#i really think there's something to be said about people seeing themselves in broadly queer stories

[skullhaver]

genuinely has somebody made a video essay about the phenomenon of queer women enjoying fictional mlm?

sarah z gets close to this topic on multiple occasions. natalie wynn talked about it in her latest tangent and brought up some good points on identification and desire, but i still feel like it could be examined in a larger way. ppl complain about straight women fetishisizing mlm, which does occasionally happen, but in my experience the vast majority of non-dude slash enjoyers are queer women who on some level identify with one or both of the men in the relationship. over and over when people survey fan-centric sites like AO3 and Tumblr, they find that the vast majority of users are queer women.

[vergess]

The Letters from Watson situation and you bringing up that being exposed to bigotry over time normalizes it reminds me of a situation where I was hurt because someone didn't tw for bigotry. I watched the Nanny a lot as a young kid and when Matt Baume did a video essay about it and it's roots in queer culture I decided to try and re-watch it. When I actually went to watch it, I was floored by the sheer scale of fatphobia presented. It wasn't a jab here or there every other episode, it was a barrage of fatphobia in every episode, baked into the text. I tried to hold out, to see if I could ignore it, but eventually found myself in tears as a chubby child actress was berated on screen for comedic effect. But what really scared me was... The show was getting to me. I was starting to see the thin but less petite elder daughter as fat, when I wouldn't have before. The show was changing my perspective despite my best efforts to not let it get to me. Fatphobia is not comparable to anti semitism, but this taught me that, if you are going to present a piece of media, or analyze it, not mentioning or warning for bigotry is irresponsible at best, and endorsement at worst. I'm still a bit irritated that fatphobia wasn't mentioned even once in the essay. I'm really sorry this backlash is happening over a very reasonable reaction. :/

Mmm, actually I think most kinds of bigotry are very comparable.

Not universally, no. But, in general? People benefit from comparing them. Solidarity is often built on learning the things we have in common first, so that we can better help respect and protect each others' different needs, interests and abilities.

Just off the top of my head, for example, fat people and Jewish people are both characterized as greedy, and in fact, Jewish people are often specifically characterized as fat.

But that's REALLY off topic, haha.

In this case, while there were some warnings made about a month ago (apparently these warnings were repeated if you use the email reader, but I do read on the website, where the warnings are not repeated), and while I was aware of the content going in, my issue is, again, not with the existence or lack thereof of the TW list.

As I have. Repeatedly and constantly said. I think the TW list is lovely. It's great. It's very complete. Nice work everyone. No one has any problems with the TW list. No one has ever had any problems with the FUCKING. TW. LIST.

THE PROBLEM. IS WITH. THE UNHINGED. ANTISEMITISM. IN RESPONSE. TO THE MOST MILQUETOAST. IMAGINABLE. POST. EVER. MADE.

Here's the breakdown.

20 y/o Jewish woman: Gosh, even with the trigger warning a whole month ago that imo was really not enough, that sure was some antisemitism. I would prefer to see more pushback on such intense racism in the future, but it is early days. Sure hope things get better as we go!

Me, 30+ Jewish person: Haha, yeah, reminded me of how much it hurt to read when I was a kid. Glad I've got bigger problems to worry about nowadays lol.

Every gentile within earshot: OH SO YOU THINK WE SHOULD CODDLE YOU POOR LITTLE JEWBABY FEELINGS HUH? WE SHOULD CENSOR ART FOR YOUR PRECIOUS WIDDLE OWIES? YOU WANT YOUR TO PRE-DIGEST YOUR WORDS BECAUSE YOUR SUBHUMAN JEW BRAINS CAN'T READ? KILL YOURSELF!!!!!!!!

Me, again: Okay, well. That is an extreme fucking reaction so let's fucking calm our asses down with the goddamn nazi shit for ten fucking minutes, perhaps????

And then the gentiles devolved into further screaming about how I'm, I don't know...

They seem to have convinced themselves of a lot of things at this point. The ones willing to put their names on it are mostly content to call me anything from a liar to a harasser to an imbecile incapable of reading, to someone with a personal hatred of the Substack operator, etc etc.

They seem broadly convinced that I "want" something or to impose on the substack. Which is nonsense. All I "wanted" was to read some books I liked with a group of people and discuss, and that ship has thoroughly fucking sailed.

