#especially lesbian love interest lady like My God she makes me uncomfortable

[woolydemon]

this is gonna sound bad but I'm watching the canon lesbian velma movie and. I kinda hate it 💀

[palaceofpassion]

Figured I'd take my shot with a second one, Ruby's suprised when Penny brings Jaune home to have him play the role of the happy couples stud. After all it's only logical that they birth strong child and who better.

"Ahhhn~ Yes yes!"

Ruby stared awkwardly at her ceiling as she bit down the bile forming in her chest. Her eyes closed tight as she rocked back and forth on her shifting bed, hoping to ignore the sounds of delightful pleasure happening behind her. "More! More! I'm breeding ready!" Her fingers grasped tightly onto her bedding, her teeth gritting as she tried to ignore the sounds of her wife... being fucked... being rutted... being mated by one of her closest friends. The sticky squelching sounds of bodily fluids exchanging with one another, quickly threw off her concentration. And yet, she knew she had to fight back the tears.

When Penny had come to her, talking about how she'd wanted a child. Ruby had, incorrectly, assumed that she wanted to go to a donation center. She HAD NOT expected for Penny to want to be bred, and creampied. She hadn't expected her loving wife to be stuffed by a big fat cock, or having her being dicked down. She hadn't expected Penny to bring her best friend over. So when she found Jaune at her door, a bashful look on his face as he asked the question.

"Hey Ruby, Penny called me, do you know why?"

Something had been wrong... something had been VERY wrong. And she could feel it in the pit of her stomach.

So when Penny came prancing over... wearing... wearing a sheer silk nightgown... one that didn't hide ANY of her lady bits... Ruby felt her heart drop. "Friend Jaune! I'm glad you could make it!"

"Hey Penny."

Jaune's smile didn't make her feel any better.

"Penny?" Ruby turned towards her wife, "What's going on?"

"Oh! I had mentioned wanting to have a child, remember?"

Ruby of course nodded, "Well friend Jaune is here to help!" Then when Penny turned towards Jaune... a twisted smile on her face... one that exuded sexual desire... one Ruby herself had never seen before. She felt her heart crack.

"Okay but... why?"

"Oh... didn't you discuss this?" Jaune turned back to Penny. "Penny, if Ruby is uncomfortable with this I don't think I want to go through with it."

"What? What are you talking about?"

“Well Ruby!” Penny quickly turned towards her, grabbing onto her hands and pulling them towards her heart. “I was hoping that we’d have friend Jaune here to be the father of our children.” Ruby blinked, confused at first.

“But… and I’m sorry no offense Jaune.”

“None taken.”

“Why Jaune?” She didn’t mean any offense by it… in fact… well Jaune had been a long time crush of hers. She’d only never made a move on him because of how anxious she’d felt about the entire ordeal. He had been one of the first people, if not the first person other than her family to accept her for who she was. He’d always been there when she needed him, and she’d always felt safe.

She had never been sure if those feelings were that of love… or of something else. But she’d held back, especially as Weiss had ended up falling for him. And now they were married, speaking of, “Wait, what about Weiss?” Maybe she could pull the plug here and now?

“I’m right here.”

Ruby nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden entrance of her childhood friend. “What?! Don’t suddenly do that! What are you Blake?!” She was so flustered by the sudden arrival that she didn’t even notice the dry look Weiss had bestowed upon her.

“No. But I’m already aware of the situation.”

Oh… maybe she was here to say no. “So… you’re not okay with it right?”

Weiss simply shook her head, “No, I’m not okay with it.”

“Oh thank go-”

“I love it.”

“What?”

Weiss beamed brightly as she placed her hand upon Jaune’s shoulder, ushering the taller man down so she could pull him into a deep kiss. Ruby felt her face flush hot, the public display of affection proving to be a little too much for her still naive mind. “You see Ruby.” Pulling away Weiss brought her attention back to her, “I love the idea of my Jaune here breeding other women.”

She didn’t miss the little shudder that ran through her old best friend. “Just… it's so enticing, watching him push them down, breeding them like the dirty sows they are. Filling their needy wombs with his rich virile Arc seed. Oh, you’ll both love it, I assure you.” The woman stroking her rounded belly, proof of their 8th child.

Honestly, Ruby wasn’t so sure she WOULD love it. But, she wasn’t even sure she could say no anymore, not with Weiss' sudden intervention. “Uh… Weiss what’s that?” She’d suddenly noticed the strap attached to Jaune’s shoulder, now that Weiss had brought attention to it.

“Oh, it’s a camera darling. To commemorate the event.”

Her brow crinkled in as she frowned at the sudden realization dawning on her. This… this wasn’t going to end well for her and she didn’t like it one bit.

“Now then, a few questions.” Weiss hurried them in the door, tugging Jaune along with her, who gave Ruby one last sorrowful glance.

“Have either of you ever been with a man before?”

“I have not friend Weiss!”

Penny raised her hand, a pleasant smile that would have normally caused her heart to race flashed across her face. Though now it only proved to make her feel… ill inside.

“Excellent!” Weiss clapped her hands together, “It’ll be an interesting experience.” Ruby felt her heart sink when Weiss turned her attention back towards her. “I assume you’re both alright with this then? I don’t want you to be uncomfortable after all. And I know Jaune doesn’t want you to either.”

“Yeah.” Jaune nodded, “I want this to be a fun experience for everyone involved… oh uhm… you’re not both lesbians right? I’d honestly feel bad if you were.”

Ruby WASN’T a lesbian persay. She wasn’t even sure what she was, she just liked who she liked. And at one time it HAD been Jaune, but now she loved Penny.

“No. Both Ruby and I are fine with both sexes.”

Ruby nodded meekly in response.

“Okay perfect, well I promise that Jaune will make this an experience that neither of you are going to forget.”

“Yeah.” She felt a hand press down on her shoulder, “Ruby, again, if you don’t want this please say something.”

She felt her heart swoon just a tad at Jaune’s concern. Her chest rose and fell and her face grew just a tad bit warm. Turning her attention towards Penny, she knew she COULD say yes. But seeing how happy and excited her wife was, how into this Weiss appeared to be… and… this could be her chance to get with Jaune for once… well it couldn’t be all bad?

No! It WAS FAR WORSE than she could have ever imagined.

“Oh yes! More please! More!”

Ruby sat there, silently sobbing to herself as her wife, her precious wife with whom she exchanged vows of solidarity with, was now on her back. Her hands tightly grabbing their bedding sheets as her best friend, and childhood crush, pounded her like she belonged to him.

She dared not look, the sounds of slapping flesh already being far too much for her to handle. Her lips trembled as she tried to silence out the sound, and she may have succeeded or at least she would have if Weiss hadn’t shifted closer.

“You know Ruby~” Her tone sent a terrified shiver down her spine, “I was the one that got Penny interested in this whole ordeal.”

“Wha?”

She looked up trying to say something, but found a single finger pressed against her lips. “Isn’t it amazing?” Weiss turned her attention towards Jaune and Penny, forcing Ruby to follow her line of sight.

Ruby’s heart dropped, tears began to trickle downwards as she SAW… no she could smell it, hear it, FEEL it… her beloved wife was on her back, her face… oh gods her face… it was contorted into the most twisted of pleased slutshammed faces she’d EVER seen before. “It was pretty easy getting the idea in her head, I told her it’d be easier to have a child if someone ACTUALLY bred her.” She heard, but did not see Weiss chuckle, too enraptured with the terrible scene in front of her. “It really was easy, your wife is suuuch a slut. She’s just so naive~” When she felt Weiss’ icey could fingers wrap around her shoulders she tried not to flinch. “It really didn’t have to be Jaune, I could have SO easily convinced her to sleep with ANY man.”

“B...bu...but why?” Why then? Why was this happening, why her? Why Jaune?

“Its simple~ I just LOVE seeing my husband fuck little stupid sluts silly. I mean just look at how happy Penny is.”

Ruby HATED how right Weiss was, Penny was… she was FAR happier than she’d EVER been when they had sex. “A silly little toy could never match up to the real thing… look at it… look at her stomach.”

Ruby could see it, she didn’t NEED Weiss telling her. She could see her wife’s belly inflate as Jaune’s… his cock pounded inside of her. Her stomach ballooning as he penetrated her over and over and over and over. The big meaty head of his cock skewering her so much smaller body, the thick bulb protruding through the other side.

“Penny Darling.”

“Y..yesh!?”

“Ruby wants to hear what's happening. She wants to know how much you love having my husband’s COCK inside of you.”

“Oh! OoOooKaaY!”

Ruby KNEW Penny didn’t mean anything by it, but she was just so excited. “Look Ruby! Jaune’s… oOooH hiiiiis hiiiis BIIIiIiIGG! CooOoCCCK! Itssssssszzzz! Its Puuuushiiing against MmyyyYy Ceervviviiix!”

Ruby could see it from here, the shape of her uterus forming on the outside of her skin. “HeeeEesssss hiiiiittttting mmmeeeeee soooo Sooosososooo deeeeep!”

“You want deeper though right?”

“YYyyyEeesssh pleeeeaassee!”

“Darling, can you please put her into a mating press for me?”

“Yeah!”

Jaune’s voice came out exasperated, his focus solely pushed upon her wife. Ruby was FORCED to watch as Jaune pulled on her wife’s legs, pinning them back and showing the extreme flexibility that came with the once gynoid. “WhoaooOh!” He’d pulled her legs practically behind her head, forcing his cock even deeper as he rose her lower body.

“Look at it, look at how DEEP his cock is going inside of her!” Weiss simply smiled, “You’d never be able to do that Ruby, but it’s okay.”

SMACK SMACK SMACK

His pace grew faster and faster, the bed underneath them started to shake as he unleashed sound defeaning thrust after sound defeaning thrust.

Ruby couldn’t believe it, she couldn’t take the emotional damage that she was feeling as her best friend pushed her wife into ecstasy. “Gods it feels SO good to have him inside of you. Its so amazing, I don’t think Penny will be able to have it any other way now.”

THUD THUD THUD

The bed jolted up and and down as he practically pinned her wife into her own bed. Thick juicy fluids squelched from their connected bodies. Beads of sweat staining their sheets as he practically pushed his entire body on her. Ruby could hardly see her wife anymore, but she could hear her squeals of pleasure. She could only watch as a man took her from her. She could only silently regret her decisions. And still why did it have to be this way, for Weiss’ sick pleasures?

“You know.” She flinched as Weiss’ hand fell upon the pit of her belly, rubbing gentle circles above her womb. “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Ruby gave her a betrayed look, scrunching her face together. “We really DID come here to help you two have fun~ And… well I’m sure Penny would LOVE if you both got pregnant together~”

Ruby meant to open her mouth, “After all, it’s not fair, now is it? Just letting Penny have all the fun?”

Ruby bit her lip, turning her attention as Jaune pulled up onto his legs, squating down on her wife and slamming his cock one last time into her depths. She could SEE his balls inflating, she could SEE the pulsing of her stomach as the bulge of his cock quite literally throbbed. She could see her wife’s belly inflating in front of her, “See?”

Weiss turned her attention back to Penny.

“Penny describe what’s happening.

“MmmNnn~♥ Fri...Fri… Ma...Mate…Br...bree...breeder J...Jaaauuune iiiisss filling My… my wooomb, with Prec...precious life giiiving seed! I can FEEL my ovaries drinking the… the preciiious fluiiids! I… I’m… I’m breeding ready!”

Ruby felt Weiss release her, shifting over towards Penny. “Oh Darling, you’re going to be JUST the most gorgeous pregnant woman.” Ruby watched Weiss run her finger over the outline of her wife’s uterus, tracing the very shape with a single soft touch. “Mmmn~ I can’t WAIT to see you nice and full. I bet you’ll have twins AT LEAST.” Weiss of course turned her attention back towards her husband, “I bet you can’t wait right? You LOVE it when women get pregnant with your children, you’re just raring to go again, right?”

Ruby turned her attention to Jaune, who had been mostly quiet this entire time. Surely he wouldn’t betray her? He’d been hesitant from the start after all! “Yeah… it’s REALLY hot... and…” No. “We should go again, I can dump a few more loads inside of her, just to make sure she’s nice and knocked up.”

“Yes please!”

“Perfect.”

Time seemed to still as Ruby did something she truly didn’t expect of herself, “STOP!”

All eyes turned to her as she flushed red, one that ran down the length of her unclothed body. “I… I…” She grit her teeth, “I’m next!”

“Perfect~”

Little did Ruby know, but she’d fallen into Weiss’ Trap, one she’d never be able to escape from.

[oodlyenough]

some disorganized thoughts on bly manor now that i’ve had some time to digest it

i’ll start with things i liked:

-obviously i appreciated a lesbian love story front and center. that was a great pleasant surprise -i liked the idea of hopping between memories and the memories warping and changing and replaying -the dollhouse was creepy af and frankly underutilized -the kid who played miles cracked me tf up -i watched a single season of izombie years ago and have liked rahul kohli ever since so it was nice to see him in something! -i like these anthology ideas with different actors reappearing. i spent most of the season like “i’m sure theo is in this but where is she??” hahaha

i think this felt like a solid B draft to me... like not a first draft, but not quite as good as it might’ve been had it gone through another round of reworking. i like a lot of the fundamentals -- most of the characters are likable except the ones you aren’t meant to like, i like the cast, i like different bits of the concepts, i like the twist of “it’s a love story”.... but many of those separate threads never fully came together for me

we saw almost every major twist coming, literally from ep 1 we were like “hannah’s a ghost”. i dunno if i count this as a point off or not, because you want stories to be logically written and have foreshadowing you can follow, but it would’ve been nice to have any big surprises a la Nellie/Bent Neck Lady. plus, in the case of edmund i correctly guessed it was headlights/taillights reflecting off glasses, but i was disappointed because i thought Dani’s dark secret would be murder~ (or manslaughter i guess, accidental) and perhaps she’d backed up into some guy, and she’d seen it too late in her rearview mirror, which is why he always appeared in mirrors... but nope. the mirror connection was arbitrary and she was not at fault at all. i mean, i get why she was upset, but considering we spent several episodes thinking dani had murdered/accidentally killed someone, the reveal of “he got hit by a car in front of me and i had nothing to do with it” was an anticlimax lol. 

every character got a really long soliloquy that was Too Long. hill house was prone to pretentious dialogue as well, but when it’s pretentious dialogue for a solid 5 minutes of one character talking, it got to be a bit much. and I like these people! so it’s not like the basic level of my interest wasn’t there, it just ...stretched on. a lot of this website probably disagrees, but jamie’s moonflower speech is the key example of this for me. i feel like we got the gist of what her life had been like and why she was the way she was in the first third of it, and then it just went on... and on...

then other things that just felt like they came up but weren’t tied together satisfactorily: peter and rebecca. i loved the turn at the end of... what, episode 7 I think?, where peter-miles leaves and you find out rebecca is undermining his plan and wants to save the kids and dani. that was a relief, since i spent the previous episode like ‘why the FUCK is rebecca on board with this’, and i thought we were building to some sort of peter/miles-rebecca-flora-dani confrontation... but then the lady of the lake interrupted and dominated the entire end of the series

which in some ways of course she did -- you don’t hear about “the lady in the lake” at the start of a haunted show and not have her center stage at some point -- but could we not have tied those two things together better?

i’m also not opposed to sad endings in this genre -- i am one of the people who thinks hill house should’ve gone with its original bleak ending lol --  but the tragedy felt a little strangely doled out. owen & hannah needed more screentime towards the end with actual-owen, I think? owen needed more to do writ large. rebecca’s story felt unfinished and rebecca in general never felt like a fully realized character -- which is part of why i was so excited when she was revealed to be working against peter, but then it barely went anywhere! (sensing an uncomfortable pattern...) 

i found viola’s story strange... ok, so she’s lost her memory of everything except her walk, and she’s stuck there by sheer will, but when she’s in dani she doesn’t... change at all, or... she still just wants to be in the lake? no one ever dragged that damn lake when there’s so many bodies in it lmao? maybe finding a way to make viola at peace would’ve been too trite but i felt like the show had kind of set up for that and then didn’t go all the way with it.

ALSO... i get that bride flora “didn’t know” or whatever... but god her bawling @ this widowed lesbian the night before her marriage because what if he diiiiies one daaaaaaay we’re so perfect and happy waaaaaaaah was like.... obnoxious to me. lmfao 

also it just wasn’t very scary imo. i apparently missed every background ghost because i saw, like, two, whereas in hill house i was ALWAYS on edge looking for them in that damn house lmao. in this one, there were a couple early scares but not many. dani’s fiance became routine, lol. peter quint was obviously just ghost peter quint. hill house did something similar, where the ghosts were slowly revealed and in essence became less scary -- ESPECIALLY bent neck lady who was terrifying af to start with lol but ultimately becomes tragic -- but i feel like hill house maintained the post-reveal scariness more effectively.

anyway I dunno, despite the above I didn’t hate it! I had fun watching it with friends and I will absolutely watch s3 The Haunting of Whatever to see this cast do other ghost stories. but it’s like a 6/10 for me. mostly it made me want to rewatch hill house. and maybe oculus.

[a-woman-apart]

Separating the Boys from the Men

Yes, that title is click bait, and if you keep reading, you’ve been warned. I’ve got a lot to get off my chest, and it’s going to involve defending masculinity, femininity, and our right to BEHAVE LIKE CHILDREN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES because in many ways, we already do. 

Let’s get straight to the point. As Millennials, regardless of our age, financial status, or level of “success” (air quotes 100% intentional) we have been accused of being lazy, entitled, and way too enthusiastic about avocado toast. At the same time, we have been described as having enough power to decimate the napkin industry, the diamond industry, and the concept of traditional marriage. We have been accused of a collective “Peter Pan” syndrome, because we “refuse” to cut off papa’s apron strings and get off the proverbial mama’s teats. 

Wonderful to know. 

Let’s unpack the “lazy” bit. Supposedly, this is tied to the fact that we have access to higher education, we [often, not always] have parents who financially support or house us well into adulthood. 

So now, my question is, Gen X (the entitled ones, ironically) and Salty Boomers, YOU DIDN’T? 

What do you call that “inheritance” you received? What do you call that education your parents paid for that was less than 1/3 what we have to pay? For Boomers, how do you explain the lavish weddings, cheap [and apparently nuke proof] home appliances, and “nights out on the town” that you were able to afford by working at whatever passed for a McDonald’s back in the day? Working on a farm, at a grocery store, or in retail used to ACTUALLY provide a livable wage; for us, those are a “side hustle” and we still have to get a “big boy job” that usually requires an education that can put us over $100,000 in debt by age 30. 

Hate to say it, but if you hadn’t made most of your income “during the War” or in  the absolute economic boom that followed it, you wouldn’t survive 24 hours in our shoes before having an emotional collapse.  

Despite the disastrous living conditions of the U.S. in the 21st Century, not much has changed in how men define their level of “manliness.” 

Financial gains (stocks, bonds, portfolio, bank account) 

Bro “gains” (a.k.a. “gym gains”, how “Gaston” they are, including whether they want to go for the Adonis, Apollo, or Brawny boi look, or just how far they can throw something or how “boyish” they look if strength isn’t an option and they suffer from femme-levels of body dysmorphia) 

Body count (since we’re in a time of peace and not literally war, this is LITERALLY a modern term describing how many people you’ve slept with, and I have never heard an adult man, regardless of sexual orientation, who isn’t a little concerned about putting those notches in the bed post, and if not that, VERY concerned about his bedroom performance: it’s quality vs. quantity) 

Kill death Ratio (I know this is a video game term now, but did you know that before video games, men in England used to regularly get on horseback, get a bunch of hounds together, and chase down tiny foxes and rabbits? FOR FUN?!?!? Did you know, that before modern sports ((including Esports)), men used to just fight to the death, regularly, even if an official war wasn’t going on? It was known as “dueling”, and in less socially developed societies, men still behave like this. So the next time you complain about “male rage” and how heartless it is to make live chickens fight, note that even though we’ve quelled male anger and hostility on some level, you will NEVER be able to take away man’s urge to destroy. Boys and men will always like knocking things over, building things from the rubble, and ruling shit. It’s what they do-- and we women can and do, too, but we have a LOT more risk-aversion and self-preservation, which is a blessing and a curse for our species-- but we just need to make sure humanity as a whole stays...chill)

So what, say ye, has changed about how WOMEN define themselves now vs. in the past. I would say that very little has changed, but the level of internalized misogyny, insecurity, and good-old fashioned denial has SKYROCKETED. 

