#but I think it can be pretty obvious 'no politics' means don't discuss specific political parties or affiliations

[warblingandwriting]

I feel like sometimes (especially Very Online people) confuse the idea that there should be a space for something, and that every space should allow something. Like people should have places to talk about whatever topics they want, but not every space is going to be the right one to discuss every topic and that's fine? You should have more than one place to discuss things in you life, and you should have spaces or people not online to do that with as well

[doctor-hopper]

You said you wished to be added to the mistranslation mailing group so I'll send you everything I've come across playing thru SDR2 original. Keep in mind I'm only on chapter 1 right now. I am not a #gamer so I pick it up and play it like once every 2 weeks LMAO.

Also half of this stuff is gonna be copy-pasted from chats I've had on discord with friends but it's the same info :>

i got to this part in the game (seen below) but the wording in the jp version is like "Hey, hey! Now, Hanamura-kun, what did I say?" Komaeda specifically uses ってば which indicates extreme annoyance and is usually used by women (teen girls) so i found it really cute

2. hajime of course doesnt use keigo (polite speech) ever, except when he first meets sonia, he suddenly starts talking politely

3. in the official english version when teruteru urges hajime to discuss dirty stuff with him in private, hajime just says "...no thanks." however a more apt translation would be hajime saying in a very flat voice "I'll have to restrain myself" or even "I'm invoking my right to refuse." (遠慮ておく) the way it comes off is a very dry way of telling him off.

4. there's also a thing in the prologue where hajime thinks, "At any rate, if this is a nightmare, I have no idea if it's even started yet... Sheesh, what kind of nightmare is that?" but in the Japanese version it comes across as more tongue in cheek (if that's the way to put it). it's more like this: "Regardless, I can't even tell if this is a nightmare or not, or even what kind of nightmare... Jeez, what a nightmare!"

5. below are 3 screenshots. The first 2 from the official translations, the third from the Something Awful forums fan translation (before the official existed). As you can see they are quite different.

Here is the Japanese text:

when talking about this with my friend, I said:

As per usual it seems to be a case of the official translation being very literal and the fan translation taking tone more into account. The literal translation is:

Kazuichi: it's an unbelievable thought, but...those two are in a male-female relationship, don't you think so? Hajime: a "male-female" relationship? That is not how a teenager should put it.

The wording is more or less "not befitting of someone of young age", with a heavy masculine/imperative tone (since hajime uses ぞ). I'd personally translate it something like:

Kazuichi: I know this sounds crazy, but...those two, dont'cha think they could be havin' an affair goin' on? (Kazuichi speaks with a slight accent in the JP version) Hajime: "an affair"? You're talking like an old man.

I think an equally as accurate but localized translation would be something like " "an affair"? You *are* a teenager, aren't you?" but that sounds slightly stilted. Hajime also later says only 2 lines later "The more he talks, the more he sounds like a dirty old man." Hence my thoughts on changing the line slightly. All in all I think the fan translation did a pretty good job sliding in from Hajime's initial comment to his thought on Kazuichi sounding like a "middle aged man" (as it is put in the Japanese original). Honestly it's funnier than whatever I could come up with lmao

^in general, Hajime (or Hazime as he was originally known as in the JP version, am I the only one who thinks of this a lot? Anyways...) is very prone to dry/blunt humor. It's kind of similar to Haruhi Fujioka in Ouran Highschool (if you've seen that show). The issue is, a loooot of the text in Danganronpa one and two are translated super literally. This isn't a huge issue all of the time (though is very obvious pretty much in every sentence), but when you have a character who's supposed to be dry/blunt, focusing more on their words and less on the tone and meaning behind the words is why Hajime talks like a Redditor in the English version. Which is a shame, because he's very funny in the Japanese version to me.

Some more points...these are from the top of my head so I am no longer quoting discord.

In Danganronpa 2.5, I think it's the only time Komaeda uses imperative speech? I may be proven wrong once I play thru all of SDR2. Anyways, imperative speech is seen as really rude in Japanese. Of course anime rules are slightly different (many characters ESPECIALLY SHONEN characters will use imperative speech like it's just another Monday) but it's notable for Komaeda because I don't think he's ever used it before. He uses it in 2.5 when World Destroyer slides into his DMs (when he threatens Komaeda and his friends). Komaeda throws his phone on the bed and yells 黙れよ！which is the forceful imperative of "to be quiet". Given the context and Komeada's usual casual but not rude speech, I would actually translate that part as "Shut the fuck up!" the widely available fan(?) translation just has him say "I've heard enough!"

It's a very interesting point when analyzing Komaeda's character especially in 2.5.

Another thing I never understood about SDR2's translation is the removal of accents and certain quirks. Nekomaru talks like a wise old master in some ways...which is totally different from the heavy shonen talk I was expecting (which he has for sure, but I was not expecting that part of him. It actually made me like him a lot more.)

Kazuichi, for lack of a better comparison, talks kind of...gangster-y? I'm unsure how to put it. He would be saying things like "bro is tweakin' skibidi style" or whatever. Again, it makes sense with his character. Kazuichi in his FTEs talks about how people basically profile him without learning who he is. The way he talks only adds to the "delinquent" impression he gives off, which is where Hajime had the initial misunderstanding.

Komaeda uses more filler particles than the average character in the game I would say, at least enough for it to stand out to me. I don't know if Makoto was the same (I'd have to re-check it's been a while), but I've caught him using "redundant" amounts of ね and さ, which would most closely translate as "uh" or "um" or even "like" in English. It's not constant and he's much more well-spoken when he's rambling about hope/despair (ironically), but it was enough for it to be noticeable to me. I just wonder why it's not in the English version.

Of course, all the characters have their own speech quirks as you've probably picked up...Hajime talks very masculine and kind of rudely, Mikan is very polite, stuff like that.

OH! Here's a fun one.

from UTDP. This got completely fucked in English. It's actually one of the worst mistranslations in the series aside from Komaeda's love confession IMO.

I don't blame the translation team wholly because if you look at the original Japanese text...

it's not very clear. But still, I think it's pretty obvious that this is how the conversation was MEANT to go:

Hajime: Komaeda...give me your hand. Komaeda: Huh...? Why? Hajime: "Why"? We're going to do a handshake. Normally, I wouldn't go out of my way to ask this, but... Hajime: Will you be my friend? Komaeda: ...Hinata-kun, do you really think this will mean anything?

This is getting long so I will leave this, because as a translator/localizer this article speaks to me very much. Specifically...

Another benefit to a good localization is that it will be truer to the intentions of the original creators than a strict translation by allowing a Western player to be entertained by it in the same way the creators intended their Japanese players to be entertained by the original – you’re laughing at the same points, and crying your eyes out at the same points, too.

That's kind of why I dislike the official ENG SDR2 translation. It is not very faithful to the emotional meaning of the original text in many ways. And I think that's a very important part about translating stories...

Whew that was a lot. If you aren't already bugged by this, I'll make sure to stop by and send more sometime :] fun fact: according to the SDR2 official art book, Komaeda's favorite food is bread, specifically toast, and he dislikes white rice.

Whoops, I didn’t see this in my inbox until now. I’m not bugged at all—thank you for the lore, and I’d greatly appreciate any more when you have it! I’m not as confident or aware about some of these particle nuances, too, so it’ll be educational.

[peridyke]

ok I'm still kinda waking up and I'm a little groggy so I hope I get this concept across but sometimes I feel like some tme lesbians can be kinda...disingenuous about transmisogyny among lesbians and in lesbian culture? a lot of the time people have a very kneejerk reaction to any associations of lesbians with terfs WHICH IS FAIR I have seen some people say some really lesbophobic things where they just blatantly say all lesbians as terfs or associated with terfs etc which I think is unfair and ironically ignores the presence of trans lesbians BUT!!!!! I also think like its pretty obvious that there's a lot of stuff that people need to unpack if they want to actually be safe for trans women. I don't think I need to tell anyone that there's a really big and politicized focus on lesbians' genital preferences specifically excluding penises and a huge focus on how much lesbians are supposed to be crazy for pwussyy and like yeah obviously gay guys get a similar thing with people saying how much they have to love dick exclusively but with lesbians preferences are waaaaaay more politicized and a lesbian's lack of intimacy with someone who has a penis is supposed to be this hugely political defining part of our sexualities that symbolize how we are like. I don't fuckin know free from the shackles of patriarchy or some bs like that. its hard for me to put into words really but there are so many little things in lesbian culture that are casually trans exclusionary or transmisogynistic and it just all adds up and ends up hurting girls who are already really vulnerable. I don't like how much lesbians are told that we have to have this innate violent disgusted reaction to a part of someone's anatomy or that our lack of interest in men is supposed to mean something grander than just a preference in who we want intimacy from. and I think a lot of the time tme lesbians will still hold and repeat these beliefs to varying extends and then just quickly tack on a comment about how trans women are women without unpacking their deeper biases. a lot of second wave lesbian feminism really focused on this association of lesbianism with grander political idea of "women who are free from the shackles of males" and if we are going to reminisce on that part of queer history we need to recognize its biases and grow from them rather than pretend that these concepts existed in a vacuum that never inherently excluded and hurt trans girls. how lesbianism connects to patriarchy and the unique misogyny and violence we will face because of that is something that needs to be discussed but that discussion must always include the experiences of trans lesbians too not just as a disclaimer at the end of an essay that is blatantly only talking about the cisgender/tme lesbian experience but as something fully integrated and understood as an unquestioned part of our history and community. there have always been trans girls who have been lesbians and there have always been tme lesbians who date and love and fuck trans girls and people need to stop acting like thats a development from the last ten years and that lesbianism and its culture has only ever been defined and pioneered by people who were afab

[prodgermmath]

You know, I'm real tired. In body, mind, and soul I've been so exhausted recently. There are loads of reasons for this, and most of it is stuff that you're undoubtedly aware of. Most of it is far far more important than what I'm talking about today, but I see ittalked about plenty already, and I don't really have anything of note to say about it. Spefically, at the moment, the thing that's on my mind is the way that the politics of the United Kingdom, the politics that effect my life and those of the people around me, are thought of primarily as a punchline by many people.

Today (technically yesterday, but when you have a sleep schedule like mine you get to decide what days mean for yourself), the Prime Minister of the UK decided to be transphobic in the Commons. He did it to have a jab at his opponent, and he laughed as he did it. It was a fun joke to him. Last week, the murderers of Brianna Ghey were sentenced. She was a transgender teenager, and her murderers had been inspired by transphobic hate campaigns to stab her to death. Her parents were visiting the Commons today, and it was with that context that the PM made his joke. The discussion aroung Ghey's murder, and the sentencing of her killers has made it clearer than ever that the dominant trend in the country overall is not transphobia. The average person feels, at worst, appathetic about the general cause of trans people, but when a specific case of transphobia--especially one as brutal as this--is brought before them, they're nothing but sympathetic. It is within Westminster that transphobia rules supreme, but unfortunately that's where the politics happens. I believe that now is an essential time to focus on that, and to shed light on just how large the Westminster discrepancy is in this case.

Today, I saw a lot of people online, from outside of the UK, talking about UK Politics. But I didn't see a single one talking about what I just mentioned. Instead, it was all about a tweet from GB News in which a "Royal Expert" said that Charles wouldn't use chemotherapy, and would instead use "Potions". Isn't it so funny!? It's English politics, and someone said "Potions"!! Gotta retweet that! Gotta bring that tweet to other websites! Gotta keep the link in, the one for donating money to GB News!!!!! GB News, for those who don't know, is an attempt to bring the Fox News Formula to the United Kingdom. It's a far right new channel. It's bigotted in all the ways you can imagine, racist, transphobic, homophobic, etc. It is not a reliable source, and should not be spread around, especially not with the donation link there. On the subject of things being unreliable, "Royal Expert" is actually a meaningless title. It indicates no affiliation with any political entity, and does not mean that the statements you make on a subject actually mean anything! This was probably already clear to many of you, but apparantly it wasn't to others! How embarassing!

On a day where real thing, impactful things, things that need talking about, happened in UK politics, the thing which I saw people talking about instead was a tweet saying "We paid someone to say something stupid for us. Bit silly isn't it? Here's the link to donate to our hateful agenda!". It's fine to not know what's going on in UK politics, it isn't directly relevant to most of you. But I expect some common sense. I expect you to demonstrate at least the reading comprehension of a four-year old. I've had friends who were spreading that around, and I fully expect that they're reading this now. I want those friends to know that I love them, but what I have to say to everyone else still applies. I'm angry about that post being spread around, and at all the people who thoughtlessly did it. I think, if you did, you should be deeply embarassed. That's pretty much it. Take care. Don't fall for obvious grifts from hate groups. Bye!

[soulless-angel25]

I think I make it pretty obvious, but I am a massive Rose Tyler fan. And before any of you say it's because she was my first companion, she wasn't. My first companion was Clara and my first doctor was 12 (whom I love dearly).

I just really like Rose's character. I like her story because of her.

And people are allowed to not like her. But if you don't, for fucks sake don't scream at people who do. In comments or reblogs. Your just being a massive fucking dick. Also, quick heads up: This post will contain a lot of quotes from Doctor Who. Alongside some crude language. Some might find offense to the topics I discuss in this or how I wrote it. I will not apologize for that, nor will I attempt to make this friendlier.

Continuing on. But if you don't like her on the basis of her and the Doctor being shipped or in a romantic relationship. Then by that logic you shouldn't like River, or Clara, or Yaz. Or anyone that the Doctor has had romantic interactions with and was/is a love interest. Because no matter how you feel, Rose and the Doctor were romantic.

No ifs ands or buts about it. Especially considering some moments that happen in canon. A few that spring to mind are: "I could save the world but lose you." -9th Doctor, Season 1 Episode 5 'World War 3' to Rose ^- This quote is 9 all but admitting he's in love with her. The thought that saving the world would mean losing her is something he couldn't bear to happen. "What use are emotions, if you will not save the woman you love?" -Dalek / "I killed her once I can't do it again." -9th Doctor, Season 1 Episode 6 'Dalek' ^- Even a fucking Dalek could tell he was in love with her. A Dalek who had only recently begun to understand feelings outside of hatred, because of Rose. "He[Metacrisis 10] needs you. That's very me." -10th Doctor, Season 4 Episode 13 'Journey's End' to Rose "But if I believe in one thing... just one thing... I believe in her!" -10th Doctor, Season 2 Episode 9 'The Satan Pit' to The Beast/Satan ^- This is part of a larger quote but this is the most memorable part. The whole thing is: "But that implies, in this big grand scheme of gods and devils, that she's just a victim. Well, I've seen a lot of this universe. I've seen fake gods and bad gods and demi-gods and would-be gods. I've had the whole pantheon. But if I believe in one thing... just one thing... I believe in her!"