The anonymous bitches are mostly wandering into blood libel at this point. Again, I used to post all my anon threats, but I stopped doing that once bigots got smart enough to start reporting me for spam when I did that, because victims showing their harassment in public is, of course, the real harassment.

They also seem not to be aware of a very simple fact:

I can still see your comments in my notifications page if I'm the OP, even after you've blocked me, and it is very fucking obnoxious.

[eregyrn-falls]

Okay listen... this is way too long for the tags, so here you go.

I got into fandom when I was 12. This was pre-internet. I literally had to explain it to my Mom so she could write me a check for the dues of the Pern group I was joining. (Dues were for photocopying and materials and postage for newsletters and zines.) She was baffled, but supportive. She thought it was neat to see my art and my writing in these little printed things.

(The rest goes under a cut because it's long.)

My close friends in high school? Yes. Most of them didn't join me in doing it, but I talked about doing it. I talked about this group I was in. I talked about the LOTR elvish-english dictionary I was composing. etc. If they were the type of people who would have teased me about it? Well then, they weren't going to be my close friends. (Was I bullied in school? Not excessively. Not for fandom stuff. Mostly for being awkward and -- looking back on it -- already giving off vibes of being queer without having any idea of it.)

In college? Oh yes. All of my friends and I got together and used the new-to-us internet system to create a big, collaborative self-insert, multi-universe rpg-by-fanfic group. Some of my *professors* knew about our fandom activities (lol especially the one we got to do an independent study with us one term). Again, if there were people who were going to look down on it, they weren't going to become my close friends.

At my job? Yes. Without getting into details, I have a job in which talking about fandom and fanfic is related (broadly) to the job, so I've talked about it with all of my bosses and other people I encounter through my job. Not all of them get it in a specific way, but they get it in a broad way (the impulse to do it, as a hobby, that is). To be clear, though, I did also talk about it with people at my previous job, which had no relation to the subject at all. There it was just, hey, this is my hobby.

My current friends? I met most of them through fandom in one way or another. (Or I met them in college where we were brought together through fandom-like interests.) Most of them still do some kind of fandom activity themselves. I do have some friends who came from outside of fannish interests/activities. Yes, I've told them about fandom and shown them fanart and so on.

I do respect anyone who says that talking about their fandom activity with IRL people isn't something they want to do. That's fine!

But I think the through-line in what I'm describing above is that from the very start of my entry into fandom, when I was very young -- I believed in it as something that was a legitimate hobby, that was interesting. That what I did for it was creative and a worthwhile way to spend my time. I did get support from adults around me who also recognized the creativity and drive behind it, and thought that was a good thing.

So I've never been shy about talking about fandom and fanfiction as a hobby to other people. As far as I was concerned, it really wasn't any different from any other hobby. Except, it was a hobby that allowed me to use creative writing and art, AND it allowed me to connect with other people through doing it. (Which is what makes it different, as a hobby, from writing stories for yourself, or pursuing art in other ways. Though, that doesn't mean that doing those things doesn't allow you to connect with people, too. In fandom, though, connecting with others is the point, and creative writing and doing art are two common ways to do it.)

And, as I said several times above: if I talked to people about fandom, and they rejected it, well then, I didn't need those people as friends. Not everyone I've ever encountered has been cool about it, but I guess I wasn't afraid of rejection, because if they rejected me, then I rejected them. There were always other people who thought it sounded cool, and wanted to hear more; or who were themselves already doing fandom things.

Back in the 70s and 80s, fandom was more or less a very underground thing. It wasn't widely known about, although it was already very organized (60s zines and a fandom being the reason Star Trek got saved as a show, etc.). Yeah, a lot of people were derisive, or it was thought they would be. We spent decades watching major publications try to write articles about emerging fandoms, and often getting it really wrong in some really cringeworthy ways.

Fandom is a LOT more widely known now. And that's a double-edged sword. More people are into it than ever and doing things within it. And more people can see the bad sides of fandom, or what they think of as the bad sides, and form snap judgements about people who are into fandom. More people have heard about it, but it's not necessarily easier to reveal you're a part of it.

I guess the only advice I have is that if you want to talk to people in your real life about reading and writing fanfic as a hobby, you should sit with yourself first -- or talk to others -- and think about how you want to talk about it. What makes it important to you as an activity? What do you think makes it worthwhile? If you're having trouble articulating that (or even believing that it IS worthwhile, because you've been exposed to a lot of commentary saying it isn't), maybe reach out to others to figure out how to articulate it. You wouldn't be doing it if you weren't getting something out of it.

