#do other people feel differently???

[yourworldiseternallycomplete]

can i be so real i am not really bothered at all by other people's BO like sometimes people smell or whatever but it doesn't BOTHER me to the point of ever needing to comment about it

[nova-rpv]

a redraw of the first drawing i posted here to celebrate the fact that ive been in tumblr for more than a whole year posting my shit and havent deleted my blog in panic yippee \:D/ (mushy rant in tags)

[secretsimpleness]

Sometimes I want to bring Morrigan but then I remember I play as a face-tanking rogue and I bring Wynne. Warden Cousland, Morrigan, Wynne / Dragon Age Origins (c) Bioware

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[1800-lemon-boy]

I’ve seen a few headcanons (especially in fics) that Will solace actually is naturally brunette but when he was claimed by Apollo his hair turned blonde (weither it’s over time due to sun bleaching or straight away).

And I just wanted to say I love this so much purely because of how heartbreaking some of the implications can be. 🤗

It’s never happened to any Apollo campers before, Will doesn’t know why it had to happen to him, his one sense of normalcy taken away so quickly, his one connection to his previous life- gone.

Will starts to pick up quite quickly he’s not like his other siblings, he’s can’t write and is average at archery. But he can heal, better than anyone else can.

He was different from the start, he was claimed differently, and his gift was different too.

And while still struggling with what to do, at the ripe age of 12 he’s now in charge of a cabin full of kids younger than him, because he was the oldest to survive.

Just imagine how the plague powers would also affect him. Apollo himself said that it seemed Will had gained all of his good qualities and none of his bad.

How would this 15 year old feel that the same hands that can heal can cause harm?

<33

[itspileofgoodthings]

one of the things that continues to strike me on reread is how much the character of Darcy, and Austen through him, finds Mr. Bennet dead. And how much Elizabeth, in growing and changing and discarding her past blindness, has to move past her way of seeing her father and thus of seeing reality, because the two are connected! Darcy’s letter exposes her father’s flaws to Elizabeth in a way she’d never been able to see before. Most especially the way his laziness and neglect of his own gifts have hurt his family and that ultimately he doesn’t. care. Not enough to change. It literally says that she comes home from Hunsford and tries to laugh at her sisters’ and mother’s folly (the way she used to; the way her father has taught her to by example for her whole life) and she can’t anymore! It sticks in her throat. She is grieved by the failures that she sees in him, all the more so because she IS his favorite and she loves him! And the thing about Mr. Bennet is he never changes. The Lydia/wickham situation exposes to him sharply his own conduct and the consequences and he feels it! Because he is neither stupid nor unfeeling. But he, like everyone, has free will. And he chooses not to change when the opportunity presents itself. He even jokes about how quickly his feeling bad will pass and how soon everything will go back to normal, to his laziness and his selfishness. He is set in his ways and he serves as a contrast to Elizabeth’s personal journey because he embodies a version of a person she could have become and was in danger of becoming if her only goal at all times was to laugh at and judge people from the sidelines.

[raiiny-bay]

Love, Dhes

Parker,

It's unfair how time with you feels so short. How the last 10 years have felt like no time at all. I like to think there are other versions of us out there, somewhere. Maybe in another timeline, another universe. I like to think we find each other no matter where we are or what we're doing. That we're together and happy and I get to love you in a dozen different lifetimes. That's what I hope, anyway. And I hope when this lifetime ends, we get to start over and do it all again. Because once just isn't enough. Not for me. Not with you.

I hope the next 10 years pass slower.