Let’s look at some terms of how the majority of women value themselves. 

Financial Security (few women will admit to “wanting to be rich”, because that sounds kind of “Trump”, but plenty will talk about having minimum income requirements for their partner(s), wanting to retire at a young age so they can “travel the world”, wanting to eliminate their debts, etc. It’s different language but essentially it translates to: I want to work so hard or marry into so much wealth that I never want to worry about money after age 35. #Hustle) 

Looks (it doesn’t matter if you want a Kardashian butt, you’re in the body positivity movement, or you just want to “dress like a bawse” women are just as obsessed with clothes, image, and body weight/shape/size as they ever were, it is just that now that we’ve “slain the patriarchy” we have more fashion options than ever before, because “boy clothes” are just as “in” as femme ones)

Ability to attract a partner (some women, like me, “chase”, but thanks to biology, most women, regardless of sexual orientation, seem to enjoy being pursued more than being Artemis-style hunters. This is evidenced by the fact that when the feminist owner of Bumble changed the rules of the dating website to where women had to start conversations with men rather than vice versa ((a move that had ostensibly zero effect on lesbian matching)) 72% of women that she later surveyed stated that they liked it better when men were approaching them rather than the other way around. I am sure Bumble’s female CEO was shook ((as was I)), especially because she made the change to empower women, and apparently 72% of women didn’t want the power because it meant they now had the power to face rejection, and it made them uncomfortable. Big yikes. So much for #EndPatriarchy and #ChivalryisDead ?)

Playing house (this is probably going to get me some unfollows, but I’ll take my chances. Women, regardless of sexual orientation, often seem to be REALLY into having babies or just “playing house.” There’s also men like this, too, “Family men” as they’re aptly called, men in love with fatherhood ((or just being called “daddy”, and that will never not be weird)). So many women who never want to pop out a baby describe being taken by an OVERWHELMING urge to fuck during their “fertile window” ((or is that just me?)) and seeing every baby alive as the cutest human being ever once we pass the tender age of 25. The biological clock is REAL, and I learned the hard way that being bisexual and having immense fear of pregnancy and childbirth didn’t spare me from the awful truth of my biology. 

I really don’t want to keep making references to modern video games, but they seem to serve the dual purpose of being deeply satisfying and helping us to quell “problematic” urges, including that one to dominate and destroy the world. For a lot of women gamers, though, our choices ((on a broad scale, every #girlgamer is different)) deviate from men’s in some interesting ways. 

#1: We still love The Sims Franchise way more than guys do 

Not only do we love it, but while a lot of men (again, #notallmen) tend to build elaborate neighborhoods to extensively mod and destroy them in terrifying ways, I still see women gamers taking obscene amounts of time to design homes, raise happy little families, and cause TERRIFYING blood feuds by having Sims marry Sims from rival families ((I guess we’re more Shakespeare than we thought, eh ladies?))

#2: We make up most of mobile gaming

Most male gamers think mobile games “aren’t real” and I tend to agree, but a mobile game is invaluable for when I, a woman, have time to kill between the 3 jobs I hypothetically have and I and don’t want to whip out something like a Nintendo 2DS that is both unwieldly and attracts the eyes of every impoverished, thieving human being in a .5 mile radius. #RiskAversion. These games are often low-quality, mindless, and insanely easy, but that is WHY WE LIKE THEM. Our entire life is a job. #Hustle

#3 We also love farming sims and RPGs

While we-- and most male Millennials-- beg god to not have to birth calves, milk cows, or labor in the tomato fields under the hot sun, most of us have no objection to having our virtual avatars perform the same back-breaking tasks to the tune of cheerful chiptune music. Also, even though men definitely enjoy them, too, I have never met a woman gamer who didn’t enjoy a nice RPG; why do you think we’re such avid readers of fantasy/romance YA? 

We want to be transported to a different world, and if you won’t take us there, we’re happy to go there virtually ((because we probably can’t afford travel; we’re still millennials)). 

Ability to murder people who threaten our young or our partner(s) (Okay this one is a bit more complicated, but I’m just going to tell you a bit about female animals. DON’T MESS WITH THEIR BABIES IF YOU WANT TO LIVE. Human females, are, in that regard, just as savage, if not more so, than our male counterparts. 

I’ve never heard of any woman ((outside of prison, maybe)) who killed another woman for “looking at her weird” or saying “your mama” too many times. I’ve heard plenty of women threaten literal murder because another woman ((or man, we’re #progressive)) came too close to her romantic/sexual partner, or another human being threatened harm on our kids or our “squad.” 

I don’t know where the meme truly originated from, but “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again” is SUCH a Mom thing to say. So much misandry is wrapped up in the idea that men are predators, and that is true, but not in the excessively sexually deviant ways you think ((that’s only sometimes true)). They just like hunting things, including people, but if you give them a toy to play with ((I MEAN ACTUAL TOY OMG)) they seem alright. Let them go play with their cars, Xbox, [insert whatever] or something. They’re men, okay, they’re easily distracted/impressed/occupied. 

Women, on the other hand, have seemed to be having an EXTREME amount of trouble curbing that baby-making urge, or the Excessive Nurturing Urge, that one that makes you ask your grown husband if he’s remembered to pack lunch for work or if he remembered to pack money for his playdate with his bros, because he’s gonna need money at Six Flags and you aren’t going to bring it to him because he should’ve remembered, you reminded him 30093390 times. 

THAT’S NOT HIS FAULT. HE HAS MANAGED BY SOME MIRACLE TO STAY ALIVE FOR 33 YEARS. THAT’S YOU, SWEETIE. STOP BEING SUCH A MOM. GO BE A NURSE, DOCTOR, OR SOCIAL WORKER OR SOMETHING OMG. 

In summary...

What separates the “men from the boys” or the “women from the girls” isn’t the era that we were born in to, our economic status, or whether we’ve been able to “conquer” our biology. That’s definitely not possible yet, chiefly because transhumanism involves a lengthy, ethics-guided process, and even if we all turn into cyborgs, the goal is to become BETTER humans, not LESS humane. Societal advancements have done more in terms of making us healthier, less destructive citizens of planet earth than raw technology ever can and ever will. Rapid technological advancement, when not combined with respect for morality, ethical standards of living for humans and all other life forms, almost always leads to human slavery, widespread abuse of animals, sex trafficking, and environmental destruction, because the “rules of supply and demand”, when not governed by strong international trade laws, dictate that consumers should be supplied with whatever they demand, because the suppliers can profit, and their right to profit should be defended at any cost. 

So, in summary, I believe that “adulting” involves giving up on entitlement. What separates a truly childish human being-- regardless of their actual age-- from someone who is, in essence, “adulting” is experience, and how much those experiences serve to broaden that person’s perspective. It is an extremely childish, self-centered view, to think that you “deserve” anything for being “a good person” or, in the case of many a “woman child” or “man child” in media and in real life, just being “not so bad.” 

Grown-ups are able and willing to do something that is known as “delaying gratification” which is the simple ability to delay a temporary pleasure for a long-term gain. Grown-ups are also able to perform true “cost-benefit analyses” to determine if a course of action, business deal, or even relationship is worth their time and effort. Finally, grown-ups are able and willing and able to make an informed choice and stick to it; in essence, we don’t try to “have our cake and eat it too” we understand that once we’ve eaten that cake, the cake is gone, but we also realize that if we are willing to work hard and make sacrifices, we can earn the ingredients to make ourselves another cake to eat, even if we might need a lot of help from other adults in getting those ingredients (we call this teamwork and cooperation). 

Children, on the other hand (in literal and metaphorical terms), are very impatient. They get angry when things don’t go their way, and instead of taking the steps needed to improve their situation, they storm off and return home. It doesn’t matter if their home is with their parents, with their 3 roommates, or with their husband or wife, these people throw tantrums, refuse to communicate/cooperate, and stew in their displeasure until someone feels sorry for them and fixes their problem for them. They lack the ability to work through daily life problems and refuse to take any responsibility for how their actions or inaction contributed to their dilemma. 

There is one difference with an actual human child or teen, though, is that they have an excuse. Their brains are still developing, and they haven’t had the chance to live through these situations yet; these are new challenges to them. Even if they do have a “bad attitude”, with help from peers and patients, principled adult mentors and teachers, these cantankerous kids can grow into well-adjusted, able adults. The high levels of neuroplasticity in their brains actually make it so that it is easier for them to accept large amounts of sensory data and to learn from processing and practicing using it.

An “adult child” is someone who, more often than not, has been coddled instead of challenged. These people have often faced no significant hardships in life. There is a reason why, even after we have recognized the immense downsides of authoritarian parenting and have demonstrated psychological harms of corporal punishment for kids, we still call “bad kids” and “irresponsible adults” spoiled. 

Authoritarianism produces rigid, scared people who often struggle with critical thinking and self-esteem or end up being authoritarian parents themselves, but that last one is actually one of the less likely options. Children of authoritarian parents often develop Borderline Personality Disorder or become defiant against authority (shocker). Overly permissive or overly neglectful parenting, though, are parental styles most associated with producing narcissists, who often become authoritarian parents, because when their kids challenge them, they completely lack the patience or emotional capacity to deal with it and resort to “because I said so”, stonewalling and/or physical abuse as forms of “character-building.” 

The reason why overly permissive parents spoil their kids is because kids actually do need discipline and guidance, and so these kinds of parents produce kids who are outwardly capable and confident but completely lack any of the life skills to justify it, and when they ask their parents for advice they are just met with a bunch of hippie mumbo jumbo or told to just avoid the conflict rather than resolve it. These kids grow into adults who are still sad little kids inside, because they never grew up, but now they’re sad little kids who are articulate and well-spoken and now can-- and often have no choice-- but to con their way through adult life because they’ve maxed out Charisma and they have almost no points in Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Dexterity.

The only parenting style worse than Authoritarian and Neglectful/Permissive is Mixed, in which a child grows up in a COMPLETELY unpredictable environment where the rules of the game change from day to day, and parents either give their children no attention at all, or they practically lock them up and throw away the key. Being raised like this is associated with the worse outcomes for the child throughout life. 

So, why am I now talking about parenting styles? Because, for all that we love to trash Boomers and large swaths of Gen X on this page, we can’t forget where they came from, so we cannot allow them to forget WHO THEY MADE. It isn’t an accident that even though we live in the times of incredible economic hardship, WE are the generation (and Gen Z, to some extent) that got hooked on reality TV, video games, and social media in incredibly unhealthy ways. A lot of us 30+ millennials are growing out of it, and a lot of us have realized that it is an invaluable (and damn near unavoidable) way of marketing our products and talents. We’re often self-employed because that’s our only option in most cases. 

The issue with Gen Z (who, while we called “Zoomers” now just all themselves “Doomers” and I think we should be a bit concerned about that) is that unlike us, they have no memory of “Before the Internet.” We remember dial up, we remember before that when you played outside untl the sun went down. They don’t have the privilege of being linked to that history. 

Now, we have to be the Bigger Person. It’s our time to be Grown-Ups. Gen Z feels really fucking lost right now, and hearing us whine about our parents probably makes them pretty pissed off, when some of us older millennials are the parents, aunts/uncles, and older siblings to Gen Z kids. Even if we can’t be mentors, we have to lead by example, because we have a responsibility to these kids. A lot of them aren’t stupid, they see exactly what’s happening and they feel incredibly hopeless about it. Greta Thunberg is still 16 years old. She shouldn’t be out there doing that; I mean seriously, climate change is accelerating, but it isn’t even as bad as Al Gore said, it’s still reversible, but the fact that SHE FELT SHE HAD TO makes us shitty people. ALL OF US. 

So you know, we all need to stop being hypocrites. We need to stop being entitled. We need to stop thinking this is about us. It isn’t. Not even close. We’re not important, even if our videos go viral or if we’re swimming in cash next to hot models by a huge swimming pool. America’s fucked up. I hate to sound Republican, but it’s because of our values. We suck at valuing what’s important, and if we don’t change that soon, it’s really going to suck to live in America. 

It already does.  

[thethirdwheel404]

Med Rewatch Series (#10)

S3 E10: Down By Law.

Episode Description: Dr. Manning sustains an injury while helping a drive-by victim and Dr. Rhodes finds himself in uncomfortable waters.

Connor being in ‘uncomfortable waters’? I can hear Ava bullying him already.

(also i wrote a little thing abt maggie giving ava a red bull so enjoy that little bit of content)

Let’s get into it.

-barry just yeeted natalie against a car holy shit that’s fucking hilarious

-will needs to chill the fuck out

-YESSSSS

-THIS WHERE CONNOR BRINGS THE WOMAN HE WENT OUT WITH UP FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT. AND THEN AVA HARASSES HIM FOR IT.

-this is one of the most iconic ava moments. (it’s first thing that pops up under the tumblr tag)

-ava overhearing connor not knowing his date’s last name. and ava walking over, already getting ready to make fun of him. barely concealing her smile

-the confidence with which she set down the file. she was too prepared and too excited

-this could just turn into a list of ava quotes

-”It must be hard, remembering all their names.”

“You know I read Derek Jeter used to send his conquests home with a gift basket. But a full cardio work up is... It’s much classier.”

-ava bekker secret baseball fan?

-Connor: “Jeter? You a baseball fan?”

Ava: “Oh, no. It’s much too boring. But I love gossip.”

-interesting. very, interesting... is it weird to anyone else to think about ava liking gossip?

-like the idea is fun and all but i hate the idea of ava being suuuper obsessed with gossip. it makes her seem way too shallow in my book. that being said, one of my hcs about women gossiping about all the shit men do to ava bc they know she’ll call them on it now has a lot more precedence

-i know she explicitly says that baseball is boring but i can’t get the idea of ava being a secret baseball fan out of my head. its just so novel

-HER SHIT EATING GRIN

- Connor: “Well, we will get you in and out of here as quickly as possible.”

Ava: “That’s what Dr. Rhodes is renowned for around here. Quick in and outs.”

Connor: *turns to her condescendingly*

Ava: *two finger salute* “I’m Dr. Bekker, by the way.”

-the lesbian icon jumped out

-also the fact that in the previous episode Ava’s mentor did the exact same salute. idk what it means but it’s not that important

-ava trying to hide her smile when asking the woman if she wanted them to contact her husband

-ava overhearing again when latham tells connor the woman he was with was doing cocaine

-ava smirking when connor says that he thinks the heart attack was from his sex and not the cocaine

-connor thinking he’s so good at sex he’s going to give this woman a heart attack

-he really drives All the ladies wild in EveryWay (sex, suicide. he’s the whole package)

-latham asking connor point blank “did you partake in the cocaine?”

-the ct team gives connor so. much. shit. it’s so funny

-also. ava just chillin at her desk looking at scans? that’s the kind of content i want to see. just her just being there. doing her own thing. that’s what i want

-THE GUY WITH A TEENAGE WIFE IS A REVEREND HOLY SHIT

-counting down the minutes til natalie drops dead (passes out but yk a girl can dream lol)

-sarah. back at it again with her rayon jacket and button up and backpack. the coffee cup only adds to the aesthetic

-connor being surprised that latham isn’t gonna let him do surgery on the women he fucked (twice, he might add)

- whatever you do, don’t think of a brown bear. are you thinking about it?

-maggie dealing red bull to people who need it. that’s a very soft idea

- ex:

Dr. Bekker is sitting at the desk in the ED. Well, sleeping, more like it. Her head is resting on her fist, her elbow precariously close to slipping off the the chair armrest, and her eyes open by just a hair.

“Dr. Bekker.”

Ava jolts awake.

“Maggie,” Ava says, strong accent cutting through, acknowledging the person standing over her. Hastily, she adjusts her jacket and scrubs, smoothing them back into place.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this tired.”

Ava shrugs, seamlessly slipping back into easy confidence.

“Rough couple of cases. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Uh huh,” Maggie says, unbelieving.

She sets a can of Red Bull on the desk with a knowing look.

“You need this more than anybody.”

Ava scoffs. “Those things? They are murder on your heart, come on.”

Maggie hums and walks away. Ava watches her leave, and when she’s out of sight, Ava darts forward, grabs the energy drink, immediately cracking it open and downing half of it.

- anyway.

- @punksarahreese that’s on you for making me believe ava loves energy drinks

- let’s continue

- sarah looking at charles telling her not to do something: I am not going to do a thing you said

- go off babe. it was the wrong decision but go off

- all the nurses watching this guy call nat a bitch:  👀 👀 👀 👀

- will being like: god that guy called you a bitch i fucking hate him

- and natalie being like: he is also refusing to let us treat the 14 yr olds cancer but you obviously have priorities

- sarah is so logical. she’s good at talking to people. can you FUCKING IMAGINE IF SHE HAD BETTER GUIDANCE (oh and less trauma)

- this is also the one with that hilarious screen cap of sarah holding a knife

- the way she is so calm about handing this patient a knife gives me anxiety

- THIS SCENE IS SO HARD TO WATCH IT SCARES ME SO MUCH

- sarah just in alone in a room with a man who keeps having visions of stabbing his wife. and her just handing him a fucking knife oh my god i have too much anxiety for this

- rewatching the series and getting completely confused bc norma is 5′7″ but she looks so short next to colin and the guy who plays latham

- AND RACHEL IS ALSO 5′ 7″ BUT THEY BOTH LOOK SO SHORT - WHY EVERYONE ON THIS SHOW SO TALL

- anyway. ignore that that’s not important

- I... the parallels btwn sarah offering this guy the ability to slit her throat (for therapy) and ava cutting her throat... i don’t know what to do with this information

- idk but sarah holding the knife got me feelin some type of way

- the way connor looks at ava with such contempt bc she... does her job (and his but yk) especially during the hug wtf dude honestly just stop looking at her

- this is also the episode where ava pawns off the patient’s hug onto connor. while yeah, it could ava just being annoying to connor by forcing him to hug his one night stand’s husband, but she did give connor due credit. (and something to be said about her being confused and a tad uncomfortable when the patient hugs her, which is why she pawns it off to rhodes)

- she also doesn’t hug the guy back, which is kind of funny, she never moves her arms and just shrugs out of it

- and like after the hug she takes a few steps away from the guy, really not wanting any more physical contact or attention

- there’s something interesting in ava’s expression when connor gets hugged by the guy, can’t quite explain it. i’m gonna go with it’s her trying to keep a straight face while connor hugs a man he just helped a woman cheat on, but that’s not all of it so

- or. okay, I think i got it. i think that that little expression when connor gets hugged is her rolling her eyes at him getting credit when ava did most of the heavy lifting. yes. final answer. i’m satisfied

- and her looking away from them is her stopping herself from laughing, bc connor is obviously not enjoying this

- and he’s so sad and angsty he can’t even play along with the jokes

- and ava smiling at him with pity as she walks in to talk to the patient, bc that’s really what it is. she feels bad for him bc connor is so obviously lonely

- and connor’s annoyed bc ‘dammit she does have a right to pity me i suck rn’

- med pushing the women are tough agenda LITERALLY SHUT THE FUCK UP

- you hate your women characters so much just fucking shut your mouth

- and will being like ‘ i have a lot to learn about women not being objects’

- and nat saying ‘you are way further along than most’ like no, he’s not. the bar is on the ground and he still can’t jump it

- i’m pretty sure this show doesn’t pass the bechdel test. holy fucking shit it doesn’t. you’ve gotta be kidding me. (at least this episode doesn’t)

I can’t believe this episode didn’t pass the bechdel test. The only convo btwn two women were like maggie and sharon and they talk about barry and oh my god this is infuriating god med the bar is so low. And I’m pretty sure most episodes don’t pass the test anyway. Will is literally the representation of med. He gets lots of credit for doing bare minimum things like giving women rights.

