! problematic!!! etc. even though the reason for that all stems from... misconceptions and misinformation (sometimes on purpose, just because... I dunno. Internet rewards people who get angry at things.) about how the technology works to begin with. No, AI doesn't simply collage a bunch of pictures together, that just isn't how it works, even if it knows what a Mona Lisa looks like almost perfectly. It's hard to put it into words, but this thread I believe explains it a bit better in simpler terms (hopefully), even if you still don't understand, it's... best to not be too ignorant about it.

Of course, I DO think AI ethics is an important conversation that should happen, but not if it's... not gonna be a conversation in the first place. If it sounds too extreme, reactionary, or sounds just about as crazy as anything you'd hear coming from Alex Jones or like, your pro-life uncle™, then it probably isn't the way to go.

This made even people who think photography isn't art come out of their closets, if they even were in one.

There are good use cases for AI in art. One of them is allowing disabled individuals to also partake and experiment with visual arts. Yes, technically nothing "stopped" them from "really" doing it, but just look at how much that argument almost slips into ableism territory (and there is a surprising amount of that coming from some anti-AI folks.) Hell, I could've used AI to create a background for the art on my header as I'm mostly... a character illustrator, focused on characters, and just don't really enjoy drawing backgrounds much at all.

Anyways I recommend y'all check out AWAY (Are We Art Yet), a collective of artists and creators alike embracing AI but also fighting for more ethical AI usage (discussion about scraping images from the web, consent for works to be used as training data, etc.), without the reactionarism and sometimes ableism. They're a friendly bunch.

What I’ve Been Playing / Watching

Gravity Falls

Well, does it really?

Hey Kids, Have You Heard Of Gravity Falls? The show's 10th anniversary was this year and, having heard mostly only good things about it since then, AND as someone who had recently been sucked deep into the modern Disney TVA pipeline (DuckTales 2017, Amphibia and Owl House are also great and would also recommend), I made it a goal to watch all of it before the year ends.

At first I thought this, like other very successful shows, would have way too many seasons for me to really get into, so I was surprised when I found out that wasn't the case.

It's definitely a great show, even 10 years later. From what I saw very little of it comes across as dated when it comes to references or jokes, the characters being likable and interesting are about enough to hook you into it I think. Also Matt Chapman is in there a lot and as an avid Homestar Runner fan, you can just Tell not only through his voices, but his humor and vibes entirely in some episodes.

If there's one thing I probably can't get enough of is Disney cartoons made by some of the most... Non-Disney people on Earth.

The Dream I Had On December 25th

Usually I share my dreams on Twitter, but decided it might be neat to feature some of the more interesting ones right here. They are an essential part of one of my creations after all. This year though, for a reason or another, I had less eventful or weird dreams in general. But waking up on Christmas day this is what was on my mind:

For more of my dreams you can check out my dream journal with stuff since at least 2014, here.

I had a dream I can split up in three parts - first I was at an old house of mine but I could hear a new trailer for the Mario movie premiering far outside, a classic game song could be heard in it and things pointed to it being a Daisy reveal.

Second part was a Strong Bad thing, where I possibly interact with him directly and actually cause a change to homestarrunner.com "accidentally". He makes some sort of analog horror parody, and an old main page gets a new "feature" permanently. I felt a sense of realization since "I caused this". I really wish I remembered more cuz it was great

Third part is the one I can recall the most, it was what seemed like a weird Gravity Falls AU type thing, which is slightly mixed up with The Owl House - In what appears to be the first episode, Grunkle Stan is nowhere to be found, with probably Eda taking his place as the twins' "Graunt". The episode begins with Mabel just wandering around the forest, when she comes across several typically good luck signs all at once, things like four leaf clovers and such. Eda knowing better knows it's a trap and tries to protect Mabel, but she is convinced that Eda is a witch (which probably Should be a secret at first in this alternate timeline I guess, Eda Is Not What She Seems™) and EVIL!!! and ignores her, acting hostile towards her, even, so Eda locks her up in a shelter. Perfectly normal. In there she finds… a journal. It doesn't appear to be -the- GF journal but rather a mix of that and Philip's journal from Owl House. At first it looked like the journal could talk by itself but someone just happened to be there in disguise, it was Soos, who happens to know a couple things about the journal but probably not much. For some reason I was "watching" it in Portuguese and they'd give him a completely different name, likely starting with a hard C, but I can't remember now. Some weird magic thing happens too which I don't remember how it's triggered or when exactly in the episode progression it even happens but it would make food and candy "infinitely stretchy", where you could essentially have infinite amounts of something just by stretching them, and it caused children to go insane over it. Eventually Soos and Mabel made it out of the shelter, with the latter no longer feeling suspicious about Eda. That's about what I can recall.

Song of the Issue

I will now feature some cool music (probably just vgm) I like here, just because. Sometimes topical, sometimes not.

But today it might be.

A secret easter egg track, on the older 2008 MIDI version of the Charlie (the Duck) II soundtrack (that probably came into existence together with the 2008 Windows version of the game, as opposed to the original DOS version which much like other Wiering Software games only had sound effects, at most.)

It would only play on Christmas day, and was basically a slight arrangement of the proper theme, but with some classic Christmas tunes thrown into it.

The OGG/streamed version you hear on the Steam release cuts the song a bit shorter.

More Stuff

Audicons Fluent/2.0/Name Pending

Inspired by Microsoft's Fluent Design aesthetics and technicalities, this will be an update to my existing icon pack for audio formats, covering even more obscure formats that only 3 people know about! Just like the old pack, this will be fully compatible with probably any version of foobar2000. Very soon!