I think that's the way you start talking to people about it. You control the conversation from the start. "Hey, I read and write fanfic, and this is WHY I do it" -- because it's fun, because it's an outlet for creativity, because it allows me to connect with people I have something in common with. Maybe because you like to write, but you don't fully have the drive or want the pressure of trying to write professionally. Some people knit, and some people bond with others over sports (either doing sports or watching sports). You, you're writing stories and reading others' stories and bonding that way. (Perhaps you can get people to relate it to something that they do and love for a hobby, and get them to see the similarities between the activities.)

Probably I'm naive, and if you read all of the above (congrats, this is long!), it looks like I've had a particularly charmed life with it comes to being open about fandom activity with practically everyone around me, with positive results. But I think I'm partly responsible for that, too. Because I've approached talking about it with the confidence that it's a good, creative hobby that I'm having fun doing. I set those expectations from the start.

Does it always work? No. But if it doesn't work, then either I don't bring it up again, or I don't really need those people in my life. And that absolutely takes another kind of self-confidence to get through. It isn't always as easy as it sounds, for sure. But what you have to believe is that there ARE other people out there, whom you'll encounter in real life, who are cool with it or think it's neat. All the people here on the internet? They're out there walking around in real life, too. You'll find them, eventually.

Good luck!

I realize this isn't going to work for everyone. Some people are living in bad situations, and it's not helpful to say "just self-confidence your way out of it!" Some folks don't have a lot of choice right now in where they live or who they can surround themselves with. As I said above, I realize my life has been particularly charmed in this respect. It's not all just "I made this happen through my willpower and approach", it's the good fortune of my surroundings, too. That's why I said, I really do respect people who don't feel they can talk about this in real life. There may be a lot of reasons for that.

I'm writing this with the perspective of, if you think you CAN talk about it in real life, and you want to hear about success stories from those who have done it in order to feel more like maybe *you* can do it, here it is.

Have you ever told people in your life you write/read fanfiction and how did that go? Trying to get courageous

[ailuronymy]

do you think every disabled character in wc is handled poorly? i understand theres def some cases of ableism but at the same time when i hear ppl say that its usually bc the disabled cat wasnt able to become a warrior due to their disability. and i feel like ppl forget, that not everyone irl CAN do what they want after they become disabled. ex. someone wants to be an athlete, but their legs have to be amputated. a cat like briarlight esp i feel is p realistic and could be a source of comfort

Hello there, thank you for writing in. I’m going to reply to this question with a series of questions I think are a bit more useful, given what you’re trying to ask me. I hope that’ll clarify what is a deeply complex, multilayered issue. 

Do I think Erin Hunter handles anything in the series “well”? Not really. I don’t have a high opinion of the work of the collective and, broadly speaking, I think every right note they play, metaphorically speaking, is an instance of chance rather than effort, skill, or intention. Stopped clocks are right twice a day, mediocre writers will sometimes do something cool by accident, similar principle. That’s not to say Erin Hunter hasn’t ever done anything on purpose--just that overall the underlying drive of the series isn’t so much quality as it is quantity, and speed of production, and it shows. 

Do I think Erin Hunter puts any significant research into how they portray disability? No. I do not think it is a priority for this series. They’re not trying to make a meaningful work of literature, or capture a realistic experience of disability, or tell especially impactful or thoughtful stories, or even make a particularly good or coherent fantasy world. Warriors is a specifically commercial product that was commissioned by HarperCollins to appeal to a particular demographic of drama-loving, cat-loving kids. It’s not really trying to do anything but sell books, because it’s a business, so the text in many ways reflects that. They’re not going for disability representation, in my opinion. They’re including disability in many cases as a plot-point or an obstacle. 

Do I think this means that people can’t connect to these characters and narratives in meaningful ways? No. Often I say that a work is completed only when it is read. Before that point, it doesn’t have a meaning: a reader finishes the work through the act of reading, and interpretation, and filling in the spaces and resonance of the story with their own values and experiences. When people talk about subjectivity, this is what they are talking about. What this means in the context of disabled characters in Warriors is that these characters and their stories can be multiple, conflicting, even mutually exclusive things at the same time, to different people, for different reasons. 

