#gender fuckery for fun and chaos

[dabblingreturns]

One of my favorite parts of having my friend read nona is having him call me after about 5 chapters going, "it's not my imagination right? There is alot of trans stuff going on?"

[princecosmosanon]

Okay, so! In Omegaverse there’s a lot of wiggle room because it’s all fiction and there’s no hard rules, BUT!! From what I can tell, it’s usually (but not always!) expressed as there being Primary and Secondary Genders.

Primary Gender is what we typically think of gender: male, female, intersex, non-binary, etc.

Secondary Gender is the Omegaverse stuff: Alpha, Omega, Beta, Zeta, etc.

Some people don’t call it secondary gender, instead using the term “dynamic” but it basically means the same thing.

That being said, does this mean you can give a definitive answer to “how many genders are there in omegaverse”? No, not really. It all depends on your interpretation (and how much math you wanna put yourself through if you want, like, a definite number).

I tend to like to think of it as a prescriptivist might: there are as many genders in Omegaverse as there are in the real world (that is, basically infinite). A person’s perception of gender heavily influences their interpretation of gender in writing Omegaverse stories. They can have as many as they want, and that’s where so much of the fun comes from writing Omegaverse.

so how many genders are there in the omegaverse?

like, 2 (men and women), 2 (alpha and omega men), 3 (alpha/beta/omega men), 3 (alpha/omega men, and women), or 4 (alpha/beta/omega men, then women)?

or do women have their own subgenders? could it be as many as 6 (alpha/beta/omega men, and also alpha/beta/omega women)?

[tens-girl]

The Legend of Venice…

Now complete on AO3!

After revealing that old friend Giacomo Casanova looks exactly like the Doctor (and of course somewhat like himself too!), Crowley persuades the Time Lord to take the gang to Venice, 18th Century, to experience the legend for themselves.

Chaos naturally ensues, the Doctor managing approximately five minutes before being mistaken for Giac and being chased around the streets and canals of the city.

Fun, frolics and flirting. Who Omens typical angst and heartache (the Doctor and Jack need to seriously sort their shit out…) Fem-Crowley (with sexy gender fuckery included…) And some great cameos.

Part 12 of Who Omens (notes for chapter one give a few pointers if you’ve not read previously!) Rated E (explicit sex, various pairings) 59,093 words. Complete.

[cangrellesteponme]

Oh boy oh boy let's see let's see hmmmm

"Crossdressing"

lemme hear your thoughts on THAT trope friend <3

my friend, you really came here asking for chaos. love that for you. i have Thoughts.

(obviously i'm going to mention and discuss transphobia a lot in this.)

TAKE CROSSDRESSING AWAY FROM CIS PEOPLE. this is a very broad statement but i like adding nuance last so bear with me.

i am sick and tired of disgusting amounts of misogyny, transphobia, gross bioessentialism, and stupidity that some people just HAVE to throw in everytime they touch the concept of crossdressing.

i am so done with the "strong woman must dress like a man to make use of her strength, and her dislike of feminine attire shows how good and clever (and detached from the lowly female ways) she is, but ultimately she is only worthy of love once she puts the dress back on and ends up with the guy who figured it out because that is the inevitable fate of all good women" trope. no exceptions. none.

i'm sure i don't need to write an essay on why the "man in a dress as a creature of ridicule, deception, and predation" trope is heinous and disgusting. i will get heated if i do so let's just not.

now let's get to the less infuriating (but unfortunately very rare) uses of the crossdressing trope.

i'm not dumb i know crossdressing is also a smut trope. sometimes the vibes are weird, but also sometimes some of y'all are really just very horny for any kind of gender fuckery, and that's. funny i guess. either way i don't care. have fun. keep putting lingerie on whole bears, you degenerates (affectionate).

i adore crossdressing as a fun thing characters just do because why the fuck not. in this house we love drag. we love wearing shit for the hell of it. we love just being a dude or a gal for a little while. we also particularly love characters with backstories that put a lot of emphasis on gender roles getting to break them just a little bit. (this is what gilles (makai ouji) could've been. but it's complicated.)

now, the best one: CROSSDRESSING AS A TRANS AWAKENING. perfect. delicious. never gets old. never. the amount of transfem marco diaz fics i have read about this is unholy. there are many other examples but marco is about as canon as it gets so it's the only one i'll dare mention. this version of the trope is so damn good i don't even have the words.

now that i've mentioned trans people i have to get to the angsty one: trans people crossdressing as their AGAB. the horror, the despair, the general "good lord this sucks" of it is actually amazing and i am an angst reader who will enjoy it and ask for more. (it's also very good as hurt/comfort with a gender-affirming bestie being there for the character). however i only like it if there's perfect clarity concerning the character's gender identity. (so even though butler!grelle slays... no. maybe if yana had been less transphobic... still, meh.)

so crossdressing can be an interesting trope to use, but 90% of the time it sucks. and i blame cisnormativity for it, because it makes crossdressing into this weird thing that must be reversed so that all is good and right again (cis character goes back to gender conformity, and all is well now) instead of just being there.

part of the problem is that to cis people, crossdressing is this faraway thing that can only be considered in comedic or disturbing situations, because that is the unknown. but for trans people, it's just a random fact of life: you can't avoid the gender fuckery when you are the gender fuckery. so the cis way of using the crossdressing trope is often transphobic (and all the other things i mentioned earlier) because it because it makes fun of, sensationalises, and dehumanises every person who lives in gender non-conformity.

so this trope needs to be handled with care. but it's manageable, i think. and when it's done well, it's never boring.

but would i write it? maybe in a very casual way. i'm more of a reader for that one.