Anyway.

This was a good episode. We dissected a lot of unspoken Ava things, which is very good. Ava had a lot of moments where she was there, but didn’t say anything, and when your characters can do that, that’s when you know your characterization is very good.

The moments where Ava isn’t really doing anything to forward the plot of the episode but she’s still just there, doing her own thing, are hands down my favorite. Her sitting at the desk looking at a scan while connor tells latham he didn’t do cocaine could possibly my favorite ava moment in the series, just bc it shows how much of her own character should could’ve been.

I drew an interesting parallel btwn sarah offering the guy to slit her throat and ava’s death. i have nothing for that but go wild

This episode also showed us Ava pitying Connor, another new aspect. she gives him shit but she also pities him. very good ep for little ava moments

as always, thanks for sticking through it

-

read the rest here:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Extra

[megfloresprotectionsquad]

ragnarok ep.1 “new boy” reaction/live blog

i hate the music selection of the establishing scene, especially since i know the song (midnight city) after the opening text that was mysterious and ancient with dark musical tones. it just badly morphs into this pop song. disgusting. not at all the mood i would have set. it continues to play as we see b roll of the beautiful norwegian countryside. i still hate it. 

the shots of magnus, the main character, sitting in the car looking out the window confused are the most annoying ever. they’re just not interesting, especially with the continuous cuts to the city that are flashing past. 

magnus gets out to help an elderly person. they’re trying to establish character traits. fine. still weird. 

oooh how unexpected the old wise man gives him cryptic warnings

old lady comes out and touches his hair and magnus’ eyes flash with thunderbolts (a bit fast and on the nose there show, huh?)

IT”S BEEN THREE MINUTES EXACTLY I HATE THIS

he gives the lady a really weird look (like it makes me uncomfortable) and walks back to the car

he broke the window handle with his new sudden super strength! can this show STOP

magnus proceeds to be cryptic as shit and become a walking weather stick, congrats

this entire sequence was jarring with bad music selection. let’s continue

title card flashes with lightning effects and sound. it seems they’re really trying to push a dark, gritty, mysterious vibe but so far failing miserably. 

the next sequence is super short it’s just them rolling up to their house and magnus seeing a flyer and picking it up and reading it. 

we flash to a classroom. pacing problems much?

laurits is magne’s brother. he’s cooler. (i will just call magne magnus lmao)

“they’re brothers but they’re not twins” obviously?? you really made that a line show? jesus fuck

they keep showing this blond girl but they don’t actually do anything with her if i remember correctly, at least in the first episode

ISOLDE 

the love of my life

she’s a lesbian btw 

they zoom in on her nature stickers on her laptop cause her and magnus will bond over caring about...nature

they say magnus has dyslexia but they treat him in show like he’s autistic so is he both?

wow we’re just in time for the old norse gods lesson? can you believe it?! i sure can’t

lmao do norwegian high schoolers actually learn about the norse gods? really?

magnus is entranced by thor in the handout. show please...stop it

the classroom scene cuts in a weird place and moves to lunch. the pacing of this show is horrendous. 

magnus sits with isolde

i want everyone to know she has short hair with blue ends and wears flannel she’s really cute with a nose ring

p-jo appears and makes fun of isolde for caring about the environment...show wtf

isolde gives a play by play of everyone in the school for some reason

we jump to after school where magnus sees isolde struggling w her bike

cause apparently people REALLY hate the environment and her care for it 

he uses his superstrength to fix her bike tire

it’s only been 10 minutes yall

some boring filler scenes. next.

isolde and magnus are not project partners! cue project working scene

why does this show act like only isolde is aware of how big industry hurts nature omg and all the other characters treat her like she’s insane

this show CANNOT build tension it’s almost pitiful

we establish the principal lady as evil

gas station scene?

a person his mom knows shows up and they chat

i hate the underlying music of this show it’s so bad

there’s a dog this entire scene except they edit in the growling lmao i hate it

the show tries way to hard to establish this guy too as evil with the most blatant sound effects and shots it’s ugly

this is the principal’s husband...my guess is there whole families are giants are something

GOD THEIR SCENE CUTS ARE HORRIBLE 

now we’re following that guy back to his house with the wife, new pov

magnus’ dad was odin who died, right, and the giants are realizing he had a son who is now older and probably coming into his powers (guess but basically i’m probably right)

p-jo guy i forget the name of reveals he isn’t actually young 

basically the show immediately reveals who some villains are...lame

we head back to magnus’ pov

“what’s up with the nazi symbol?” what’s up with your stupidity who the fuck would call a rune a nazi symbol

his brother is a fun character, obviously loki

THIS SORT OF STUFF SHOULD HAVE BEEN AT THE BEGINNINGGGG

the whole show of magne and laurits bonding and being brothers is better than the random jump to a classroom and gives us a quick understanding of their financial situation

annoying pop music is back.

p-jo guy is rude to isolde again at lunch about plastic 

laurits seems to have written magnus’ paper for him, at least i think that’s what just happened

love character establishing moments like this *chefs kiss* but the show lacks them 

love how in loki establishing style he writes about norway needing one true leader (king style lol) and that democracy sucks. very funny, one of the only things to make me laugh this entire episode.

we flash to magnus in his room watching isolde’s youtube channel

we’re told basically something is in the water and is poisoning fish and other wildlife

the show has some sappy inspirational music play as magnus narrates about big bad private industry hurting nature and other stuff...the show seems to really harp on this but i think it’s executed in such a boring and weird way by making everyone hate and harass isolde for her strong beliefs

filler scenes now we’re with magnus and isolde walking

she invites him over for dinner cause they’re friends! yay! it’s been like 3 days i think lol

“i’m not trying to date you” yes we know you’re a LESBIAN 

the old man from the opening scenes is back and says more cryptic shit. boring. next.

the old lady also gives cryptic advice. anyways something bad will happen on a mountain....does this show not know how to write tension...or write at all

isolde “i’m going up to the mountain on saturday” thanks for notifying me of your death girl

god why does this show HATE isolde so fucking much

LMAO WAIT THE SHOW ACTUALLY DID CONFIRM ISOLDE IS A LESBIAN AND THEY STILL KILL HER? THEY KILL HER FOR MAN PAIN? FUCK THIS

school and home scenes

laurits keeps mentioning hitler...do i have to be the first to say loki is not EVIL he is a trickster god...he is anything but evil...

magnus picks up a hammer....it is now a magical hammer

now people are making fun of magnus for sounding like isolde...show FUCK off with this

laurits knowing isolde is a lesbian? idk why i laughed

“my gaydar is never wrong.” uh laurits what? is he supposed to be gay lmao? hets dont have “gaydar”

what an unimportant scene omg why wasn’t that cut

hike time on the mountain. aka bad time.

they establish these nice scenes with magnus and isolde before her death...for what reason? why kill the lesbian? for magnus’ pain in the first episode and make her the catalyst for his story. fuck off. 

this show for the love of god cannot build tension it’s so shitty

ahhhh laurits doing casual bad things stirring the pot

we don’t even care about the mom as an audience member...this is such bad writing 

ew stop i cringed so hard wtf editors

anyways isolde found a strange cave in the mountain...okay then

this whole shit with the principal’s husband eating a deer heart naked on a mountain makes me wanna laugh it’s such bad editing

the principal man killed isolde and then made it look like a parasailing accident

they play more shitty pop music over the ending sequence of him in the rain...whoever picked the music...ew

he discovers his thor powers as he’s raging over isolde’s death...literally digusting

basically i hate this show so much already but i promised i would review it all so...fine

[harringroveficarchive]

Flowers for Yikes!

Steve stands outside of…Atomic Midnight Tattoos…preparing for his demise. He breathes in, then out, and opens the door of the parlour. As he walks inside, he is greeted with a smile by a lady that looks suspiciously like Connie Marble. “Hi, welcome in! Do you have an appointment with one of our artists?” Steve reaches the counter and says “I-I don’t, sorry.” He’s never been to a tattoo parlour before. He doesn’t know the procedures; he’s only aware of the pain factor from stories his friends have shared. “No need to apologise, it’s alright. I’ll ask and see if any of our artists have free time for a flash tattoo appointment. Be right back.”

Steve waits for a second, looking around the parlour with it’s red on (darker) red damask wallpaper, and the wooden baseboards and door frames painted black. He admires the chrome chandelier above him and especially loves the exotic plants decorating some corners of the shop. When “Connie” returns, Steve stops his prying and gives her a hopeful look.

“Hurricane Bill isn’t busy at the moment. Would you like to see examples of his work? Or just book now..?”

Hurricane Bill? What kind of fucking name is that? “No, it’s alright. We can just book now. It’s…it’s not a big deal of a tattoo, so I’m sure Bill’s skills will do.” He hates that the last part rhymed a little.

The lady in red chuckles behind her hand and tells Steve to fill out a release form while his tattoo artist prepares and sets up his work station.

As Steve returns the release form, he hears the sound of rubber soles approaching on his left.

“Harrington?” 

Steve turns quickly to see the owner of the boots, and time suddenly stops. 

“Billy?!”

A chuckle.

“Yeah, it’s me…don’t cream your pants.” Billy winks at Steve.

“Oh god…” Steve’s face flushes and he covers it with his pale hands.

“What are you doing here?” (‘Connie’ leaves to the back, giving these two idiots some space.)

“Well…what do you think?” One hand remains on Steve’s face.

“I never expected to meet you here…”

“What? I can’t get a tattoo?”

“No, I mean I never expected to see you in CALIFORNIA.” Billy holds his arms across his chest.

“Oh…well Robin and I just opened business here and-”

“Woah! Wait, wait…come into my room and you can tell me all about it while I sketch, yeah?”

And so Billy leads Steve into his “studio” and closes the door behind them. Billy gestures for Steve to sit on the dentist-looking chair, and Billy takes a seat on a rolling chair next to him, quickly fetching for his sketchbook. The room is small, but looks efficient and organised. There’s many drawers; hygienic products and ink on some shelves; a sink; a few photos framed over the eggplant painted walls; and some potted succulents scattered here and there. There’s also a small bookcase that catches Steve’s eye, and a fancy lamp on one of the corners.

“So, what are you looking to get tattooed today?” Billy grabs a pencil from his desk.

“Well…” Steve starts nervously. “I kind of lost a bet and-” 

“Oh no.” Billy lowers the sketchpad to his lap.

A beat.

“I have to get ‘DINGUS’ tattooed and…” Steve trails off, a shade redder than he was before.

“Like…the word DINGUS…on your dingus?” Billy teases with a smirk plastered on his face as he ties his hair back into a bun.

“What? No! That would be…inappropriate.” And there Steve goes placing his hands to his face again. 

Billy doesn’t say anything and just waits for Steve to tell him more about this horror-piece of a tattoo idea.

“It…it has to be a tramp stamp.” he says in a very wonky, very unsure tone and looks down the whole time, obviously embarrassed.

“Oh…ok, no. I’m not doing that. That makes me uncomfortable.” Billy gets up and puts his sketchpad away. He seems tormented by the situation and Steve just “What? What do you mean? It’s just-”

“Steve, I don’t care if you lost a bet.” He looks back at Steve. “Hell, is your friend…Robin?” Steve nods once. “Is Robin at least paying for the tattoo?”

“Well, no, I lost the bet so I-” 

“No, fuck that shit. I’m not fucking up your beautiful body that way.” He begins to remove his jacket. “Do you trust me?”

“What? N-not really …I haven’t seen you in years its-”

“Wow…ouch.” Another beat. “No here-” Billy takes Steve’s left arm and places it over Steve’s head. “Just trust me. Keep your arm here for me. I’m going to lower the upper part of the chair…just sit still.” Billy fiddles with the bottom of the chair and Steve would be lying if he said he wasn’t panicking a little. Suddenly Billy grabs at his shoulders and gently brings Steve’s head down on the chair. He gives him a pillow to lay his pretty head on and Steve is still nervous…but also, Billy just fucking called him beautiful. He doesn’t know what to expect anymore, but he also doesn’t want to get up and leave. As scared as Steve feels in the moment…he’s also immensely curious to see what Billy is up to.

Billy gets some sharpies and a disposable razor from one of his many drawers. He presses play on his boombox and Kashmir by Led Zeppelin begins to play from the speakers just audible enough to be comfortable. Billy then shaves the back of Steve’s forearm, and then starts free-handing some design on his arm. Steve can see nothing; he’s not allowed to. He only feels the smooth tip of the markers making delicate lines on his skin, and it almost feels…seductive. 

“So tell me about this business of yours. I’m intrigued.” Billy asks while he continues to mark Steve’s arm.

Steve actually smiles at that…Billy’s interest makes him feel more at ease. “It’s a flower business! It’s actually right across the street from this shop.”

“Oh, no way! That’s you guys? We saw the establishment come to life little by little. It looks like a very homey shop. Congrats.”

“Thank you! We’re very proud of it. Robin and I just opened last week and so far everyone’s been so nice and supportive.”

“Is Robin your girlfriend?” Billy asks nonchalantly, but with a hint of worry at the VERY back of his voice.

“Noooo.” Steve says with an almost brooding tone. “Robin is my best friend and nothing more than that…”

Billy scoffs at that statement and tries to lighten the mood after Steve’s tone. “Hmm…yeah sure…because friends can’t be real best friends unless they make you get tramp stamps across the street. Is she cackling over there, or how come she didn’t come witness the glory of her suggestions?”

“Well she went out of her way to restock some flowers today…she’s expecting the tramp stamp when she arrives and now…I don’t know what to tell her.”

“That’s alright. I can talk to her if you’d like…” Billy scribbles at the bottom of Steve’s forearm. “I won’t miss adding DINGUS on this fucker anyways.” He continues sketching.“So why flowers?”

“Well, I’ve always been very attracted to flowers…they’re just so pretty, and plants are SO interesting! Robin has also told me I have an eye for detail. Flower arrangements are a great way to combine my skill and passion.”

“That’s admirable. Say…do you think I can swing by your shop, and request a special bouquet for my girlfriend after our session?” Billy smiles, even if Steve can’t see it.

“Sure!”Steve tries to sound enthusiastic, but waits a little before adding with another brooding tone“…you have a girlfriend?”

Billy chuckles. “Nah! Mag is my best friend. She has a girlfriend though! And I’m pretty sure they’d love to have some flowers in the apartment. It’s been a while…”

“Huh…funny how both of our best friends are lesbians.” Steve makes a remark, and Billy rolls his eyes but manages to crack a laugh anyways.

“Hmm…yeah, a little weird. Alright, I’m done sketching and-NO! No no…you can’t look!” And Steve pouts a little when Billy grabs and keeps his arm over his head.

Billy then starts to prep the tattoo machine. He grabs some black latex gloves and brings his small table with ink caps closer. “Alright Stevie, I’m coming in. Are you ready?”

But Steve is still stuck at the fact that Billy just called him Stevie. “Umm…” and then he catches on. “Ready…yeah, sure. Let’s do this.”

“Alright. Remember to just keep breathing, and if it gets too uncomfortable…count to 10, focus on your breathing, or talk to me! I want to make this a comfortable experience for you. Wait…is this your first tattoo?” Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd washes over the sudden silence.

“It…it is.” Steve’s eyes narrow a little at the corners.

“Oh wow…a virgin amongst us. Well, it’s a pleasure to be your first.” Billy winks at Steve as he cuts some paper towels from the roll. “Okay here we go.” And Billy’s needle starts buzzing and comes in contact with Steve’s arm. He drags the machine across, and Steve feels a ticklish kind of pain. He’d heard people compare the pain to cat scratches, but Steve’s never been scratched by a cat…He begins to think it might not be as painful as people make it out to be?

“Why don’t you tell me more…I want to catch up with your life. What have you even been up to?” And Steve is touched by Billy’s generous gesture to learn about his life. So they talk through the session, learning what things have changed and what has remained the same since high school; and it almost feels surreal that they’re able to talk as if they’d just seen each other yesterday. Getting the lineart done was a breeze, and the random moments of silence were brief. Somewhere down the line though, Billy feels a ragged breath coming from Steve the third time he comes in to apply colour.

“C’mon, Steve…deep breaths now.” The room tenses a little, and in the air you only hear Steve’s panting, followed by Billy’s constant “I’m sorry” mumbles and “breathe, breathe” or “You’re doing great!” but Steve still seems in discomfort. “Would you like a break? I can give you 5 minutes if you need them.”

Steve seems in a bit of a daze, and he doesn’t give Billy a reply, so he gets worried. He places his machine down and removes his latex gloves to fetch Steve a cup of water. 

“Can I trust that you won’t peek at your tattoo?” Billy asks in a delicate voice, and gets nothing but a soft nod from Steve. Billy takes this opportunity to flip his mixtape over, and goes outside the room for the water. When he returns, Steve has kept his left arm over his head like a good boy. He also has placed his right arm over his soft tummy and brought his legs up, dirtying up the chair with his sneakers. Steve looks comfortable and so inviting with that pair of forest green shorts, making Billy’s heart skip a beat.

“Is the water for me? Hellooo…”

Steve’s sudden preppier tone brings Billy back to, and he apologises nervously. “Sorry, you…you’re too distracting with your handsome face and… your… everything.”

Steve isn’t taken aback by the comments anymore. He’s getting more and more comfortable around Billy, and so he puts his right arm out to take the water from him. Steve takes a few gulps and Billy presses play on his mixtape before getting a fresh pair of latex gloves. “We’re about halfway through…do you think you can take some more pokes for me?” Steve holds the paper cup between his teeth, no hand required.

“Okaaaay” he mumbles through the cup in a childish tone that makes Billy smile.

“Hey…I know what will take your mind off the pain. Why don’t you tell me about your favourite flowers?”

And so Steve lightens up and starts to tell Billy about Cyclamens, Hydrangeas, and Gazanias. Of how much he adores Daffodils, Gardenias and Lilies the best. He doesn’t miss mentioning how much he loves the colour of Lilacs and Caucasian pincushions, as well as his current obsession with adding Baby’s-Breath to every arrangement he makes.

Billy doesn’t fail to chime in about his love of Delphiniums, Irises and Penny Blacks…

“I also like those, ummm…what do they call them? Ace of Spades?”

“Oh! The ones with all the tiny buds in deep red?” Steve still holds the empty paper cup in his right hand. “That’s a good pick! You probably would also like Passifloras.”

“What are those?”

“The crazy purple ones with-…geez, I don’t know how to describe them. Maybe I should just show you?”

“I would like that very much!” It almost felt like Steve was no longer in pain! So they continue talking and they both comment on the amazingness of succulents; they agree that water lilies are great and that magnolias are precious flowers that should definitely be in the flower arrangement for Billy’s best friends back in his apartment. At some point Steve sheds a few tears because apparently flowers make him very happy…and Billy thinks he might be mixing his emotions with the pain of his pokes…but he can’t help to find Steve crying over flowers to be extremely endearing, and it makes him smirk like crazy.

When Billy is done, he sprays water on Steve’s arm and wipes away with a paper towel, like…twice too many times, Steve thinks, because honestly…that shit stings!