Ninjin on Archive.org

Yeah!

juke...box. AI. video.

yeah dude.

(no, seriously, it'll come out when it comes out. that's it.)

Miscellaneous Tumblr Side Things

I dunno, I just felt like... having a couple dedicated side blogs for specific interests, as some people do, cuz I have ideas. One of them will be about brazilian animation in general. Nothing fancy or scheduled, just things that will exist.

Conclusion

The more I write the more self-conscious I get that I might just be shit at writing Anything, but I still appreciate if anyone actually likes reading through!

Stay tuned for the traditional yearly dumb highlights collage pic™ on my main Tumblr (@lu9) and Twitter (if it's not completely broken by then...)

Bitty's Message of the Day

My new year's resolution is to Exist more!

[shallyne]

Pet peeve? when people draw Feyre with small boobies when we all know Rhys constantly fondles and loves on them. That weak man is a boob man through and through, why do some choose to just assume only Nesta has the big boobs lmao? Do we need an adult Feysand book to prove it? I know it’s so unimportant but something about intentionally not paying attention to detail is annoying to me 😅 If she was apart of the itty bitty committee I’d support it but she obviously isn’t. There’s lots of art when she does look accurate body wise, but some recent ones where she doesn’t too.

NO, NO ADULT FEYSAND BOOK PLEASE I AM BEGGING SJM I'd be so happy for another Feysand book but not ADULT PLEASE GOD NO

Never really thought about Feyres boob size honestly. I don't like to talk about the Archeron Sisters boobs because I saw some discourse and it was absolutely pathetic. But you're probably right. But I do have a little fanart pet peeve and it's on EVERY fanart. (No complains , I love y'all artists. Keep going, I am so proud of you) and that are Feyres muscles. That girl is so strong. and she was training with Cassian every day until her pregnancy. She must have the absolutely juiciest biceps (and thighs) in Prythian. (not in a sexual way). I WANNA SEE FEYRE MORE MUSCULAR. And I wanna see more of her strength in the next book. Amren said in acosf that Feyre doubles Rhys's strength. Don't talk, Sarah babe, SHOW ME!

And another thing that I am thinking about Feyres statue: I don't think she's as thin as in all the fanarts. I think she's a lot curvier. Not mid-size yet, or barely mid-size, but on her way to mid-size.

Maybe it's me wishing for more mid-size and plus-sized representation but that's what I think about Feyre. Especially now maybe that she's a mother because bodies change during pregnancy. It's not a bad thing!

But no matter her body: Feyre is a queen and she rocks her confidence. As she should.

[fightmekentparson]

When Bitty comes out to Shitty in year 1, he is incredibly nervous, even though he’s known Shitty for almost an entire semester at this point, which is enough time for Bitty to learn that Shitty is sympathetic to LGBT+ issues and is unlikely to react negatively to the news that Bitty is gay. Due to Bitty’s anxiety and Ngozi’s love of narrative parallels, as well as the lack of canon evidence of the Bittles’ homophobia, it is not naïve or overly hopeful to predict that Bitty’s parents will be similarly sympathetic when Bitty finally comes out to them. In this essay I will

[mountain-lion-gremlin]

Yeah, p-shifters have a horrible wrap from years of damage, and I don't think we will ever be able to clear this damage, or be "forgiven" for our sins. There is nothing to forgive.

And I feel absolutely horrible about what has happened to others. I hate that people teach and reteach the idea that p-shifting is the only thing that matters. The only thing to do, to say, and to BE. That's what breaks them, that's what hurts them.

P-shifting is only a tiny, itty bitty part of shifting. Many of us will spend less then %1 of our lives in our shifted form, and to think it's the largest discourse in the WHOLE community! I've read too many stories of people who have been manipulated by cults, and end up harming themselves badly because of their teachings. Many of these stories have something similar in common-

They want to escape human life.

I wanted to escape it. She and he and they - many people flock to p-shifting because they promise an escape to life. We skip past the warnings and jump right in, without listening at all.

And it's scary, because not knowing the effects of just jumping right in could hinder, damage, or even scar you. Sometimes I think that I'm lucky to have not fallen into a cult, or bought into their lies. I had to slow down and M-Shift first, and once I put p-shifting second, I was finally able to learn, grow, and understand more about what I was actually doing. I'm glad I didn't cut corners.

I don't think we should ever downplay the damage. We should teach what has happened in the past, and learn from it to adjust how we spread information. I just have to wonder how many people have willingly came, asked or found the information, and now regret all of it. People who are triggered by seeing physical shifters. People who will gladly spread hate and cyberbully p-shifters. It's an age old arguement that will probably never die.

*sigh.*

You don't have to p-shift to be considered a shifter. It doesn't matter if you experience one type of shift, or another type of shift, or whatever. Very few people can p-shift, and even fewer will ever achieve p-shifting. We forget that many people who are fighting this battle have never p-shifted before, because everyone else has checked out from it.

And I fucking hate the people who manipulate everyone below them. Fucking sad people who have nothing better to do then tell little kids to die because they asked a question or argue against them. People who are scum to everyone around them, including their real life.

And no, I will never teach p-shifting unless somebody asks. I feel like we always forget to warn others of the consequences of shifting. I feel like many people can't take attempting to p-shift if they distance themselves from reality itself. And I'm worried for a lot of people too, about what they read and how it breaks them, over and over again.

I've had my fair share of breaking apart and trying to put things back together. Learning that Blaze was a fake, having multiple identity dilemmas, frustration, boredom, anxiety... but I'm still here. I can't say the same for other people, and my heart goes out to them.

