#but in some contexts you are like Young to me

[alexaloraetheris]

This is so fucking funny if you know some context, because almost all of those options are false.

Option A: Enormous wealth. False, because historically eunuchs wielded a shitton of power, esp. in case of child emperors, and while I'm not sure if they could ALWAYS have a lot of money in their own name, their families at least had a shitton of wealth. There was PLENTY of wealth embezzled by eunuchs, believe me.

Option B: Also false. Please refer to the explanation in Option C. Yeah marriage was almost 100% arranged back then, but if you got lucky you could marry your true love as a concubine. But even AFTER they lost their balls, Eunuchs FUCKED. Like. There's a whole erotica genre in ancient China about eunuchs and the Emperor. (Jiru/Gaozu anyone?) (And also Chun'er/Empress Cixi) And according to some... Dubious legends, Emperor Gaozu loved Jiru so much it ended his whole ass reign. Youtube has videos, I'm sure.

Option C: Could be true and could be false. Having kids was a BIG DEAL in historical Buddhist societies, because going through the afterlife without leaving behind descendants to pray for you was a one way ticket to failure and damnation. If you got castrated without having kids, you were probably a criminal and nobody was going to give you a position as important as a eunuch in a royal court anyway (EDIT: Apparently Sima Qian got castrated for treason and AFTER THAT he went on to serve as the court archivist and become the first Chinese historian, so. Never say never.)

So the men who became eunuchs were (depending on the era and emperor) older (often) noble men, who had experience with governing and often ADULT CHILDREN. Their balls had served their purpose, and they were apparently a fair price to pay to serve in the imperial court. Or, if they were younger and usually a second or further son, they were someone's important uncle who never married (a woman) for one reason or another, so they didn't have biological children but they still adopted some related orphans from their clan.

(There WERE rumors that brash young men wanted the position so badly they took a knife to their own family jewels before marriage, but that was almost certainly an exaggeration. Self-castration often went wrong and was banned pretty much the second a concubine's kid came out looking like one particular eunuch)

Option D: Ho hum, this depends. As men who weren't in danger of impregnating the imperial concubines, eunuchs actually had a lot bigger range of motion than any intact man. They still served the Emperor, so the 'absolute' part of that freedom is debateable, but they could serve as anything from errand boys to babysitters to ambassadors to generals, and a seal from the Emperor was a guarantee that you were here on IMPORTANT BUSINESS and it's a mortal sin to deny the Emperor's hands and eyes. There WERE some positions they couldn't achieve (chancellor, iirc) but compared to 99% or their contemporaries, they had a lot more freedom than most men.

So yeah, IN THEORY, a clever and pretty eunuch who got lucky (and lived in the right era) could have ALL OF THE ABOVE. Whether or not he could keep it was another matter.

[missbliss12]

Just letting you know, there's an anon going around messaging people that you ship a child with their caretaker and urging them to reconsider interacting with your posts

Thank you to the anon who messaged me about this, and thank you to the anon who is unhappily engaging with my work! As a fine artist, comic artist, and person who likes to think about culture, stories, and history, I’ve been wanting to write about the Dynamic Duo for a while. This is a good opportunity for getting those various drafts together. And for anyone who’s curious about DC comic dynamics and likes, like me, to play with comics… I hope this can be an interesting little read into the various ways of reading Batman and Robin, and why one might choose to engage in a queer reading of “Brudick.”

Bruce and Dick: Father and Son, Brothers in Arms, Partners Fighting Crime

First, Bruce and Dick can certainly be read as “Father and Son.” There are several Dynamic Duo stories from various decades that do this, some of which I quite enjoy.  

Like in Batman Vol. 1, No. 20 (1944), where Bruce has to fight Dick’s corrupt blood relations to retain guardianship of his almost son/best friend.

And in writer Tom Taylor, artist Bruno Redondo, colorist Adriano Lucas, and co.’s Nightwing comics, including Nightwing Vol. 4, No. 100 (2023).