“Okay champ, you can have a look now!” Billy says enthusiastically as Veterans of the Psychic War by Blue Öyster Cult nears its end.

He helps Steve get up from the chair, and guides him to the mirror on the wall. Steve is extremely nervous; what if Billy just did some crazy, but very meticulous lettering work for the word DINGUS all across the back of his forearm? He did say the word dingus would be there…he just didn’t want to make it into a tramp stamp…apparently. But throughout this journey Steve realised that he’d gained an immense trust in Billy. 

Billy, who had once beat the living daylights out of his face, now made him feel so safe and comfortable throughout the pain of this tattoo…he couldn’t possibly have fucked-

Oh.

Steve stands in front of the mirror, gasping into his right hand. He has no words…he’s frozen. Billy stares at Steve, then at the tattoo, and back to Steve.

Steve brings his left arm across his chest and glides his eyes over the neo-traditional dagger that decorates his arm. He traces his gaze from the tip of the blade to the handle…and marvels at the sight of the flowers wrapped on the handle, gracing near his elbow. Billy notices Steve looking at the flowers; their deep purple shade making a lovely contrast on Steve’s skin tone, and says,

“I wanted to make a homage to your new flower business, and Orchids are my favourite flowers so I…” he drops his comment at the sight of tears in Steve’s eyes.

“Oh, Steve please don’t cry. You’re being a baby, just-” Steve has now enveloped Billy in a tight hug, and he doesn’t know what to say. Billy just eases into the hug and pats Steve’s back. He’s very glad to see Steve is content with the outcome of his work. Above all, he’s also secretly VERY glad to see Steve again.

Back at the front counter, Steve complains that Robin will punch him because the word DINGUS is only a shade darker than the stems of the Orchid; and SOOOO TINY.

“Just send her over to punch me. Guess I’m to blame for not respecting the bet.” They both giggle nervously and stand timidly around. Parting is such sweet sorrow…and neither one of them knows how to break that ice.

“So…” Steve finally begins again. “How much do I owe you?”

Billy chuckles a little. “Oh, right. Well, how about you pay for my dinner? I half-assed your original tattoo design anyways.”

“Oh…no, I insist. What you did is so beautiful…I must pay full price.”

“Right…” Billy says assertively. “Pay for my very expensive dinner at the fanciest, most overpriced restaurant we can find, and we can call it even Steven” And they both just burst out laughing.

“Alright, it’s a date then.” Steve smiles, and Billy flutters his eyelashes at him, leaning forward and placing his arms on the counter.

“Can I get my private tour of your flower shop now, pretty boy?” Billy winks at Steve and that makes him blush like crazy. In his flushed panic, he looks down and catches a glimpse of Billy’s arms on the counter. He notices a dagger tattoo on the back of his right forearm, and Steve melts for a second.

The next time he sees Billy inside his flower shop again, there’s a pair of white lilies adorning the handle of his dagger, making Steve melt twofold. Lilies are Steve’s favourite flower.

[dotdotdottie]

Cats and Dots || Dot & Luce

LOCATION: Ink Inc.

TIME:  Before Bea’s Death

@divineluce

Clicking on her “Bad Ass Bitches” playlist on Spotify, Luce set to work on fixing the absolute shitshow that was Dot’s tattoo. Not only was the placement bad, it looked like a drunk toddler had decided to go to town with a machine. Which is why she was more than happy to be working on it. Nothing was more interesting than fixing a bad tattoo and turning it into something worth showing off. “How the fuck did you wind up with this hot mess? And, you can’t fucking smack me for saying that because I’ll make it worse.” She grinned as she dipped the needles into ink and set to work, bobbing her head along to the beat of the pounding bassline. “Like, love is love, but christ.” She gestured to the god awful rainbow plastered on her hip. “The lines on this are hot garbage.”

The rainbow tattoo had been something Dot got in a frat house in her junior year of college. Her friend had ordered a tattoo gun off the internet and the ink had been sourced from somewhere she had no desire to examine. She didn’t regret the tattoo, it was a funny fucking story and she liked being a dumbass with a rainbow tattoo... But if she was going to make sure everyone going down on her knew she was pretty fucking gay, she wanted it to a nice rainbow. “I got it done by a coked-out frat named Braydon.” She had almost considered eating him afterward, but her colony would have been pissed. She wished she had done it. “I probably could have done it better myself, but it was kinda fun watching him struggle. Hope you know how to make it look less like an idiot did it. I don’t need people to focus on the rainbow when my snatch is out.”

Stories like this weren’t super surprising, especially not when it came to shit tattoos. Luce nodded as she filled in the stencil, a black cat whose body covered the majority of the rainbow. What bits it didn’t, she was planning on incorporating into a rainbow collar around its neck. And besides, even without the collar, it was still gonna be pretty gay. “You know, that doesn’t fucking surprise me in the slightest. Braydon,” She wiped away the excess ink, “Had awful goddamn hands. And, trust me. This is gonna be dope.” Luce grinned, “Definitely a pussy out kind of look.” She laughed. Given the fact she usually tattooed straight, toxic masculinity dudes all the time, it was a goddamn delight to be tattooing someone who wasn’t. And, Dot was cool enough. She was dating Blanche, which honestly sounded like a match made in chaotic heaven.

Listen, Dot didn’t love cats, but she would get one tattooed on her for a pussy joke. Most of her tattoos were jokes anyway. She knew plenty of people thought tattoos had to have meaning but she thought they just had to have a fun story and be cool to look at. “Oh trust me, I know Braydon’s hands were terrible. He’s one of those boys who think the clit is a suggestion instead of required.” She had slept with him a few days later simply because she had been bored out of her mind. “Can’t wait for the summer when I can show it off when I’m at the beach,” She cackled imagining the horrified faces of suburban mothers as they covered their kiddie’s eyes. She liked Luce and if she wasn’t with Blanche, she would have considered trying to smash, but for once Dot didn’t have the desire to cheat. “You got anything fucking weird tattooed on you?”

Letting out a low whistle, Luce shook her head. “Sounds about right. Boys are the fucking worst.” She said, remembering her ill-fated attempts at dating boys in high school. For the most part, they’d been boring and dumb and not terrible to hang out with. But, Jared, he was a fucking time. “Sounds like the dude I slept with back in the day. But, I gotta say, hats off to Jared. He did in fact, turn me gay.” She joked. That had been a hilarious thing for him to realize, when they ran into each other at a house party the year after they graduated. Specifically, when he found her fucking a girl on the side of his house. “Oh, it’ll be a look. And a damn good one at that.” She said as she finished up the tail of the cat. At Dot’s question, Luce laughed and nodded. “Of course I do. This is a good one,” She said and backed up to show Dot one of the tattoos on her ankle. At first glance, it was a normal anchor tattoo with a scroll script around it, the cliche every college girl got. But, the scroll read ‘Fuck your Anchor.’ “A tribute to all the stupid anchor tattoos I have to do.”

“Men are good for two things, paying us and looking pretty,” Dot said with a grin. There was a third, very important thing they were also good for, but she doubted that Luce shared her passion for sinking her fingers in the chests of frat boys and eating their hearts. “Speaking for the community, I thank Jared for his contribution. We’re glad to have such a hot gay with us.” Was she flirting? Yeah, but Dot didn’t think it was terrible to do so. It was a joke after all. She craned her neck a bit to see the progress and grinned, honestly, it looked fucking sick already. She couldn’t wait to show Blanche… And literally anyone else who was willing to look at it. She let out a cackle as she took in Luce’s tattoo. “Wow, what an icon. I hope you make sure everyone sees it when they ask for an anchor tattoo. You get a lot of those stupid mom heart ones?”

“You can say that again.” Luce laughed, thinking back to the random venmo that she’d gotten from Adam. As much of a big dumb frat boy he seemed, the dude was half-way decent. When he wasn’t talking about his crotch goblins or giving her stupid nicknames. That said, Dickcleaver Vural had a nice ring to it. “You’ve got that right. I am, in fact, a gift to the ladies and they-dies of White Crest.” Luce chuckled to herself as she filled in the body of the cat. Was she aware of the tone behind Dot’s words? Yeah, which is why she dug in just a little deeper with her needle. Not enough to blow out the ink, but just enough to remind Dot that she was, in fact, tattooing her. Besides, Luce was a lot of things, but she wasn’t the other woman type. “You know it. Oh, I’d be fucked if I did. Ulf would have my head on a spike if I went flashing that around.” She remarked as she looked at her handiwork. “Nah, most dudes have figured out those are out of style.”

Adam’s venmo had sent Dot into a cackling session that lasted for several minutes. She hadn’t expected anyone to actually send her money, but when she got the notification on her phone, Adam had gained a few brownie points. She gave Luce a mock salute,“Thank you for your service. You should be given a medal of honor.” Her eyes narrowed as the needle dug in deeper, sending a glare Luce’s way. She was pretty sure the tattoo artist was too practiced at this point to change pressure like that. Guess flirting, even jokingly, wasn’t allowed with Luce. “If Ulf doesn��t see it happen, what’s the harm? Some people wouldn’t even read it, I bet.” Even if they did read it, Dot was pretty sure some people would just get it anyway. She laughed,“That’s tragic. I love when I see them, it’s just so funny. Teasing guys about it is so fun.”

“Every lesbian who ever slept with a man should, honestly. Gold star lesbians, my ass. Give me a gold star for having to suffer through forty seconds of super sexy thrusting.” Luce grumbled as she wiped away the last of the excess black ink. Popping over the rainbow array of ink, she dipped her needles in to color after color, filling in the rainbow pattern on the cat’s collar. “The harm is when all the piss babies storm out or write bad Yelp reviews. I’m in customer service,” She pasted a fake smile on her face before rolling her eyes, “I gotta service the customer.” Arching an eyebrow at Dot’s words, Luce couldn’t resist the urge to snicker. “Well, I can tell you this, you can and should make fun of anyone who’s got a terrible tribal. God, 90’s and 2000’s tattooing was the worst.”

“Wow, he lasted a full forty seconds? You had a marathon runner. Most boys out there are one thrust wonders.” Dot loved moments like this where she just got to make fun of men as brutally as she wanted. So many people got uncomfortable when she talked about boys and her sexual experiences with them. “I’ll write you a five star Yelp after this. I’ll even include that I reccomend the lesbian artist.” It wouldn’t be the first time she wrote a long review just to praise a friend. She was great at acting like a Karen and if she used her real name, everyone thought she was seventy anyway. “I should make them tip me extra for making me witness their bad tattoos. At least my bad tattoos are covered up or I’m getting them fixed.”

“I was truly #blessed.” Luce said in a mocking voice, as she shut off her machine. “What got me was the fact he had the balls to ask, ‘was it good for you’? That was when I straight up told him I was pretty sure I preferred girls. Whoops.” She said as she wiped off the last of the ink and gestured for Dot to take a look at the tattoo in the mirror she had on the wall. “You better mention me, otherwise people will come in thinking it was Rory who did this sick pussy tat. God knows how the girls would react to that.” She snorted, amused at the other artist’s struggles with the fairer sex. “Honestly, they really should. And hey, you’re getting there.” She said as she tossed her gloves in the trash and began to clean up her station. “When are we gonna fix that jank ass dolphin tattoo of yours, huh?”

“‘Was it good for you?’ Well, bud, if I’m getting up to leave then I’m pretty sure it wasn’t good for me. Boys are fucking stupid,” Dot laughed. This is part of the reason she ate human boys, they were just so annoying. She stood, looking into the mirror with an almost feral grin. “This is fucking awesome.” Turning back to Luce she let out another half laugh,“Yeah I’ll make sure I tell them it was you. Try not to hit on all the hot ones I send your way.” Dot took out her phone to take a photo to send Blanche and a few of her old college buddies. Snorting, she shook her head,“The dolphin is staying as messed up as it is. It’s a Dot classic at this point.”

“Right? You’d think me grabbing my shorts and booking it out the door would have been a dead give away.” Luce said with a laugh as she grabbed the aftercare instructions pamphlet and stuffed it into a baggy with a little Ink Inc. sticker, some candy, and a few packets of Aquaphor. “I’m glad you like it.” She said as she held out the grab bag. “And, no promises on that.” Luce winked and shook her head as they walked out to the register. Setting the station up for her, Luce shook her head with a disappointed snap of her fingers. “Damn, and here I thought I might have a chance at getting you to rethink that. But, hey. You win some, you lose some.” As she leaned against the front desk, Luce glanced up at the clock. Dot was a dope lady, if chaotic. And, coming from her? That meant she was pretty much chaos incarnate. But, she was good company for a drink. “You wanna grab a drink? Celebrate your new art?”

[lblwlw]

Hello!

First post here, but I have a long history with tumblr. Tumblr has always sort of been a place for me to escape because few of my friends ever had my URL/followed me. This time it’s a little more important.  

CW: Brief mentions of sexual occurrences with men, brief talk of depression, nothing too serious or graphic

TLDR; I’ve suppressed my gayness on accident for basically my whole life, identified as bi, married a man, realized I’m gay, am now figuring out my life.

Warning, this is a LONG post.

I have always been been fascinated with sexuality, more specifically same sex relationships. I was always interested in the idea of being in a same sex relationship but told myself, “no, that’s not me”. Eventually in middle school I played with the idea of being bisexual when I learned what that meant. I said, perfect. I can tell my internet friends I like girls, too, but I won’t have to tell anyone else and I can just worry about boys then at school and for my parents. I had a few crushes on boys, but the thought of actually dating them terrified me and so I very rarely did more than think about them a lot and just tell my friends that I was “too ugly” or whatever else, or “too awkward.” What they didn’t know was that through MySpace I met a girl and had a huge crush on her. We talked a lot and we said we were dating. I never really told anyone. That eventually fizzled out. 

Over time I got bullied a couple times because classmates found my MySpace and found that I identified as bi. I quickly learned it was something I didn’t want to talk about. I dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression throughout all of school. In high school I steadily crushed on one boy almost all four years, but looking back I think I really just enjoyed and wanted to be his friend. Or I just kind of picked him as the one I liked the most so I had a crush to be a normal girl. I dated two boys the entirety of high school, the first one I broke up with because once he finally asked me out (after I “liked him”) and we did relationship things, like kissing, I was not all about it. It didn’t feel right. I thought, maybe I just didn’t like him. Next boyfriend, I wasn’t entirely objected to kissing him but it wasn’t my favorite. It got more frustrating when he wanted to do more. I wasn’t so opposed to him touching me, but when it came to touching him I was like “this ain’t it”. I stayed with him anyway, hoping I would “get over it” until he broke up with me. I wonder now if he could tell I wasn’t into it.

There was actually a time in which I thought, maybe I should date girls? One of my friends was dating a girl, and I thought that was wonderful. I went to her to tell her that I had been thinking maybe I’d rather date girls. I totally blocked this conversation out of my head until recently.

Once I was done with high school I was discouraged but tried to date a few different guys. None of them went that fantastically. If I met them online, I usually came up with a reason we couldn’t meet. “Maybe this just won’t work” It was fun to talk and flirt but when it came down to bringing it into real life I’d panic because that meant kissing a guy again, and possibly having sex. It made me totally uncomfortable. Finally I said, “I wish I was just into girls, ugh.” Remembered that I was, and that I should try it finally. I matched with this sweet girl that was about a year younger than me. She seemed so put together and so kind. We went on a few dates, getting ramen, fancy cupcakes, riding on a trolly in the city, etc. I remember when I got to kiss her in public and I was SO pumped to be seen doing that! Another time, I believe I drove her home but we parked away from her house and made out in my car. I still remember so much of it vividly. 

Eventually I realized that if I was seriously dating her, she would want it to be known. I’d have to face my fears and tell my family. For some reason, this absolutely terrified me. It shouldn’t have but it did. I thought through my options, and decided I should just find a nice guy that will love me and spend my life with me so I don’t have to do this anymore. I did the unspeakable act of basically just ghosting her and pursued a guy from work who, realistically, kind of freaked me out. Thanks to good old compulsive heterosexuality, I read this as my attraction to him. Thankfully, he was pretty easily attracted to me. I recall early in the relationship wishing I hadn’t done that awful thing to that girl, and that I wish I was still dating a girl. Nothing was technically wrong with my relationship that I had now, but something felt off. Like I was missing something. I tucked that away somewhere in my head and enjoyed building an amazing friendship with this man. I did love him, and I still do. He’s kind, he’s sensitive, we have a lot of shared interests and he’s taught me so much intentionally and unintentionally. 

We got married last year and while I felt grateful I had this amazing person beside me, I remember a part of me wondering if this was right for me. I had this weird little empty pocket somewhere in my heart. That I had given up my young adulthood maybe, and that I could have experienced being with... a woman, for real. I thought, I wish I could have met my husband later in life, maybe. Maybe then I’d have gotten my desires for women out of the way and then been with him forever. Because I do love him, he’s a good person and deserves to be loved. I enjoyed the wedding as a big party that I got to have with my family, but I just remember wondering where that extreme excitement was that everyone always described. Was I broken?

Now over a year later, I was sitting at home one day feeling lost and depressed. I had been on TikTok and saw all these young people having fun and I wished that I had spent more time trying to have fun in the past, before I got married. I thought, I could do it now, but what if something happened and I somehow I fell for one of these girls while being with my husband? Wait... why would I even think that? I started to really analyze this thought. I thought, if I was bi like I had always identified, why could I not be happy with my husband? Well, I was, but something was missing. This thought popped into my head: Oh no. What if I am gay? 

What?! Why would I think that? That’s crazy. I would have known as a kid like everyone says. Right? That’s how that works. I chalked this up to feeling like I was missing out and tried to stop thinking about it. It was hard not to, though. And so I googled one morning while out listening to the birds, after escaping bed before my husband rose to avoid his intimacy: “lesbian married to a man”

This article came up about a woman who had been married to a man for many years and they had kids. She started to question herself, and her attraction to him. I don’t remember all of it but I remember getting really uncomfortable but also having this weird sense of calm. That finally, I felt like I identified with something. I wasn’t really sure though. I sent a message to the lady who wrote the article. She replied a week later telling me that she had a podcast called Lesbian Chronicles. I said, okay, I need to listen to this. I listened to about two episodes or so when they mentioned this thing called “The Master Doc” and the reddit sub called Late Bloomer Lesbians. I was like “Holy crap, a community??”

I logged onto reddit for the first time ever. I saw all these women posting in similar situations to me. I found “The Master Doc” and “Straight women don’t say...”

It was like a light bulb went off. Oh my god, everything makes sense! Maybe I’m NOT broken! I remembered all the women that I had crushes on. All the times I thought about women but told myself I was just “weird” and tried not to think about it. I always thought, no I can’t be gay because I wasn’t sure of it as a kid. Now I realized that women especially are fed a straight narrative. It’s “normal” to not be attracted to men the way they are to you. It’s normal to not totally enjoy sex with men... When I learned that we’ve been told this, and it isn’t really true... I wanted to cry. Now I was in the biggest “pickle” ever. I have this man who loves me, who I said vows to swearing I loved him the same forever. Did I just accept who I was and what I did and live with it? Did I break up with him? That seemed to harsh. I heard a lot of women in the same position say they spoke to a therapist. I immediately googled therapists in my area that specialized in LGBTQ+ issues, sent an email ASAP, and felt a little bit of relief. I knew this was real because after years of playing with the idea of seeing a therapist, this came so naturally when I needed help with this.

Now I am here. I feel very confident that I am gay, and my dad knows now. I tried to bring it up with my husband but it didn’t go very well. He currently thinks that maybe I’m just a sad bisexual who hasn’t been able to express her bi-ness. I am at a point a conversation needs to happen again. I told myself when my lesbian flag and pin came in the mail, I would talk to him again. It’s being delivered today. I am terrified, to say the least. It feels so wrong to “betray” this man who has dedicated to much time and work to giving us as good a life as he can. But I need to live my truth. It will come. I’m low-key excited for it. I hope maybe this helps someone going through the same thing.

