#from one gay media form to one slightly more implicit gay media form

[ratspoizon]

Real.

Oh yeah I'm really into my ace attorney hyperfixation I think I'll be into it for a while like this always happens where I get obsessed with ace attorney for m- [Raging fuckin call of duty hyperfixation out of nowhere] ??????

[thedeadflag]

so this is something I've been mulling over for a while now - do you reckon it'd be possible to make a version of a/b/o that isn't fundamentally transphobic, or would it reach the point of "this is so different that you might as well not call it a/b/o" before that? off the top of my head you'd have to take out all elements of g!p, mpreg, and biological essentialism, and it'd probably be possible to write a version of a/b/o with that framework, but I don't know if I'm missing anything.

a/b/o is a reactionary trope that relies on cissexism-derived biological essentialism to function. Like, that’s the engine that powers the bdsm/power dynamics, cisheteronormative breeding/family building, “dub/non-con”, etc. elements that draw people to it, and led people to create it in the first place. 

Like, my best attempt at describing a non-transphobic, non-shitty typical a/b/o adjacent fic would include:

Werewolves (let’s face it, werewolves can be really cool if written well, and there’s a lot of really good ways to write them, a lot of ways to subvert tired subtropes within the trope)

Found Family-focused family/pack building (because wolves often adopt wolves from other packs into their own, blood lineage isn’t really a thing; much like vampires being created, newly turned werewolves of any age can be considered their sire’s child; if it needs to have a pregnancy arc between two men or two women, there’s IVF/IUI, or magically/spiritually-induced pregnancies, and of course writing a fully fledged complex trans character with their own non-pregnancy arc and virtues/flaws/goals/etc. and getting relevant trans beta writers who aren't your friends to keep it on track if you’re a cis writer)

A flexible, non-binary gendered society (rather than the rigidly structured biology-is-destiny a/b/o society) that’s trans inclusive either explicitly, or implicitly if it’s a new social universe with different rules. 

If mating seasons have to exist, they’re cultural more than biological, and no biological processes that could impede or trouble a person’s ability to properly consent. 

No inherent, glorified or reified power dynamics, certainly none rooted in or fostered through biology. 

That doesn’t seem very much at all like a/b/o to me. It’s a werewolf AU, which is the reason why a/b/o was created in the first place. It wasn’t enough. It needed something more than just a supernatural bent

I’ll continue on below for a bit on some simplified functions of a/b/o, but it’s mostly just some ramblings.

-

Like, to quote the originators of the genre/trope:

I'd like to see Alpha male Jared, and Bitch male Jensen. Jensen is a snotty prude (think Lady from lady and the tramp) he may be a bitch male but he's not just going to let anybody take a go at his sweet little ass...until he meets Jared...then prudey little Jensen turns cock slut for Jared. Bonus points for J2 being OTP, Jensen was a virgin before Jared, and now that they met each other, it's for life.

...

There are three types of men, alpha males, beta males, and omega males. Alpha males are like any ordinary guy with the exception of their cocks, they work just like canines (the knot, tons of cum, strong breeders, etc) The beta male, is an ordinary guy without the special cock. Omega males are capable of child bearing and often called bitch males.

Like, I want you to look at that real close and see what’s going on in there.

This was created to be a trope where there’s a world where women, as we explicitly know them, don’t exist, but where a subgroup of men take up the functional role of the woman in the heteronormative social structure of the world. It’s also not surprising that (assumedly cis) women created and initiated the spread of this trope.

Look at the language used. This is heavily, explicitly gendered for a reason. If you’ve read much of anything about how the male gaze impacts female sexuality, you’ll know a common response is for women to position themselves out of the proverbial frame entirely, so that no part of them can explicitly exist as an object, where they can take on the role of a subject. There’s no women whose experiences will directly link to her own and her own perceptions, comfort/discomfort/etc.

However, many of these women also have been heavily affected by the male gaze and heteronormativity, and that combined with not knowing what a real gay male relationship is like, what it looks like, what experiences might be unique to it...they fill in the blanks with their own conditioning. 

And maybe seeing a lot of that toxic masculinity in media content was unsettling because of how women get treated in that content, and how they in turn might feel in those shoes. But if a MAN, even if it’s a heavily female-coded man, were to undergo that...well, it’d be easier to appreciate those tropes and dynamics they’ve been force-fed to believe were arousing, hot, desirable. Especially if they can have two hot men in it. They can enjoy that self-created taboo, bypass their own discomfort and insecurity, and project it onto a type of person different enough to suspend their disbelief and maintain that difference, even if they’re pumping that guy full of all the typical misogynistic tropes and experiences they’re not comfortable having directed towards them and other women.

In short, it’s a way to get off on heteronormative norms/tropes, using another as a vehicle in order to keep up their cognitive dissonance.