But “Father and Son” isn’t their only definitive relationship.  

Dick wasn’t adopted by Bruce at first for logistical reasons inside and outside of text (the difficulties of single men adopting kids during the 40s, when Batman and Robin was first published, for example.) There are comics that describe them as brothers for example, including when Dick first leaves to attend university as a young man and when he dons the Batman cowl after Bruce “dies.”

Batman & Robin Vol. 1, No. 7 (2009) by Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, and co.

Batman Vol. 1, No. 217 (1969), by Irv Novick, Dick Giordano, and Frank Robbins.

(Said vow of manliness was then followed up by Dick crying like a heartbroken heroine of a 1960s romance comic.)

Young Romance No. 125 (1963)

Dick and Bruce have even, on significant occasions, denied being father and son (though one could choose to read that as the first step of a cautious, tsundere journey towards patrilineal bonds)

Batman Vol. 1, No. 439 (1989), by Marv Wolfman, Pat Broderick, Adrienne Roy, and co.

The bond that Bruce asserts with Dick in this compelling story is based not on him replacing Dick’s parents, but on bonding with him as a similarly traumatized and wounded child.

This resonates with the words of David Mazzuchelli, fantastic mainstream and indie comic artist behind Batman: Year One. In the “Afterwords” section of Year One, Mazzuchelli describes the pair as being a pair of innocent, un-sexed twelve-year-old boys (Bruce mentally) who connect as best friends pretending to be heroes. 

(Take a look at Austin Kleon’s blog for the full post where this comes from – all photo credits to him)

This reading of the Dynamic Duo who are mainly partners, fighting against the crime that destroyed their parents, vibes with Darwyn Cooke’s beautifully rendered DC: The New Frontier (2004).

As Batman explains, they are “two lost souls who found each other”... romantic, no?

2. Bruce and Dick: Romantic Partners

With all the various interpretations of Bruce and Dick over the decades, from the perspectives of various writers and artists, there is also room for a romantic reading. Not just the comic panels taken out of context and spoofed on the internet. From this Reddit post… 

…To “A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder”, a great summary by Glen Weldon, author of The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. The comics themselves are ripe for various – *eh-hem* – creative readings and misinterpretations.  

Canon Jokes about Batman and Robin’s Relationship

But Bruce and Dick’s ambiguous relationship is also referenced in DC’s canon comics, like World's Finest Year 6: The Imp-Possible Dream (1999) by Karl Kesel, Peter Doherty, and Robert Campanella.

By aligning Dick with Lois Lane, damsel in distress, DC’s officially published comics pokes at the stability of a purely platonic father and son relationship between the Dynamic Duo.

Then there are the much more disturbing jokes from the Joker in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989) by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean. 

Joker makes plenty of insinuations about Batman’s mental wellness and his attraction to a Robin. Queerness as pathological isn’t new to Batman – it’s embodied in the Joker, a lipstick and acrylic-wearing man obsessed with another man. Joker not only evokes drag queens; in Batman: The Dark Prince Charming (2017-2018) by Enrico Marini, he even dresses as one.

It’s easy to forget the Joker’s queerness with Heath Ledger’s highly popular elemental Joker, Joaquin Phoenix’s sad boy follow-up, and the heterosexual, Harley Quinn-touting Joker of the Batman animations. But I think Joker has lasted – and surpassed Robin in popularity – because Robin was a good boy who was scandalously attached to gay jokes while Joker was a bad guy, who one, historically, could easily accept as being evil.

And then Robin became the Joker.

Like Sin City, Frank Miller’s infamous Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again is a testosterone and titty fueled extravaganza. And it makes Dick a Joker mutant targeting Bruce’s new sidekick, former female Robin, current lovely Catgirl, Carrie Kelly. A side-by-side comparison shows who is more desirable and healthy amongst them.

Dick envies Carrie, going so far as plotting to steal her body by skinning her alive. 