All I'm trying to say is no, we shouldn't forgive or downplay the damage done. Instead of fighting the same battle, the same ideas spread everywhere over and over again, we need to learn from our mistakes and become better. Instead of fighting, we should be growing and learning from our mistakes, and understanding that p-shifting can be incredibly harmful to people. To many people, especially those who want to escape from their human life or reality itself.

Either way, I just wish that one day we could co-exist, without the hate or fear-mongering. It's a desperate and probably hopeless, but either way. I just fucking wish people didn't hurt people. Hurt people hurt people.

(This isn't supposed to start an arguement, just talk more on this.)

I wanted to let you know that from 2010 until 2019, I was in a cult that predominantly focused on physical shifting, built around the narcissism and manipulations of the “alpha”, who recruited anyone looking for answers and especially focused on recruiting children l. This alpha started an entire community around information and myths she twisted into supporting her narrative, and would bully anyone, even doxxing them. The worst of it? She’s a cop. She has the power for that. And for those ten years I really believed that I was a physical shifting werewolf until her beta - her beta of FIFTEEN years, told me that she and the leader never shifted. It was all just a power fantasy and waiting for magic to occur, magic that hasn’t ever been possible in our lifetime. I believe that at one point there were shifters, back when magic was far stronger than it is now, but I waited my entire childhood and adulthood for a shift that wouldn’t come. I got bullied in school for not realizing I was in a cult, I lost relationships, I even had to move because of it. I didn’t even realize the leader was batshit insane until she tried to tell me that she’s a “decedent of the goddess Selene and also was the wolf who built Rome”. I tell anyone who identifies as shifters this story, because I want people to get out of any possible cults, of any possible teachings by shifter cults and people in them. Pls get out when you can, and not when it’s almost too late

I know exactly who you're talking about, and won't hesitate to tell everyone that this person gives shifters a bad name.

Do not listen to SheAngel / TrollQueen.

Those are her two main usernames, and I've seen nothing but toxicity from her and anyone to do with her, and this only confirms it. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt, and if she sees this then she can confirm for herself that I have tried to respect her and give her that benefit in the past, but I won't support or respect a situation like this.

Anon, I'm sorry you had to go through that. From what I've seen, a lot of the people in her community believe they're a shifter but most of them never have been and never will be. It's an ability you're born with, and I did "join" her community for some time to see what she was telling people, and it just made me sad. The amount of people spreading falsities as truth was just insane to me. I'm careful in what information I share publicly, but anyone is always free to dm me and I will give you all the information you request. If I share all of it publicly and share all of my personal experiences, it will only make it easier for more fakes to pop up and do EXACTLY what is so toxic to our community.

This kind of situation kills me, especially being a leader among the community myself. It literally pains me when I see situations like yours, Anon. Someone who has been lied to and gone through even remotely what you have..

I wish you the best in life, and hope the rest of it is wonderful. I thank you for your selflessness in sending this ask, and I only hope that others can get out from under her shadow as you have.

[coffee-at-annies]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how I don’t like the idea of Bitty cooking Jewish food for the Haus unless its in the context of him bonding with Jack and learning about his boyfriend’s religion or in a Jewish!Bitty scenario and trying to unpack where this is coming from since I’d be totally okay with showing my gentile friends how to make matzo ball soup and I think its b/c it feels like ppl are more likely to headcannon Bitty making Jewish food than they are to headcannon the more commonly headcannoned-Jewish characters doing it. Especially if they don’t headcannon Jack as Jewish and Holster is the only Jew on the team. Bitty (or Ransom!) trying to make him matzo ball soup cause he’s homesick is one thing but the idea that if someone in the haus is going to make Jewish food its a gentile just makes me uncomfortable. And I think part of it is because food is a really big part of our culture so the implication that the Jews in the house either a) cant make the food and thus participate in their culture that way or b) a gentile can make Jewish food better than any of the Jews, while probably working from an internet or box recipe and never having made it before rubs me the wrong way. 

Instead I’d love to see fandom writing stuff where Jack or Bob are in the kitchen teaching Bitty how to make latkas for the first time. Or Bitty fretting nervously as Ransom and Holster take over the kitchen to make hamentaschen for the Purim party Hillel is throwing and making a mess of the kitchen while asking Bitty questions about cooking times since he knows more about baking cookies than they do. Stuff like that. Stuff that places the Jewish character in an active role rather than a passive one. Its our heritage, not theirs and as much as I’d love it if my gentile friends invited me over for latkas I’d be super weirded out because its my tradition not theirs.  

 And like you should totally ignore this if your headcannon is Jewish!Bitty rediscovering his heritage. That’s like the opposite of what I’m saying. But you should look at what you’re writing and if a gentile character has taken over presiding over some aspect of jewish culture, maybe ask yourself why you wrote it that way. Ask yourself why you wrote a gentile doing that and if you still think the character is perfect for the role, ask yourself why you aren’t headcannoning them as Jewish. N hasn’t given anyone a religion and as far as I know none of them wear religious symbols so really they can be anything as long as you justify it well enough and know what you’re talking about.

