#but it’s Hard to deal with internally

[ardentpoop]

tangentially: so so evil when the thing you’re writing goes from the thing you’re writing - piece that you’re working out complicated emotions through, piece that gives you something to focus on and something to get up for, piece that reminds you that you Can create and that you’re sometimes proud of what you can create - to…

big unsightly mass of negative feelings bc now it’s just about whether people are reading it (they are not) and if they are reading it whether they’re responding to everything you put into it which you can only glean from the comments (you’re not getting those kinds of comments)

I have this reaction every time I post in recent years bc the stuff I’ve been writing in recent years has gotten darker and more personal and Every Time I conclude that perhaps I should not be writing fanfiction anymore bc it’s just not. it does not feel rewarding in the slightest outside of fleeting little instances of gratitude. does it ever? it did for me once, a long time ago, but it wasn’t as serious for me back then - I knew I wasn’t especially good and I wasn’t expecting any attention. it used to be just for fun! I really don’t know what I’m doing it for anymore.

[contagious-watermelon]

there's something to be said for the fact that it's so much easier to accept yourself as asexual than as aromantic. when you realize you might be asexual, you have to contend with a giant shrinking of your dating pool, and the realization that you won't be able to have kids the way people want you to. but you — or, I at sixteen — can take comfort in the knowledge that you'll still be able to find love — that thing which we've been told since practically birth that will be the purpose of our life, basically. get a nuclear family, have kids, fall in love. people who are single spend their whole time complaining about it, wishing they had a partner. someone dying alone is the worst thing that can happen to a person. if you're not dating someone, you're alone.

and the alloace (or someone who thinks they are, at least) clings as tightly as they can to the insistence that we can still love — because to deny that would be to doom yourself to forever be alone, unable to find a place in our society. the reason i think that so many aroace people realize their asexuality before their aromanticism is because of exactly this, that asexuality can still be somewhat (with much effort) slotted in to romantic society. aromanticism cannot, and every aro person has to contend with that when they discover their sexuality. (at least, i did.)

a lot of people in the aro community are trying to do the same as the ace community has, to hang onto "we can still love" with the skin of their teeth. to insist that it's still possible to aro people to date — for that way they'll have some way of still fitting in. this, in my opinion, is why qprs have so proliferated throughout the aro community specifically; so much so that being aro, you're assumed to want a qpr as much as an alloromantic person would want a romantic partner. it's a fear of reckoning with what your place your sexuality puts you in wrt society, of facing the fact that you will be forever alone. because, if you spend your whole life being told that a bachelor, a spinster, a crazy cat lady is the worst thing that could happen to you, when you realize you're not going to ever fall in love? you don't want to accept that perhaps they were wrong, that perhaps you can live a completely fulfilling life without having to replace romance with anything at all, be it friendship or a qpr or anything else.

[jmdbjk]

And another thing...

Korean news media hyping how BTS has continued to release content with no gap even while enlisted in the military.

Yonhap News.

KBS News.

"Is this BTS' military service?" astounded, like... what kind of military service is this where the members are still active while they are enlisted??

They've even coined a new term to describe it: Rubber Shoe Content.

Apparently this sort of thing has not been done before, at least not to this extent, when an idol group is on break fulfilling their military obligation and release things for the fans while they are away.

"They are creating a new activity model to fill the gap with so-called 'rubber shoe content' for fans waiting for BTS, from music videos and entertainment documentary films to offline events."

The planning that had to have occurred and length of time it took for all of this to be produced... BTS and their staff, along with their agency BigHit and the resources available to them via Hybe, were able to carry out this extensive effort so that we would continually have things to look forward to while they are away. They worked hard before enlisting for us.

And we know more is coming! Wait until K-news sees Jimin and Jungkook doing MMA in their sleep!!

[thirdtimed]

its so crazy how 3L is literally not that serious. but It Can Be. if you use your beautiful mind

[never-forget-viva-la-pluto]

TOMO CHAN IS A GIRL! SPOILERS AHEAD

Tomo-chan is a Girl is genuinely one of my favorite shows. Like it's a comedy but it's attitudes on sex and early romance and gender are hilarious but also handled so well. Sure there is fan service but the main couple is so well written as just the most awkward teens. Like sure they love each other, but they are 16 so they are going to have to get through a thousand layers of awkwardness before they will even consider getting to kiss.