Of course, this eventually spilled out into the Het fandom (makes perfect sense, since many of the a/b/o originators and proponents were het women), and then worked its way into Femslash fandom by piggybacking on g!p in order to meet the necessary criteria for PiV sex. 

Just, in this case, you necessarily shift some of the puzzle pieces around. Trans women take the place of the “alpha”, acting as an acceptable vehicle for a toxic masculine cis man, since lesbians aren’t into men. Even if the trans woman is generally written, in nearly every way aside from part of her body, as a toxic cis man. The original a/b/o’s “Bitch Male”/Omega Male is swapped out for the  Omega Female, usually a spunkier, more in your face version outside of romantic/sexual contexts in the media content, but let’s be real here, she’s still by and large submissive when it comes down to it. 

In a world where more wlw grew up feeling predatory for their attraction to other women, for feeling sinful, for being rejected from female intimacy het women enjoyed with each other after coming out, etc., it’s pretty common for a lot of lesbians to lack initiative, not be able to read or communicate romantic/sexual cues between each other...to essentially be “useless lesbians’ as the joke goes,and to feel isolated and undesirable. 

So writing a F/F fic where some hot woman modeled in the image of some hot cis woman pursues you? Takes the initiative sexually/romantically? Doesn’t beat around the bush, but is blatant? Who can’t control her lust around you? Who can give you the perfect nuclear family you’ve been conditioned to want in order to feel value in our heteronormative world, but were told you weren’t worthy of or could never feasibly attain? Who gives you a sexual encounter you have some education in and some emotional stake in due to common conditioning of PiV sex > all else? Who can give you plausible deniability for a number of contexts due to a lack of ability to explicitly consent? etc. etc.

Like, yeah, that’s going to feel comfortable for a lot out there. That’s going to seem pretty hot/arousing. It’s a way to get off on the norms and expectations thrown on women in society, but in a way that lets them distance themselves ever so slightly from men by shifting it from text to subtext, explicit to implicit.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s a few snippets from one of the most popular g!p/omegaverse femslash writers (if not the most popular) that help illustrate how/why this trope has found an audience

Why Do I Write G!P?The elephant in the room. It arouses me, but it’s also a form of self-comfort. I grew up in a very fundamentalist home. Women being with women was at first unspoken, and then derided, both by my church and at home. I felt insanely guilty for my attractions, so I developed ‘cheat codes’ to deal with it.

It was okay if the woman I had sex with in my dreams had a penis, for example. It was okay if she forced me to have sex with her. It was okay if we basically simulated heterosexual sex.

Because of my childhood (which included conversion therapy), I found myself falling into heterosexual roleplay patterns, at least sexually. It was a lingering thing from my childhood.

It’s still there, and I know I’ll never be rid of it.

...

I associate penetration with power. You know, being steeped in sexism from an early age turned some problematic thoughts into kinky lemonade. And since I’m a femme sub, taking power away from the top by ‘penetrating’ them can ruin the mood for me. I mean, I can write power bottom scenes with the best of them, and I enjoy them, but… *shrug* if I’m going to write omegaverse or g!p, someone’s getting fucked, and it’s not the top.

There are rules to a/b/o. There are specific reasons it’s sought out, read, and created, and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a version of it without those harmful elements, because the trope requires them for the audience to be satisfied.

It’s why all gay male a/b/o fits a pretty specific pattern. it’s why femslash a/b/o fits a very specific pattern. There’s nearly no deviation as a rule, because there are so many parts that have to be in play and functioning in a specific way in order to get the desired result. 

I could go on for hours about this, and the above is all a pretty damn simplified take of what’s going on in a/b/o for it to exist in the way it does and meet the needs of the audience, and I’ve already written a lot about this in the past, so I’ll try to cut it short here.

[mathematicalghost]

heaven will be mine has the kind of love i want to have

I finished We Know the Devil recently, because it was on the Steam summer sale and I love spending all my money believing I’ve saved money. I bought Heaven Will Be Mine on sale too, during the Itch winter selection ($10 for like, five games! And all I lost was my playtime stats, which is most of the reason why I’ve stayed a Steam shill for so long), and honestly the more they both stay installed on my laptop, the more I feel the recurring call to play them through again.

Well, maybe just Heaven Will Be Mine. I liked We Know the Devil a lot, with the extra help that the full 100% completed story (all 4 endings, although I admittedly did use a guide for the fourth) only took me two hours. Or 2.1 hours, if we’re going by Steam’s calculation. It knows what story it wants to tell, and it pushes through in a haze of beautiful dialogue and an incredible soundtrack. I played it through four times (for each ending) - first playing depending on who I liked most, and then trying it all tactically to get each ending. It has a somewhat scary ending, and although I loved it I’m probably happy to move on to other games. And particularly, part of the reason I loved it stems from the clear path you can draw from it to Heaven Will Be Mine.