Love, Dhes

[untitledgoosegay]

re last reblog I do see fanfic culture pushing/replicating a certain model of "what trauma looks like," "how trauma works"

this is a problem across all areas of society obviously, but transformative works are, well, transformative. they're about crafting and modifying narratives where the fan-creator sees a flaw or a lack -- often for the better! don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of "I take a hammer and I fix the canon," it's the main thing that gets my creative gears spinning -- but what happens when that "flaw" is simply a narrative not conforming to popular expectations?

some people just don't get PTSD from events that sound obviously traumatic. they're not masking, and they're not coping; they just straight-up didn't get the permanently-locked stress-response that defines PTSD. they walk away from a horrible experience going "well, that sucked, but it's over now." some people do get PTSD from events most people wouldn't find traumatic. we don't really know why some people get PTSD and others don't. but fandom has an idea of events that must be traumatizing, of a "correct" way to portray trauma. you see the problems with this lack of understanding in e.g. fans pressuring the devs of Baldur's Gate 3 to add dialogue where the player character badgers Halsin about his own feelings on his abuse -- because he must be traumatized, and his trauma must fit a certain mold and presentation of sexual trauma, under the mistaken impression that anything outside that narrow window is somehow "wrong" and disrespectful or even harmful to survivors.

take, for another example, the very common trope of a traumatized character who hates touch or sex "learning" to like touch or sex as a part of their healing process. certainly that can be healing for some people; other people will never like, or want, touch or sex, because of trauma or because they just don't. the assumption that someone who doesn't want sex or doesn't like to be touched must be traumatized, must be suffering from this perceived lack, is seriously harmful -- to asexual people, to people with sensory issues around touch, and to people for whom healing from trauma means freedom to refuse sex or touch.

and there's a secondary trope, one that's slightly more thoughtful but ultimately repeats the problem -- that once someone has learned that their boundaries will be respected, they'll feel it's safe to soften those boundaries. once they feel safe refusing touch or sex, they'll feel comfortable allowing it on their own terms. but many people don't, and many people won't! many people will simply never want to be touched, and never want sex, and they are not suffering or broken or lacking because of it. the idea that proving you'll respect someone's boundaries entitles you to test those boundaries -- the paradox is obvious, and yet this is something i've seen hurt (re-traumatize) people i care for.

people are imperfect victims. people don't heal in the ways you expect. many people have positive memories of their abuse, of their abusers. many people hurt others in the course of their trauma, in ways that can't easily be unpacked in a 5k oneshot. very few narratives of trauma and recovery actually fit the ones put forward by popular children's media and romance novels -- which are the ones I most see replicated in fandom spaces, because they provide the clearest narrative and easiest catharsis, and so they're easy and soothing to reach for.

that's not necessarily a bad thing! i am not immune to goopy romance tropes. i am not immune to teary catharsis. not every fic has to grapple with ugly realities. but there's a problem when these narratives become predominant, when people think they're accurate and realistic depictions of trauma, when the truth of trauma is unpleasant and uncomfortable, and doesn't fit any single narrative, let alone one of comforting catharsis

[thebinturong]

German* food poll but we have meatless options

A while ago everyone did those regional food polls and i wanted to do one back then but forgot... anyway. If you don't eat meat the options can be very limited in (traditional) restaurants around here. I wanted to do one with dishes that don't typically contain meat or can at least be easily adapted. Also yes this is kind of based on both my personal tastes and experiences so it's biased towards southern food, lmao. If you're vegan please just pretend it's a vegan version it's almost impossible to find options otherwise

*yes some of these are technically considered to be from Austria or France but they're still incredibly common in the regions near the border.

[fear-no-mort]

favourite thing: his new habit of saying uhuh/mhm and also this

[capydoodle]

have compassion for yourself and for others. it seems hopeless but any small amount of good you can do is just that much more love in the world

[randomalistic]

Wait you guys are actually buying Disney products I thought it was a joke

(READ TAGS FOR FULL CONTEXT Sorry it’s long dies

[uncanny-tranny]

Hey, if you have speech impediments, you are so amazing.

If you stutter or have a lisp or misspeak easily or you have a flat affect or a limited verbal vocabulary or if your voice is AAC or if you just have a difference in your vocality, you are so incredibly important and amazing.

Just know that your voice is yours. Nobody will ever be able to truly take it away. Your voice is part of you, and you deserve to make it as true to you as you deem fit. I hope you have the space to grow with your voice and whatever about it makes it unique.