[auspex]

i know. literally nothing about polyphria(???), all i know is they're a mage in like the 1850s and they have a gun. what's their gist, what's goin on in their story, im a bit curious /lh

ok!! cool i love my sunshine mage. her tag is here https://www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/tagged/porphyria%20mage%20oc

there you can find a lot more about her.

Also for the vibe checks: https://www.pinterest.com/quowwww/porphyria/

Their gist is that they are an Ancanthus mage, which means she is good at Fate and Time magic and does a lot of spells w those things. She's positive. She's confident. She figures if she screws up she can rewind time anyway and she simply Did Not mess up actually, and that goes for her cabal.

She loves her cabal and they love her back. They'd kill for each other and have done so. They are all Fun Mages that are good at all sorts of different things and have pretty different personalities.

She's a mom though surprisingly not as big mom friend vibes as you might expect. She loves her kids but isn't sure what to do since she can really tell them about mage society.

She cares about non-mages a lot, more than many other older mages tbh, but isn't like. Interested in them anymore in the same way. She wants to help people out and make things better, but she can't be her true self with them, yanno? Plus society is. very misogynistic in this time period.

As for her story she's travellin the wild west trails cause for some reason normal teleporting doesn't work so we have to travel the Old Fashioned way, investigating leads against the Evil Seers and also figuring out WTF happened to the cabal to give them shared dreams and visions and destiny lkasdjflksd

I expect her to go a Bit Feral and possibly have gender fuckery as she'll be able to see parallel universes and the future and stuff. I'm excited for her Descent into MORE CHAOS.

[chaoticneutralgood2627]

Gender is all sorts of fuckery on every level, there's no right way to do it. Cis-fem-catboys exist. Cis masc women exist. Cis men with long hair exist. Cis women with beards exist. Your clothes don't say shit about your gender. Wear what makes you comfy (as long as its safe, plz be safe)

You don't owe anyone a damn thing when it comes to gender. Have fun fucking with it and find what makes you comfy and makes you feel cool/hot/eldritch horror/chaos/attractive/whatever-the-hell-other-adjective-you-want.

Serious post gross.

I know I have a lot of followers who are trans minors so grandpa duo wants to give some wisdom that I wish someone told me when I was a baby trans man.

You don’t have to change your name. You can keep it. It’s not a requirement.

You don’t have to have T/E to be trans.

Don’t wear your binder while doing sports. It hurts.

You don’t have to be hyper masculine or hyper feminine. Just be you.

Do not use bandages. They can cause issues.

Surgery isn’t a requirement.

Being part of the lgbtqia+ community is a new family. If yours doesn’t support you now, we do.

You don’t have to pass to be trans. You are trans anyway. You look good.

Go to Starbucks and use your chosen name to get a feel for it. They’ll shout it.

Be proud of who you are. It’s not a weakness it’s a strength.

If it’s not safe for you to come out, I promise it will be one day. The closet sucks but it’s better than being hurt. Use that time to find other people in your situation.

Being trans isn’t glamorous. It’s tears, pain, hurt and being unsure. That’s okay.

Detransitioning is fine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Transitioning later in life is fine. Transitioning early in life is fine.

Transitioning wont happen over night. If you take hormones, it can take up to 5 years to see big differences.

Love,

Someone who was forced back into the closet at 13 and is now transitioning at nearly 26.

Bottom surgery isn’t a requirement.

Top surgery isn’t a requirement.

Please add to this if you have anything else!

[secretbouquetpeanut]

ITPE 2024 Dear Podficcer Letter

Do wants:

Found family!! And generally friendships and relationships based in friendship - and poly relationships too

I love a good forced proximity trope - marriage of convenience, only one bed, fake dating

Humor, fun chaos, and general light heartedness. Some angst is cool as long as it has a good-ending payoff. It's been a rough year out here in the real world 🫠

I always love f/f, femslash and anything that centers women!

Do not wants: unhappy endings, heavy angst, body horror, explicit violence or gore, mpreg, infidelity

For most fandoms, especially the small ones, I'm open to anything! Some notes for the larger fandoms with enough content to be picky:

MDZS - I've never actually watched CQL so a MDZS specific fic would be amazing! But can be harder to find, and I've learned CQL from fandom osmosis. In general, I mostly only ship wangxian (especially when they get to be unhinged), but I love character studies & platonic relationships for WWX, JC & JYL. I don't like JC/WQ or yi city characters.

