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bao3bei4 · 4 years ago

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girlbosses, male wives, and other lesbian genders

a post about jing wei qing shang. but also mostly about another unrelated movie. spoiler-free.

for a lot of people, mulan 1998 is their definitive “ohhh i’m a chinese woman dressing as a man for contrived reasons and i get absolutely nooo erotic pleasure from this” movie.

however, because i am very special and unique, for me it’s the love eterne 1963. it’s the shaw brothers adaptation of butterfly lovers, the classic chinese folktale. here’s how i’d summarize the movie:

zhu yingtai, an aspiring scholar, convinces her parents to let her dress as a man to attend school. on the way there, she meets liang shanbo, another prospective student, and they become sworn brothers. they study together for three years, growing closer, until zhu yingtai returns home. liang shangbo accompanies her for the eighteen-li journey home while she hints she’s a woman, but he remains oblivious. by the time he learns her gender, her parents have engaged her to another man. he dies of grief, and while she mourns at his grave, it splits open, and she buries herself inside with him. two scraps of her torn outfit turn into butterflies and fly away.

it’s worth noting here that like. this movie is made in the huangmei opera style. so both zhu yingtai and liang shanbo are played by women (betty loh ti and ivy ling po respectively). because of this, basically every level of the film is preoccupied with gender: if we take zhu yingtai’s male performance as credible (as the characters in the movie do) the leads bond through male homoeroticism; the text is ultimately about a heterosexual romance; it is acted out by two women, in a performance that is difficult to mistake as heterosexual or even feminine; and the dialogue of the movie can’t help but remark on this.

basically it asks: what if lesbians could be gay both ways? wouldn’t that be based?

like opera was traditionally made by single gender casts, so roles tended to be genderless, in that the gender of the actor doesn’t determine the gender of the role they play. roles are instead typed into four categories: dan (fem), sheng (masc), chou (clown), and jing (painted face). it’s a sick gender quadinary. each of these roles has further subtypes that are represented through stylized patterns of singing, makeup, costuming, movement etc.

so in butterfly lovers, betty loh ti plays a dan, and ivy ling po plays a sheng. but because of the textual cross-gender play, you end up with a woman playing a woman playing a man who falls in love with a woman playing a man.

i’m going to make a brief digression here into talking about like.. acting theory. in the european tradition, you see it evolving out of early concerns (from stanislavski, brecht) about the fourth wall, and its permeability or lack thereof. in chinese opera tradition, the fourth wall didn’t ever really exist. and mei lanfang, the legendary fanchuan performer, claimed that his success wasn’t just due to his appearance, but rather, his mastery of some nonliteral feminine subjectivity.

If I kept my male feelings, even just a trace, it will betray my true self; then how can I compete for the audience’s affection for feminine beauty and guile?

i’m not going to argue that there’s like, an essence to being a woman because i’m not a fucking idiot. but there’s something to be said for the idea that the gendered interplay between the audience’s perception of the actor, the actor’s perception of themself, and the character they play is a massive part of the appeal of fanchuan performance.

this is echoed by david hwang’s m. butterfly, in which gallimard memorably says, “i’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. everything else—simply falls short.” btw sorry for having the type of brain disease where i constantly reference chinese crossdressing related media. you already know why i have it.

anyway. parallel to that (but far less morally detestably), jin jiang argues “young male impersonators in yue opera embody women’s ideal men—elegant, graceful, capable, caring, gentle, and loyal.” so, trivially, 1) the eroticism embodied by fanchuan performers is distinctly different from their “straight” counterparts, and perhaps less trivially 2) it’s way better.

back to the love eterne for a bit. one of the many reasons it’s lodged itself into my psyche is because there’s something more interesting at play than just all that. normally in opera, to compensate for any perceived residual femininity in the sheng, the dan camps it up even further. so this is how zhu yingtai first appears, this bratty femme pastiche of womanhood. yet within a couple minutes she’s dressed as a man, which she’ll stay as for the bulk of the movie. they do however make compromises with the makeup--more gently lifted eyebrows than the steep angles of the sheng opera beat, and an improbably masculine smoky eye.

that’s right. they performed girlbossification on her.

i don’t want to suggest that she’s straightforwardly feminine. i could write an entire other thing on her relationship to masculinity. instead i want to highlight the erotic interplay not just between the “girl” and the “boss” but also between her and her counterpart: the male wife.

liang shanbo is ostensibly straightforwardly male, but his relationship with zhu yingtai isn’t gay in the ahaha what if i was into my bro way-- it’s a what if i was into my bro and i was his wife way.

that’s right. they performed force fem on a cis woman-man. like when zhu yingtai tells him he can’t watch over her as she recovers from an illness because “boys and girls can’t sleep together,” liang shanbo asks “are you implying that I’m a girl?”

there’s a lot of shit like this that builds up over the course of the movie. it all culminates in that final 18 mile journey. along the way, zhu yingtai compares them to a pair of mandarin ducks, one male & one female. liang shanbo sputters “i am a man inside out-- you shouldn’t--” before graciously conceding, “you may compare me to a woman.”

this is like. a simple punchline. but it’s incredible. it’s true! liang shanbo isn’t a man inside out in that he’s a man and only a man, but rather that he’s a man seen inside first, built for desiring, by a woman & for a woman. as a perpetual object, he becomes a more believable woman than zhu yingtai. and at least in his view, it seems more likely that he could be a woman than her. but beyond that, his permissive tone reads as a kind of wanting in itself--recast, if she wants, “for you, i’ll be a woman.”

obviously this is a classic lesbian mood. who among us has not seen “no gender only lesbian” posts. and speaking of classic lesbians, you might ask. did you just tiresomely reinvent butches and femmes but with a more annoying name? yes. no. okay. well.

first, like butch/femme dynamics have both historical specificity and a classed character such that it’s not rlly that appropriate to impose them on the love eterne. and i guess more importantly, i wanna talk about stuff that isn’t real.

we fight all day about people who confuse performance with performativity, (i use we lightly here. for instance, i go outside every day so i don’t care about discourse) but what if we actually wanted to talk about the former for once? something specifically, whether we choose or are forced into it, that we pretend to be?

anyway. what the hell does all that have to do with jing wei qing shang. i’m going to start by first making the argument that there’s no such thing as a naturally occurring girlboss. i think, honestly, she’s a product of capitalism (“boss” should be the tipoff here) but because both of these stories are set in ambiguously historical china, i’m going to say, instead that she’s a product of uhhh primitive accumulation.

semantics so that i can be canon compliant with marxism aside, if girlbosses are made not born, can you choose to be a girlboss? sheryl sandberg says yes. i don’t disagree, i guess, but i will say: stop glamorizing it! humans only become girlbosses when they’re greatly distressed.

you become a girlboss when you have no other choice not to be one. when your wants are too great to be a woman, when the things you want are not things that women should want-- whether that’s something that really no one should want, like being a ceo, or whether that’s just something like loving a woman (or, as it is quite often, both) -- you have to become something else.

another important part of being a girlboss is that other people are not. your excesses mean that not only do you lose something in the process, but your bosshood comes at the expense of others. the girlboss necessitates a girlworker, or so to speak.

now we’re getting to jwqs. i’m assuming that you haven’t read jwqs, because most people haven’t. that was me until like four days ago. in broad strokes, the novel is about a woman, qiyan agula, who was raised as a prince, and her quest for revenge against the kingdom who slaughtered her people. of course, this involves marrying one of the princesses of that kingdom. it’s all very exciting (lesbian).

what’s striking about jwqs is that both of them seem to fit the girlboss paradigm, in vaguely similar ways. qi yan (agula’s assumed name) seems to follow the lineage of zhu yingtai, who pretends to be a man to achieve her goals. she’s forced to give up much in the process, and also sacrifices a, uh, lot of innocent people. similarly, nangong jingnu, the princess, is inherently a girlboss because royalty sucks. but also, qi yan girlbossifies her over the course of their relationship.

but i wouldn’t say jwqs is girlboss4girlboss. there’s something a little more complicated happening. qi yan isn’t zhu yingtai in that she’s a dan pretending to be a sheng. it seems more like that she was a sheng all along. it’s something that the women of the novel return to often: qi yan seems to be better than a man.

for instance, nangong sunu, jingnu’s older sister, reflects on this.

Nangong Sunu had seen many foolishly loving women who sacrificed everything for the sake of their husbands, but there were rarely any men who would do the same for them.

(...)

Thinking it through, Nangong Sunu felt that Qi Yan was truly becoming more interesting. She intended to observe discreetly for a while, to verify if such a man truly existed in this world. (ch 221)

and i forgot to write down the citation for this, but nangong jingnu also seems to argue that not only is qi yan prettier than a man, but she also seems to be prettier than a woman. (it’s the bit where she’s watching qi yan sleep. help me out here.)

moreover, the way qi yan relates to nangong jingnu is suggestive. jingnu brings out the elements of wanting to be a woman in her. it’s jingnu’s body that makes her wonder what she would look like if she was more feminine. it’s jingnu’s happiness that she resents, wishing that her people could have that as well. it’s her desire for jingnu that makes her a woman.

(another important distinction i suppose--while one person can’t be both a butch and a femme, because the girlboss and the male wife are things we pretend to be until we embody them / them us -- there’s greater slippage between the two.)

anyway, the girlboss/male wife dynamic is reversed wrt who’s actually dressing as a different gender. that suggests an inversion in the implications we see from the love eterne, if we are to take the love eterne as the paradigmatic girlboss text. which i do, for no reason in particular.

so then, is qi yan pretending to be a man? under the opera framework, we’re forced to say no. she’s not pretending to be a man any more so than liang shanbo (as acted by ivy ling po) was. but that, of course, feels incorrect, just looking at the text. is she, then, pretending to be a sheng? i’d strongly say no. the things that others see in her, they authentically see; and she does authentically feel the same things as liang shanbo wrt femininity.

so it has to be the opera framework that jwqs is subverting then. if qi yan kept some trace of her once-womanhood, if qi yan reveals her true self, and yet she still can compete for the audience’s affection-- jwqs’s inversion of the opera framework seems to argue instead that it’s that true self that allows you to compete. it’s being masc that lets you be a desirable woman; it’s being feminine that lets you be a desirable man.

there’s an increased gender ambivalence to jwqs, which make sense, i guess, seeing as it’s not meant to be a het story the way that the love eterne was. for instance, nangong jingnu crossdresses to go out in public, and qi yan remarks that jingnu’s disguise fooled her on their first meeting. when qi yan and jingnu go out in public, both disguised as men, they’re repeatedly perceived as a gay male couple. there’s freedom in that: they could be gay women only privately, they could be straight officially, but they could be anonymously gay publicly.

so it’s through the gay male pretense that they can be gay women; it’s through the qi yan pretense that agula can love women; it’s the qi yan caring husband persona that coaxes jingnu in caring for qi yan in return-- jwqs, more precisely, argues that you can’t be a woman if you’re going to love them, and even less so if you’re going to be loved by one.

this is perhaps well-trodden ground for anyone who has read wittig & certainly many people who haven’t. but it’s the layer of pretense that for me complicates these two narratives.

i think it’s a relatable feeling: wanting something anticipating getting something, or wanting something for yourself anticipating knowing that you already had it. that is, desire in itself being constitutive of that reality.

or less abstractly, knowing that you’d want to be a lesbian if you could, knowing that you’d want not to be a woman if you could-- anticipating any realization of either.

the dramatic excesses & wants of the girlboss, i think, are a decent literary stand in for being a lesbian.

i wanna note here that this is rlly just based on my experience being a transmisogyny exempt nonbinary diaspora lesbian lol. it’s fun & cathartic to overread this history & place myself in the accidental implications.

i don’t think most of the things i say are literally true. and i don’t want to overstep & say any of this can be generalized. please lmk if something here doesn’t read right! ok kisses bye

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vidavalor · 4 years ago

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Bucky flirting with Sam as part of the changing times theme in Ep 5...

This is on the long side. Contains brief mention of the show basically canonizing Bucky as a sexual assault survivor. It’s meta on Bucky and Sam’s identity themes and how the show is shifting into a theme of changing times with the latest episodes-- mostly about how Bucky’s journey is paralleling Sam’s, even while being a different kind of journey.

One of the more interesting subtle themes of Ep 5 is that while we have had a lot of emphasis in the earlier episodes on how much horror still exists in America-- and a very right, necessary emphasis-- as the show begins to pivot towards the part of Sam’s journey that involves him deciding to become Captain America, they are pivoting a bit to illustrate that as much as many things have, unfortunately, not changed the way they should have over time, a lot really has. (Also, the Sam-as-Captain-America thing isn’t meant to be a spoiler as I don’t really totally know if that’s the ending, it just seems um... really the only place this story is going...) They have been using Isaiah to illustrate this point for Sam quite a bit in Ep 5, especially. The core conflict comes from Isaiah believing that a self-respecting Black man wouldn’t want to fight for America after the horrors that have been done to Black people in its history, which is not something that Sam ultimately feels is true. He definitely feels the pain of Black history in America but he still believes *in* America and views it as his country and is accepting that everyone in it really has a role to play in making it live up to the ideals it espouses but has still yet to achieve. In deciding to appreciate Isaiah choosing to open up to him and share his story but respectfully disagree with him on what to do next-- and to have his ability to make this choice reinforced by Sarah supporting him by saying she knows he will choose to fight in the fights he believes in and she has his back-- Sam is choosing to become a symbol of something, even if he’s just a man, and he’s affirming to himself that it is okay for him to believe in this thing he believes in. It’s okay for him to believe in America and love America and what it stands for, even in all its extremely imperfect glory, because he can be the change he wants to see in the world. He knows there are many people who will support him in that and that it only happens if we make it happen and that America, in all its imperfection, has made a lot of positive change happen throughout its short history.

You know who else is enjoying similar truths in the same episode? Bucky.

Bucky arrives in Delacroix all “Hello, 21st Century! I’ve always wanted to flirt with a man in public! I will be over here, lifting heavy stuff and getting in the personal space of your next Captain America, Good People of Delacroix, Louisiana!” What’s so endearing about this is not even just that this is clearly the first time that Bucky has felt like he has some control over his own mind, after proving he can manage The Winter Soldier in him a bit in the last few episodes, but that he’s working towards this kind of peace in a time where he really no longer has to hide any part of himself. Long before The Winter Soldier, Bucky was so the guy with a girl on each arm and a guy in the dark of the back alley. He has never, in his entire century-plus of living, been able to really be who he is without fear. It’s not as if there is not any fear left for LGBTQIA people in the world because, sadly, of course there is but loving Sam would have gotten Bucky arrested twice over in the 1940s. Interracial marriage was illegal until the Loving Act of 1967-- and that was still just for heterosexual couples. Obviously, same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized in the U.S. until 2015. If Bucky had been caught with a man in his youth, let alone a Black man, they both would have been arrested. Even if they were let go (and Bucky would have been more likely to suffer less, on account of being white), their reputations and ability to work and serve in the military could have been impacted.

