#gay when its not june and stuff

[ianisblus]

my children once again

[renthony]

Nimona: a Story of Trans Rights, Queer Solidarity, and the Battle Against Censorship

by Ren Basel renbasel.com

The 2023 film Nimona, released on Netflix after a tumultuous development, is a triumph of queer art. While the basic plot follows a mischievous shapeshifter befriending a knight framed for murder, at its heart Nimona is a tale of queer survival in the face of bigotry and censorship. Though the word “transgender” is never spoken, the film is a deeply political narrative of trans empowerment.

The film is based on a comic of the same name, created by Eisner-winning artist N.D. Stevenson. (1) Originally a webcomic, Nimona stars the disgraced ex-knight Ballister Blackheart and his titular sidekick, teaming up to topple an oppressive regime known as the Institution. The webcomic was compiled into a graphic novel published by Harper Collins on May 12, 2015. (2)

On June 11, 2015, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news Fox Animation had acquired rights to the story. (3) A film adaptation would be directed by Patrick Osborne, written by Marc Haimes, and produced by Adam Stone. Two years later, on February 9, 2017, Osborne confirmed the film was being produced with the Fox-owned studio Blue Sky Animation, and on June 30 of that same year, he claimed the film would be released Valentine’s Day 2020. (4)

Then the Walt Disney Company made a huge mess.

On December 14, 2017, Disney announced the acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. (5) Industry publications began speculating the same day about Blue Sky’s fate, though nothing would be confirmed until after the deal’s completion on March 19, 2019. (6) At first it seemed the studio would continue producing films under Disney’s governance, similar to Disney-owned Pixar Animation. (7)

The fate of the studio—and Nimona’s film adaptation—remained in purgatory for two years. During that time, Patrick Osborne left over reported creative differences, and directorial duties were taken over by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane. (8) Bruno and Quane continued production on the film despite Blue Sky’s uncertain future.

The killing blow came on February 9, 2021. Disney shut down Blue Sky and canceled Nimona, the result of economic hardship caused by COVID-19. (9) Nimona was seventy-five percent completed at the time, set to star Chloë Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed. (10)

While COVID-19 caused undeniable financial upheaval for the working class, wealthy Americans fared better. (11) Disney itself scraped together enough to pay CEO Bob Iger twenty-one million dollars in 2020 alone. (12) Additionally, demand for animation spiked during the pandemic’s early waves, and Nimona could have been the perfect solution to the studio’s supposed financial woes. (13) Why waste the opportunity to profit from Blue Sky’s hard work?

It didn’t take long for the answer to surface. Speaking anonymously to the press, Blue Sky workers revealed the awful truth: Disney may have killed Nimona for being too queer. The titular character was gender-nonconforming, the leading men were supposed to kiss, and Disney didn’t like it. (14) While Disney may claim COVID-19 as the cause, it is noteworthy that Disney representatives saw footage of two men declaring their love, and not long after, the studio responsible was dead. (15) Further damning evidence came in February of 2024, when the Hollywood Reporter published an article quoting co-director Nick Bruno, who named names: Disney’s chief creative officer at the time, Alan Horn, was adamantly opposed to the film’s “gay stuff.” (16)

Disney didn’t think queer art was worthy of their brand, and it isn’t the first time. “Not fitting the Disney brand” was the justification for canceling Dana Terrace’s 2020 animated series The Owl House, which featured multiple queer characters. (17) Though Terrace was reluctant to assume queerphobia caused the cancellation, Disney’s anti-queer bias has been cited as a hurdle by multiple showrunners, including Terrace herself. (18) The company’s resistance to queer art is a documented phenomenon.

While Nimona’s film cancellation could never take N.D. Stevenson’s comic from the world, it was a sting to lose such a powerful queer narrative on the silver screen. American film has a long history of censoring queerness. The Motion Picture Production Code (commonly called the Hays Code) censored queer stories for decades, including them under the umbrella of “sex perversion.” (19) Though the Code was eventually repealed, systemic bigotry turns even modern queer representation milestones into battles. In 2018, when Rebecca Sugar, creator of the Cartoon Network series Steven Universe, succeeded in portraying the first-ever same-sex marriage proposal in American children’s animation, the network canceled the show in retaliation. (20)

When queer art has to fight so hard just to exist, each loss is a bitter heartbreak. N.D. Stevenson himself expressed sorrow that the world would never see what Nimona’s crew worked so hard to achieve. (21)

Nimona, however, is hard to kill.

While fans mourned, progress continued behind the scenes. Instead of disappearing into the void as a tax write-off, the film was quietly scooped up by Megan Ellison of Annapurna Pictures. (22) Ellison received a call days before Disney’s death blow to Blue Sky, and after looking over storyboard reels, she decided to champion the film. With Ellison’s support, former Blue Sky heads Robert Baird and Andrew Millstein did their damnedest to find Nimona a home. (23)

Good news arrived on April 11, 2022, when N.D. Stevenson made a formal announcement on Twitter (now X): Nimona was gloriously alive, and would release on Netflix in 2023. (24) Netflix confirmed the news in its own press release, where it also provided details about the film’s updated cast and crew, including Eugene Lee Yang as Ambrosius Goldenloin alongside Riz Ahmed’s Ballister Boldheart (changed from the name Blackheart in the comic) and Chloë Grace Moretz as Nimona. (25) The film was no longer in purgatory, and grief over its death became anticipation for its release.

Nimona made her film debut in France, premiering at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 14, 2023 to positive reviews. (26) Netflix released the film to streaming on June 30, finally completing the story’s arduous journey from page to screen. (27)

When the film begins, the audience is introduced to the world through a series of illustrated scrolls, evoking the storybook intros of Disney princess films such as 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. The storybook framing device has been used to parody Disney in the past, perhaps most famously in the 2001 Dreamworks film Shrek. Just as Shrek contains parodies of the Disney brand created by a Disney alumnus, so, too, does Nimona riff on the studio that snubbed it. (28)

Nimona’s storybook intro tells the story of Gloreth, a noble warrior woman clad in gold and white, who defended her people from a terrible monster. After slaying the beast, Gloreth established an order of knights called the Institute (changed from the Institution in the comic) to wall off the city and protect her people.

Right away, the film introduces a Christian dichotomy of good versus evil. Gloreth is presented as a Christlike figure, with the Institute’s knights standing in as her saints. (29) Her name is invoked like the Christian god, with characters uttering phrases such as “oh my Gloreth” and “Gloreth guide you.” The film’s design borrows heavily from Medieval Christian art and architecture, bolstering the metaphor.

Nimona takes place a thousand years after Gloreth’s victory. Following the opening narration, the audience is dropped into a setting combining Medieval aesthetics with futuristic science fiction, creating a sensory delight of neon splashed across knights in shining armor. It’s in this swords-and-cyborgs city that a new knight is set to join the illustrious ranks of Gloreth’s Institute, now under the control of a woman known only as the Director (voiced by Frances Conroy). That new knight is our protagonist, Ballister Boldheart.

The film changes several things from the original. The comic stars Lord Ballister Blackheart, notorious former knight, long after his fall from grace. He has battled the Institution for years, making a name for himself as a supervillain. The film introduces a younger Ballister Boldheart who is still loyal to the Institute, who believes in his dream of becoming a knight and overcomes great odds to prove himself worthy. In the comic, Blackheart’s greatest rival is Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin, with whom he has a messy past. The film shows more of that past, when Goldenloin and Boldheart were young lovers eager to become knights by each other’s side.

There is another notable change: in the comic, Goldenloin is white, and Blackheart is light-skinned. In the film, both characters are men of color—specifically, Boldheart is of Pakistani descent, and Goldenloin is of Korean descent, matching the ethnicity of their respective voice actors. This change adds new themes of institutional racism, colorism, and the “model minority” stereotype. (30)

The lighter-skinned Goldenloin is, as his name suggests, the Institute’s golden boy. He descends from the noble lineage of Gloreth herself, and his face is emblazoned on posters and news screens across the city. He is referred to as “the most anticipated knight of a generation.” In contrast, the darker-skinned Boldheart experiences prejudice and hazing due to his lower-class background. His social status is openly discussed in the news. He is called a “street kid” and “controversial,” despite being the top student in his class. The newscasters make sure everyone knows he was only given the chance to prove himself in the Institute because the queen, a Black woman with established social influence, gave him her personal patronage. Despite this patronage, when the news interviews citizens on the street, public opinion is firmly against Boldheart.

To preserve the comic’s commentary on white privilege, some of Goldenloin’s traits were written into a new, white character created for the film, Sir Thoddeus Sureblade (voiced by Beck Bennett). Sureblade’s vitriol against both Boldheart and Goldenloin allowed Goldenloin to become a more sympathetic character, trapped in the system just as much as Boldheart. (31) This is emphasized at other points in the film when the audience sees Sureblade interact with Goldenloin without Boldheart present, berating the only person of color left in the absence of the darker-skinned man.

The day Boldheart is to be knighted, everything goes wrong. As Queen Valerin (voiced by Lorraine Toussaint) performs the much-anticipated knighting ceremony, a device embedded in Boldheart’s sword explodes, killing her instantly. Though Boldheart is not to blame, he is dubbed an assassin instead of a knight. In an instant, he becomes the most wanted man in the kingdom, and Queen Valerin’s hopes for progress and social equality seem dead with her. Boldheart is gravely injured in the explosion and forced to flee, unable to clear his name.

Enter Nimona.

The audience meets the titular character in the act of vandalizing a poster of Gloreth, only to get distracted by an urgent broadcast on a nearby screen. As she approaches, a bystander yells that she’s a “freak,” in a manner reminiscent of slurs screamed by passing bigots. Nimona has no time for bigots, spraying this one in the face with paint before tuning in to the news.

“Everyone is scared,” declare the newscasters, because queen-killer Ballister Boldheart is on the run. The media paints him as a monster, a filthy commoner who never deserved the chances he was given, and announce that, “never since Gloreth’s monster has anything been so hated.” This characterization pleases Nimona, and she declares him “perfect” before scampering off to find his hiding place.

It takes the span of a title screen for her to track him down, sequestered in a makeshift junkyard shelter. Just before Nimona bursts into the lair, the audience sees Boldheart’s injuries have resulted in the amputation of his arm, and he is building a homemade prosthetic. This is another way he’s been othered from his peers in an instant, forced to adapt to life-changing circumstances with no support. Where he was so recently an aspiring knight with a partner and a dream, he is now homeless, disabled, and isolated.

A wall in the hideout shows a collection of news clippings, suspects, and sticky notes where Boldheart is trying to solve the murder and clear his name. His own photo looks down from the wall, captioned with a damning headline: “He was never one of us—knights reveal shocking details of killer’s past.” It evokes real-world racial bias in crime reporting, where suspects of color are treated as more violent, unstable, and prone to crime than white suspects. A 2021 report by the Equal Justice Initiative and the Global Strategy Group compiled data on this phenomenon, focusing on the stark disparity between coverage of white and Black suspects. (32)

Nimona is not put off by Boldheart’s sinister media reputation. It’s why she tracked him down in the first place. She’s arrived to present her official application as Boldheart’s villain sidekick and help him take down the Institute. Boldheart brushes her off, insisting he isn’t a villain. He has faith in his innocence and in the system, and leaves Nimona behind to clear his name.

When he is immediately arrested, stripped of his prosthetic, and jailed, Nimona doesn’t abandon him. She springs a prison break, and conveys a piece of bitter wisdom to the fallen knight: “[O]nce everyone sees you as a villain, that’s what you are. They only see you one way, no matter how hard you try.”

Nimona and Boldheart are both outcasts, but they are at different stages of processing the pain. Boldheart is deep in the grief of someone who tried to adhere to the demands of a biased system but finally failed. He is the newly cast-out, who gave his entire life to the system but still couldn’t escape dehumanization. His pain is a fresh, raw wound, where Nimona has old scars. She embodies the deep anger of those who have existed on the margins for years. Where Boldheart wants to prove his innocence so he can be re-accepted into the fold, Nimona’s goal is to tear the entire system apart. She finds instant solidarity with Boldheart based solely on their mutual status as outsiders, but Boldheart resists that solidarity because he still craves the system’s familiar structure.

