#but mostly women

[beetlehoven]

also Valkyrie was my bi awakening. Like i was questioning it but when she started getting REALLY badass as the series went on i had a bit of a crisis. huff i wish she would squish me to a pulp and then fry me up into an omelette with her lightning magic stuff 💔

[a-roach-in-the-limelight]

That’s it

Females your Terzo

Mama Terzo my beloved

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

main take aways from Halloween (1978) rewatch:

michael myers is canonically 21??? this bitch should be at the club

*sees tiddies* ***MURDEROUS RAMPAGE NOISES***

that's it that's the movie

outside of the fact that everyone who has sex is murdered by the narrative, this is a surprisingly chill portrayal of female sexuality? these teen girls are horny and actively enjoying Getting It On with their boytoys. no pushy boyfriends sneaking in through their bedroom windows--these ladies are taking the initiative to sneak out and GET SOME. one of them gets laid and then immediately orders her boyfriend to get her a beer. (yes she gets Slashered soon afterward, but so does the boyfriend so honestly, gender equality.) yes the Final Girl is the only one not having sex, but she's not bullied for that, nor are her friends slut shamed except possibly by being murdered by the narrative

actually the only character who is shown being morally condemned on-screen is michael myers. specifically FOR his violent overreaction to other people's sex lives. (people he is spying on). metaphorically, the villain is American Puritanism sticking its judgy nose into other people's business.

aka Michael Myers Is A Republican

but actually the real villain is the doctor. guy's a judgemental, shaming, pathologizing asshole. and he's been in charge of michael's care since he was SIX YEARS OLD? kid never had a chance. i'd go on a killing spree too

also the parents. where are the parents? it's halloween night and all the teenage girls are home babysitting their younger siblings? come to think of it, michael's first victim was his own older sister, whom he killed while she was babysitting him. teen girls are really shouldering a labour burden here. maybe parentification is the true villain

side note: mike commits his first murder wearing a clown costume...which is never referenced again? his 'iconic' costume is a generic mask and wig and jumpsuit, when we coulda had a Killer Clown Michael Myers??? travesty

i like how the Final Girl and her friend casually smoke weed in her car. yeah she's an honor student and her friend is the sheriff's daughter. yeah they smoke weed. so what it's 1978

(to reiterate, mike is 21 and should be at the club. im not saying he shouldn't be rampaging, im saying it's sad that he broke out, tasted freedom for the first time in his life, and immediately snuck back into his childhood home to go rampaging. let's have a remake where he goes to a nightclub and has a few beers. maybe some slutty dancing. then rampage)

oh no he's hot

[queenburd]

in the span of hours tumblr has banned an out trans woman who was outspoken about her harrassment and the unfairness of the website's system and MULTIPLE out trans women who commented on the absurdity of the situation--has even banned them for posting pictures of hammers and cars.

if staff thought this was going to make the situation go away, all staff's gotten is a class action lawsuit. good job, hellsite "moderators." you showed your whole ass and you're going to go to court. again.

[softlytraced]

Yeah I’m up thinking about women

[lesbunnian]

I love women

[heliomanteia]

I actually like how Epic did Calypso.

It did not shy away from her dangerous/forceful nature in the previous saga and in this one she's just deeply non-sympathetic while compelling. Her vocals are overpowering Odysseus, she's overtaking the narrative. She shouldn't be but she is, and it fits her mythical character.

Not Sorry for Loving You is such a backwards "apology" and I love it because it fits Calypso perfectly. It's weird to say but I'm actually glad they didn't shy away from correctly portraying a character that never "learned to be better" in the original source.

Like, this is a Goddess, not a human. She does not have human morality, she is wrong for what she did to Odysseus. Her emotions are selfish, she's incapable of understanding that she hurt this mortal. She's convinced she's the one hurt and the world is unfair, and that's unreliable narration but it's so good.

Calypso I hate you and I love you.

[inkskinned]

even 2 years ago people still said autism with a whisper. it was also how people sometimes whisper lesbian, like they're afraid of uttering a slur. autistic was either an insult or it was something terrible, a horrible burden only select people endure. "select people" were usually 9 year old boys and skinny white men.

they are not hispanic young adults with a dog and a life and friends. i can make (sustained, calculated, painful) eye contact. with certain people, i don't even have to count how many seconds i am holding their vision - i can just look at them. i can wear clothes that bother me, i will just have a worse day than usual. i might cry about any changes to my schedule - but change is scary! this is normal!

when i was 16 it was OCD. i mean that was the thing everyone said. i totally have ocd. they would arrange 6 colors of gel pen in rainbow order (no worry for indigo feeling left out) and they'd be "so ocd" about it.

if you struggle with intrusive thoughts, be careful at this next paragraph, but. at 16 i developed a compulsion that involved self-harm. my ocd was convinced i was simply forgetting that i'd hurt someone terribly - a thought that persisted for no clear or delineated reason.