BTS - I like anything that includes hyung line really, the maknaes don't do as much for me on their own. I especially love poly ships in this fandom!

SVSS - I love SQQ as fandom bicycle in this fandom! I especially love trope subversions that play with SQQ's harem & obliviousness

Mysterious lotus casebook - my favorite ship is li lianhua (aka li xiangyi)/di feisheng/fang duobing but honestly I like all the 3 sides on their own too.

The sleuth of ming dynasty - my favorite ship here is the tang fan/sui zhou/wang zhe trio, but I like tf/sz on their own as well. I also love the women and gender fuckery in this show, and any character studies or ships that get into that.

TGCF - I love this fandom but it's been a while since I read the novel, so I mostly remember the central characters. I like xie lian/hua cheng, especially fics that explore the wild depths of hc's devotion or play into how completely he loses his cool around xie lian. Also shi qingxuan/he xuan (the more fucked up the better) and also pei ming as a character.

[doctordiscord123]

Can you talk about your favorite headcanons? I love hearing them

:O

I like genderfluid!Dark!!! Or just generally any Not Cis Dark, I think it fits really well with his character and how he’s literally got a male and female soul, I think it’s neat c: I try my best to portray it right considering I am cis and have no personal experience with gender fuckery, and I hope you guys would tell me if I did something Bad

I know my Bim is like.....barely canon akjsfnskdj because there’s so little on him, but honestly I do love him. He’s very fun to write, I like messing with him, I enjoy writing his magical fuck ups and getting to express my own Theatre Kid Nonsense XD I think Bim’s very neat, and I really love that I decided to put glitter in his hair alkjfnsdj really sets up his whole personality

I like writing Reynolds’ and Eric’s dynamic! I tried so hard to nail their Brother Vibes right, I was kinda worried people would ship them since I had a little trouble a while back with people shipping my interpretations of Silver (straight) and Ed (aro), so I hope I did good! I think they’re sweet, and I had a lot of fun sort of giving the background to their build-up in bond in the Streets fic. They’re very cute, I take pride in taking the characters no one else really cares about and giving them life anyway

The Jims man....love me some chaos twins....I don’t know when I decided the Jims are weird little bastards, but I Love It, and I love the idea that they can get away with almost anything thanks to Dark’s little soft spot for them....everyone likes to forget that the Jims did murder someone in my series, they aren’t exactly innocent weird little bastards XD

This became less of a headcanon rant and more of a character rant but oh well

[tenbees]

do you have any favorite lesbian characters &/or shows/movies/books featuring lesbians? i've seen & read a lot of media with lesbians, but a lot of it leaves me kinda cold for various reasons. mostly i feel like there are so few depictions of actual lesbians... it seems like most lesbian characters are shown to have fucked men or randomly (& unnecessarily) mention fucking men in their past. do you have any favorites that don't do that & show actual lesbians? looooove your blog btw! thank you!

aw thank you!! 🥰 i’m also Eternally trying to find media that portrays lesbians in a good way and the only two i can think of that i actually enjoyed (lol) are gentleman jack and the book priory of the orange tree, which i’m actually rereading right now because i’m obsessed with the noblewoman/handmaiden trope asdfsadf there is some of that in priory of the orange tree though, but i still interpret both the characters as lesbians and i’ll say why so you can decide if you want to read it--(spoiler)one of the characters is the queen and it is believed that the existence of her bloodline is the only thing stopping the world from descending into chaos. she avoids marriage, tries to have people create an elixir of life so that she’ll live forever and never need to marry, but when Evil Things start stirring she decides to get married. she gets pregnant, but pretty soon after her husband dies and she miscarries, then she and a female love interest get together. its... not ideal, but at least it isn’t like she was out thirsting over men then decided to be a lesbian. i also just love the rest of the book enough to outweigh that haha (end of spoiler)

besides that... ugh i’m trying to think. the true queen by zen cho has a lesbian couple, but it isn’t a central part of the book and just sort of happens three fourths in. it still might be fun to check out. i read it without reading the prequel because it’s pretty standalone.

the tiger flu by larissa lai has a society of lesbian clones, but it’s kind of fucked up because there are ‘starfish’ whose organs are harvested by their partners. and the main character kills her partner early on while trying to harvest her heart, which is a very risky operation. i have mixed feelings about this book because i LOVED the narrative voice of the organ harvesting lesbian and she was such a unique character, but the author didn’t use her to her full potential and made the plot mostly about this random girl in a thief academy... wow i’ve never heard of that one before 🙄

the deep by rivers solomon has a ‘lesbian’ couple, but it’s RANDOMLY REVEALED like 3/4 into the novella that all the mermaids are HERMAPHRODITES, that they identify as MEN, WOMEN, NEITHER, or BOTH, and that they USUALLY HAVE SEX IN GROUPS OF FIVE. even though that is Completely Irrelevant and makes no sense because they have no gender roles? and the only time characters are shown fucking, there’s two of them? the author is one of Those queers and literally physically could not write a book without including some fuckery i guess. so this is a weird one because the ‘lesbian’ couple could have literally been a straight couple if the mermaid character had arbitrarily decided to be a man. i have mixed feelings about this novella because the concept is really interesting, but the concept existed before she wrote the novella so she wasn’t really responsible for it and i feel like it was all tell and no show. but it might be worth reading if the summary intrigues you.