Do I think characters have to be “good” to be significant to someone? No. I think genuinely “bad” (i.e., not researched or poorly researched, cliche, thoughtlessly written, problematic, etc. etc.) characters can be deeply meaningful, and often are. Ditto above: for many people, and especially marginalised or stigmatised people, reading is almost always an act of translation, wherein the person is reading against the creative work of the dominant culture in a way that the author likely didn’t intend or didn’t even imagine. There’s a long documented history of this in queer culture, but it’s true for just about everyone who is rarely (or unfairly) represented in media. Disabled people often have to read deeply imperfect works of fiction featuring disability and reinterpret them in the process--whether to relate to a kind of disability they don’t experience themselves but which is the closest they’re offered to something familiar, or to turn positive and meaningful what is intended as narrative punishment, or simply to create what’s commonly called headcanon about “non-disabled” characters who echo their personal experiences. 

Do I think everyone has to agree? Extremely no. As I said before, people will actually always disagree, because all people have different needs and different experiences. What can be interpreted as empowering to one person might be very othering and painful for another. There is no “right” answer, because, again, that is how subjectivity works. This is especially true because marginalised communities are often many different kinds of people with different lives and needs brought together over a trait or traits they share due to the need for solidarity as protection and power--but only in a broad sense. It’s why there is often intracommunity fighting over representation: there isn’t enough, there’s only scraps, and so each person’s personal interpretation can feel threatening to people whose needs are different. You can see examples of this especially when it comes to arguments over character sexuality: a queer female character might be interpreted as bisexual by bisexual people who relate to her and want her to be, while being interpreted as lesbian by lesbians who also relate to her and want her to be like them. Who is correct? Often these different interpretations based on different needs are presented as if one interpretation is theft from the other, when in fact the situation is indicative of the huge dearth of options for queer people. It becomes increasingly more intense when it comes to “canon” representations, because of the long history of having to read against the grain I mentioned above: there’s novelty and, for some people, validation in “canon” certainty. And again, all of this is also true for disabled people and other stigmatised groups. 

Do I think this is a problem? Not exactly. It is what it is. It is the expected effect of the circumstances. Enforced scarcity creates both the need for community organising and solidarity and the oppressive pressure to prioritise one’s self first and leave everyone else in the dust (or else it might happen to you). The system will always pit suppressed people against each other constantly, because it actively benefits from intracommunity fighting. Who needs enemies when you have friends like these, and so on. A solution is absolutely for everyone in community to hold space for these different needs and values, and to uplift and support despite these differences, but it’s not anyone’s fault for feeling threatened or upset when you don’t have much and feel like the thing that you do have is being taken away. It’s a normal, if not really helpful, human response. But until people learn and internalised that the media is multifaceted and able to be many things at once, without any of those things being untrue or impacting your truth of the text, then there will be fighting. 

Do I think my opinion on disability on Warriors is all that important? No, not really. I can relate to some characters in some moment through that translation, but my opinion on, say, Jayfeather is nowhere near as worthy of consideration than that of someone who is blind. I don’t have that experience and it’s not something I can bring meaningful thinking about, really. That’s true for all these characters. If you want to learn about disability, prioritise reading work about disabled rights and activism that is done by disabled people, and literary criticism from disabled people. And as I mentioned above, remember that community isn’t a monolith: it’s a survival tactic, that brings together many different people with disparate experiences of the world. So research widely. 

Finally--do I think there’s only one kind of disabled narrative worth telling? No. For some people, a disabled character achieving a specific, ability-focused dream is a good story. For other people, a story that acknowledges and deals with the realities, and limitations, of disability is a good story. The same person might want both of those stories at different times, depending on their mood. That’s okay. Sometimes there’s power and delight in a fantasy of overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles and defying all expectations. Sometimes there’s value and catharsis in a narrative that delves into the challenges and grief and oppression experienced because of disability. There’s no one truth. 

To round all this off, I’m going to give my favourite example of this, which is Cinderella. I think it’s a great and useful tool, since for many it’s familiar and it’s very simple. Not much happens. In the story, she is bullied and tormented, until a fairy godmother gifts her over several nights with the opportunity to go to a royal ball, where she dances with a prince. The prince eventually is able to find Cinderella, due to a shoe left behind, and they are married. In some versions, the family that mistreated her are killed. In others, they’re forgiven. 

Some people hate the story of Cinderella, because she is seen as passive. She tolerates the bullying and never fights back. She does every chore she’s told. She is given an opportunity by a fairy godmother, and she doesn’t help herself go to the ball. She runs from the prince and he does the work to find her again. Eventually, she’s married and the prince, presumably, keeps her in happiness and comfort for the rest of her life. 