In the comic, Blackheart’s stance is not one of fresh grief, since, just like Nimona, he has been an outsider for some time. Instead, Blackheart’s position is one of slow reform. He believes the system can be changed and improved, while Nimona urges him to demolish it entirely. In both versions, Ballister thinks the system can be fixed by removing specific corrupt influences, where Nimona believes the government is rotten to its foundations and should be dismantled. Despite their ideological differences, Nimona and Ballister ally to survive the Institute’s hostility.

The allyship is an uneasy truce. During the prison break, Nimona reveals that she’s a shapeshifter, able to change into whatever form she pleases. Boldheart reflexively reaches for his sword, horrified that she isn’t human. She is the exact sort of monster he has been taught to fear by the Institute, and it’s only because he needs her help that he overcomes his reflex and sticks with her.

Nimona’s shapeshifting functions as a transgender allegory. The comic’s author, N.D. Stevenson, is transgender, and Nimona’s story developed alongside his own queer journey. (33) The trans themes from the comic are emphasized in the film, with various pride flags included in backgrounds and showcased in the art book. (34) Directors Bruno and Quane described the film as “a story about acceptance. A movie about being seen for who you truly are and a love letter to all those who’ve ever shared that universal feeling of being misunderstood or like an outsider trying to fit in.” (35)

When Boldheart asks Nimona what she is, she responds with only “Nimona.” When he calls her a girl, she retorts that she’s “a lot of things.” When she transforms into another species, she specifies in that moment that she’s “not a girl, I’m a shark.” Later, when she takes the form of a young boy and Boldheart comments on it, saying “now you’re a boy,” her response is, “I am today.” She defies easy categorization, and she likes it that way.

About her shapeshifting, Nimona says “it feels worse if I don’t do it” and “I shapeshift, then I’m free.” When asked what happens if she doesn’t shapeshift, she responds, “I wouldn’t die-die, I just sure wouldn’t be living.” Every time she discusses her transformations, it carries echoes of transgender experience—and, as it happens, Nimona is not N.D. Stevenson’s only shapeshifting transgender character. During his tenure as showrunner for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix/Dreamworks, 2018-2020), Stevenson introduced the character Double Trouble. Double Trouble previously existed at the margins of She-Ra lore, but Stevenson’s version was a nonbinary shapeshifter using they/them pronouns. (36) While Nimona uses she/her pronouns throughout both comic and film, just like Double Trouble her gender presentation is as fluid as her physical form.

Boldheart, like many cisgender people reacting to transgender people, is uncomfortable with Nimona. He declares her way of doing things “too much,” and insists they try to be “inconspicuous” and “discreet.” He worries whether others saw her, and, when she is casually in a nonhuman form, he asks if she can “be normal for a second.” He claims to support her, but says it would be “easier if she was a girl” because “other people aren’t as accepting.” His discomfort evokes fumbled allyship by cisgender people, and Nimona emphasizes the allegory by calling Boldheart out for his “small-minded questions.” While the alliance is uneasy, Boldheart continues working with Nimona to clear his name. They are the only allies each other has, and their individual survival is dependent on them working together.

When the duo gain video proof of Boldheart’s innocence, they learn the bomb that killed Queen Valerin was planted by the Director. Threatened by a Black woman using her influence to elevate a poor, queer man of color, the white Director chose to preserve the status quo through violence.

Nimona is eager to get the video on every screen in the city, but Boldheart wants to deal with the issue internally, out of the public eye. He insists “the Institute isn’t the problem, the Director is.” This belief is what also leads the comic’s Blackheart to reject Nimona’s idea that he should crown himself king. He is focused on reforming the existing power structure, neither removing it entirely nor taking it over himself.

Inside the Institute, the Director has been doing her best to set Goldenloin against his former partner. Despite his internal misgivings and fear of betraying someone he loves, Goldenloin does his best to adhere to his prescribed role. As the Director reminds the knights, they are literally born to defend the kingdom, and it’s their sacred duty to do so—especially Goldenloin, who carries Gloreth’s holy blood. This blood connection is repeated throughout the film, and used by the Director to exploit Goldenloin. He’s the Institute’s token minority, put on a gilded pedestal and treated as a symbol instead of a human being.

Goldenloin is a pretty face for propaganda posters, and those posters can be seen throughout the film. They proclaim Gloreth’s majesty, the power of the knights, and remind civilians that the Institute is necessary to “protect our way of life.” A subway PSA urges citizens, “if you see something, slay something,” in a direct parody of the real-world “if you see something, say something” campaign by the United States Department of Homeland Security. (37)

The film is not subtle in its political messaging. When Boldheart attempts to prove his innocence to Goldenloin and the assembled knights, he reaches towards his pocket for a phone. The Director cries that Boldheart has a weapon, and Sureblade opens fire. Though the shot hits the phone and not Boldheart, it carries echoes of real-world police brutality against people of color. Specifically, the use of a phone evokes cases such as the 2018 murder of Stephon Clark, a young Black man who was shot and killed by California police claiming Clark’s cell phone was a firearm. (38) The film does not toy with vague, depoliticized themes of coexistence and tolerance; it is a direct and pointed allegory for contemporary oppression in the United States of America.

Forced to choose between love for Boldheart and loyalty to the Institute, Goldenloin chooses the Institute. He calls for Boldheart’s arrest, and this is the moment Boldheart finally agrees to fight back and raise hell alongside Nimona. When Goldenloin calls Nimona a monster during the ensuing battle, Boldheart doesn’t hesitate to refute it. He expresses his trust in her, and it’s clear he means it. He’s been betrayed by someone he cared about and thought he could depend on, and this puts him in true solidarity with Nimona for the first time.

During the fight, Nimona stops a car from crashing into a small child. She shapeshifts into a young girl to appear less threatening, but it doesn’t work. The child picks up a sword, pointing it at Nimona until an adult pulls them away to hide. When Nimona sees this hatred imprinted in the heart of a child, it horrifies her.

After fleeing to their hideout, Nimona makes a confession to Boldheart: she has suicidal ideations. So many people have directed so much hatred toward her that sometimes she wants to give in and let them kill her. In the real world, a month after the film’s release, a study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law compiled data about suicidality in American transgender adults. (39) Researchers found that eighty-one percent have thought about suicide, compared to just thirty-five percent of cisgender adults. Forty-two percent have attempted suicide, compared to eleven percent of cisgender adults. Fifty-six percent have engaged in self-harm, compared to twelve percent of cisgender adults.

When Boldheart offers to flee with her and find somewhere safe together, Nimona declares they shouldn’t have to run. She makes the decision every trans person living in a hostile place must make: do I leave and save myself, or do I stay to fight for my community? The year the film was released, the Trans Legislation Tracker reported a record-breaking amount of anti-trans legislation in the United States, with six hundred and two bills introduced throughout twenty-four states. (40) In February 2024, the National Center for Transgender Equality published data on their 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, revealing that forty-seven percent of respondents thought about moving to another area due to discrimination, with ten percent actually doing so. (41)

Despite the danger, Nimona and Boldheart work diligently against the Institute. When they gain fresh footage proving the Director’s guilt, they don’t hesitate to upload it online, where it garners rapid attention across social and news media. Newscasters begin asking who the real villain is, anti-Institute sentiment builds, and citizens protest in the streets, demanding answers. The power that social media adds to social justice activism is true in the real world as it is in the film, seen in campaigns such as the viral #MeToo hashtag and the Black Lives Matter movement. (42) In 2020, polls conducted by the Pew Research Center showed eight in ten Americans viewed social media platforms as either very or somewhat effective in raising awareness about political and social topics. In the same survey, seventy-seven percent of respondents believed social media is at least somewhat effective in organizing social movements. (43)

In reaction to the media firestorm, the Director issues a statement. She outs Nimona as a shapeshifter, and claims the evidence against the Institute is a hoax. Believing the Director, Goldenloin contacts Boldheart for a rendezvous, sans Nimona. From Goldenloin’s perspective, Boldheart is a good man who has been deceived by the real villain, Nimona. He tells Boldheart about a scroll the Director found, with evidence that Nimona is Gloreth’s original monster, still alive and terrorizing the city. Goldenloin wants to bring Boldheart back into the knighthood and resume their relationship, and though that’s what Boldheart wanted before, his solidarity with Nimona causes him to reject the offer.

Though he leaves Goldenloin behind, Boldheart’s suspicion of Nimona returns. Despite their solidarity, he doesn’t really know her, so he returns home to interrogate her. In the ensuing argument, he reverts to calling her a monster, but only through implication—he won’t say the word. Like a slur, he knows he shouldn’t say it anymore, but that doesn’t keep him from believing it.

Boldheart’s actions prove to Nimona that nowhere is safe. There is no haven. Her community will always turn on her. She flees, and in her ensuing breakdown, the audience learns her backstory. She was alone for an unspecified length of time, never able to fit in until meeting Gloreth as a little girl. Nimona presents herself to Gloreth as another little girl, and Gloreth becomes Nimona’s very first friend. Even when Nimona shapeshifts, Gloreth treats her with kindness and love.

Then the adults of Gloreth’s village see Nimona shapeshift, and the word “monster” is hurled. Torches and pitchforks come out. At the adults’ panic, Gloreth takes up a sword against Nimona, and the cycle of bigotry is transferred to the next generation. The friendship shatters, and Nimona must flee before she can be killed.

After losing Boldheart, seemingly Nimona’s only ally since Gloreth’s betrayal, Nimona’s grief becomes insurmountable. She knows in her heart that nothing will ever change. She’s been hurt too much, by too many, cutting too deeply. To Nimona, the world will only ever bring her pain, so she gives in. She transforms into the giant, ferocious monster everyone has always told her she is, and she begins moving through the city as the Institute opens fire.

When Ballister sees Nimona’s giant, shadowy form, he realizes the horrific pain he caused her. He intuits that Nimona isn’t causing destruction for fun, she’s on a suicide march. She’s given up, and her decision is the result of endless, systemic bigotry and betrayal of trust. Her rampage wouldn’t be happening if she’d been treated with love, support, and care.

Nimona’s previous admission of suicidal ideation repeats in voiceover as she prepares to impale herself on a sword pointed by a massive statue of Gloreth. Her suicide is only prevented because Ballister steps in, calling to her, apologizing, saying he sees her and she isn’t alone. She collapses into his arms, once again in human form, sobbing. Boldheart has finally accepted her truth, and she is safe with him.

But she isn’t safe from the Director.

In a genocidal bid she knows will take out countless civilian lives, the Director orders canons fired on Nimona. Goldenloin tries to stop her, finally standing up against the system, but it’s too late. The Director fires the canons, Nimona throws herself at the blast to protect the civilians, and Nimona falls.

When the dust settles, the Director is deposed and the city rebuilds. Boldheart and Goldenloin reconnect and resume their relationship. The walls around the city come down, reforms take hold in the Institute, and a memorial goes up to honor Nimona, the hero who sacrificed her life to reveal the Director’s corruption.

Nimona, however, is hard to kill.

Nimona originally had a tragic ending, born of N.D. Stevenson’s own depression, but that hopelessness didn’t last forever. (44) Though Nimona is defeated, she doesn’t stay dead. Through the outpouring of love and support N.D. Stevenson received while creating the original webcomic, he gained the community and support he needed to create a more hopeful ending for Nimona’s story—and himself.

The comic’s ending is bittersweet. Nimona can’t truly die, and eventually restores herself. She allows Blackheart to glimpse her, so he knows she survived, but she doesn’t stay. She still doesn’t feel safe, and is assumed to move on somewhere new. Blackheart never sees Nimona again.