The show toys with this with Bucky’s interest in exploring it, even through the haze of a lot of severe trauma, back in Episode 1. While he’s mainly eating at the sushi bar because he’s befriended Yori on account of his amends project, he is living in a very modern existence by regularly conversing with these two. Consider that the show chose to make both of them Japanese, basically to illustrate that Bucky, in a sense, was always progressive for his time period. Bucky *could* have been the kind of WW2 soldier who forever saw people of the countries the Allies fought against as an enemy-- your grandfathers and great-grandfathers who never stopped hating the Japanese. But he’s not. He actually comes off as someone whose inability to fit the mode of the heterosexual white American guy in his own time period lent him a lot of empathy towards others and I might be wrong about this because I can’t quite recall at the moment but wasn’t he drafted, as opposed to enlisted? It’s doubtful he even really wanted to fight, although he’s always up for a fight against a bully and clearly hated the Nazis (but wanting to fight fascism makes you far from intolerant.) My point is that Bucky, back in Ep 1, is already experimenting with how living in the 21st century could be a positive thing for him in a life he might want to make for himself, if he can get through his trauma enough to do so.

He eats lunch on the regular with a man who is, in all likelihood, descended somewhere from at least one person who fought on the enemy side to Bucky in WW2. He regularly chats with Leah, who is completely unlike anyone he would have been able to talk to in the 1940s and seems almost designed to be *exactly* that intentionally-- she is a woman with a job that wasn’t like a nurse or a teacher or Peggy Carter lol. She tends bar, a job that was virtually exclusively male in the ‘40s. She has open visible tattoos and is probably putting herself through college-- something that women were just being able to attend, usually in female-only settings. She makes her own money and lives as a single woman, likely without the express intention on getting married and having a family relatively soon. (There’s nothing wrong with any of that. It’s more just that it would have been the exception, rather than the norm, in Bucky’s youth.) Atop that, she is Asian and works in a Japanese restaurant-- the ultimate business that would have suffered during the ‘40s as America didn’t exactly do right by its Japanese-Americans during the war and if Bucky, a white soldier, had been seen with a Japanese girl, it would have been bad for him but worse for her.

So the reason why Yori has noticed that Bucky always looks at Leah when they eat lunch is probably less about the attraction Yori assumed Bucky had for her and more that Leah is this personal fascination for Bucky-- a human being who is basically the total embodiment of everything that has changed in the world since Bucky was last freely a part of it. Yori assumes Bucky wants a date but Bucky really wants what he ultimately got out of it, which is more just to talk to her a bit.

They also play Battleship, which is kind of darkly funny. The game originated after WW1 and used to be played on paper. It soared into popularity in the 1930s and has never stopped being popular ever since-- so, in essence, the game they play is the one part of this that, like Bucky, has been in existence the whole time. It has taken on different forms, though. It became a plastic board game in the ‘60s and has been modernized a few times but it’s still here. (It’s also funny that Bucky is kind of losing the game with her, symbolizing that he’s not entirely figured out this whole modern world yet, even if he’s very interested by it.)

But the big thing is that Bucky is beginning to edge away from just observing this new world and trying to decide how he wants to participate in it. He’s basically decided that he might like to and while his heart is completely with Sam, he’s also afraid of himself and his ability to potentially destroy that one really strong wish he has to be with him, so he’s pushing him away by not answering his texts. He’s likely also, atop insecurity in himself, literally terrified at the idea of hurting Sam not just physically-- through some nightmare or some untapped Winter Soldier potential or failing to protect him-- but through the fact that he’s a guy from the 1940s who has literally never openly dated a man, had Black friends during the war but that was decades ago and is not really sure how to do this.

Forced into a date with Leah, he experiments with the modern world in a way because he’s here because sure, he likes her and all but he was more just interested in her world than her personally and he just didn’t want to disappoint either her or Yori, so he showed up. She seems fairly trustworthy (and he trusts no one but Sam and Yori, so that’s a start) but what he wants really is to say aloud to someone for the first time that he likes men. To see how that goes in this modern era. (Depending on how you take Bucky and Steve, he could have put this into words to Steve at one point, likely way back when, but it’s also possible that they both just knew and didn’t talk about it. Either way, you didn’t go around telling people you didn’t trust in the ‘40s and it’s doubtful that he’s ever just said it to anyone and for sure not on a regular basis.)

He even knows that this wouldn’t be a deal breaker for a woman, necessarily, in the modern era, which is probably blowing his mind a bit because you would have been hard-pressed to find a woman who would admit to someone she didn’t implicitly trust that back in the ‘40s and it wouldn’t have been so open and accepted. What he really wants in Leah is a new friend and she seems to sense that-- she likes this weird guy with the circulation problem that is nice enough to lunch with the old man at her restaurant, he seems okay enough, if broody and sad, so why not talk to him for a bit? She totally thinks he’s just a closet case (she’s not wrong lol) and won’t really be crushed by him rushing out of the date beyond like “too bad, he was pretty hot” but for Bucky, this is the likely the first time he’s ever casually chatted with another human being about his attempt at finding a guy he likes.

It’s actually really sweet in that he’s still sort of coding it a bit, if not that much. He’s still a bit nervous about this so he’s saying tiger pictures to reference men so he can say it without saying it. Leah gets it and just kind of rolls with it and probably has zero idea how big a deal it was for the century-old guy sitting at the bar.

He might have been intentionally dramatic a bit about how it was all “a lot” but he was also telling her the truth-- he did a little exploring online. Found some men. It looked like a lot of work to stroke all these egos. Bucky’s for the modern world but he’s kind of into more old-fashioned guys. He’s got a warm-hearted soldier kink. Family man kind of guys with generous spirits. He’s considering online stuff because he’s also a guy who has been through an absurd amount of trauma-- some of which the show will just come out and say involves sexual assault, off that Selby scene-- and he’s probably considering trying to get beyond some of it by just having sex with somebody. It’s not at all an uncommon response for people who have been raped to try to get beyond it by just having sex again and you know this is yet another level of anxiety for him when it comes to the idea of having another chance at life. He’s nervous around himself at this point and doesn’t fully trust himself, so he’s not sure how he can trust other people and the one guy he *does* trust and *does* want? Bucky has that whole ‘don’t want to burden him with my own issues’ thing happening. (That’s not a bad thing when it’s a situation of expecting your partner to be your therapist, which shouldn’t happen but Bucky would and should have expectations that someone he’d have as a romantic partner can be someone he can trust to care about him and be sensitive to how his past plays into his present needs, in and out of bed.) He’d trust Sam with this but he also wants to be like... he basically feels like he met the potential love of his life while trying to kill him and just got his mind back and the timing is all wrong. It’s a lot of ‘too broken for Sam’ self-narrative.

Whether or not Bucky actually went beyond scrolling and being astounded at the unattractive insecurity of tiger pictures or whether he hooked up a time or two, it’s clear he didn’t get what he needed out of it and he gave up on it, admitting to himself that he’s really basically a tired old romantic who wants love and trust and the whole dance of things and that kind of intimacy more than the back alley casualness of online dating. This is about as far as Bucky has gotten while trying to deal with his trauma while having a truly terrible therapist: he likes sushi now and would like to have his life’s first real chance at an open, mutual, loving, romantic relationship. He just didn’t know how to get himself there.

John Walker and the shield issues actually, ironically, gave him scenarios where he could, through actions that suited him better than those his therapist had assigned. He needed to learn not to not hurt anyone but how to manage it when he did. He needed to learn how to be a soldier that protects people again, not the Winter Soldier, and that he can control that part of himself. He needed the opportunity to show Sam that he really does care, he’s just a grieving mess of a man working through being so out of time and secretly scared that he might like this time better, might have a chance at being who he is for the first time, and he doesn’t know quite what to do with that. He lets Sam in enough that they can show one another that they understand each other’s traumas. He tosses himself out of a plane for Sam in the first episode to prove he’ll follow him anywhere, that he’s strong and will survive and come back, knowing about Riley not being alive when he hit that ground. Sam responds by seeing Bucky essentially frozen in a PTSD moment of the train car on the side of that truck and grabs him out of danger. They snark and bicker but the actions speak louder than the words-- there’s caring there and want and a sense that they’re a bit gone on the other.

Sam’s trust in Bucky-- even as Bucky is still learning how to trust himself with himself-- gives Bucky a confidence boost that he was missing when he pulled away from Sam out of fear of hurting him. The whole White Panther/White Wolf scene? Sam expected Bucky to grumble or blush, he was for sure flirting with him but didn’t expect quite that amount of flirt back. Without realizing it, he had hit on the exact part of Bucky’s identity that was giving him the biggest boost, that he understood the best at that time-- the White Wolf. The White Wolf is the freed Winter Soldier, a peaceful tender of goats, a wounded warrior beloved by a community who rescued him. He represents Bucky’s recent past into his present-- being able to work for the chance to shake loose the Winter Soldier and evolve into a different version of himself. He wanted to impress Sam with that-- he saw Sam’s flirting and parried back, which he didn’t always do, because he knew it would be impressive that the Wakandans had given him a (pretty sexy actually) nickname. He’s boosted by Sam still flirting, Sam still caring, still seeing something in him he’s working on seeing himself. He has some hope, even as they fight, because his attempts at getting closer to Sam are not being rejected wholesale and Sam keeps reaching out to him, often literally. After Madripoor and after Bucky going after and finding Zemo, he feels more ready. He’s more in control of himself. He thinks he has a path to getting beyond the worst of this stuff and he might not have worked out all the details yet or figured out what it looks like but he finally feels ready to try and since Sam hasn’t rejected him, he’s going to take Yori’s advice, just with the right person and stop waiting around, stop just looking and make a move.

In a way, Sam is introduced to 1940s Bucky for the first time in Delacroix-- this is the guy he saw glimpses of but was pretty deeply buried. He’s not reverted back to the Bucky of old as how could he, after all he’s been through? But this is the flirt, the natural charmer and he’s been set free for real for the first time, without worry or fear that he can’t live a life he wants and be the person he truly is without fear of rejection of who he loves, his family and the community at large. He likes this place that is the exact opposite of everything he’s suffered-- it’s so warm, he’ll never feel frozen again, physically or emotionally. The people here don’t care about his arm or who he loves, Sam’s family has Sam’s big, warm heart and Sam? Well, Bucky’s enjoying making him a little flustered. You like that stealthy White Wolf, Sam? Well, he’s got his eyes on you. ;)

Maybe the best part of this being the parallel to Sam’s decisions about how he wants to identify when it comes to him deciding to take up the shield is that it relates to a sense of freedom that is at the core of both of Sam and Bucky’s stories and is the whole point of Captain America and how it is supposed to symbolize a fight against fascism. Bucky has been told twice in the series that he��s “free” and each were, in a sense, a bit true. Ayo tells him this when he’s free from mind control and that is a major move forward for him-- life-altering-- but he’s not free from the trauma of it. Dr. Raynor tells Bucky that he’s free now and can build whatever life he wants but we see on Bucky’s face how those statements for him, in those early episodes in New York, really are conflicting ones-- he is free from mind control but still imprisoned in his trauma and that is what is keeping him from making the life he wants. Over the course of TFATWS, alongside Sam’s journey to decide how he wants to feel about America as a Black man and what he feels he owes to the country and the country owes to him, is the story of Bucky having to build his own identity as well. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is ultimately what these guys were-- the identities they still have at the beginning of the show. They’re going to end it Sam and Bucky, Captain America and the White Wolf. Bucky’s real sense of freedom only came when he realized he could trust himself to decide how he wanted to live, when he proved that to himself and took control over it. He’s still not completely fine-- no one really is, ever-- but he has a path now. Sam and Bucky have different identity conflicts but ultimately, at the core, their struggles with them and with what their country has asked of them and with how they want to live and what they want for themselves, is very similar and the core of a lot of why they understand one another well.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we find out that Bucky stopped answering Sam’s texts when Sam suggested he come to Delacroix. Bucky knew about the boat when he got there, the same way that Sam knew about Bucky’s nightmares, so these two were talking a lot, they were friends on a verge of more but both knowing they each had too many struggles to overcome first and I think that Sam had to have been trying to reach out and accidentally went too far. It’s kind of like in the therapy session-- most of the time, Sam is amazing at dealing with people who have been through trauma but he sometimes falls off his game with Bucky. The whole “this is what you wanted, right?” in the therapy session is frustration, it’s pushing a little too hard, it’s snarking over feeling like Bucky rejected him romantically, even if Sam understands why and probably wasn’t convinced they were ready for it anyway. It’s possible that Sam thought inviting Bucky home with him would be good for him-- and the sun and the Wilsons would have been-- but, at the time, it just made Bucky panic, which is then also why Sam just rolls over the fact that Bucky hadn’t been returning his texts when they see one another again. Sam kept reaching out to check on him but accepted the non-response because he felt like he might have kind of pushed Bucky too fast. They both know they both have feelings for one another but are scared by how much the other has to get through to get to that point and feel ill-equipped to really help one another, often blunder in their attempts to (and other times, get it just right.)

So, yeah. There’s still no shortage of conflicts to be dealt with but alongside Sam finding his path to living his truth in this modern world has been Bucky’s arc from daring to whisper about tiger photos to showing up to show off his prowess with heavy stuff and tools to win over his boyfriend in front of his family and hometown. It’s not subtext. It’s literally Bucky’s identity-themed character arc, existing in parallel to Sam’s. Just because they aren’t giving it a ton of labels does not mean that it isn’t the intent of the story.

#sambucky #buckysam #bucky barnes #bucky #sam wilson #tfatws

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savagekxds · 3 years ago

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basics ~

name: theodora nikhazia zabini age: 19 birthday: january 25 pronouns: she/her sexuality: heterosexual blood status: pureblood species: human affiliation: death eaters (unmarked) family: mia zabini (mother), william zabini (father), thomas zabini (oldest brother, deceased), alexander zabini (older brother) faceclaim: paulina singer

wizard stuff ~

former school & house: hogwarts, gryffindor boggart: her tigress form in chains patronus: tigress current residence: her parent’s manor in the english countryside hometown: her parent’s manor occupation: unemployed

biography ~

Theodora has been a troublemaker since the day she was born. She was the third child, the youngest and a girl. By the time she came into the world her oldest brother, Thomas, was already well and truly established as the favourite. He was the golden boy, the Zabini heir. Alexander was the spare, the second son, just in case something ever happened to Thomas. Which left Theodora as…well nothing really. She was left in the care of nannies almost instantly, were it not for the gaudy family portraits strewn about the home she might have forgotten what her parents looked like. But that was fine with her. She didn’t care about power or prestige, Theodora craved freedom.

Her early childhood years were spent making life a living nightmare for her nannies. Her magic came in early and with force, wild and unpredictable like she was, and she took great pleasure in inciting chaos wherever she went. She would often go careening down the halls of her family home, leaving mayhem in her wake and her nannies trying desperately to clean up after her. While her parents usually wouldn’t care enough to intervene, there were the rare occasions where she would overstep a line - which usually earned her a hard slap and a few harsh words from her mother.