i also read the abyss surrounds us by emily skrutskie but i thought it was ass. badly written and the romance was really weird--captive falls in love with their captor. there was some talk about how they couldn’t get together until the power imbalance was gone but i thought it wasn’t done well. but again, you could check it out if the summary looks interesting.

omg this is such a pessimistic rec list. if there’s anything that you would recommend help a girl out 😭 i don’t watch a lot of tv/movies so all that’s coming to mind is pariah... but i’m a cheerleader... campaign 2 of critical role has two lesbian player characters (who are played by straight women, but still) but Do Not watch that unless you’re also just really into dnd and consuming media that has 4 hour long episodes. also dragon age has sera lol

[williamsockner]

LGBT+ Identity in the Time of Mindless Self Indulgence

Mindless Self Indulgence isn’t an act that could have flourished at any other time. The emo/pop punk wave was gathering steam; hip hop was still a novelty one could distinguish themselves from the flock by cribbing. “Random” Invader Zim-style humor was in the decline, while “edgy” no-limits humor was skyrocketing. Nerds hadn’t become the dominant force they are today, but due to the internet and the rise in manga and anime sales in the United States, they were able to access nerdy content much more easily. Youtube was taking off, music piracy was booming, and reliance on both radio and local record-store gatekeepers was at a low for young music fans.

Perhaps most critically, our national understanding of politics and identity at the time, particularly LGBT+ identities, was in a different stage of development than it is today. “Punching up” vs. “punching down” was not a concept that most people considered in their comedy. “It’s just a joke” was more widely accepted as an excuse for transgressive entertainment than it is today. “I’m an equal opportunity hater” was a common refrain.

Early in their career, the band released multiple tracks where Jimmy Urine, a man who was certainly not black, used the n-word. The “Pantyshot” cassingle was a treasured possession among MSI fans, featuring an early song that supposedly lost them a record deal due to being about lusting over a 5 year-old. Little Jimmy Urine sold kisses for a dollar to fans after shows, including to the teenagers. As a whole, the band made punchlines of racial and sexual slurs, rape and child abuse, school shootings, prostitution, drug use, incest, and just about every other taboo under the sun.

The understanding was that none of it was real and that none of it had any real consequences. Calling someone a faggot didn’t matter if we were all in on the joke, that homophobia was stupid. Words were just words. The identity of the speaker didn’t matter so long as their ideology was clear. It was something of an inversion of the way we publicly navigate comedy now, in that their identity determines where on the ladder they are to punch up or down, and the contents of their ideology is of minimal consequence compared to the text of their words. The context of a joke is not a matter of what the audience believes, but of the many complexities of hierarchy that society as a whole believes.

“Who cares?” asks 2008. “It’s just words.”

“How could it not matter?” answers 2018. “Words create culture.”

So LGBT+ identity in the era of Mindless Self Indulgence.

Describing the difference between 2005 and 2018 to young queer people is a source of anxiety for me, because I feel like the old woman talking about how she walked uphill both ways to the library if she wanted to read a book. It’s difficult, however, to put in perspective how quickly the culture around LGBT+ identities has changed. As dangerous as it is for queer kids today, they have much freer access to information about their resources and history than we did, and far greater representation in all forms of media.

When I was a teenager, I was the first person openly LGBT at my school, and my only point of reference for LGBT identities were Rosie O’Donnell and Elton John. There was no “Born This Way” yet, no Halsey and Hayley Kiyoko and Ellen Page, no Troye Sivan and Adam Lambert and Frank Ocean, no Miley Cyrus, no Laverne Cox. There were no empowerment ballads.

Which was fine, because I didn’t want empowerment ballads anyway. I felt disgusting. In reckoning with my LGBT+ identity, I felt small, broken, repulsive, confused, discarded and doomed. I was sickened in my own skin and filled with self-loathing because of my sexual orientation. Sometimes I still am. When I was 15, I drew a map of my heart, and in between the “fields of sexual insecurity” and “possibly irreparable damage” I had written “guilt!” several times and underlined it.

“You’re beautiful” didn’t only feel false, it felt invalidating. I was fiercely defensive of my self-hatred. I was working so hard at it, spending so much time and energy convincing myself I deserved the beating I was giving myself. To this day the barriers I’ve put up against generic bromides persist, and songs like “Scars to Your Beautiful” or “Roar” make me cringe. Maybe someone gets something out of them, but I can only think of the teenagers like me who used that sort of sentiment as fuel for their own self-abuse. I remember once bursting into tears at a “Jesus Loves You” sticker because it served as proof that the whole world was playing a joke on me, telling me that someone so unlovable should have some hope.