For being written in 2015, it is surprisingly progressive in terms of gender identity and gender expression. The main character is a girl who is wildly uncomfortable in girly clothes, wears her school uniform hiked up with sport shorts underneath, but wants to be seen as a girl so badly. She is wicked strong and the guy she likes thought she was a boy for 70% of their relationship. But the show constantly reminds the audience that she is a girl, but she likes all this boy stuff. They remind you again and again that Tomo hates "girly" stuff but that she is a girl and she wants people to know it.

The male lead is face blind, himbo of the ages, and has no idea he loves Tomo because being with her and competing against/with her just makes him so happy already. He follows HER lead, only feels brave when SHE is around, and wants to get better so she can be on equal footing with HER. He sees her in a kimono and begins weeping.

In fact the show does an excellent job of showing that their friendship wasn't insignificant, nor is it any lesser than if they were lovers. In fact the show explicitly states that neither want things to change much, they just want the other to know how they feel and to be reciprocal. The show states many times that friendship isn't lesser, and being lovers doesn't make their friendships null and void, the opposite in fact, and the show is half main leads romance antics and the other half is Tomo's relationships with her female friends.

No one in the show ever really puts her down for her boyishness in a way that feels transphobic or puts down her attempt at looking more feminine when she asks for help with it. There are two girls who at first see Tomo as a romantic rival but it takes one convo with her before they are questioning their sexuality and it goes on for the whole first season.

This show does a good job of playing in the safety cishet norm ballpark of "girls want to be girly" while also showing that there are many forms of femininity, with each of the female leads pursuing their own form of "girly".

As a gender queer person, this show is a delight and it has helped with embracing my own gender identity. It also helps that all the characters have their own brand of autistic swag.

Also, she fang. A single fang, the whole show. No explanation.

Tomo-chan gotta be one of my favorite genders.

[mountmortar]

i made a slight netiquette blunder and am being so brave about it

[i-am-just-a-skeleton]

does anyone else live with such a constant paralyzing fear of Being Wrong that you avoid doing or saying things you're at all uncertain of even in situations where you know you've got something right or there's no reason to expect consequences from the people around you

[spurgie-cousin]

I'm still thinking about the Bridgerton thing, like why can't married Christian women have anything?? If they're married and faithful, why can't they get some sexy period dramas as a lil treat every now and then I mean c'mon, couldn't it technically be a marital aid or whatever (in the sects that allow those)

As annoyed as conservative women usually make me I can't help but feel bad for them when I think about stuff like that, like their husbands can truly do ANYTHING with the expectation that they will stay married. meanwhile the women have so much internalized misogyny that they're policing themselves over things as small as a stupid sexy netflix show

[ladywaterfall]

Can we agree on a shared clothing size system. I ordered a bikini bottom on eBay (cause I found the top here but the bottom was sold out, uncommon size bra girlies know how hard it is to find a bikini that fits AND in a color you like) and it was marked as a size 10 and since the store was in the UK I thought that must mean it was a UK size 10. So off I go converting to EU sizes and yes UK 10 is a EU 38/M so great my size!!

But it arrived today and NO it was apparently a AU 10 which is NOT a EU medium but a EU small! I got this shipped all the way here for it to be too small bc size conversions needs way more research than I thought! Can we have a shared clothing size numbering system please!