I’m not great at paying attention, or taking in large chunks of information all at once, especially when it’s not provided in the same explanatory context later down the line. Heaven Will Be Mine starts off with a collection of screens that lay the groundwork for the major factions in play, their history and their motivations. It’s given in the form of manifestos, meaning the information needs to be peeled away from the writing as you go through it. My first play through was done in a bit of a haze as I struggled to grasp exactly what was going on - except for the incessant flirting. The incessant flirting was very good.

There are many aspects to Heaven Will Be Mine that I deeply, deeply enjoyed. Unlike We Know The Devil, which requires you to keep a mental tally of who you’re including and who you’re leaving out, Heaven Will Be Mine tracks your percentage allegiance with each faction so I knew which ending I was likely to steer too. On a first play through, this wasn’t my first call, but helped a lot when it moved further on and I wasn’t necessarily playing in the same session. It’s also a lot more expanded in the content than Devil - alongside the main storyline, there were chat messages sent between your player character and side characters, emails sent about the pilots in the story, as well as the faction counter itself. The whole game was built to be bigger in scope - a world moving with or without the pilots. It was big, beautiful, and all I wanted to do was learn. The lore dump at the start pulled itself into focus as I read it over and over, understanding the context behind it as I watched it later.

And most importantly, it was filled to the brink with lesbians.

My relationship with lesbian media has always been tricky. I’d only really be motivated to delve into the depths of slightly less than legal and virus-adjacent corners of the internet to find films and television that filled my genre interests of science fiction, which doesn’t have a whole lot of lesbians in the explicit text.  It left me with what was easily accessible: The L Word (good, but not incredible), Blue Is The Warmest Colour (badbadbadbadbadbad), and… that’s it, I guess? LGBT cinema in general always likes to have a twinge of pain to it, specifically the societal kind. No matter how much I enjoy the surrounding content, it wears me down to consume fiction that has a consistent undercurrent of hey, just remember, there’ll always be people who hate you because you like girls.

Heaven Will Be Mine isn’t strictly a happy love story. It’s about three messy people with messy lives and messy emotions and messy ways of communicating. It’s about three women who love or did love or will love each other, often all of the above and all at the same time. Their tragedy and pain comes from their own selves, their own inability to manage their affection and desire with the crushing pressure of everyone around them. Nobody cares that these three disaster pilots are all lesbians, who desire and are desired by people of their same gender. Their love - their type of love - isn’t the issue here. It’s that Saturn won’t follow a single order and Luna Terra has inconsistent loyalties and Pluto wants to just do it all at once. It's not that they want to kiss a girl - it’s that they’re thinking about kissing while there’s a goddamn war on, please stop flirting and just punch them out the sky already. Playing Heaven Will Be Mine gave me the slightest of glimpses into a world where there was no shame in lesbian desire. There was no embarrassment, no implicit bravery in announcing that hey, I want to kiss and be kissed by a girl. I want her to love to consume me whole. I want to desire and be desired, to touch and be touched, to love and be loved.

I watch films like Carol (and like, if I have to be The Carol Disliker then I’ll take one for the team and be The Carol Disliker) and know that the second Therese and Carol lock eyes that the film is going to be built around their hidden desires bubbling over. I watch Halt And Catch Fire and once Joe meets with his old flame, I put the pieces together of It’s A Gay Man In The 80’s and instantly have to brace myself for a tragic ending. I watch Disobedience and watch them talk in hushed tones, darting around the word lesbian as Esti opens herself up to Ronit. Stories build themselves not just around their characters, but into the society that doesn’t want them to flourish. I remember that every day, I consciously work to ensure that I’m direct and clear when I say I’m a lesbian, that I fit into society as a lesbian, that I read and write and watch and play as a lesbian. It feels like a ‘fuck you’ in so many ways, a representation that I fight against my own internalised homophobia I worked hard to beat, that I will defend my identity despite those who hate it.

But it’s tiring. I just want to have crushes, and flirt, and talk about girls sometimes. Heaven Will Be Mine lets me have that. You can be messy, conflicted, and a poor communicator. But you can also be passionate, determined, and deeply empathetic. And you can also be a woman who deeply, romantically, sexually, loves other women.

[faithisaverb]

A Tribe Called Quest & the call to resistance.

Day 22: A Tribe Called Quest & the call to resistance.

[MIND THE SWEARS IN THIS SONG.]  

So... Politics… (sigh)...

Today’s song is “We The People…” by A Tribe Called Quest from their 2016 album We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service.

This is a song that hits a lot: the fake news, systematic racism, media consumption, gentrification, gender equality, fear of immigrants, homophobia, and the politics of fear.