She wasn’t particularly close with her brothers growing up. Thomas went off to school when she was still too young to have made any meaningful memories with him, and she and Alex were too different to get along as children. School couldn’t come soon enough for Theodora, in the halls of Hogwarts she had more room to roam, more space to cause trouble. The Sorting Hat sat for a long time on little Theodora’s head before sorting her into Gryffindor. This development in her life was the first time she’d received any real attention from her parents. The Zabini daughter, sorted into Gryffindor? They took it as a personal slight against them.

Theodora on the other hand, didn’t care. She’d never cared for all those ideals her parents held in such high esteem. Concepts such as good and evil seemed so trivial to her, all that mattered was freedom. She only cared for education as much as she could use it to have fun, and when she began learning about animagi she knew she finally had something to focus on. What could be more freeing than being able to change forms at will? And besides, she may not have been incredibly close with her brothers, but she’d did take notice in what they did. And she could let Alexander have all the fun.

This and quidditch were the two things she really set her mind to in school. Quidditch was a good outlet for all the energy that got pent up while she was stuck in classes, and she achieved the position of chaser in her third year. She achieved the animals transformation towards the end of her seventh year, and was delighted when she slipped into her stripes for the first time. A tigress. What could be more splendid? She found such immense joy prowling through the Forbidden Forest in her new form, stalking the halls of her family manor when she returned home for holidays - hiding around corners to scare the household staff.

She wasn’t sure what she wanted to when she graduated, the thought of being tied to one job for the rest of her life terrified her. Instead she went travelling for a little while, exploring all the forests of the world, completely free of responsibilities, supported by a trust fund. Until Thomas died. Her parents called her home, apparently having their golden boy die had spooked them, and they wanted to keep her close to home. Suddenly the war seemed so much closer. And while Theo doesn’t care for ideals or causes, her family is wrapped up in the Death Eaters, and it’s her family money that keeps her living footloose and fancy free.

physical appearance ~

height: 5′6 hair colour: dark brown eye colour: black, with flecks of gold distinguishing features: her nails are always painted black and are often sharpened into points - if this is natural or she does it herself is a mystery. her irises are flecked with gold and upon close inspection there’s a slight amber ring around her pupils. fashion style: her style is as wild as she is, bright colours and fun patterns, often loose clothes that are easy to slip in and out of when she’s shifting in and out of her tigress form because she cbf shifting her clothes with her.

traits ~

positive: adventurous, easy-going negative: amoral, selfish

◈ – — more info

#◈ – — theodroa threads #◈ – — tiger tiger burning bright | theodora visage #◈ – — theodora tasks #◈ – — theodora asks #◈ – — theodora starter #◈ – — what the hand dare seize the fire | theodora musings #◈ – — kissed by the wild | theodora character #ahintro

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whatwouldmindykdo · 4 years ago

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I wrote a little something about coming to terms with my sexuality and thought I’d share it here...

For as long as I can remember I’ve dreamt of my wedding day. As soon as I was able to comprehend the concept of wedding and marriage it became my only goal, my ultimate achievement: I wanted, I needed to get married. This would make me successful and prove my worthiness. I would be happy forever. And so, for years, I’d spend hours imagining the magical day: the dress, of course, and its designer, the venue, the guests, the music, the menu, the bridal party, the decor. And of course, the groom. Because it was always a groom. However, I would find it extremely difficult to imagine him. I could think of qualities I would look for in a partner, but that was it. Looking back now, I think that, more than any of these things, what I dreamt of was being loved and being in love. I was just hoping to find the kind of unconditional love I grew up surrounded by. Not a person but a feeling. An ideal.

I grew up in what you would probably call a liberal family. My parents are very open-minded, left-wing voters and I grew up having political debates at the dinner table. But it was always about tolerance. Every love is love, they would say. Everyone deserves to be happy, they would say.

This, however, was not true for them growing up. Both my parents grew up in working class families and worked their way into the middle class. As liberal as my parents are, their own parents were rather conservative in thought.

My father’s parents had grown up on farms. Their own parents, my great-grandparents, lived a life I cannot even begin to comprehend. After the Second World War, as life was changing everywhere, and especially in the countryside, my grandparents left for the city (well, a city, not THE city) to work in factories. They were deeply religious and my father was raised a Catholic. However, he also enjoyed great freedom. He was free to come and go, almost as he wished, to play with his brother and friends. He was free not to work in school, drop out after middle school and go on to work with his father. Which he did, for a while, until he realized he didn’t want to do that his entire life. In other words, he was free to fail, and try again. Would it had been the same thing had he been a girl? We will never know, as he was one of two boys.

My mother, on the other hand, was not. Her grandparents had been mining workers, as almost everyone in the area. Her own parents had been saved from this life, and pushed to look for work in other industries. They had married young and my mother was the eldest of two. Her parents were heavily involved in political and union movements, pushing for workers’ rights. This gave her an awareness of the political situation and an ideal of what is achievable when you work for it. My mother, however, is also a woman. And as such, her parents expected her to behave a certain way.

She was expected to be the perfect little girl. Calm, pretty, smiling. Not to take too much space. Do well in school. Be polite. And so my mother tried her best to be this ideal girl. She excelled in school, practiced many sports, and took it upon herself to keep the family together and happy. She eventually went on to work and had to move out to another city, but always close to family as she was sharing an apartment with her aunt. When she found another job closer to her parents, she moved back home. Eventually, she met my father. They dated for a couple of years, but moving in together was unfathomable. Not before marriage. And that’s how my parents ended up married without having ever lived together, something I honestly find quite hard to imagine. Her brother, on the other hand, lived a life closer to my dad’s. He could not roam the streets or drop out of school but he did leave high school without graduating, moving out to work away and never looked back. He introduced many girlfriends to his parents before eventually having a child and getting married, in that order.

My parents would probably tell you that they raised me and my brother the same way. That not more was expected of me. That I could do the exact same thing he did. And to some extent that is true. We were both expected to excel in school. To be polite and respectful. We were both told we could dream of being whoever we wanted to be. But what had been instilled to my mother was also, somehow, perhaps more sneakily, taught to me. I also had to be the perfect little girl, no excuses. The one that doesn’t move. The one that doesn’t scream or make a scene. The one that helps at home. As Michelle Cliff says in Notes on Speechlessness, ‘I am reminded that a great compliment of my childhood was: ‘she’s such a quiet girl’’.

Instead of rebelling against this system I made it mine: it was my way of taking up space. My way of being remarkable. I was expected to excel at school: I was top of the class. I was expected to be calm and discreet: I would literally never speak. Even today it takes a lot for me to be able to do things I know my parents disapprove. Because I have built myself through others’ approval, and then who am I once they don’t approve?

What does that have to do with being a lesbian, you may wonder. See, I knew about lesbians. I knew about gays. It was not entirely unknown to me. I saw them on the news, we talked about them at home. But no one in my family was gay, lesbian or part of the LGBTQI+ community, at least not openly. That was not what we did. As much as my family rebelled against capitalistic society, we were expected to conform in certain areas, and this was one. We, as a family, are heterosexuals. And so I unconsciously associated being a good girl to being heterosexual.

I don’t remember the first time I heard of the LGBTQI+ community, nor do I remember the first time I had a crush on a girl. I am quite sure she was my primary school best friend. I very clearly remember wondering whether I was in love with her or whether that was just how you felt for your best friend (hint: I kinda knew the answer). And so, little me moved on with life. Eventually the feeling wore out, and there was a very intense and dramatic fall out. But that was it, no more questions about my sexuality. Not until I was well into my teenage years, at least. When I made it to university I had began what I would call my transformative journey, learning extensively about feminism, inclusivity and human rights. I was passionate about these subjects and wanted to learn more, and more. I surrounded myself with people who were open-minded, teaching me about these very topics, and, for some of them, part of the LGBTQI+ community. At about this time I began identifying as pansexual or bisexual. I have never been really sure about this. There was no major coming out though. I just stated here and there that I thought love was about a person and their soul, not their gender. Even though I was identifying as pansexual / bisexual, the doubt never really left. I felt ill-at-ease with the identification. Maybe I’m not into labels, I’d think. Maybe.

Deep down, I knew. I think I’d always known. I would get major crushes on women in films and TV shows. Maybe that’s just identification. I could hardly imagine being in a relationship with a man. Maybe I just haven’t met THE one. I would feel uncomfortable whenever a man flirted with me. Maybe I’m just not into him.

I just couldn’t imagine being a lesbian. And that’s not to say that I could fathom the very existence of lesbians. I knew they existed, I had a friend as they say. I truly believed that all love is love. What I couldn’t accept was that I was a lesbian. How could I not like men? Good girls like men. Good girls are straight. Good girls get married TO A MAN, and have children WITH A MAN. No way. I must be pansexual. Or bisexual. Not lesbian.

Funnily enough, the pandemic was a big transitional time for me. I was able to truly connect with myself. Away from the world and the mundanities of everyday life, focusing on what really matters for the first time, I came to a realization. I do not like men. I do not find pleasure in imagining a relationship with a man. This realization was validated by experience. I signed up on a dating app (what??? I know, don’t judge). My immediate reaction was to set up my preferences to women only (that should have been another hint right?!). However, almost immediately I changed those preferences to everyone (men and women). Why? Because, I thought, by excluding men I might miss out on the one (he’s always somewhere). What if I miss on the opportunity of happily ever after because I renounce to dating half of humanity? And oh boy did I regret that. I was instantly contacted by half the male population of my surroundings (the joys of being on a dating app) and it really felt like it was not for me. I was feeling miserable rather than happy, anxious rather than excited. I switched back to women only and I have felt safer and more myself ever since.

I guess you could say that I have been feeling rather at peace with who I am. I have come out to a few (selected) friends, in the least dramatic way possible (well, they also are the least dramatic women I know). There remains the question, however, of coming out to family. Because although I have come to term with being a lesbian, I am still scared AF when it comes to coming out to my family and the main reason is: what if I am not lesbian after all (eye roll emoji)? The real reason, though, is that I know that as open-minded as my parents are, a coming out also means a period of adaptation, of understanding what it means exactly. And for someone like me who hates both confrontation and disappointing this feels like a big deal. Selfishly, I wish someone had been there before in my family. That I would not be the first. The trailblazer. The odd one out. The lesbian aunt. But then, I think of my little cousins. And how I could be that person for them. If I allow myself past the fear.

Thing is, I also truly believe that I will not be able to be fully happy until I come out. I will not be truly happy until I can be who I am fully, knowing that the people who accept it are the ones who love me, for real. But what if that means losing my grandfather? What if it means that people will literally never stop talking about it?

As much as I have talked about the hardships of coming out and coming to terms with my sexuality, I will also mention that coming to terms with this reality has been a huge relief. It has opened me to a world where love and inclusion are legion. A world where you are accepted for who you truly are. It has given me role models, values and a political awareness that I probably would not have had otherwise. In other words, being lesbian is a blessing because it is who I am, fully. And when I get to be this person, I can finally start to breathe. I can finally start to live.

My problem lies with mainstream culture and the way it portrays lesbian relationships. I have grown up with the ability of seeing gay couples loving each other, hating each other, flirting, breaking up. Mainstream media and popular culture have very much romanticized gay relationships. What of lesbian relationships then? The reality is completely different. And how could it not be when Instagram still censored the ‘lesbians’ hashtag two weeks ago? When we only have The L Word as a reference? Where on TV and in films have lesbians been given the space and time to actually develop a relationship except in that show? And I’m not even talking about the perfect, happy relationship. Just any relationship. More than 3 minutes of screen time. You’ll have to agree that this is rather recent.

How different would my life have been if I had seen lesbian couples on TV? How different would my life have been if people had not shied away from lesbian relationships? It is time for pop culture to be inclusive of our people. Little girls need this representation. They need to know that this kind of love exists, is normal, and brings fulfillment. I wish this had been my reality so that I wouldn’t have been mad when Casey from Atypical dumps her boyfriend to explore her relationship with Izzie. Because then perhaps I wouldn’t have been mad at her for doing that. I wouldn’t have been mad at Izzie for being honest. Because that is how deeply rooted my fear of being a lesbian was: I was mad at these two women for having the courage to explore their feelings and be true to themselves, when Casey could have had the perfect ending with Evan. And that is not ok. I need to let go of the idea that the perfect life means being in a heterosexual relationship. Because I know that this is not for me. This will not bring me fulfillment.

#lesbian #lgbtqplus #about me #sexuality #coming out?#gays of tumblr

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starfirette · 5 years ago

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fantasy | diana prince x reader

»a/n: 😈

»masterlist

» Diana Prince x Reader | sensitive Diana | fem x fem smut | lowkey angst | wordcount: 4,563

Your little London townhouse has a perfect view of the steelyards and its workers who slave away under a sunless sky. It’s your tradition to fall asleep to the sound of them packing up, then to wake up to the sounds of them beginning work again.

To say time passes slowly for you would be a grand understatement.

You tried many times to find happiness in the city, looking high and low in the most unseemly of places. No thing or person could make you happy these days. You sit at a desk most of your life, taking notes for a bitter old man who can’t ever say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Secretary positions are all the rage these days since it’s the only real way women can make money without signing away their soul and what little freedom that have to an angry, rich man. To be a wife is to be silent and gentle, even if you’re hot tempered by nature. If you were to marry, you would surely have to give up the outlandish dreams you have. You crave independence, freedom, true love; what woman doesn’t yearn for these things? Some women have the unsuspecting loophole to win a man’s affections and hope he will let them at least pretend they have rights.

This option is not one you can choose so easily. You have never had eyes for a man. When you are alone, lounging on your bed or soaking in the tub, you envision yourself in the arms of a woman.

That’s your deepest, darkest ‘secret.’ You badly want to live in a world where your desires of romance don’t count as a real personality trait or as a sin.

You’ve never uttered this secret to anyone, ever. How could you? What friends do you have that are loyal enough to keep that to themselves?

Conversion therapy frightens you a good deal more than a heterosexual marriage. And that’s saying something.

There are plenty of times where you feel completely alone, stranded in silence, and forced to live in your cramped, London townhouse, where the wind whistles through the cracks of the walls and the floorboards creak anxiously. Even in your own home you feel trapped.

The only escape are your books, which you come upon rarely enough as it is. Your books aren’t the type of books women read. Your books are textbooks. Some you’ve purchased under fake names or titles, as if you were shopping for your husband or father. Some you’ve stolen. But all are cherished by you.

The largest wall of your home is lined with weak shelving where you could display your texts happily. Almost proudly.

Ah, to have independence—to be free to study at a university, to do such good with talents reserved solely for a man. And how could they be? What makes you different from a man? You love women, like they do! You breathe, like they do!

It’s the curls of your hair that keeps you from achieving your dreams. The breasts and the curve of your hips which you are coerced into keeping hidden, even on the hottest summer day.

In your ideal world you’d live with a wife, with a few cats and dogs, and you’d be a real doctor of history. A professional, dedicated to her work of uncovering the truths of the world.

In your ideal world...