[gunstreet]

sorry I'm not a photoshop master but would someone mind hanging this up in the SNW writers' room because I think we have all had enough

[dykedvonte]

You ever just see a Mouthwashing take that makes you want to bang your head into a wall? I literally just saw someone claim Curly couldn't have been emotionally abused by Jimmy before the crash because he was in a higher position of power than Jimmy.

-Shrimp Anon

The mouthwashing fandom has shown me that people genuinely do believe that certain types of abuse are not as detrimental as other types especially when they deem those immune/resistant, ergo, believing one is objectively worse no matter how it affects the person nor the intersections of power, history and dynamics at play.

Get ready cause this is a yap session:

Cause like it's heavily implied that Curly and Jimmy's friendship was toxic and abusive, pointedly in the direction of how Jimmy uses Curly's belief/comfort in him. Curly wasn't forced to enable Jimmy but he was emotional and mentally on edge around him in almost every scene in some way. Mental and emotional abuse are not contingent on what positions you have at work. Yeah, he's Jimmy's boss but he was Jimmy's friend first and it's like getting into Psych discussion to talk about how social power tends to overshadow any perceived organizational power in the human mind. People are concerned about their jobs ofc but they tend to hang onto and put more value/investment into their personal relationships, hence why there tends to be laws and restrictions around mixing the two.

I always see the sentiments that "Curly is a grown ass man", "Curly is bigger than Jimmy", "Curly is Jimmy's boss", "He just needed a backbone" as criticisms of Curly and while I do agree that on the surface level all of these to be true and viable ways Curly could've taken more control of the situation, I often look at the parallels of Anya and Curly as victims of Jimmy pre/post crash.

The way Jimmy talks to Anya post crash is how he talked to Curly in the pre-crash segments. It's hard to pin-point mainly because we know he hates and wants nothing to do with Anya compared to his contrary but similarly handled obsessions with Curly. It's a weird sort of "honey-moon" effect of abuse Jimmy does in terms of emotional and mental victimization. He is always horrid to Anya, always talking down or questioning her abilities and thoughts in a situation, this of course includes the harassment and assault. However, he has a moment of attempted gentleness/conditioning when he question her about the mouthwash when she's contemplating drinking it at the table. The key difference is he has no personal investment in Jimmy outside wanting nothing to do with him, meaning there is no sort of romanticized version of him that he can condition her off of. He knows this, hence, why he always reverts to trying to make her to scared to oppose him.

This sort of give and take of "kindness" doesn't work on her because she knows he is just doing it to take more from her than whatever he could possibly give but it reflects even the "softer" scenes between him and Curly where he always rewords or rephrases Curly's sentiments and concerns to sound more shallow. He is feigning a deeper understanding by reworking Curly's emotions into something bad and needing to be hidden. Everything is laced with envy and resentment, an outburst just around the corner, I mean he even slams the table in the birthday party scene, a tactic in emotional manipulation to set the victim on edge and cloud their ability to respond. Even if Curly knows Jimmy won't get physical in that moment, the physical actions is intended to make him back down in the confrontation in case it does. This is something that is just not person specific. It ingrains itself into how you interact with the world and life and it shows in major and minor ways with Curly.

Post-crash, the abusive nature is more in tandem to the physical victimization Anya went through and the stripping of voice and autonomy we see take place. Like the parasite in HFIM, Jimmy speaks for Curly most of the time and puts words in his mouth, similarly to how he takes Anya's plans as his own. He very commonly, with the both of them mind you, supplements the worst aspects of himself into them; pettiness, selfishness, lack of understanding... And tries to cover himself with their best qualities; kindness, planning, initiative, etc...

These parallel are just to say that positional power has little to do with if a person can be abused and how it can even be flipped to further the abuse. There is no doubt that Curly could've picked up on Jimmy's envy of his position hence another reason he never confronted him as a Captain but as a friend as doing so would immediately put Jimmy in a space to be confrontational/combative.

I think the disdain some people have when they talk about the heavily implied if not implicitly stated emotional/mental abuse Curly experienced being Jimmy's friend is when treating it as an excuse to why he didn't do more. I can understand that completely because it is not an excuse to why he didn't do more but is a very real reason people in his position in these scenarios can experience whether in the context of a work or social environment. However, I also think the way people talk about it really does demonstrate a bigger problem when talking about abuse when somehow who is/was abused is either part of the issue or enabled it.