The film’s ending is more hopeful. There is a shimmer of pink magic as Nimona announces her survival, and the film ends with Boldheart’s elated exclamation. Even death couldn’t keep her down. She survived Gloreth, and she survived the Director. Though this chapter of the story is over, there is hope on the horizon, and she has allies on her side.

In both incarnations, Nimona is a story of queer survival in a cruel world. The original ending was one of despair, that said there was little hope of true solidarity and allyship. The revised ending said there was hope, but still so far to go. The film’s ending says there is hope, there is solidarity, and there are people who will stand with transgender people until the bitter end—but, more importantly, there are people in the world who want trans people to live, to thrive, and to find joy.

In a world that’s so hostile to transgender people, it’s no wonder a radically trans-positive film had to fight so hard to exist. Unfortunately, the battle must continue. As of June 2024, Netflix hasn’t announced any intent to produce physical copies of the film, meaning it exists solely on streaming and is only accessible via a monthly paid subscription. Should Netflix ever take down its original animation, as HBO Max did in 2022 despite massive backlash, the film could easily become lost media. (45) Though it saved Nimona from Disney, Netflix has its own nasty history of under-marketing and canceling queer programs. (46)

The film’s art book is already gone. The multimedia tome was posted online on October 12, 2023, hosted at ArtofNimona.com. (47) Per the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the site became a Netflix redirect at some point between 10:26 PM on March 9, 2024 and 9:35 PM on March 20, 2024. (48) On the archived site, some multimedia elements are non-functional, potentially making them lost media. The art book is not available through any legal source, and though production designer Aidan Sugano desperately wants a physical copy made, there seem to be no such plans. (49)

Perhaps Netflix will eventually release physical copies of both film and art book. Perhaps not. Time will tell. In the meantime, Nimona stands as a triumph of queer media in a queerphobic world. That it exists at all is a miracle, and that its accessibility is so precarious a year after release is a travesty. Contemporary political commentary is woven into every aspect of the film, and it exists thanks to the passion, talent, and bravery of an incredible crew who endured despite blatant corporate queerphobia.

Long live Nimona, and long live the transgender community she represents.

_ This piece was commissioned using the prompt "the Nimona movie."

Updated 6/16/24 to revise an inaccurate statement regarding the original comic.

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Notes:

1. “Past Recipients 2010s.” n.d. Comic-Con International. Accessed June 10, 2024. https://www.comic-con.org/awards/eisner-awards/past-recipients/past-recipenties-2010s/.

2. Stevenson, ND. 2015. Nimona. New York, NY: Harperteen.

3. Kit, Borys. 2015. “Fox Animation Nabs ‘Nimona’ Adaptation with ‘Feast’ Director (Exclusive).” The Hollywood Reporter. June 11, 2015. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/fox-animation-nabs-nimona-adaptation-801920/.

4. Riley, Jenelle. 2017. “Oscar Winner Patrick Osborne Returns with First-Ever vr Nominee ‘Pearl.’” Variety. February 9, 2017. https://variety.com/2017/film/in-contention/patrick-osborne-returns-to-race-with-first-vr-nominee-pearl-1201983466/; Osborne, Patrick (@PatrickTOsborne). 2017. "Hey world, the NIMONA feature film has a release date! @Gingerhazing February 14th 2020 !!" Twitter/X, June 30, 2017, 3:16 PM. https://x.com/PatrickTOsborne/status/880867591094272000. ‌

5. “The Walt Disney Company to Acquire Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc., after Spinoff of Certain Businesses, for $52.4 Billion in Stock.” 2017. The Walt Disney Company. December 14, 2017. https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/walt-disney-company-acquire-twenty-first-century-fox-inc-spinoff-certain-businesses-52-4-billion-stock-2/.

6. Amidi, Amid. 2017. “Disney Buys Fox for $52.4 Billion: Here Are the Key Points of the Deal.” Cartoon Brew. December 14, 2017. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/disney-buys-fox-key-points-deal-155390.html; Giardina, Carolyn. 2017. “Disney Deal Could Redraw Fox’s Animation Business.” The Hollywood Reporter. December 14, 2017. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/disney-deal-could-redraw-foxs-animation-business-1068040/; Szalai, Georg, and Paul Bond. 2019. “Disney Closes $71.3 Billion Fox Deal, Creating Global Content Powerhouse.” The Hollywood Reporter. March 19, 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/disney-closes-fox-deal-creating-global-content-powerhouse-1174498/.

7. Hipes, Patrick. 2019. “After Trying Day, Disney Sets Film Leadership Lineup.” Deadline. March 22, 2019. https://deadline.com/2019/03/disney-film-executives-post-merger-team-set-1202580586/.

8. Jones, Rendy. 2023. “‘Nimona’: Netflix’s Remarkable Trans-Rights Animated Movie Is Here.” Rolling Stone. July 3, 2023. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/nimona-netflix-trans-rights-animated-movie-lgbtq-riz-ahmed-chloe-grace-moretz-1234782583/.

9. D’Alessandro, Anthony. 2021. “Disney Closing Blue Sky Studios, Fox’s Once-Dominant Animation House behind ‘Ice Age’ Franchise.” Deadline. February 9, 2021. https://deadline.com/2021/02/blue-sky-studios-closing-disney-ice-age-franchise-animation-1234690310/.

10. “Disney’s Blue Sky Shut down Leaves Nimona Film 75% Completed.” 2021. CBR. February 10, 2021. https://www.cbr.com/nimona-film-abandoned-disney-blue-sky-shut-down/; Sneider, Jeff. 2021. “Exclusive: Disney’s LGBTQ-Themed ‘Nimona’ Would’ve Featured the Voices of Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed.” Collider. March 4, 2021. https://collider.com/nimona-movie-cast-cancelled-disney-blue-sky/.

11. Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, Anna Brown, and Rachel Minkin. 2021. “The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Long-Term Financial Impact.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. March 5, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/05/a-year-into-the-pandemic-long-term-financial-impact-weighs-heavily-on-many-americans/.

12. Lang, Brent. 2022. “Disney CEO Bob Iger’s Rich Compensation Package Revealed, Company Says Bob Chapek Fired ‘without Cause.’” Variety. November 21, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/finance/bob-iger-compensation-package-salary-bob-chapek-fired-1235439151/.

13. Romano, Nick. 2020. “The Pandemic Animation Boom: How Cartoons Became King in the Time of COVID.” EW.com. November 2, 2020. https://ew.com/movies/animation-boom-coronavirus-pandemic/.

14. Strapagiel, Lauren. 2021. “The Future of Disney’s First Animated Feature Film with Queer Leads, ‘Nimona,’ Is in Doubt.” BuzzFeed News. February 24, 2021. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/laurenstrapagiel/disney-nimona-movie-lgbtq-characters.

15. Clark, Travis. 2022. “Disney Raised Concerns about a Same-Sex Kiss in the Unreleased Animated Movie ‘Nimona,’ Former Blue Sky Staffers Say.” Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-disapproved-same-sex-kiss-nimona-movie-former-staffers-say-2022-3.

16. Keegan, Rebecca. 2024. “Why Megan Ellison Saved ‘Nimona’: ‘I Needed This Movie.’” The Hollywood Reporter. February 22, 2024. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/megan-ellison-saved-nimona-1235832043/.

17. St. James, Emily. 2023. “Mourning the Loss of the Owl House, TV’s Best Queer Kids Show.” Vanity Fair. April 6, 2023. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/04/loss-of-the-owl-house-tvs-best-queer-kids-show.

18. AntagonistDana. 2021. “AMA (except by ‘Anything’ I Mean These Questions Only).” Reddit. October 5, 2021. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheOwlHouse/comments/q1x1uh/ama_except_by_anything_i_mean_these_questions_only/; de Wit, Alex Dudok. 2020. “Disney Executive Tried to Block Queer Characters in ‘the Owl House,’ Says Creator.” 2020. Cartoon Brew. August 14, 2020. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/disney-executives-tried-to-block-queer-characters-in-the-owl-house-says-creator-195413.html.

19. Doherty, Thomas. 1999. Pre-Code Hollywood : Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press. 363.

20. Henderson, Taylor. 2018. “‘Steven Universe’s’ Latest Episode Just Made LGBTQ History.” Pride. July 5, 2018. https://www.pride.com/stevenuniverse/2018/7/05/steven-universes-latest-episode-just-made-lgbtq-history; McDonnell, Chris. 2020. Steven Universe: End of an Era. New York: Abrams. 102.

21. Stevenson, ND. (@Gingerhazing). 2021. "Sad day. Thanks for the well wishes, and sending so much love to everyone at Blue Sky. Forever grateful for all the care and joy you poured into Nimona." Twitter/X, February 9, 2021, 3:32 PM. https://x.com/Gingerhazing/status/1359238823935283200

22. Jones, Rendy. 2023. “‘Nimona’: Netflix’s Remarkable Trans-Rights Animated Movie Is Here.” Rolling Stone. July 3, 2023. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/nimona-netflix-trans-rights-animated-movie-lgbtq-riz-ahmed-chloe-grace-moretz-1234782583/.

23. Keegan, Rebecca. 2024. “Why Megan Ellison Saved ‘Nimona’: ‘I Needed This Movie.’” The Hollywood Reporter. February 22, 2024. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/megan-ellison-saved-nimona-1235832043/.

24. Stevenson, ND. (@Gingerhazing). 2022. "Nimona’s always been a spunky little story that just wouldn’t stop. She’s a fighter...but she’s also got some really awesome people fighting for her. I am excited out of my mind to announce that THE NIMONA MOVIE IS ALIVE...coming at you in 2023 from Annapurna and Netflix." Twitter/X, April 11, 2022, 10:00 AM. https://x.com/Gingerhazing/status/1513517319841935363.

25. “‘Nimona’ Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed & Eugene Lee Yang Coming to Netflix in 2023.” About Netflix. April 11, 2022. https://about.netflix.com/en/news/nimona-starring-chloe-grace-moretz-riz-ahmed-and-eugene-lee-yang-coming-to-netflix.

26. “’Nimona’ Rates 100% on Rotten Tomatoes after Annecy Premiere.” Animation Magazine. June 15, 2023. https://www.animationmagazine.net/2023/06/nimona-rates-100-on-rotten-tomatoes-after-annecy-premiere/

27. Dilillo, John. 2023. “’Nimona’: Everything You Need to Know About the New Animated Adventure.” Tudum by Netflix. June 30, 2023. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/nimona-release-date-news-photos

28. Reese, Lori. 2001. “Is ‘“Shrek”’ the Anti- Disney Fairy Tale?” Entertainment Weekly. May 29, 2001. https://ew.com/article/2001/05/29/shrek-anti-disney-fairy-tale/.

29. Sugano, Aidan. 2023. Nimona: the Digital Art Book. Netflix. 255. https://web.archive.org/web/20240309222607/https://artofnimona.com/.

30. White, Abbey. 2023. “How ‘Nimona’ Explores the Model Minority Stereotype through Its Queer API Love Story.” The Hollywood Reporter. July 1, 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/nimona-eugene-lee-yang-directors-race-love-story-netflix-1235526714/.

31. White, Abbey. 2023. “How ‘Nimona’ Explores the Model Minority Stereotype through Its Queer API Love Story.” The Hollywood Reporter. July 1, 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/nimona-eugene-lee-yang-directors-race-love-story-netflix-1235526714/.

32. Equal Justice Initiative. 2021. “Report Documents Racial Bias in Coverage of Crime by Media.” Equal Justice Initiative. December 16, 2021. https://eji.org/news/report-documents-racial-bias-in-coverage-of-crime-by-media/.

33. Stevenson, N. D. 2023. “Nimona (the Comic): A Deep Dive.” I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand. July 13, 2023. https://www.imfineimfine.com/p/nimona-the-comic-a-deep-dive.