It’s not a good look on Dick. It is also sad, twisted, and one of the most fascinating ways Frank Miller could have acknowledged Dick’s mixed cultural legacy within DC published comic (even one set in an alternate universe). Here is a panel of Dick declaring his wicked love, driving Bruce to (lover’s) suicide.  

So there is room for laughable and sick interpretations of romantic Brudick. Now let’s take a look at a healthier option for these not-quite lovers, enemies, partners, and family members.

3. Batman’s (and Robin’s) Queer Liberation: Fredric Wertham, Feminism, and Kevin Conroy

I’m personally captivated by a romantic reading of Bruce and Dick. Stories revolve around conflict and that poses A LOT OF PROBLEMS. It also has led to plentiful interesting fanart and fanfiction that tries to make sense of decades of stories with a cohesive narrative. While there’s plenty of porn (which, no anti is entitled to shame others about), it also involves strangely compelling coming-of-age stories that few other slash pairings can inspire.  

Also, Bruce and Dick’s queer potential is really important for Western comics history – it’s part of what Fredric Wertham M.D. took comics to task for in the 1950s, leading to a (flawed) study, a Senate Hearing, censorship and comic codes, as well as the creation of family friendly female characters! Wertham clearly read the comics as queer – and that still holds currency for other LGBTQIA comics fans who see themselves in Batman and Robin. 

Excerpts from pg. 190 of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954):

Wertham also accuses Wonder Woman and her friends of loving women to the detriment of men on page 193:

DC superhero media has a history of deviant queerness – to say no is to deny an important facet of comics history. 

Mining said queerness can give room for female characters to be more than objects of men’s violence/sexual objectification. One of my favorite Batgirl comics gets Batgirl away from Dick Grayson, putting her on her own journey of friendship, love, and self-fulfillment in the capable hands of Babs Tarr.

From Batgirl, Vol. 4, No. 40 (2015):

Other female characters who have flourished when given the ability to be more than love interests include Batgirl’s bestie, Supergirl, in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021-2022) by Tom King, Bilquis Everly, and co.

Superhero stories are so big, full of questions about what makes a person moral and how/whether they can ever truly belong. Do stories that play with Bruce and Dick as romantic connect to those ideas? They certainly do.

And, as we see from the autobiographical comic of Kevin Conroy, iconic voice of various animated Bat-men, these questions and deviations can enrich our superhero stories too. Excerpts below from “Finding Batman” by Kevin Conroy, J. Bone, and Aditya Bidikar, published in DC Pride 2022.

The Batman and Robin stories are so strange, plentiful, and varied – there’s room for various interpretations, none of them “wrong.” 

If the anon who’s messaging other social media users to stop looking at my art wants to tackle issues like child exploitation, or if they want to support girls and women who are in danger of incest or rape, they can donate and spread awareness of organizations like Save The Children, Planned Parenthood, and others using ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

And for wholesome DC comic recs with gals of color, I recommend DC comics like Diana and Nubia: Princesses of the Amazon (2022) by Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Victoria Ying and Girl Taking Over: A Lois Lane Story (2023) by Sarah Kuhn and Arielle Jovellanos. My twin collaborator and I are also working on stories that tackle superheroines and intersectional feminism – stories which criss-cross with our platonic and romantic Brudick stories!  

[pinkmoondoll9shihtzu]

Mugwort_Dreams_Report_(1)

OK so firstly i think i took too much lol because it made me feel fucking HIGH i did not know this could HAPPEN !! i made it in a large cup of tea and used the amount i would use for sleepy time tea. It is also the worst tasting tea i ever tried lmao. shortly after chugging the whole cup, i started to notice this really drowsy/dizzy feeling, And when i finally was falling asleep, it felt like i had the spins, W/o the nausea. Wasn't expecting it at all & even this morning i still feel very dizzy, Unalert, Spaced out.