at some point i will probably write about how the idea of "morally pure thoughts" was hell for me and others with ocd, but this was the odd dichotomy for many of us: they liked our "aesthetic", but were genuinely repulsed by our lived experience. "intrusive thoughts" now means "cutting your hair in the sink" instead of talking yourself down from believing horrible things. "so ocd" is a label without any true understanding.

it's something i've talked about before - in multiplicity - but i firmly believe in the veracity and necessity of self-diagnosis. i think it saves lives and it saves tragedies from occurring. as someone raised in a house that wasn't safe, self-diagnosis was, for many years, the only viable option. 15 and honestly googling: am i depressed or are there demons affecting my behavior.

but it is not genuine self-diagnosis anymore, most of the time. it is a strange, blanched version of that whispered word autism. now certain traits are constantly seen as "autistic" - any passing intense interest. any flubbed social interaction. people say it while laughing - a touch of the 'tism.

and i like the acceptance! i do. i like that people are talking about it. i like that if i self-identify, more people speak up and say me too, bitch. but there is something-else quietly happening, the way it happened to OCD. the quirky, "fun" parts have been washed and sanitized and removed of all suffering. now it is just something that makes you "a little bit silly."

it took me 27 years on this planet before i learned to make friends. something about me just seems incredibly odd, i guess, some kind of radiation monitoring. someone once (in a way that was almost friendly) told me i am doing the right things, but in a way that's off-putting. i have scoured myself raw attempting to be charming.

someone on tiktok does a deep dive into their particular passion. the top comment says "what kind of autism is this lol". like we are a breed of animal. like it has no influence on our experience. like our life is a fresh breeze, an open meadow.

more often for me, life was a drowning.

[linddzz]

Thinking about Weird Barbie and how she's the very obviously queer outsider of the Barbie world, she straddles the lines between Barbie and the Real World. She's the most aware of the performative nature of it all. She supports Barbie while also gently mocking her panic at losing the hyperfeminine perfection. Her weird house is also home to the discontinued reject weird Barbies, the outcasts (including very gay earring Ken) who never fell into either the original matriarchy or the Kentriarchy brainwashing.

The other more classically heteronormative and beautiful Barbies both pity and fear her, and at first the narrative pities her as well. She's the vessel of girls going weird and crazy and feral on their dolls and that's amazing. Weird Barbie is aware of who she is and how the world sees her and she loves it. She's Weird Barbie and She Owns It.

[sfordaisy]

fem kobylu what to do

[dootznbootz]

Sorry, not sorry but I see this too often and it bothers me :)

Before people get mad: Notice how I put “Me and Penelope fans” there? I know there's others. this ain't about you <3

edit: This is about how people in the fandom prioritize Odysseus and Telemachus (and even Diomedes, who is not in the Odyssey) despite the Odyssey also being HER story as well. I've seen many fics about Odysseus and Telemachus in their youth, and never really seen that for Penelope.

[specialagentartemis]

Thinking about Agamemnon sacrificing his teenage daughter in order to go to war. Thinking about Odysseus trying to avoid going to war but when the choice was to kill his infant son or to go to war he chose the war. Thinking about how upon the death of Achilles, Odysseus recruited Achilles's teenage son Neoptolemus to join the war. About Odysseus or sometimes it's Neoptolemus throwing Hector's infant son off the battlements to his death. About Achilles's ghost demanding the sacrifice of Hecuba's daughter Polyxena before the Greeks can sail home from Troy and when Hecuba begged Odysseus to spare Polyxena he said no, I want to go home, we're going to kill her. Thinking about how the only one of the Greek generals opposing Polyxena's sacrifice was Agamemnon. How Odysseus never wanted to be here but he will inflict the pain he wanted to avoid on others out of his duty to the other Greek soldiers. How Agamemnon, leader of the Greek soldiers, is so, so tired of sacrificing children to this war. How it happens anyway.

[gay-otlc]

Actually I think we should talk about how incredibly fucked up it is for sapphic women to say shit like "I'm no better than a straight man 😔" when attracted to a woman in a way that isn't 100% pure and wholesome, or act like men's attraction to women is inherently dirty, predatory, or objectifying.

[sarasade]

One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".

Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.

That's the TL;DR version of this post. 

ANYWAY here is the long version

Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".

One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.

Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.

It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.

This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.

People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.

I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.

Anyway if you want to read more:

- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info

-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos

-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.

-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa

- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.

-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge

[hansoape]

warhammer dudes will treat the female characters in the nastiest way. Degrade Celestine's and Yvraine's characters to nothing but waifu bait. Talk about what they'd like to do to sororitas with consent optional. Gleefully describe what a daemonculaba is and act like its so cool and edgy. But the minute female fans and queers start to talk about finding a male character attractive NAW that's where they draw the line. How dare we find Titus handsome. Filthy perverts degenerates all of us. Its apparently too much for them and they get really, really mad about it. Stay pissy you gross ass weirdos, your hypocrisy stinks through the walls

[glitterslag]

needed to clear out my drafts so