There are a few other examples that I can think of but I can't remember the exact phrasing. Like when Donna asked 10 what Rose and him were and he said, "We were... together." Those few obviously point out the Doctor's feelings for Rose. And even if you want to ignore those you can't ignore the fact that in Journey's End, Rose and Tentoo end up together. Comics even stating that they have a daughter together (Mia: Empire of the Wolf).

Hell even later on in the show when RTD wasn't the showrunner anymore there were still references to Rose. Like in Season 6's Episode 8 'Let's Kill Hitler' when the Doctor stumbles into the TARDIS and the emergency program activates and at first it's him, in his 11th incarnation, his current one. He says[pleads] "Oh, give me someone I like!" and the TARDIS chose Rose as the first choice, and don't give me any bullshit. The TARDIS is fully sentient and can understand the Doctor (stated in Season 6's Episode 4 'The Doctor's Wife'). The TARDIS heard the Doctor and chose someone she thought he'd like.

Oh! You want another example? How about Season 7's Episode 9 'Hide', featuring 11 and Clara when he's talking to her after the episode adventure is pretty much concluded about love, "It’s the oldest story in the universe. This one or any other. Boy and girl fall in love, get separated by events–war, politics, accidents in time. She’s thrown out of the hex or he’s thrown into it. Since then they’ve been yearning for each other across time and space. Across dimensions. This isn’t a ghost story, it’s a love story." Some specific points are literally parallels to Rose and the Doctor.

There's probably a few others that could be pointed out that are slipping my mind right now. Oooh how about this one: "Blimey" -9 / "Don't laugh." -Rose / "You look beautiful. Considering." -9 / "Considering what?" -Rose / "That you're a human." -9th Doctor, Season 1 Episode 3 'The Unquiet Dead'

If those don't read to you as the Doctor in love I don't know what would.

And if your wondering 'where is the evidence for Rose having feelings HUH smart guy???' ... do I need point out the episode where Rose canonly confesses her love for him? I do? Oh, ok. Here ya go: [Rose, choking on tears] "I... I love you." / [10 looking at her] Quite right too. (pause) And I suppose... if it's my last chance to say it... Rose Tyler - {connection ends} - Season 2 Episode 13 'Doomsday' ^- She FUCKING CONFESSED HER LOVE TO HIM!!!! And even though we don't actually know what 10 was going to say it is heavily implied that he was going to say 'I love you' back to her. Believing it would be his only chance ever. "You're never gonna see her again, your own mother!" -10 / "I made my choice a long time ago." -Rose, Season 2 Episode 13 'Doomsday' ^- Rose is willing to sacrifice being with her mother to stay with him. "How long are you gonna stay with me?"-10 / "Forever." -Rose, Season 2 Episode something ^- I can't remember the episode that this happens but I think it /might/ be School Reunion.

Even taking out the romantic stuff for their relationship they're friends.

Continuing to add more evidence from quote in the actual show: "So the year five billion, the sun expands, the earth gets roasted..." -10 / "That was our first date." -Rose / "We had chips!" -10, Season 2 Episode 1 'New Earth' ^- Oh? Would you look at that! Both of them think of that as their first date. And-AND in the episode that's mentioned, Season 1 Episode 2 'The End of the World' after the adventure they go to have chips and 9 says he doesn't have any money making Rose say that he's a 'cheap date'. Which he doesn't deny. "I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone you..." -10 / "What, Doctor?" -Rose / "You can spend the rest of your life with me. But I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on, alone. That's the curse of the Timelords." -10, Season 2 Episode 3 'School Reunion' ^- My oh my, its almost like he's in love with her but holding back cause he doesn't want to see her die before his very eyes. "You can tell you're getting older, your assistants are getting younger." -Sarah Jane Smith / "I'm not his assistant." -Rose / "No?" [to 10] "Get you, tiger." -Sarah Jane Smith, Season 2 Episode 3 'School Reunion'

"Can you build another Tardis?" -Rose / "They were grown, not built. And with my home planet gone... we're kind of stuck" -10 / "Well, it could be worse; this lot said they'd give us a lift." -Rose / "And then what?" -10 / "I don't know. Find a planet, get a job, live a life, same as the rest of the universe." -Rose / "I'll have to settle down. With a house or something - a proper house with... with, with doors and things - carpets! Me! Living in a house!... Now that, that - that is terrifying." -10 / "You'd have to get a mortgage!" -Rose / "No!" -10 / "Oh yes!" -Rose / "No, I'm dying, that's it, it is all over." -10 / "What about me? I'd have to get one too!" [pause] "I don't know, we could have the same one, we could both... I don't know, share... or not. Whatever. I don't know, all sorts of..." -Rose / "Anyway" -10 / "We'll see." -Rose / [pause] "I promised Jackie I'd always take you back home" -10 / "Everyone leaves home in the end." -Rose / "Not to end up stuck here." -10 / " Yeah, but stuck with you - that's not so bad." -Rose / "Yeah?" -10 / "Yes." -Rose, Season 2 Episode 8 'The Impossible Planet' ^- Good gods look at that! Rose being fully accepting and telling 10 that being stuck with him wouldn't be so bad and him not being able to believe that someone would want to stay with him and he's like 'yeah?' because someone willingly staying with him and never leaving is such a foreign concept.

"They did what?" -10 / "I'm sorry?" -Detective Inspector Bishop / "They left her[Rose] where?" -10 / "Just... in the street." -Detective Inspector Bishop / "The street. They left her in the street. The took her face, and just chucked her out and left her in the street. And as a result, that makes things... simple. Very, very simple. Do you know why?" -10 / "No." -Detective Inspector Bishop / "Because now, Detective Inspector Bishop, there is no power on this earth that can stop me!" -10, Season 2 Episode 7 'The Idiot's Lantern' ^- As dark as this may seem, it certainly isn't 10's worst after losing Rose. That honour would go to when he was fully willing to DIE after losing her as we saw in 'Turn Left'. Rose is so fucking special to him that any time she is harmed and gone he loses it. She is the one holding him together.

Also for fucks sake she was constantly a presence in Season's 3 and 4 of the revival. Also also, during several episodes starting as early as Season 1 Episode 2 'The End of the World' people assume that they are together romantically.

And if you try to pull; "Oh but River is canonically married to the Doctor!" so is Rose. She is married to Tentoo, who is the Doctor. Also River is not solely married to the Doctor, it is established in canon that River was/has been married to multiple people outside of the Doctor. While married to him.

Reality is I could expand upon this post a lot more, but I'm choosing to cut myself off here.

[spiderace]

Because of my diagnosis of autism in September 2023, I was in a full eight-session course of Dialectical Behavior Therapy group this winter. I've been thinking about it a lot, so I have some comments to share. Feel free to skip this if it's not interesting, but I know a fair amount of fellow autistic or BPD people are on Tumblr and might end up considering emotion regulation therapy.

Some stuff from DBT was distress management, which was useful. For me it was worth it for that alone. So from the start, I do recommend it if you are offered it. But:

Some of DBT was the therapist failing to explain basic masking to a group of autistics and people with BPD. This was because whoever developed the course she was rushing through did not examine the reason WHY these people haven't learned masking skills already. It was usually because those that hadn't, had never had explained to them the difference between expected social diplomacy and lying.

See, I'm going to explain this now, from the POV of a Level 1 late-diagnosed autist with pretty decent masking skills. So this is going to seem super obvious to those of you that are neurotypical.

Many people with autism feel inherently that concealing your feelings or opinions is the same as lying, and that you are doing someone specific harm by not telling them when you know they're wrong. We can't read tone or expression well a lot of the time, so it's not clear to us when someone is saying something just to be polite, or otherwise saying other than what they mean. And we hate not knowing what people mean. So we tend to just SAY what we mean. The natural result is that the autistic person sounds like a rude asshole to everyone except other autists. It's not unusual for people with BPD to have a similar problem, as I learned from my fellow patients!

Neurotypical people generally agree that lying is wrong in a broad sense, but they also preserve an internal distinction between lying that is wrong and stating a non-fact for social reasons that are obvious to the listener. No one tells the autistic person about this, because you're supposed to just know it.

An example of this that we discussed in class is that a coworker in a lunch discussion says the world is flat. Now, you, the autist, know that's not true. But the important fact is that everyone around you does, too. So when you gently deflect the person by politely saying, "Wow, Dave, that's interesting. I've never heard that before," everyone around you is NOT assuming you believe Dave. They assume that you are being polite. You're not actually lying or deceiving anyone, because everyone actually knows what you mean ("I'm not comfortable with this, let's change the subject"). It's possible even Dave will get the message and not bring it up again, depending on how good Dave is at reading the room himself.

This is a much better use of your time and social presentation than point-blank telling Dave he is nutter butters and starting an argument that ruins everyone's lunch break. Because at that point it's not Dave everyone blames, it's YOU. Everyone knows Dave is wacky about the flat earth, why can't you just skim over it as fast as possible so we can all get him off the topic?

The important skill to learn here is when not to engage on something. If you don't agree from day 1 that sometimes there's a Dave and we don't have to point out they're wrong, you simply can't function or mask for longer than it takes for someone in a conversation to say something you don't agree with. This is a very common autistic problem.

Because the fact is that there will definitely be times where you are sure someone is wrong, even Dave and the flat earth level wrong, but it's NOT obvious to everyone. If you can also learn not to try to correct everyone when that happens, you can be a lot less annoying to other people socially. (And I do mean socially here; obviously if you work at a nuclear plant or something and see someone doing something unsafe, you have to speak up, and I'm saying that because I know a lot of us are also very literal.) But you definitely don't have to tell Madison, your boss who can fire you, that there is no evidence essential oils have other than a placebo effect on any health condition. You can say that's very interesting, Madison, and hey did you watch the game? For "the game" you can swap out something else you know Madison likes. It doesn't really matter what it is, it matters that you got her off the thing you disagree with onto something you don't care about, and then you shut up and let her talk about it, so she still has a positive feeling about the conversation.

This is the most basic thing on earth, and if any neurotypicals are reading this you probably can't fathom how anyone doesn't know this. This makes a lot more sense if you are coming at it from the point of view of never, your entire life, knowing what people mean by a certain tone, or what the thing they're doing with their face exactly means. It's very possible to learn these things (not easy, but possible), but you have to first realize there's something there TO learn, and that learning it is not BAD or EVIL, and that's a hurdle my DBT course failed to clear immediately for most of my classmates.

[uboat53]

I had a discussion with a friend of mine in the (US) military recently and it reminded me that most people in the US and, in fact, in the world, are almost entirely unaware that there is a new Cold War taking shape. I think more people should be aware of it, knowledge is power after all, and knowing about something gives you the opportunity to help shape it, particularly if you're a citizen of a country where your voice has an impact in government. I hope this LONG RANT (TM) helps someone better understand.

INTRODUCTION

As I said, there's a new Cold War beginning, and, like the previous Cold War, there's a strong component of ideology to it. Specifically, the world is beginning to fracture between liberal democracy and autocracy.

What makes this conflict particularly complex is that we're at the early stages. When thinking about the Cold War, capitalism vs communism, it wasn't until the 1950s, 1960s, or even the 1970s in some cases that it was really clear which side most consequential nations would end up on. It was pretty obvious that the Soviet Union and the United States would be the major communist and capitalist powers, respectively, but the status of many other nations didn't become clear until long internal political debates and outside interventions had a chance to play out.

So, without further ado, let's get into it.

WHY IS THERE A CONFLICT AT ALL?

This is one of the key questions and, honestly, it all comes down to the interconnectedness of the modern world. You see, modern autocracies that don't rely on the divine right of kings to justify their rule generally justify it by results. In order to make sure the results come out correctly, they control the information available to their people to ensure that their people are told that the autocratic rulers are giving them the best results, whether that's in terms of economics, culture, religion, or whatever else they want to focus on.

As my old boss used to tell me a decade and a half ago, "North Korea can't afford to allow YouTube to get to the average person even if the average person just watches stupid videos because it's going to become really obvious that, yes, this person is an idiot, but that idiot has a fridge, a TV, a car, and has obviously never missed a meal in their life; they can't possibly be poorer than us."

In the olden days that would be fairly easy. Radio signals only travel so far, so as long as you control the TV and radio stations and limit the ability of printed media to spread too widely, you could completely control what information your population receives.

Nowadays, however? Well, that's very different. The internet allows people from all over the world to talk to each other in an instant and it can even go a long way to easing language barriers. The advent of satellite internet means that even efforts to control internet traffic such as the so-called "Great Firewall of China" will be increasingly limited in their effectiveness.

Today, in order for an autocracy to control the information their people receive, they not only have to control the information environment in their own country, they have to control the information available in other countries as well. That's the reason you're seeing things like the Saudi Arabia's murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, Russia's poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a Chinese attempt to kidnap dissidents in the US, India's alleged killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and it's attempt to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

All of these were killings or other physical violence that took place in liberal democratic countries (except for Khashoggi who, though American, was lured to the Saudi embassy in Turkey where was killed) where what the individuals were doing was perfectly legal. This is the driver of conflict today, authoritarian nations attempting to maintain their monopoly on the information their citizens receive in a global information environment.

THE EARLY DAYS

We're currently in the early days of this autocracy vs liberal democracy competition and there are numerous nations currently in conflict over which side they're going to be on including, unfortunately, our own. In order to explain that, I need to get a bit technical over the difference between "democracy" and "liberal democracy".

Democracy, basically, can describe any situation where leaders are elected by some kind of popular vote. If you look closely at that for a second, you'll realize that it's such a broad category that even the autocratic Soviet Union technically qualified. Obviously, a category broad enough to include actual autocracies isn't really in opposition to them.

Liberal Democracy, on the other hand, is a Democracy, but with a whole bunch of other things as well. In general, a Liberal Democracy will feature multiple distinct candidates and/or parties in their elections, some sort of separation of powers between branches of government, the rule of law (law that applies equally to all), an open society (one in which individuals make choices rather than being controlled by tribes or other type of collectivism), a market economy with private property, universal suffrage, and the protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms for all people.