-Anonymous Married Lesbian

[artificialqueens]

Show me the Stars, Chapter One (Trixya) - Kite

A/N: It’s been a long ass time since I’ve posted to AQ, but here I am with a Trixya fic. Hope you guys enjoy it! Feel free to check out my concept art over on my tumblr @youre-a-kite. And if you’re feeling the space themed lesbian au vibe, check out my fic Artemis on Ao3, which features Branjie, Trixya and Scyvie in space.

Summary: Trixie is a tour guide in a planetarium who makes up the facts as she goes along, and Katya is an astrophysicist who takes the tour with the intention of calling her out, but doesn’t.

Trixie sighs as the gaggle of elementary kids start to screech when she dims the lights, plunging them into darkness. She waits for the teachers to regain control of the room, and nods politely whilst they apologise, but she knows it’s going to be a few minutes before the kids settle.

It’s the same story every day.

But on the plus side, it usually means she can shave five minutes off the end of her presentation. Ten minutes, if one of them needs the bathroom half way through.

“Good morning kids,” Trixie says, with as much enthusiasm as her slightly hungover self will allow. “My name is Trixie Mattel and I’ll be your tour guide today. Please remember that there is no eating or drinking in the planetarium. Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a star.”

-x-

The door to the break room slams shut behind her.

“I swear to god, I’m quitting tomorrow,” she groans.

Pearl scoffs. “Bitch, you say that every day.”

“I know, but this time I mean it.”

This isn’t how Trixie pictured her life would work out when she moved to LA the moment she graduated college. Like every other hopeful out there, she was going to be a star. She thought she’d at least have a recurring role on a sitcom by now. But gradually, as her savings account has drained, acting classes had been switched for shifts at the makeup counter in the mall. The agent that she’d hired became a luxury that she was no longer able to afford. She’d taken a job at the planetarium because she figured it was the closest thing to acting that she could find, but, God, she fucking hates kids.

Her colleagues are the only thing about the job that she actually enjoys. She’d gotten the job through her roommate Kim and became friendly with the other pretty quickly. She’s never been one to shy away from social situations, especially not at work.

In the break room, anything goes.

Last week, their boss, Brooke, had pulled Trixie into the office to give her a lecture on ‘why we leave our personal lives at home’ when she realised that half of the tours started late one morning because her guides had been too busy grilling Trixie about the hickey on her neck from her Tinder date to keep an eye on the time. Honestly, that talk had gone in one ear and straight out of the other. She figured that it was pretty hypocritical, coming from the woman who’s almost definitely banging the chick who works in the gift shop.

“Trix’, you’ll like this,” Pearl tells her, beckoning her over. “When Violet was working the public telescopes last night, some old couple asked her to point them towards Ursa Major.”

Violet laughs loudly, “like I know where that fucker is.”

“What did you do?” Trixie smirks.

When their job amounts to little more than following a script and flicking the lights on and off at the right time, they all know how stressful it can be when they get asked a specific question.

Violet shrugs, “I just pointed upwards. What else was I supposed to do?”

-x-

After lunch, Trixie is leading the ‘Moons of the Solar System’ tour that is open to the public. On the one hand, the ratio of children to adults on these tours is always much lower, so that’s a positive, but on the other hand, members of the public come with their own set of problems.

There’s the entitled moms, who think that their kids should get to climb up on the displays. There’s the know it all dads, who like to jump in with a ‘well, actually’ every once in a while. There’s always a group of tourists who never listen to the ‘no flash photography’ instruction at the beginning. But every once in a while, there’s someone interesting or quirky or different, that makes her shifts just about bearable.

Pearl is collecting ticket stubs at the entrance to the planetarium dome, and gives Trixie a nod when the last members of the audience have filtered in. As she leaves, she closes the doors behind her and sets the lights so that they begin to dim.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gents. I’m Trixie Mattel and I’ll be your tour guide today. Please remember that there is no eating or drinking in the auditorium. Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever seen the moon.”

She rattles through the opening section about Earth’s moons fairly quickly. It’s the most boring part of the script by far, since even young kids will already know this by now. With feigned enthusiasm, she asks her audience participation questions about solar and lunar eclipses. Once she’s finished, someone raises their hand to ask a question. She prays it’s something she knows the answer to.

“When’s the next lunar eclipse?”

Trixie shifts uncomfortably. The woman’s blue eyes are piercing, waiting for her to answer.

“Um, some time next month. You’ll have to check out our website for further details.”

The woman nods, seemingly satisfied. But she’s barely into her segment on Jupiter’s four largest moons when the woman speaks up again.

“Which space probe has travelled the furthest?”

She has to use all of her willpower to force herself not to roll her eyes. The Lord really is trying to test her today. Quickly, in her head, she rattles through all of the names of the space probes that she knows, trying to pick the one that sounds right.

“Um, Galileo,” Trixie guesses.

The woman smiles, but says nothing.

“And how far away is-“

Trixie has to cut her off.

“I’m sorry ma’am, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave all questions until the end.”

The woman apologises, but it doesn’t make Trixie feel any less on edge.

The thing is, Trixie knows that he answers are wrong. She knows that she’s making up the majority of her script on the spot. And she knows that the parents here are lapping it up, planning to go home and brag to their book club friends about how their kids enjoy educational pastimes, because they’re just so damn gifted.

But this woman. Who’s teetering in skyscraper heels and watching her like a hawk. Who’s nodding along with the presentation, smirking softly to herself, like she knows something that everybody else doesn’t. Trixie is sure that this woman knows that everything she’s saying is bullshit.

Trixie sets up the projectors to play a short clip showing the names and sizes of some of the solar system’s biggest moons, then positions herself in the back corner of the room. Then, as if this woman isn’t odd enough already, she starts to look up at the dome. But she doesn’t look up like all the rest of the parents, with a semi-interested expression and frequent glances to her watch. She looks up in awe, like this is the greatest thing she’s ever seen in her life. Like nothing could bring her to look away, not even for a moment.

And it’s funny, because Trixie is as captivated by the woman as the woman is by the moons.

At the end of the presentation, Trixie is dreading the asking the audience for questions, because she knows whose hand is going to be the first in the air. So, she drags out the end of the show for as long as possible, praying that she overruns. When Pearl pokes her head through the door to give her the two minute warning for the start of Kim’s next group, she’s so relieved, she could kiss her.

“And that’s all we have time for today folks. Please exit via the gift shop on your right. Have a lovely day!”

She makes a beeline for the door, but of course, the woman follows her.

“Hold on, I didn’t get to ask my questions,” she smirks coyly.

Trixie sighs and gestures to the edge of the corridor so they can stand out of the way of the crowds.

“Look, I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing but-“

The woman holds up her hands in defence. “I’m not playing any games, I just wanted to know-“

“Save it,” Trixie cuts her off, and she really hopes she’s right because if not she’s just been very, very rude to a curious audience member. But then the woman grins and she knows she isn’t wrong. Trixie sighs. “Are you going to tell my boss?”

The woman shrugs and Trixie’s eyes widen.

“Look, I’m sorry if your kid didn’t enjoy the show or whatever. I’ll get you tickets to the next-“

“Ew, gross” the woman cuts her off by shaking her head, “I don’t have a kid.”

“Oh. Then why are you at a kids planetarium show?”

The woman laughs. Her teeth are perfectly straight and perfectly white, not that Trixie cares.

“My niece watched a show here last week, but the new facts that she learned turned out to be the biggest load of garbage I’ve ever heard.”

Trixie ought to be embarrassed, but really, she’s just annoyed. Why can’t this woman just leave a bad review on trip advisor like a normal person?

“Are you some kind of space expert or something?”

The woman takes a business card out of her purse and hands it over.

Prof. Yekaterina P Zamolodchikova. Astrophysics Department - UCLA.

“Jesus,” Trixie mumbles.

“No, Katya,” the woman replies, holding out her hand for Trixie to shake.

Trixie doesn’t shake her hand.

“Please don’t tell my boss, I really need this job.”

“Maybe if you really needed it, you’d be less terrible at it.”

Trixie shrugs. “That’s fair.”

Katya’s gaze sharpens. “What you’re doing isn’t right. Kids come here to learn and you’re just making shit up as you please.”

Trixie shifts on the balls of her feet. It would be easier to just let Brooke tear her a new asshole than have to put up with this. Maybe if she tells her before Katya has the chance, she’ll get to keep her job.

Trixie looks at her watch and sighs. “Okay, if you’re going to tell her will you at least tell her tomorrow, so that I get paid for the rest of the day.���

Katya looks Trixie up and down, then grins devilishly. “I’m not going to tell her.”

“You aren’t?”

“No.”

Trixie blinks rapidly, then stares at her, unaware of what they’re supposed to do now. Then, Katya gestures to the business card in her hand.

“See the address? I want you to meet me there at eight. I’m going to teach you what you need to know.”

Trixie narrows her eyes. “You’re a college professor and you want to teach third grade physics to a terrible planetarium tour guide…”

Katya shrugs. “Or I could tell your boss that you can’t do your job properly.”

“Fine. God damn it. Whatever. I’ll be there.”

Trixie had been warned of the unsavoury side of life before she moved to LA, but had never thought she would be blackmailed into being educated.

She looks down at the card in her hand, but when she looks back up, Katya is already walking away.

“How will I know where to find you?”

“You’ll know,” she calls back over her shoulder.

“This had better not be a trap so that you can kidnap and murder me,” Trixie shouts after her, earning her a few uncomfortable glances from nearby parents.

“No promises,” Katya tells her, then leaves the building.

[passionandpurposeblog-blog]

Sexuality: No More to say and so over it

A few months after my long term girlfriend and I split up, I ended up in bed with Phillip, A nice guy that I’d known for some time. During the post-sex talk, he turns and asks “So does that mean you’re straight now?” 

“LMFAO” 

‘You’ve got a nice cock and I had a great orgasm, …..but you haven’t awoken anything in me that wasn’t already there. You cannot ‘make’ me straight and no one forced me to fuck you’ 

Infact, No one else would sexually awaken anything in me. Not the next guy after Phil, or the guy after that guy, or the girl after the guy after Phil. The list goes on and the list started waaaay back into my early teens. I've always been open, I was experimenting with drugs and people at a young age, I had a threesome with a guy and a girl when I was just 18. When I look back, I must admit that was very young for such an experience, but I just went with the flow. I don’t regret it, but I wish I had done it at a later age to really make the most of it and have the emotional maturity that you need to go with it. 

I’ve been listening to an interview with Kate Pierson (B52’s) and she has recently married her long term partner, a woman that she has dated for 15 years. She said that she had always dated men, and was even married before and that this lady came along and bang she was in love, just like that. Kate Pierson is now 71, So this is her 55-year-old self experiencing a major transition and shift in her life. Whilst trawling through the B52s back catalog online I read so many comments from random fans. ‘She's a lesbian’ ‘I never knew’ ‘But she was married to so and so’ and this is exactly the snooze fest that I am writing about today. Yawn...... If she spent 40 years with different men and now met a woman, perhaps shes just er just bisexual? And more importantly, shouldn’t we be interested in the music and her voice? As much as I love her, when all is said and done I don’t really want to think about the bedroom antics of a 71-year-old yknow.  

What is it with the labels?  

It’s like no one is comfortable until they know exactly which box you belong in, and if you stray from that box then their tiny minds scramble and system overload occurs. ‘ANNOUNCE YOURSELF AT ONCE’ ‘What are you?’ and ‘Don’t you dare have options or change, it doesn’t fit with the label I’ve prescribed you’.  

Before we label Kate a lesbian, how about we mention that she’s a brilliant talented vocalist with over 40 years in the band? Or is that how we are defining her now ‘The lesbian’?. *Insert laughing emoji here* 

“Bisexuals always get dumped on,” says Cynthia Nixon from Sex in the City...The Media has too labeled her a lesbian when much like Kate Pierson, she was in fact with men and entered into this new world later on in her life. It’s like now we must erase her whole previous life and deny that any man has ever come close to her! How dare she now turnaround and say she's’ attracted to men! How fucking dare she, she’s lesbian property now and she has no voice! She never said she was anything, You did!   

I thought, ‘I get it! I get You, I just get it’. She’s attracted to people, they may be male or they may be female yet shes being kettled to a place she never asked to be. It really is that simple. Should her current relationship end, nothing stops her going back to men, dating another woman or even staying single. Your past partners do not mean that your future self is set in stone. It’s not difficult to understand really is it?  

But! And there is a But!  

Say Cinthia and her gf/wife did break up and she dated a man. She won’t find it that easy, because of what I call, the whole ‘lesbian fragility’ - Gay women who pride themselves on being with women and only women and god fucking forbid should you show any interest in a guy. Well, You are now damaged goods my girl. A sell-out, banished!....exiled from the pride....like the Lioness in last weeks BBC Planet Earth. How can you and the gay community ever really watch the L Word again together or listen to Ani Difranco in the same way? ‘It’s just not the same’ they’ll whine.  

I’m being serious. There is a reverse discrimination within the gay community! I’ve seen it first hand. I’ve seen a few women in same sex relationships end, then go for a guy and their ‘friends’ no longer feel the same way about them, there’s no time to hang out anymore and she is “too busy with her straight friends”.  

Awwwww did someone emasculate you? 

I’ve never really enjoyed the company of gay women if I'm honest. I always found their friendships forged on sharing of sexual preference rather than common interest, views or hobbies. I usually think their haircuts are shit and they present me with this feeling where they are unsure if they want to fuck me or fight me. Very awkward, not to mention its a very childish and incestuous scene.  

I have seen this so many times with women, either in a same sex or opposite and then switch later on down the line which is what I mean about experience and just understanding those around you. I think a lot of women are on the bi spectrum. Not all, no, but a lot are, and sexuality is fluid.  About three months ago my cock hungry straight friend told me she’d met some woman online and is now having the best sex of her life! Great, wonderful, Whoppie.  So how do I label her? …....‘Err Mary’......... I label her Mary. I can’t really call her cock hungry right now, so I’ll just label her ‘Hungry Mary’. 

One of my oldest friends is gay – full blown lesbian, never been with a guy but totally cool with every bi girl that has. She and I sit on a different part of the spectrum, but she gets it and like myself she gives those around her that mutual respect and safe space to be who they are. If she turned around tomorrow and said she’s dating a guy, I wouldn’t be shocked, not because she has ever indicated that she likes guys, but simply because people change.  

I know three guys that have also experimented with other guys, would identify as straight and two of the three have long term girlfriends and kids. I just think at the time they took the ‘any holes a goal’ attitude and like my younger self, just went with the flow. 

As we age and grow the fuck up, this should be more accepted and we should just allow people to do who and what they want without the questions, especially the silly questions. It’s really mind numbingly boring, not to mention so nosey!? Jeez, get your own life in order. Despite my ramblings, I'm actually a pretty private person.  I just don’t discuss my private life or anyone I’m dating, I have so many transient non-committal interactions with people that I just don’t feel I need to. 

 I’ve been chatting to some people for ages, and I still wouldn’t discuss parts of my life with them. I keep my circle so small, and If we don’t click like that, we don’t click like that. It’s cool, because there is far more to me and far more to you than who we have in our beds right? I cant imagine meeting someone and asking them, “so what are ya?” CRINGE. I’d die. I’ve got some friends that I’ve spoken to for years, we’ve had really great conversations and it’s never occurred to me to stop and ask ‘do you have a partner? Are you gay?’  

The small circle of friends that I have know me, they get me and that’s my safe space.  

I do find some of the questions and statements really annoying, and if I’m honest just plain weird. I have an irritating male friend in that likes to continually remind me that I’m attracted to women, and of course, there is no way that I can be attracted to men, because I’m not attracted to him..... *eye roll* Dick! It’s like me saying to someone, ‘but you said you like mixed raced girls, so why don’t you like me’ it’s really really weird and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Its uncomfortable because he cannot address or acknowledge his own fascination with bisexuality and cannot stop mentioning it every time he sees me? He makes out he is cool and open-minded, yet I seem to be the topic of convo or butt of his jokes. Address your homophobia or your weird unrequited sexualisation of me whatever the issue is. Seek help mate, Your issue not mine. 

I cannot recall being asked what two women do in bed, but I have heard of it being asked to other people. It’s hilarious. I honestly believe that if you are over 25 and cannot work that out then you have a really dull imagination and I’d bet you are not very experienced. Not necessarily in bedding two women at once, but just in experiencing people; hearing their stories, watching porn, understanding their anatomy and physiology. OR You are being a menace and condescending..... I’ve never seen two men at it live, but I’m pretty sure I know how it goes down ;-)  

Sometime ago I spent a fair amount of time at a bdsm sex dungeon helping out an old friend. Id mostly film her sessions, and now and then Id help out by giving some guys the odd little kick in the nuts etc. Boy, I could write a whole new blog on that experience LOL! I saw some things!  

Meeting all the different types of people that came in the dungeon really opened my eyes to the world of sex and sexuality and just what turns people on. You really cannot judge what people are into, and you’d never know. It’s funny, the ‘geezers’ that make the gay jokes about bumming are often the same ones that ask the women to wear strap ons ;-). People have their quirks and their kinks, they just hide it well BELIEVE me. 

I’ve seen a lot and I’m very open and not much phases me, but because I’m not phased, or excited by the gossip or the fascination of it all I'm over it. …....over the labels, the questions, the presumptions, opinions and the basic inability to let people do what they want in peace. So because of this I decided a long time ago that I’m actually over my sexuality and stopped speaking about it  back in my twenties. 

Yawn.  

No one owns me and no one dictates.

I’m not anything, I’m just me in that particular point of time. No path is set and I answer to no one except who’s in my bed. 

Keep your own truth

[balancedpluto]

All arcana asks ;)

I hate u so much Hayden. Putting it under a read more cuz HECK this is a lot. Also u can clearly tell Rose is my most fleshed out apprentice lmao. U can also tell when I started to burn out lol. THIS TOOK ME ALL DAY HECK

1. Name? Surname?Rose LaFontaineAaron (???)Lyra (???)

2. Any Family?Rose: she has a sister who’s 10 years older than her named Yvette, she’s a pirate. And her mother still lives in Fantasy France.Aaron: SO MANYLyra:….she doesn’t like to talk about it

3.Any Familiar?Rose: A bull mastiff named Mika who can change in size (so she can fit in a pocket or be the size of a horse, at her will)Aaron: A bearded dragon named Sir Slappy Skiddaddly the Third Lyra: A cute little rat named Pixie

4.Asra, Nadia, or Julian?Rose: JulianAaron: AsraLyra: Nadia

5. Best strength in magic?Rose: IllusionsAaron: Fire magic. Anyone who follows Eereree saw this coming.Lyra: the creation and manipulation of light

6. Favorite color?Rose: Maroon or light pink Aaron: Red. Surprise surprise Lyra: Purple

7. Favorite number?Rose: 69Aaron: 420Lyra: HOW DID YOU TWO ANSWER THAT SO FAST??? Uhh, 7?

8. Sexuality?Rose: BiAaron: PanLyra: Lesbian

9. Weird hobby?Rose: not really weird so much as unexpected for her, but she likes to sew and knit.Aaron: Weed lmaoLyra: Buying books but never actually getting around to reading them.