Harkening back to the sentiments about Curly's inaction regarding Jimmy, I think the exact phrases I used/have seen show how there is an inherent belief that it is easier to overpower the effects of emotional/mental abuse that go in tandem with the perception of Curly as someone who should be able to. There is not an age you suddenly stop being susceptible to abuse nor a set point or low where you realize how it has affected you. You don't suddenly know to stand up or put a face on to face your abuser nor admit that you inadvertently enabled them to subjugate someone else to the same treatment. Maybe it's my psych brain but their is this growing belief that direct action is somehow easy or always the best method with the game shows you instances where it is not always the case. In real life that rings true too. He should have done more, but it's not impossible to see why he struggled to find a way or didn't even if it makes us mad.

It's not easy to suddenly gain a "back-bone". You don't immediately want to resort to aggression, especially if it mirrors the type you were a victim to. You don't want to believe you allowed yourself to be treated this bad, let it get that bad or allowed something bad to happen to someone else. It is easy to be in denial, to retreat to your thoughts or make excuses to avoid the painful truth. It's frustrating but in a way we know is relatable. It why we both hate and love Curly for it. We know we'd be better, we think we'd be better, we like to think we wouldn't falter in the same ways but it's always easier to say that from the outside looking in. It's easy to see what he was doing wrong because we are seeing it, not him, but the game really does make you picture what you would do if this was your raw reality and it's why this debate about Curly seems so never ending/contradictory. We can all say what we'd do but bottom line is that's much different when you're in the moment with all the emotions and human feelings attached.

I personally think Mouthwashing tackles the themes of rape culture, enabling, toxic masculinity, types of abuse and patriarchy in ways that are meant to deconstruct the typical straightforward views we mostly have of these concepts and how little subtilities of them are just as, if not more, detrimental than the overt/obvious parts. The game deals with the idea of little details and bigger picture in a way to show that sometimes the bigger picture is not the issue but the little details that make it up. It's why I have a personal dislike of depictions of Jimmy as the typical horrible person who would of course do something like this because the game is about noticing the little warning signs, the foreshadowing and foresight.

It's why I dislike the typical discussion of "bro code" and "boys will be boys" for the game because the game makes a point to avoid the standard depictions of such. It is about the type of men who still enable despite not condoning, agreeing or even perpetuating harmful beliefs because they can't see the little details or the ways it seeps into their everyday. The severity is not obvious to them as it was not obvious to Curly, Swansea or even Daisuke the way it was to a woman like Anya. There are little details about Jimmy that should ring alarms but if you are too naive like Daisuke, too distant like Swansea or too conditioned like Curly, they are just off markers.

There is 100% more constructive/concise ways to say "Curly was a victim of Jimmy's abuse on an emotional and mental aspect that clouded his judgements and perceptions in the scenario" while also critiquing on the side of "Curly still had a responsibility to protect Anya as a crew mate and Captain that he failed to do due to biases and stigma's he failed to surpass" without the weird condemnation people give him about should've knowing better than to let himself be manipulated by a person he considered a close, if not family/best-friend and had his own reasons to trust initially. Also stop being weird about victims of abuse in general with this fandom, like sorry not everyone has a like social epiphany the moment someone's nasty to them. People are treating it like you immediately know when you are in a toxic relationship immediately or comprehend when a person is actively dangerous and either it's your fault for not knowing how to leave/cut them off or you deserve it. Like the hypocrisy of people believing how certain fans treat the story reflect their irl views but not their own is crazy.

End statement is: I honestly don't even know man, I've been writing this too long and just like no man on that ship was perfect or really helped Anya when it mattered and I feel like pitting them against each other in discussion on who did the least or most or how it was justified sucks cause in the end Anya always did the most and best thing for herself.

[inkskinned]

you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.

you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.

instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.

you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.

your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.

because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.

so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.

all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.