[cherrymoonvol6]

absolutely no one asked for this but i will rank every kent parson pairing that i can think about (warning: SUPER subjective, but i tried)

kent/bad bob

i don’t even know what to say except NO. come fucking on. -1000000/10

kent/fry guy

i mean... first of all, LOL. second of all, if we take in account that all the times we see fry guy he’s being annoyed by either jack’s or bitty’s accomplishments/happiness, then i can see them bonding over that and going straight to the hook up. but again, come onnnnn in the best cases this is either a blatant self-insert or pushing the concept of a crack-ship, at worst this is deliberatedly ignoring richer characters in the comic in order to pair kent with the LOL option. 2/10

kent/bitty

i feel like this is the one pairing that makes NO sense at all yet i know people are gonna go for it because two conventionally attractive guys together cute. imo a lot of people go into this thinking bitty is morally superior than kent and it’s like an extension of the kent discourse and a form of a “fix-it” for him (and fix WHAT?) (if you don’t, you are so valid and please keep going). like, do you really think kent parson would give a single fuck about eric bittle? i love bitty, but c’mon. this is like the kinda thing bitty would come up with in his own head to make himself feel better about his second-hand feelings of anger and sadness over kent and jack’s history. your only shot at this is to write one or both of them ooc, which, valid i guess. 3/10

kent/holster

same thing with fry guy: holster isn’t very fond of jack, he and kent can bond over that. i can totally see holster being kent’s type, too. maybe holster wants to act some of that steamy jackparse fanfiction with him. 4/10, has potential

kent/ransom

bro did you SEE ransom’s face while talking about parse coming to the epikegster on year 3????? and kent remembering ransom on that forbidden update????? after all, ransom was the one holding kent’s body issue on parse ii. nhl guys are ransom’s weakness, 200%: they’d hook up and then they’d spent the rest of the night gushing about how hot tater is. 6/10

kent/tyler seguin

bro this pairing is like, fucking hysterical. whoever came up with this, i love you because is there anything more on brand for kent than pairing him with the irl hockey player he’s based off??? this is a crack ship done right. 6.5/10

kent/whiskey

listen....... i’d be so up for this. whiskey and kent are essentially the same person. whiskey is literally what kent would’ve been if he had gone to college. they’re SUPER ambitious and competitive, have problems opening up, it’s all about the Fronts(tm), but like. what’s that age difference, again? like, six years? idk. idk, man. if they were to end on the same team, though, they’d vibe so hard with each other... opening up to each other might be pushing it, though. whiskey must have mad respect for him because he’s a great player and same with kent! so like, if i pretend i do not see it, 7/10

kent/scraps

am i imagining it or did ngozi describe scraps as someone who sees kent as the smartest one in the room? or something like that. anyways, it’s about time that kent gets someone on his life that he can confide in and then return some of that love. if they’re not higher on the list is because i like them more as the platonic bond kent desperately needs (also i’m not sure about what the age gap is?), but friends to lovers following deep conversations and personal growth in an incredibly toxic environment? good shit. 7/10

kent/lardo

i feel like this is either a hit or miss with whether you headcanon kent as gay or bi, but even though i always think of kent as gay i’m so up for this pairing. i feel like they have so many things in common and you could truly portray them in such different settings! and i love to think about them opening up to each other. oh, the softness and tenderness that could come out of these two!!! bonus if we get jackshit as the background couple, plus that damn jackparse reconciliation. 8/10

kent/omc

i love kent parson, which means i’m always up for the idea of him getting himself a boyfriend who can challenge him and drive him to want to become a better person so that he can come out of that self-destruction spiral that his life in the nhl has been. free space, you can quite literally do anything with this. 8/10

kent/swoops

i hate to say this but this pairing, though it’s the friends-to-lovers crusade that kent deserves on his nhl life, is kind of a wild card because swoops is just a shell of a character. this pairing is kinda like kent/omc but the omc has actually appeared in canon. but again, FRIENDS TO LOVERS and there’s SO many cute and angsty and wholesome things you could get out of it. 8/10

kent/tater

listen, enemies-to-lovers isn’t my shit, i’ll admit it. but i love tater and i love kent and seeing them clashing looks like so much fun. i feel like once kent shows some of the ugly things he’s hiding inside, these two could click so well. and also that one panel with tater lifting kent off the ground with one hand, out of pure anger at this little shit trying to make jack’s nhl life a living hell, boy oh boy do i love me some of that. with them, and if done right, there could be a great balance between humour and the deep angst we all know and love from kent fics and character studies. plus, it’s going to eventually push a jackparse reconciliation. gimme all that closure baby! 9/10

kent/jack

you 200% expected this if you have seen a single post from my blog. i mean.... this literally has it all. the two characters with the richest backstories and/or development. rivals to friends to “lovers” to enemies to ??? to enemiesANDrivals to eventual lovers??? YOU pick it. you get all the angst, all the conflict surrounding each others’ expectations, the pressure of the hockey world around them, the APOLOGIES and the growing up, the delicious trope of them individually solving their shit and then coming back to each other. all the personality clashes! legends on the ice! kenny and zimms! jack and cat content! absolutely everything you could wish for. hot and steamy? we got it. angry and challenging? hell yeah. soft and forgiving, eventually? just the best of the best. you get the closure that bitty’s pov couldn’t provide, character studies, SO many different types of pining and unrequited and forbidden love... if you’re not on the jackparse life, you are missing out. come join us in hell. 1000000/10

[ofashandofrose]

(Had to cut off part of this because I’m not wanting to get into drama I’m not involved in but I do want to address this since the whole top/bottom/vers discourse never seems to go away. Rant forthcoming and I realize this might get me some blocks but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Ok my life at work and outside work is spent almost entirely around gay and bi men (cis and trans) so can I just say what their golden rule is for this discourse?