10. Favorite season?Rose: SpringAaron: FallLyra: Spring as well

11. Favorite weather?Rose: Sunny, but not hot.Aaron: Thunderstorms Lyra: Drizzly

12. Favorite place in Vesuvia?Rose: The Raven, or Mazelinka’s place. She loves that lady like she was her own grandmother.Aaron: The market. That pumpkin bread thoLyra: The palace library

13. How does their laughter sound like?Rose: Sober, its a soft almost teasing giggle. Drunk, loud cackling. Both are very charming in their own way.Aaron: LOUDLyra: giggling and soft snorting

14. How do they look like when they cry?Rose: She doesn’t cry often so when she does its…a lot. Loud gross sobbing often accompanied by yelling. Its not pretty.Aaron: Ghibli tears. You can’t convince me otherwise.Lyra: A lot of sniffling

15. What do they like to wear?Rose: Long dresses/skirts with low cut tops. Her brests are her best asset and she’s gonna show em whether you like it or not.Aaron: Tits out. That’s all u need to know.Lyra: Long, modest cut dresses with a corset. Very simple, but she always looke nice.

16. What are their fears?Rose: Fears? Don’t know her. (Actually death, which is…ironic considering the circumstances)Aaron: Abandonment. And cockroaches.Lyra: Rejection. The dark.

17. What do they like to do Friday night?Rose: put on fancy lingerie, get wasted, and play card games.Aaron: Blaze it lmaoLyra: (cuddling with Nadia) Reading

18. Do they use makeup?Yes. All 3 of them.

19. Favorite food?Rose: Mama LaFontaine’s crepesAaron: Spicy Vegetarian ChiliLyra: Cookies (technically not FOOD, but sweets are her big weakness)

20. Favorite drink?Rose: Rosé wine. Sounds redundant considering her name, but thats why she likes it. Growing up she thought it was named after her.Aaron: Just water, surprisingly.Lyra: Green tea

21. Zodiac sign?Rose: CancerAaron: Cancer Lyra: Aquarius(I dont care i have two apprentices that are the same sign leave me alone)

22. Day of birth?Honestly haven’t even thought if that lmao

23. Favorite movie?Rose: Heathers. She loves a bad bitch movie.Aaron: Shrek. Lyra: Not really a movie person tbh. She likes Disney stuff tho.

24. Favorite music genre?Rose: Classic rock or indie. Also has an interest in things involving old or obscure instruments.Aaron: Pop PunkLyra: Soft indie or video game soundtracks

25. Favorite song?Rose: Over the Hills and Far Away- Patty GurdyAaron: It’s Never Sunny in South Philadelphia-The Wonder YearsLyra: Youth- Daughter

26. Favorite TV show?Rose: Likes to watch cooking shows cuz its usually the only thing good onAaron: Doesn’t really do TVLyra: Also not really into TV, will put on like, QVC or something for background noise tho (im guilty of this)

27. What is their style?Rose: Like i said before. Long skirt, tits OUT.Aaron: Lazy but somehow manages to look hot? How does he do that???Lyra: Simple and modest, but always in pretty colors.

28. Any mental health issues?Rose: She has some anger issues, along with a tendency to bottle everything upAaron: hrrhgghh i haven’t gotten that deep with him WHOOPSLyra: Really bad anxiety

29. Any health issues in general?Not really?

30. Are they human?Yeah….or are they dancer?

31. Favorite book?Rose: She honestly can’t remember the last time she had time to read for fun.Aaron: Wtf is a book lolLyra: Don’t make her choose for the love of god

32. Favorite book genre?The person writing these questions assumes I know books lmao

33. Favorite time of the day?Rose: SunsetAaron: Early afternoonLyra: Like, really early morning. My sweet child why are you awake this early

34. If they weren’t a magician, who would they be?Rose: A pirate like her sister. Unless this is meant as like a modern AU then she’d probably sew and knit cute things and sell them online.Aaron: Probably a video game youtuber tbhLyra: Not much different, only she’d run a little mom and pop knick knack/ book store instead of a magic shop

35. Do they believe in ghosts?Yeah

36. Do they believe in aliens?Kind of?

37. Do they like sports?What is this…sport you speak of?

38. How do they look like?Sexy

Rose: 

Aaron:

Lyra:

(art by @willowwish64 )

39. What is their biggest motivation to solve the Lucio’s killer mystery?Rose: To clear Julian’s name Aaron: To make sure it wasn’t him and he just doesn’t remember. I mean…fire is kinda his thing, so…Lyra: To put Nadia’s mind at ease

40. What do they think of Lucio so far?Rose: “He’s an asshole.”Aaron: “Goatman! Fuck you, goatman!”Lyra: “I can never look at a goat again without feeling terrified”

41. What do they think of Nadia so far?Rose: “She’s the kind of woman I strive to be. I have so much respect for her.”Aaron: “A smart, capable woman. Also really hot like wowie.”Lyra: “She’s so amazing and so beautiful and i don’t know why she likes me so much, I’m so dull compared to her and-” (this can go on for hours)

42. What do they think of Asra so far?Rose: “A great friend and mentor. I’d do anything for him.”Aaron: “He’s like…a human sheep…but really skinny…imagine hugging cotton candy filled with bones…its amazing. Also dat ass.” (He loves him but he’s bad at serious answers)Lyra: “A close friend to whom i owe my life”

43. What do they think of Julian so far?Rose: “Oh, Julian. How do i begin to describe how i feel about him? I’ve never met someone who’s so smart and witty yet so dumb? And he’d do anything for you but doesn’t think he deserves the same, even though he does. And, well, i could go on but the long and the short of it is, I love that idiot.”

Aaron: “He’s like a taller, hotter version of me AND IM SO PISSED”Lyra: “he sure is…something”

44. What do they think of Portia so far?Rose: “My future sister in law???? I love her so much! ”Aaron: “She’s…so small…my god im surrounded by small people”Lyra: “She’s so lovely!! She’s like my best friend!”

45. What do they think of Muriel so far?Rose: “He…doesn’t like to talk much does he? And he’s so…TALL. Makes you wonder about…things.”Aaron: “Him big. ”Lyra: “He…kind of scares me a bit? ”

46. Do they like animals?OF COURSE

47. Are they allergic to anything?Nope

48. Do they have any talents (except magic)?Rose: Again, she’s really good at sewing/knittingAaron: He can lick his elbow. And he shows off his “skill” to everyone. Charming i know.Lyra: She’s really good with animals

49. Do they get drunk easily?Rose: No, she can hold her liquor pretty well. She usually just gets tipsyAaron and Lyra: YES

50 .What is their personality type?*fart noises*

51. What is their worst negative quality?Rose: She tends to dodge any question that’ll make her show any negative emotion. Being with Julian is kind of helping her with that, since he needs her support and she feels okay talking about this stuff with him. Also she tends to be kind of overly sexual. She doesn’t really mean to, it just happens.Aaron: He tends to take serious things as a joke sometimes.Lyra: She likes to just, avoid people. She’d rather just be alone by her own choice than face rejection.

52. What is their best positive quality?Rose: She’s like a mom? You wouldn’t think that on the surface, but she’s actually really warm and motherly.Aaron: So fucking funny.Lyra: She has a heart of gold

53. What is their position to fall asleep?Rose: She likes to fall alseep with Julian resting his head on her chest and petting his hair. Motherly instincts, i guess. Also it’s the only surefire way of making sure he sleeps. If she’s alone, on her stomach or side with her arms under the pillow.Aaron: Starfish. Asra just has to deal with it, i guess.Lyra: Curled up with Nadia. It’s where she feels safest.

54. The most uncomfortable moment they ever experienced?Rose: (spoilers) Finding out she died. Considering death is her greatest fear, it was especially hard for her to swallowAaron: When his brother found out him and Asra were fuckin…and he found out his brother and Nadia were fuckinLyra:…..

55. Their happiest memory?Rose: When she first came to Vesuvia. It was kinda scary, but there’s SO MUCH TO SEE!!Aaron: Getting Slappy. Lyra: Finding out Nadia likes her back. She nearly fainted.

56. Do they blush?Rose: Not really, if she does its hard to tellAaron: SometimesLyra: YES

57. Are they clumsy?Nah

58. Do they like jokes? Of course, they’re people, arent they?

59. How do they flirt?Rose: VERY direct. She’s not afraid to let people know what she wants.Aaron: “Hey cookin’, what’s lookin’?”Lyra: oh god she’s so bad at it help her

60. Favorite fruit?Rose: StrawberryAaron: Orange Lyra: Kiwi

[ayekanaru]

SHIPPING INFO.       Answer the following for your muse(s) so people       know how shipping works on your blog. REPOST.       Don’t reblog.

WHAT’S YOUR OTP FOR YOUR MUSE?:

#IDontKnow2k17

I mean...not Yosho and Ayeka, for sure. Ew. *Michael Jordan voice* Stop it. Get Some Help.

if you want romantic otps, I guess it’s Ayeka/Ryoko/Tenchi and even then, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t go nuts for it. It’s just the ship that makes more sense for me. I don’t go nuts for the more popular Ryoko/Tenchi and yet that also makes much more sense than Ayeka/Tenchi -- I think because I see the latter as working better as friends. Ayeka has had such bad luck with romance, I’m just happy somebody who isn’t her direct family LIKES her XD

For the maybefriendsotp-but-we’re-not-really-sure-category, I like the dynamic between Ayeka and Mihoshi. Partly thanks to the lovely @mihoshi-kuramitsu since it’s through our threads that I was able to think deeply about these two, and how Ayeka thinks about Mihoshi. From the OVA we got a glimpse that maybe Ayeka respected her/her reputation/her title as Galaxy Police officer, until she started living with her XD But at the same time, in lots of domestic things, Ayeka never fails to be next to Mihoshi and I like to think it’s through that that Ayeka begins to understand -- or at the very least, see where Mihoshi’s coming from. 

At the same time, lookit episode 7. Their Episode 7 interaction never fails to make me laugh and also cringe a little now as an adult. Ayeka is MEAN when she’s in extreme rival mode. Mean mean MEAN. Poor Mihoshi!

SASAMI AND AYEKA, BEST SISTERS 4EVAH. Urd, Belldandy and Skuld who?

FOR FRIENDOTPS THOUGH -- this is a recent one comparatively, but I love the idea of Umi from Magic Knight Rayearth and Ayeka hanging out. I feel like they’d get together so well, since they’re both from rich families yet pretty subdued in their personal selves. They have quiet chats, or sometimes are just content to be next to each other in their worlds. Oh! And Ayeka could teach Umi how to sew (Umi hates sewing), while Umi can teach Ayeka how to bake (Umi’s an expert baker!) I HAVE LOTS OF OTHER HEADCANONS, I’D JUST HAVE TO REMEMBER THEM AND ALSO THEY’RE CONTEXT/SITUATION-BASED. (Umi would be the tag team partner with Ayeka while fighting. FRIENDLY BANTER ENSUES ♥)

And for a little blog crossover -- ironicaly enough, I think Skuld and Ayeka would be more acquaintances than friends. Ayeka may treat her like the kid that Skuld doesn’t want to be treated as (seeing her like she sees Sasami), and Skuld may see Ayeka as a classy lady, someone like Belldandy, someone to look up to...until she sees Ayeka and Ryoko XD. deja vu, yo. 

I also think Ayeka and Skuld would not interact a lot? Like. They’d be quiet together, to the point of not wanting to get together. (Or get angry and destroy the universe, both have some tempers!) IDK,  their relationship may mirror how Ayeka feels about Washu? Blah.

(For the record, I see Ayeka and Belldandy getting along swimmingly.)

And then there’s some people from ZOIDS too, but I’ll leave that for later because apparently I can crossover two or five series with ZOIDS. Jeebus I have a problem.

WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO RP WHEN IT COMES TO SHIPPING?:

Anything so long as it’s not incest*, torture porn, pedophilia and look, just pick up your local doujinshi with Ayeka in it, especially as the submissive, innocent type, and anything in there is off-limits, there you go. (Weeps for humanity.)

*And considering the incest mess Tenchi Muyo! has, this gets complicated. I recognize and know why Ayeka loved her brother as both brother and man, but I also know that Yosho didn’t want her that way thank Tsunami, and their families created their engagement for political reasons. Not good reasons, but it is what it is. I’m not up for any incest of any kind, either way and Tenchi's case is a hullabaloo, hoo-boy, but yeah

HOW LARGE DOES THE AGE GAP HAVE TO BE TO MAKE IT UNCOMFORTABLE?:

If romantic: I’d rest easier if both muses were 18+, but if there’s like…a 40 yr-gap and both are human –unlike say, everyone on Jurai who are millennia old and some random person from Earth– I’mma just close the ‘X’ and back away. (My parents have a 22 yr-old gap, I know what I’m saying.)

Other than that, *shrugs*

ARE YOU SELECTIVE WHEN SHIPPING?:

Based on personal roleplay experience, yep-a-roonie. Also, some of the questions below answer why, besides the fact that I’m choosy as heck. More so with Ayeka, because she doesn’t seem to ‘search’ for love, if you know what I mean. 

HOW FAR DO STEAMY MOMENTS HAVE TO GO BEFORE THEY’RE CONSIDERED NSFW?:

Once it gets into groping territory and some clothes are startin’ to be shuffled. I don’t rp smut on here at all. just because it’s extremely uncomfortable,

WHO ARE OTHER MUSES YOU SHIP YOUR MUSE WITH?: 

Didn’t you ask me this in the first question? Go up there and read again, yo.

…Unless you meant on Tumblr…in which case…

(Most of these are as friends, because i’m a boob. If you’re not on here I JUST FORGOT I SWEAR)

As I said above, I love how Mihoshi and Ayeka have gotten enough development thanks to @mihoshi-kuramitsu. Same goes for @asktenchi -- it’s refreshing to see Tenchi written almost the same way as he is in the Okuda manga, only with more memes sass and “oh god why am I even here why do I do these things????” Tenchi feels real, man. I like that the dynamic between Ayeka and Tenchi gets explored because YEAH they need it.

I love how all the active Ryokos can get something out of Ayeka. The quiet chill and quick liners from @galacticdemon -- the sparse canon and domestic from @spacepirate-ryoko -- and the balls off the wall insanity that is @bringerofdxmons -- they’re all so great and I love that I can have Ayeka reflect on aspects of Ryoko with them <3

I like the banter and general interaction with Nappa! @nappainanotherdimensionI think it’s pretty cool that Ayeka gets to interact with another alien, as it were, who’s not from the Masaki household, and who actually forces her to rethink things. To top it off, his thoughts and (for her, out of the blue) occasional words of support surprise her. Think of it this way: you know what your family thinks about you, so you might not care as much -- but when a friend tells you things, you feel like you exist.

Dandy and Ayeka are best pop-duo 100/10 @pyoniumyankee I gotta get back to our threads, but Ayeka’s learning to keep up with Dandy, let’s just say! 

@invenina never fails to have her muses be fast friends with mine IT’S AN AMAZING ABILITY. Though with Carmilla, Ayeka’s starting to feel more like “the friend that wishes she wasn’t a friend, but would probably still get a froyo* with you.” Ayeka sees Carmilla as a young upstart (haha young geddit) who’s rough but at least is better than Ryoko in the sense that she's not a pathological liar and someone who’s trying. She’s got a young nation-state in Madripoor, Ayeka sorta gets it. 

*I have no idea if froyos are still a thing. I have never tasted one either.

@yunhuntress‘s Fang and Ayeka are so great and full of feels together, that Kat already made a verse for us. It’s such a weird relationship because they’re definitely friends --Ayeka cares for Fang and appreciates her a lot, especially her insights. But there’s also a feeling of...”ARE THEY?????” or is that just me I certainly didn’t mean for it to turn out that way, but who’s complaining, idk mang, you? 

DOES ONE HAVE TO ASK TO SHIP WITH YOU?:

Yes. Because a) I’d like to know and b) I’m an idiot, I don’t know when’s someone’s interested or not.

HOW OFTEN DO YOU LIKE TO SHIP?:

Not a lot, really…I like thinking about ships, if I have them, and theorizing a lot. But never put anything into play, and if I draw them, I either doodle stuff like here or…don’t draw them at all. The latter is what usually happens, haha. I’m poopy at drawing cute stuff too, so.

ARE YOU MULTISHIP?:

NAH, SON. It’s an unpopular stance on Tumblr, more so nowadays, but I’m singleship! I’d say why but again, pretty unpopular, so bleh. (I mean…at some point, if something drastic happens, I might change to multiship, but I have a good reason for my stance.)

ON AYEKA HOWEVER, it’s different because she actually has a canon future polyamorous/polygamous marriage! And it’s one that absolutely makes sense out of most anime I’ve seen, haha. So that’s why here I’m singleship, but multiship if polyamory’s involved. AKA if it’s at the same time in one universe, not an AU or anything like that.

ARE YOU SHIP OBSESSED OR SHIP MORE-OR-LESS?:

Um…neither…it depends..?

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SHIP IN YOUR CURRENT FANDOM?:

#NumberOneFanofKazukiAmameClub

please. lookit them. She basically decides to teach him Juraian martial arts after calling his butt out for not carrying a gun to protect himself (aren’t you, like, a police officer????) and then they fall in love and listen, just based on this pure image alone, and the Masaki men having a Thing for strong women, that this is where it all started...

Also, I love that Seto had a deep relationship with Mikami, and something happened where they basically just separated and then Seto got married to Utsusumi. Like. We had canon lesbians/bi before the polygamy angle. This explains why Seto talks so much to Mikami! And Seto’s harem, I guess....? Now if only Kajishima showed us instead of his shota crap,it would be better! GIVE US THEIR ADVENTURES, THEY PROBABLY PRANKED EVERYONE ON JURAI.

FINALLY, HOW DOES ONE SHIP WITH YOU? :

I guess just ask? I prefer to write enough with someone where I know that our muses know each other well enough, that I could see it happening!

TAGGED BY.

One Gigamillion Years Ago by @nappainanotherdimension

TAGGING. @mihoshi-kuramitsu @yunhuntress @cantusecho @galacticdemon @spacepirate-ryoko @bringerofdxmons @pyoniumyankee @rosabrida @spiritxgun @sammyadorable @personategod @extravachance @reilapsed @invenina @discguise @devilslcg @asktenchi @way-of-flowers

[paxvictoriana]

The Incredible, Radical Jessica James

• • •  [spoilers below]  • • •

In the middle of a blind date she doesn’t particularly want to be on, The Incredible Jessica James’ eponymous heroine squares off with her equally uncomfortable, male dinner friend/potential boyf/adversary.

They volley back and forth several brutally, “completely honest” questions.

After a few, he asks her, “How do you pay your rent?”

“I… work at a non-profit, in Hell’s Kitchen.” (Pride in her voice, though a somewhat knowing tone: yeah, I know. Very Brooklyn answer.) “I teach public school kids how to write and produce their own plays.”

“So… how do you pay your rent?”

She laughs.

Already – my Netflix ticker says this is barely 13:50 into the entire movie – the two biggest threads of the film come together: (1) an endearing, realistic romantic comedy starring Jessica Williams (that Dope Queen off The Daily Show who now does other stuff – namely, this) and rom-com’s staple dorky everyman Chris O’Dowd (because the thinking, even semi-straight woman[**] needs an IT guy); and (2) the female Bildungsroman.

If you’ve taken an English class any time since approx. 1980, you’ve probably had to learn and use “Bildungsroman” in an essay. It’s the coming-of-age novel, the story of growing up, an arc from innocence to experience. Except, as a pivotal cohort of feminist critics in the 1980s argued, the female Bildungsroman means “growing down,” a story of women being taught by society: Lower Your Expectations! Conform! Settle! The debate around what even is a Bildungsroman has wrestled with how gender-specific a story about maturing and (in essence) #adulting can be, given that women in Western society since the inception of the novel itself haven’t really had the options to leave home, discover themselves as autonomous, free, independent selves. The male Bildungsroman, in other words, is about the boy who grows up to be a man, and gets a job; the female Bildungsroman is about the girl who becomes a lady, and finds the right husband. Sure, there’s status and some freedom attached to that – class status and thus economic freedom, as the bourgieness of the novel excels at rewarding. But by and large, no matter how failed the male career, no matter how much the woman takes on a new career of domestic labor, the novels usually emphasize along these lines. Men achieve professional success; women aren’t left to be spinsters.

