#but you aren't doing queer readings

[aipilosse]

🔥6 and 7?

lmao are you my Maedhros anon? sending me asks because you sense our shared distaste?

ok. VIOLENCE TIME.

6. which ship fans are the most annoying?

Russingon of course!!! Caveat that I used to enjoy Russingon greatly and I have many beloved mutuals who ship Russingon and I don't think you're annoying at all <<<333

But.

LMAO the fact that people are so insane about the ship that they'll take offense if it's included as a non-canon ship? To the point where there is at least one event where implying it's not canon is taboo? The fact that people seem to legitimately believe it was intentional subtext from Tolkien and any minimization of it is homophobic? 'Chrissy T straightwashed the Silm' is something I have read with my own two eyes (and it had more than zero notes). The fact that I think like 75% of the long fic about it has the most god awful pretentious (and incorrect) lore documents to go along with it? The fact that they tie themselves in knots making terrible arguments to explain why their relationship is OK in canon (which... why does it need to be OK in universe? forbidden love is sexy. and why do you care what Tolkien the very conservative oxford professor thought about your ship? and why do you care about what a random anon thinks about your ship? THEY ARE FICTIONAL IMMORTAL ROYALS OF AN INVENTED SPECIES MODELED AFTER MILLENIA-OLD EPICS. why would modern sentiments apply at all?) instead of 'Yeah they're fucking half-cousins deal with it, bitch.'

I will put down the knife now.

And then pick it back up, because

7. what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

lololol OK, now I have to put Maedhros for this one. There are still a handful of people whose Maedhroses I'll read, but for the most part 'gentle giant who never meant to hurt anyone uwu' has completely turned me off the character.

Though gentle giant might be better than the full on incoherent takes I've seen. People sometimes seem to give him the most brutal, violent, callous characteristics while keeping the same 'poor Maedhros didn't mean to hurt anyone' overtones while not realizing that that is so much worse.

lol now putting down the knife for real.

[do-you-know-this-queer-character]

Do you know this queer character?

Carmilla is a Lesbian and uses she/her pronouns!

[rhinocio]

NOW WITH PODFIC ACCOMPANIMENT!

[infiniteorangethethird]

being loveless does suck sometimes but less bc of some "ohnooo I'll never be able to loooove what will I ever doooo" bs but because how the hell do you tell the ppl around you that you view all relationships as business transactions where the currency is care and support and the reward is trust? How do you tell someone "hey so I could not care less about you as a person but also I enjoy every second we spend together and I'd fight the universe for you if you asked and if you ever disappeared I probably wouldn't miss you but I'd still cry for all the things we never got to experience together" without being the asshole?

[summergoodwife]

"If you want well-written women/queer representation/nuanced character arcs/less wish fulfillment/etc. just consume something other than shounen" completely misses the point of the original complaint. Like no, I don't just want representation. I want representation in shounen, the genre that I otherwise love but that never seems to respect people like me. And shounen can have representation. The idea that there's somehow a contradiction between those two things may come from a different place when it's shared by underrepresented people themselves, but it ultimately arrives at the exact same conclusion as anti-woke dudebros who think trans people and women existing is an assault. I have had too many other marginalized folks recite anti-representation, anti-diversification, pro-identity-based-gatekeeping arguments to me word-for-word without seeming to realize the logical end of what they're saying.

[regenderate]

by the way i've been going through rtd's non-doctor-who work and the first thing i watched was queer as folk and i have to say. there's a lot going on in that show but my main takeaway is "it's extremely obvious that the guy writing this really wants to write doctor who." there are ten episodes and of those i believe seven mention doctor who in some capacity. the theme starts playing in the middle of gay sex. k-9 is there. the character responsible for most of these references breaks up with his boyfriend because the boyfriend can't name all the doctors. at the end he has a couple lines where i was like "wow this sounds like something the doctor would say" and then the next lines out of his mouth were about doctor who. all of this is retroactively much funnier now that rtd kickstarted a 20+-year-long reboot for the show

[pain-is-too-tired]

Pride month is in a couple weeks chat. And I'm begging for Piper art with queer/unlabeled flags instead of bi/lesbian

I'm on my knees, please please please-

[cosmossystem]

hey, uh – i don't really want to come at you because i think you have a decent point, but you can be a trans man, lesbian, and on testosterone all at the same time (source: i am one). while i think there may be some people like that, i also think that a lot of them choose to call themselves lesbians because they are lesbian trans men/transmascs, not straight trans men

i don't want to come across as condescending, so i apologize if i am, but i don't like the insinuation that all trans men attracted to women are strictly straight, because a lot of us have complicated relationships with our sexuality and gender