Good thing i looked it up online cus i found out you shouldnt drink it more than once or twice a week Due to the psychoactive property "Thujone" which can be hard on liver/kidneys. So i will wait A few days before trying again + Use a much smaller amount Necxt time ^_^;

My dreams were really LONG & winding it's actually hard for me To remember most of what happened because It felt like they went on for days & days. The first dream from before i woke up to pee is almost lost to me but i Do remember some crucial details.

Ok this is Not meant to be concerning It Is purely for context sake But i struggled a Lot with suicidal thoughts/urges This Is Not Anything New it's a lifelong thing but I guess LAtely it has been pretty Burdensome on my mind. And before I fell asleep i was sort of Having my usual spiral about it. Then,, in my dream, i was talking to this girl I Knew from tumblr but we haven't spoken At All in over 10 years Even on tumblr we were never close She's not someone i think about you know.

But i dreamt I was talking her down from killing herself. And i was saying like, Listen, I;m suicidal too, I totally get it, I understand, But we can't do this, we just have to keep going for now, We just have to, etc etc. And there was a man with blue skin watching over us smiling, i kept thinking, Omg it's Krishna !! Krishna is here !!! He was so comforting. OK idk why i just teared up typing this remembering how beautiful & serene he looked, & his presence. I can't remember what lead up to this in the dream. But when i woke up to pee i was still thinking omg, Krishna, Krishna...

That was probably the most important thing that happened all night

The second dream was EXTREMELY long, I can only remember bits and pieces, like in one part I was at A huge shopping mall i've been to before in other dreams, I was at a Used games store, And my worst ex from 2012/2013 was in there spying on me. Every time i would catch him staring i laughed in his face And made comments about how he doesn't scare me.

Then the part i remember most is that I was at this summer camp that was like, A square island in the middle of water, lined with bunk beds as if they were a fence, and there was one small Log cabin No one ever went inside. It was me and all these other people who looked to be in their older teens, We were all wearing grey sweatsuits, and we just lived in this barren dust square island, there was no plants or shelter or anything but no one cared. The water surrounding us was very dark and freezing but there were other islands in the distance w plenty of pine trees it looked like the Vancouver islands Area.

And all I really remember about this is that one girl had written a book about the history of tumblr (Fashion & trends & Stuff) Which she was really famous for & everyone would sit around reading the book & trying to recreate All the different hairstyles And they were all wrong LOL i was like Oh this girl is so young she has No idea what it really was like But i didn't say anything or try to correct her because i didn't really care + Everyone was having fun. At one point the girl who wrote the book decided to jump into the sea & try to swim away & i thought wow she is so brave i'm much too scared of The cold black water to try that.

Then i went to sleep in my bunk bed (bottom bunk) & watched myself sleeping in 3rd person & thought wow that mugwort really knocked me out I can't believe I can sleep so peacefully with all the people & commotion going on around me. (This part is funny to me now)

IDK at some point after this i woke up but it took forever for me to come out of the dream state Rly felt like i had to claw my way out. Like i said at the top of this post i still feel really dizzy And i could pass out again at a moment's notice lol. Yes next Time i will dose is out way more frugally.

Overall i'd say very interesting experience I wonder how the dream recall aspect of it is meant to work. My sister said the first time she tried it she didn't remember anything at all but the second and third time it started to work better. The dreams she told me about from when it really worked definitely feel similar to the length of my dreams last night and how it felt like Several days past.