It was impossible to internalize that queerness was not dirty, unnatural and loathsome. Any attempt to break that association was drown out by the rest of the messaging we were receiving and our own tried-and-true mental gymnastics. Reassurance could not reach us at the bottom of the well.

At the time, I was obsessed with Mindless Self Indulgence with the kind of all-consuming adoration that only teenagers can possess. I aped frontman Little Jimmy Urine’s fashion, writing slogans across my coats with white tape. “What Do They Know” and “Cocaine and Toupees” were my ringtones, much to my mother’s chagrin. I had catalogues of bootlegs, lovingly sorted and pressed to CD. Mindless Self Indulgence populated my artwork, both in classroom doodles and in art pieces for my portfolio that I labored on for weeks. They were the subject of my college application essay. I met my first love on an MSI forum (which I moderated) and lost a few romantic relationships over my inability to talk about anything else. I owned every shirt. When I was hired on at Barnes & Noble’s music section, I would nominate Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy for the staff recommendation shelf every single week, and whenever it inevitably got recalled to the warehouse for lack of sales, I’d order it right back.

Sometimes my friends and I would go to the mall parking lot at night and blast Mindless Self Indulgence from my car, dancing around the empty lot with our striped stockings, fingerless gloves and Hot Topic trip pants.

This band kept me from killing myself.

“I’m filthy, disgusting, horrible, irredeemable,” we’d say. “People tell us we’re beautiful and we know they’re lying. I’m a freak.”

“Yeah, you’re fucking ugly,” the music said. “So what? So’s everything else. Have some fun with it.”

Despite the fact that Jimmy Urine has never publicly labeled himself with an LGBT identity, we young LGBT MSI fans claimed him as our own. We enshrined the article where he described being sexually attracted to anyone regardless of gender. We imitated and revered his gender fuckery onstage, the skirts, the pink suits and tutus, the eyeliner, his yelping falsetto leaping up from the masculine shouting, the way he danced. We pored over lyrics - that we transcribed ourselves in many cases, through multiple listens and endless debate - for those nuggets of same-sex attraction and gender ambiguity.

“I make a good girl but I make a terrible boy,” went one song. “These things in my pants that we’re all waiting for, I never really knew what that thing down there was used for,” went another. And the most sacred text of all was “Faggot”, off Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy, the most beloved record of the vast majority of hardcore MSI fans.

“I played that shit straight / blowing suckas to the side hopin' I get laid / now everybody knows / no way in hell I can ever live it down”.

Shit was a revelation.

Kitty, the drummer of Mindless Self Indulgence, once said of the band’s LGBT fans that listening to MSI’s music was like vomiting: it hurts at the time, but then you feel better. You got it out. And the band always cultivated their relationship with their LGBT fans. Gay marriage was one of the few political issues they openly took a stance on, in a time when states like my own were amending constitutions to protect themselves from Massachusetts’ same-sex marriages.

Thus, we had a place where we felt simultaneously seen and valued by the band, and unseen amongst the chaos surrounding us. The irreverent humor of the band created a safe space where homosexuality could be disgusting, but so was everything else. There was no shame at an MSI concert. You were listening to a man famed for drinking his own urine sing about whipping his meat out, who cared if you liked to kiss girls? That’s old news. We’re all freaks down here at the bottom of the well.

I’m 28 now, and I don’t know if the kids these days have an equivalent band. I don’t know if there’s a market for it anymore; I’m sure there will always be queer kids who have internalized the awful message that they are inherently unlovable, but I’m not sure if they can’t find more accessible and more inherently positive panaceas. I see mutations of the same style of humor in Willam from RuPaul’s Drag Race and in some of the undercurrents of Tumblr’s teen humor. “We’re goblins, trash, garbage babies.”

“Yeah,” my inner child says. “I fucking feel that.”

The paradigm of humor has changed since 2008, at least in my circles, and the reasons for that are manifold, political, social, capitalistic. In many ways, it’s been a good thing: bigotry can be exposed rather than cloaked in excuses. A basic understanding of social inequality is presumed of most audiences. People are responsible for the impact of their words, not the intent. “Equal opportunity hater” is seem for what it is: intellectually lazy and blinkered, the refuge of white guys who don’t want to own up to the fact that some jokes aren’t funny.

But I’ll always have a place in my heart for comedy that meets people where they’re at. Where we’re at isn’t always beautiful or acceptable or healthy, but sometimes it’s the place where we need the laugh most.

[indesperateneedofavisualart-blog]

Introduction

This is a foreword, probably a mission statement, hell if I know, but let’s get this puppy rolling. There are a few things this blog will be addressing.

The first among them will be a 5e DnD setting where I will create an in-depth locale and myriad of wonderfully developed items, characters, storylines, background music and much more for your perusal. All of these, I am certain, will inevitably be used for a chaos they were never meant to be engaged in. Memoirs of such escapades will be highly prized as though shining pinnacles of a coveted dragon’s hoard.