Hi. i will not be articulating myself very well in parts of this. so please bare with me & assume that i have a good faith argument here, not one built on hate but rather built on both inclusion and introspection. that 'introspection' part is key in my politics. Also, when i say "you", i mean it in a general sense, not "you" directly as the asker here. i don't know you personally and i'm not trying to tell you how to live your life.

so, to your ask specifically: i know that, and acknowledged that in the post even, but i don't think it detracts from my point.

i'm not saying you (general) can't be a man AND a butch lesbian. i'm sure you can! there are plenty. but i'm saying if you are to a point where you are kicking and screaming that you can never ever never be a straight trans man... why? what's stopping you, aside from comfort in the lesbian label? what's so comfortable about it, to you, as a man?

i get having a complicated relationship with gender. (i have one too, believe it or not.) but... listen. take it from someone who has tried their entire life to explain their feelings away. you cannot simply slap a label on a complex feeling and call it a day. you need to address the feeling.

i guess at the end of the day (and this is me personally, i'm not trying to make a statement or something) i'm not really seeing why you would want to label it as lesbian attraction as opposed to literally anything else. THAT'S why i made my post -- this attachment to the idea that a 'queer' attraction MUST be gay/lesbian, when really, it's a queer relationship because the people inside of it are queer. 'straight' is a bit of a misnomer here. to me, these terms are descriptors moreso than they are full-fledged identities -- however, it seems the folks in question are treating it moreso as identities, which i get... but also don't get.

ok, here is where i DO make a statement: there is a serious problem of trans men's identities not being seen as enough because they're men. this is just fact. questioning trans men will do absolutely anything to avoid accepting a binary male identity -- including and especially identifying as things like butch, nonbinary, or genderfluid when really if they were to kill the transphobe in their heads, they would find that they're happier as a man. sure, these things can coexist with maleness, but more often they are used as "stepping stones" so to speak. this is why movements like forcemasc/autoandrophilia are so popular; because for decades, it's been told that if you're a trans man, you are 'not queer enough', because we associate queerness with femininity. (the history of that is one of my special interests, but unless you want my 20ish-page WIP thesis, that's a convo for another day.)

right now i'll just say that communities on tumblr are REALLY adamant that you can be many things at once. and that's great and all, because you can! we all contain multitudes. but if you just accept things at face-value, it does nothing to confront that internalized transphobia in your head. you need to be asking *why* a label/identity/descriptor/etc resonates with you.

it boils down to then, i suppose, if the word 'lesbian' is really a necessary term/descriptor for any reason other than comfort. which, once again, comfort is a valid reason... but were it me, i would also want to challenge that comfort.

are you a lesbian because you feel like you "need" to be a lesbian for your queer attraction towards women to "count"? are you a lesbian because historically, lesbianism has been close with butchness and transness? are you a lesbian because it's convenient? because of history? why are you so strongly adamant that you MUST be a butch transmasculine lesbian? is there a voice in your head saying that you "can't" be a man attracted to women, because if you are then it will "detract" from your queer identity? why do you cling so hard to being a not-woman, but refuse to even entertain the idea of being a man instead? and if you are comfortable being a man, how is the lesbian label (historically associated with women who like women) serving you? i'm not saying it can't, i want you (not me) to answer how.

i'm not intending to say that i know more than you about who you are. i simply mean to say that often, it's a misdiagnosis of sorts. i have this same problem with folks who have dozens of microlabels or sets of pronouns. again, there's nothing wrong with it necessarily, but it begs the question of if ALL of that is necessary, if ALL of that feels 'true' to yourself, if ALL of that is a crucial part of your identity.

is it how you are happiest? is it the most accurate way to describe yourself?

let me use my personal experience to explain better what i mean. for a while, i refused to acknowledge being a trans man in any capacity. i identified for a good chunk of time as nonbinary, and even as a nonbinary lesbian when i was really young, and for over a decade i always explained away why i 'couldn't' transition, or why testosterone 'just wasn't for me.' (i read a great article about this recently, btw.) because i couldn't be a man--i just couldn't, that was off limits--but, oh, i could NEVER be a woman. for the majority of my pubescent life i refused to acknowledge to be anywhere NEAR womanhood. i wasn't a man, but i certainly WASN'T a woman.