All of this is coming so rapidly in the verses that it can be hard to decipher, but the hook is pretty clear in the way it serves as a burlesque on the sentiments of some of the political rallies of the last 18 months:

“All you Black folks, you must go

All you Mexicans, you must go

And all you poor folks, you must go

Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways

So all you bad folks, you must go”

The tenor of the internet has long been charged with political divisiveness and name calling, but over the past year and a half, it seems that that tone has seeped into our offline culture as well.  Discourse has long given way to debate, and thoughtful dialogue has lost out to defensiveness, contrarianism, and the outright denial of anything which does not fit into one’s preconceived narrative.   Twitter has supplanted documented journalism.  

We have become a culture of shouting, a culture of ALL CAPS. 

[if you’d rather skip some slightly political stuff, go down to the end of the indent…]

Over the past decade, the veneer of being a “post-racial society,” and a “Christian nation,” and the idea the we’ve achieved gender equality have disappeared.  These are only three of many issues, but let’s highlight why these issues are not simply made up, or things that have been exacerbated in the last decade.  Rather these are systematic issues that were established into the bedrock of our American (even Western) culture since its inception, and we need to be clear that ignore them won’t solve them:

Systematic Racism.

Racial crimes have not gone up, they have merely gained the spotlight, and thus cannot be ignored.  The systematic racism of our societal constructs have become more obvious, or at least people are starting to take notice of the ways in which implicit racism in our culture has persisted long beyond the Civil War and the Civil Rights act of 1964 (when some contend we “ended racism”).  See more here (I know it’s a website for delicious ice cream, but it’s also a well presented and sourced brief explanation of systematic racism.

The “Christian Nation.”

The church membership has declined, but data indicates that this exodus is largely made up of “nominal Christians” – people who claimed Christianity, but did not express any deep faith the tenets of the theological church.  They were members of an institution.  These numbers are not being replaced as quickly by members of younger generations because it is no longer expected for a citizen to belong to a church or house of worship.  The status quo has changed and the numbers reflect that.  This doesn’t mean that the amount of people who follow Christ has necessarily gone down.  It means that the number of people who simply call themselves “Christians” has gone down.  At the same time, the level to which the “Christianity” has been engrafted into the concept of being “American” (that “Christianity=American” even as a subconscious assumption) is very troubling.  For all Christians, and presbyterians in particular, it is worth reading the Theological Declaration of Barmen, which speaks directly against the assimilation of the church into the state (and vice versa).

Gender Inequality.

On average, women are still paid just $0.80 for every $1 a man makes for the same position & skill/education levels. Ninety-eight years after women were given the right to vote, women are still drastically underrepresented in US Congress (104 women vs. 431 men, or a mere 19.4%).  The Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment to the US constitution proposed in 1972 to ensure that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex” received ratification in 35 of the 38 states needed to be added to the constitution in its initial proposal.  As of today, Nevada is rallying to become the 36th state to ratify the amendment forty-five years after being introduced. 

None of these issues were created in the past decade, they’ve merely been brought to the forefront.  Ignoring these issues will not solve them (as has been proven throughout the history of our country).  Pretending they have already been solved is simply statistically untrue.

[Hi!  Welcome back!]

Resistance is an important word.

While it is very much a buzz word in our current landscape, it is a word that we in the church should particularly not dismiss.  Christianity, at its heart, is a form of resistance.  Not resistance against others, or resistance against the world,

but resistance against fear,

resistance against hate,

resistance against prideful self-centeredness,

resistance against suffering,

resistance against oppression,

resistance against our need to control others,

resistance against our desire to put ourselves ahead of others,

resistance against assimilation, but also resistance against disunity.

We are called to follow

a Christ who challenges the systems in place that structure society and religion of his day…

a Christ who speaks truth to power.

a Christ who befriends the outcasts and shuns the self-righteous.

a Christ who loves us in spite of our sins, while we still hate him.

a Christ who invites us to resist the dark, and to embrace the light of God.

Do not harden your heart to this world, for God is in love with these people.

Let us resist our desire to do nothing.

Let us resist our indifferent complicity.

Let us resist our ambivalence.

Let us resist our acceptance of a world that needs walls. Christ is not huddled in our churches praying to keep the evils of the world at bay.

Christ is out in the streets, giving food to the hungry, quenching those who thirst, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the prisoners. Resistance is not arguing or demonizing the other.  Resistance is not accepting that this reality is the only way that it can be.  It is believe that there is a way beyond fear and division, and accepting the hope that Christ offers in the promise to make all things new.  

Resistance is taking part in what Christ is doing in this world, believing that we can bear witness to and reflect God’s light in all that we say and do.  A light that is for all people.

That is resistance.

A Christian’s place is in the resistance.

Let us follow Christ into the world.

See the video of today’s song below.  Click here to see the full Lenten playlist.