It doesn’t do good to live in a fantasy land. As cruel as your reality can be, it is the only reality you have. It is in this reality that you must crawl out of bed at five in the morning and be at the office no later than twenty after six, with a plate of pastries and a mug of tea ready for Mr. Landings.

A dreary winter day you leave your London townhouse dressed in a new, fine suit of buttercream cashmere. It had taken the majority of your yearly savings to purchase, but you figured if you cannot be granted the right to bury your head in a woman’s thighs, you can at least dress the way you’d like to.

It’s always best to wake up extra early to be at the front of the bakery line. The freshest breakfast treats sell out first thing of the bakery’s opening, and considering you buy for Mr. Landings, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Carber, and the two respective secretaries, you have no choice but to be at the front of that damned line. This morning the cost of your number three spot was your rouge and lipstick. You feel absolutely plain, but your fine suit cancels out most of the insecurity.

You managed to get a good number of items. On your way out you found most of the line to be other secretaries, dressed in their own cashmere suits and nervously tapping their heels. No doubt they were praying the bakery didn’t sell out of breakfast goodies. You tip your hat down to avoid meeting their eyes. You’ve had your share of failed food runs, and it’s never fun.

You run across the street, only able to take sparing steps as your heels wrestle against loose gravel. You arrive to the office at the perfect time, with your fellow secretaries Etta Candy and Julia Deneiros still in the process of unlocking the doors.

“Sorry I’m late,” you murmured to your work friends.

“You have nothing to apologize for when you have the breakfast, my dear,” Julia assured you.

As Etta got the doors open, Julia ushered you in first. You hurried to set the treasure down on the main desk of the office. Once that was out of the way, you started tea in the side room, then proceeded to settle at your ‘desk.’ It was a small slate of red stained wood, though the legs sometimes wobbled and creaked. Your telephone on the left, accompanied by the contacts you kept for Mr. Landings, hardly rang as Etta usually took care of every business call.

Emptying your pockets took hardly a minute. You set your coin purse and silver pocket watch on the wood before shuffling through the loose pages that cluttered your workspace.

The tea kettle lets out a whistle. Julia tended to it herself, and you softly muttered a ‘Thank you’ but she’d already been gone.

Around a nibble of croissant, Etta wondered aloud whether Mr. Trevor would be coming in today.

You shrug without looking away. "Perhaps he's gotten himself a lucky lady,” you suggested. Julia poured you a steaming cup of tea.

You half expected Etta to scold you, but she instead made a small sound of agreement. “I suppose he could have found himself an exotic bride!” Etta laughed.

Julia giggled like a school girl, choking on her words: “We mustn’t gossip!”

Even though she said as such, she couldn’t help but to entertain the topic. The two ladies remarked that Mr. Trevor would settle with one woman the day the sky turned green.

And for a moment, you agreed with them, humming softly into your tea before you took a cautious sip.

For a brief moment the world was just right—and then Mr. Trevor quite literally waltzed inside with a beautiful woman.

Now, beautiful couldn’t properly describe this woman. What you notice first was her lips, round and quirked as though she was seeing an office like this for the first time in her life. Her eyes sparkled with a million untold stories.

Also, she appeared to be wearing the strangest of costumes. A coat of black fur strapped close to her waist, but every step she took revealed flashes of bare legs. You could have fainted.

Etta only saw the face of her boss, and she cheered. “You’re not dead!” She exclaimed. She doted over the wrinkles of Steve Trevor’s suit before hitting him over the chest with friendly familiarity. “I did think you were dead, you know.”

You frowned. “No, you didn’t,” you mumbled halfheartedly. You made to your feet, shuffling over to greet Mr. Trevor. “Hello,” you said, nodding your head.

The young woman met your eyes and she smiled, showcasing her perfect, pearly teeth.

“I’m Y/n L/n,” you say, forcing yourself not to stutter. Etta introduced herself next, holding a hand out to the woman for a handshake. While that would have been proper, you find it’s rather scary to shake hands with attractive people.

“We ladies are Mr. Trevor and Mr. Landings’s secretary.”

She cocked a thick brow. “What is a secretary?” She has a thick accent, one you can’t quite recognize, but it’s rather musical.

“Oh, well, we do everything. Go where tells me to go, do what he tells me to do.”

The woman looked flabbergasted. “Where I’m from that’s called slavery!”

You laughed before you could stop yourself. Both you and Etta became large fans of the woman, who introduced herself as Diana. No last name, but she seemed so confident with the partial title that you couldn’t bring yourself to ask.

“Would you like a cup of tea? Shall I take your coat?” You offered. Can we run away and get married and adopt lots of babies?

“Oh, thank you,” Diana beamed. She went to shrug off her fur, and you quickly stopped her when you saw what she had been wearing under it. Etta lurched to tie the coat up tight, making Diana grunt as the air was pushed from her lungs.

You laugh nervously, eyeing Mr. Trevor, who looked annoyed rather than surprised.

“Fantastic,” Mr. Trevor snubbed. “Ladies, would we care for a trip to, uhm, get Diana new...well, new…”

“Clothes?” You suggested when Mr. Trevor became clearly uncomfortable.

“Yes, that, thank you.”

“Mr. Trevor I would be more than willing to, but I do have to wait for Mr. Landings—”

“Nonsense, Miss L/n, Julia can manage on her own. Let’s just be on our way.” You gathered your few things, shoving your coin purse and silver watch deep into your pocket. “Sorry, Julia, dear,” you say. She shakes her head. “It isn’t a bother. Try to enjoy your day out of the office.”

You smiled and waved her goodbye before joining Mr. Trevor and the ladies.

Mr. Trevor inquired where you and Etta frequent for clothes. You suggested Paya’s Apparel, but Etta suggested Madame Penny’s Dresser. You tried not to take notice when Mr. Trevor sized your outfit up to Etta’s. He dubbed Etta’s suit no doubt fancier and declared Madame Penny’s.

Diana didn’t move her feet to follow. “What is the difference?” She asked. She asked you. You were caught at a pause. “I would think Mr. Trevor finds Madame Penny’s

more suitable for a...for you.” You awkwardly shoved your hands into the pockets of your skirt. You’d splurged on this suit. Or so you thought.

“Steve! Steve, wait, let's go to Pa-Papaya’s?” Diana asked you.

“Just Paya’s,” you giggle.

“Steve,” Diana continued, “I think Paya’s will do just fine.”

Mr. Trevor sighed heavily, as if he had been expecting something like that to happen. “Fine. Lead the way.”

Diana held a hand out. You looked at it fearfully. “We are walking together, so should we hold hands?” She asked. She went to wrap her hand in yours. Steve scrambled for Diana’s arm, pushing it down to her side. “No, no, no, don’t hold hands. When I said people hold hands when they’re together, I meant together as in married.”

Diana’s mouth rounded out as she said, “Oh!” She sent you an apologetic smile, to which you promptly looked away from. Looking her in the eye made you nauseous, more than you’ve ever felt before.

Away you were whisked to Paya’s. It’s a good center, with plenty of fashionable dresses. Admittedly it isn’t nearly as expensive as Mr. Trevor probably would have preferred. But it’s fashionable, affordable, even for you. It’s a large shop with dim lights behind brassy lamps and lanterns.

Diana looked around, her eyebrows raised practically to hairline. She approached a mannequin clad with a silky pink corset. She touched the material and frowned. “Is this what passes for armor in your country?” She asked.

You couldn’t quite imagine what she meant by armor.

“No, no,” Etta explained, “that’s what keeps our tummies in.”

Diana sent a sharp glance to Etta. “Why must you keep them in?” She demanded.

Etta repressed a few other comments. She settled with, “Only a woman with no tummy would ask such a question.”

“Why don’t we look around?” You suggest as Diana’s eyes wander for more things to poke at. You figure she’s never visited a London shop before. Where could she be from that has such different traditions?

“How about this one?” Etta suggested as she found a brown suit with a thick fur wrap. “Stylish, professional, but still good to wear for a night on the town!” Etta seemed thrilled with her sales pitch. You weren’t impressed. If Diana was to wear something, she should wear something more flattering. Of course Diana could wear a sheet of dirty canvas and still look stunning.

Diana tucked her hand into yours, catching your attention immediately. You looked to her, finding that her eyes were already fixated on you. “What do you think of this one?” She asked. She didn’t seem sure of her own choice. Your legs felt numb as Diana’s fingers tickled the top of your hand.

You quickly pulled away from her. “I think something like this would be better,” you suggested, turning to the first suit you could find. It was black, with a long skirt and a frilly kind of blouse.

Diana still seemed uncertain. Mr. Trevor begged her to at least give it a shot. Diana sighed. “I suppose I can,” she declared. She began to remove her coat. You got a longer glimpse at what was underneath it.

Etta darted like lightning to stop her. Once again Diana was gasping with confusion as Etta tied her coat shut tightly. “Come with me, dear,” Etta said, blotting the sweat off her forehead with her handkerchief. “We’ll find you a dressing room.”

Diana was ushered off with Etta, leaving you to recollect your thoughts. You stopped Mr. Trevor from following.

“Might I have a word, sir?” You softly asked.

“Of course.” He continued to look quite ill.

“It’s just that I did see what she was wearing, sir,” you began. You’d seen such similar armor in your stolen books. “Is she…?”

Mr. Trevor suddenly gripped you by the shoulders. He looked absolutely relieved. “So you know about them?! And the magic island? I don’t think I can handle it on my own, Y/n.”

You blinked a few times. “Did you say magic island?” You finally asked. “No, I meant is she Greek?”

Mr. Trevor recoiled, falling into a fit of coughs. “Absolutely, yes,” he said. “I’ll be...I need some water.”

You wonder what in the hell happened to Mr. Trevor for him to lose his usual composure. He’s been known to always have a witty remark for something, but today he’s entirely off his usual tempo.

You searched for Etta. She is speaking with the oncall saleswoman, who was in the process of explaining the most boring details of Diana’s selected suit. “Etta, Mr. Trevor bid me go ask you if you could pick out a few more outfits for Miss Diana to try.”

“Of course!” Etta said. “Stay and wait with her, please?”

“Done,” you promise.

Etta and the saleswoman took off to find more dresses and blazers for Diana. You looked around before darting back to the dressing rooms. “Diana?” You called.

A door opened promptly. “Hello.”

“H-hi,” you stuttered out.

Facing her was incredibly difficult. Her eyes literally seemed to sparkle with pure joy. Among that, her hair falls over her shoulders in loose, brown curls. Her coat is off, strewn behind her over a chaise. You can see her arrangement of weapons on the floor. Her armor, red and gold, has yet to be removed.

“I wanted to-to speak with you. About you.”

Diana moved aside for you to come in. You felt a bit uncomfortable. It’s not really wrong for you to be here. Any other woman wouldn’t mind helping Diana dress, and afterall, richer women have handmaids specifically for dressing them and even to bathe them. Diana may be a stranger but she’s warm and kind; she’s different.

She didn’t seem to bashful about her variety of weaponry. You’re mostly in awe.

“I’ve never known any female warrior before,” you muttered as you gave the sword a final glance. The hilt had strong patterns carved over it, and the blade looked razor sharp. A stab with that sword would feel completely painless at first, while the blade sliced through you like a ribbon.

“I am an Amazon,” Diana explained.

“Pardon me?” You asked.

“Warriors put upon the world by the gods. We are...well, a bridge to a better world. The guardians of mankind and all that is good.”

Oh, well okay. You weren’t exactly sure how to respond to that, considering it’s a bit crazy.

“You don’t believe me,” Diana says. “I cannot say I don’t understand. We have lived in secret for most of history.” She shrugged in her plates of metal. “I feared the world was under a bigger threat than it ever has been. That is why I left my people to join Steve Trevor.”

You nod. “Alright, I guess. While I’m hesitant to believe all of your story, I trust Mr. Trevor’s judgement.”

Diana smiled at that. “That is all I need.”

She gestured to the loose garments of purple you’d chosen for her before. “I hate to trouble you more than I already have. But I cannot understand how this is supposed to work.” She referred to the corset which ties up underneath every layer. “Oh, well generally someone can do it for you, but there are some that tie up in the front. Should I choose one of those for you?”

“No, that’s alright. I have you to help me.” Diana started to remove the plates of armor, starting with her thigh pieces. She organized her things very sternly, as if she were keeping a strict inventory log in her mind. For all you know she is.

She wrapped her arms over her chest to keep some modesty, but even so, even as you chant to yourself not to look, you felt your mouth become bone dry. You grabbed the corset and waved for Diana to turn around. She molds the front of the corset to her chest, using one arm to keep it in place while she used her left hand to move her hair. Your fingers dragged over her skin. She is so golden, so soft. The smell of soap and seafoam lingers.

You could easily dip your head down and kiss her neck.

You force the thoughts from your head. Trembling, you lace up the corset, hardly able to maximize your strength as you pull as tight as you can. Your limbs feel like phantoms. They move on their own while you bite back tears.

When you finished, you blotted your tears away with the inside of your wrist. “I’ll be leaving, now,” you tell her. “Good luck.”

Fleeing the room while Diana calls after you was the only way to save yourself. The need for Diana built up strong in your belly, as did the cloud of heartache in your chest. Your breath became restricted by the pain. You brushed past Etta on the way out of the store, briefly explaining you needed to leave and to send your apologies to Mr. Trevor.

What worries you most isn’t Mr. Trevor and Diana’s alarmingly fictional stories, or even Diana’s weaponry she keeps strapped to her body; it was the fact you had let Diana get to you. She messed with your brain without even knowing it, and now you couldn’t help but think how horrible your life is.

You briskly walked home. You fumble with your keys at the door, scraping the sides of the lock with the blade. Throwing yourself inside is the only thing that relieves you. This little house by the steel mills is your palace of your true nature. While you shiver at night and hear things creak, you can at least be yourself.

Typically you would calm yourself with a nap or a bath, but your nerves are far too shot.

You journeyed straight to your bedroom and kicked off your heels. Settling over the squeaky mattress with your lip caught in your teeth, you struggle to steady your hands enough so you can unbutton the top of your coat.

You lay back and slide your hand down your belly, poking through the band of your skirt. And you imagine…

You imagine yourself in that dressing room, your hands sliding down Diana’s smooth back.

You pressed the smallest of kisses atop her bare shoulder. The little hairs on her neck rise, her breath caught. She turns on her heels to face you, practically forehead to forehead.

She drops the corset to the floor, kicking it away without a care in then world. Her hand finds yours, and she holds it one more time, tickling your skin with the lad of her thumb. With a gentle smile, Diana raises your hand to hold one soft breast.

You palm and squeeze at her, feeling completely in awe of her beauty. Diana dragged you down to kneel with her on the floor. In the fantasy you lay not in a dressing room, but on a soft quilt. Where you are doesn’t matter; it’s Diana. Diana pushes you to your back, undoing the clips in your hair and massaging your scalp of the pain your tight bun left behind. She drags her fingers through your hair, then down your chest. She bows her head down, mouth catching your hard left nipple. Your right breast is tended to with her hand, while your left earns the attention of hee teeth, tongue, and lips. She leaves tender bruises over your chest, purring her affections and compliments into you.

