#i just wish that they were queer ...............

[knifearo]

ultimately when it comes to shipping and fandom space treatment of aspec characters i just don't accept "aro/ace people can still date/have sex" as an answer from nonaspecs. like yeah. mhm. okay. now i think we both know that you're not saying that out of real interest in the diversity of aspec experiences. so you can turn in your seventeen-page essay on why and how you plan to examine this character's aspec identity within the context of a romantic or sexual relationship complete with evidence from canon and peer reviews from multiple aspec people within the next week or i'm putting you in the pit from the edgar allen poe story

[k3n-dyll]

I know I said I'd be inactive but I gotta rant like I'm at a point of pure rage and I'm not all the way sober rn. As a black woman? I feel betrayed. Like I have no clue why, but for some reason I had faith in y'all to come through and recognize that while Kamala isn't perfect by any means that a Trump presidency would likely mean wraps for all of us, but no. Every. Single. Group managed to fuck up aside from black men and women in this election.

What happens when the internet becomes so overruled with censorship that we can no longer share information about the causes we care about? The police are already over militarized and the oompa loompa that's been put up in office is fully ready to grant them immunity, meaning they would essentially be able to do whatever the fuck they want to us without consequence.

I mean let's be fucking real that immunity is going to affect my community at a disproportionate rate just in case you guys already forgot what those pigs like to do to us. And my community is also that main group of people that is out on the street riding for everybody when there's an issue so what's gonna happen now? Hm?

Black women have been saying for a good while that we should vote for the candidate who will let us keep doing the work we're trying to do. The one that we would be safe protesting and organizing under so that we can make change both in and outside of our community, for example, actually putting third-party candidates in STATE GOVERNMENTS so that when actual viable third parties run, they'll have some chance in the presidential election. Y'know because the Electoral votes and support from state governments are really what matters.

And I say ACTUAL viable third-party candidates because, let's be real once again, half the people who voted for Jill Stein didn't do research on her like they should have. That white lady has been a grifter this isn't news.

It's like...watching people just cling to the idea that some big revolution is going to start within the next year because of this is exhausting, especially when the vast majority of American citizens had not a fucking clue about Palestine, Sudan, or Congo until 2023. Unfortunately for us, this shit takes time and actual irl community building. These election results have only made what would have been difficult nearly impossible because people either want to stand on some moral high ground or for 'tax cuts' that they aren't eligible for because half of you bitches are poor just like the rest of us.

I'm fucking exhausted. My ancestors survived slavery, Jim Crow, red lining - we're still surviving and fighting for justice for victims of police brutality and I am so. Fucking. Tired of surviving shit because y'all can't think critically for two fucking seconds. It's like doing a group project but everyone else has a few pebbles in their skulls knocking around in there instead of brains.

[lady-lessobian]

Haha silly tumblr lesbian, don't you know that you're missing out on half the population? That surely Mr. Right is out there if you look hard enough? Everyone's a little bit bisexual, there's certainly an exception out there for you somewhere. In fact, I don't believe you when you say you're gay- I mean sexuality is sooo fluid, right? Aren't you being bigoted by not being into men? Isn't turning down a man such a bigoted and hateful thing to do? When will you find a man? Go find a man now. Go find a man or you're a terrible person. It is imperative that you find yourself a man. It's simply against nature that you refuse to make yourself available to men.

[dukeofthomas]

Jason Todd's the aroace guy who doesn't realize he's aroace but is also not oblivious to how big a driving force sexual attraction is for other people. He's the type to dislike and judge men for thinking with their dicks so much and kind of think himself better than them because of the fact that he doesn't

[aeolianblues]

Seeing people who were openly queer in the 80s and 90s and were either ignored or ridiculed at the time getting to openly embrace their sexuality in the present day, and wrap themselves triumphantly in their flags does something else to me, I have such a soft spot for it that I could cry

[grassbreads]

Man, genuinely there's little that excites me more than encountering queerness in fiction where I wasn't expecting it. I'm gonna be thinking about Kikuhiko/Yakumo from SGRS for so long.

Even setting aside the subtext of his feelings for Sukeroku, the narrative around his relationship to gender norms and his own expression is so fascinating. Guy who grows up steeped in rigid 40s gender roles and actively tries to enforce them, yet only truly feels like himself when he's acting on stage as a woman. Guy who says his life would have been better if he were born a woman and then refuses to elaborate.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Picture Genderbent Janeway still having that 'I prefer captain but ma'am in acceptable in a crunch' moment with Harry in episode 1 and it's never addressed again. Thank you.