Write and read literally whatever you choose but never discourse on reasons why you think someone is more of a top/bottom/vers. Oh and that vers isn’t the magical solution because it still comes loaded with a lot of harmful preconceived notions. The reasons fandom gives for why they think someone’s sexual position is this or that are automatically problematic. They’re assuming that someone’s sexual position is attached to who they are as a person or the choices they make in life. Yeah there’s a lot of position-related talk among me and my friends but it ain’t deep or serious. Bottoms joke about “typical top” and tops do the same about bottoms but it’s not serious at all. There’s no actual rules.

Also a lot of the “trends” and preconceived notions are completely heteronormative or responding to heteronormative assumptions. It’s like in the Check Please fandom where you were considered homophobic if you wrote Bitty as a bottom. The only way you can be homophobic about Bitty is to say that his position preference is at all connected to who he is as a person rather than just a simple sexual preference that could go any which way. You’ll never know anyone’s sexual position because even if an author or celebrity says that they topped or bottomed one time, it doesn’t mean that they never do the opposite. Also that information is extremely personal and even when you’re writing your own characters it would be extremely weird for them to offer up that information unless they’re about to get into bed with someone. Sometimes not even then because penetration of any kind is very often not even on the table.

Saying that Geno being a bottom bucks norms just reinforces the norms in the opposite direction. Also it’s funny because 2015 tumblr used to insist that the guy with bigger muscles was always the top so technically bucking the trend would’ve been to make Geno the default top since he’s skinner than Sid. 2009 tumblr usually said that whoever is tallest is the top so bucking the trend would’ve been to make Sid the top.

It’s silly to make penetration this deep (ha ha). If you see someone explicitly say something to the effect “x person or character obviously the bottom/top because they’re womanly/manly” then by all means call them out on it and educate them if you have time. But otherwise if you assume someone is using gender stereotypes about their character in a harmful way then you could easily be making harmful gendered stereotypes yourself. By saying that a character or person can’t go strongly against heteronormative stereotypes without creating a new stereotype that is also somehow to be avoided is just so much I can’t be dealing with.

Oh yeah and since we’re all writing characters that are simply based on Geno and Sid, there are no rules about their positions in bed. It’s imaginary and not really crucial to how we write them as characters.

[checkdispleased]

so this might be a silly question, but how does one find anything on failfandomanon? I've tried searching for the check please specific stuff, but i'm not sure where to look, and all the thread titles are super confusing

That’s not a stupid question! It’s not necessarily straightforward, and while I’m sure everyone agrees that the instructions we gave in our discourse episode were very clear and helpful, FFA is a community with its own subculture and there can definitely be a learning curve if you haven’t used the community before.

The best way to find anything on FFA is to use dememe.info, the search engine. If you look at the top of each new post, they list various username+password pairings; I use the username “nonnie” and the password “pony.�� Once inside, you should see a search bar. Type in “check please” or any variant thereof (zimbits, ngozi, kent parson -- whatever) and it’ll display results like this:

As you can see the most recent comment on meme this search turned up isn’t actually about OMGCP; it just happens to have the words “check” and “please” in it. The next two comments are feedback left on 100-word OMGCP prompt fills. These comments aren’t in Check Please threads; they’re in fic-writing threads where someone made a Check Please contribution. If you click on the comment title (i.e. re: 100 words of OTPober - Check Please!, Bitty/Tater) it’ll bring you directly to the comment. From either the dememe archive search results or the comment itself on meme, the “parent” link will give you the comment directly above, which in this case is the fill itself; “thread from start” goes to the original comment to the FFA post itself that started the thread - in this case, the main 100 Words of OTPober thread, which ... doesn’t have much doing.

If you scroll back through dememe, you’ll notice that there hasn’t been a big main OMGCP thread for a couple of months. You can always make one, and nonnies might populate it with content (eg. fics you want to write/read, fic recs and discussion, hockey research questions, Huddle 4 predictions ... whatever). Usually people make threads when they have something specific they want to discuss, so I think the likelihood of your thread filling up with comments will depend on whether people on meme want to talk about OMGCP or if you bring up something people want to reply to. My guess is, someone else won’t come along and make a new thread until some content is produced, or the Y4 KS is announced, or something -- but if you scroll through dememe you can see that since the last Check Please thread proper, it’s come up several times in other threads. Of course, the major shortcoming of dememe, as with any search engine, is that if people aren’t using the search term you entered, you might miss something. If someone recently mentioned “OMGCP” or “that hockey comic about the former figure skater” and a discussion took off from there but no one typed the words “check please,” it’s not going to come up.

As far as I can tell from dememe, the most recent thread about OMGCP happened in August.

I pretty much always use dememe to find topics I want on FFA; I might scroll through posts if I am very bored, or if something really dramatic is happening, but my fandom interests are limited so I search dememe to see if people are discussing OMGCP basically daily. If you go back far enough, to maybe April or May when the comic was wrapping up, Check Please threads should have a link to discussion in the previous post, and you can go back that way.

I never use flat meme, which is an option that lets you see new comments in the other they’re posted, by either first or most recent, with no nested comment threads. But a lot of people who want to read the entire meme do -- maybe Tomato does? Also here are the first few threads from when OMGCP initially exploded on FFA in 2017-2018.

If you have other questions about FFA, hit us up. I hope this wasn’t, like, insane?

[pieforbittle]

wow can you believe people can write about and read fic for whatever ships they want**? and can just scroll past ones they don’t like?? without attacking people for liking ships they don’t????? what a concept

**i ask that this post not be taken out of the context of what is going on in the check please fandom. “ship what you want” does not mean writing incest, rape, pedophilia, and abuse in ways that glorify it and let people get off on it are ok.