Soon she trails her mouth down. Her long, dark hair drags over your stomach. Diana places herself just between your thighs, resting her weight onto one of her elbows.

With two fingers she spreads you apart to see your dripping cunt clenching with suspense. Diana presses a kiss to your hipbones. With a finger dipping inside of you, she catches arousal and swirls it around your hole, preparing to widen you out. Two of her fingers creep inside of you, curling up and pressing the top of your cunt’s walls, making you lurch your hips up against her face.

With a muscled arm she pushes your hips down, a hand digging into you to keep you in place as her lips pucker over your aching clit.

The bead pulsed with excitement as Diana pressed a gentle kiss against it. Her tongue poked out to swirl a small circle over your clitoris. You whined, wiggling your hips desperately to feel more of Diana.

Her fingers pumped in and out, scissoring apart and always tickling that magic spot deep inside of you.

Her tongue swirled faster and wider, occasionally taking breaks to ease the muscle, but her attention on you never failed.

Her cherry red lips sucked on your clit. She sang a sweet song into your cunt, the vibrations making your thighs tremble.

She made you cum hard over her fingers, which she stuck within her mouth to clean them.

As you wind down, she places her own two fingers at her own entrance, already slick with arousal. She lubricates her own clit, rubbing the bead for a few moments while gasping your name like a prayer. She roughly grabbed at your legs, spreading them apart so she could position herself at your cunt. She lowered carefully onto you, her warm pussy sliding against yours.

She forced one of your legs over her shoulder as she started to wiggle her hips. She murmured your name, casting her head back and closing her eyes. The movement was rhythmic and precise, your clit rubbing against hers sweetly. Tears bubbled in your eyes, blurring the vision of Diana’s face as she fucked you into the floor, her hips bucking faster, skin and cum mixing and slapping loudly.

Lewd moans fell out of your mouth as you cried out to Diana, begging her for more, to which she obliged. She thrusted faster, kissing the side of your leg that now trembled violently over her shoulder.

You whimpered when she sang your name, a warm smile still quirked on her lips.

You wanted to sink into the fuzzy blanket and stay there forever, being fucked blissfully by Diana’s hot, soaking cunt.

The intense orgasm brought you to the brink of sobs as Diana pushed your hips hard into the floor. “Fuck, yes,” you shout. You beg for it harder and Diana listens, giving you everything you could ever want.

In your fantasy you would cum twice. You would reciprocate the pleasure, flipping Diana over and crawling between her thighs. Her hand would weave in your loose hair, pushing your face deeper into her hips. Your tongue would dip into her entrance, lapping up her cum like it was honey. You would send wide stripes up and down her before using one finger inside of her—then two, then the third, as gently as you could. Her hips would be grinding against your face, her cum dribbling down your chin. She would whimper like she never has before, moaning your name mercilessly, because it doesn’t matter who heard.

Your fantasy ends.

Your fingers are soaked with cum and you move off your bed to wash your hands. You use a warm, damp cloth to clean the mess between your thighs. A part of you feels satisfied, but only the primal part. The rest of you feels sad. Lonely. You crawl into bed, still dressed in your new red suit. You wonder if Diana thinks you to be totally insane, considering how you had run away so abruptly. You worry that she knows, somehow, your secret. You want to know what she would think. What would she say if you ran to her, now, and confessed you wanted nothing more than to kiss her and be held by her muscley, tanned arms.

Despite it being the dead middle of the day, you stay in your bed for hours. Your telephone rings a few times, but you don’t bother. It could easily be your office calling to fire you.

Something within you no longer cares. Let them.

Leave this place, maybe, and find that magic island which Mr. Trevor had spoken of. It would be a land of freedom; freedom to study what you want, to kiss who you want—to sleep in past eight in the morning and not worry about the secretariat duties of providing breakfast.

If Diana is an “Amazon” then you want to be one too. For besides her blatant beauty, there was something about Diana that was incredible. Her smile, her eyes—she glistened with confidence. She knows who she is.

You know who she is, too.

She’s the love of your life, but of a life you will never get to have.

#diana prince x reader #diana prince #wonder woman x reader #wonder woman #dc #dceu #dceu imagine #dceu x reader #diana prince imagine #wonder woman imagine #starfirette writes #i wish queue well

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the-knights-who-say-book · 5 years ago

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Yentl (the Yeshiva Boy)

For those who don’t know, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy is a 1962 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It follows Yentl, a Jewish girl from a Polish shtetl who loves Torah study, as she disguises herself as a man named Anshel in order to study at a yeshiva. Yentl (1983) is the movie-musical adaptation of the story, directed by and starring Barbara Streisand.

Yeshiva Boy moves fluidly between referring to the main character as Yentl or Anshel depending on context, which is a great detail. The movie, not having third person narration, is a different beast. I take my cue from the story and use both names, depending on the context of what I’m talking about—for example, if Yentl is definitely seen as Yentl by the story in that moment, or as Anshel, or ambiguously as both.

I've seen Yentl the movie-musical several times, and of course there's so much gender play to unpack there, you could watch it a hundred times and have something new to talk about each time—whether it’s in the vein of despairing over the unnecessary heterosexuality of it all, or reveling in its grudging gayness.

But reading the story is a whole new area to analyze. It's so much less detailed in many areas (the movie has to flesh it out a lot to get it to two hours), but in other places it has glorious details that were totally excised from the movie (all the women in town have crushes on Anshel!) or completely changed in the movie. Notably, in Yeshiva Boy, Anshel finds a way to have some kind of un-described sex with Hadass, while the movie cowardly has Yentl entirely evade the situation. Yentl also has a happy ending for everyone, while in Yeshiva Boy Avigdor and Hadass are not entirely happy in their marriage, as both of them, you could argue, are still in love with Anshel/Yentl.

It's interesting and frustrating to see the ways in which the film worked to cis-normalize the story, and yet in other ways preserved the queerness of the story and allowed new ways for it to do queer readings. For example, the film takes Yeshiva Boy's ending, in which Anshel intends to continue dressing as a man to study in yeshivas, and turns it into Yentl heading to America to study as a woman. That’s an ending that throws out some of the story's ambiguity and unapologetic queerness in favor of, one might charitably say, a feminist ending, or one might say uncharitably and truthfully, a cisnormative ending.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was not a fan of the movie. He said about its ending,

“Miss Streisand [made] Yentl, whose greatest passion was the Torah, go on a ship to America, singing at the top of her lungs. Why would she decide to go to America? Weren't there enough yeshivas in Poland or in Lithuania where she could continue to study? Was going to America Miss Streisand's idea of a happy ending for Yentl? What would Yentl have done in America? Worked in a sweatshop 12 hours a day where there is no time for learning? Would she try to marry a salesman in New York, move to the Bronx or to Brooklyn and rent an apartment with an ice box and a dumbwaiter? This kitsch ending summarizes all the faults of the adaptation. It was done without any kinship to Yentl's character, her ideals, her sacrifice, her great passion for spiritual achievement. As it is, the whole splashy production has nothing but a commercial value.”

Now, here Singer is not mad at Yentl the film for cisnormifying his gender-ambiguous, interestingly queer Yentl, but rather for making the ending optimistic kitsch that ignored the reality of what America was for Jewish immigrants, especially for Jewish women. And in some ways I feel like rolling my eyes at him for that. Aside from the fact that it offends his artistic vision, why shouldn’t Jewish women get a film where—suspension of disbelief!—a Jew will study Torah, loudly and proudly, as a woman?

But then, as a queer Jewish woman, I agree that the ending of Yentl is supremely disappointing, especially compared to the unapologetic ending of Yeshiva Boy. “I’ll live out my time as I am,” Anshel says—and Anshel is the name she is referred to in this passage, even while also referred to as a woman and with she/her pronouns. (Yeshiva Boy often engages in this mixing of gender signifiers.) This is how Anshel is. A woman with a man’s soul, a man with she/her pronouns, a person with two names. It’s not couched in easily understandable modern terms, but no one who has heard of these modern terms would read Yentl as a cis woman playing dress up. It’s different than that. Queerer than that.

This genderqueerness is the simple fact of Yentl’s character in Yeshiva Boy, but totally painted over in Yentl.

Yet in other ways, because of the nature of telling a story through actors' subjective body language and voice rather than objective words on a page, I think Yentl the movie is possible to read as Yentl genuinely being in love with Hadass, rather than Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, which is more insistent that Anshel does not have those feelings. And that’s a lot of fun.

I'm not of Singer's opinion that the movie has no merit. I love Yentl's music and emotionality (the short story is more distant), and I think I'll always love it. But I do prefer Yeshiva Boy's ambivalence and ambiguity to the movie's heterosexual Hollywood polish.

#yentl the yeshiva boy #book review #Abi's Book Reviews

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jackswolfe · 5 years ago

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Why do you hate padre d'italia? I thought his performance was stellar

His performance was amazing! He really made me feel Paolo’s sadness and frustration. However, my issue is with the film itself. There were a lot of things that made me uncomfortable and I literally had to stop the movie and resume another time because it was so bad. Once again, I want to make it clear that I absolutely loved Luca’s performance and everyone else did an amazing job!

One issue I had with it is that I didn’t really understand it and I encourage you to dm me if you’d like to clarify some things. I just didn’t understand why it seemed that he loved his former partner a lot, but at the same time wasn’t ready for a family with him. However, as soon as Mia comes into his life he starts to slowly consider the family life and towards the end of the movie that becomes the ideal that he wants. To me it felt like it came out of nowhere. Maybe it came as a result of meeting Mia and starting to care for her and the future of her child, as he was quite literally forced to get invested into their wellbeing. Maybe he wanted a family, just not with Mario? I really don’t know, feel free to remind me I’m a big dum dum and explain it to me!!

This leads us to by far my biggest issue with it, which is the reason why I clicked off Amazon Prime a few times and had to take a breather. I’ve said this before to someone else and I hate to repeat myself but here goes! I felt extremely uncomfortable with the slowly built up s*xual tension that was written between Paolo and Mia. Even if it wasn’t s*xual tension, it still was coded in a way that implied that. Halfway through the film when Paolo starts questioning who would ever choose to spend their life with him, it’s kind of like he is giving up on himself. It’s a moment where he thinks to himself that he is in no way desirable just because he is gay and not ready for a big commitment. Those are valid concerns since I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t start to feel that way after a while tbh but it’s the fact that he gets it into his head that the only future he will ever have is if he, in his own words, “tries to have a heterosexual life” with Mia. He goes to meet her family, he keeps having these vague flashbacks of his mother with her back to him, leaving him. And the film implies that he has found in Mia everything he has ever searched for: a family and a normal life. This would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that what they did next is, in my opinion, the worst thing you could do to a gay person, even a fictional gay character.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with loving Mia as a friend or as a sister. There is nothing wrong with portraying them as soulmates, as long as it is platonic. But they made Paolo feel like he has to pretend for the rest of his life that he is straight. They even engaged in s*xual activities? At this point I just shut down my laptop and went and did something else to distract myself. The most toxic and detrimental thing that you can do is to so much as imply to lgbt people that they will only have a happy stable future if they pretend to be heteronormative and that they have to follow the traditional ideas of a family between a man and a woman. So many lgbt people already think that way because that is what the society around them, their friends and family tells them is right. There were so many other ways to achieve what they wanted, which was to have Paolo grow up and accept Italia as his. Just don’t force a gay character to force himself to be straight just for the sake of feeling normal. At the end of the movie, even Paolo laughs in a bittersweet way about it, thinking about how he fooled himself into believing those things.

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akechicrimes · 5 years ago

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ok alright there’s been some talk about sumi’s outfit being modeled after joker and how this is disappointing, so today i’m getting on my soapbox and we’re talking about:

sumi and akechi are foils of each other through foiling joker.

this breaks down really easily. it’s literally like math.

sumi wants a happy ending so badly that she’s willing to sacrifice her entire identity, sense of self, even the physical manifestation of her soul, to become like kasumi and model herself after joker. she is heavily invested in the damsel-in-distress narrative, and models herself after it. she’s so heavily invested in it that she conscripts joker into performing it with her (take a look at her showtime and how she grabs his hand to make him dip her). and ultimately, as we already know, this means that she literally is destroying her sense of identity as “sumire” in order to become literally someone else (kasumi and also joker).

akechi is... the opposite. of literally all of this. not only is he not into happy fairy tales, he actively embraces villain aesthetics. especially in royal, he has a strong sense of self and sticks to it, even when it pisses off other phantom thieves members, even going so far as to antagonize them with it. he spends less time cooperating with joker as he does asserting his independence and arguing against joker. on the note of akechi arguing against joker, akechi actively advocates against a “fairy-tale” ending,

in sum: akechi is joker’s opposite--his antithesis, if you will. sumi is joker’s replicate--his identical.

so of course sumi’s outfit is identical to joker’s.

sumi, i think, is a really interesting observation that in some way, sumi’s erasure of herself is exactly what joker does throughout the game: he erases his self, hides who he really is, all for the sake of pleasing other people’s social links and narrative arcs. in the same way that sumi is trying to fulfill kasumi’s narrative arc post-death, joker can model his answers to whatever will help the other person’s personal story, and the game actively rewards you for modeling joker’s personality after s links according to the person. dating sumi, especially in the valentine’s day scene, feels like fulfilling all her princess-in-a-castle dreams, and joker successfully models himself after the same fairytale narrative that sumi’s modeled herself.

akechi, by contrast, asks the exact opposite: he wants to see akira’s true self, wants to see what akira’s really made of, wants akira to choose reality and truth over a manufactured happiness. (i don’t think it’s a mistake that akira as a character with a personality is far more prevalent in akechi’s storyline than sumi’s.)