[cobwebbed-crow]

There's a huge range of diverse thoughts and opinions within veganism, the same way there's a huge range of diversity of thoughts and opinions within Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or leftism. It's a philosophy and way of life. Anyone is within their rights to criticize veganism but how valuable is that criticism when it refuses to acknowledge that veganism isn't a monolith? At what point does it stop being legitimate criticism and start being straw manning?

[icarianarts]

There’s like such a weird and specific kind of agony that comes with watching your younger sibling willingly fall into such awful alt-right spheres as they become more and more of an adult... Like I remember when you were such a sweet little kid.

[ilovedthestars]

why are all the queer stories romance (unless they're about the 1 token ace person)

[evocatiio]

if chibnall was the one writing this season you lot would be talking VERY differently

[dromaeo-sauridae]

natural history museum sketches. the bison was the last one i did and you can tell lol

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[transmascutena]

finding a good reaction series for any anime is so hard, and then trying to find one for utena is like trying to find a needle in a very small haystack, i think i've only found like one or two??? that have actually been pretty enjoyable?? and by that i mean, like, where the reactors actually take the show seriously and try to analyze and understand all of the symbolism/meaning/commentaries on society instead of being just like 'woahhh that was weird ig, oh well' and just moving on. although one of the ones i enjoyed also completely missed that juri was in love with shiori in her first episode but honestly i found that more hilarious than frustrating considering how good they were at picking up other small details and how blatantly it was spelt out hfsiuacjk. suffice to say, they figured it out later.

but like when I found the other good reactor to utena it was SOOO nice. like. i don't need the reactor to be absolutely correct on everything and catch every single detail, i just need somebody WILLING to actually engage with the show, and have the ability to look deeper than surface level. i've watched this reactor regularly for a while and i figured utena was the type of weird symbolic stuff he would really enjoy, but when I was proven right and he loved the show and loved the characters and created well-reasoned theories and predictions it was SOOOO satsifying. and i can probably never recommend him to anyone in good faith because he can make some tasteless jokes that i've been pretty desensitized to over the years because he says them more as a bit, but it's still to the extent that I can't tell how other people would take it if they were to watch him for the first time. but when it came to the utena and akio stuff he immediately understood that the show was depicting grooming and abuse and treated it as such in his commentary even before episode 33. and i know like that's probably a low bar, but after seeing people think it was a legit romance, it was so gratifying to see the actions of akio being responded with immediate disgust. he said that utena was probably in his favorite shows of all time at the end of the series, and he was so excited at almost every twist of the plot, so altogether my favorite reactor.

anyways, all that's to say, do you have any reaction series recommendations for utena that you think were a good watch? thanks for your time and all of your great utena posting!

only utena reaction series i remember liking pretty much all the way through was the one by semblance of sanity. there were probably things they missed or whatever as there will always be on a first viewing, and some of the things they said about the final episode in particular were a bit odd (though i've forgotten what exactly it was), but generally it was very enjoyable to me. you could tell they liked the show a lot and wanted to understand it and i think it also helped that they were two people who could bounce ideas and theories off each other. most reactors do it alone which can in my opinion get a bit stale at times. it was really just one of those things where i was looking forward to the new episode from them every single week (maybe helped too that it was only my own second or third rewatch and i was looking for new stuff myself still). i even subscribed to their patreon for a month towards the end so i could view the full uncut reactions, meaning i effectively watched the whole thing twice, but i don't think that was the smartest use of my money or my time lol

[mars-ipan]

danganronpa is so fucking crazy bc it’s like “hi. this is a game series with a fucking amazing premise. unfortunately the writing sucks and is bad and you will spend half the time going ‘eugh why did they write that’ but you will play the whole thing anyways and get attached to your favorite characters and cry when they inevitably die. also it is filled with romance subplots that will stay in your brain forever” HUH??????

[braddourifscareertrajectory]

gonna be honest i think there is such a fundamental difference in the bioware fandom - as well as the company - before and after, say, 2015, that i find it genuinely difficult to relate to people who got into the fandom in more recent years. like we're just operating on entirely different foundational experiences lol