That aside.

There will also be notes on a rather long-winded narrative involving zombies. Yes, the shambling kind of which there are already too many stories about. The hope, however, is that the stories and the surrounding tom-fuckery of world building will create some sense of entertainment.

By the way, this is at least a PG-13 blog. There will be some delving into sexual themes, murders, some aspects of violence and the like.

Additionally, the blog will be welcoming of queerness, gender theory, discussions of consent, and will likely include an in-depth glance at various emotional states. So pretty much all the building blocks but the kitchen sink, though sometimes even the plumbing fixtures, should goblins be involved.

Constructive commentary will always be a welcome force - may the thoughts be with you - and with all that in mind I will be trying for Tri-Weekly updates on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

So if you’re here to have fun, be weird, and enjoy aspects of social revolution, I am here and happy to add you to our ranks.

I meant that pluralism, I did not stutter, and with that excited sort of word-vomit, see you Wednesday.

Or perhaps later today, I’m excited and goodnight.

[aion-rsa]

Once & Future Sequel: Cover Reveal & Excerpt (Exclusive)

https://ift.tt/2Z3y6tq

Ari and Merlin are back in the follow-up and conclusion to King Arthur reimagining Once & Future: Sword in the Stars.

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Once & Future, a space-set reimagining of Arthurian legend, was one of the most fun reading experiences I've had this year. Cori McCarthy and Amy Rose Capetta's young adult novel casts Arthur as teen girl named Ari living in a future where humanity has populated the galaxy. The story is highly-inclusive, action-packed, and ended on a killer cliffhanger.

Thankfully, McCarthy and Capetta aren't going to leave us hanging for long. Once & Future is the first half of a duology and its sequel and conclusion, Sword in the Stars, is set to be released April 7th, 2020. Better than that, we have a sneak peek! Check out the exclusive cover reveal for the sequel, as well as an exclusive excerpt from the book itself.

Warning: Spoilers for the ending of Once & Future ahead...

Once & Future ended on a great cliffhanger: with Ari and Merlin traveling back in time to the Middle Ages with a seemingly impossible mission: to steal the Holy Grail. How are they faring in Sword in the Stars? Check out this exclusive excerpt...

Lost & Found

Merlin crash landed in the past with a great, undignified belly flop.

            The chaos of waves left him torn between gasps and muttered curses. He had rocketed through the time portal, an endless sky dive without parameters or parachutes, before it dumped him in this flooded, cramped, circle of stone.

            “Anyone else down here?” He bobbed. “No? Just me?” He splashed around, finding rough stone and high above, a hole punch of blue sky. This was no cavern. The walls had been hacked in a pattern that spoke of plans and intentions and humanity. He was in a well.

            “Nothing a little magic won’t fix.” But when Merlin went to dig some up, he was near empty. Trying to keep everyone together in a time portal with completely different laws of physics had drained him. And it hadn’t even worked. He would worry about that later; for now he had to get out and see if their great gamble had paid off.

            Merlin braced his arms and legs for a long climb. The well was narrow enough that he could jam himself between two opposing sides, scuttling upward and hurting his back and his neck and his dignity most of all. “Dignity is for knights,” he scoffed under his breath. Merlin was a mage. A bit of absurdity came with the territory.

            When he reached the top, he gripped the side, hoisted one leg, and rolled over. Merlin hit the flagstones of a central square with a resounding smack. He stood, shoved his glasses into place, and looked around.

            At Camelot.

            It wasn’t off in some hazy distance, surrounded by dragons and dreams. The city was here, the city was now. A normal day in Camelot should have been bustling with crowds, crying babies, forges clanging, and those incessant flutists, a shrill reminder that music wouldn’t improve for centuries. Yet all was silent, still. Layers of odor that Merlin hadn’t even known he’d missed stampeded his senses. Damp earth. Sprightly grass. Meat cooked in a godless amount of butter…

            And there was his castle rising above the whole scene, keeping watch over the city. It was Arthur’s too, yes, but Merlin had design it for the young king, giving it towers and secrets that regular castles could hardly dream about. It had been his highest achievement, next to Arthur’s reign. Only now the castle looked small—the starscrapers of the twenty-second century had broken Merlin’s sense of scale—and yet the way it stood against this perfect blue morning left a mark.

            On the sky. On his soul.

            He was home.

            Merlin’s memories should have risen up to meet him, rather like the flagstones had risen up to meet his face, but none were forthcoming. Perhaps he was too nervous. After all, he wasn’t supposed to be facing his past alone. The time portal had tried to burst his body into atomic confetti, but even worse, it had ripped his friends away from one another. Merlin looked around for Ari, Gwen, Jordan, Lam, and Val, wondering if they’d all landed safely in the square while he alone had had the misfortune of shooting straight down the barrel of a smelly well.