(again, not to make it LGBT, but i think it’s worth noting that the fairytale aesthetic is one of the most insidious forms of heterosexual scripts, employing men as the masculine savior and women as delicate and in need of saving. as lesbianakechi mentioned, sumi’s adherence to fairytale heterosexual scripts feels a lot like comp het that she’s conscripted joker into. by contrast, akechi, the coded queer love interest, gives less than a negative fuck about heterosexual scripts, and instead pushes an alternative romance script in which both partners are religiously equal to each other in power and agency, respect each others’ decisions as individuals, and are unafraid to disagree with each other while still remaining dedicated to each other.)

if we’re taking it as a fact that both sumi and akechi are more or less presented as opposite love interest options for joker, what ends up happening is that they become paired up as two completely opposite ways of going about a relationship with someone. and in pairing the two of them up, royal is able to demonstrate the pros and cons of both situations. the comparison means that royal walks away with pretty consistent and strong message about what a good romance should be--hell, what a good relationship in general should be.

royal says that it’s actively harmful to erase oneself so be in a relationship with someone else. royal actively pushes against sumi’s erasure of her own identity and asks her to be--well, sumi. royal’s bad ending is akechi’s free will and his identity being erased. royal’s good ending has them all returning to reality, in which the phantom thieves go on to pursue their individual interests and don’t have their selves erased to fit into some perfect ending, and this reality includes the fact that akechi picked being true to himself and his ideals over being alive (insofar as he was aware), and also this reality includes sumi having to do the terrible, horrible work of actually being herself at the risk of being hated for being imperfect.

basically, insofar as i can see, sumi’s not just there to distract from the amazing amounts of shuake in royal. sumi is struggling with the core problem of royal’s storyline all by herself, which is the need to sacrifice oneself and one’s free will and one’s truth for a mandatory perfect, happy ending. takuto struggles with the same issue from the other end, in that he’s sacrificing other people’s free will and truths for a mandatory perfect, happy ending. akechi and joker are obviously struggling with the same issue, but for each other (”if only akechi were just NOT an asshole to all the thieves, people could be friends... if only akechi WEREN’T dead, we could have a fairytale ending...”)

ironically, what sumi does seem to be there for is to illustrate the ways that shuake, for all its arguing and fighting and the fact that both parties have attempted to kill each other, is a relationship that’s founded on respect for each other’s autonomy and individuality. their rivalry has an appreciation for the ways they’re different, rather than merely tolerating the differences or working around them. akechi disagrees all the goddamn time with the phantom thieves, from the minute he shows up in the interview newsroom at rank 1 all the way to the moment he tells joker to return to reality even if it means akechi will die. and this is shown as a good thing, and this is especially obvious because sumi is there to demonstrate the opposite situation in which nobody argues and nobody is honest and we achieve happy perfect endings at the cost of everything else.

according to royal, a romance in which someone erases their selfhood to fit a (heterosexual) fairy-tale script is a deeply fucked up thing, and we should not do that. royal says that sumi is making a mistake in trying to be kasumi and trying to be a perfect damsel--or should i say, perfect waifu.

the irony about sumi is that in this light, her storyline is really a self-inflicted crime. she’s hurting herself at its core. it has nothing to do with romance or joker or being a cute waifu. her adherence to fairytale scripts is a means of self-destruction. which, in my opinion, is a pretty bold fucking plotline to pitch for a female character: that her adherence to feminine-coded roles and heterosexual interactions are actively destroying her as a person.

#meta #mine #p5r spoilers #i say this with a lot of love for blkmvsk because u are one of my favorite mutuals #please dont be offended hahah..........#i was following the conversation on ur blog and honestly i thought it was really interesting tbh #i just wanted to pitch in my two cents

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poppyofwales · 5 years ago

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BASICS.

Name:

philippa

the feminine form of her father’s name. technically it means lover of horses.

alexandrina

the given name of her great-great-grandmother, queen victoria. greek in origin, it means defender of the people.

beatrice

meaning she who brings happiness. the guide through paradise in dante’s divine comedy and the high-spirited heroine of much ado about nothing.

clementine

the only name her american mother was allowed to choose to bestow upon her. it is one that poppy holds quite dear.

house of saxe-coburg and gotha

technically, as a member of the royal family styled HRH, poppy does not have a traditional surname. ( her passport lists her as her royal highness the princess philippa alexandrina beatrice clementine ) if she ever did need a surname for legalities, she would use saxe-coburg and gotha

Nickname: poppy, by most everyone; pippa by very close family; clementine by her mother alone.

Gender & Pronouns: female & she/her

Age & DOB: twenty-eight; january 18, 1992

Zodiac sign: capricorn

Orientation: heterosexual & heteroromantic

Nationality: british

Ethnicity: white

Religion: church of england

Neuroses: poppy always has to ensure she looks perfectly presentable when in public, even if she is just at lunch in an out-of-the-way restaurant with a friend. there could be cameras everywhere. she is also quite sensitive to the flashes of cameras and worked for years with a therapist to overcome that.

HISTORY.

Hometown: london, england

Father: his majesty the king philip i

Mother: her majesty the queen willa ( nee symonds )

Siblings, if any: his royal highness the prince edward of wales, aged twenty-six

Extended family:

on her father’s side, an aunt ( victoria, the princess royal ) and two cousins ( jeremy, earl of snowdon and lady annabel saxe-coburg and gotha ). she was incredibly close to her paternal grandmother, the queen mother, who has recently passed away.

on her mother’s side, several aunts, uncles, and cousins who all reside in america. she is close only to her mother’s parents, for they relocated to england shortly after poppy was born.

Educational background:

north london collegiate school; 1996-2000

hill house school, london; 2000-05

benenden school; 2005-10

gap year

university of edinburgh; 2011-15 ( ma in linguistics )

Languages spoken:

english (fluent) welsh (fluent) latin (reading fluent; not conversationally fluent) french (fluent) german (moderately fluent) italian (conversational) spanish (conversational) portuguese (basic; currently working on it)

Occupational history:

princess of the united kingdom

poppy is a working royal and, as such, carries out official engagements on behalf of her father, king philip i. she has a decent amount of free time where she can occasionally jet-set off to other locales, but she tries to keep those under wraps and does not flaunt it publicly.

Achievements:

head girl; benenden school

THE SOCIETY.

Codename: theia

Meaning: goddess or divine. after the titan goddess of sight and the blue ether of the sky. she also is the reason gold and silver have such intrinsic value.

Traditionalist or Reformist?: traditionalist; poppy knows well what duty and the status quo mean and most of the time she follows them.

Goals in the society: to ensure that she becomes the next queen regnant, being the first heir of her father.

Opinion on the society: it’s necessary. without the society and similarly functioning organizations, the world as we know it would cease to exist. people in power exist to ensure that those not in power know how to function.

PERSONALITY.

MBTI: enfj-A { the protagonist }

Protagonists are natural-born leaders, full of passion and charisma. Forming around two percent of the population, they are oftentimes our politicians, our coaches and our teachers, reaching out and inspiring others to achieve and to do good in the world. With a natural confidence that begets influence, Protagonists take a great deal of pride and joy in guiding others to work together to improve themselves and their community. Protagonists radiate authenticity, concern and altruism, unafraid to stand up and speak when they feel something needs to be said. They find it natural and easy to communicate with others, especially in person, and their Intuitive trait helps people with the Protagonist personality type to reach every mind, be it through facts and logic or raw emotion.The interest Protagonists have in others is genuine, almost to a fault – when they believe in someone, they can become too involved in the other person’s problems, place too much trust in them. Luckily, this trust tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Protagonists’ altruism and authenticity inspire those they care about to become better themselves. But if they aren’t careful, they can overextend their optimism, sometimes pushing others further than they’re ready or willing to go. Assertive Protagonists view themselves with more self-confidence.

Enneagram: One { 98% } with a very close Three { 96% }

Type One can be thought of as the Perfectionist. Ones are defined by their belief that everything must be in order, and by their feeling that they must always be right. They show great commitment and determination to improve conditions that they find need improvement, and they are forward in encouraging others to improve their performance, too.

Type Three is also known as The Achiever. Threes want to be successful and admired by other people, and are very conscious of their public image.

Temperament: phlegmatic

The phlegmatic temperament is fundamentally relaxed and quiet, ranging from warmly attentive to lazily sluggish. Phlegmatics tend to be content with themselves and are kind. They are accepting and affectionate. They may be receptive and shy and often prefer stability to uncertainty and change. They are consistent, relaxed, calm, rational, curious, and observant, qualities that make them good administrators. They can also be passive-aggressive.

Hogwarts House: slytherin

Inspirations/Parallels: princess anne, catherine de’ medici, queen mary i

Tropes: old money, royal blood, british royal family, rich kid, forbidden fruit

YOUR MUSE AS ..:

A piece of art: girl with a pearl earring by vermeer

A song: to live is to fly by townes van zandt

A book: the voyage out by virginia woolf

A movie: the secret life of walter mitty (solely for the traveling aspect)

A TV show: belgravia

A historical era: the regency period

A historical figure: mary i of england

A fictional character: caroline bingley

A colour: peacock blue

An animal: a swan

YOUR MUSE’S DREAM ..:

Job:

queen of the united kingdom ( and the commonwealth ). if she was not royal, however, poppy would have loved to have worked in international relations on a smaller scale ( translating, perhaps working for an ambassador, etc. )

Vacation:

something relaxing, where there are not cameras taking photographs of her every minute of every day. a private island would be ideal, with the opportunity to be on the beach as well as venture into a lush jungle or forest. in reality, most of poppy’s vacations take place in the cotswolds or on a royal estate.

Day:

waking up for tea with her parents at buckingham, a couple of engagements in the morning, lunch at the bluebird with her friends, followed by afternoon bikram yoga and a dinner that she prepares for herself in her kensington palace apartment. ( poppy generally likes her life and often lives out what she enjoys doing. yes, she has a strong desire for duty, but if she did not enjoy it, she’d have found another ambition for which to funnel her attentions. )

As a child:

to be queen. poppy never truly understood why her brother should be king simply because he was born a boy and she a girl. it’s a dream that has stuck with her throughout her entire life.

Last night:

poppy very rarely remembers her dreams.

That they gave up on:

attending university in america. she was accepted at harvard, princeton, and stanford and had desperately wanted to study outside of britain. however, she chose the university of edinburgh instead, well aware that attending a british school could only endear her to the public.

That they have right now:

to pursue that which is hers. with primogeniture being abolished years ago, it makes sense that poppy should be the next queen regnant. but as her parents and parliament don’t see the need to “strip edward of his birthright” ( that poppy argues shouldn’t have been his birthright to begin with ), she has to find a way to do it herself.

#gilded:task #{ about poppy }

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mmmmalo · 5 years ago

Note

Do you have any thoughts on the super popular headcanon transgirl John?

Been pretty resistant to it, since it doesn’t seem to mesh with the idea of John seeking to merge with the image of Dad, which I’ve read as alternately realized in John becoming the Dad of a family unit and in his gay thoughts (for his Dad or others). But the fact that ‘merging with an image’ is an impossibility that requires interpretation to be brought into reality means there are some exploitable cracks in that position, which I’ll try to outline.

An acquaintance of mine once suggested that John’s dabbling in ectobiology (in Mom’s lab robes no less) constitutes appropriation of the feminine – on the grounds that the scifi trope of penis (bearers) creating life without vagina (bearers) should be viewed not simply as an aspiration to a (gender neutral) God-like capacity for emanation, but as a jealousy of the opposite sex. This would be one approach to June – to read the fantasy of reproduction via busting-out-ghosts (ie manbro bukkake theater) as necessitating a desire to embody feminine characteristics, and to proceed from there.

But I’m also acutely aware that within the confines of heterosexuality, gay thoughts can entail positioning oneself as the opposite gender (in a “i would have to be a girl to like guys!” sort of way) – which is to say, John “i am not a homosexual” Egbert could potentially reconcile that statement with his attraction to men by identifying as a girl (even if that’s in tension with the identification with Dad that’s packaged with the attraction to men?) – but this is not necessarily the case, since depending on the configuration of John’s head, he could just as easily come to the realization that he does /not/ have to be a girl to like guys, and that his statement was a denial.

[Tangential: I read Nedry in Jurassic Park as being gay before (x) on the basis of his loading an embryo (amber mosquito) into a phallic symbol (shaving cream) and later being blinded by bukkake (poison spit), but for similar reasons as the above, I suppose trans woman is also a valid reading]

There’s also the matter of Nanna – that John’s birth entailed her mortal fall from the ladder could imply that John actually sees Nanna as the image from which he is descended (and thus seeks to return to), though this is in tension with moments that imply Dad is highest… likewise, since kernelsprites represent wishes, the existence of Nannasprite swings the pendulum towards identification with the feminine… while John’s association of clowns with Dad swings the pendulum right back again, perhaps suggesting Nannasprite as the reconciliation of the competing ideals. (Perhaps related to how Jane aspires to certain masculinized ideals while still viewing herself as a girl?)

More on that tension: on pages 48-50, John swings from vilifying the aromas of his nemesis Betty Crocker (Dad is actually the one who bakes, so the aromas are actually Fatherly?), to insulting Dad and the associated harlequins, to waxing romantic on transcendent Platonic Forms at the fireplace (above which sits the image of Nanna and her ashes). This is also the moment where John invokes pale fire snatching its light from the sun, which brings us to the Thief of Light.

It’s very interesting that Vriska interrupts a dream in which John nearly re-unites (ie merges) with (the image of) Dad. (And in the subsequent conversation no less, John reads Vriska’s elongation of his name as “June”) Could be related to John discussing how Dad is more of a half-brother than a father, while acknowledging Nanna as the true source? And thus the true target of aspiration.

Also interesting that Vriska acknowledges that John’s session is doomed to fail, in light of her seemingly representing John’s realization that he cannot (or does not want to?) become his father. Her insistence that he should try to win anyway (because winning is the only point of anything) also seems loaded in the context of the parallel discussion of ideals… likewise, John’s insistence that winning is still possible becomes an insistence that dreams CAN come true. Vriska manifests again as John muses on the desecration (and decaptation?) of his Con Air poster, upon which Nic Cage has become a sad clown… which relates to John’s ongoing disillusionment with Dad…? (Finding out that Dad was a boring businessman was a while ago though). Reminds me that the phrasing of ‘reunite with your loving wife and daughter’ can at once represent union with the masculine role of husband AND union with the feminine… so I’m lost again? Very possible that masculine/feminine is just an inadequate dichotomy, but let’s ignore that and press forward.

(I am skipping around re-evaluating the events surrounding conversations with Vriska at this point, since the circumstances of her intro seem to be a pivot)

…in John’s first conversation with Kanaya (after which Vriska manifests for the Remember Me date) is prompted by John preparing to send his gift to Jade, which I don’t know what to make of. However, the conversation dips into a discussion of Contact (need to watch), pivoting on the ambiguous reality of Jodie Foster’s vision of her Dad, which Matthew [horse-noises] has faith in – so we’ve returned to the topic of John musing on his own dreams of Dad, and everything that entails. That reminder is followed by perhaps the most damning exchange:

…which suggests that the applicability of John’s tangent is gender skepticism? But let’s return later to evaluate the resulting Vriska convo – I want to stay linear here. Vriska next manifests as John prepares to kiss Ghost Dad:

…after which Vriska mostly berates John for waiting around and not doing things when he’s supposed to, despite her being the very reason that he is forced to wait. This seems appropriate insofar as union with the Father also represents union with the divine will (in the Stoic sense), to which the Heir of Breath’s openness to suggestion is an end. So the confusion and frustration of Vriska’s orders constitutes an interruption of this fantasy of doing exactly what you’re supposed to do (ie what god/the player tells you to do), which is visually represented by Vriska preventing John from kissing Bill Cosby? I think… though since John’s present objective is to meet up with Nannasprite, I feel like the roles are blurring again… (even more so when Nanna reminds John that he is also sort of HER father)

John’s penchant for playing pranks on the bossy aliens who claim to rule him, submitting disingenuous words for them to repeat, is also a disruption of this supposed order… and/or John’s way of claiming the God-status for himself? Vriska makes the disruption of the way things are ‘supposed to be’ more explicit later when she berates John for initiating a conversation…

Anyway, the rest of this gets very rambly and speculative, so I’m placing it under the cut. Long, incoherent read.