That's all for now. PMD9

[transmutationisms]

@apodeme ok disclaimers that i 1) am not an americanist 2) didn't finish the video 3) am not typing out formal citations for this post but

mainly what annoyed me is that olson does an incredibly poor job contextualising usamerican 'creationism' and young earther stuff. 'flood geology' isn't really a new thing by the 1930s -- in the usamerican context what's different to most of the continent is the biblical literalism but even this was not wholly foreign to either england or europe. geologists and palaeontologists have been looking at fossils and trying to date the earth since at least the mid 18th century, & have in fact been mocking or stigmatising one another's age estimates the entire time. even by like the geoffroy-cuvier debates of 1830 most french savants thought cuvier was full of it to some degree,1 and in his theory it wasn't even just one flood responsible for everything -- he thought the earth's history was one of multiple destructive floods and other geological events, hence the term 'catastrophism' to describe this loose branch of theorising, with 'uniformitarianism' the counterpart proposed by early evolutionists ('transformists / transmutationists') such as lamarck.

which brings me also to point out that the theories here being shorthanded as creationism or young earth or catastrophism etc are pretty varied and have only ever borne a loose family resemblance to one another. even among current usamerican evangelicals there is disagreement as to what age the earth is or how far living beings can be altered;2 the same has always been true among people discussing these ideas. when you strawman them or oversimplify them you don't really convey anything of value re: how these theories spread or whose interests they appeal to.

the video, or what i saw of it anyway, is also predictably coloured by the current reigning liberal understanding of science as a march of progress and enlightenment and a gradual accumulation of objective truth, which i won't waste time complaining about yet again except to say that the reason this narrative is still so pervasive in pop histories of evolution, in particular, is largely because the usamerican creationist historiographies of the mid 20th century have gone quite out of their way to gin up the idea of an irreconcilable split between science and religion, and liberals like olson love to take up this framework uncritically and simply invert the valences lmao. in reality scientific and religious inquiry do often overlap and historically have done quite extensively in the field of evolutionary biology,3 and this is a pretty serious problem for anyone who does actually give a fuck about scientific inquiry and what it is capable of achieving.

1 to be fair some of cuvier's problems were also just down to him being a protestant, which was obviously more of an issue in early 19thc france than in 1930s usa. he wasn't really any more creationist than the religious savant average at the time, though, and did not use scripture to directly support his interpretations of fossils, but i digress

2 by the 18th century it was long since abundantly clear to anyone who paid any attention to agriculture that living beings can be altered by selective breeding to look & function quite differently to any 'original' forms. this observation could be logically extended to support a concept of species evolution (as in lamarck) but some savants considered it a limited type of change that would run up against impassable biological barriers (as in cuvier's functionalist teleology). some savants split the difference (as in geoffroy's transcendentalist anatomy)

3 most notoriously in the anglo world, in chambers's 1844 'vestiges of creation' -- but, see also many bridgewater treatises, harriet martineau, german romanticism in 19th century biology, most french evolutionary theory prior to anti-clerical neo-lamarckians like de lanessan, etc etc

i can't finish the new dan olson video i wish people would stop making history videos about things they don't know the history of

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

not to like relate to fictional characters but like rewatching v*ltron and shiro is even more relatably than before bc like oh I get it being the Adult for some late teenagers. like at my last arch field school i was the only grad student on the program and frequently ended up as a de-facto supervisor and i’m 23 and many of the undergrads were like 21yo and more like peers to me but a handful were 18-19 and like yes they are in many ways adults who I respect as peers but also wow you are a baby adult at that age. Anyways I ended up being the enforcer of things like throw out the bad lunch meat and please watch where peoples’ heads are when you’re shoveling. But like I understand the the whole mid-20s in charge of late teenagers feeling. The difference between 19 and 23 doesn’t seem that big but your brain really really cooks during those years.

[yridenergyridenergy]

Vicious August 1998

[arolesbianism]

Despite how much I suffered making my last isat au Aris sprite redraw, I decided to do it again and once again went through hell doing it. There’s like a billion mistakes in this (such as her having the wrong arm rip) but at the end of the day I’m still happy with how it turned out :]

[osteochondraldefect]

another doodle dump . i think i sold my soul and carpal tunnel and last braincell to this podcast and you should too!

[nordfjording]

I get the whole thing about self-deprecating jokes and things not being laughing matters and there are some really fine lines there. And that this is probably some cultural or generational thing, snd so on.