[worms-wav]

Inhabiting The Body

I began this essay wanting to write a structured, academic piece about the body as a home. Habitat. But the more I searched, the more I realised academia is not the framework within which I can best unpack and understand my (or anyone’s) relationship to the body. I grew up being told that Western forms of knowing were the only ones that were correct. You cannot write an essay without citing sources. It is not enough to just know something, or to inherit knowledge passed down in whispers. Real knowledge is double-spaced, Times New Roman, and cold. This is not to say that I don’t think that kind of research and knowledge is valid. I think there are certainly situations where I want to understand something through the lens of academia, through other people’s research, through a bright, naked paper trail.

But trying to write this essay has taught me that that can’t be the only kind of essay I try to write when I want to understand. Which has been a difficult thing to unlearn, especially when the body has always felt like a site of public discourse. Even more so when the body is femme, grew up as a cis girl, of mixed heritage. Less so because the body is able-bodied, light-skinned, Chinese-passing, and cis-passing. The body -- and I say ‘the’ body instead of ‘my’ body because in analysing it, it rarely feels like my own -- is a crazed intersection of privileges, learned behaviours, unlearned truths and internalised value systems. Who owns the body? Who has a right to the body? When do these people have a right to the body? What is the body in the context of the self? What is the body in the context of society? What is the body in the context of other bodies? These are questions that, perhaps, can be trudged through in Scopus and JSTOR, but are really, honestly, best understood through turning inwards, thinking, and speaking quietly to the people who don’t necessarily wish to filter their experiences through the pipes of academia. Western academia feeds into the myth that the mind thinks, and the body follows. The genesis of an idea can never be in the doing -- it is in the conceptualising, the theorising, the thinking. So when we think about the body, we think of it as primal and lesser and full of instincts we must evaluate before following.

And even as I write this, I know that this essay is not exactly the anarchist anti-academia piece it wishes it was. Perhaps I am Southeast Asian, but I have been so colonised that my regional awareness is clinical, not cultural. I come from Singapore, which has been dubbed ‘the imperialist of Southeast Asia’ because of how passionately we suck the empire’s cock and try to distinguish ourselves from the rest of Southeast Asia. Last year, we celebrated the ‘Singapore Bicentennial’. What is that? It was a nationwide commemoration marking the 200th anniversary of Stamford Raffles’ arrival in Singapore. Raffles was the British son of a slave trader, whose arrival on our shores marked the beginning of our colonisation. So when I speak about the body outside an academic understanding of it, as much as I want it to be an ode to local, indigenous ways of understanding the body, I know it never will be.

So here is the first marker of my body: colonised, but also, coloniser. Literate, in someone else’s tongue. Literate in someone else’s tongue that, for most of my growing-up years, was indistinguishable from my own. 

This essay is self-serving. It’s not meant to be a great essay. There are millions of great essays out there by much more qualified people than I. All I want through this essay is a space in which my thoughts and feelings can visibly exist. I speak about my own body and my own feelings, and I understand that academia does not always enjoy these things. We are meant to be rational and disconnected, a voice displaced from personality. But again, perhaps academia is not the entity that needs to read this, and perhaps there is merit in writing about my own experiences and those of the people around me. If art is about externalising the internal, then here is my contribution.

The genesis of this project lay in my own tangled relationship with my body. I used to believe it was normal to be unable to perceive my body accurately -- after all, we drown in images of other people’s bodies on the daily, and we’re constantly told what our body should and shouldn’t look like. It was unsurprising to eleven-year-old me that the sight of my body in mirrors and photographs repulsed me. But the nonchalance turned to concern when the repulsion morphed into vivid hallucinations, also often centred on my body. They ranged from the mild (the body grows old, then it is a man, then it is my father) to the terrible (the skin on the body melts off flesh, exposing neon maggots within).

I wish I could package that discomfort neatly within my relationship with my gender. I wish I could make a broad, sweeping statement like, “once I acknowledged I was non-binary, the hallucinations stopped, and I felt more connected to my body” but this is wholly untrue. I’m sure, deep down, there is some connection between my gender trouble and my disconcerting grip on reality, but on the surface at least, the only thing they have in common is my body. And so this is where we begin - at the body. At my colonised, coloniser, dissociating, disconnected, immaterial, tangible, hallucinogenic, Queer body.

I think most of us begin to conceptualise the body as a space long before we find the words for it. We explore our bodies, trace topography, memorise shortcuts, collapse geography, navigate terrain. We know what goes where, what feels good, what hurts, what is part of our body and what is outside it. We create a distinction between our own bodies and other people’s bodies. Just as geography is not simply a matter of cartographic divisions, the borders between bodies are not simply physical. Our bodies and what they mean, where they are, bleed into each other in meaning and solidarity and sex and pain. How do we group some bodies together, decide the societal value of bodies based on similarities and differences? A friend named Ants points out that the body is not truly separate from the world around us - we are a microcosm of organisms and other things, the “edges” that cut us off from the air around us do not truly exist. Art teachers tell you to look at the world and recognise there are no lines -- this is true on a bodily level as well. This friend points out, ‘the notion of a “home” relies on the ability to invite in and to refuse entry - but actually wow humans are more permeable than we like to admit.’

This permeability goes beyond the physical entanglement of us and our surroundings. We are not the only ones residing in our bodies - we share the room with a thousand other people’s opinions of us, some more dangerous than others. Some bodies, the system has decided, do not belong to themselves. There is a lot to be said about the colonisation of the bodies of Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC) by the violence of white systems of power within which much of the world operates. There is also a lot to be said about the gentrification of our bodies to fit in, the policing of femme bodies by a patriarchal system, the cheapening and exploitation of some bodies, and the way some bodies must mortgage themselves to imposed power structures in order to survive.