[sadiecoocoo]

That moment when you write an entire chapter of Fic and then realize that it works better a lot later in the story rather than making it the third chapter because it escalates a relationship past a lot of the initial gay panic stages and doesn’t leave much room for further development

[thebigqueer]

unrelated to that rb but im thinking about it and i dont think piper liking jason was ever a forced heteronormativity thing i think she genuinely liked him

[transmutationisms]

ok i apologise if this is a bad question because i don’t know anything about politics but i liked your bourgeois failpolitics post and would love it if you could expand further especially on how their ideological horse blinders lead them to justifying/reproducing what’s trapping them in the first place especially given how some of them, in theory, have “principles” & i guess how the show explores politics in general. again sorry if this is poorly formed i know nothing!!

hmm, not a bad question, but many directions to go in here.

first of all, none of them claims to be anti-capitalist ideologically. shiv wants to be a moral capitalist, kendall wants to be a coolguy capitalist, connor wants to be a virtuous capitalist (different from shiv's morality), and roman wouldn't identify with any ideological term but thinks capitalism is inescapable and omnipotent, and therefore not worth objecting to in any way. so even aside from their class interests, there's no ideological inconsistency between any of their political positions and the actions they take to preserve or strengthen waystar.

since shiv and connor are the ones with political principles, i think they're a good place to start.

shiv is a liberal, meaning she believes in individual liberty, private property, and equality under the law. her line "what if a good person ran waystar" is telling: she doesn't want to alter the fundamental structure of the economy or waystar, but she thinks someone with (her own) principles should be running the propaganda machine. she's being genuine when she talks about reform and wanting the company to be better, but this should not be mistaken for any kind of opposition to the economic structure.

connor self-identifies as a libertarian, so he's in the liberal tradition but with an increased emphasis on individual liberty. by this, he means private property rights, so his politics broadly oppose government intervention (regulation, social welfare policies, labour protections) except where the police / military state and the carceral apparatus are concerned (these are necessary to protect property). connor never had any real hope of inheriting waystar, but his politics are still broadly in support of it, insofar as it's a corporate interest and connor sees 'creating wealth' as a political virtue.

roman and kendall are simpler in this respect. as i've written before and many people have pointed out, kendall wants to kill dad and wants to be a 'good person,' but has no concrete sense of what that means and therefore no principled opposition to anything about waystar or its economic functioning. roman sees capitalism as totalising and inevitable, so it's not something he would ever bother taking a stance against, plus taking any kind of stance is lame anyway. fundamentally he wants daddy's love (kendall is motivated more by daddy's respect, which is why he needs to become a killer).

so the siblings' tendency to reproduce and reinforce their own oppression basically comes from the fact that none of them has the ideological or epistemological creativity to espouse any kind of anti-capitalist critique. there are nuances here (shiv places more value on the idea of market competition, like when she opposes the move to buy pierce in s2; connor sees flows of capital and flows of reproduction as part of the same political economy, hence his usury and onanism line), but at the end of the day they all accede to logan's economic worldview. in their minds, there's no reasonable or viable alternative. they have extremely limited understandings of political ideology, as evidenced by them all thinking that shiv's liberalism is, like, radically different from logan's. in many ways the intra-familial ideological disputes are a smokescreen distracting from the underlying economic convictions they all share.

as to the show's handling of politics in general: it's strange to me that more people don't point out that jesse armstrong has at least a passing familiarity with marx and has referenced him in discussing the show. the main narrative drive for the show is psychological, not ideological; nevertheless, it rests on a view of politics that basically builds off marx's base-superstructure distinction, with politics as an ideoological superstructure determined by the economic base. this doesn't mean people with the same class interest will have exactly the same ideology (obviously, the sibs don't; idt armstrong goes in for that type of crude determinism), but capitalism has a tendency to narrow the field of envisioned possibilities, hence the way that all four sibs fail to see any other economic arrangement as viable or even worth considering.

[sysig]

Totally unaffected by this gesture of affection, definitely (Patreon)

[uncanny-tranny]

Honestly, I always find it weird how many instances I've seen of cis people wanting a token trans friend who, in reality, is self-loathing enough to hate their own existance and see cisness as the ideal. It's almost like a power-trip fantasy to find a trans person who despises either the way they are treated or their existance just to prove to themself that the only existance that's meaningful is a cis one.

And you can tell which cis person wants to meet token trans people if you don't give them the satisfaction of being the self-despising trans person, or even if you aren't completely self-hating.