34. Sugano, Aidan. 2023. Nimona: the Digital Art Book. Netflix. 259-260. https://web.archive.org/web/20240309222607/https://artofnimona.com/.

35. Sugano, Aidan. 2023. Nimona: the Digital Art Book. Netflix. 7. https://web.archive.org/web/20240309222607/https://artofnimona.com/.

36. Brown, Tracy. 2019. “In Netflix’s ‘She-Ra,’ Even Villains Respect Nonbinary Pronouns.” Los Angeles Times. November 6, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2019-11-05/netflix-she-ra-princesses-power-nonbinary-double-trouble.

37. Department of Homeland Security. 2019. “If You See Something, Say Something®.” Department of Homeland Security. May 10, 2019. https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something.

38. University of Stanford. n.d. “Stephon Clark.” Say Their Names - Spotlight at Stanford. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/saytheirnames/feature/stephon-clark.

39. Kidd, Jeremy D., Tettamanti, Nicky A., Kaczmarkiewicz, Roma, Corbeil, Thomas E., Dworkin, Jordan D., Jackman, Kasey B., Hughes, Tonda L., Bockting, Walter O., & Meyer, Ilan H. 2023. “Prevalence of Substance Use and Mental Health Problems among Transgender and Cisgender US Adults.” Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/transpop-substance-use/.

40. “2023 Anti-Trans Bills: Trans Legislation Tracker.” n.d. Trans Legislation Tracker. https://translegislation.com/bills/2023.

41. James, S.E., Herman, J.L., Durso, L.E., & Heng-Lehtinen, R. 2024. “Early Insights: A Report of the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality, Washington, DC.

42. Myers, Catherine. 2023. “Protests in the Age of Social Media.” The Nonviolence Project. February 11, 2023. https://thenonviolenceproject.wisc.edu/2023/02/11/protests-in-the-age-of-social-media/.

43. Auxier, Brooke, and Colleen McClain. 2020. “Americans Think Social Media Can Help Build Movements, but Can Also Be a Distraction.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center. September 9, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/09/americans-think-social-media-can-help-build-movements-but-can-also-be-a-distraction/.

44. Stevenson, N. D. 2023. “Nimona (the Comic): A Deep Dive.” I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand. July 13, 2023. https://www.imfineimfine.com/p/nimona-the-comic-a-deep-dive.

45. Chapman, Wilson. 2022. “HBO Max to Remove 36 Titles, Including 20 Originals, from Streaming.” Variety. August 18, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/hbo-max-originals-removed-1235344286/.

46. Iftikhar, Asyia. 2023. “Netflix CEO Slammed by LGBTQ+ Fans over Cancellation Comments: ‘They Are NOT Allies.’” PinkNews. January 24, 2023. https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/01/24/netflix-ceo-ted-sarandos-cancelled-shows-lgbtq-fans-reactions/.

47. Lang, Jamie. 2023. “Netflix Has Released a 358-Page Multimedia Art of Book for ‘Nimona’ - Exclusive.” Cartoon Brew. October 12, 2023. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/books/nimona-art-of-book-aidan-sugano-netflix-233636.html.

48. “Wayback Machine.” n.d. The Internet Archive. Accessed June 10, 2024. https://wayback-api.archive.org/web/20240000000000.

49. Lang, Jamie. 2023. “Netflix Has Released a 358-Page Multimedia Art of Book for ‘Nimona’ - Exclusive.” Cartoon Brew. October 12, 2023. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/books/nimona-art-of-book-aidan-sugano-netflix-233636.html.

[zackstriker]

Their recent inability to shut up about sex is making me craaazy because it’s giving “we’re not having sex right now so we’re incredibly sexually frustrated and will not shut up about it!”. It’s a more recent thing too, not their typical sporadic comment but literally every video and occasional tweet and reply has had sex and positions and top and bottom since June. Idk maybe it was Dan’s birthday maybe it’s the summer weather but they cannot shut up about Phil being a bottom and their love of sex.

ohhhh that’s an interesting take… with phil’s medical stuff that definitely could be the case. I firmly believe there’s truth in every joke (universally, not just w dnp) so i could see that.

i assumed its more of the boiling frogs theory. i think they’re purposely including lots of romantic/sexual moments within videos a) because they know we will eat it up (and we do), but also b) because they have the freedom to do so and there’s a sense of reclamation (kinda like when baby gays only talk about being gay because they actually can for the first time) and c) to either let us know they’re together without explicitly saying it or to prepare us for a hard launch post tour (dan did similar stuff to soft launch the gay before hard launching it after II).

They’ve been doing so much subliminal couple-y stuff lately like the bride+groom look in dnp dress each other and the matching shirts in todays video. i used to not think there would ever be a hard launch (i think they’re together but i thought they would want to keep something to themselves bc of how much the internet took from them) but they keep pulling more and more shenanigans that makes me think they might just be boiling us for the hard launch after all.

It’s interesting though because you can see moments when they still limit what they say bc of how it could be perceived, like in the video today when Phil changed the lyrics of paparazzi into a joke bc he didn’t wanna say the “i’ll follow you until you love me” part out loud. Similarly there’s been a few jump cuts in recent videos where they have been laughing at a joke that was seemingly cut.

I also must admit i did not participate in top/bottom discourse or anything back before the hiatus, so my lore knowledge in that particular regard is somewhat lacking in historical context.

All that being said, I do love a good bottom phil joke tho.

[ladyluscinia]

I know my last experience with a season ending on a note everyone hated and unanimously tore to fucking shreds for destroying the story on every level was... atypical. Lockdown. 6 month mass hysteria at minimum. Conspiracy theories that were, like, real things we had on camera. There was a Twitter wedding. Creative fervor that broke 100k fics on AO3.

Like. I know this is not a rational point of comparison and I'm not going to expect anything in my lifetime to match it 🤣

But.

If that was the highest high of post-season fandom engagement built on a cocktail of tasting everything you ever wanted AND the absolutely lethal levels of spite and swearing to eat showrunners' hearts in the marketplace, then whatever the fuck is going on after OFMD S2 is the opposite of that.

OFMD S1 was a huge fandom explosion. One silly little streaming show that had a gay kiss and then it skyrocketed. Fic numbers were soaring, high activity fic and meta engagement lasted for at least four months, it was constantly trending and flooding the dash... Like, fucking hell, over a year and a half after the immediate finale fervor it beat Stucky in the top ships bracket?!? To the point I was willing to give it what felt like due credit toward its potential as a future juggernaut ship. Not guaranteed, of course, but the potential was there.

In that context, new content should be a blow out party. Which it kinda was pulling off as it was airing, but looking back now? Not even quite a month later?

The effect of S2 on the fandom is like... a blip. Possibly over already.

New fic numbers started dropping off the moment the finale aired and have returned to deep hiatus levels. It's dropped off trending and streaming leaderboards... I'm very curious to see the first tumblr Week in Review since the finale, though we're still waiting due to the holiday.

Like, I've even popped on to scroll a few Izzy hater blogs that I know loved the finale out of morbid curiosity what they were up to, and I'm telling you... if I hadn't just watched the new season I'd think they were still over a year into hiatus. Saw some standard bitching about the izcourse / Edward takes (aka the one thing that kept them going all hiatus), they're currently passing around posts mocking one specific long OFMD version of TJLC I'm just hearing of, the same BTS gifsets everyone else is thrilled by... But barely any new meta or discussions. There's like 2 people posting actual analysis of S2 that's getting reblogged and they aren't even names I recognize from the hiatus. Nor is it particularly interesting to read. 🤷‍♀️

In July of 2022 I could pop onto a random OFMD blog and scroll through a dozen enthusiastic Stede or BlackBonnet metas about jacket colors or that moth from 1x07 or lighthouse symbolism or whatever. Now the new stuff has the same energy as posts from June 2023. It's borderline dead. And this is what it's like when there's an active campaign to engage fandom and Renew as a Crew?

(I will say fanartists are bringing some energy and there's some lovely pieces being passed around, which I do think the Renew as a Crew campaign is helping to boost?)

Even the hundreds of people saying it was a beautiful season and they loved it so much don't seem to be finding it a very engaging or inspiring season.

It's such a turn, like, what the fuck.

[fredwkong]

1000: Dog

Though he agonises over the Capybara card for a long moment, Eric picks the Dog card. He would rather keep being able to think. Like before, the Dog card vanishes in a flash of blinding light while the other two cards turn to dust.

As he gets ready for bed, careful to clean under his new foreskin, Eric notices two things. Firstly, his cock’s neediness and discharge seem to have dropped to a high, but still humanly possible, point. Second, some ink from the Dog card seems to have become embedded in his palm.

“Okay,” Eric says to himself. “Guess I can expect things to get equally extreme with whatever this card turns me into.” The thought frightens and thrills him in equal measure. Eric goes to bed excited to find out how the Dog card will change his life.

The next morning, Eric wakes up hard and leaking, just like he’s gotten used to the last few days. He considers masturbating, but that sounds so boring. No, he deserves to fuck someone, in the mouth or the hole.

“Get up here,” he texts Blair. He opens up his desk drawer and pulls out a bottle of lube that he bought at the start of the year. When he remembers the boy who bought it, little limp-dicked cut Eric, Eric finds himself sneering a bit. What a bitch that guy was.

Eric shakes his head violently. “What the hell?” he gasps. Whatever’s happening to him this time, it’s intense and fast. “I… That’s not me,” he tells the box. He has to keep in mind who he really is and resist these urges if he wants Blair to like him. He’s—

There’s a knock on his door before Eric can collect his thoughts. Startled, Eric struts to the door and opens it, realising at the last moment that he’s naked, his hard cock sticking straight out from his groin with a trickle of precum running down its length.

Blair looks sleepy and cute, Eric thinks in the back of his mind. “Good morning, handsome,” Blair says, his voice thick with sleep. “Gonna feed me breakfast again?”

“Gonna fuck you,” Eric grunts, grabbing Blair by his perky ass as he walks into the room.

Blair smirks in reply. “And what if I want to blow you?”

In response, Eric pulls down Blair’s flannel pyjama pants, making him squeal in surprise.

It’s hot and rough. Eric seems full of an energy he never knew he possessed. As he enters Blair—he barely needed any lube, his cock is so leaky—Eric feels pumped, swollen with masculine power. Blair, barely able to think as Eric slams into his prostate, watches in horny amazement as Eric’s skinny muscles thicken and define themselves with each thrust, until he cums, his shredded new body shuddering as he fills Blair up.

Barely looking at Blair, Eric pulls on a pair of shorts. He hears Blair open his mouth, probably to ask if they can get breakfast, or play video games, or something else boyfriend-y. Eric suddenly can’t stand the thought. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “Gotta go to the gym.”

“Oh,” says Blair, a bit crestfallen. He looks hot, lying on Eric’s bed with Eric’s copious load leaking out of his asshole. “Want to hang out later?”

“I dunno, man.” No. Eric suddenly knows he’s going out tonight.

Eric’s never been to the gym before, but he instinctively knows what to do. He hits chest and arms for an hour, then goes to pose in the changing room. Even with his defined new muscles and masculine shape, though, he suddenly thinks that he looks small. He looks weak.

Even though he knows his clothes used to be different, before being washed in his precum transformed it all into bro clothes, Eric’s happy with the way his new stuff shows off his body. He goes out to the closest gay club and dances the night away, facefucking a tiny twink he meets on the dance floor to get out a load. Somehow, Eric can’t imagine hooking up with a guy bigger than him.

Eric ignores Blair’s repeated texts all day Monday. Instead, he goes to the gym to hit back, then roams around campus with his shirt off, enjoying the late June sun. Some big fratty guys chuckle at the sight of a lean, short guy like Eric showing off his body, so Eric flips them off.

At this point, he notices that ink that stuck to his hand has spread further. It’s reached up his arm and started to edge onto his chest. On the underside of his wrist, where the tattoo started, is a snarling dog face. When he gets back to his dorm, Eric searches his whole body and grins when he finds a small banana tattoo forming just under one ear. The tattoos make him look badass!

