#for someone who sees themself in buck and has similar experiences as him

[hirakiyois]

my tumblr being full of tommy love and my twt being full of tommy hate is the exact opposite of what i expected but because i do deeply dislike tommy im glad there's at least one place i can go to

[just-a-carrot]

Hi Carrot so I was thinking about character designs and stuff but wanted to ask.

Do the Ow cast have any lasting fears or scars from their Time in wonderland ?

Like Iggy getting uncomfortable when people have or wave around scissors.

Or just occasional awkward tension between some of them when smt gets mentioned that connected to their death ? Since I think they would sometimes have déjà vu if I remember correctly.

Actually what are their fears ?

Also side questions would any of the cast get tattoos or piercings? Idk why I could kinda imagine Orlam having a ton.

hope you have a good day/night.

omg many questions lakdsjfa

some of these actually i've answered before if i remember correctly, i shall go look...

these were their fears:

Iggy: needles (and also doctors/hospitals in general to an extent), general fear of the dark

Genzou: (depressing one) dying alone, (sillier one) clowns, because he watched peewee's big adventure on tv when he was a kid lakdjfad

Orlam: being publicly humiliated/chastised, people yelling in general, but also when things are too quiet

Gidget: very very large things, heights (tho can force themself if they have to)

Bucks: ghosts and phantoms etc (she's super superstitious about that kinda stuff and enjoys scaring herself with it; she probably longs to go on ghost hunting treks and scare herself silly)

the other question i have answered here, tho it's not a great answer so i apologize (but there's some better discussion in the notes:

and as for the overarching question of whether or not they have lasting fears/scars, i think so. like they definitely experience a variety of deja vu moments, random flashes of memory. i think it says at some point in the epilogues that like, sometimes iggy just becomes overcome with an intense feeling of melancholy that weighs him down. so i think that lasting fears would definitely be part of this. i can't really think of any specific ones off the top of my head, but i think that in general, anything similar to or objects/locations related to a horrific experience they had in wonderland would be likely to dredge something up. even if they're not strong enough to make any of them actively afraid or actively avoid certain situations/places/objects, it would certainly summon guttural feelings of anxiety or sadness, which they'd probably all respond to differently. iggy would likely either want to be alone for a while or if with someone he feels safe with, just be held for a while. genzou i could see pretending he's not affected until later and then just going melancholic the rest of the night/having trouble sleeping. orlam i could see the opposite in that he'd probably try to overcompensate for it by being extra exuberant. gidget would want to talk to someone they trust. and bucks would probably cry (i see bucks as being much more prone to crying in general in the updated timeline than in the original)

[mishafletcher]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[needsmorewlw]

okay this is a weird ask but I am curious, the quarry counselors if they had super powers.. what do you think they would be?

Wait oh my god this is a GREAT ask.

I'm sorry this took so long for me to reply because I rly had to think about it. Also to anyone who sees this pls interact with your ideas?? I wanna read them so bad.

Max is some offshoot of a shapeshifter, C'mon it's right there. SweetBoi™ turns into GiantMonster™ with all the angst and accidentally hurting his loved ones that comes with it. Or maybe instead of a monster he has some kind of volatile elemental or a radioactive form that he can't control (at first) but eventually he figures it out and can swap between that and his regular form at will. Then maybe gradually he can kinda alter the form shapeshifter style.

Dylan is simultaneously giving me "No superpowers but just incredibly smart" ironman/batman moment. And ALSO the "scientist who accidentally gives themselves superpowers" genre. Especially since there's a massive list of energy manipulation brand of powers that is literally all about quantum physics (link to wiki page). I think his whole schtick would be utility. Using energy to make force fields or spatial displacement, like teleporting or making portals. Or maybe even messing with gravity, altering a thing or persons mass to make them heavier or lighter and throwing them around and make them explode. He just uses it to help with his experiments.

Either that or he experiments on someone else *cough* Kaitlyn*cough* and gives HER energy bending powers.

Speaking of Kaitlyn, she also gives me "No superpowers just incredibly competent" the BatFam master tactician energy. Nightwing, Batgirl "yeah we're just hot, smart and good at fighting". But if she did have powers, using a specific type of energy bending to enhance her fighting just seems like the sickest shit. Like she channels the energy around her and blasts it out of her fists when she punches. Plus she can channel energy to heal herself and all that.

Meanwhile Jacob! The first thing I thought about with Jacob is the whole "you hit him, he can hit back twice as hard" power. WHICH FUNNILY ENOUGH is also an energy manipulation sub genre. Kinetic energy absorption and all that. He can like, store energy from hits and then use it to buff his strength or to just do one massive game-ending attack. He can also like, save himself from a massive fall but absorbing the fall damage (though that took some practice). I think Dyl in this universe is just going buck wild handing out powers and tbh I'm living for it.

In a similar vein as Dylan, Laura gives me "scientist who purposefully fucked with themself for whatever reason. (Maybe bc her beloved bf got accidentally mixed up in some shit and got turned into a monster 👀) so she made moves to make herself into something that could help him. And she got the whole heightened senses, faster, stronger, she can jump really fkn high, regenerative powers, all that dope shit. Maybe she used animal genes or something.

Nick has the aura of every speedster in every comic book and movie. BUT ALSO could fall into the "person who found some otherworldly shit that attached itself to them now they're kinda possessed/share a consciousness with said otherworldly thing and have all its powers/abilities." Like Blue Beetle alien suit kinda vibe. And at first it tries to control him but eventually he gets his consciousness back and he can use the powers himself.

Emma gives me alien princess. She's a star, she's an otherworldly goddess. Like Starfire with a Superman background, she was adopted on earth and lived a normal life, not knowing she was an alien/had powers until she was put into some dangerous situation then she learns about her true origins. She can fly, she can shoot beams and balls of light out of her hands, her eyes glow, her hair sets on fire, all the hot girl shit.

For Ryan, he's definitely that hero that people are a little freaked out by because his power is kinda spooky. Like he can cloak/camoflauge himself and walk through walls by bending and altering his own matter which is rad, but he could also control your mind and reach into your chest and squeeze your heart, which he would never do but he could. He can also alter the matter of other things. Like he can make a ladder by sticking pipes through a wall, making them solid again and climbing up. Maybe he also has telepathic abilities where he speaks in your head and all that.

Meanwhile Ryan's powers also fall into the energy/matter manipulation subgenre and Dylan is entranced by Ryan's seemingly natural abilities and wants to know more about him 😌👉👈 you KNOW I had to add some Radioheads in here.

And Abi! She has all the making for "unbelievably powerful character who's too afraid to use it to its full potential." Like she can control the weather type of mayhem but she'll never do anything more than freezing the air around people's feet to stop them from running away or zapping people with electricity to stun them. But her powers are linked to her emotions and inevitably something happens to make her angry and it's a whole potential apocalypse scenario until her friends can calm her down.