The next “moment” that strikes me spans from 3386 to 3468, from John spotting the Hussie-Rufio kiss in the clouds to Vriska’s giant X-marks-the-spot. Crucially, these moments (emphasizing a father-son kiss and feminine anatomy) are bridged by Seek the Highbl00d – implying that that flash functions as an expression of John’s thoughts, just as Return to the Core was an expression of Jade’s thoughts. What follows is an attempt to make sense of the dream – I expect to fail in some capacity, but I will do my best.

3386: Hussie emphasize that Rufio saw Peter as a father-figure, so Hussie’s attempted revival involve bestowing the breath of life upon a son-figure. SMOOCH! (It bears repeating that the insertion of the divine breath into inert matter also has bearing as John’s self-conception as a video game avatar, animated by a divine will)

3393: The kiss appears in the clouds of Skaia above John, meaning that the thought of being kissed by his Dad is running though his head. He is transfixed by this image (for hours!)

3401: Since the instillation of breath into inert matter is often tinged with traces of necrophilia (corpsesmooch!) WV imbibing shaving cream “like the wind” seems like a euphoria tinged with sensuality, as though John leafing through his Dad’s wallet with a recently conferred sense of responsibility is akin to Terezi falling in red kool-aid (there’s no way he’s not getting off on this)

3410: WV compared buckling himself into the drivers seat to his (imminent) assumption of the title of mayor. The position of driver linked to a role of authority…

3414: …so as John takes off into the sky, we get another peak at the moment that Gamzee first declared himself God, to insinuate John similarly feels like he’s on top of the world. The SBaHJ complements this – John is riding his 4-wheel device into the sky (thus achieving unreal air) up to a cloud labeled clown (which is associated with fatherhood). John feels as though he’s achieved the ideal.

3419: The main takeaway from John’s conversation with Jade for me is that he is anxious about the idea of his Dad marrying Mom (jealousy?) and also anxious about idea of himself getting married… inclined to read this as John getting antsy about some of what (he believes) being an adult man necessarily entails, which here means getting wife. The comment about “a shipping grid made by an alien” strikes me as a tongue-in-cheek jab at heterosexuality as GOD’S PLAN, given John and Karkat’s previous conversation about Superman.

It’s also striking to me that the many of the cloud visions John describes were of Jade, if the idea that the clouds function as internal mirrors holds. I suppose the vision of Jade surrounded by frogs means he’s thinking of reproduction, even before he brings of romance… and Jade worrying about if the frogs are going in a cauldron is interesting, considering her infanticide motifs…anyway,

3420: John commented about discomfort at the Crosby tops blinking at the beginning of the Jade convo, and now that it’s staring me in the face I feel compelled to contend with it. I think… it’s sort of a call back to page 1, with John blinking and staring directly at the camera. The moment of locking eyes across the forth wall – the moment orders started entering the command prompt, the moment union with God (the player) started. I’m not sure if, looking at that blinking computer, John regards himself as the player or the played.

Anyway, Karkat has manifested, and he is terrified of Gamzee – John asks him what’s up, which in context of the above is a haunting echo of Gamzee’s first line, which then too functioned as a questioning of the nature of hierarchy. (“What /is/ up? What is authority? What is divinity?” - you have to read it literally) John makes WV stop honking the car in response to Karkat’s mortal terror of honking – not sure if this means John is the Gamzee figure, all the car beeps triumphant honks upon having ascended to the domineering position of godhood, or if John is Karkat here, experiencing terror of the various potentials of his ascension. Perhaps both, perhaps neither. Moving on…

3422: John contacts Karkat (again, reversing the way that trolling is “supposed” to work… I think John is the only kid to initiate contact pre-act 6?)… but otherwise I’m not getting a lot out of this conversation. The panel though, I will note, uses the arrangement of clouds from 4 panels prior to emphasize that John is heading towards and unseen castle. After the upcoming sequence, he will crash into a tree… suggesting that Seek the Highbl00d represents an end to whatever high John’s currently on?

3427: Karkat just took a fall down some stairs in response to the terror of a honk… which places him squarely on Earth instead of Heaven… (important only insofar as it establishes Gamzee as high and Karkat as low, for the purposes of this scene). Terezi manifests, poorly attempting to hide her excitement about murder (which makes sense, since murder!Gamzee originally manifested for Karkat?). This implies that Karkat’s own terror is accompanied by titillation… and retroactively means that John’s anxiety about sex masks an excitement that he regards as unbecoming?

Then Terezi honks – ostensibly, because Gamzee has claimed her glasses (leading Karkat/us to believe she has been killed). But the appearance that Terezi honked is perhaps equally important…? It’s as though the enthusiasm for murder which Gamzee presently embodies has possessed her, as she kissed Tavros’s corpse? (Worth noting that the depiction of her corpse-smooch directly preceded the Hussie-Rufio kiss, which John responds to by… getting in the car and honking a bunch, as he approaches the sky-image of a megalomaniacal Gamzee?)

3431: Things are getting weird now, and I’m starting to lose my grip on how this all relates to John. Quoth Equius, “Are you saying the highb100d has finally embraced his position atop the hierarchy” (in response to happy Gamzee murder times) – which in context suggests that this is well within what John considers the tyrannical rights of a father, somehow. Or of a God, I suppose – whatever you wanna call that-which-occupies-the-highest-rung….

Also, seeing as Karkat is manifesting for Equius, Karkat asking if Equius is still strong means Equius is questioning his own strength… why? The only context we get is that he is looking at Nepeta, and is somehow enmeshed in Egbert’s psychodrama…

CG: THE POINT IS, IF YOU SEE HIM, WOULD YOU MIND SNAPPING HIS STUPID WAND IN HALF OR SOMETHING? CG: AND THEN CHOKE HIM TO DEATH WITH HIS OWN SHITTY PRETENTIOUS SCARF.

Weird future-echoes of Equius’s death in Karkat’s words… the motif of Breath is definitely significant, seeing as the transmission of the animating breath of life is the key act of God here, and thus representative of total domination…? Whereas choking the breath out of someone would mean…?

I’m getting ahead of myself, perhaps.

CG: JUST DO WHAT I SAY, OK. CT: D –> I will 100k into it

An ominous note to end on, given that Equius’s willingness to combat orders from above is part of his conflict here.. but also, because of the motifs of self-alienation, orders from above /includes/ orders from within (ie urges)…? Or should I consider those at odds, in an id/super-ego kind of way? God I’m confused

3437: All I’ve gathered from Terezi’s proceedings here (which lead into Seek the Highbl00d) is that she is projecting all of her concepts of criminal debauchery onto Vriska – which you could compare to all the absurd clown theatrics that John used to project onto Dad, but there’s no particular reason to privilege that at the moment…

I will admit that John’s fear of disillusionment (of the collapse of the ideal, the fall from the Pleroma to Earth) is giving me some confirmation bias which may be clouding/guiding my appraisal of the proceedings. I will try to remain openminded.

3438 (Seek the Highbl00d): Oh boy here we go

This is… something? Cats are a child symbol, so to call someone feline-obsessed is to call them baby crazy (see: Roxy). Earlier, John was “joking” about a desire to sink the Mom-Dad ship – and later, Bec Noir’s murder of Mom and Dad realizes the fantasy (Noir’s bloody footprints lead Rose to John, further implicating him as source). If Equius and Nepeta are doing parodies of eachother’s masculinity/femininity here, only to be brutally killed, could this be regarded as precursor…? But the deaths themselves bear no resemblance at all…

I guess the idea of Dad having Equius’s attitude of being SO PROUD that his son has finally decided to kill him for supremacy is funny to me (even more so, but I’m not sure that it checks out…

…okay, when Nepeta is checking out her shipping wall she emphasizes the role reversal in Karkat Gamzee so I guess that’s our focus here?

…for Nepeta to enter the grate placed along the wall of ships makes it as though she entering the wall, the unreal place where all the possible union are true? Or that could just be where the grate is

…Kanaya sliced the left most transportalizer, which prevents her from being followed, but also from going back where she came from. Gamzee’s “miracles” imply a child-like state of blissful ignorance – the announcement of a miracle at this juncture, along with Nepeta travel in the direction that Kanaya has marked as impossible, make it seem as though Nepeta is going into the past…? So the horror of what Nepeta sees in the final grate should reflect a (possibly falsified) rendition of the past?

…likewise the arrow fired into the chessman’s eyes seems to suggest being blinded by the light (also the motif with Rose jabbing her ogre’s eyes out), hinting that some horrible truth lies ahead.

The truth being that, like Equius, John finds joy not in domination but submission? Or the reverse, if Gamzee is the figure of identification…? Or if this is truly a look into the past, this would be how John has come to regard his own relationship with Dad? As brutal subjugation, and forced deference? Which he has nonetheless come to fetishize (as per Equius’s ecstasy)? (If this were absolutely a memory, it would not be outlandish to accuse Dad of sexual abuse, given how Equius looks like he’s giving Gamzee head while he’s being choked, as though Equius were actually gagging on a dick. But for lack of any other instance of this coming up, it seems more likely to me that John has eroticized otherwise normal interactions with Dad?)

…but then what of the death of Nepeta? Is her failed attempt to avenge herself upon this past also a part of the dream? Does Gamzee scarring himself imply and integration of Equius’s knack for taking pleasure in pain?

3462: …or rather, Nepeta’s death marks the exact point that we exit the dream, the car’s beeps one again replacing Gamzee’s honks. So it’s as though she was John’s eyes, preparing to die a second death at the hands of the patriarch, and the result is an awakening, and fall back to Earth (crashing the car again).

3465: Oh goody, Vriska’s manifesting in response to all of this as John arrives at the castle. Please enlighten me Vriska, I’m dreadfully confused.

3466: Vriska telling John he looks great with his hood up reminds me of Vriska telling him how great he looks in her clothes, making me wonder if the windsock hoodie is being construed as long hair. In which case, as per Egbert’s weird gendering of hierarchy, it’s possible that his ultimate refusal to consider upending the total authority of (his image of) Dad comes with the feminization of himself…? Hence Vriska’s current interjection.

3467: …the doubt and regret surrounding Vriska’s lifetime of murder is loaded in a way I am utterly failing to parse. I don’t think Homestuck ever painted aggression as a ‘masculine virtue’ or whatever so there’s no reason to take John’s vocal horror at the bloodshed as a feminine thing.

3468: X marks the spot…. why here, though?

…Vriska seems to be making the connection between violence and sexuality, both noting that the game selects players on the cusp of sexual maturity and contending that if Karkat hadn’t done such a great job of brokering the peace between teams, perhaps more of them would have god tiered…

Her observation that the dead-girl (Aradia) had John’s same laptop is ominous for some reason. I know the kids have a paranoia that they are in the Matrix, and that if the die/wake up, they will suddenly be real – but stuff like this always makes me paranoid that someone is /actually/ secretly dead, like Aradia. Hate that feeling.

…more likely that John views himself as metaphorically dead, as a mere hollow vessel before the divine will, and thus feminized before God? But my ability to parse all of this deteriorated like 20 pages ago.

3475: involves Vriska and John musing how alike they are in emulating their ancestors, for anyone who wasn’t aware that was a Thing

…and we’re done. Well that was pointless. Let’s go to the point were dead!John and Vriska go on a date. Vriska opens up with a reminder that she made John change close, then mostly teases John about how she will kill him, as John intermittently brings up Little Monsters.

Did you know that in Little Monsters, the tire swing is used to represent a noose? It’s like when Vriska accused John of being obsessed with her as he attempted to prototype Grandpa’s blue beauties… the undertone was that he was obsessed with death (through the medium of the crypto corpses). Which is, more characterization of the dead/vessel as implicitly feminine or?

…I’m not learning a lot going through their d8 again, but I sure am getting sad.

…Yeah I’m getting nothing, psychology-wise. We’re done here.

#Anonymous #homestuck reread 3 #john #dad #vriska #equius

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daddy-winter · 6 years ago

Text

This challenge came to me some time in the last couple days and I just couldn’t get it out of my head. So here it is! The premise of this challenge is that each generation is based off a townie in one way or another. This is only 8 generations as I don’t have the attention span for 10!

For this challenge you’ll need the vampire pack, get together, city living and ideally the vacation worlds! If there are any generations you don’t really feel like doing just skip em!

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please direct them to my askbox! :) And now, the challenge!

Generation 1: Johnny Zest

You’ve been shunned by your family, unwilling to support your “outlandish” ideals and dreams. You’ve decided to set off into the big world of showbiz alone. No backups. Any failure could mean the difference between fame and another clip on a comedian failing videos. Despite this, you refuse to give up so easy.

Aspiration: Joke Star

Traits: Ambitious, Friendly , Goofball

Challenges:

Join and max the comedian career

Live in a starter house until you reach level five in your career

Complete Joke Star Aspiration

Marry your S/O when you become an adult

Have 5 children

Generation 2: Bella Goth

Your parents enjoyed the simple life glorying in one another. You on the other hand have other ideas. From a young age you craved wealth and status so when you met a young, wealthy, novelist you took your chance and never let go. At first you were only with them for their money but in years you were eventually softened and nourished a genuine affection for them. But despite this, it’s a rocky road to happiness.

Aspiration: Party animal

Traits: Good, Family Orientated, Romantic

Challenges:

Complete party animal aspiration

Do not work, simply use your rich partner for money (better get speed dating!)

Have 2 children

Have a home costing 100,000+ simolens

Accept every invite to a party

Generation 3: Dominic Fryres

You grew up in grandeur and wealth but despite this you weren’t happy. You could see the affection your parents had for one another though you could never label it love. You wanted something different for yourself. As soon as you possibly could you married your childhood sweetheart after getting her pregnant shortly after becoming a young adult. Though the happiness would not last for long…

Aspiration: Musical Genius

Traits: Neat, Music Lover, Self Assured

Challenges:

Join the Music Career and max it

Marry your childhood friend after getting her pregnant shortly after reaching young adulthood

Divorce your partner when you’re your child is in the child stage

Marry your true love when your child is a teen and their child is in the child stage

Master two musical instruments of your choice

Generation 4: Sergio Romeo (Bro Household)

You move out of the family house after many years of playing second to your step-sibling. You don’t have the money for a place alone so you decide to get a roommate. You two are polar opposites; you enjoy technology while your roommate prefers DJing and loud music. After time together you become friends and eventually more than just a couple of bros.

Aspiration: Fabulously Wealthy

Traits: Materialistic, Athletic, Hates Children

Challenges:

Join the Tech career and max it

Have a string of heterosexual relationships before realising your bro is more than just a bro*

Have 1 Adopted Child

Complete Fabulously wealthy aspiration

*your bro can also be a sis! Just be the same gender :)

Generation 5: Miko Ojo (karaoke legends)

Moving out from your two overbearing parents and into the big city. You had always been politically minded, wanting to be the change you saw in the world so that’s what you did. Amidst the political climate you had another hobbie: music. You spend most free nights at the karaoke bar until you find them.