            All he found was one young person with a gaping mouth and fishy-wide eyes watching his every move. They had ruddy white skin and scruffy brown hair, and they said a word that sounded a fair bit like shit.

            It was hard to adjust now that Merlin had gotten used to the distinct Mercer accent of the future. Not Mercer; English, the language is English, Merlin corrected. Curse that consumer monster with its uncanny knack for swallowing culture and rebranding history! Actually, he’d gone back far enough that England didn’t exist quite yet. The island was known as Brittania during this time. He spent a moment mentally mapping it out: Camelot’s golden age had flowered just before the Norman invasion, and after the island’s run-in with the Roman Empire, which left nothing but divisions and bath houses in its wake.

            “Good day!” Merlin shouted heartily, causing the scruffy kid to drop their bucket.

            They eyed Merlin, then the well. “Did you spring from the roots of the stone?”

            “Stones don’t have roots,” Merlin quipped, though he enjoyed the way this language lent itself to metaphor. His future-y friends had been so amused by his allegorical loquaciousness, but it was a remnant of his origins, a rare one he actually treasured. Not that he knew his precise origins. The farthest back he could remember was waking up in the crystal cave, ancient and alone.

            “Then where did you come from?” the small stranger asked.

            Merlin suppressed the desire to say a galaxy far, far away. “I’m from Camelot.”

            He was only half a foot taller than this young person, which begged the question, how old was Merlin these days? Was it possible he’d gotten younger since they left the future? Perhaps the portal had shaved off more of his life. A penalty for time travel? Morgana had given up her existence to send them back, while Excalibur had broken to bits. Was this his price?

            Merlin loved magic, but sometimes it was unmistakably the worst.

            The kid grumbled as they sent the bucket down the well, while Merlin twisted water from the ruby robes Ari had gifted him on Ketch. He tried not to look suspicious, though that ship had probably sailed to distant seas by now. First things first, he needed to find the crowds. Ari was always at the center of the action, the others not far behind. They were her little ducklings. Thinking of Jordan and her knightly skills, he course-corrected: lethal ducklings. “What’s happening today? Where is everyone?”

            “All attend King Arthur’s wedding,” the kid said, sweating under the weight of the bucket as they brought it back up. “He takes his bride in the tournament ring.”

            Oh yes, the ever-delightful treatment of women as possessions. He was definitely back.

            Something clicked oddly. “Gweneviere? Arthur is already marrying Queen Gweneviere?” He didn’t know why he was surprised. He’d commanded the portal to take them back to Arthur’s eighteenth birthday season, which had been a particularly momentous time for the young king and a rather squishy blank period in Merlin’s memories. That’s when the enchanted chalice had appeared—and disappeared—and that’s what Arthur’s spirit had sent them back to retrieve.

            “The Lady Gweneviere comes from afar,” the kid said eagerly. “An exotic beauty. My friend says she’s a force for good in Camelot, but my mother believes she bewitched the king.”

            Ah, another piece of the past he hadn’t missed. The perfect storm of anti-political, cultural, and social correctness. His friends were in for a migraine of homophobic, racist, and gender-related fuckery. He had to find them. Fast.

            “Where is the wedding?” Merlin barked, making the kid jump.

            They pointed beyond the city walls, and Merlin left at a run. His path wound him around Camelot’s central castle, as glowering as it was grand, with eight-foot thick walls, stones capped with dark moss, and mere arrow slits for windows. He forced himself not to look up at the tallest tower. Another version of him might be up there, even now. Merlin had told his friends he didn’t want to expose them to the horrors of the middle ages, which was true, but some of those horrors weren’t just historical. They were deeply, deeply personal. He had to avoid a run-in with his old self at all costs.

            “Shouldn’t be hard,” he murmured. “As long as we stay out of the castle and don’t cause any scenes.” How likely was it that Ari had found trouble in the few minutes they’d been apart?

            Good heavens, Merlin needed to sprint.

            As his breath cut short and his feet rubbed against the inside of his wet boots, he soothed himself with one of his focused to-do lists. Merlin had to find his friends, steal the chalice, and make a new time portal to return them to the night they left.

            Oh, he thought, three steps. Always a good sign.

            In the back of his mind he added less immediate, but ever-important hopes: to protect Gwen’s baby, reverse his ridiculous backwards aging, and release Arthur’s spirit from Ari’s body, allowing the dead king to finally rest. To end this cursed cycle once and for all. But surely those things would happen if they made it back to the future and irreversibly stopped Mercer.

            “Piece of—” A scent wafted over Merlin. “Delicious roasted meat.”

            A cheer rifled the air, and the cacophony led him through the main gates and up a dirt road slick with mud. In the near distance, atop a perfectly green hill, a proud tournament ring held thousands of people and quite the celebration. The pennants were flying, bearing the red dragon and Excalibur. More promising smells hit. His stomach roared, and he told it to stop being so Kay-like.