On Tuesday, Eric doesn’t bother paying attention in class. His cock is getting pent up again, since he hasn’t dropped a load in a guy since Sunday night. Instead, he chats up some twinky bottoms on Grindr, feeling precum ooze from his half-chubbed cock as he tells them how slutty he’s gonna make them feel. He feels powerful, like he’s been riding a growing high since Sunday, even though every glance in the mirror makes him cringe at how small he looks.

That night, Eric invites the twinks over one by one. He grunts and groans in a deepening voice as he fills each one up with a thick load, hoping that all his neighbours will hear him and know what a man he is. Each time he cums, Eric feels his tatts spread a little further across his body, patterns sharpening with every thrust.

Eric makes up for not going to the gym on Tuesday by spending the whole day there on Wednesday, hitting a full body circuit like the beast he knows he is. When he spots a twink watching him from the treadmills, Eric winks at him and follows him into the changing room. They fuck in the shower, but when Eric walks out, letting his softening cock swing and shed drops of cum on the bathroom floor, a huge jock is standing at the sinks. Eric thinks he saw this guy at the front desk when he first arrived.

“That’s against the rules,” the jock grunts at Eric. “Gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“What are you, a homophobe?” Eric asks sharply, pulling his gym clothes back on. “I still have the rest of my workout to do.”

“Keep it out of the showers, bro,” the guy says. “Go fuck in your dorm like everyone else.”

At ‘everyone else’ Eric sees red. He’s not ‘everyone else.’ He’s better. He’s got the muscles, the manliness. He’s got the fucking magic cards! Eric throws a punch before he knows what he’s doing, and the jock goes down like a sack of flour.

Standing over him, Eric feels exhilarated. Yeah, that’s what happens when you question his manliness! Curling his lip at the guy, Eric leaves the locker room and continues his workout, hitting chest again.

As he does, though, Eric feels the high he’s been riding all week start to ebb. He just assaulted a guy! In the mirrors, Eric watches as the thick musculature he suddenly gained while fucking Blair shrinks down, becoming a taut, defined physique a few steps beyond where he was when he picked the card. It’s like he’s waking up from a trance, his head clearing. Eric still feels cocky, proud of his body, but he doesn’t feel quite so defensive and abrasive all of a sudden.

(thanks to @idesofrevolution for the inspo pic)

The jock’s back at the front desk when Eric finishes with his workout. His face looks a little bruised, but nothing like he just took a hit hard enough to knock him out. “Uh, hey, man,” Eric says, scuffing his shoe on the floor. He’s fighting his new personality traits just to apologise. “Sorry for, uh, punching you before.”

Surprisingly, the guy chuckles, continuing to work on something on the computer. “No worries, Eric,” he says. How does he know Eric’s name? “I know you’re kinda touchy. You didn’t hurt me.”

“I knocked you out!”

“What?” The jock looks up at Eric for the first time. “Bro, I know you’ve got, like, small man complex or whatever, but we were, like, play-wrestling. I know what your real punches feel like.” He laughs again and goes back to his work.

By the time he gets back to his dorm, Eric’s pretty sure he’s entered some kind of different reality. People are treating him strangely. To make sure, Eric opens up his conversation with Blair. He cringes at the number of messages Blair has sent that Eric’s left on read. “Hey bro,” Eric types out, “wanna come hang out?”

The “Yes!” arrives embarrassingly quickly, followed shortly after by Blair.

“Oh, did you just get back from the gym?” Blair asks, when Eric opens the door. “That’s really hot! Can I suck you off?” He’s suddenly right in Eric’s space, trying to take off Eric’s shirt and shorts at the same time.

Before he can think about it, Eric finds himself saying, “Sure, if you don’t mind tasting the twink I fucked in the shower.” Why did he say that?

But Blair just grins at him and sinks to his knees. “You know how to get me going.”

Eric doesn’t know why he avoided Blair all week. His mouth feels so good wrapped around Eric’s thickening cock, and he’s so good at opening his throat when Eric grabs his hair and starts to facefuck him. It's good to have a consistent fuck now and again.

After, Eric resists the urge to kick Blair out, and they end up chilling on Eric’s bed, playing some video games. “Sorry for blowing you off all week,” Eric finally says, after a long silence.

“No worries,” says Blair, surprising Eric again. “I know you need a good variety of guys to fill up or whatever.

Eric is absolutely sure something about the world changed in response to his card choice now.

Blair keeps talking. “You should invite me up next time you have a bunch of twinks over. I’d love to suck your balls or eat you out while you fill them up.”

Eric’s cock jumps and oozes a bit of precum at the thought.

The rest of the time until Saturday night, Eric figures out his new normal. He’s still high strung and defensive, and he goes to the gym almost every day. But he actually feels attracted to bigger guys again, and he can fight down his aggressiveness.

Having Blair back is great. On Friday night, Eric brings the jock he punched back to his dorm. Turns out, Aaron’s okay with gay sex as long as it’s not happening in the gym showers, and he’s a really needy bottom. While Blair fills Aaron’s mouth, Eric takes his ass.

On Saturday evening, Eric begs off spending the night with Blair again. “This has been a lot more sex than I’m used to,” he says. He wants to take some time picking his card tonight.

Blair acquiesces, but promises to come by on Sunday morning. “You’re not ignoring me for half a week again,” he tells Eric as he leaves. “I’ll come up here and suck you in the shower if I have to!”

It doesn’t sound like an idle threat.

As soon as Eric sits down to consider the box, it pops open, and he draws his cards. He spreads them on his desk to get a good look at his options for the week. He can’t wait to see how its symbol gets added to his tattoos.

The first card has a simple scene on it featuring a colourful rainbow. There’s some glitter stuck to the card as well, though Eric can’t tell if it was part of the card’s design or was added later. In the background, behind the rainbow, the lines of the landscape seem to come together somehow to create the sense of a scantily clad male body.

The second card shows a stylised drawing of a bull’s face. It looks stronger than Eric could ever imagine, and with his new gym habit, he can imagine a lot. He would bet that, if this bull’s face was attached to the body, it would be absolutely thick with muscle.

In the centre of the third card is a simple drawing of a clock. The hands are rushing around, and in the background Eric sees the faded outlines of things like weights, birthday cakes, and calendars. Could the cards have the power to change more than just Eric’s body?

Or vote here on strawpoll: https://strawpoll.com/xVg7j6wQznr.

See Eric's whole journey with the 1000 cards here.

Did your pick not win the vote? Send me an ask telling me what card Eric should have picked to see what could have happened.

[freddiemercurylegendabovelegends]

Today - June 27th, 1970 - Queen Story!

The first Queen gig: Truro, City Hall, UK, with Mike Grose on bass

🔸What must it be like to brag that you were at rock gods Queen’s first ever performance? Well, quite a few people in Cornwall can, because on this very date – June 27 – in 1970 popular rockers-on-the-rise Smile played their first gig with a new line-up and a new name, Queen, at Truro City Hall, which later became the Hall For Cornwall.

Truro boy Roger Taylor told Cornwall Live: “That was actually arranged by my mother in aid of the Red Cross. We were paid £50, which was quite a lot of money back then. I’m not sure many people turned up though.”

Roger’s mum Win had placed two adverts in The West Briton newspaper on the run-up to the gig, still in the name of Smile. However, the band had already decided to play under the new name Queen – eyebrow-raising for the time.

She recalled Freddie explaining the new name at her Truro bungalow: "He just kept saying how regal it sounded.”

Sue Johnstone, a friend of the band from Truro, remembered: “We would hitch a lift back to Cornwall from the start of the M4, and on one of these occasions Freddie walked us to the bus stop and said ‘what do you think of the name Queen?’

"We thought it was hilarious because he was always so camp. And we just laughed and thought of the gay connotation immediately, but he tried to make it more acceptable by persuading us that it was ‘regal’.”

The first Queen gig: Truro City Hall, June 27, 1970

With Fred, still known as Bulsara, and bassist Mike Grose – a Truro regular at the Smile shows at PJ’s – on board, Queen was born.

The new band intended to concentrate on its own material. Mike recalled rehearsing tracks from the first album, as well as 'Father to Son' from 'Queen II' and 'Stone Cold Crazy' from 'Sheer Heart Attack' from day one.

In preparation for the first Queen concert, Freddie stayed at the Johnstone sisters’ house at Truro’s Rosedale.

Sue said: “He stayed in our attic room and Freddie would stand on his head with his legs crossed doing yoga against the wall. He had long hair and would use our heating tongs to curl his hair in the way he wanted. And my dad was completely taken aback and initially thought they were all a bit weird.”

However, Freddie and Sue’s father soon became the best of mates when Mr Mercury-to-be and his friends dug up the garden, filled it full of flowers and sorted out the lawn.

Sue Johnstone said of that debut concert and other early Queen shows: “Freddie would get up on the stage and strut his stuff like he’d been doing it all his life. He was well prepared. He didn’t just get up and sing, he got up and performed from day one. I loved Tim's voice, but he wasn't the same as Freddie as a performer"

By Lee Trewhela - June 27th, 2018

👉 Full Article 👇

https://www.cornwalllive.com/whats-on/music-nightlife/queen-played-first-concert-cornwall-1720494

Pic: Queen in 1970, on the left Mike Grose, Queen's first bassist (dies in 2019)

📸 Photographer © Doug Puddifoot

[fillipquesender]

HEY YOU

ARE YOU A SUN AND MOON SHOW FAN?

ARE YOU A SOLAR FAN WHO WAS SUFFERING FROM HIS DEATH?

ARE YOU A RUIN FAN WHOS NOT A BIG FAN OF THE FACT THAT HES BEEN ACTING THE WHOLE TIME??

Well, lovely to meet you, I'm Fillip and I have a wonderful offer for you

I have an au where its badically the exact same as now, just minus the newer episodes since those are tearing me apart, called Ameliorate au

Its going to be built on my theories on what I thought what was going to happen, and guess what? SOLAR WON'T DIE AND RUIN ISN'T MORALLY GREY 🔥🔥

Its gonna be mostly art, with the occasional story or vrchat photos just for fun :3 (stories will eb rare I can't get motivation 💔)

Designs:

Cosmos (ruin)

Cosmos' sun and moon

Solar

Sol/Evil Sun (not done yet)

Evil Lunar (Not done yet)

Earth

Actual stuff changed but its mostly ruin (I will add onto this):

Ruin is renamed as Cosmos

Cosmos is just a goddamn sweetheart/he acts like dlc eclipse

Cosmos isn't considered family, but a family friend (If this was in canonical time as of 7th of june 2024, cosmos is still more of an aquiantance and not really that trusted)

Rather than Sol (evil sun) telling the truth, I made him be lying here with a deal made with evil lunar (FUCK I'M GONNA HAVE TO MAKE DESIGNS FOR THOSE TWO- Wait I saw someone give him glasses hold on what if i do that)

Solar and Cosmos would be slight friends in canonical time, but out of it they're really gay for eachover because why the fuck not :3

Solar doesn't die, and he gets a new body instead. If he gets revived in canon with a new body I may change his design to be a stylized version of the new body, but I probably won't unless I like the design better.

Cosmos' Sun and Moon are actually alive in this au, except they were just locked away by the virus. It wasn't until a while after Cosmos got the cure that it reached Sun and Moon, so they stayed locked away until they got cured

Every ep up until this one are part of the au, but some just stylized a bit to fit (eg, Cosmos not acting when infected)

This ep is also in the au, but the only difference is that evil sun is lying 🔥 (why would you trust someone whos litterally refered to as evil and locked away his moon if thats what his lore is like what??)

