#but heterosexuality

[getvalentined]

sometimes I think about that one VN that featured

a character whose parents were murdered in front of him in a racially-motivated hate crime when he was in kindergarten

a character who had given up on her dreams for the future in order to leave her home country and earn money for her dying father's medical treatment and whose father dies in the course of the narrative

a character whose mother was so devoted to her work that she literally spent more time with the children she tutored than her own daughter, leading to this character attempting to re-parent herself by dedicating her entire life to working with children so nobody else has to feel like there are no adults that love them

a character whose mother may have been poisoned to death by his estranged rich father who later tried to force this character to murder his wife

a character whose father only treated her like a person after she got married to the previous character in spite of her running his company behind the scenes since she was like fifteen

a character whose father was a violent alcoholic who drove her into the same addiction from a very early age prior to drinking himself to death

and a character whose parents divorced when he was like seven

and how the narrative was set up in such a way to indicate that we were all supposed to feel that the character who had it worst out of all of them was the one with divorced parents

How Not To Write a Visual Novel: The Visual Novel

[lgbtlunaverse]

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

[smoothjazzdigit]

Have you guys seen that clip

Go off Kermit

[mod2amaryllis]

i love being married to a straight guy. this morning we were parallel chilling and i glance at his computer and he's watching a drill fight tournament. as in, guys attaching drills to the same rod and turning them on until one breaks. to find the strongest drill. jose noticed me staring and rolled out of the way so i could see the screen. he knew every drill brand and told me their quality and price. i watched the whole thing without comment. the violence was enchanting. i never would have found this. he's a vector to an entirely alien, often beautiful, world.

[justgivemeabookplease]

Shrek 2, while a cinematic masterpiece, is also an interesting look at queerness and comp het.

Fiona is married so it's time to reunite with her parents. But instead of marrying a prince, she's married to an ogre. Not just that, but she's also an ogre. (Yes everyone knew she would sometimes be an ogre but that was when she was a child, she didn't know she would be an ogre for the rest of her life, and besides once she met the right prince she would stop being an ogre. She was supposed to stop being an ogre.)

But okay they're both ogres. We can still ask about when they'll have children because even if they're ogres they can still have kids, right? That's what married princes and princesses do so naturally that's what everyone does. Even if ogres might not be great parents (I've heard that ogres eat their young, is that something you people do?) it's still something that should be discussed.

And okay you can stay in Fiona's childhood bedroom filled with all the reminders that hey, everyone thought she was just a princess and princesses marry princes. Her toys left out from the last time she played with them. The prince slays the ogre. The princess offers a token of gratitude for slaying the ogre. Fiona wrote Mrs. Fiona Charming a million times in her diary because what else was she supposed to grow up to be?

And Harold you have to fix this, your country can't be ruled by ogres. You were unfit to rule when you were a frog but I changed you, I made you better, I made you a prince. You know how this works. Think of your daughter's safety.

Shrek goes to the Fairy Godmother and oh honey, ogres don't live happily ever after. It's just not done. It hasn't happened in all of fairy tale history. You have to change the both of you to be happy. You have to present as a prince and a princess. It will be better. You'll fit in better that way. You'll be accepted that way.

[hollowboobtheory]

you know there actually is a meaningful difference between 'men's' and 'women's' deodorant beyond the selection of scents. 'mens' plays better with pit hair and doesn't pill up in it and 'womens' tends to have a more powdery finish to help prevent chafing. so really the two genders are actually hairy and bald.

[amisscreant]

With @staff 's recent post saying 1/4 of this site is LGBTQ going around, I'd like to see what the actual demographic is

So!

Please reblog for bigger sample size!

[hinamie]

trick or treat!

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

we don't make enough fun of Batman for not being a vampire. seriously this guy:

nightwalker, lurks in the shadows

goes flying through the city at night hunting down his quarry

romps around in a dramatic ass cape

lives in a gothic manor that is definitely haunted (by the narrative, the ghosts of the past, etcetera)

served by a single devoted familiar servant who seems to share some portion of his strange powers

has multiple fledglings proteges he recruits and trains to share his dark powers

the source of great, often contradictory lore (conflicting reports on his powers/weaknesses/backstory, varies by canon)

unaging (his publication history spans how many decades?)

clearly has some sort of arcane powers superhuman abilities, despite making a huge effort to pass as a Normal Human Guy

autistic bisexual

notice i didn't even mention the whole BAT themed everything. and we're expected to believe this character is NOT a vampire? i'm being baited.

[minecraft]

Did y'all know that Elon Musk's Twitter recently added LGBTQ terms (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Transgender, Queer) to it's "offensive words" list - meaning that links to tweets with words containing them aren't previewed in twitter DMs and are generally de-boosted (shown to less people) by the website? Did you also know there exists a character called the zero-width non joiner that you can copy and paste in-between letters of any keyword so that the keyword visually looks the same but isn't automatically seen by the algorithm as containing a keyword?

[demigod-shenanigans]

Leo. Genuine question. How much time did you spend staring at Jason’s lips to figure that one out?

[sandwitch-watermage]

I think it would be really funny if Kingskin ended up being Wendell’s bisexual awakening. Like yes it’s inherently about Liv occupying Kingskin’s body, counterpoint, at what point does feeling each others muscles cross the line of homoeroticism. Anyway I know if no one got me Ify “37 times in one month” Nwadiwe got me amen

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

[gaystation4]

[shushmal]

Eddie, feral: back off straight guy, i WILL bite you.

Steve, hopeful: bite me?

Robin, deeply offended: STRAIGHT GUY??

[that-butch-archivist]

source: Rubyfruit Mountain: A Stonewall Riots Collection by Andrea Natalie