If the body is a space, then capitalism wants to cut us all up into little bitty pieces and make sure each of our components is most efficiently and clinically used. And, as dystopic as this idea is, it has already been achieved. We all labour under capitalism, our bodies are broken and exploited (again, some more than others. Some much more than others.), and we all go to sleep only to wake up to do it again. When the world is constructed such that nothing belongs to you without capital, the body feels like precious real estate (or, conversely - the body feels incredibly fucking distant). We want agency over it, we want control over it, we want it back. We want to feel comfortable in our skin, so we pay a premium to make sure our physical, spiritual and emotional selves line up with the identity we have created for ourselves in our minds. We find ways to slide ourselves into our bodies, we look for things like connection and authenticity. We want our bodies to feel like home. And yet, the language we are given to talk about habitation of body, of space, corner us to think about our agency in very specific terms.

When we think about habitation, we think about the home. ‘Where do you live?’ is the same question as ‘where is your home?’ or, more transparently, ‘where is your house?’ Although the concept of home is arguably intangible, we find ways to ground it in a very material context. Linguistically, we position ‘home’ through idioms like ‘home is where the heart is’, ‘a man’s home is his castle’, ‘home ground’... The English language has developed a very extensive range of phrases that link ‘home’ to a sense of permanence, ownership and identity. This conceptual positioning of the home is mirrored in very tangible ways. We want to buy a house, not rent one. We have landlords who own our houses but do not live in them. We deliberately build walls, doors and locks to demarcate ‘our’ space. And ‘our’ space is defined mostly by the fact that it is not anybody else’s. 

We think of habitation in terms of property. It is not really surprising that England declared the legal definition of property in the 17th century, around the same time the colonial empire was established. Theorists like John Locke tried to naturalise the concept of ownership -- in the process, also cementing who was viewed as a person and who was not. Property is an inherently racist, sexist and problematic idea. And yet, we don’t view home ownership as the selfish offspring of imperialism (see: mass deaths and poverty). The home, by all means, is a warm, comforting concept. The home is where the heart is! The home is where we take off our bras, put on a stained shirt and dance arrhythmically to Diana Ross. It is a safe space, where we unfurl, exist without fear of being watched, exist without concern about acing the performance. The home is apolitical - you don’t have to have the right opinion when you are at home. You can just be.

Before thinkers like Proudhon, Marx, Lenin and Mao called for the abolition of private property, there were indigenous peoples who viewed the land as sacred, as living, as relatives and ancestors, who continue to view the land in this way. We do not own the land - we exist alongside it. In many ways, we owe our existence to it. In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui Maori iwi won a 140-year-long legal battle to give their ancestral Whanganui river the same legal rights as human beings. India’s Uttarakhand high court cited this case when it ruled that the Ganges River and the Yamuna River have the legal statuses of people. I’m going off on a tangent. The point is that before we dive into thinking that abolishing private property is a radical new thought, it is important we remember it is the age-old thought of the voices we have drowned out.

The relationships between land and humanity, between property and agency, between capitalism and the individual, are complex and political. So when I speak about the body as a site of habitation, there are thousands of unavoidable histories inherent. When I refer to the body as a home, that claim does not exist in a vacuum of happy thoughts and first-world identity crises. Bodies and land are both sites of violence and ownership - historically, they have been, and presently, they continue to be. I move away from describing the body as a ‘home’ because of the way I’ve unpacked it in this essay - but I also want to be clear that I am not trying to police the language we use to discuss our bodies, our relationship to the land, the spaces between us.

In my work, I spoke of the body as a habitat. A space, landmark, geographical love letter. The home is not a habitat, and vice versa. While ‘home’ conjures images of place and ownership, ‘habitat’ alludes to something more natural, more accidental. The space we end up in because it is best for us. The space that feeds us, shelters us and places us within a larger ecosystem of which we are an essential part. When I ask ‘how do we inhabit the body?’ I am not asking ‘how do we make the body a home?’ because the home has already been made for us. It is a question, then, not of altering the body to a point of marketability, but of peeling it back and returning to the state that feels the most comfortable.

So what does it mean to inhabit the body? What does it mean for Queer people whose bodies often feel inherently hostile? How do you slide into a body that, for one, does not feel like the body you want to slide into, and for another, does not feel like it belongs to you? How do you exist as a transgender and/or non-binary person whose body doesn’t feel like the habitat it is naturally supposed to be?

At this point in the essay, I got stuck. I messaged a friend saying, ‘I forgot what my point was.’ And was promptly reminded that I started this essay to de-intellectualise the relationship I have with my body. To feel my way through the words, rub out this idea that I have to have sources and academic knowledge to discuss my primary site of existence. If that was the point of this essay, then you and I both know I have failed. I’ve intellectualised the hell out of the body. And I realise a lot of us Queer people do this - we see the body as distant, so it is much easier to evaluate it without engaging directly with the sense of loss that comes with putting ourselves inside our bodies (not to mention the fact that most of us are rarely, if at all, inside our bodies). But perhaps this, too, is a Western approach to Queerness. I think of the thousands of indigenous cultures that treated Queerness as the norm until their land was colonised and their beliefs stamped out to make way for Western laws. Singapore’s ‘main’ ethnic groups and our indigenous peoples all have long histories of non-binary genders: from the five genders of the Bugis people to the gay Hainanese sex workers to the Malay sida-sida. Was gender ever supposed to be this complicated? Or are the complications a Western import? You can understand my rage with Western LGBTQIA+ activists who view Southeast Asian countries as ‘behind’. ‘Behind’ is a flaccid word coming from those who tread on us until we could no longer walk forward.