(That definition borrowed almost entirely from the Wikipedia article on Liberal Democracy, check it out if you're interested.)

In other words, Liberal Democracy is more than just "do people vote for leaders?", but encompasses just about everything we'd associate with individual rights and liberties and the structure of institutions to ensure them. People in an Illiberal Democracy may technically vote for their leaders but, without all of these other rights and protections, they can hardly be said to have truly chosen them. And, when you define it clearly, you can see that there's a bit of a disagreement about that in American politics right now.

The Republican Party, and particularly its MAGA wing, is increasingly of the mind that not everyone's vote is legitimate and has been putting in place barriers to voting that disproportionately affect disfavored groups. In addition, they're pushing to end much of the separation of powers, putting more unchecked power in the hands of the president at the expense of checks, balances, and sometimes guarantees of individual liberty. Democracy would continue, but Liberal Democracy would end.

To be clear, this isn't just an American problem, but one that is faced by nearly every Liberal Democracy today. As part of autocrat's efforts to control information outside of their own borders, they've been attempting to influence politics within Liberal Democracies and promote internal autocratic movements; usually right-wing nationalists. From the Republican Party's MAGA wing to France's National Front to Germany's Alternativ Fur Deutschland, just about every Liberal Democracy in the world now has a fundamentally autocratic right-wing party that is doing much better than it did just ten or twenty years ago and, if you scratch the surface, you will find support for them, both financial and otherwise, from autocrats around the world.

Of course, it's not just the far-right either, autocrats have been promoting the far-left in Liberal Democratic countries as well. While the far-right has had much more electoral success and is much more politically organized in the west and, thus, has received more attention, we can't ignore the fact that autocracy is largely neutral on the political scale and operates anywhere that conspiratorial thinking can take hold and distract people from the removal of their freedoms or even convince them that those freedoms hold no value in the first place.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

Well, that's the trillion dollar question, isn't it?

Conflict will likely continue between autocratic and liberal democratic states, but the complexities are growing. Much like communism vs capitalism, autocracy vs liberal democracy is more of a spectrum than a hard binary and many states are actively sloshing around along that spectrum.

There's also the uncertainty of how different countries react to incidents like the ones we're seeing. Technically, killing a person on the soil of another country is an act of war, but not many people in the modern world are willing to go to war for the killing of one person. Most likely what we'll see is a gradual hardening of blocs as liberal democracies react to provocations by slowly pulling back from cooperation and connection with autocratic nations.

We're also likely to see countries switch sides. Unlike the rapid shift in allegiances that we saw during the Cold War, however, these are likely to be more gradual shifts like what we've seen in Hungary and Turkey where individual rights are stripped away gradually and a governing autocrat is slowly ensconced in power rather than a hard and fast coup. We could, of course, see countries go the other way as well, as in the case of Ukraine which has slowly strengthened individual rights and overthrown its autocrats.

All of this, the solidification of blocs and the shifting of countries within this spectrum, is going to create the opening situations for this particular conflict. Whether it becomes a conflict of more rigidly defined blocs or even sparks proxy wars remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION (TL;DR)

The days of a fairly open world, both in physical travel, the movement of goods, and in communication, is starting to come to an end as that openness begins to threaten the hold of autocrats on power. Those autocrats are attempting to keep both the openness and power by working to control the information available in countries that practice Liberal Democracy and generally guarantee individual liberties.

Over the next several decades, it is likely that we will see increasing separation between a bloc of autocratic nations and a bloc of liberal democracies, much as the Cold War saw separation between pro-capitalist and pro-communist countries. Some of that separation will likely not go smoothly and we will likely see at least some military tension and possibly even armed conflict as leaders react to changes or even try to distract from them with military force.

Just as importantly, we are likely to see tension within countries all over the world as autocratic political parties attempt to take control of liberal democracies and pro-democracy movements attempt to overthrow autocrats.

I'll admit this isn't the most hopeful vision of the future that we'd like to see, but I think it's fairly realistic given the current realities we see. I hope that this gives you some insight into what's going on and allows you to plan accordingly.

As always, let me know if you think I missed something or got something wrong, I'm always up for adjusting my thoughts, and I hope you enjoyed the read.

[sizequeen1]

Maybe it's obvious that I'm an oldhead, and I struggle with the question of whether I'm blinded by nostalgia, but there seems to be a general consensus that rap as a genre has gotten pretty stale and corporate with a pretty narrow set of song topics.

When I state that black artists are being pushed into making this violent and hypersexual music (rap is as good as any genre, but this specific kind of music is trash to me), I don't mean they are being directly ordered to do so. I meant something similar to the concept of manufacturing consent in which a system is created that only allows certain kinds of art to be played and therefore profitable, so that is what the artists are "forced" to make and also what the audience is trained to enjoy. To paraphrase Cardi B, she tried to make a song that wasn't about her pussy but it didn't sell because the audience wants to, well, hear about her pussy. Can she talk about the grinding poverty of her childhood, the sexual threats she likely faced as a stripper, or the struggle to be a mom and a star? Those are all parts of her life too. Queen Latifa talked about this kind of women-centered stuff and the songs were bops. Hell, Tupac, wrote a song about his mama. Or Bone Thugs talking about being on welfare and the joy of check day. All that shit is real. When Meg tried to talk about her depression, people complained it wasn't sexy enough.

It's not just about people discussing their reality; it's about how they are allowed to do so within the confines of a profit-driven music industry.

You can be a former gangsta and talk about killing, but the unrepentant expression of contempt for other black men and false bravado is not a message I want to hear, especially without any sense of remorse or fear or much if any reflection on the system that pushed them toward that life.

There used to be a lot more variety in mainstream rap (sex music, hippy art pieces, jazz inspired, g-rated political commentary, love songs, horror, comedy, etc). I imagine there is a lot more of variety on apps but I'm really talking about radio play.

I'm constantly hearing the message that media matters and representation matters. I think a lot of this music is ugly and harmful in general, but to also have such a narrow set of musical choices, only exacerbates that harm.

I can't just shrug and say "there's no ethical consumption (or production) under capitalism." There has to be pushback somewhere.

the “cannibalism is inherently sexual and about love and so hot” crowd somehow turns out to be very put off when a rap song has the word pussy in it

[squirrelno2]

Apropos of nothing but

The thing people mean (or should mean) when they say "product of their time" is shit like this Agatha Christie I'm reading rn, where she is clearly trying to call out antisemitism in the text but also turns around and regurgitates some pretty awful antisemitism as though it's fact, like - I don't know where overall her beliefs fell, just what I read, and there's real sympathy and an attempt to dissect the English Christian attitude towards the Jewish characters presented unless I'm really misreading, but it's also deeply upsetting to see some of the shit that gets said in basically the same paragraph

(edit: actually more of this feels straight up antisemitic as I dig deeper into it, she did write from povs of characters that she clearly didn't agree with at times but I wanna make clear that I'm probably going to be retracting my opinions on her good intentions here. The rest of what I say still stands)

And I think this is important to recognise not just so we don't put ppl whose work has cultural contributions on a pedestal where we can never critique them, but also because like. She was probably saying all the polite, progressive things. We can all say the polite, progressive things. That is what makes us products of our time

The thing that helps us transcend that in our fights against bigotry is to really look at each impulse we have when discussing/describing/characterizing marginalized people, and to say "why did I choose this? Is there something else I could do that would achieve the same goal? Why is it so important to me to tell this story, and does it convey a truth or does it convey a theory I have built about the world that I always assumed is truth?" I started writing characters of colour as a teen because I knew I should, because I knew the world wasn't as white as my backyard is. I didn't know why it would matter to a reader beyond that. I just did it because that is what A Good Author does, and A Bad Author ignores poc. It's not the worst place to start, if you ask me - deeply invested in your own status as a good person or writer and therefore dangerously self centered, but a jumping off point if you're willing to learn.

The thing that took me farther was the moment I realised I didn't know why I had disdain for certain things (in my case specifically hip hop dance was the catalyst but that's a longer story). I sat down and looked at those things I ignored and claimed not to like and found that I had no tangible reason for any of that. I simply had never looked for something to love. I have found, in my time in fandom, that many people refuse to look for things to love in characters they do not associate with themselves. They might pay lip service to a character being great, say they deserve the world, but in the end these are not the characters who get endless fics and meta and art. (This is most obvious with fandom racism but it manifests with other facets of marginalisation as well) It requires an active effort, and a willingness to step beyond "I have said the right thing, the appropriate thing, the polite thing, and that means I have done it all right" into a space where you know you may get it wrong, but always in pursuit of doing something not just right but good

Anyway "products of their time" still fucked up, whether they were trying to do the Right Thing or not, and we all will fuck up, but you have to be willing to step further than politeness, and really start to conceptualize other people as being just as wholly human as you. Nobody is the guest star in an after school special about acceptance. We are, in fact, all the main characters of our own stories, constantly crossing over and spinning off, and the sooner you realize that your kindness to somebody else isn't about you being the protagonist who needs to be loved but about them being their own protagonist who deserves your respect, the better. Don't say things because you're supposed to. Say them because you thought about what they imply, and because you stand by those implications - or don't say them at all

[pumpumdemsugah]

So im pretty sure i know what you're talking about in your last textpost (about how woc are discussed in the 'gender debate') but do you have any specific examples of how exactly those arguments are used/ what they look like? I wanna make sure im not compleatly missing the point (mabey you explained it already and i missed it, in that case ignore this i havent slept in 48h and my brain is soup)

I hope you sleep. Not sleeping is my best skill in 2021 and I have to take afternoon naps to my brain doesn't melt

I've mentioned some stuff but basically when it comes to Black women, we're only ever mentioned when white people want to be sassy about who doesn't count as a woman. There's never any detail or gentle tone when talking about us. It's not about us really

How do you respect me as a woman and that's the only time you mention me ? They think that Black women look in the mirror and see a freak and not a person, not someone regular so why would we take issue with framing like that. It's obvious they can understand that even though society might see them as weird cause of gender stuff they're people and deserve to be spoken about like that but cant give the same respect for Black women. And let's be real, when they say trans women they mean white trans women cause Black trans women are only ever mentioned in the same dumb glib way before they start monologuing about themselves and their white experiences. Blackness is simply a set-up for the real show, themselves and the arguement they just engineered

The fact that people are really flippant when they do this and invoke slavery - we're talking about an atrocity? Why do I need to tell you using a bad article that refers to slavery as a gotcha is unbelievably disrespectful ???

They treat woc as if our history and stereotypes are interchangable cause they don't care about how our oppression works, they just want someone to call them smart they're repeating certain phrases. The fact that person stressed they posted that for "EVERYONE" they think it's a favour and that screenshot was more framing than fact

The discussion is never actually about us but mentioning us in a crass way to mock other white people and look smart to your feeble minded followers. It's a performance.

The way you'll see white people be very poetic about their gender + life and then be slap dash and giggly when they bring up Black women for comparison. We only exist to show how human they are, we don't get spoken about in the same poetic way. It reinforces the Black toughness Vs white fragility dynamic

The fact people think as long as they're arguing with rad fems, they're automatically correct and none of their arguements aren't cheap or stupid or racist. On a funny note, Audre Lorde is literally a rad fem, has taken photos with rad fems and it's why it's obvious no one reads what Black women say lol we're there for optics cause idk how people can do twice monthly warnings not to read radical feminist text then say read Audre Lorde. She didn't hide her politics people straight up do not care what she said beyond two quotes

The funniest one is when they mention woc but then go on to talk about Black women, they're trying to avoid being accused of being anti-Black by quickly mentioning another ethnic but it's obvious the way Black women are racialised we work better for these convos

I can't follow most white people that talk about gender cause it's simply not good for me to see twice weekly mention about what slave masters thought about my ancestors for a dumb internet slap fights. Why is referring to the propaganda of slavery so easy ?

It's the obvious disrespect and fact they dont want to learn anything that contradicts what will go viral cause the way people talk about Black women and gender is literally fan fiction at this point and ascribing ideas to historical Black women who we don't know what they'd think about certain modern ideas cause those ideas didn't exist back then. The thinking is basically, Black women are political and trail blazers so they agree with me because I'm a trailblazer, it's not about any actual named idea, analysis, book or theory from a Black woman but the general vibe we'd agree. We're mascots for virtue

This weird idea that Black women academics can be spoken about as if they all agree with each other/ there's a singular Black woman theory , we're being put on a pedestal as a trump card and not people with ideas. It's the resistance to learning about things from Black women the way these leftist pour over a single paragraph from a white academic ; mention books of white academics; debate a SINGLE line by a white person and can compare the different ideas of individual white people but Black women are a super entity with one idea and that idea is whatever a white person needs for them to be right. All Black women get put in this bin of biologically virtuous so you don't need to analyse our ideas. Some Black women have awful ideas but they're living their best life on twitter/ Tumblr / Tik Tok cause they know as long as they say something aggressive about white feminism etc people will stay firmly lodged up her ass for repeating the buzzwords they want to hear, as long as she doesn't start talking about her experiences in a complex way...a human way, she's useful

[transsexualhamlet]

sherlock holmes reactions part 4 (?) ive lost count already but unsurprisingly ive grown even more attached to him

using this as the cover image because i made him a playlist. cause im awful

no legit this is gonna need a read more because it's SO LONG SHIHEWIESHEFSHIEWHF

Had three mental breakdowns this week and realized i do in fact kin sherlock motherfucking holmes. this does not bode well for anything in my life mentally I've diagnosed him with so many things

Oh boy lol you want the list I think hes autistic (undisputed honestly) plus also adhd but on top of that there's the manic depression and uhhh the bpd lmao I dont even think that's it those are just. the obvious ones

But yeah man's a fucking mess and a shit person but in the same way as me so 👍

Some highlights I thought were very funny:

watson: we are in fact going to be waltzing into a place where people are Shooting People you do not have your gun. this is a problem

sherlock: don't worry watson I have my trusty stick!

watson: visible pain

This clearly happens like every day or so with them

but yeah there were some really honestly sweet scenes with them at the apartment and why am i getting soft over the crusty man being gay

have you considered tho. have you considered them

have you considered sherlock, who usually only plays absolute garbage on his violin serenading watson to sleep when he was tired and in pain and watson being so fucking in love with the man and waxing poetic about falling asleep to his music and waking up to see him fallen asleep on the couch next to him and oh my god them

They're just really sweet together for such a completely dysfunctional couple so much of the time lol I just. Sherlock being like.