            He pushed himself to remember the less than admirable qualities of this place. Even from a distance, the divisions of an unequal society stood out. Commoners huddled together on the edges of the ring, while the nobles kept comfy seats under the dyed red pavilions. If Merlin dared to ask anyone their pronouns, he might very well be treated as more dangerous than a rogue mage.

            Merlin elbowed through the commoners for a better look. He was a bit grimy from well climbing, which helped him fit in with this foul-smelling bunch. Musicians lit up horns, and everyone stilled with anticipation. Everything looked and sounded and felt like the start of a royal celebration.

            He really had come out of the time portal at the right moment. It was the first bit of good news since Ketch, when for a few glorious nights he’d believe the universe was free of the Mercer Company’s oily grasp and headed for the end of the Arthurian cycle. He had celebrated with Val and copious amounts of kissing.

            Val. They had all gotten separated in the time portal—Ari first, then Gwen, Lam, and Jordan—but Val and Merlin had been holding onto each other, Val’s brown eyes the only grounding force as every rule of physics was stripped away, and they plummeted toward a nightmare Merlin thought he’d escaped long ago.

            And then Merlin blinked, and Val was gone. Stolen right out of his arms.

            Drumbeats announced the procession as knight after knight on horseback rode into the ring. Merlin watched while they circled, noticing armor from all kinds of places. Most likely these knights had traveled for weeks to attend the event and seek favor from the king. Some of their suits were polished silver, some red, scratched, and dented, others blackened with coal. One knight stood out in blue armor, a circular dragon emblazoned on his breastplate.

            Merlin squinted, both recognizing the image and drawing a complete blank. “I should remember more,” he muttered, but then, he was seeing this wedding for the first time. His old self had boycotted Arthur’s wedding—that much he did remember.

            After the knights, women with flowers in their hair and woven around their ankles stepped forward, faces calm but unsmiling. As they formed a circle and started a complex pattern of steps, Merlin noted that it wasn’t a homogenous medieval dance crew. For some reason, he had expected everyone to be whiter than the puffy clouds above the tournament ring. A single look proved that wasn’t true. While some girls were white and wildly freckled, others had smooth bronze complexions. There were pale blondes and paler redheads, as well as maidens with warm brown skin and tight black curls tumbling out of their braided crowns. One girl had a Middle Eastern set to her features and jewel-bright eyes much like Ari. And one looked so much like Jordan with her thick blonde braid that Merlin did a double take. But no. Jordan would put her neck on the block before she’d throw herself into such festivities.

            Merlin went back to scanning the—also surprisingly diverse—crowd for his friends, when the star of the show appeared.

            “King Arthur!” the people cried as one. “All hail King Arthur!”

            Merlin’s heart skidded to a stop. It had been so long since he’d seen Arthur. His first family, his only real family until Ari and the others swept him into their lives. At a distance, Arthur looked small, his straw hair unkempt beneath a golden circlet crown and his moves jerky with nerves. There was no command in his presence, no steel in his gaze. He wasn’t yet the king of legend, but he wasn’t the curious, half-wild boy Merlin visited so often in memories. He was caught between the two.

            Merlin wanted nothing more than to shout Arthur’s name, break through the crowds, and reunite himself with his former ward and first magical pupil, but such a meeting wasn’t in the books. Interacting with the story in the past was strictly off-limits. They were here to steal from Camelot, not make fools of themselves by bum-rushing the king.

            Arthur walked slightly sideways, pulling a woman in a cream-white dress in his wake. She wore greenery in her dark curled hair, blossoms around her neck, and a decorative knot of cords on her wrist that bound her to Arthur’s arm.

            “Gweneviere!” several people shouted, almost reverently. Many more stayed silent. While no one would openly jeer the king’s choice, dislike crusted over plenty of features. Merlin huffed and looked back to the bride. And blinked. And then blinked harder.

            Gwen?

            The girl he’d known as the queen of her own Renaissance Faire Planet was standing at the dead center of Camelot, her gaze defiant until she turned to Arthur and gave him an encouraging nod. Gwen looked like she fit right in, perhaps because her life had been a unique form of training for this moment. Though her mix of European and East Asian heritage set her apart enough that the youth at the well had given her the micro aggressive title of “exotic.”

            The truth was that Gwen had come from much farther than China or Japan. Far enough to be measured in galaxies and centuries. That’s the sort of distance it took to be safe from Mercer, and they were meant to be hiding out, yet it looked like Gwen had done more than storm the castle—she’d broken down the doors of the king’s heart.

            In a single day? How?

Sword in the Stars is now available to pre-order via Amazon. Once and Future is now available to buy at local independent bookstore—such as the authors' local independent bookstore, Bear Ponds Books. 

You can check out our podcast interview with McCarthy and Capetta below....

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Kayti Burt is a staff editor covering books, TV, movies, and fan culture at Den of Geek. Read more of her work here or follow her on Twitter @kaytiburt.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Feature Kayti Burt

Aug 12, 2019

Young Adult Fiction

from Books https://ift.tt/302z5Yo