and because of that rejection of womanhood, i did anything in my power to distance myself from liking women or even feeling a connection to womanhood. it's like being anywhere adjacent to femininity 'tarnished' me somehow. i am only just now starting to come to terms with an attraction to women and i still haven't gotten out of that rut yet, and hell sometimes i start to think i might be genderfluid--but because i pushed away any possible connections with femininity, i would have never accepted that. similarly, i'm only just now going on testosterone after having battled my entire teenage years with why i didn't need it.

the point of my post wasn't that you can't be happy as an xyz; rather that we often use these straddling identities that seem contradictory because we have conflict somewhere in ourselves that is unresolved. i was genderfluid, i was a transmasculine lesbian, i was a gay nonbinary person-- and all of those are respectable labels to use which i have no problems with, but they weren't serving to address my underlying problems. they did nothing to address why i felt the way i did, why i used those labels.

it's one thing to use a label, it's another to identify with it.

ultimately, not everyone is going to see identity in the same way i do. and i understand that and i respect it. for some people it's a fun little game or they like collecting words and flags. but i think when you treat it that way, when you collect these labels without crucially examining why you feel that way, or when you use a term because it's what is most comfortable to you without examining why it's comforting, you are essentially refusing to examine yourself critically. no, you aren't required to do it, but the longer it goes unexamined, the bigger a problem it becomes.

once again, if you (general 'you', not asker) come away from it all and are truly, fully happy as a trans male butch lesbian, that's great, i might not get it but i don't need to, and i wish you the best in life as your beautiful self. but i think it's something to think about that we (for lack of better term) encourage so much overlap of labels. the overlap exists, and i recognize that it does--at the end of the day, other people's identities is none of my business, and i'm just pointing out that too many people are not enough people are addressing their real feelings (which i'd like to remind you, dear asker, that was the point of my post.) but i also have to note--if you are adamant about being a not-woman, i would imagine you would want as far away from a label that historically has applied pretty exclusively to women as possible. i sure did. well, ultimately it's not for me to decide.

i have a lot more to say, but to be honest, i don't think tumblr is where i'm going to get full-blown academic-level good-spirited discourse about the historical usage of terms like 'lesbian' and 'dyke' so i'm just going to stop here. Sorry if something didn't make sense or seemed like i'm putting an entire community of people down.

[ilistentogirlinred]

i call dark academia books fucked up university books and i would say its accurate

[malhare-archive]

I don't do discourse here anymore I SWEAR but the thing that will always drive me crazy is people insisting that trans men do not face a specific intersection of oppression like trans women do. There are issues specific to trans men whether you like to admit it or not lol

[soupandsorcery]

it's been a long time since i read a book that just consumed my entire day and left me bouncing off the metaphorical walls, but holy shit

[summergoodwife]

Gonna say it again, "Just stop consuming the genre" is THE WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSE to someone complaining about the lack of representation in their preferred genre!! And "Consume other stuff too" is not much better!!! I don't care how much you think varying media consumption is a Good and Holy lifestyle, not everyone wants to do that! There is no obligation to do that and there should not be! Because it's fucking entertainment. It's not a college major.

And! And and and. I would be remiss to not point out that when you tell someone, "If you want well written (minority) just get out of (genre fandom)" you are, regardless of your motivations, rhetorically aligning yourself with the exact same bigots who just want the pro-representation crowd to shut up and go away.

[leatherbookmark]

dear god that would be turbo cringe or whatever, but seeing all those annoying little things in fics over and over again really makes me want to write one in which they're not obligatory funnymoments but rather like, words that have meaning and weight and so on

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread

Like A Love Story

historical YA following three teens in 1989 New York amidst the AIDS crisis

a closeted Iranian boy who’s just moved to the city, a young punk activist rebelling against his conservative parents, and his best friend, an aspiring fashion designer

complicated friendships & romance, and revolution

[arckhaic]

idk what im saying but i just think hating on a piece of media bc it's been made into a different form ( specifically book into a movie / show / play / etc ) is so limiting ... like ur not any better bc you hold the opinion that the book is better than show and picking it apart to show the differences only the proves the point that they're Two Different Pieces of Media ... interpretations aren't inherently bad they're just different

you can enjoy them both

[allbeendonebefore]

editing a different writing style this week and its so dry i Thirst for some Meat in this essay. it’s just like “and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened” and i am like oh man, is the situation that desperate? do we really have nothing? and then i check the citations and there is SO MUCH COLOUR, there are QUOTES, There is ATMOSPHERE and so I’ve given myself license to roll up my sleeves and paint this thing pink because having a write up on pride without colour is just. huh?

there’s not even context as to what else was happening at this time or why we even started having parades in the first place so i am injecting all that back in.