Sherlock half of the time: watson you're fucking stupid. no i won't take care of my personal needs stfu. watson get a goddamn life. watson shut up. watson no one cares about your goddamn opinion. no i need to disturb you in the middle of the night it's for science. hey watson mind if i manipulate mansplain malewife

Sherlock the other half of the time: HELLO SIR YOU ARE MY FAVORITE MAN TO EVER MAN HELLO MAY I SPEND THE REST OF MY DAYS WITH YOU HELLO I WILL DO ANYTHING FOR YOU WE ARE PERFECT MATCHES I LOVE YOU AND I NEED YOU YOURE SO MUCH BETTER THAN ME PLEASE MARRY ME

They're... they certainly are.

ALSO OH MY GOD.

THIS ONE TIME WHEN SHERLOCK WAS JUST PACING AROUND THE ROOM AT 3 AM GOING "IT DOESNT MAKE SENSE >:(((" AND HUDSON LIKE BARGED IN TO COMPLAIN AND THEN WATSON WAS LIKE DUDE YOU GOTTA STOP DOING THIS AND PROCEEDS TO SAY THE LINE "YOU ARE KNOCKING YOURSELF UP, OLD MAN"

BAHGHSFHGRHEWHEWHIFEW

BRB SOBBING

CALLING HIM AN OLD MAN???? KNOCKING HIMSELF UP?? I DONT KNOW WHATS FUNNIER

The main highlight of this part was I have now gotten to see him have a great time watching his homo homie get married

Its so fucking funny.......

I was prepared for a funny reaction by yuumori sherlock's face when he said it lol but. Damn i was really not prepared tbh

watson: I'm engaged!

sherlock: *pained groaning*

watson: do you... not like her?

sherlock: no she's fine she's great you'll be wonderful together bUT I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE ARE HETEROSEXUAL WATSON DO I HAVE TO MARRY MYSELF THEN WATSON? ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME MARRY MYSELF.

watson: yeah... yeah... fair, I feel really bad because you did this whole case and I got a girlfriend out of it and all you got was me leaving you alone fuck man im sorry what are you gonna do without me

sherlock, highly sarcastic: dont worry watson I've always got my handy cocaine! *pulls it out and gets high in front of watson just as he's about to leave*

watson: *in fucking agony*

sherlock: good for you!

I DONT EVEN- THIS SCENE KILLED ME MULTIPLE TIMES OVER WHAT

ITS SO GODDAMN NONCHELANT ABOUT IT SHERLOCK IS JUST LIKE YEAH I WILL IN FACT NOT BE MENTALLY HEALTHY IF YOU ARE NOT WITH ME 24/7 BUT WHATEVER YOU DO YOU /S

I'd like to apologize to watson on sherlock's behalf lmao. man is being a bit too codependent on main

The last thing about sign of four I do need to address is yeah, there's the Horrific Amounts Of Racism in that one and the whiplash hearing it is just ridiculous because they seem to be so knowledgeable in all other areas and fairly... politically correct, taking sherlock's original misogyny as a purposeful character flaw, but then they just mention someone indigenous once and suddenly its all parrotting racist propaganda and just... really awful shit. There's no way I'm gonna speak for the group that just got absolutely hate crimed here but anyone can tell the author just has no clue what he's fucking talking about and it's physically painful.

And I don't know, it's just so bad it seems out of character? Doyle's making these motherfuckers say shit that honestly, Sherlock would know better about. And especially Watson. Come on, you cannot tell me watson is mentally capable of being prejudiced against someone. Please do not make him that way.

I'm not sure how to handle it specifically, or what's the proper way I should handle something like that in a media I otherwise like. Is it ok to say Doyle was clearly a piece of shit on the matter and separate those characters from his bias or is that insensitive?

I don't know, I was Not a fan of it and I'm glad to see they've at least finally shut up about the guy

But anyway yeah, uhhhh onto the short stories because I'm trying to read those before I get to the final problem

Scandal in Bohemia was a fucking ride, first of all, before we even get to Sherlock's girlboss arc we have to discuss how gay the whole situation was and how Doyle's attempt at making them less gay failed spectacularly

Like he's all "ah yes I need to marry off watson and uhhh make sherlock ummmm interact with a woman so they dont look gay" but he does it SO BADLY that it makes them look EVEN GAYER

cause i mean, even the conversation they had about watson getting married back in sign of four was gay af, but how Doyle handled things afterward was in no way straighter.

Cause you know, the man kind of wrote himself into a corner with the fact of Watson narrating these stories. So Watson has to be around to witness them, and to witness Sherlock's own thought process rather privately, so he has to be around sherlock at night, a lot. But trying to come up with a reason for that happening just... it didn't occur to Doyle. He just went. Ah yes this makes sense. And it's Watson just like Sleeping Over At Sherlock's like every other goddamn day and every time his wife leaves town and having them basically still live that cute domestic home life but they have absolutely no excuses for doing it anymore. It's quite funny

Like it was gay already the way they interacted when they officially lived together but it was like, a necessity for them. Now it's not, Watson just comes over because he goddamn wants to, and it's hilarious to me.

LIKE IDK I THINK THEY KIND OF BROKE UP FOR A YEAR OR SO BC OF WATSON GETTING MARRIED AND THEY LIKE DONT HAVE CONTACT WITH ONE ANOTHER BUT ONE DAY WATSON JUST INEXPLICABLY HAS THE URGE TO COME VISIT SHERLOCK ON NO NOTICE AND THEN SUDDENLY THEY ARE TOGETHER NEAR 24/7 AGAIN LIKE BARELY ANYTHING CHANGED AHIEHOEWH

SIT DOWN AND TRY TO TELL ME THOSE ARE NOT HOMOSEXUALS

Watson walks in on no fucking notice after a full year and Sherlock is just. In the middle of some experiment obviously but hes like

Sherlock, carrying around unidenfiable chemical mixtures: W A T S O N you look good you look good! i see you've gained seven pounds!!

watson: uh. thanks??? Hey lol *awkwardly waves* Uh um Wanted to Uhm sEe you

Sherlock: ABOUT gODDAMN TIME AND YES WONDERFUL LOOK LOOK SIT DOWN I HAVE THINGS TO INFODUMP ABOUT

watson: :) ok :) *turns to camera* and we were back to the old days

sherlock: makes a deduction

watson: wowwwwwwwwwwww !! so true bestie !!

sherlock: !!!!!!!!! :))) !!!!! :))) uh fuck im supposed to be smooth Its Elementary Lol

watson: *turns to camera* when i stroke his ego like this and compliment him he blushes like a girl like i just complimented his dress so i do it more because he likes it. this is a homie trait

watson: well i should probably get going! my wife will notice that i am gone my dear buddy bro homie!

sherlock: NO DONT LEAVE IM LOST WITHOUT YOU (pretty much a direct quote lol) your. wife doesn't. get back home until monday. I know this because I am smart and definitely have not been stalking you.

watson: alright :)))))

AND THEN HE FUCKING SLEEPS OVER LMAO FUCKING HOMOS

So yeah they're right back where they were before pretty much and there's a case bc of course there is

And honestly I think this short story specifically was so insane mostly just because of how absolutely fast it all went. Yuumori kind of made me believe the original Irene Adler was more of an important character than she really is? And I think that's. Honestly so funny. Motherfucker shows up for ten pages, girlbosses her way around town, and changes sherlock's entire opinion of the female gender while still keeping him gay?

LIKE NO LOL SHES NOT IN ANY WAY A LOVE INTEREST AND WATSON GOES OUT OF HIS WAY TO SPECIFY THE FACT THAT IN NO WORLD WOULD THEY HAVE BEEN ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED BECAUSE. SHERLOCK. DIDN'T DATE WOMEN.

HE WAS JUST??? SO IMPRESSED AND SHELL SHOCKED BY HER EXISTENCE HE DECIDED IT WAS TIME FOR GIRLBOSS APPRECIATION DAY TODAY AND ALL DAYS HENCEFORTH???

AND THEY HAVE LIKE O N E INTERACTION?? God, the power this woman(?) has. Watson looks at her once like. damb shawty 😳 and she's like "no<3" and he's like FUCK

Like yeah it's pretty much just the king walking up like "help girl the whore is blackmailing me" and sherlock being like "ok lol this will be easy" and then it proceeded to not in fact be easy or even possible

sherlock like... posed as a dead body and tried to get her to give up the location of the photo but she out-acted him and skipped the town the next day after doing the 'good night mr. sherlock holmes' thing with sherlock completely tricked

and she just. sends a letter like "dear sherlock holmes. you're a fucking idiot and i think it's funny that you lost. nice job tho mad respect" and sherlock just SHORT CIRCUITS

the king comes back a bit later like "hey Dude where's my Photo" and sherlock's like oh yeah uhhhhhhhhhhh about that and the king is like HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN THAT GODDAMN HARD i would have dated someone more noble if she wasn't so pretty i swear im on a whole different level from her

and then. GIRLBOSSIFIED SHERLOCK HOLMES RESPONDS "from what I have seen of the lady, she seems indeed to be on a very different level from your majesty" ABSEHHESHEFHHFES ROASTED

and the dude just LEAVES

After that I read a few more of the short stories and well the highlights I got from that pretty much were these conversations

Watson: sherlock. honey. have you. eaten anything today

Sherlock: IT DIDNT OCCUR TO ME DEAR WATSON

Watson: ITS FIVE PM

and:

Sherlock: *having one of his Moment Moments at three in the goddamn mornig* GRRRR CRIME ISNT WHAT IT USED TO BE

Watson: MY DEAR SHERCOCK WHAT IS CRIME S U P P O S E D TO BE LIKE ACCORDING TO YOU

Sherlock: no one's original anymore fucking copycats

Watson: so you want the criminals to make things harder for you specifically.

Sherlock, exasperated: yes!

I love them your honor.

[mitigatedchaos]

the grounds that you attack op on don't even make sense since you never really make clear how to differentiate between object level arguments and fandom level arguments.

The distinction is "object-level" vs "meta-level," not "object-level" vs "fandom-level."

An "object-level" position is something like "I think the sales tax in my county should be 6%." It's specific. It's concrete.

A meta-level position is more abstract. It could be a position on how we decide what the sales tax should be, or on how we should decide issues generally, including forms of government or discourse norms. It could be a position on what the sales tax should be given other factors.

Rather than there being a hard boundary between the object level and the meta level, it's a matter of less abstract vs more abstract.

We can usually go more concrete or specific, or more general or more abstract, from any given position. And what counts as object-level is relative to the issue under discussion.

For instance, suppose we are debating whether the sales tax will be decided by an appointed committee or decided by a vote. Relative to what the exact value of the sales tax will be, this is a meta-level discussion. Relative to the discussion of how the sales tax will be decided, this is an object-level discussion.

Cool?

If that all sounds like it's pretty obvious now, well, like. My position is that most of the stuff on my blog is pretty obvious.

Anyhow, sincerely, thanks for this response. A lot of my regular readers get my meaning pretty easily, so it's useful to get a response from someone that doesn't share the same background of assumptions.

Your response gives me a pretty good idea of where the confusion occurred (e.g. a soft example brought up to illustrate an axis taken as a hard example for classification of the OP, as just one issue w/ the clarity of the writing for your audience), and the kind of content needed for a longer-form approach for a more general audience.

A few additional notes,

I consider balioc a friend*, even though I don't think he'll ever vote outside of his party. If you only vote for one party, you can still have influence through discussion and through primary voting.

It is not suggested that you do not vote.

I am aware of the issues with two-party politics. TIMAC covered an alternative proposal in the 6,000-word post Alternative Voting Systems.

They want a violent crime wave to exist so fucking bad but it never happened so they had to make a moral panic over shoplifting and loitering ie things people use as examples of the most minor types of misdemeanor crimes but even then they had to fudge the numbers with fucking shoplifting

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Have you listened to the latest episode of the Homo Sapiens podcast? There’s an interesting discussion of Harry’s Dazed photoshoot and ngc fashion.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/181Eepc3k89Y0xNZ0X4GiR?si=b1Oka-xaQ6W5DBdXwQFB9w

I listened to it after you sent it to me - and I thought it was a pretty inane discussion that retrod all the questions that I find most tedious.

I blame the starting point. The whole piece was framed by a comment from Dr Wrongs (I think I couldn't find it). "I am bit bored about everyone congratulating Harry Styles on this."

That is not a comment that can sustain a discussion - on the face of it a fleeting opinion barely worth sharing. For it to be worth sharing you have to put political meaning and weight on 'boring' that it just cannot hold. Other people's praise is neither designed nor intended to interest a third party - why would anyone care that some random person was bored by whatever praise they were seeing of Harry?

There were some views in there that I strongly disagreed with politically. I hate Pleasing's marketing copy as much as the next anti-capitalist. But to have a problem with someone saying that they want to 'dispel the myth of binary existence' unless they've come out as non-binary in a very specific way - seems to me incredibly limiting. In all sorts of ways, but most importantly I think to police so heavily who can talk in what way about what they'd like the world to be like - is both controlling and will actively hamper building a better world.

I feel like if I went through and talked about all the views that were based on assumptions that I don't share - and think will need to be actively torn down in order for us to build strong movements that have any chance of changing the world then - then I'd be here far longer than it deserves.

So I'll say this: I think the fundamental error here is thinking that you can get justice within an attention economy by talking about things that you think have too much attention, rather than seeing that an attention economy is fundamental incompatible with justice.

And there's two different ways I think that's true. If someone actually has a problem with Harry getting so much focus when he does a shoot like Dazed the solution is obvious - talk about someone else - anyone else. The reason people don't do that, is because within an attention economy talking about what everyone else is talking about gets you more attention than talking about something you think is brilliant, but no the focus. Statements like 'I'm bored of the praise Harry Styles is getting' are so contradictory, because if they were actually true then you wouldn't say it. I think such statements are better understood as saying 'I want a piece of people talking about Harry Styles and this is where I'm going to position myself'. The only way an individual can impact an attention economy is through rigid discipline in who they publicly talk about. But it's very rare to see people do that, because it's neither fun nor attention getting.