(A professor in my department, Jesse Rosenthal, pointed out how pervasive this narrative still is within even the most indie, “unconventional” of tales. His case study? (500) Days of Summer. As he recounted to a class on the 19th-cen. British novel, here’s a movie putatively about the romantic maturation of the male subject – a rom-com trajectory usually reserved for women [i.e.. He’s Just Not That Into You could never be She’s Just Not That Into You]. But Joseph Gordon Levitt’s problematic-nice-guy fairy tale, complete with problematic-indie-dream-girl Zooey Deschanel, isn’t his acceptance of a limited role in his next relationship. It’s a successful job interview. [roll credits])

So the fact that The Incredible Jessica James coupled, in several senses, these two plots wasn’t surprising to me. Less than 15 minutes in, and yeah, obviously, Chris O’Dowd is gonna get the girl, and Jessica is gonna get over her ex by realizing that she “deserves” this more mature guy. Her work is great and all, the story goes, but obviously what we want is Bridesmaids with a lady of color. Comedy + late capitalism’s precarity (Jessica, how do you pay your rent? Are you going to have to go live with your parents like Kristin Wiig had to after the cupcake biz tanked?) = love story. And bonus points for being about Instagram, and having a WOC lead where a white actress would have been five or ten years ago (slash even now): kudos, my friends. Kudos.

But… that’s not what happened. And here’s where this movie is radical.

Because The Incredible Jessica James is a female Bildungsroman [or Bildungs-Film] that subtly, cannily, definitively breaks the mold. 

It isn’t a story about a woman realizing how wrong she is to be hung up on the wrong, bad boy, and thus the return to the family, to society’s right side of the tracks, to *herself* that is made whole again by giving up her rebellious adolescent wandering and waffling. Instead, TIJJ presents a heroine who goes through a series of rejections not of lovers, but of jobs [displayed on her wall: see first screencap]. It tracks her indefatigable efforts to make what she loves (theater) into a career, even a somewhat uncertain one. It’s about her slow realization – not the sudden “awakening” narrative that critics have ascribed to female/feminist Bildungsroman of old – that what she’s doing, working every day with kids, continuing to send out her resume, writing and reading and connecting with the public circles of her aspiring field – all that, is a career.

Take, for example, a crucial marker of James’s acceptance of herself, and of her status, as grown-up, matured, sufficiently adult that she’s no longer faking it til she makes it: she’s Made It. The blueish-purple jumpsuit spotted in a Brooklyn consignment shop, the kind that is explicitly labeled as male by the sewn patch of its previous owner, “Randolph,” tall enough for even the pretty tall JJ. 

Working-class, second hand, male-identified uniform; natural hair in box braids; red lipstick and bright eyeliner. This is how Jessica meets her parents. But the music slides to an uncomfortable stop as Jessica gets off the Arrivals moving walkway: her parents are bourgie, sweet, stable, and utterly unlike her in spirit. This is the American middle-class dream – as authors from Frantz Fanon to Paul Gilroy to Ta Nehisi-Coates have written – that preys on Black people specifically, the double-consciousness of passing as it works in all its formulaic vapidity. Jessica’s younger sister, too, has bought into this dream: she takes one look at Jessica.

“You look like an auto-mechanic,” Jerusa (her sister) points out in a tone dripping with judgment.

“It’s cool, though, right?” Jessica beams.

“Yeah…” her sister nods, meaning the opposite. “I mean, you’re not going to wear it to the party?” [Her very normative, unironic, and uncritical baby shower.]

“… Nope,” Jessica deflates. Pretending this has been her plan all along.

Because this family isn’t ever going to be the place where Jessica can be anything other than stifled. The prim-and-proper group sits in the suburban family room late that night, merrily gooey-eyed over a romantic drama they’re watching on TV, whose dialogue (that’s all we overhear) is so utterly, sickeningly banal that Jessica doesn’t even enter the room. She hangs back, in the darkness. The entire setting – with all its race and class implications (and the sincere and moving subplot about the James family’s struggles with making their own rent, and how this continues to the present with Jessica’s public school kid whose divorced parents are fighting over custody, intertwines class and race throughout) – requires, in sum, the painful subjugation of Jessica’s self. A “growing down,” a compromise, as its definition of “growing up.”

Women of traditional Bildungsromane, Abel, Hirsch and Langland posit, “are not free to explore; more frequently, they merely exchange one domestic sphere for another. While the young hero roams through the city, the young heroine strolls down the country lane” (8).

Jessica James, by contrast, goes back to New York.

And back, at least superficially, to the romantic sphere of this rom-com. Where her jumpsuit is acceptable; where people like her appreciate thoughtful, empowering arts (instead of, like her mom’s Very White Book Club Lady friend wants, Cats). Where her lesbian best friend (that actress from Master of None) is the elective community James wants, not the family she’s contractually obliged to recognize in her blood. Where Chris O’Dowd is; where her career is.

So how does the movie wrap up the romantic plot without making this about Jessica’s successful “deserving” of the Right Man™?

(It’s worth noting, before we spoil the ending, that the Boone – aka O’Dowd – subplot of the movie focuses on his not being able to get over the right girl. He stalks his ex-wife, amusingly because it’s Chris O’Dowd, but I think the movie implies cringe-worthily and creepily too: the dude side of rom-coms, it seems, is bleak; not somewhere the film is especially interested in lingering, and neither really are we. He’s eventually ashamed of himself, and this humility is deliberately more endearing than his Every Breath You Take enactment was. Admittedly, we could get into the politics of who says they’re sorry at various points in the film, who asks for and who gives forgiveness, and the ways in which being placed in a position of forgiving is, in a way, simultaneously powerful and powerless. But Nietzsche and feminism is a debate for another time.)

What I’m especially struck by – and I’ve watched this movie myself and with my sister, and then thought about it again after it was praised by another woman I love who watched it an ocean away – is that TIJJ ends with Jessica.

The final two scenes are crucial here. The penultimate brings together the two guys; formally, the two choices of a Bildungsroman: forward, or back? Jessica’s ex, Damon, finds her backstage after the kids’ theater night concludes, and opens with how he “know[s] how much this means to” her. For a split second, I panicked: OH GOD, fuck, this is why we can’t have nice things. They’re gonna have this guy realize how great she is – because obviously the only way a guy can appreciate a woman is for him to be in competition with another man. She deserves better! I shouted internally. Don’t take him back: sure, you realized you were as responsible for the break-up as he was. So what! You can do better.

But they hug, they sigh, and he leaves. (At which point I breathed a sigh of relief.)

Enter Chris O’Dowd. (At which point I was back to, fuck conventionality. What a missed opportunity.)

Turns out, though, the movie saw me – and the Bildungsroman – coming a mile off.

Because Jessica – unlike Rachel – gets on the damn plane.

Jessica, after all, has been offered a huge job opportunity in the most novelistic of cities: London. But things are just getting back on track with Right Guy; but going is her dream, is her big break; but he, like Damon, just realized how great she is – he read her entire corpus of theatrical writing, and declared – #honesty – that he’s still coming to grips with her complexity, on the page and off; but; but; but…

But… she forgot to tell him about London. And in a sense, this is where swelling crescendos of orchestral joy began filling my head, because if this had been a rom-com like the others, if this had been a female coming-of-age story like the others, she would never forgotten about him. Ever. Not once. He would have been her one phone call; her best friend-par-excellence; her Person. Instead, that honor goes to Tasha, the semi-parodic self-involved best friend who always, though, has Jessica’s back.

And so when the clearly wealthy – loaded, because of an app that is explicitly about the formal gesture afforded by technology of Family, without the actual emotional or affective labor of having to talk to those totally different people who somehow raised you! – Boone mentions “frequent flyer miles,” we can anticipate an airplane that Jessica (by now we can say, of course) will be on.

“Just if you wanted to… bring someone with you… to show you around the town,” he hedges, just before the cut.

“How does that work? [...] Frequent flyer miles?”

Cut to Jessica – in the god. damn. JUMPSUIT. Pleased as punch, sitting in – oh yes, we can have nice things – not even economy seats. The nice seats.

At which point, the truly INCREDIBLE part of this movie becomes clear:

Tasha: Dude, I can't believe your boyfriend bought us tickets to London.

Jessica: Okay, who said anything about him being my boyfriend?

T: Wait. What are you talking about? This is like, the most romantic gesture I have ever seen.

JJ: Yeah, it's dope. But it takes more than a couple of roundtrip tickets to London for somebody to be my boyf.

T: That is so boss.

Shandra – the elementary school girl whose divorced parents prompted Jessica’s own reflection on her parents/childhood – returning to her seat: What is so boss?

T: Uh, Jessica.

S: Oh, yeah. Duh.[… I]t was really cool of your boyfriend to get me a ticket, too.

T: Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. Sister. Just because a guy buys a lady a couple of roundtrip tickets to London does not make him her boyfriend.…

[a beat]

S: You know, I like your jumpsuit.

JJ: Thank you. Yeah, it's pretty bad-ass, right?

S: Hm. Yeah, it is.

They all exchange smiles, the camera zooms in for one final-close up of Jessica’s excited anticipation of landing for the beginning of – not her romance, but – her career.

COME ON! You’re telling me the final scene of this movie is a new affinity, a new definition of family, in which the white, straight, married couple form is reshaped into the female solidarity of friendship, while the child of that hetero dyad of yore is now the dark-skinned girl who herself is a budding author, having been mentored by Jessica, who is – onscreen – mentored by another strong, Black female playwright??? You’re telling me that throw-away moment in the corridor backstage with Chris O’Dowd that seems like the lead-in to a kiss is in fact his last appearance onscreen??? You’re telling me the movie, moreover, goes out of its way to stress – TWICE -- that whatever erotic/romantic relationship they’re in, Jessica didn’t accept this trip as the quid pro quo of settling down??? YOU’RE TELLING ME THIS NEW COLLECTIVE IS SO AWARE OF ITS MEMBERS’ QUIRKS AND FOIBLES AND SELF-AUTHORSHIP/FASHIONING THAT THE FINAL LINES OF THE MOVIE UNDERSCORE THAT JESSICA CAN, IN FACT, DRESS HOWEVER THE FUCK SHE WANTS, AND THAT SOME PEOPLE WILL LOVE HER FOR IT, AND FEEL THE SAME ABOUT THE THINGS SHE LOVES???

Get out of my face, TIJJ. You have *EXPLODED* the female Bildungsroman, and maybe the Bildungsroman full-stop. There is no return to the original society, no compromise, no settling. Jessica isn’t the one forced to the margins of the story by choosing either independence or submission: the family is.

For that matter, romance sort of is. Jessica has no “boyf”; Tasha has no (onscreen, stable, couple-form) gf, but neither is she a hypersexualized lerb. She masturbates on/off-screen, but it’s one of her quirks! She and Jessica go to a lesbian bar, where Tasha chats with several recognizably-styled queer ladies: but she is neither reduced to her own romance plot, nor denied any sexuality at all. She and Jessica, however queerly you read their relationship (and I don’t especially, but I see how one could), are the empowering couple of the film, supporting each other not just in romance but in their mutually-reinforcing careers.

This is a rom-com about aiming high, about finding a career not in, because of, or in spite of a guy, but because it’s the one through-line of the entire story. Jessica begins and ends loving her work, and the slow build of that love rewards her by the end. She has Made It. The fact that she probably goes home to an attractive dude who boosts but is not himself responsible for her career – sure, he gets her upgraded tickets, but her confidence, “forthright[ness],” and drive suggest she would have made it to London without him, no question, by whatever means necessary – is icing on the cake. Yes, there was a maturation narrative within the romantic plot (she learned to leap in her relationships; she also learned, as Boone did, to have realistic expectations of where both partners are at any given moment in a relationship). But this, the movie stresses, is not the end of the story. It’s a subplot within her story.

[gif from x]

I don’t think it’s unimportant, either, that Jessica Williams – a fine actress in this movie, entirely winning the screen – plays the heroine. By which I mean, I think it’s all the more radical that to play the romantic interest to gaze adoringly at rom-com’s Irish nerdboy Chris O’Dowd, the director/producers/writers picked a woman whose best-known appearances are in scathing condemnations of male privilege, white supremacy, and American patriarchal, racist, and just terrible norms in general. That such a woman is the new face – but I didn’t even get to talk about the fact that in a few scenes, Jessica J/W’s complexion is a little spotty, which made me (with a long history of struggling with the medical and psychological reality of being a teenager and then adult woman with terrible acne) want to cry with gratitude: this is what a heroine looks like? 

Sure, Wonder Woman is fab, but damn I needed this representation so much – maybe more – than the superheroic, impervious demi-goddess from Themyscira. I needed a strong, self-loving, no-nonsense, tall, Black, not-quite-starving artist in Brooklyn, jamming with headphones in the concrete stairwell of her building, who proudly declares, “I’m freakin’ DOPE.”

I needed a new female coming-of-age story – especially in 2017 –, and, somewhat subtly but unquestionably, The Incredible Jessica James delivered.

***

{** I use “women,” “men,” “male,” and “female” throughout this piece to refer mostly to the historical categories of those identities/concepts. I also want to be clear that I’m not trying to gloss over this film’s missteps; rather, I’m trying to celebrate its major, but possibly missable, wins. Lastly, I know that in German Bildungsroman means *novel* of development/maturation, not *film*. Don’t @ me.

Thanks to Jesse Rosenthal (JHU) for getting me thinking about the basic understanding of the Bildungsroman in such concise, formal terms. For the debate about male vs./and female Bildungsromane, see – to name just some –, Abel, Hirsch and Langland (eds.), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983); Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750-1850 (1999); Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (1989); Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987); and Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993).

The Incredible Jessica James (2017), dir. and writer Jim Strouse; produced by Beachside Films/Netflix. S/o to casting, Kate Geller and Jessica Kelly. Thanks also to Springfield! Springfield! movie scripts for their transcription, which saved me time. }

[twistednuns]

December 2018

Iglo Veggie love with broccoli, buckwheat and black beans. Quick and easy.

The TEDxTUM event was pretty inspiring. I loved how they organised it and some of the speakers were amazing. Seeing all the cool stuff other people are working on actually motivated me to try and achieve great things myself. I'd like to learn about something new, start a project or volunteer.

Pick Up Limes videos.

The way Cher sings the word Memphis in her cover song.

Seeing Frank for the first time in four months. Having a good time at the Uncle Acid concert, getting a beer at Flex. Even though meeting him always causes some kind of emotional turmoil it might actually help to solve a few things I've been stressing over this time, for example that whole deal with Claudia.

Spending two hours in the kitchen on a Sunday morning. Preparing a summer and a winter curry. Pre-cutting salad. Listening to Tai Chi music. Baking these divine buckwheat chocolate cookies - absolutely delicious even though I forgot to add salt. Kinda healthy, too! It's grain-free (I even used groats) and I substituted part of the sugar with honey.

Gift ideas for rock collectors and mycophiles.

A spotted woodpecker in our backyard.

Dalmatian Jasper. Such a pretty stone.

Blinded by the Light. And a trip down musical memory lane. Making a nostalgia mixtape. Singing, enjoying the sound of my voice (as long as I hit the right vocal range).

Drawing owls. For hours. Using my Polychromos coloured pencils. I'm currerntly working on two owl-related projects, designing a logo for coffee roasters and making my friends' wedding invitation. Drawing owls like lovebirds is such a satisfying thing to do. Also: making my students come up with new ideas! Some actually drew some owl logos, too!

Tetris.

Reading books I don't understand. By people who are smarter than me. A very humbling experience. There is so much more to learn, experience and achieve.

Franzi's elegant coat and her ice crystal earrings. She's pregnant but she is skinnier than before and looks great. We cuddled up on a rooftop and had Kinderpunsch.

Practising The Pogues' Fairytale of New York for for karaoke night. I never hit the NYPD choir note quite right. My neighbours must hate me.

Taking a mental health day. Starting the day with baking cookies, making vegan sushi rolls. Reading, taking a nap. Yoga in the evening. Feeling really happy and relaxed. One of those rare inspired days when everything just falls into place. I kept revisiting beautiful places and memories during Shavasana. And I LOVE my yoga teacher more and more each week. So sad she is leaving the studio.

Taming your temper - tips for anger management.

Another coincidence. I wondered when the next Bilderbuch record will be released when I was looking at Mavi Phoenix at her concert - that girl is the female version of Maurice Ernst. A few hours later I found out that Bilderbuch actually had released a new album one day ago. WHAT.

Mirror tape.

Being a fluffy little red cat's human of choice. We sat in a cat café, no animals in sight. After a while a cat walked up straight towards me, sat down on my yellow scarf and kneaded it. Later she demanded attention and purred while I scratched her jaw. Apparently this was quite a rare occurence because she is said to be really shy and hard to handle. Weirdos unite!

Making Bhindi Masala, a vegan okra curry. Spicy and intense - delicious! Oh, and sushi rolls filled with avocado, veggies and fancy tofu/tempeh. Now I have a whole container waiting for me in the fridge.

Practising yoga for 20min on a gloomy Monday morning. Lighting a candle, drinking a cup of Ayurvedic Kapha tea with honey and lemon.

Tom, who inspired me to learn more about Ayurveda. And to rewatch The Darjeeling Limited because let's face it - Wes Anderson really knows how to make one of the poorest countries in the world look gorgeous.

We become what we think about. It's impossible to be successful without having a destination.

Quotations from Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World: 1 / 2

"Smelling you almost makes me cum."

Running around with a fake septum piercing. I kinda like the look. I'm actually considering getting a real one but so far I'm fine with the clip-ons. The good thing is that you can't see the ring's ends anyway in that kind of piercing.

Spending time with the old friends. The best ones. The ones you don't have to speak to and it's still not uncomfortable. The ones you can be super weird around and they embrace it. The ones you can tell your strangest ideas and stories.

There is a new Turkish supermarket right around the corner! Fresh cilantro whenever I want! YES!!!

Heavy snowfall. It does look kinda pretty, I admit.

Many questions, not enough answers at the ESO Supernova exhibition/planetarium. / Making another cat friend over breakfast. / Seeing my foxy ginger lady Anika again after such a long time! / Orange marzipan lebkuchen and roasted coconut almonds (they taste like Raffaello). / Finding the perfect earrings and a beautiful head band at EDITED - The Label. / Performing Fairytale of New York live on stage with Manu. Being able to curse at somebody through song is perfect, I had a lot of fun. Also, he promised me his art teacher sweater as a Christmas present.

A knitting project with rainbow wool.

Making a clay sculpture for my mum. Taking it out of the oven at 80 degrees, wrapped in a dish towel like a baby.

The honey marzipan nougat bar from dm bio.

Meeting Manu at his office. Receiving the most awesome paint palette sweater as a Christmas present! And he let me spend a full hour in virtual reality! He has such an amazing programme which lets you draw in 3D and float around in space (with VR goggles). I'm absolutely fascinated and intrigued. Gotta visit him more often.

Meeting Tobi, Maike, Lena and Christian at Märchenbasar. Being drunk after some Feuerzangenbowle with rum (Pfeffi in Manu's case) and white mulled wine. Taking the long way home.

Buying Paulaner Spezi for my class. Supermarket trips with the kids before 8am. Schrottwichteln. Watching random goat videos and intros to children's series.

Having a drink at Goldene Bar in Haus der Kunst. Such a gorgeous place. I'm trying to get into a workshop on the museum's architecture at the end of January.

Making random people want to kiss me. Having no desire whatsoever to actually kiss them.

The Harry Potter round (on special request) at the pub quiz.