[boofbuck]

Thinking thoughts about alpha Robin again 🥰

[canichangemyblogname]

When I started therapy, I was actually hung up on the fact that I didn't seem to have ever experienced dysphoria, which is a lie that has its origins in part in the fact I had no fucking clue what dysphoria actually is. I've since found that it's actually kinda hard to explain, and that's why these narratives that dysphoria is when trans people are revulsed by their body and agab, or when they "hate" their past self, persist. It's also why these "trapped in" bodies and "wrong" bodies narratives exist.

Like. I'm in my body. My body is my body. My consciousness isn't in another person's body; it's in my own. And I know myself. I know myself well enough to know that I am not a woman despite society telling me that my bits, pieces, and parts "make" me one. And how else do I explain this to someone with no frame of reference for this? I liken it to "Freaky Friday," despite the fact that's- technically- what it isn't? It’s like having an out-of-body experience. You're looking at your body. You know it's your body. But there's also a disconnect. Something's missing, and something's there that makes no sense.

I also don't think I could ever hate the girl my parents tried to raise or the woman I wanted so desperately to be. That wouldn't be very kind to me. She really tried her damnedest. And she's not "dead" because she's a vital part of my past. I, quite technically, wouldn't be trans if "she" never existed. I'd be a cis man if I was never afab. "Trans" is an important part of my lived reality.

Was I ever a "girl"? A part of me still has no idea. I know I truly believed I was, but the reasons I believed I was weren't healthy.

I held on to a lot of sex-essentialist ideas for a good portion of my youth. Why? It was all that connected me to the identity society and my family was trying to raise me into. When my cousin gifted me a uterus pin with the words "Women's rights" on it, I wore it proudly. It was a very tenuous connection to womanhood, and it was a connection I needed to critically rethink when my mother and grandmother were both diagnosed with cervical cancer (I was 11). I knew that it ran in my family and that, one day, I might need to go through the same surgery they did just to live.

I asked my mom what connected her to womanhood, and she replied: motherhood. I was never, ever going to be a mother, so I returned to the drawing board. I asked my grandmother what connected her to womanhood, and she replied: standing up to violent men and men who denied her and other women the opportunity to work; community. And I realized that I had never been extended the same community my grandmother always had been. Part of the disconnect I felt was due to violence (sexual and not) I had experienced in single-sex, "women's only" spaces. Girls in "girl's only" spaces made it clear that I was not welcome, and, at the time, I didn't understand why they singled me out and picked on me.

Even though my family was trying to raise me as a girl, the society around me saw me as nothing more than a "failed" girl. I was an "unwoman," not "woman enough," for reasons such as what I preferred to wear. But it's not like in marking me as "unwoman," they made me into a man, far from it. They sorted me- on the basis of my queerness- into some other third category. Something of a eunuch.

And it seemed like the only thing I had was some sex-essentialist, cisgender pretense (I absolutely loved the linked blog post as I found it quite striking, even though I was *never* trans-exclusionary, and I never supported those ideas about trans people) to sort of reassure myself that I belonged in society. Every time I usurped or rebelled against our sex/gender norms, I would work to distract myself from how I constructed my body into a binary and thus ignore how being made into a girl was wrong for me. I literally disconnected myself from parts of my internal self & internal thoughts, and I denied myself the opportunity to construct an identity. I was constantly gaslighting myself and consistently engaged in thought-stopping. In part because I was terrified of being "different."

I so desperately wanted to be just like every other girl that I ignored the fact that I likely never was (and that there is no such thing as universal woman/girlhood). With that realization, I could hear the words of my school-yard bullies from years ago, words which, it seems, many trans masc people have heard in their lifetime, "What's wrong? We're all girls here, aren't we? We're all alike."

I've been unable to recognize my own dysphoria because I have spent my whole life purposefully ignoring and distracting myself from those moments of "huh. something's off." I spent some 23 years of my life essentially disassociating from myself (I'm 26 now). I felt detached from my body and detached from the world around me. It felt as if everyone else was moving, but I was floating in place. I disconnected myself from my thoughts and emotions in an attempt to be accepted by a society that finds queerness disgusting.

I literally felt like I was watching my life and body unfold without my consent rather than me unfolding it myself. So, I liken my experience to "Freaky Friday" because that's also what it is.