But more fundamentally, I do think that attempting to remake the attention economy so that everyone gets the right amount of attention, praise, or any of its tangible or intangible rewards is both impossible and pointless. And the way forward is to recognise that and instead focus on building a world where people access to resources, security, ability to do things that give their life meaning, and validation, are not dependent on other people's responses on platforms built by capitalism to make a profit.

[the-fiction-witch]

Lovely tag : whitey winn

A - Affection [How affectionate are they with you?]

Whitey Winn is rather affection but at specific times, in the office he'll barely give you anything but in bed he'll wrap you up in his arms and never let you go giving you a million kisses a minute. Even if he does like holding your hand and waist most of the time and whispering in your ear how much he loves you.

B - Butter [How much do they coddle you, and how?]

Ohhh you where coddled worse then ever! Your father had always been protective of course as your his own little girl and his only child before your mother died so being protected was just something you where used to. However when you and whitey got together you assumed it would stop that he'd let you be more independent but ohh no you where mistaken Whitey's worse then your father ever was, he was extremely protective of you holding you on his arm, sitting behind you on your horse, barely letting you out after dark unless he was with you.

And it somehow got even worse when you got married, and even more so once you got pregnant. At that point he would even let you pick up spoons for yourself.

C - Confide [How easily do they confide to you?]

He's pretty open as far as confiding goes he was very happy to tell you things as soon as you two started courting he liked telling you things and he loves listening to you tell him to.

D - Defensive [How protective are they over you?]

Super protective! Another man looks at you Whitey's growling like a wild dog pushing you behind him or into his side. One of the mine security men tried to hit on you one evening and honestly your surprised whitey didn't kill him but it was a close call if maggie hadn't have stopped the fight you think that boy would have been dead. Not to mention the time one visiting boy pinched your bottom thought your dress and by the time you had squealed and turned around the boy was knocked out in the dust and you where tight to Whitey's chest. But you know it's just what he's like and that he's just trying to help so you'll give him a little reward later after dark.

E - Exhausted [How do they take care of you when you're tired or feeling low?]

He'll spot your tried or upset from a mile away he'll find someplace cosy and sit you across his lap, and make you tell him all about it he'll play with your hair and stroke your skin while you explain nodding and agreeing at moments he needs too and once it's all explained he'll pulling you to rest your head on his shoulder and chest and let you rest till your better.

F - Fluffy [How sappily sweet can they get?]

He can be a very sappy boy, giving you flowers, giving you cuddles telling you he loves you a hundred times a day

G - Game [How much do they play around, and are they a tease?]

He's not much for teasing or playing around he'd rather just be sweet to you.

H - Happy [What's their favourite thing to do with you, that makes them happy?]

Cuddle! Or go out riding he loves sitting behind you his arms around you to hold the rains of the horse as you go off on little adventures together.

I - Initiate [Do they make the first move?]

Depends, if it's a cuddle then one hundred percent whitey is asking and moving first, but other stuff like kissing and so on its almost always you. Even after your married with children you still have to make a first move to give him a kiss or hold his hand and each normally make him go bright red

J - Jealousy [How jealous can they get and how do they show it?]

He gets super jealous. Luckily labelle doesn't have alot of men and the ones who are in labelle are mostly older men who barely do much of anything so he didn't need to worry much about you, but when those young dirty mining security men came whitey was not happy as at times it seemed almost like the intentional picked on you to wind whitey up and make him do something so they could lock him in the cells. He gets defensive, violent, he'll do anything do defend you even if it means he gets in trouble for doing it because your his girl and knowone is going to hurt you or take you away from him not while he breaths.

L - Love [How do they react to you giving them affection?]

Blush!! He blushed when you kiss him, when you hold his hand he just always has blush in those dirty cheeks. But he loves when you give him affection he just wishes it wasn't so obvious how much he liked it.

M - Married [What's it like to be married to them?]

Amazing, he always cuddles and kisses you once he's home from work, compliments atleast three times a day, and cuddles and sleeps beside you every single night he's not at work.

N - Newborn [How are they with having kids, and how would they be as a parent?]

He got so excited when you told him you where pregnant, but he wouldn't let you do anything for yourself he was going to care for your every single need until baby came. And as soon as it did you saw him smile wider then you had ever seen before he was so happy to be a daddy and he was an amazing one. He loves all your children so very much and takes such good care of them even if he does spoil them a little bit mostly because your first child was a boy and whitey was ecstatic! Having little whitey jr so he kinda spoilt him rotten. But then soon enough when little addison came he had to spoil her too so it was fair. And then elijha came so he had to spoil the boys as much as the girls and so on and so on spoiling all your children rather alot. Even if you keep saying when you have a baby in the house that you won't have anymore children after this and yet it keeps on happening. Even if you think whitey secretly really wants more children, you have said you draw the line at five but with your current tummy thats already out the window.

O - Outdoors [How are they with you in public?]

Defense and sweet, he likes holding onto you but other then that he's okay he doesn't much like kissing you or anything outside because that's privet stuff even if... Maybe the office is privet enough for a snuggle or two.

P - Propose [How would they propose, and when would that be?]

It was nervous. He barely got thought it without stuttering. Almost all of labelle came out to watch which probably didn't help as whitey let it slip to bill in the office that he was going to do it so bill told maggie and of course within an hour the whole dam down new except you. He of course had asked your father's permission first and once he had that he got you as many flowers as he could and asked you in the middle of town in front of everyone.

Q - Quarrel [How are they after a fight, and will they try to make amends right after?]

You've never been in a fight with whitey, he's too sweet, the moment your upset about something he cuddles you holds you hands and let's you explain all about it and how he can make it all better. I don't think it's actually possible to get into a fight with him over anything you can try and tell at him and he'll just stand there politely and nod agreeing with you and discusses ways he can improve and how he can help. "Of course, your right darlin' I'm sorry. I'll remember next time"

R - Romantic [How much of a hopeless romantic are they, and how do they show it?]

He is rather a hopeless romantic, he always brings you flowers after a long day of work and tells you he loves you almost constantly.

S - Snuggles [Do they like to cuddle, and how do they do it?]

Whitey loves to cuddle he almost always starts a cuddle or asks for a cuddle he adores cuddling with you, he moves just wrapping his arms around you having you engulfed in him, usually both arms around you, Maybe a leg around you too with your head nuzzled into him so you have no escape from his love.

T - Touchy [How touch starved are they, and would they show it?]

He was so touch straved when you where first together you could poke him and he'd have a heart attack, but even when he's been in the office a few nights or just hasn't seen you all that much he gets a little desperate for kisses for touching for anything you'll give him. You can tell he's getting touch starved because he'll bite on his mouth alot more and you can see it in how his eyes lingure and move much slower.

U - Urchin [What's one negative trait about them that hurts you?]

That he can be a little too accommodating t the ladies in town, you understand that Whitey Winn is the deputy of La Belle a town almost all of the women have lost their husbands but you get rather jealous when you see the women going to the office to try and bring him things in the office, he never flirts or anything you just get a little worried sometimes

V - Vibe [What energy do they give off when you're with them?]

he gives off the energy of being very cocky and strong but also very sweet like sugar, he is so blushy with you its a rarity he gets though a sentence with you before he's blushing and stuttering 

W- Wedding [What are they like at their wedding?]

a mess, He cried so much when you got married, he was so happy, so excited and so thrilled your father finally allowed you two to get married, you met him in the half-finished church and half of Labelle showed up mostly all the women to see you and whitey get married and they spoilt you with presents of baked goods and wine for you, and bill spoilt you giving whitey a week off for you two's honeymoon

X - Xtreme [What lengths would they go to for you?]

He's do anything for you, anything you asked just to see you smile, back before your father found out about whitey courting you he used to ride out to the river with you just for dates even if it took about half an hour to get from his house to your spot, but he still did it every day after work. 

Y - Yogurt [What's their ideal place for a date?]

A little ride out to the river, sitting down by the edge with maybe a little picnic of maybe some beer and pie, maybe a little cuddle if it gets too cold out as the sky gets dark and you can sit and stargaze together maybe He'll wrap his jacket around your shoulder if you get too cold and maybe if he's lucky he might get a kiss at your door when he walks you back to your door Before your curfew of course so he doesn't get yelled at by your father.

Z - Zipper [What clothes do they like seeing you in?]

he loves seeing you in your underdress when you don't bother to really get dressed he thinks you look sweetest that way.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Can you tell me about the latest bit of social science fieldwork you and your Freemason friends have done?

So, here's the core idea.

1. In the present day, political and social conflicts often play out in public, in the form of arguments, protests, boycotts, etc.

2. Different people are capable of having different opinions, even in extremely niche topics, and these opinions are sometimes very divided. Examples:

There are many people on the political left who hate Hillary Clinton, for obvious reasons

There are also many people on the political right who hate Hillary Clinton (see #1), for similar reasons

People tend to have very different opinions about Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk

et cetera

A lot of this is "people have very different opinions about anything, and are very adamant about these opinions." But in social science we don't pay too much attention to what people think, we focus on the structure of their social networks and how those networks evolve over time.

3. Most social scientists like to talk to lots of people, but making research staff do this on their own time is very hard (maybe completely impossible?) because a large fraction of the people you want to talk to will be unreachable. Thus, a lot of social science research, even when it involves talking to people on everyday topics, is based on the small number of people who feel like collaborating.

3b. Often this leads to the same small number of people collaborating on more and more projects over time.

3c. The people who do a lot of social science research are (on average) aware that their primary source of funding is their National Science Foundation grant, and that being seen as "too political" can, in the long run, result in the loss of their grant. As a result, they do their best to appear as disinterested as possible, and this results in them working on fewer "too political" projects than some more-neutral group of people would be willing to do. Thus you get an "echo chamber" of social science research.

Being trapped in an echo chamber can have bad consequences:

The literature on the social psychology of political extremism is a lot less useful than it could be, because social scientists write it based on their personal impressions of events and discussions with the two or three other people (of varying quality) with whom they happen to be studying politics at the time

A lot of the research that does get published about fringe/controversial views (e.g. flat earth, Reptilian aliens) is so bad that it's not really worth discussing except as a cautionary tale about the dangers of echo chambers

(I was going to say that the social science literature on fringe views is not a "literature" per se – it's just some guy somewhere arguing that Reptilians are probably real, or some other crankshaft – but as a formal "literature" it exists, and is impressive/terrible in roughly equal measure.)

4. Freemasonry, as you likely know if you've followed the news, is a broadly mainstream men's social club/movement centered in the U.S. and originally based on a U.S. historical society. There's public debate about whether Masons should endorse Donald Trump, and if so how, and there's also public debate about whether Trump is really a Mason. I think the "Masons vs. not-Masons" political battle is now pretty ossified, and there's broad agreement about many important things (e.g. what Trump's campaign meant, what the U.S. was like in 1980, what the Holocaust means).

Our idea is: let's pay attention to what non-Masons – people who aren't members of Masons, but who aren't part of the political "club" (Republicans, Democrats, Independents) – are talking about. Unlike typical social science research, we aren't looking for what works in general (we're studying a very specific group and trying to understand things about them), we're just looking at what different people talk about. And instead of ignoring people we don't find agreeable, we want to talk to as many people as we can, and try to understand the shape of their opinions – where are the disagreements, what are some people agreeing with and some not, what different clusters are there.

4b. People talk about different topics in different forums. We wanted to sample a broad range of these topics. Here is a list of the forums we looked at:

LGBTQ stuff (obvious)

Flat earth

Reptile aliens

Gun control (I think was in the news recently?)

David Icke (who is sort of a celebrity "fringe theorist" – his ideas are confusing, and have led to a kind of "pizza conspiracy" involving 9/11, and have some mainstream popularity in certain circles, but aren't really mainstream in general)

Various fringe economic ideas, like "gold currency gives you psychic powers"

Various fringe psychology ideas, like "you can read minds by looking at irises"

There were others, but these were listed because they are examples of topics that are controversial in the public sphere, and thus seem especially good for our purposes.

Note that we looked at threads, not people, and only looked at posts by people who identified as part of the Flat Earth community on the PE forum, and so on. The latter restriction helps ensure that we are studying conversations among fringe groups, not conversations about fringe groups, and hopefully will lead to less researcher degrees-of-freedom. It definitely would be better to have paid more attention to the nature of other fringe groups in the sample, but the PE forum was the first one we found that had some activity to give us access to their posts, and our paid-for Masons membership got us access to most of what was going on in there.

We limited the sample to these particular fringe topics because otherwise the forum tends to be super unproductive (mainly due to the general reluctance of forums to restrict what can be posted there, but also because there are other reasons we don't discuss here, like the potential to offend people).

Also, while we weren't exactly looking for discourse threads that touched on political topics, we did end up doing some of that along the way, which was nice, but didn't feel like we were spending an appropriate amount of time on that.

4c. A lot of interesting social science research is published by researchers affiliated with universities, not by the people doing the actual fieldwork. This is not nefarious, but it does mean that what we look at could be unintentionally skewed toward academia.

5. There's a phenomenon we refer to as "the filter bubble," meaning a tendency for people to talk only to or about people who agree with them.

This is a special danger for social scientists trying to understand "fringe" views, because (as we saw in the case of Trump, above) there are lots of people who like to talk about those topics, and not all of them are friendly. If you are immersed in fringe-discussion among "fringe-y" people, you might end up talking to the exact sort of person who would end up on the "fringe" if we studied "fringe" issues – and you might think that, because we studied fringe issues, our subjects are fringe people.

But even if the issues happen to be "mainstream" issues

[wordsandrobots]

Ah, yes! That is indeed one of the quotes I was thinking of, though it got muddled with some of the ones you'd pointed me to previously.

With respect the the wider presence of queerness in Gundam, yes, definitely. What I wrote was not intended as an exhaustive overview but rather a brief synopsis covering the (to my awareness) earliest example and the most recent one. I ended up including the cross-dressing in 00 purely because it seemed too obvious a connection to make regarding the 'otherness' of the characters involved and how I'd noticed that tendency in contrast to the more normalised examples in IBO and G-Witch. That wasn't meant to dismiss other instances -- they just lay off topic for something already 9000 words long!

(That said, what were the examples from 00? It's been a couple of years since I watched it and I'm drawing an embarrassing blank . . .)