And yet, ‘behind’ is such an important position to us -- in Singapore, we want to be ahead. Myself, in my body, wants to be better, as if better is an absolute point that can be reached if I just do the right things, am the right type of person. ‘Better’ is a weird thing to want for a body that does not really feel like it belongs to you. Early in the morning, my mama chides me: ‘you’ll never know what it’s like to fight until you have your own children.’ and I think about the life that I fight to live and I wonder if that’s not real fighting because the body I am fighting for is so far removed from my soul, the soul that is trying its best to inhabit it. And again, what does it mean to try our best to inhabit a body? At what point have we succeeded in being?

This essay is maybe useless academically, but it is useful spiritually. Writing this piece has felt like detangling a very long clump of hair in a drain, spreading them out on wet tile bathed in sunlight and watching them dry til they curl back in on themselves. I am no longer interested in coherence. I am interested in this dissonance, the words I say versus the words I learned, the land I walk on versus the land taken away from me versus the land that was never really mine to begin with. The body as its own agent but so bounded by words and language and bullshit that I have to write an entire essay just to arrive at the point of: oh. Perhaps it is okay for all these feelings to be messy, to be just loosely strung together. Perhaps it is okay that the only thing that they have in common, is my body.

[itsdappleagain]

Cleobellum (if you ship it)

Heck yeah.

-Bellum is allergic to cats and Cleo dislikes them. Bellum starts screeching every time Cleo brings up hating cats, raving about their itty bitty paws and little rough tongues and beautiful smooshy faces. This was a source of great discourse in their relationship. Recently, its been ending by Cleo conceding that it might be cool to have a Persian to sit in her lap so she could stroke it evilly.

-After a little while of Bellum pestering Cleo about the cats, Cleo found Sphinx cats, which Saira isn’t allergic to and she adores, because they remind her of Egypt, obviously, and they don’t get hair over everything. Also they wear clothing and its very cute. Now Cleo likes Sphynxes.

-Cleo is more of a kisser and Bellum is more of a hugger/snuggler.

-Saira is the only one Cleo has ever allowed to see her in her pajamas without her makeup. She has some freckles that she always covers, but Bellum loves them.

-On the flip side, Cleo is the only one who’s allowed Cleo to see her eyes, which were damaged in a failed science experiment. Both are very self-conscious about their flaws and, even now, don’t allow each other to see them for very long.

-Cleo is the only one that can convince Saira to call it a night on a project.

-Travelling is far from either’s favorite thing, but they always start out any flight or drive together by watching either The Devil Wears Prada, Cleo’s favorite movie, or Back to the Future, Bellum’s. Its a tradition.

-They bicker a lot during the day, but nighttime is cozy sleepy hours. They don’t talk much, mostly enjoying each other’s company.

-Cleo and Bellum are ironically the more innocent two of the faculty, Bellum protecting Cleo from all the people she’s injured and Cleo protecting Bellum from language, “commonspeak”, and politics. This is why Cleo has hardly ever gone into the field and why Bellum doesn’t know a lot about metaphors and phrases.

-Both are secretly into horror, sort of. Bellum is and Cleo likes watching them with her because she feels safe with Saira.

-Neither can cook. They like going to restaurants.

-Bellum once tried to leap into Cleo’s arms romantically, or goofily, but Cleo’s perfectly manicured twig arms couldn’t support her.

-Bellum has strong arms and hands and Cleo could kill you with her legs/feet. The flip side for each are very weak.

-Cleo calls Saira “darling” and “sweetheart” and Saira calls Cleo “dear” and sometimes “baby”

:)

[kodzukenscorner]

🍜hello! could I get a haikyuu matchup pls!! I’m 5’4 and on the skinnier side (the small boobs team sighs). I have black shoulder length hair and wear glasses. I’m a university student studying bio and psych! I’m really introverted, and I have a very small group of friends cos I’m not sociable and not good at keeping in contact with people. Im not chatty with people I don’t know well, but once we hit it off I can talk a lot. I’m also pretty sporty; I go for morning runs and I like to rock climb

🍜 and practice yoga. I also rly like to eat (rice :p). im mostly chill and i like having someone to banter with, or engaging in intellectual discourse. I like reading (psych thrillers!) and drawing, and I love hugs and lazy days. My go-to outfit is t-shirt and jeans, and sometimes a hoodie when the weather allows it. I have a history of anxiety but I try to keep it in check! thank you so much!

Your match is...

Suna Rintaro

Suna is the resident lazy day king

So staying at home with some lazy hugs and cuddles with him is almost an everyday occurrence 

He is a pro athlete so he still is quite active and works out, so you two often go on morning runs together and would love to try rock climbing with you

When Suna tries rock climbing with you the first time is so intimidating!

He has so much stability and can reach places most other people struggle with, especially for a beginner 

But it’s something you both enjoy to do together so you continue with your rock climbing dates and he just gets better and better everytime

And Suna’s got a bite to him, he’ll get real snarky with you if he sees he’s climbing the walls faster than you

But he never means anything malicious by it, he just likes messing with you and loves it when you return his banter

He’s not someone who particularly cares about having a huge group of friends, he’s perfectly happy with his little circle and you

Oh and once the weather gets cold, he will insist that you wear his hoodies 

He will hide your hoodies so you have no choice but to take his

He loves when he gets them back and they smell like you

Runnerup:

Akaashi Keiji

a/n: itty bitty titty PRIDE!!