Oh yeah and old moon does come back in this au and we get Nexus, but its more of him figuring himself out on who he really is rather than going fucking insane 😻

I do know in canon the family almost considered ruin as part of it, however I do like it better for him to be a friend in this au since cosmos was not acting with the whole virus thing, meaning he had less time to get to bond. Also gotta give them a break with the fuck ton of family members (coming from someone with around 7 family members, its a lot to deal with)

[ladykailitha]

Permanent Tagging List Final Call

Hey, guys it's that lovely time again when I go through my permanent tag list and remove people that haven't interacted with my stories in awhile to clear the way for new people.

So here's the deal, you'll have 24 HOURS to respond to this post. I have posted this two other times, trying to get the word out. Once two weeks ago and again one week ago.

IF YOU DON'T RESPOND BY 12PM EST SUNDAY JUNE 2ND I WILL REMOVE YOU FROM ALL OF MY LISTS MASTER OR STORY.

NO JUDGMENT! I swear it. I just want to know if you're still interested so that if you're not, people who are can take your spot.

UNTIL THIS HAS COMPLETED ITS DURATION THERE WILL BE MORATORIUM ON ALL FUTURE REQUESTS TO BE ADDED TO MY PERMANENT TAG LIST! THIS MEANS I AM NOT TAKING NEW REQUESTS TO BE ADDED TO THE LIST!!!

I love all the requests I'm getting to be added to it. But I am at 44 on my permanent list and if it hits 50 then there is no way to add people to a story's tag list. Something I really don't want to do.

You can tell me if you want to be:

Removed from my permanent tag and all my stories

Removed from my permanent tag list but keep you on all my stories

Removed from my permanent tag list but only some of the stories (let me know which ones)

Stay on my permanent tag list but be removed from all my WIPs

Stay on my permanent tag list but be removed from some of my WIPs (let me know which ones)

Stay on my permanent tag list and all my WIPs.

My current WIPs so that you know what I'm currently working on:

Well Met By Moonlight: Steve is a werewolf, Eddie is a vampire and there are strange and horrible things going on in Hawkins. No Upside Down supernatural creatures AU.

Never Hold Back Your Step...: Boy With a Bat book 2. Sequel to Can Anybody See Me? Season 2 Au where Eddie picks up Steve as one of his lost sheep and him and Steve get together. Set immediately after book one, Steve has to get through high school and his new summer job. Only this is Hawkins and danger is always lurking around the corner. Featuring season 3 AU.

Icarus: Eddie makes it big with Corroded Coffin as Steve and Robin seemingly struggle with menial jobs. Only there is more than meets the eye with the up and coming metal band The Fallen as Eddie learns that the lead singer and Steve is one and the same. Now they have to manage three private lives with super stardom. The path to love never was smooth.

Sweet Home Indiana: Sweet Home Alabama fusion. Eddie and Steve get married when the first state makes gay marriage legal. But soon a rift forms between them and Eddie leaves. Now almost a decade later, Eddie's back in Hawkins looking for a divorce so he can marry his fiancee, Chrissy. But when he arrives, Hawkins starts feeling like home in a way he thought he lost long ago. Now he has to chose between his new life in Seattle and his old life in Hawkins. But not everything is as it seems and that makes things harder. For everyone.

Paper Hearts: Post Season 2 Valentine's day AU. Hawkins is doing a fund raiser for senior ball, people can buy paper hearts to give to their friends and lovers. Pink for friends and red for lovers. Steve doesn't have a girlfriend this year so he decides to get twenty pink hearts to give to girls that wouldn't normally get any. Cue Eddie finding that adorable and to do the same for Steve so he doesn't feel so lonely on Valentine's. They fall in love.

So here is the list of people that haven't liked, commented, or reblogged my stuff in about two months.

@danili666 @chaoticlovingdreamer @genderless-spoon @emly03 @scheodingers-muppet @i-must-potato

Some additional info!

I remove people who haven't interacted with any of my posts in more than 60 days. This is anything I post: chaptered fics, one-shots, and rants, whether or not they've been tagged.

What does interact mean? Comment, like, OR reblog. It doesn't have to be all three. Hell it doesn't even have go beyond a like. Though, really reblogs are the best because it means more people beyond the tag list can see it.

If you've done any of those things in less than sixty days, or have said that you're going through a rough patch and interaction will be down for awhile, you are still on the list.

I put up the option to be removed from certain stories because @maya-custodios-dionach said that they didn't like a couple of the stories (omegaverse and metal band Steve) and I thought oh, why don't ask people what they want to be tagged IN?

And in the last couple of days I've had about half of my tag list chiming in and tell me what they want. It's fantastic! Open communication for the win!!! It makes me giggle that no one has asked be from Boy With a Bat book 2, though. Literally everything else has.

Most of my regular permanent listers have made themselves known on what they want to be tagged on, but if you just like the post without commenting, I will take that as option 6 and move on. These people don't HAVE to comment or like, you'll stay on the list regardless.

But if you have stories you would much rather not be tagged in, I'd like to know, you know. ;)

IF YOU ARE REMOVED AND YOU WANT TO BE ADDED BACK ON LET ME KNOW!!

[saccgiriangel]

Welcome to my acc!!

I have many names but you can call me MONI/MARK/MIGUEL/TEGIRI (TEG)/ICHIKA/GIDEON/DANTE/EZEQUIEL (you dont have to use all of them, as long you respect them, im okay), im a weird freaky guy who likes to do silly things

im a GNC CISTRANS TRANS MAN/TRANSMASC GIRL AEGOSEXUAL GREYROMANTIC ACHILLEAN GAYBIAN who uses HE/IT pronouns (use masc + fem terms)

More info about me under cut:

BASIC INFO:

Minor

My birthday is June 20 (gemini gang ♊️)

ESFJ - 4w5

For the Homestuck fans, im a heir of breath and prospit dreamer (my true sign is Gemus)

Chaotic good

multi / rarepair shipper

multifandom

white latino (argentinian) (ESP/ENG)

selfshipper (ezekiel's bf 🤭💚✨️)

artist and writer (Sometimes)

in my total drama and avril lavigne era

INTERESTS:

Total drama (lol)

Homestuck

Scott pilgrim (all medias)

Lacey Games

Horror media content in general (games, shows, movies, books, etc)

Literature

History

Creepypastas + MLP Creepypastas

DDLC

Vocaloid

Internet

PJSEKAI / Project Sekai

Bandori

The Eltingville Club

Madoka Magica

Animanga

AUs (Alternative Universes)

Shipping

Zero Day

Etc...

BYF / B4 U INT.:

I use and need tone tags, its not obligatory to use them but I would be grateful if you do so

I write fast so I will often have mistakes in words.

Stupid to clarify this but im neurotypical

Im okay with gore and nsfw content, as long it isnt a problematic thing (like pedo, zoo, etc)

I usually do nsfw jokes and flirt in a jokingly way, if u are uncomfortable with this, let me know

I am a slow person when it comes to make (art) requests or answer some questions in my askbox, be patient and feel privileged if I get to answer ur question in the askbox fast (��)

I can be annoying about my interests (including my AUs)

I don't like to talk about political issues and I don't tolerate questions regarding my political opinions or views on something, I don't mind arguing but I would prefer that you leave out the political stuff when talking to me (and also because I'm stupid and don't have the skills to debate about it)

Im pro mogai and i support ‘contradictory labels’ (mspec lesbians/gays, straight lesbians/gays, lesboys/turigirls, etc), i dont mind if u dont support them but dont be annoying about hating it or avoid sending me hate bc of it

TAGS FOR THE ACC

#sacc_intro: self explanation

#sacc_reblog: all my reblogs

#sacc_art: all my art posts

#sacc_talks: texts or things I say for no reason

#sacc_ask: all my asks

#sacc_fankids: my fankids / fankid requests

#total drama island of the chaos / #tdiotc: my td swap AU posts

I dont have a DNI list, if i dont like u or i find u annoying i will just block you owo 🎀✨

Mutuals/Friends:

@deimosbreakfrost @geoffparty @thatpersonkiwi @heavenpedia @million4rex @catrinita-jadez @istheharold @bl00dyv4mpzz @fightclubgayporn @error-drawings @donsfreakyleftit

Other Accs + Social medias

@sementaryoffags (label hoard acc)

SOCIAL MEDIAS:

my instagram

my pinterest

my spotify

my tiktok

my Ao3

[yonpote]

as someone who wasnt here at the time (was a fan from about 2011-2013) what exactly defines the "softlaunch era" pre-coming out that i hear you and others refer to?

you've come to the right place cuz this is the era when i truly became a Phannie... "gay softlaunch" is generally considered 2017-18, but to be more specific it was october 31, 2016-june 13, 2019!

before they came out this was also referred to as "post-baking universe" referencing the halloween 2016 monster pops video that had an (at the time) abnormal amount of raunchy humor and just general derangedness. nothing like it is today, but that point felt very significant and dan even brought it up in liveshows like yeah idk what happened there and when phil called a peach an ass in a gaming video dan said "we live in a post-baking universe" (i believe fans coined the term tho).

people have also called it the "glass closet era" which is a divisive name for a lot of people cuz "glass closet" can be seen as kind of a mean term and it implies like, stereotyping or speculating or the "we been knew" behavior dan had talked about in BIG. which i understand that feeling, but i don't think that's what was happening, because the way i see it was queer flagging. ways they could show a little bit who they really were without saying it just yet. they weren't Out out, but they were just like. openly talking about attraction to men and finding men hot and not calling it a Man Crush or anything. dan would bring up queerness more often in liveshows, which hes mentioned queer artists and stuff before but now it was also making jokes about like.. being in a gas leak man porn fantasy in his first livestream of 2017 LMAO. phil would make a lot more innuendos, which hes always done, but now he wasnt pretending like he didnt know what he was saying. dan started wearing a single hoop earring on his right ear. this is an old school form of queer flagging, in The Olden Days (im too lazy to look up when but like my 70-something year old history teacher knew about this) if a man had an earring on his left ear, he's straight, and if he had one on his right, he's gay. that one's pretty subtle if you don't know much about queer history and there were Great Debates over whether or not we should take it to mean he is gay, but personally i saw it as like. he was letting us know without needing to say the G word out loud just yet!

i think a really important part of this era was even outside of directly discussing queerness, they were both trying to become more authentic online and figuring out how to do that without compromising their own privacy. dan stopped straightening his hair and rebranded and opened up about his mental health. phil's authenticity journey seemed a bit slower and wasn't as overt or seemingly drastic as dan's was, but it was happening! he changed up his hair!!! which yes its kinda silly to talk abt dnp's hair but the emo fringe was Their Brand. phil in particular said that, the emo fringe was a comfort place but he was feeling like he was trapped in having it forever because it was Who He Was, so it was a huge deal for him! he opened up a little bit about his physical health, both of them were a bit more honest about all the stress and anxiety they were dealing with (the mukbang is a pretty good video where they talk about that and an interesting one to watch in retrospect) and their whole 2018 tour was themed around whether they should Give The People What They Want or do what they wanted to do.

god i talk too much ANYWAY then dan disappeared in 2019 and phil was manning the helm for a good five and a half months and then the Big Gay hit! the Hard Launch Era if you will :) and now i would say 2023-present is the Unhinged Era so i have no clue what the hell their next move is gonna be...

[long-lost-mcguffin]

biff its still june trust what flavour of lgbt sandwich do each of the ninja eat

my joke answers

zane: it’s/it nonbinary

jay: he/him cishet

kai: she/her cishet

nya: she/they bisexual

cole: he/him cis gay

lloyd: they/them ace and cishet

pixal: they/she nonbinary

srs answer under cut i go into way more detail LOL

zane

-he/him

-androgynous with a slight masc lean. he doesn’t go for very femme/masc outfits unless the situation calls for it. that’s not to say he dislikes that sort of fashion, it’s just not his thing. he prefers simple clothes with simple designs and fits. he LOVES suits though, they make him feel mature.