As for Shino . . . OK. This is tangential, but you've prompted me to think about something my partner brought up while we were discussing this essay. They mentioned how some people didn't see the explicit gay overtones in Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens despite it being a fairly straightforward recreation of a realistic homosexual dynamic for the time and place the story was originally written/set. That's an understandable disconnect, caused by shifting norms, but it doesn't mean Good Omens does not intentionally depict a queer dynamic.

Something similar can happen if you do what Iron-Blooded Orphans does and treat a character's sexuality as a twist. Because they absolutely did. Shino being bi is deliberately obfuscated even down to little details of his design. They did *not* want him to carry stereotypically gay markers and the only reason to do that is so the could have those moments before and after he dies, where he finally responds to Yamagi's yearning. I joked about straight-baiting, but his plot line was shaped around making him 'plausibly straight' up to the very last moment, because that's how you get the emotional impact to land. I'll stick by the claim it's not melodramatic, since Yamagi's anxieties are largely underplayed throughout. It's still drama.

And that inevitably creates space for the intention to be missed or willfully misread. I've had the motivation to pour over every frame with the knowledge of where it's going. You don't necessarily get to do that the first time around, especially when the writers aren't showing their hand until the correct moment. Through no fault of the audience's, being equivocal always carries a risk.

I strongly believe it's important for writers and artists to be allowed to convey things without stating them outright (it makes me twitchy when people insist on things being spelled out with e.g. specific statements about character sexuality). But there are pitfalls to trying to be subtle and especially with trying to get clever about it. On balance and knowing what I do of the behind-the-scenes stuff, I am prepared to defend IBO on this score. I think Shino and Yamagi's final scenes together are something they built up to well and pretty damn blatant, all told. There are still a lot of places they left themselves wide open as a result of plotting decisions (and most likely what they thought they could get away with for their genre, broadcast requirements and political climate, too).

Which sort of cycles around to the ending and the treatment of Atra and Kudelia's relationship. As I've attempted to square the circle between exactly what's on screen and believing it is absolutely the correct choice to read them as lovers, I've leaned on the fact Eugene is a chronic sufferer from foot-in-mouth syndrome who can be a right prat at times. Because I also would have liked a more definitively married take on those final scenes. That would have been really nice!

I'm just not sure it's something we could have realistically expected, and I see the whys of doing it the way they did. For all the reasons I broke down in the essay, I think it's both a fitting conclusion and a technically correct one. Plus they gesture towards the queer interpretation strongly enough, I never feel I'm 'fighting canon' when I write fanfic that treats these two women as a romantic couple. That's far more than I can say about a lot of stuff I like. (I also just plain don't get angry over media that doesn't deliver queer outcomes where it might otherwise have done so -- part and parcel of what I grew up with, I suspect.)

I still get it. I'm not about to claim 'this is perfect queer fiction' or anything of the kind; I hope I was clear about that. IBO's ending isn't explicit about Atra and Kudelia being married and it does focus on the male protagonist's son, in what is ultimately a very traditional approach for the genre. The bait-and-switch with Akatsuki is something I would have softened precisely the way you suggest, had I been writing it.

In the end, though, I've found I'm happier focusing on what's actually present and meeting it where it's at. There's a wealth of things to be excited about in IBO as a queer person, and it's the Gundam show that's executed queerness in a way that most chimed with me. Hence, well, those 9000 words, which I am most grateful to you for reading!

IBO reference notes on . . . queerness

How has it taken me this long to write about this aspect of the show? (He asked rhetorically, staring at the enormous amount of fanfic that basically stands as a thesis statement on how very queer this part of the Gundam franchise is [as opposed to all the other terribly straight parts, he added, sarcastically].)

Anyway, let's do it. Full spoilers up to the end of the show will follow, together with discussion of child abuse and exploitation, since that is what IBO is all about.

Special thanks to @lilenui and @prezaki for their invaluable assistance in locating sources.

Statement of caveats: this work is an amateur analysis of the English-language localisations (subtitled and dubbed) of a piece of Japanese media. I do not speak or read Japanese. I am myself bi, which qualifies me to be attracted to more of the cast than the average viewer, and have a working knowledge of LGBTQ+ history in the UK and USA, which tells me nothing about the cultural and historical context in which this anime was made. As such, I will not be addressing the behind-the-scenes production or the corporate mandates surrounding it but will focus narrowly on what I perceive to be present in the text (hereafter meaning both the script and animation, and any additional fictional details provided elsewhere).

Queerness in Gundam

Some background before we dive in. To my knowledge, the first character in the Gundam franchise to be intentionally depicted as LGBTQ+ is Guin Sard Lineford from Turn A Gundam (1999). An ambitious young aristocrat who spends the series on the line between hero and villain, he is infatuated with protagonist Loran Cehack and the show makes little attempt to play this as anything other than one man falling in love with another.

This is entirely one-sided and not appreciated on Loran's part, although that seems to have less to do with it being homosexual attraction than with Guin's high-handed and entitled attitude to life, filtered through heavily gendered social norms. For plot reasons, Loran spends several episodes cross-dressing as 'Laura Rolla', corsets and all, and Guin continues referring to him as 'Laura' long after the deception is no longer required, saying it 'suits him better'. Guin is eventually called out on this by a third character, who accuses him of forcing an idea of feminity on the other man rather than stoop to place himself in the position of a 'wife'. Objectifying Loran is presented as of a piece with Guin's overall flaws as a person, to whit, putting his own views about how things should be above the material reality and desires of those around him.

Guin is also the only explicitly gay character in the show (I'm honestly not sure how to classify whatever Dianna Soreil and Kihel Heim have going on, but it's certainly not labelled in the text). Therefore no counterpoint is provided to demonstrate healthy queer relationships. I don't state this to dismiss his inclusion: he forms part of a smart, nuanced plot thread, and Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino had to fight to get Guin's homosexuality clearly included. But even so, Guin is a palpable step forward rather than a watershed moment, and the end result veers close to some nasty stereotypes about queer people imposing their desires on others.

There are other examples of characters transgressing gender norms in Turn A, most especially Loran's aforementioned cross-dressing. He is comfortable playing the part of 'Laura', in ways that mitigate viewing this situation as the extended joke it might be in another production. Funny moments do come up – particularly in the lead-in to his 'debut' as he acclimatises to the female attire of the show's pseudo-Edwardian setting and takes posture lesson – but he and the concept of a man in ladies' clothes are never made a subject of mockery. The same cannot be said for the character of Sochie Heim, whose attempts as a young woman to fulfil a gung-ho masculine role often turn comedic. This is part and parcel of her assaying militaristic modes of action, which are soundly mocked across the board. It nevertheless stands out next to Loran/Laura.

Further, Loran's status as a literal moon-child carries implications for his attitudes. His dismissal of existing social standards on Earth is very much presented as correct, and in keeping with what I know of Tomino's other writing and stated beliefs, but it dovetails unfortunately with a treatment of queerness as otherworldly, not something that may be found among an average population. We get another example of cross-dressing in the next-but-one series, Gundam 00 (2007, not a work Tomino helmed), where the usually male-presenting artificial lifeform Tieria Erde switches to a female presentation (in a ball-gown, no less) during a covert mission. This sufficiently parallels Loran's case, I assume it was a deliberate call-back, being as it is a disguise enacted by someone even less typical than a boy from the moon.

What I am driving at is that while Guin, Loran and Tieria may be characters who are queer or perform queerness in some manner, they do not necessarily represent an outright embracing of queerness as a mundane facet of everyday life.

Fast-forward to 2024 and the latest mainline Gundam show is a lesbian romance.

If you have been following my blog for a while, you will know I do not hold The With From Mercury in especially high regard. I think it is annoyingly messy, frequently half-baked, and, broadly-speaking, exactly as frustrating as I'd expect from the guy who wrote Code:Geass. It's still an explicit love story that opens with a clangingly blunt statement about the acceptance same-sex relationships and ends with the two female leads happily married to one other. For all its flaws, I genuinely think the central relationship between Suletta Mercury and Miorine Rembran is a nice piece of story-telling, not to mention admirably open about what it is doing. Like it or lump it, Gundam is gay now, properly, with a protagonist and co-protagonist who can be definitively labelled queer and whose romance appears entirely unremarkable for the setting (in terms of being same-sex; clearly there is a lot to remark upon otherwise).

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the conclusion of the series was accompanied by a certain amount of corporate arse-showing, with hollow attempts to walk back the ending seemingly for the sake of appeasing homophobic elements within and without the companies that produce Gundam. The frankly laughable nature of these actions stands testament to how unequivocal G-Witch is. It is flatly impossible in my opinion to interpret as anything other than flagrantly homosexual, and that's great.

Between this interesting but limited start and the full-throated present lies Iron-Blooded Orphans (2015), my absolute favourite and the show that got me writing slash fic after years of… not doing that. So: what is the deal with queerness in IBO?

Natural for a human

By my count, including all present spin-offs, there are three characters stated in-text as being attracted to people of the same gender (Yamagi Gilmerton, Iznario Fareed, Deira Nadira), two who are at the least open to the idea (Norba Shino, Mina Zalmfort), two whose mutual attraction is stated within the context of polyamory with a third person of the opposite gender (Atra Mixta, Kudelia Aina Bernstein), one whose sexuality is briefly hinted at (Chad Chaden), and one male character who is possibly not attracted to women (Orga Itsuka).

Let's get Iznario out of the way first, because the less time we spend on the actual paedophile, the better.

Lord Iznario Fareed is a rich, powerful aristocrat who sexually abuses young blonde boys and inadvertently sets large parts of the plot in motion as part of quasi-villain McGillis' backstory. In a lesser show, Iznario would be the embodiment of the 'predatory queer' stereotype Guin skirts the edge of. Here, however, he is very much not the only 'gay' character present and his proclivities demonstrate one of the many ways the world exploits vulnerable children, a core theme of the series. Early on, we see fleeting glimpses of young girls being pimped out on the streets of Mars. Iznario shows this social failing extends to the much richer Earth and although he is portrayed as the worst among the Gjallarhorn elite, they all abuse their power for personal gain. Thus, as much as the reveal of what he has done carries a certain shock value, it is not present purely for cheap impact. (This isn't the essay to discuss it, but the flashbacks to McGillis being abused as a child are a masterclass in how to frame such things around the victim, clearly communicating what's happening while avoiding gross voyeurism.)

I don't know how deliberate it is the canonical gay character who is shown in an entirely positive light fits the profile of Iznario's victims to a T, but it does underscore we're looking at a case of power allowing people to get away with hideous things, not a stand-in for queerness in general. To an extent I resent having to spell this out, since it seems so obvious Iznario is not fulfilling the role of a homophobic cliché. Sadly, the cliché exists and the point is worth discussion.

Moving swiftly on: Yamagi and Shino.

Yamagi Gilmerton is a small, quiet teenage boy with a somewhat withdrawn and acerbic personality, who spends much of Iron-Blooded Orphans nursing a hopeless crush on mobile suit pilot Norba Shino. Like the majority of the cast, Yamagi is a child soldier, but a mechanic rather than a combatant. Additional backstory commentary reveals that he struggled on joining CGS mercenary group due to his physique. Indeed, while this detail is not directly referenced in the anime itself, he is indeed drawn noticeably thinner than the other boys.

Again, we veer towards stereotypes, where a queer character is portrayed as weaker and more effeminate. Yet in spite of leaning this way in looks, Yamagi is an eminently capable person, never treated as lesser for fulfilling a support role rather than being a fighter. If anything, IBO goes out of its way to highlight how vital good mechanics are to mechanised warfare, and we see multiple examples of Yamagi being both assertive and kind of badass. At one point, he scales, unaided, an 18 metre tall mobile suit that's collapsed to its knees. When he and Shino are revisited in spin-off game Urdr Hunt (soon to be some form of animated production), he pilots a spaceship within an active battle-zone, flying escort for a damaged freighter as it retreats. In Season 2, he's comfortable ordering Tekkadan's new recruits around and is the first person to properly chew Orga out for his failings as a leader. Far from being an outlier among the protagonists, Yamagi is equally brave and dedicated to the cause, irrespective of his sexuality.

To be fair, he does tend to clam up and grow more awkward around the object of his affections. To be equally fair, he has the misfortune of having fallen for the most oblivious himbo on God's red Mars.

Shino is a big, boisterous warrior, the polar opposite of Yamagi in personality and physicality. He embodies Tekkadan's machismo, eagerly anticipating the chance to prove their strength and generally being a standard bearer for becoming the biggest, baddest group around. Things are not as straightforward as they seem on the surface, however. He shows a good awareness of when the group is in over their heads – going so far as to suggest retreat in the face of bad odds several times – and he is not nearly as sure of himself as he might first appear. He displays a wide streak of insecurity about his abilities as a soldier, reacting badly to people questioning his dedication or competency. And he crumbles completely when some of his comrades are killed as the result of a split-second mistake on his part, stating a wish to have died in their place. Thereafter, he acts in ways that read as choosing to take all the risks on himself rather than go through more loss. It makes him an interesting mix, someone who acts as a cheerleader, boosting everyone else's morale, while swallowing his own doubts and personal fatalism.

He is also presented as one of the most sexually active members of Tekkadan, using his wages to visit brothels to sleep with women. Indeed, he is frequently found extolling the virtues of the opposite sex, referencing collections of pornography (at least in the English dub), and generally being a very typical teenage boy about such matters.

Given this, you might assume Yamagi is longing hopelessly for a straight man. That is indeed the idea the show teases us with for much of its run (can something be straight-baiting? I feel if anything ever earned that title, it's this). OK, Shino's fond of Yamagi as a friend and frequently relies on his assistance in improving his fighting ability, and per ancillary material, is the one who got Yamagi transferred to the mechanics corps in the first place, rescuing him from struggling in the infantry. And sure, Shino spends an awful lot of time in very close proximity to Yamagi, including literally pulling him into the cockpit to assist with a mission. And yes, Shino is absolutely a flamboyant creature, sporting gold ear studs and an attraction to the colour pink, ensuring his mobile suits are painted all over magenta in order to stand out on the battlefield. And certainly, Shino is extremely empathetic, adjusting his attitude depending on his impressions of other people, such that he dials his boisterousness down in Yamagi's presence, displaying a far more gentle affection than he does with his other friends.

But clearly he hasn't noticed Yamagi is head over heels for him.

Right?