Aspiration: Serial Romantic

Traits: Good, Geek, Neat

Challenges:

Join and max Political career

Max singing skill

Meet your S/O at a karaoke bar

Have 4 children

Generation 6: Gunther Munch - inspired by @gunthermunch!

You were always reliant on your family never once straying from them. You are the definition of a parent’s child. You never stayed out late and always tried your best in school. By all means, you were a genius though you had your mind set on things less accepted than your fellow peers.

Aspiration: Renaissance Sim

Traits: Bookworm, Clumsy, Creative

Challenges:

Research vampirism to the highest tire

Marry a vampire and get turned by them

Have three children, one not a vampire*

Write books for a living but never join the writer career

Do not move out of your parents’ house until you are engaged

*You may use MCCC but the child not a vampire must be heir

Generation 7: Caleb Vatore

Growing up is always hard but take that and times it by ten when you were the only kid among your siblings who didn’t inherit vampirism. You tried to live the vampire life which proved hard without the specific taste you family had. Eventually you turned to the only person who would indulge your wish, Vladislaus Straud. He turned you and shortly after turning you decided to put your new and special talents to good use.

Aspiration: Good Vampire

Traits: Ambitious, Materialistic, Foodie

Challenges:

Get turned by Vladislaus Straud

Never drink from a human

Join and max the Spy career

Fall in love and marry a sim of the criminal career

Visit all vacation worlds

Have as many children as you wish

Generation 8: Penny Pizzazz

You were never the closest with your parents as they were always away on “business” trips for days on end. You had to find social connection through other means, the internet. You found you had a flare for blogs and the internet in general and in time you built a small following. Without your parents around to be concerned with their child you had free reign with your borderline obsession and soon it snowballed into your career.

Aspiration: City Native

Traits: Ambitious, Friendly, Romantic

Challenges:

Max the Social Media career

Have 3 partners before you find your true love

Make public appearances (going to public lots) three times a week.

Complete city native achievement

Have 2 children

And that’s it! Tag me if you wish to do it and tag the challenge as S4 Townie challenge :)

#sims 4 #s4 challenge #sims 4 challenge #challenge #s4 #Mine #my challenge

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sbwritesshit · 6 years ago

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Finn Blackthorne

BASICS

FULL NAME: Phineas Jonah Blackthorne NICKNAME(S): Finn BIRTHDAY: July 10th, 1985 SPECIES: Werewolf, Zalman Pack (~4 years) RELIGION: Atheist ORIENTATION: Heterosexual OCCUPATION(S): Watcher

APPEARANCE

FACECLAIM: Bob Morley EYE COLOR(S): Brown HAIR COLOR(S): Dark Brown HEIGHT: 6’2” BODY BUILD: Average PIERCINGS: None TATTOOS: None DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Large scar on his left side from the attack. It has faded for the most part, but there’s still some light puckering.

BACKGROUND

HOMETOWN: Cheshire, CT FINANCIAL STATUS: Middle class PRIMARY MODE OF TRANSPORTATION: Walking/running EDUCATION LEVEL: Master’s in Environmental Architecture LANGUAGES: English

RELATIONSHIPS

BIRTH ORDER: Youngest SIBLINGS: Melchor, older brother FAMILY: Sean (father), Rosamie (mother) SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S): Mari (deceased) CHILDREN: None PETS: None

PERSONALITY

MORAL ALIGNMENT: Lawful Good MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE: ISFJ, The Defender HOGWARTS HOUSE: Hufflepuff POSITIVE TRAITS: loyal, kind, committed NEGATIVE TRAITS: rash, can be closed off, jaded

MISC

ELEMENT: Earth TROPES: Arbitrary Skepticism Broken Bird Worth Living For

BIOGRAPHY

A nice job, good friends, a lovely girlfriend, Finn had the world on a silver platter, but not for lack of trying. Growing up in a small town in Connecticut, Finn was taught all the wonders of New England life; the woods, the rivers and creeks, how to survive a cold winter and how to enjoy the warm summers. Born to a lower class family was never a sore spot for the boy growing up, all it did was add to his determination to make something of himself. His parents were always there for him, pushing him to succeed, but never adding too much pressure. It was the ideal life and Finn never asked for anything he couldn’t make sure he could achieve himself. By the age of 24, Finn had put himself through school and was on track to become one of the most promising young architects of his year. Growing up with such proximity to nature, Finn knew he wanted to study Environmental Architecture, a degree that made his “hippie” parents ecstatic. Being offered a dream job in a great firm, Finn decided that in a few months, he would propose to his girlfriend, Mari, on the front steps of the house he’d made for them. Everything was falling into place for a fairytale life.

It was spring when Finn and his friends decided to take a last minute camping trip to celebrate Finn’s passing of the NCARB exam. He was now a fully licensed architect and had the groundwork laid for a perfect life. The first day of the trip was uneventful, ordinary outdoorsy activities filled with laughter, booze, and friends, nothing short of bliss in the familiar woods they’d all grown up in. The next morning, however, things took a turn for the worse. Sometime in the early hours of dawn, Mari’s best friend, Kris, had gone wandering off with her boyfriend. Figuring they were having a private tryst in the trees, Finn and Mari thought nothing of it. For a few hours, they lounged in the woods, took a swim in the lake and hiked up to the top of the mountain and back, only to return to silence. Getting worried, the pair grabbed their flashlights in the fading light and separated to search for their friends.

Finn would be lying if he said he didn’t feel something off the moment he separated from his girlfriend and looking back, sees that moment as his biggest regret. In a matter of no time, the woods were blacker than black and teeming with unfamiliar sounds. Always the hero, Finn plunged further into the darkness to find his friends, only to turn back the moment the scream reached his ears. The campsite he returned to was straight out of a horror movie. Blood and gore everywhere, bones and flesh laid out like some satanist’s fantasy. None of the sights compared to the smell, though. Rotting flesh mingling with a sickly sweet smell of what Finn could only guess was a fresh kill. He’d never been a hunter and–after this, damn him if he ever would be. Thinking – hoping – it was just some bear’s meal, Finn slowly walked toward his own tent, praying his satellite phone was still there. Instead he found his beloved, torn apart and mangled, some thing gnawing at her stomach.

The next thing Finn remembered was waking up, miles away from the campsite, a throbbing pain in his left side and his camping buddy next to him, looking like he’d just dragged himself out of hell. Finn came to learn that he’d been bitten and nearly killed by what his friend said was an enormous wolf, bigger than anything he’d ever seen, but he was alive. Unable to come to terms with the amount of loss he experienced in such a short time, Finn left his friend, his town and his job behind, leaving his picture perfect idea of a future die in those woods. He drove until he ran out of gas and walked even further until he found civilization. It wasn’t until days later when he tried to get out a message to his parents that he even realized he was stuck. The once boisterous and outgoing man was now more fearful and tentative, but he couldn’t stifle the need to protect. Since finding himself in Ashbourne, Finn learned about what he had become – a werewolf. The knowledge transformed him into more of an introvert and while he tried to keep himself away from anyone he might hurt, Finn found a family in the Zalman pack. The new pack showed him that he could have a new future here. His condition wasn’t a death sentence, and despite the fact that he was trapped in this town, he could have a life. Finn couldn’t protect Mari anymore, but maybe he could keep his new home safe.

#m: finn #tw: death #v: ashbourne #finn bio

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hollowedrpg · 6 years ago

Photo

CONGRATULATIONS, BEC! — You’ve been accepted for the role of Alastor Moody. To be honest, I was so so so worried about applications for Alastor. Frankly, with a character as multi-faceted as Alastor, there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, but reading your app was like a giant sigh of relief. Not only did you completely understand who Alastor is, but you even convinced me into parts of your app with your characterization (I never thought Alastor could have been a Hufflepuff, but boy was I wrong.) Do me a favor and keep convincing me into things; you’re right on the money.

Thank you so much for applying. Please create your account and send in the link, track the right tags, and follow everyone on the follow list. Welcome to Hollowed Souls!

ooc.

Name: Bec

age: 26

preferred pronouns: She/her

timezone: EST+10 (AEDT)

activity: Ok, so I do work fulltime and often that entails 10 hour days but I’m often able to get on when I get home for a couple of hours. I might not be able to get on every single day, but I should be able to remain within the activity requirements!

are you applying for more than one character?: Nope :)

how do you feel about your character dying?: I mean it’s definitely plausible when it comes to Alastor considering how headstrong he is. He would absolutely die for a cause that he truly believes in (getting the fuck rid of Voldemort is certainly one). Let’s hope I don’t regret saying so in the future, but I think I’d be okay with him dying. I generally love causing my characters pain (I know), I basically breathe for in character drama.

anything else?: I just wanted to say that this place is beautiful, and I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on here whether I get accepted or not! Thanks for the opportunity!

ic details.

full name: Alastor Moody

date of birth: July 19th, 1947.

former hogwarts house: Hufflepuff

There is no question that Alastor could have fit in at any Hogwarts house. Sure he’s ambitious and some would say that he would just about do anything to achieve what is necessary. However, Alastor lacks the need for notability as a direct result of his actions. He carries out what is necessary because it is simply that, necessary. There is no doubt that he is clever, but knowledge is not something that he seeks merely for his own desire or curiosity. Frankly, he would have had no joy in solving that silly riddle each and every time he had to return to the common room, far too impractical for his liking. He was almost placed in Gryffindor. He’s certainly brave and determined, but once again, his actions are never designed to seek his own means. He’s brave because the situations he’s placed in simply demand it, in his eyes, he has no other choice. Despite what many believe, Alastor lacks much of the impulsion that other Gryffindor’s harbor, instead he’s much more calculative. That left him with Hufflepuff. A house that helped level his impatience over the years, and establish that good does exist. Being placed in Hufflepuff is largely what saved Alastor. A teen who was so fragile when he first stepped into Hogwarts that it took him years before he started to open up.

sexuality: Heterosexual

gender/pronouns: Cisgender male. He/him

face claim change: Michiel is a God.

more.

how do you interpret this character’s personality? how will you play them? include two weaknesses & two strengths.

It’s probably safe to say that Alastor, he’s had it tough. Growing up he was always told that emotions were not made for wizards like the Moody’s, that they’ll only make him weak. And weakness is not something that a great Auror can afford to have. Despite now knowing that this is not always the case, Alastor’s always been a little silent. As a teenager his silence often came across as brooding, as an adult it’s matured with wisdom. He’ll only speak when necessary, not the sort to fill the air with words of flair and uncertainties. While Alastor does know how to smile, his need for constant vigilance often means he’ll be the last one to loosen up at a social gathering. He possesses an inflexible will, ever pushing forwards with what must be done, his purpose always clear and forever at the forefront of his mind. This might mean that he may be a little brash with you at times but you can’t always take his curt mannerisms to heart as he only does so with no partiality and only when necessary. He possesses a zeal so great that his actions are often misdiagnosed as those of impulsiveness, but he is anything but. Every action has been carefully premeditated.

+ Pragmatic: At his very core Alastor is a pragmatist. He doesn’t allow himself to wander too deep into ideals and what might be as this leaves him open to the possibility of failure. At this point in the war, failure is not an option. His pragmatism is largely attributed to his upbringing. Gone are the days of believing that fairytales exist, that someone else will come in and save the day. While he certainly doesn’t believe himself a hero, Alastor is a firm believer that only he can shape his own future, and perhaps the future of their world too.

+ Committed: Alastor has already sacrificed so much to the order and has every intention on continuing with the same zeal. In his opinion, it’s not sacrifice if the cause is one that is a necessity to fight for. If they stop fighting who will take their place? He spoke an oath, wand to the sky, hand over heart. An oath of the aurors that he does not plan to break. He won’t rest until their world is exonerated by the evil that threatens, he won’t hide away as thousands of muggles, half-bloods and their defenders are slaughtered.

- Distrustful: After years of emotional and physical abuse alike, it’s hard to not let some of that filter through. When the two people in the world who you’re supposed to be able to trust wholeheartedly betray you beyond repair, how are you supposed to have faith so easily. Alastor has a hard time trusting people. The easiest way to judge a person’s character is to not let them close enough to find out if they have good or bad intentions. Perhaps this isn’t a healthy train of thought, but for the most part it’s kept heartbreak at bay. He’s managed to find methods of coping with what some would call an issue, and that is with keeping himself occupied. Alastor’s almost always constantly busy, on his toes working, a rather well welcomed distraction if he’s honest.

- Guile: Alastor knows how to navigate a bad situation to make it the very best that he is able to. Sometimes his methods can erre on the side of manipulation but he will usually try and avoid as much collateral damage as possible. He’ll only use his guile methods when absolutely necessary, and in situations when he’s got to think quick on his toes.

how has the war affected this character, emotionally and otherwise?

Alastor feels as though he’s been in a constant war almost all his life. He’s been involved in this particular war since the very beginning and has since allowed it to consume every aspect of his life. He’s never had a serious romantic relationship, despite often receiving interest from various women over the years. It’s not that he’s oblivious to the attention, but more so that he believes that there are higher things at stake. Is there really a point in getting attached to someone when the future’s so uncertain? When tomorrow may not even be an eventuality?

Alastor has become particularly good at mastering his emotions. It’s perhaps the one skill his parents taught him, for better or for worse. It’s made him function under pressure better, hard decisions are made by him with more ease.

where does this character currently stand? with those who wish to hide in godric’s hollow until the war ends, with those who wish to rebuild the order and continue fighting the war, or on neither side? Why?

He knows that they’re currently sitting ducks just waiting to be fired at one by one. That they must act sooner rather than later. Hiding doesn’t fix anything, hiding doesn’t reverse the lives lost or guarantee that no more will be lost. In fact, hiding in Godric’s Hollow means guarantees that thousands, if not more, innocent lives will be lost. They’ve already wasted far too much time in Alastor’s opinion.

extra.

Mock Blog: https://amoodymood-mock.tumblr.com

Character questions:

How have the setbacks the Order has faced affected Alastor?

Alastor already feels as though they’ve wasted time. He’s truthfully disappointed in many of the members in the Order who are happy to take a backseat. He believes that no matter what they believe, pretending that they’re in a safe bubble doesn’t change the reality that the more time they spend at Godric’s Hollow twiddling their thumbs, Voldemort is only re-charging his strength and gathering his forces. Each minute they spend in hiding he only grows stronger. With each day his patience wanes, and with it he’s losing more and more control over keeping his anger at bay. His irritation is becoming more evident with the occasional unwarranted snipe at the wrong people. He can only hope that they understand, but only Merlin knows how much of it they’ll be able to take.

What does he think the Order should do next?

Alastor wants to continue with recruitment. He also wants to continue gaining intel from his internal informants amongst Voldemort’s ranks.. He also wants to attack. Moody knows that now is the time to strike, the Death Eaters are at their weakest point too. They also has those Order members still in captivity and those that are missing on his conscience. Alastor knows that they’d been far too careless the first time that they’d gone in, with more wands ready to fight, they might have a better chance at saving their fellow members. That is, if they aren’t already too late.

#hp rp #rp #marauders rp #lsrpg #roleplay #accepted

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