But there's something so deeply normalizing and freeing about taking the piss out of something that feels like it should ruin you.

[dream-sans-mogai]

This will probably get looks from performative and ultimately harmful non-transfems despite my being transfem but-

Some y'alls only interaction with feminist history and theories, radical feminism regardless of its intersectionality and really any feminism deeper and louder and meaner than blatant choice feminism like the barbie movie and whatever TF taylor swift thinks shes got going on is through your occasional and short interactions with terfs and it shows. You call vagina art terfy and it fucking isnt. Its feminist art. Your brainrot is making you a fucking mra. The fact y'all think talking about the man vs bear situation is about/started/ran by terfs (and encouraged some really questionable other transfems shitting on it despite it clearly just being about women's safety and yes all men, not transphobia.), everything from questioning wether certain groups belong in our community to thinking a word is a slur or having a lesbian icon (I have sources don't test me) or not to not liking a certain band has been called "terf rhetoric". I'm all for us Transmascs talking about how terfs affect us cause they absolutely do and their harm to the transmasc community can not be understated but like.... Y'all are not allowed to call Jack shit terf rhetoric anymore. Like nothing. You don't know what it means, you litterally call transmedicalism and sysmedicalism terf rhetoric. Do you mean exclusionist? Say exclusionist. Terfs are not the end all be all hate group. They have a very specific complex mindset that affects so many people in specific ways. Someone hating Neopronouns is not fucking terf rhetoric. It's nbphobia. Holy fuck. Learn what words mean.

(intersectional trans radfems exist, radical feminism isn't terfs and swerfs and historical radfems would laugh in their faces for their idiocy)

[woolydemon]

ohhh franmaya... forced to bear legacies..........

[thewhizzyhead]

yo so there is this Philippine girl pop group called BINI and they've been growing in popularity on twitter not just because of their genuinely impressive vocals and performances, but because of them being one of, if not, the most unhinged OPM stars to ever exist. They are also going viral for being among seemingly the gayest group of Filipino pop girls to ever exist. Both unhingedness and gayness have been at display with surprising genuineness like I'm not kidding those two descriptors seem very much so real so go check them out-

[silvery-stars]

would it be sacrilege of me to say that i am kinda hashtag Underwhelmed by the percy jackson show

[fitzrove]

Sometimes I feel like being controversial and think about making my next video essay about poto. Unfortunately I would probably be murdered irl

[boy-armageddon]

Personally I think the little phenomenon w/ Johnny Whitney writing a just genuinely sort of devastating song once per every record or so (or twice! take, well, Take Me to the Sea 4 example. actually three times maybe. talking about specifically georgia + my organ sounds like… here and also bonetrees and a broken heart a little. also also As Brass And Satin just feels utterly melancholic in its near entirety) is that he just wakes up face down covered in blood in the studio, his own or someone else’s he can’t tell, shaking and grasping some shoddily scrawled out lyrics on a rlly very old piece of paper. The rest of the band might be like “johnny what the fuck happened” and he just springs 2 his feet like “oh haha nothing :> im fine don’t worry. nothing happened!!!!!!! anyways i have this cool new idea 4 a song wanna hear” and any time anyone tries 2 ask about it he immediately dodges the question and moves on2 a diff topic. He can explain what it’s about, but any time someone asks about the inspiration he gets nervous and is like “ohhh ummm. I 4got! Any other song though lol” and doesn’t wait 4 an answer. that’s just a theory though a Seattle theory

[funshinebf]

omg happy 5 year anniversary to me eating shit in disney world and getting a free ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. had to get 3 stitches, a taxi back to the hotel (also covered by disney) and then me and my mom went to disney springs to get chicken tenders. i could barely eat them because my jaw was still busted and chewing hurt too badly. a few days later my mom took my stitches out herself in the hotel room before going to some fancy disney world restaurant for breakfast. i still have a scar on my chin. ahhh, memories