Well, towards the end of Season 2, during another moment where Yamagi is literally sitting on Shino's knee, Shino proposes the two of them drink together all night long once the fighting is over. Not only is this an unambiguously romantic overture (he's asking while pushing aside the fringe that normally covers half of Yamagi's face, in order to look into his eyes properly), it comes after a joke several episodes earlier in which Shino has to explain to a less worldly comrade that a girl inviting you for a drink is not a request to go out with the whole gang but a far more intimate gesture (I say explain, it's more expressing incredulity Akihiro didn't realise Lafter was asking him on a date). Later, it is revealed Shino did indeed work out that Yamagi 'likes' him (to his friend Eugene's exasperation that it took him so long to notice), and he reacted with amazed delight to discover there was someone in Tekkadan who'd fall in love with 'a guy like me'.

He'd assumed because Tekkadan is a family (a description provided by their ally Naze, which everyone just kind of runs with), romantic love wasn't possible between them. Having worked through this mental block and finally realised the blindingly obvious, he renews his desire to protect Tekkadan as long as he lives, refuting his previous view of himself as an expendable human shield and heading out with every intention of surviving all the way to the end.

And because IBO is an exquisitely-written tragedy, he is promptly killed while attempting a futile one-man attack against their enemies, his advances on Yamagi forming part of a long build-up whereby the boy who loves him provides the tools he needs to charge into a suicide run.

Right then. *drags out the reading comprehension soap-box* I have seen some people refer to this as an example of the 'bury your gays' trope, and there is nothing more likely to get me manifesting behind you in the form of an irate shoebill than to do likewise. 'Bury your gays' refers to a tendency for queer characters in fiction to disproportionately suffer tragic fates. This is a writing choice usually rooted in the idea queer relationships are inherently tragic, either because they are viewed as a perversion of 'correct' forms of love, or because of some misguided idea the prevalence of homophobia means queer joy is impossible. I am going to be charitable and concede this is indeed a case where one half of a budding homosexual relationship dies horribly. But, as always, the context matters.

All but one of the romantic relationships established prior to the epilogue of Iron-Blooded Orphans end in death. Of the two that survive in some capacity, one is a heterosexual background romance between two older characters and the other is a pair of women I shall be covering later. IBO is a story about child soldiers that does not shy away from the fact these are teenagers being fed into a meat-grinder. That the director's original intention of killing every named character was toned down (to the series immeasurable benefit, in my opinion) dos not change a narrative arc towards doom.

Within this, Yamagi and Shino aren't singled out for being queer. The coyness around Shino's eventually-evident bisexuality serves to generate an instant of hope and relief right before the rug is pulled from under everyone's feet. Where Shino's death does differ from those of other characters is in presentation: he dies alone and does not get any form of farewell or the passing-on moment afforded to others. But that is only to be expected, since we're talking about the point where it becomes clear there is no saving the situation. It's a cruel, abrupt moment of bad luck, puncturing the heroic idea of scraping victory at the last second. Shino flew out intending to live and he died anyway. A queer relationship forming part of what he was fighting for is an almost incidental detail.

(As an aside, I am aware of two other examples in Gundam fiction where a pilot and a mechanic have a doomed love affair. One is in Char's Counterattack, where a male engineer's romance with a female pilot ends with them both being abruptly killed, and the other is from Gundam AGE, where a female mechanic sacrifices herself for the greater good, leaving a male pilot to mourn her loss for the rest of the series. Shino and Yamagi reiterate this same concept.)

Stepping back from the tragedy, Yamagi's love for Shino is as delightfully underplayed as the other relationships in the show, with little emotional melodrama being wrung from the romance itself. Yamagi can't bring himself to declare his feelings, frequently turning cold instead and perpetuating Shino's misunderstanding of where they stand. Yet Shino ultimately proves enthusiastic for the idea, rendering moot any concerns Yamagi had over getting turned down (going beyond the text, a Q&A with the series' director confirmed Shino was written as bi). Equally, in the aftermath of Shino's death, Eugene comforts Yamagi by relating the truth of Shino's earlier realisation and even going so far as to rebuff Yamagi for implying there's something wrong with him for grieving. This and other interactions in the same episode imply those nearest to the pair were well aware of Yamagi's desires and had absolutely no problem with them. The prevailing attitude within Tekkadan is one of complete acceptance for its members and this is no different.

Indeed, for me, the most important part of how queerness is represented in IBO is that it is treated as just another aspect of the diversity of the cast. I've seen it stated that viewing homosexuality as a natural part of human existence was Tomino's motivation in making Guin gay. IBO presents us with the same idea, far more seamlessly and far more positively.

Now, let's leave the anime proper and look at the same-sex pairing from spin-off manga Iron-Blooded Orphans: Moon Steel.

Deira Nadira and Mina Zalmfort are part of the Gjallarhorn nobility and their marriage was arranged to strengthen relations between their two families. We see an example of a similar political match in the main show, where the heir to the Fareed family, McGillis, is betrothed to the second child of the Bauduins, the much, much younger Almiria. That this can take place regardless of the gender of the participants has big implications for the functioning of a bloodline-focused aristocracy. Presumably it indicates they are happy to use medical technology to ensure the Nadira family continues into the next generation, and if same-sex marriages are thus permitted, that means fewer factors to worry about when it comes to perpetuation. Whether male-male weddings are allowed too remains an open question; given the existence of real-world double-standards, it is possible Deira and Mina represent the only acceptable form of homosexuality. Nevertheless, that it is accepted speaks volumes. Gjallarhorn is not an especially progressive organisation, built as it is on rigid class structures and notions of human purity. Yet here we are.

Perhaps we should have expected that the norms around gender in this system don't correspond to strictly patriarchal patterns from the real world. Carta Issue, a key player in Season 1 of the anime, is the only child of the Issue Family's current leader and positioned as his sole heir, irrespective of the fact she's a woman. The logical inference is that any children of hers would count as Issues, rather than belonging to a potential husband's family. Deira is similarly the heir to her father's position, although intriguingly, it's not outright confirmed if she is his only child or simply the oldest. The possibility exists that gender is a non-factor in determining inheritance.

With respect to sexuality, Deira seems pretty obviously intended to be a lesbian. Her relationship with Mina is presented as one they are both happy with, despite it being an arranged by their parents, and Deira is depicted in the manual for Gundam Gremory's model kit as favouring the clothes of 'a handsome man'. She doesn't present that way within the manga' story, first showing up wearing the standard unisex Gjallarhorn pilot-suit, then wearing a formal gown for a meeting while in an official capacity. But she is depicted wearing masculine clothes in silhouette when initially mentioned and in a post-story panel at the back of the final volume.

(Another aside: the fan translations I use for this part of the manga refer to Deira using male pronouns when she's introduced. However, that could simply be down to the poor quality of said translation; she's consistently referred to using female pronouns in official materials and the game adaptation of this scene has her named as simply 'Lord Nadira', the standard appellation for Gjallarhorn family heads.)

Whether Deira's code-switching is the result of institutional expectations around her role or personal preference, it adds extra texture to her depiction. While civilian garb was designed for the adult version of Carta and closely matches conservative gender expectations for a woman, she's never shown wearing it, so we don't have a point of comparison to judge what's required of a character in Deira's position.

Regarding Mina, you'll notice I grouped her with Shino rather than the characters whose sexuality I consider to be stated outright. With Shino, the nature of his sexuality is not put absolutely beyond question in the text. This is splitting hairs due to the overt nature of what's on screen but the fact remains, the anime doesn't clarify if his being open to Yamagi's love means he already thinks of himself as bisexual, or if this is something he hadn't considered before. With Mina, it's more a case that I'm unwilling to label her one way or the other based on the available information. Deira carries sufficient signifiers, I find little room for doubt over the intention. We also have an outright statement that she holds great affection for Mina regardless of being obliged to consider her an eventual romantic partner. Indeed, she becomes so upset by believing her fiance dead, she runs off to Antarctica in a Gundam. But the exact depth of Mina's feelings in return is not discussed.

In addition, Mina is considerably younger than Deira. McGillis and Almiria's match takes place when he is (probably) somewhere in his late twenties and she is nine, with plans for the union made four years prior. This is not great, to put it mildly, albeit fairly typical of how such things have historically worked for nobility. Based on appearances and how they are treated by the rest of the cast, I would assume Mina to be in her mid-teens, and Deira to be in her early twenties (annoyingly, exact ages are provided for several characters in Moon Steel, just not these two). A less dramatic gap (and I don't believe Mina is meant to be quite as young as her appearance perhaps suggests), yet still significant when one of the people involved is below what we'd consider adulthood.

There is no indication of anything untoward going on, within the confines of the situation, similar to how we're given no indication McGillis is abusive towards Almiria. Any comparisons with Lord Iznario's activities lie purely along the axis of how children are exploited by adults even without suffering directly. All indications are that Deira and Mina have made the most of something they have little choice in. Regardless, I still feel more comfortable describing Mina as open to being in a relationship with another woman, rather than pinning her to a specific preference.

Continuing the theme of things where doubt or ambiguity exist, let's discuss some characters were there shouldn't be any: Atra and Kudelia.

I don't know about you, but I find it extraordinarily hard to read this as anything other than a three-way love-confession. Still, in the interests of fair play, let's review the wriggle room for declaring this something else.

Kudelia Aina Bernstein and Atra Mixta are love interests of nominal protagonist Mikazuki Augus, in an iteration of another tried-and-true trope, that of a male lead inexplicably being attractive to the female characters in his orbit. Or rather, it would be if the show didn't take such pains to demonstrate why these girls fall for him, setting up a long-established crush on Atra's part (rooted in him being the first person in the world to be nice to her) and a mutual respect on Kudelia's that gets spurred to more when Mikazuki randomly decides to kiss her because she 'looked cute' (Mikazuki has the manners of a feral stray raised on the streets, because that's precisely what he is).

Justification aside, this has the makings of a traditional triangle, that is, one without a connecting base, which we might expect to be resolved by either Kudelia or Atra 'losing out'. For a few episodes, this does indeed seem where we are headed. Then Atra discovers the concept of polyamory via the polygamous Turbines group and all bets are off.

Having realised it is perfectly possible for a family to consist of multiple romantic partners, Atra proceeds to work towards ensuring everyone gets everything they want. Strictly speaking, this doesn't mean she is attracted to Kudelia as well – even if she clearly recognises Kudelia as an attractive person from the start and…

You know what? Acknowledging that the information about their eventual marital status was only stated in interviews at live events with no official record and seems to have been framed around raising the son Atra has with Mika, I'm going to abandon the pretence of both-sided objectivity and go straight for the throat. Turns out my patience for soft-footing this lasts about as long as it takes to say 'bi-erasure'.

Over the course of Season 1, Atra not only decides the end-game is some form of three-person wedding, she also:

Shows no jealousy over Mikazuki and instead chides him for not providing the correct emotional support to the girl he kissed.

Spends a great deal of time with Kudelia and enthusiastically throws herself into furthering Kudelia's goals, without necessarily understanding the technicalities.

Covers for Kudelia by pretending to be her during a confrontation with Gjallarhorn soldiers, getting herself soundly beaten up in order to prevent them from chasing after the real deal.

Drives an armoured car through a battlefield for Kudelia's sake, safely delivering her to a vital rendezvous.

Leaps in front of a massive mobile suit to push Kudelia out of its path, physically shielding the other girl with her body.

As much as it pains me to resort to the 'if this were a man and a woman, would it read as romantic' crudity – yes! Yes it would! Especially since in Season 2, Atra presents Kudelia with a good-luck charm bracelet she has woven, something she previously did for Mikazuki explicitly out of having a crush on him. I'm all for embracing platonic love (which is why Takaki and Aston are not featuring in this rundown) and there's nothing in the above list necessarily entailing attraction beyond deep friendship. But when Atra consciously repeats her actions towards Mikazuki (someone she goes on to definitely have sex with) with Kudelia and it leads to the scene between them where they declare how they feel about each other and Mikauki, looking for non-romantic angles takes more effort.

After all, if we are to read Shino's openness to Yamagi's affection from the things he says and how he looks saying them, we can certainly do the same for Atra and Kudelia's use of the word 'like' in reference to one another and their reactions to hearing it said of them. (Obligatory note that if there is some nuance in the original Japanese the translation doesn't capture, I'd love to hear about it. The English scripts, however, leave little to the imagination.)

It is indisputable that Atra feels a strong affection towards Kudelia and while I have been focusing on her a lot (she is by far the most proactive member of the triad), Kudelia reciprocates at every opportunity she is presented with. Even if there truly wasn't an intention to portray this as exactly equivalent to Atra and Mikazuki, the end result manages to be on par with Yamagi and Shino. Consider Kudelia and Mikazuki, for example. In terms of portrayal and the two-girls-one-guy trope being explored here, they have the same level of chemistry and the same absence of overt consummation as Kudelia and Atra, and it would hardly be a serious position to claim the show does not place the two of them in romantic conjunction, now would it?

You may at this point be wondering why I am getting so defensive of reading Kudelia and Atra as romantic partners. Honestly, I am too. On reflection, I think it's because IBO is playing around with such a worn-out and insipid means of wringing drama from characters who should know better, I keep searching for the catch. And yet there isn't one. This show really did respond to a nascent love chevron by having the mousy, homely girl tell the governor's beautiful daughter to shut up and get in the polycule, and turned it into a true triangle.

That's wonderful. I cannot properly express the wave of joy and relief that came over me when I realised this was the direction they were taking. It ends in tragedy, of course, Mikazuki giving up any chance of a peaceful life to die in battle, far away from the women who love him. But their lives continue because of his sacrifice and by all appearances they remain together. In some ways, for the overarching message of hope persisting on the back of heartbreak, the precise details of that arrangement don't particularly matter. So why not take the gayest reading possible?

What an excellent segue into a blink-and-you'll-miss-it, probably-stretching-too-far, nonetheless-compelling potential bit of queerness: Chad in the series epilogue.

One of the many tertiary characters in Tekkadan, Chad Chaden has minor speaking parts throughout Season 1 and a larger role in Season 2. He initially appears during a particularly dire early moment when it looks like everyone is about to be killed by attacking mobile suits. His obvious resignation to this fate sets the tone for a rather dour personality, at least while on the clock. Chad starts out as human debris, a person enslaved after a space battle and sold to the CGS military group as free labour. This gives him a very matter-of-fact attitude towards fighting and the kill-or-be-killed nature of being forced into it – he voices the sentiment that even when facing other human debris, they can't afford to show mercy.