-demiromantic heterosexual. very monogamous, politely shuts down all fan attempts to flirt with him. he gushes about pixal every chance he gets in interviews.

jay

-they/he

-non-binary with heavy masc presentation. realized they weren’t as cishet as they thought they were when he started dating nya. they felt like masculinity was an act they had to put up out of insecurity. over time he got more comfortable with masculinity(with nya’s help). he likes flamboyant clothing and gets a lot of fashion inspiration from vintage magazines.

-bisexual. with the support of nya(before and after their s3 breakup) he started experimenting romantically and sexually. when he started getting semi-famous for tv stuff, they definitely used it to his advantage to get hookups and paid it off with hush money. it fueled their ego in a very hollow way.

kai

-preference for he/him but it’s not that important to him

-is also very nonchalant about his gender, but his fashion style is function over literally everything else. his bright yellow skirt has deeper pockets than his cargo pants? he’ll wear it.

-questioning. considered himself hetero comfortably for a very long time, then after meeting skylor started to think about experimentation. he’s a flirt for the show of it, but actual romance and intimacy makes him VERY shy. dude is hella suppressed.

nya

-she/he

-always considered herself a very masc tomboy, she looked up to kai a lot during their childhood and sorta subconsciously modeled himself presentation-wise after her older brother. sooner or later he identified as trans-masc and started using t-gel around s7. she’s also very function-oriented in her clothing but the aesthetics are a little higher on the list compared to his brother.

-also considered herself heterosexual for a very long time, but it wasn’t until after zane’s death in s3 that she really questioned his own sexuality. she did car odd-jobs around ninjago city for money and met all varieties of people doing it. eventually settled on pansexual with a preference for masc people.

cole

-he/him

-trans man. loves his masculinity and being a teddy bear. started crying when he grew in a patchy beard because it was so euphoric. started doing testosterone in secret pre-s1 and got bottom surgery during s7. there was a lot of cake when he got home from the hospital.

-knew from a very young age that he was not straight. wanting to rebel, he started sneaking out with the boys/girls from his dance classes during recital rehearsals. after zane’s death in s3 when he moved to the forest, he started to realize how gay he was being around all the shirtless men.

lloyd

-all pronouns, no preference.

-intersex, didn’t really give his gender much thought until after s5 when she began feeling SEVERE impostor syndrome and dysphoria after morro’s possession. began a process of “reclaiming” her body by binding her chest for a while(with cole’s help), which then lead to t-shots and top surgery. now identifies as non-binary with a masc lean.

-bisexual with a heavy preference for women. she definitely wrote a few fritz donnegan x reader in their Darkely’s note books. Had a few crushes on some of their fellow students, but never really pursued them for fear of being not evil enough. becoming the green ninja and getting super famous overnight means he got a LOT of fans asking him on dates. after the first 8 failed dates, they stopped being interested in romance until harumi.

pixal

-she/he

-demiromantic pansexual. like his partner, very monogamous and is not interested in anybody else. she experiences aesthetic attraction often and loves fashion as gender expression. gives compliments on outfits as often as he can.

-genderfluid. designed herself a bunch of different outfits while in zane’s mind when she had the time. he wanted to try masculine clothes for a very long time, but was worried zane wouldn’t be attracted/supportive. being samurai x was her avenue to discovering gender fluidity, and after revealing himself as samurai x, came out to zane in private. he supported them full-heartedly and lent her some of his clothes.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

medialog june 2k24

watched

wordplay - rewatched this documentary about crosswords and particularly about the annual crossword tournament put on by will shortz while waiting for the anesthesia from my wisdom tooth extraction to wear off and found it about as charming as i remembered... i love a doc about a subculture made up of endearing nerds. i first saw it when it came out and on revisit it also has some intensely 2004 vibes - in particular jon stewart shows up as one of their crossword-fans talking heads and it really brought home for me how influential he was on the development of internet tone (like to this day the reason so many people on reddit sound Like That is because they're trying to be jon stewart and failing...)

the bourne ultimatum - movie go zoom zoom! still not convinced matt damon can act

artists and models - i had never seen a dean martin/jerry lewis film before and i don't really want to again but i'm glad i saw this one (this is how i feel about the two (2) wes anderson movies i've seen, and also pulp fiction & tarantino). some great colors & costumes, a plot that goes surprisingly bonkers in a final third turn that reminds you it was the cold war (between that and all the stuff about comics & violence this one also functions as a real time capsule), and (my main reason for watching) shirley maclaine the love of my life is so adorable and funny as a daffy sweetheart in a role that really lets her (a former dancer) show off her gift for physical comedy.

the secret garden - the cast in this movie is so good, including the children in the starring roles, and while it doesn't even attempt to do anything with the book's deranged relationship with things like the british empire and the concept of disability, watching it really did bring me back to why the book has been so beloved - the fantasy at its heart is ultimately about hard humble work paying off and about friends teaching each other to be nicer, which are i think deeply appealing narratives for children in a way that people sometimes forget. it's so funny that part of what cures mary and colin of their bad personalities is meeting another unhappy rich child for the very first time!

humanist vampire seeking consenting suicidal person - this was slight but sweet, a darkly funny romcom with some style and heart. also i had never seen a french-canadian movie before i don't think and it was a fun surprise to hear them talking like "frenchfrenchfrenchfrenchRRRRfrenchfrenchRRRR." not an accent with which i have much familiarity!

jurassic park - my somewhat inexplicable, even to me, aversion to raiders of the lost ark had me avoiding action spielberg for basically my whole life but i gave this a shot thinking maybe i would appreciate it if not enjoy it and was absolutely GLUED to the screen from about five minutes in. i understand why other directors are like that about spielberg now, and also what jj abrams is trying to do all the time and failing because he doesn't understand how it actually works. this is like the most famous movie in the world basically and i've seen so many clips from it over the years and yet even waiting for them and expecting them to come i was ON THE EDGE OF MY SEAT! like WOW! truly a movie that feels like a theme park ride more than any other i've seen except maybe fury road. anyway as you statistically speaking probably already know this movie absolutely rocks, and not just for (1) laura dern and (2) jeff goldblum with his tits out.

citizen kane - spent the last weekend in june at two different marches & closed it out sunday night with a screening of the movie that made me bisexual <3 one day i'll figure out a way to articulate how this movie did what it did to me but for now i will just say that it is great and its reputation is deserved and orson welles is one of the most entertaining screen presences of all time and it looks so cool and beautiful all the way through and it is so so so so gay

interview with a vampire season 2 - my opinion on this is at this point well established lol finally some good fucking food!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

read

megan abbott, the turnout - this & the zadie smith book are further steps in me catching up with authors i lost track of during some bad reading years! when i heard that megan abbott was coming out with a book about sisters who run a ballet school i was like LOL because that's like the peak ultimate megan abbott premise (girls and the nastiness of both feelings and bodies and ambition and hunger and an atmosphere of nightmares and filth and the insane dynamics of a tightly knit but deeply dysfunctional world, all to the nth power), and guess what as a megan abbott fan i loved it :) all the bad reviews on goodreads for this are like "why is this book so gross? why is she sexualizing the nutracker? there were scenes in this book that made me feel dirty reading them. way too much focus on the wet leotard crotches of little girls" and i was sickos dot jpg the whole time. but actually i think the reason that this wound up being my favorite abbott since dare me is that at its core it's a book about a woman with an unbelievably fucked up childhood due to her incredibly fucked up dead parents and the suspense that gives the book its tension and its form is less about what's going to happen with the plot and more about whether she is at any point going to put it together that the things that happened to her when she was young were actually bad; the further the book goes, the more deeply you understand the walls of denial and distortion around her entire life. it rules.

david j. skaal, something in the blood: the untold story of bram stoker, the man who wrote dracula - as previously mentioned, i have some real qualms with some of his dracula readings, but overall i found this an addictively pleasurable tome - 600 pages and he kept them turning the whole time. i love a biography that starts off with some background on medieval ireland, you know? skaal is a good writer with an engaging but learned style, and the book is clearly both exhaustively researched and intended for popular audiences (albeit popular audiences who have definitely read dracula, but, i mean, who else is reading 600 pages about this guy?); reading it often feels something like having a drink with a professor who knows his stuff and is NOT afraid to gossip. dracula qualms aside i may investigate some of his other books, particularly his book on dracula screen adaptations, since i'm curious about those but don't necessarily want to, like, watch most of them, lol

bonnie jo campbell, the waters - book club book that was objectively certainly not terrible and which had some things i did like or appreciate, like an 11 year old girl obsessed with math (representation matters...) but which i found just about the most boring thing i have read in my life. like i would definitely say campbell is a better writer than, say, taylor jenkins reid (to name another book club book) or whatsherface who wrote the book of fried green tomatoes which we also read las year... but i found those books much more aggravating but also easier to get through than this book, which really requires you to have some level investment in, like, the natural world of rural michigan, but mostly made me feel so glad i don't live in a small town where all the men have guns.

zadie smith, swing time - it's funny because when i started this i was spending a lot of time thinking about how maybe plot and structure have become underrated, but then this was like a very long book written in the style of someone just kind of talking at you about their life, with plot events technically happening but never feeling like the driving force of the book, and i was totally riveted, which was a good reminder that you can get away with anything if you're a genius! smith is just such a keen observer of people and how they operate, and so allergic to relying on any kind of obvious assumptions about the relationships between demographics & personality or beliefs, even as demographic realities are such a key part of the fabric of the book... i was a little worried i would be disappointed by the fact that she abandoned the modernist-leaning experimentation of NW for a more straightforward, even chatty, style, but "you can get away with it if you're a genius" applies to that too. this book is also an absolute masterclass in the universal through the specific - i cannot emphasize how much literally not one thing the protagonist experiences has ever happened to me, how much our lives and backgrounds and personalities overlap not at all, and yet constantly i found myself aching with resonance over things like "it's so true that's what it's like when you have a mom" or "that really is what it feels like when you are young and sort of smart but also sort of stupid" (which if i were to define it briefly is i think more or less what the book is about).

listened

charli xcx, brat - i remain after all these years a true romance truther and continue unfairly to measure all her subsequent work, much of which is frankly too sophisticated and experimental for my listening taste even if i recognize she's Doing Something, but this album sounds great and has some bops. as a straight-through listen it was too rich for my blood, but i find myself enjoying the songs on shuffle mixed in with whatever else i've been into more than i would have expected from that first exposure, and also 360 has been stuck in my head more waking hours than not for like a month and a half now and i'm still not sick of it (although i think my favorite song on the album is 365, and not just because i think it's really funny that she ended the album with "the opening track coming out of the bathroom after doing cocaine"). plus as someone who HAS been listening to charli since whenever the video for "you're the one" dropped it is nice to see The Culture finally rally around her even if i remain a little puzzled over why now, the all-star remixes getting rolled out have been pretty delightful (LORDE!!!!!!!!), and it's nice to have the zeitgeist coalesce for a moment over something i too think is fun (especially since the other thing gay people love this summer is chappell roan on whom i have yet to be converted sorry to everyone i'm sincerely glad you're having a good time)

[finalgwen]

I'm going to go on a little ramble about representation in Doctor Who because tonight they managed to make me feel a way I haven't felt since 18 June 2005.

So let's start there, with the last time we got to see the Doctor and a male character have a romantic kiss. On family tv in 2005, with kids across the country watching. Two years before that, it was literally illegal to mention LGBTQ+ people in a positive sense in UK schools. Section 28's shadow lingered for a long time, I don't think there was any palpable change to the curriculum in those two years. But RTD gave us Captain Jack and that kiss, and he did so explicitly for the purpose of representation, saying 'It’s time you introduce bisexuals properly into mainstream television'.

Then after that kiss, Jack dies. Tale as old as time for queer characters. But then... He doesn't. He comes back to life, and refuses to die from that point on. A writer that saw too many brilliant gay and bi men disappear from his life (as It's A Sin brings into stark contrast) gave us a queer hero whose power was that he couldn't die, and I still marvel at the power of that.