Reading Stephen Hawking's short answers to some of the big questions. I have to admit, I know nothing about physics or cosmology and at times his explanations were super hard to understand (fine, I probably didn't understand most of it) but I love creating a need to use my brain in uncommon ways.

Vivid dreams. About  dangerous skyscrapers (just different floors stacked loosely on top of each other), a kidnapping in a futuristic car by very glamorous gangsters, lesbians on a scooter trying to save me, travelling through Asia and the US with Sash, a sinking ship (but all the passengers swam back to the surface after a short period of unconsciousness), ATMs, fancy drinks, meeting strangers with beautiful eyelashes at a restaurant.

Discovering the Trouvelot astronomical drawings (1882) on the darkest day of the year, winter solstice. Watching the night fade away ever so slowly in the morning from the kitchen window, squeezing fresh oranges to make juice for breakfast. Bright orange and midnight blue is a great colour combination.

ASMRctica.

An article about a dear friend of mine appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung! So happy for him.

Spending time with very old friends right before Christmas. Tobi, Sash, Michi, Yanic, Fischi and his wife... Playing MarioKart on SNES with Peter and taking weird selfies together. I had a very nice evening.

Managing to get a look at downtown Chicago during my layover. I uber-ed into the city centre (watching the skyscrapers getting larger and larger), walked around Millenium Park and along Lake Michigan. I spent quite a bit of time at Blick, an amazing art store, before I took the train back to the airport.

Arriving in Mexico in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. Seeing the city sparkling from above. Watching a bunch of kids beating a pinata well after midnight. Arriving in a beautiful artist's apartment in Condesa.

The Anthropology Museum in CDMX made it on the list of my favourite museums ever. I could have spent days there. I kept sketching some of the funny masks and Maya figurines. There were plenty of creepy tombs and skeletons, depictions of weird Gods, handicrafts and woodcarvings. It was just so interesting, probably because I had never seen a lot of South American / Aztec culture before and I love learning and exploring new things.

Christmas day in CDMX: sunshine, tacky glitter decorations, pointy balloons and spiky pinatas. Dancing, ancient smoke rituals performed by a Mayan community.

Mexican street food, especially the vegetarian street food tour with David. Meeting the Blue Corn Lady (her quesadillas are with cactus and beans and they're incredibly delicious). Flatbread, corn, fruit with chili and lime. Pulque and Mezcal. Finding out that the green salsa is actually worse than the red one. Tacos, Enchiladas, Tamales. If you go to Mexico just for the food you'll still have plenty to explore.

That evening with the pink sunset. Walking through the old used book store in Roma. Reading an interesting take on Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Meeting the resident cat.

Lucha Libre! Watching the luchadores, especially the small people in the second round. Laughing about the Mexican boy next to me swearing at the top of his lungs. Getting a mask as a souvenir.

Climbing the sun and moon pyramid at Teotihuacán. Getting a sunburn. Enjoying the atmosphere. It's a very impressive site.

Diving in Cozumel with Brooke-Anne (a librarian from Las Vegas who was raised by Mormons), Cynthia from Quebec and Lucie from Toulouse. Entering some coral formations underwater. Eating cantaloupe melon and chocolate cookies after the dive. Spending the evening with another Canadian, Jussi from Finland and that other dude from Puerto Rico. And some Indio beers.

What I loved most about Tulum were the ruins (right next to a gorgeous beach) and the health food restaurants (La Hoja Verde and Co.Conamor).

And this year I don't really have a good New Year's Eve story because I fell asleep at quarter past eleven in a little village west of Tulum. All alone. Could be worse though, I had an amazing year.

[femslashrevolution]

On the personal as normal; on the normal as political

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

A few months ago I had a conversation about pubic hair, with a lover of mine. Your bush is super hot, my lover said. I’m blushing, I said. Then she asked: was my decision not to shave a political one, or just a “this is fckn sexy” one? And at that last question—I wasn’t sure what it was, or why it was happening, but something reared up in me. Some looming, rebellious objection. It wasn’t my lover’s fault; she is a thoughtful and considerate communicator, and had done nothing wrong. And it was strange, to feel as I did; because it wasn’t as if I was new to the idea of female body hair being a site of political dissension. I’m thirty-five years old; I was hassled by my schoolfriends in middle school for not shaving my legs and hassled by my girlfriend in high school and my Womyn’s Center mates in college for shaving them. Patti Smith’s Easter, with its iconographic pit hair has pride of place on my record shelf. I have done my time in the trenches of feminist debate, and when I was younger I spent my fair share of time agonizing over which personal grooming strategy made me “the best feminist." 

 But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels normal. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of "at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous. And though I acknowledge the usefulness, in many contexts, of interrogating received wisdom and assumptions about what constitutes “womanly” or “hygienic” female behavior, I would argue that in this world—this world which, today more than ever, teaches women never to be at home in our bodies, never to be comfortable in our bodies, never to stop thinking about our bodies and feeling guilt and shame about our bodies—that there is value to carving out spaces of normalcy, as well: space for us to breathe into all our inconsistent and idiosyncratic ways. 

What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked. 

I am no longer a fandom newbie, but neither am I a long-time veteran of the wars. I wandered wide-eyed into fandom in my late 20s, already a full-grown adult: a near-lesbian in a foundering long-term relationship with a man, I was also a crafter and feminist and compulsive reader of literary fiction; and I was looking, with mercenary intensity, for writing which explicitly portrayed the kind of sexual complexity with which I was struggling in my personal life, and which I was pointedly not finding in published fiction. I knew zilch about fandom traditions or fandom political histories; all those fandom battles which old-timers were already heartily sick of fighting. I just knew: god! Here were people writing about sex (between men) so viscerally compellingly that even I could understand the appeal: I, who have always felt vaguely repulsed by men’s society and men’s bodies—even, inconveniently, the bodies of men I loved.

And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, the normal thing to do in this subculture into which I’d wandered. 

 Unsurprisingly, this provoked some interesting reactions.

Due in part to my ignorance when I came on the scene, I’ve since had a lot of interactions and internal debates, and witnessed a lot of fandom dust-ups, about those three things: writing female characters; and writing female characters in relationship to other female characters; and writing female characters fucking other female characters. (I have also written a lot about this, as well.) Some of these interactions have involved talking about why folks write queer women characters. More of them have revolved around why folks don’t; or don’t like to; or don’t think it’s a fair thing to ask; or don’t like it when I do. Common objections I’ve heard to writing and reading women fucking women include: there are fewer female characters in source media (or they’re not as interesting), so finding them and developing investment in them requires more work; f/f writing doesn’t get as much attention, and it is disheartening to choose political correctness over reader response; writing female bodies while living in a female body in a culture that hates female bodies is more emotionally difficult/traumatic; female bodies are gross; the mainstream hypersexualization of lesbians means that is it anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex among women, especially kinky sex; mainstream objectification of female bodies means it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex involving women, especially kinky sex; the omnipresence of sexist tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write female characters as anything less than morally exemplary, which is boring; the omnipresence of homophobic tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write a story that deviates from the anti-trope script (e.g. “happy lesbians with well-balanced relationships”), which is boring; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and including female sexuality is too close to home to be enjoyable; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and expecting hobbyists to be warriors in the army of capital-r Representation is obnoxious; fandom space is dominated by young women, and expecting them to be warriors in the army of capital-R Representation is sexist when we don’t hold middle-aged male media creators to the same standard. 

I could write an essay about each of these, some of which are really complex points with some merit. But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not. 

The $64,000 question: do I agree with this?

Are electrons particles, or waves?

I mean, let’s get this out of the way: if writing about women is political, then writing about men is political, too. Masculinity is constructed as the default flavor of humanity in our society, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear critical examination, nor does it mean that the actions of men aren’t informed by their socialization, or that everyone’s perceptions of men aren’t informed by power structures. Nor does it mean that men are immune from the toxic effects of life in a heteronormative patriarchy. If we as writers experience a focus on men to be a relaxing break from the stifling responsibility of depicting oppression, that is (a) pretty understandable, since that’s the myth of the (white cis hetero) male experience that’s sold to us from birth, but also (b) probably in need of some interrogation, since it doesn’t actually reflect anyone’s lived reality. Not even the lived reality of dude-bros who roll their eyes at the words “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”; and ESPECIALLY not the lived reality of queer men, who are, let’s remember, real people with a real history and a real present of active oppression due to their orientation. 

As to the question of queer women: was I right or wrong, in my fandom-naïve days, to assume that writing sex and relationships among women is essentially the same as writing those things among men? 

Yes. That is, I think I was right, and also wrong.

In a 1995 essay, Paula Rust enumerates many of the widely divergent and in some cases mutually incompatible interpretations of the oft-quoted second-wave feminist slogan ��The personal is political”:

The personal reflects the political status quo (with the implication that the personal should be examined to provide insight into the political); the personal serves the political status quo; one can make personal choices in response to or protest against the political status quo; one’s personal life influences one’s personal politics or determines the limits of one’s understanding of the political status quo; the personal is a personal political statement; personal choices can influence the political status quo; one’s personal choices reveal or reflect one’s personal politics; one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s personal politics; personal life and personal politics are indistinguishable; personal life and personal politics are unrelated.

If we adapt Rust’s terminology slightly to accommodate the act of reading and writing fiction, so that “the personal” becomes something more like “individualized character depictions,” then I think this passage becomes a useful tool in breaking down how we think about reading and writing women versus how we think about reading and writing men. It seems to me that often, when we are reading and writing about men (especially cis white men who are canonically assumed to be straight even if they fuck in fanfic), our attitudes tend to hang out in the spectrum ranging from, on the more nuanced end, “choices about individualized character depictions can be made in response to or protest against the status quo” to, on the less nuanced end, “individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated.” Since straight white men are the default, depicting them doesn’t feel primarily political. It feels normal. Things that happen to straight white male characters seem not to carry the burdensome weight of responsibility and representation that plagues female characters, especially queer female characters or female characters of color. The unspoken logic here posits that the things that happen to men, just happen! The traits men have are just traits! Men can be evaluated as individuals, because there is nothing to distract from that individuality. No matter that whiteness/straightness/maleness is not actually nothing, only an invisible something; and never mind that the completeness of the divorce between individualized character depictions and greater political realities is to a large extent illusory. The fact remains that that’s often the in-the-moment experience of reading and writing about male characters: they can exist as individuals, because their maleness is the norm. 

By contrast, when we are reading and writing about women (especially queer women and women of color), our default assumptions tend to range from “individualized character depictions can influence the political status quo” to “individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable.” It is burdensome to write about queer women because we feel that every individualized queer woman character we write, in her body and her actions, must both bear the brunt of, and actively resist, all that baggage listed above. She must subvert (on a meta level) and/or stand against (on an in-story level) the tide of mainstream objectification, of lesbian hypersexualization, of sexist and homophobic tropes, of poor treatment and shoddy development at the hands of media creators, and on and on. Everything that happens to her or doesn’t happen to her, every physical trait and every mental tic, is massively overdetermined, because we feel that to write about queer women is to body forth our own personal politics into the world—and, more than that, to transform the landscape of queer female representation entire. 

OBVIOUSLY, as a writer and reader this is neither fun nor possible! No character can do this. 

Please let that sink in. No character can do this. No character is so well-written that she is going to transcend the Oppression Soup in which we all swim; and even if she did, she would not be enough transform the landscape of queer female representation into an egalitarian wonderland. We can stop hitching our wagons to that star because it’s not going to happen. Good news! We are not failures because we fall short of this demonstrably impossible metric! Similarly: my friends and I can install low-flow shower heads in every bathroom in every apartment we move into, from now until our deaths, but we are still not going to offset the effect of Nestlé extracting 36 million gallons of water per year from our national forests to bottle and sell at a profit. Or again: my personal choice to make my own clothes, though potentially politically meaningful to me as an individual, is never going to counteract the coercive power of a global fashion industry that earns $3 trillion a year peddling the lie that women who are larger than a size 10, or who don’t have expendable income to keep up with the latest trends, are not employable, fuckable, or worth taking seriously. This is not to say that making my own clothes can’t be politically meaningful for me personally. Nor is it to say that I am incapable of meaningful political action: I can help to take on these oppressive and exploitative industries via mass organizing: public actions, legal challenges, legislative lobbying, investigative exposés, mass boycotts. But there is absolutely nothing that I alone can do, with my body or my apartment or my novel, that will dismantle these power structures. 

For one thing, this is not how institutional oppression works. Yes, the ramifications of oppressive power structures can manifest in intimate details of one’s life, and it does well to be conscious of that. But the causality doesn’t work in reverse: identifying and purging artefacts of oppression from the intimate details of one’s life, while potentially personally meaningful or satisfying, won’t meaningfully reduce the overall strength of the originating oppressive power structures in society at large. I cannot take down the fashion industry by making my own clothes. I cannot save the world from Nestlé by installing low-flow shower heads. I cannot dismantle sexism and heteronormativity by writing a queer female character who carries perfectly on her shoulders the representation of every oppression she suffers, and perfectly represents my personal authorial politics—or, indeed, by writing a host of such characters, and sharing them with a few thousand people on the internet. This needs to stop being the expectation, or even the ideal. To hold the queer female character to such a standard is to make of her even more of an unattainable exception to human existence than she already is: for none of us can stand in for All Women, or All Queers, or All Queer Women; and none of us should be asked to do so. 

For another thing, this is not how fiction works. Fiction doesn’t convince through intellectual perfection. Fiction convinces through building empathy and voluntary identification in readers for characters who may or may not be wildly different from them, and may or may not be placed in radically different situations than they have ever found themselves in, but whom they the readers, on some basic human level, nonetheless recognize. Crafting an individual character who inspires that kind of gut-level recognition is difficult if the author is assembling them primarily as anti-oppression talisman rather than a flawed and complicit individual; or if the author is undermining the voluntary nature of the reader’s identification by making the character, Ayn Rand-style, a prostelytizing mouthpiece for the author’s own philosophy. I think this is part of what people mean, when they object that writing women, or queer women, or women of color, feels “too political”: the strictures of talisman-creation undermine the ability to foster empathy for a real-seeming individual. But this is not a problem with writing queer women! It’s a problem with the unrealistic expectations we’ve placed on ourselves around doing so. 

I mean, for my money, the way to craft characters who do inspire this gut-level sense of recognition is to draw on one’s own experiences—one’s own passions and one’s own struggles—while also refraining from providing neat and tidy solutions to which real people (and hence characters in the moment) do not have access. People are messy; we have to be able to let our characters be messy. To paraphrase John Waters, who surely knows whereof he speaks: we have to let our characters make US uncomfortable. We have to let them make us feel queasy and ambivalent sometimes, just as we sometimes make ourselves feel that way. We have to let ourselves discover things through the journey of writing and reading that we did not know when we started out. 

Does this mean there is no point in research, no point in educating ourselves about over-used tropes and the history and current reality of queer representation, no point in critiquing media that perpetuates these tropes? Of course it doesn’t mean that. The goal—my goal, anyway—is to write characters who ring true to life, who come off as real people, with real struggles. And in order to do that, a writer needs to be familiar with the toxic and un-lifelike nonsense that gets endlessly recycled in media. It’s helpful to know, for example, that the “lesbian dies, goes mad, or returns to the heterosexual fold at novel’s end” trope was originally imposed on lesbian pulp writers as a condition of publication if they wanted to avoid obscenity charges: here is an example that’s, VERY clearly, not an artefact of lesbian reality but an artificial and homophobic narrative imposed from without. I think it’s valid to make the point that maybe, in this year of our apocalypse 2017, we have reached a point where this narrative should be largely avoided. 

But you know: there are a lot of artificial and homophobic narratives. And there are even more narratives that, while not intrinsically artificial or homophobic, have so often been twisted that way as to be forever tainted by suspicion and pain. And that suspicion and pain twist back into real lived experience in ways that can be complicated and unpredictable. If our culture is a house, then so many of its walls are built of tainted narratives, and so many of its other walls are built up against those tainted walls, that it’s very difficult to dismantle the structure, or determine what’s sound and what’s not. As a real-life queer woman, I have never met an anti-oppression talisman, but I have met plenty of queer women who have made me uncomfortable—myself at the top of my own list. Though I squirm at the “lesbian goes crazy” novel ending, I have known many queer women, myself included, who struggle with mental illness (as well as many who don’t). Though I have noped out of media for egregious and self-serving use of the “lesbian was just waiting for the right man” trope, I myself am a near-lesbian who once fell in love with a man, and I know others who have done the same (as well as many who haven’t). Though I share the frustration over the assumption that bisexual characters are universally flighty and commitment-averse, I also know several flighty and promiscuous bisexuals (and many bisexuals who are neither, and many flighty and promiscuous straight folks). Though I cringe a little at depictions of alcoholism and drug abuse in queer female culture, I am myself a queer woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. In a cringe-y catch-22, I am deeply uncomfortable with both the demonization of the working-class butch/femme subculture by the middle and upper classes of lesbian society AND ALSO with the degree of forcibly normative gender expectations I personally have encountered in butch/femme environments… so I decided to go ahead and write a whole novel about that, despite the fact that I might avoid someone else’s treatment of the same subject matter. 

The pattern here is hopefully obvious: even drawing from the pool of my own personal lived stories, many verge on or overlap with narratives that are often toxic in their execution. So what are we to do? Does all this add up to a wash, a free pass for the continuation of any tired and harmful trope imaginable? No. It adds up to a call for a nuanced and subjective calculus around analyzing works of art: an acknowledgement that some versions of Narrative X or Character Y will spark that sense of recognition or that shock of injury for audience members, and others won’t, and others will for some audience members but not for others, and all of that is valid to talk about. And it also adds up to a call for writers of queer female characters—especially those of us who are queer and/or female ourselves—to allow ourselves the freedom to write individualized queer women who, though they may not body forth our personal politics, make us familiarly uncomfortable. Characters with whom we are intimate. 

Characters with whom we feel at home. 

Taking a larger view, I think that we need to close the gap between our reading and writing of men, especially straight white men (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated”) and our reading and writing of women, especially queer women and women of color (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable”). Both sides need to shift. Neither extreme is true, and we are doing a disservice to all our characters, and our works, if we disregard the nuance that lives between them. But more intensely, and more specifically, I would argue that where queer female characters are concerned we need to work toward an attitude that—however partially and strategically—begins to uncouple “individual character representation” from “personal authorial politics,” and does so with the express goal of allowing these characters normality. Weird, inconsistent, flawed, complicated, mundane normality. We need to let go of the intimidating and paralyzing attitude that queerness and femaleness raise the political stakes in such a way that mundane fuckups, either on the part of the author or the character, are no longer allowed. 

To extend the analogies from earlier: if we have the water pressure to support it, we should install low-flow showerheads, not because we can thereby compensate for the evils of Nestlé, but to save on our water bills. And if we have the time and inclination we might make our own clothes, not because it will magically deliver us from the perils of the beauty industry, because it it a mode of self-expression that is also personally empowering. And if we can, we should write and read complex, flawed queer female characters, and support others who write and read them, because to do so enables us—real-life queer women, and people who know real-life queer women, and even people who might be intimidated or repulsed by real-life queer women—to feel that real-life queer women, in all their flawed and problematic glory, are more human; more at home; more recognized. Closer to the range of the normal. 

None of these things is going to save the world, and we don’t need them to. They are important and life-sustaining anyway. 

(The author can be found online as havingbeenbreathedout on Tumblr and breathedout on AO3. She can be found offline on the wide open beaches and labyrinthine interstates of sunny southern California, where she lives the social-justice nonprofit life and also enjoys Bloomsbury history, kissing girls, poolside cocktails, early-morning yoga, and crying about fiction with her live-in editor/BFF/queerplatonic life partner fizzygins.)