Off the clock, Chad displays a more sensitive personality. He seems studious, learning about interplanetary communications from Kudelia's maid Fumitan and later being promoted to leader of Tekkadan's Earth branch. He has some difficulty acclimatising to being treated as a free person, proving unsure about the concept of wearing a smart suit instead of his normal fatigues. And he grows anxious when he returns to Mars to discover nobody told him two of the few adults in the group (Yukinojo and Merribit) had started dating, worrying that he's no longer 'one of the guys'.

The most we learn about his relationship preferences prior to the series epilogue comes in a comedic sequence about a third of the way into Season 2, when Shino suggests a trip to a local brothel. Eugene responds by proclaiming that he's realised money will not buy him true love. This prompts Chad to ask Merribit if this is true and, on her saying she supposes so, opts out of the trip as well. Judging by his body-language in the next frame where he appears, this is possibly a decision he regrets – perhaps owing to his anxieties, since he just passed up the chance for some team-bonding.

None of this is directly relevant to the topic of this essay. If anything, the scene I just described suggests that, like Eugene, Chad has previously gone along with Shino in paying for sex with women, only to discover he wanted more than just physical intimacy. But then we get the exchange in Kudelia's office during the last episode, following a time-skip after Tekkadan's defeat and dissolution. Now working for Kudelia as an assistant of some kind, Chad notes that Merribit is shortly to give birth to her and Yukinojo's second child, saying he and Yamagi intend to meet up later to plan a celebration. Eugene reacts with amused disbelief, accusing them of just wanting an excuse to go out drinking, to which Chad retorts, 'what's wrong with that?'

And the thing is he's blushing when he does. Which may simply be because Eugene is accusing him of slacking off – IBO characters blush all the time and their embarrassment is frequently to do with being caught acting immature or otherwise against how they want people to see them. But given the weight that 'drinking the night away' carries in regards to Yamagi following Shino's actions shortly prior to his death, it is easy to speculate this represents something more specific.

As far as I can recall, Chad and Yamagi do not interact at all over the course of the show's two seasons, meaning these lines present a rather unexpected combination of characters. Eugene would have seemed a more likely candidate to associate with Yamagi. He's positioned as Shino's closest friend, he comforts Yamagi over his grief, and they are together for much of the climax to the series' plot. So what has happened in the years since, that Eugene's teasing should elicit a blush from Chad instead?

If we put on our shipping goggles, it's far from a nonsensical pairing. Chad goes through an arc not too dissimilar to Shino's. He is knocked into a coma while protecting an ally from a bomb blast and subsequently the Earth branch gets swept into a war orchestrated by one of the factions within Gjallarhorn. On recovering, he blames himself for the many deaths that result, echoing Shino's line about thinking it better if he'd died in place of his comrades. On returning to Mars, he jumps head-first into mobile suit training, determined to make up for his perceived failure as a leader and cheering himself up through rigorous activity. Different though their personalities appear on the surface, there are clear commonalities here. Further, Chad's responses to his traumatic experiences have a more measured quality to them than Shino's. He is not nearly as reckless and provides clear directions to his comrades even while acting as a decoy against a dangerous enemy, rather than abandon any attempt to be an effective leader. Taken together, and coupled to a more long-term view of romance, these qualities might make him a 'safer' version of things Yamagi loved about Shino, creating space for them to be drawn together.

Or perhaps they're simply the most logical points of contact between the ex-Tekkadan survivors at the Admoss Company and Kassapa Factory and intend to make that an excuse to get companionably plastered for no greater reason than it being a nice time. I am speculating over a couple of lines and an animation choice. Nevertheless, it does not feel like unreasonable speculation. When we already have a veritable gaggle of characters who are queer or may trivially be read as such, it's hardly a stretch to assume one more.

Chad/Yamagi doesn't appear to be a thread the fandom at large has pulled on much, likely because the pairing of Shino and Yamagi is so prominent, it eclipses a mere throwaway possibility. But I'm glad it exists within easy reach. And even if we take off our goggles, these lines demonstrate life for the characters has not stopped. The ex-slave and the gay kid are not stuck, trapped by the tragedies of their past. They have instead grown in both confidence and happiness and now have peaceful, stable lives where they're on going-out-drinking terms. That above all is why I wanted to explore this exchange: it reinforces Iron-Blooded Orphans' rejection of the idea the suffering people like Chad and Yamagi go through is perpetual or inevitable.

OK, one more character to look at. Let's talk about Orga and asexuality.

Orga Itsuka, leader of Tekkadan and instigator of the series' events, is notable for his charisma, his drive to provide a safe home for his comrades, and his complete unsuitability for the grown-up activities he attempts. Trying to party all night leaves him puking up his dinner. He forces himself into a suit and tie to handle the administration of a break-out paramilitary company, despite finding it stultifying and bewildering. His goals spin like a weather-cock, as he's surrounded by older characters possessing strong convictions while unable to stick to his own. And he is ultimately undone by an unwillingness to ask for help, having assumed that, as leader, he must decide everything alone.

I suspect his expressed lack of interest in women is intended to help convey overall immaturity. Orga is a good soldier and tactician, but he plainly isn't prepared for adulthood, lacking the grasp on the complexities of life that implies. Making him uncomfortable about sex serves to heighten the impression of a teenager trying to navigate circumstances for which he's not yet ready.

Relatedly, it should be stressed Orga stating he 'doesn't care' about woman is a response to Eugene asking if he agrees love and kindness are what's important, as opposed to Shino's endorsement of boobs. On hearing this response, Eugene proceeds to mock his commander for inexperience. That he himself has only just had his first sexual experience with another person and previously said much the same about not caring about sex simply proves hypocrisy is a fundamental aspect of Eugene's characterisation. The whole scene is very teenage.

Matters have not improved much when Orga and Eugene's dynamic is revisited in one of the side-stories released via the Iron-Blooded Orphans G mobile game. A year and change later, Eugene continues to act superior about having 'experience' where Orga doesn't.

Orga takes this rather poorly.

(Subtitles by @trafalgarlog)

Eventually Merribit has to shout at them to stop being brats, shaming them for behaving like argumentative children. It's funny – and then you remember they basically still are children and this is headed towards more carnage that will not spare them for being young. Such it is to engage with Iron-Blooded Orphans.

What does any of this tell us about Orga's sexuality? In principle, taking it as a device to convey immaturity, nothing. Orga's persisting virginity could simply mean he's not worked out this aspect of himself yet. He is a busy young man who likely hasn't had the time to try.

Alternatively it could mean he is gay. Mikazuki/Orga is an extremely popular ship in the fandom and we might take Orga's professed lack of interest in women as 'evidence' of him swinging the other way.

Or we could take my view, that Orga is asexual and his embarrassment is rooted in just not getting what the big deal is.

To immediately clarify, I don't think he is ace because he 'hasn't worked out what he wants', I think he's ace because he blushes on admitting he doesn't care about women and does not try to prove otherwise once he's in a position where he could easily do so. In circling back to the same joke for the side-story, the writers portray Orga as continuing to be uninterested in sex and sensitive over being needled about it. Again, a feasible interpretation is that he's into guys. Yet this is an argument with Eugene, whose response to the idea of Yamagi being in love with Shino is basically 'you mean you didn't notice?' Eugene is a dork and jerk; he isn't bigoted. None of the Tekkadan guys are. It's unclear if homophobia is even a factor in the setting. Sexism is, but when someone as superficially macho as Shino is comfortable with male/male attraction, and there are same-sex weddings inside Gjallarhorn, we cannot assume stigma exists around being gay. So why should Orga be worried, unless it goes beyond a question of who you're attracted to and into the answer being 'nobody at all'?

When you're surrounded by people who happily wax lyrical about how the joys of sex make you a real man, the absence of a libido might easily become a sore point.

Again, I'm supposing. Again, there is room to do so. As I touched on with Chad, it is easy to read queerness into the text when the assumption of straightness has been taken away, which is something this show does wholeheartedly and deliberately.

Orga Itsuka is one of the first characters I looked at and realised, not only shouldn't I assume heterosexuality, I shouldn't assume sexual attraction at all. I cannot credit Iron-Blooded Orphans alone with this. I do credit it with being a piece of media that applies itself to inclusiveness in ways quite remarkable for a show about giant robot fights, produced to market toys.

The word we want here is 'normalisation'. IBO has a lot to say about what constitutes 'normal' and a lot of it accords well with my own views, particularly those that have me twitching whenever anybody demands we 'be normal' about something. Normality is horrible. It is cruel and it is callous. 'Normal' is a world run on exploitation, on slave labour and on police savagery. Normal is children forced to risk their lives to earn the money required to feed themselves, because it is normal for their parents be gone, or incapable of supporting them. War is normal. Corruption of political systems is normal. Death coming more rapidly for those deemed expendable by society is very, very normal.

But so is protest. The drive to do something, to change things. The capacity for caring about each other. Love. 'Normal' is just a statement about what surrounds us every day, for worse and for better. In too many pieces of fiction, normality is narrowed, rendered a neater, cleaner picture, often excluding the kinds of people we might run into on the street, or walk past, or see on the news, distant and dehumanised.

Queerness is normal, yet for a long time it has been one of the first things to be cut out of fictional worlds. And when it is present, it's a big deal. An object lesson or a cry of triumph over breaking free of unfair strictures. I love stories about queer joy and victory. Heck, I'm a sucker for a good, soppy gay romance. But these aren't the only kinds of stories we tell. Sometimes we need to reflect the worst aspects of the world and what it does to normal people.

In attempting this, Iron-Blooded Orphans commits to an idea of 'normal people' that includes those who are gay or bisexual, those of colour and those we'd call white, the polyamorous, the illiterate, the desperate, the powerful, those who throw themselves into the fight with everything they have, and those who are simply kind. Those who are accepting, understanding and compassionate. Those who need to be accepted, who struggle to be understood, who suffer for a lack of compassion.

There are all sorts of people in IBO and – as a certain cheery, violent dumbass once said – man do I love it. I don't believe it is reading against the spirit of the thing to imagine more diversity than gets outright stated, to interpret one of the leads as ace or suppose another side character is bi or pansexual. It would seem entirely natural if they were.

Everyone's welcome here, down among the debris and the bloodshed, where hope is precious and fleeting and still somehow endures. So why shouldn't we raise a few extra pride flags?

Queer as in 'fuck you'

This all said, taken as a whole, Iron-Blooded Orphans is not a story about queerness or queer romance. Nowhere is this clearer than in its ending.

I skipped over the framing of the final scenes of the anime when I discussed Kudelia and Atra. They form a striking contrast with the ending of The Witch from Mercury, where the conclusion is directly focused around Suletta and Miorine's love for one another, their bonds of wedlock, and the happiness they have found together. This follows from the show being primarily about their relationship. In Iron-Blooded Orphans, the ending focuses not on Kudelia's feelings toward Atra, but those she has for Akatsuki, Mikazuki's son, with Eugene even saying she's eager to go see 'the man she loves', setting up a brief moment of uncertainty over who the character with Mikazuki's outline actually is.

The nature of Kudelia and Atra's relationship post-time-skip is implied rather than stated: in the English versions of the script, they do not refer to each other using terms suggesting they are married, although Atra has dropped her habitual 'Miss' from the front of Kudelia's name. They do not have wedding rings (redundant as those would be alongside the charm bracelets) and Akatsuki does not call Kudelia 'mom'. That they are raising him together is suggested very strongly, in line with Mikazuki asking Kudelia to be guardian of his child if he died. There are non-romantic ways of taking this idea, though, and none of these are closed off as viable interpretations.

But why should we expect some definite statement about romantic status when the point being conveyed is how Tekkadan's legacy continues to shape the world? This is a story concerned with the exploitation underpinning the world and the effort required to make even the smallest wide-scale change. It is about how people trapped at the bottom of the pecking order are still people, still human, messy and complex. It is about their pointless deaths, they ways they struggle on until those deaths come for them, and why they matter, even if the world forgets them.

Mikazuki, the living weapon, the human sacrifice for Orga Itsuka's reckless ambitions, leaves behind a child who will grow up in a more peaceful time, in a society slightly better off than when he and Orga were starving on Chyrse's streets. He doesn't live to see it; Akatsuki does. For all the failures, the attempt wasn't a waste. Don't you dare disrespect the people who died by saying it was.

This is where the epilogue centres, on Akatsuki and on Kudelia's cherishing of the world Mikazuki and everyone else built. Atra and Kudelia's relationship is there, a part of the gentler life they now have (Atra's desires were always towards the version of her existence where Mikazuki retires to a farm; here she fulfils the dream with Kudelia alone). It just doesn't need to take up space for the ending to land.

Yet, as I pour over how queerness is incorporated into Iron-Blooded Orphans, I find myself considering the struggles queer people face in reality. The victims of the AIDS crisis, dehumanised by indifferent institutions. Section 28 and the attempted destruction of knowledge around non-heterosexual forms of love. Riots and campaigns, voices raised loud and proud. How we are equated with dirt and corruption, reduced down to facts others find disgusting. The name-calling. The petty, pathetic posturing that makes everyday existence pointlessly harder.

So it goes for space-rats and degenerates alike.

I am lucky. My life is about as far from that of a child soldier as it is possible to get. My sexuality has been largely invisible. My gender matches the one most favoured by my society. I still have more common cause with those born in poverty on the other side of the world than I will ever have with the aristocrats and billionaires who shape the direction of my country. Because we hold many causes of misery in common. Because we share the same capacities for joy and suffering. Because our humanity is so easily cast aside by those we will never be able to touch.

There is always a place for stories uncomplicatedly about queer love conquering all. Equally, it is important to recognise the places queerness overlaps with stories about the many other ways the world casts people out. It is vital to be able to explore loss, futility and heartbreak. It is essential to capture why we strive onwards despite how heavily tragedy might weight us down.

We may be doomed. Our lives still matter. To ourselves, to each other and, whether they remember or not, to those who come after us.

So, no: for all the queer characters it contains and the many more we might trivially imagine queerness into, Iron-Blooded Orphans is not gay in the vein of The Witch From Mercury. It is not a happy story.

But it is a tenaciously hopeful one and, from certain angles, that alone looks queer as hell.

---------

Happy UK/US Pride Month – in honour and memory of Marsha P Johnson and everyone else who refused to go quietly.

I shall leave you with one of the least straight things ever to be included in any Gundam show.

[Index for further writing]