(... And then sadly the elephant in the room, John Barrowman refused to learn about what's appropriate on set and kept doubling down on why his behaviour was actually just fine and dandy, and so we'll likely never see the character again, which sucks given how much he meant to bi kids growing up in that era.)

So anyway, Doctor Who moves on as it always does. We get Torchwood and a gloriously bi team there, but safely away in the adult television space. RTD era Who keeps on mentioning queer characters but we never get anyone quite as in your face or central to the plot as Jack. River Song briefly mentions flirting with everyone in the same 51st century way, but then stays mostly focused on the Doctor on screen.

Then Moffat era Who comes about and Season 5 doesn't feature a single queer character except River's reappearance. Even Moffat realised how much he'd fucked up here and course corrected. So things get slightly better with Vastra and Jenny (two prominent lesbian characters, only one of whom gets non-consensually kissed by the very male Doctor, yay) and eventually Clara, a canonically bi companion. It's only mentioned in little side snippets about kissing Jane Austen in unseen stories, but it's there? You can't deny she's bi, even if it never really informs her story. And then Bill, who's actually genuinely handled pretty well as a lesbian character, I think Moffat tried and things like getting a gay date interrupted by the pope are genuinely funny gags. Wish we got more of an actual dynamic between her and Heather though.

Then we get the Chibnall era and we do get queer characters here and there, The Witchfinders casting of Alan Cumming as James I is very good, and Praxeus has a quite sweet central gay relationship. But then there's Yaz.

See, Yaz is in love with the Doctor, apparently anyway, it's never mentioned before Revolution Of The Daleks when they became aware of the fan headcanon, and after using Jack to point to the similiarities between them in his last appearance, they kinda kept it on the backburner after that, so it's all very hastily resolved in one conversation in Legend Of The Sea Devils and they never kiss or get to display much affection.

So really we've had two eras where the main character representation has been piecemeal, there's certainly stuff there for queer fans to cling onto, in the same way that we've torn apart the classic era for hints of gayness. But Nyssa and Tegan weren't really for us, and neither is most of this. Even at its best it feels like straight writers realising it's a thing they should include but without any real passion for it.

And along comes Rogue and we get a full fledged romance, a dashing hero stepping into the Doctor's world and them instantly clicking and flirting, the chemistry palpable, all leading to a heartbreaking conclusion where they actually get to kiss before the end, and the chance of more to come in the future. No little one liner where Rogue says 'I like guys btw but anyway moving onto the important stuff'. No nods and winks and jokes about long tongues. Actual text, more development in an episode than Yaz and the Doctor managed across an entire run.

The writers of this episode are Kate Herron and Briony Redman who used to work on Loki, the one with the one side conversation about bisexuality that's a nice nod but never really builds to anything, that RTD famously called a 'craven, feeble gesture'. So they came in without the shackles of the MCU and did it right, and I love them for it. They tried to give us what representation they could, and with a producer that wants the same, we got something authentic.

Authenticity matters when it comes to representation, it can't just be to tick a box, and it really feels like this was for us. Something that might lead to the same brain explosion in a queer kid watching Doctor Who that Parting Of The Ways did in 2005 for me.

[conceptofjoy]

I'm not particularly against tfem Dirk even if it's not a reading I subscribe to, but tbh there is evidence in homestuck even if small of tmasc Dirk. In hussies forum posts iirc, they explain that the chumhandle acronyms are basically chromosomal. For example GG= xx and GT= xy. (It doesn't count for the trolls. the in universe explanation that they're aliens and they have different chromosomes, and the out of universe explaination that it would be impossible to implement since there was 6 "girl" trolls and only CC and AA would be available)

Roxy and Dirk break this, because Roxy's handle is TG (XY) and Dirk's handle is TT (XX). Admittedly this isn't huge evidence and you're totally free to disregard it. I prefer using it as evidence for Tfem Roxy because a lot of the tfem evidence stacks in her favour (her revealed name is described with "the last two chromosomal letters" aka xy) I feel like it's also evidence for June in a way, as she changes her handle out of the GCAT code... (Lost the point I was making started thinking about transfems) Man Roxy is t4t as hell she just attracts tgirls like moths to flame...

roxy's hellllaaaaa t girl. she has points even beyond the chumhandle fact like her ties to the fuchsia girls :] yeah that would be a bump in t girl dirk reasoning but i think there's enough thematic and general character stuffs that point towards dirk needing to take a hard look at himself and let go of all the self imposed rigid gender roles and bro worship tgat he does. like he could be a trans guy and still do that introspection as well but the topic's abt t girl dirk.

his idolization of roxy could be seen as part of a repressed desire to be her. Damn my best friend is trans? That's cool, wish i could be a girl too WHO SAID THAT. his conflicting views on his bro can stem from his dissatisfaction of bro assigning him male at birthmeteor. he latched on to this man who's given him the means to live so he copies eeeeverything for a semblance of closeness with him. its easy when everything left for him's part of his legacy- including himself. he needs to be him because he owes it to him AND his friends to be the guy who knows what he's doing. dude's afraid of calling himself gay, and especially if he's a girl, NO way is he actually admitting that to himself.

he either doubles down on it post canon or one someone else notices that's what he's doing and is like okaaaay lets get you out of ur head now. ult dirk.... :/ well his deal certainly isnt the latter.

[hawkland]

Four years ago I was blissfully continuing my path of ignoring Supernatural all my life except for the occasional lols over the fandom and whatever batshittery made its way onto fail_fandomanon.

November 2020 and I had pretty well faded out of SVU fandom and was somewhat deep into Gorillaz when November 5th struck. At the time I was even more hype about the Valley of the Pagans video released that day hinting at a return to Plastic Beach!

But I stayed up deep into the night on tumblr, reading f_fa, fascinated at watching all this shit going down. Watched clips of SPN crossing my dash, looked up more stuff on my own, even read one or two fixits (mostly) canon blind just because I was now invested, damnit, in getting the gay angel out of Superhell!

Over the holidays while visiting my mother I finally started watching SPN from the start and by early January 2021 was deep in the hole. June 2021 I posted my first SPN fanart piece and look at how that's gone since then!

I know it's cheesy to say a fandom's changed my life but in four short years this one certainly has. Now I just hope the power of gay love will once again pierce the veil of death and save the day!

[cloud-navi]

So I finished DuckTales (2017), my thoughts:

⚠️ Spoilers ahead ⚠️

- Bradford Buzzard:

His feelings for hating adventure and chaos is valid but he should have told his grandma to fuck off and got therapy instead of trying to destroy it. Also its not his fault that Della took the Spear of Selene even if he told her about it.

You can’t have one thing without the other, there must be chaos if there is stability and vice versa.

- Webbigail Vanderquack and Bentina Beakly (Agent 22):

It was a good twist, but it makes me question where FOWL got Scrooge’s DNA to make Webby and why her exact clones (sisters) aren’t perceived as Scrooges kid like Webby is.

My theory: “The Papyrus of Binding only appears to a direct heir of Scrooge McDuck” I think it mean’s physically and emotionally. If June and May are Webby’s clones that means they are just as much Scrooge’s physical child as Webby is, except they don’t have a relationship with Scrooge. Scrooge even before knowing Webby was his kid thought of her like his Grandniece, like family, making her an heir like the boys.

For how much Beakly talked about how important and strong a family is together when getting the boys to talk to Scrooge again in Season 1, it doesn’t make much sense to have her go in alone without informing the family of what she knows of FOWL from SHUSH.

Goldie O’Gilt:

I love her so much, except in the ImpossiBin episode, there she was okay. At the end of the ImpossiBin episode Goldie calls Scooge assuming he took the fountain of youth when they agreed to keep it for both of them, (she went back to steal it for herself so she says). They made progress in the Youth Fountain episode and having Goldie call him about it being gone kinda defeats the whole purpose of their bonding in that episode. Except I understand they needed a character to tell him it was gone like the other missing mysteries but I find it defeated the whole point.

Lena and Violet Saberwing:

To me it looked like Violet’s parents adopted Lena and I’m all for that. Also love the hinted gay rep with their dads.

Magica De spell:

While it was Scrooge that blocked her spell, it was still her spell that she shot that turned her brother into a raven. Theres no reason or obligation for Scrooge to have caught him and give him to her when they were both terrible people. If anything her brother got a new chance at life as a raven instead.

I wish there was kinda a redemption arc when she was training Lena, if not for Lena a little redemption for Gladstone because I like those two.

Fenton Crackshell (GizmoDuck) and DarkWing Duck:

I like Drake with Fenton regardless if he’s Drake or playing DarkWing but I feel like he needs to accept that GizmoDuck is also a hero. Bro needs to know the difference between hero and vigilante.

Fenton is pretty bbg too <3

Launchpad McQuack:

Giant himbo and I love him so much.

Daisy Duck:

Love her, not much else to say. She had standards, that was clear when we heard what she said while driving away from their second date except she still fell in love and was willing to put up with Donald enough to go rescue him and keep going out. Overall a girl boss <3

Huey, Dewey and Louie:

While Dewey should have come forward earlier about looking for Della I understand his intentions more then Huey did when he found out. Louie was right, its not okay, but in the beginning Dewey was just trying to find if she was alive or not, not where she was. He was sorry because he ‘got caught’, he was genuinely sorry. It’s difficult to want to tell someone you’re finding all this stuff about someone you all seek when none of you know if they’re even alive or not. Dewey didn’t want them to lose hope that Della may be alive even if he found out she might not have. Yes he should have told them but I understand he didn’t want to them to be more hurt that she’s unalive instead of just missing. Also they aren’t even teenagers and communication skills are ass with teenagers what makes you think they’ll be any better as 10 year olds?

Again, their anger is misplaced when they’re mad at Scrooge for building a Spear of Selene.

Scrooge McDuck (sugar daddy?):

I like his character and I feel theres a bit of development through out the show with him and the kids, to be a teacher you need to be able to learn from your students.

While yes, he shouldn’t have built the rocket right there he also didn’t tell Della about it. Not his fault she left. Also the audacity to find out it wasn’t really his fault or the fact he nearly went bankrupt looking for her and they didn’t apologize at all.

Donald Duck (DILF):

Literally the best man in the whole show. He put his family first the whole time even when he should have taken breaks except he stepped up. We know that he had some form of falling out with Scrooge because of Della but even so he stepped up to take the kids and stayed in DuckBurg instead of moving anytime in the 10+ years they lived there. I have a feeling they stayed because he knew deep down that he could somewhat still count on Scrooge if not Beakly. Why else would he have stayed and gone to Beakly to watch the kids, granted he didn’t want to talk to Scrooge, Scrooge still took them in and watched them while Donald was off getting a job.

Donald may not be their bio-dad, but he is no way a fucking Uncle. He raised those boys by himself for 10+ years, through their formative years and until they were old enough to know he wasn’t their bio-dad. He stepped in to be a parent because Della chickened out and chose to go to space even when he told her she shouldn’t so she can be with her kids.

Donald Duck, not an uncle, a father.

Della Duck (cool-ish weird Aunt):

My opinion has not changed, she still isn’t a mother to me. Della is an estranged aunt that comes by and is the ‘cool aunt’. She willingly, without obligation, without threat, consciously CHOSE to leave her kids. Regardless of if she knew she would get killed or stuck in space, “there were too many variables” -Huey. She had a fight with Donald that specifically told her that it was a giant, dumb fucking idea with kids on the way. The idea that anyone would accept her back as a parent so blindly is so dumb. Yes she’s their egg-layer, but there is no way in hell she is their mother. A MOTHER would never choose to leave their children unless they positively fucking had too (obligation for safety). Whether or not she regrets it holds no power because she still chose to leave for a stupid reason.

Season 1 finale: “Get away from my kids” by Donald Duck will forever hold more power and significance then anytime she ever says it because she gave up parent rights before they were born. No parent would willingly, without valid cause like their safety (not fucking exploring space for funzys) would leave their child.

Over all:

Scrooge and Donald are DILFS and Della can get bent.