For some, this story is infuriating, because Cinderella doesn’t “save herself”: she is largely saved by external forces. She is seen as a quintessential damsel-in-distress, and especially for people who have been bullied, infantalised, or made to feel less capable or weak, that can be a real point of personal pain and discomfort. 

However, for some others, Cinderella is a figure of strength, because she is able to endure such hostile environments and terrible people and never gives up her gentle nature or her hope. She never becomes cruel, or bitter. She is brave in daring to go outside her tiny, trapped world, and she is brave to let the prince find her. She doesn’t have to fight or struggle to earn her reward of happiness and prove her worth, because she was always deserving of love and kindness. The prince recognises at once, narratively speaking, her goodness and virtue, and stops at nothing to deliver her a better life. 

Depending on the version, the wicked family disfigure themselves for their own greed--or are punished, which for some is a revenge fantasy; or Cinderella forgives them and once again shows her tenacious kindness, which for others is a different revenge fantasy. 

The point? Cinderella is the same character in the same story, but these are almost unrecognisable readings when you put them side-by-side. Which one is right? Which one is better? In my opinion, those are the wrong questions. I hope this (long, sorry) reply is a set of more useful ones. 

[vagabond-sun]

this was originally posted on my pillowfort. come join the conversation there, too!

also, a disclaimer i feel like i have to make on tumblr: this isn’t an invitation to coin something. i think we should spend some time learning what the terrain looks like before we give the place a name.

so this is a question and a conversation that comes around every so often in the alt+h discord, on tumblr, and in some other places:

is identifying with an archetype otherkin? more broadly, is it alterhuman?

to the latter question: definitely yes. but i think we could stand to let it stand on its own as an experience, for a number of reasons. so here’s my attempt to write a bit about my experience with this concept, pin down what we’re actually talking about and its unique dimensions, and possibly reach people who are doing the same thing in the interests of building a community around it.

to start out with: what am i talking about?

there are people in the alterhuman communities (and outside of it!) who consider things like 'royalty' or 'pirate' or 'ranger' or 'mad scientist' part of their identity. I’ve seen a lot of people simply using the ‘kin’ label for this. and, like i said, I’ve seen a lot of people asking questions about it, often as a hypothetical experience, but also many times wondering if other people also feel what they feel.

there is a historical precedent – the silver elves in one of their books on ‘types’ of fae mention the Daundre, who are ‘rangerkind’ - a (presumably fictional or otherwise not-of-this-world) population of humans considered explicitly otherkin by dint of their connection to the wild and disconnect from society at large.

but for me, the ‘kin’ label is ill fitting. for me, it sits in a space partway between our understanding of ‘kin’ frameworks and gender ones. when i say I’m nonhuman, I’m describing an experience that affects my self image, the way i filter information, certain desires, my sense of embodiment, and so on. when i say i'm butch, i'm making a statement about where i sit in relation to men, and women, and femmes, and straights, and to Society In General. i'm making statements that might give you a clue as to how i'll dress or act, or what my values might be.

when i say I’m a pirate, I’m kind of saying both.

so what’s my experience? other-life experiences of literally being a swashbuckler aside, why does this speak to me? in what way, in this life, am i tangibly experiencing and manifesting this?

it’s more than just an aesthetic, though cultivating a particular Look is not not part of it. i think it’s a very pirate-ish thing to want to look flashy - it's only jolly roger enamel pins and barely-buttoned hawaiian shirts right now, but i'll have my 17th century frock coat eventually. i think it's also worth pointing out that people who do dedicate themselves to presenting a specific way like this are still not considered normal, even if it's 'only' an apperance thing.

but also, i think i would be deeply unhappy if i lived too far away from the ocean. it’s a bucket list item of mine to buy a boat one day, and i already have some sailing experience. i spent a lot of my formative years travelling and moving around the world and now i get itchy if i stay in the same place for too long. i’m really, very queer and i like to let people know that. i’m a strong advocate of freedom of information, the abolition of intellectual property, digital privacy and decentralization, as well as just generally striving for a system of (non?)governance that radically departs from the current social order.

pirate is a nice way to put a little bow on top of all of that. it's a thread that loops through all these seemingly disparate concepts and draws them together, creating a narrative.

i have similar but less definable relationships to the idea of kingship, and to some kind of village wiseperson, sage-on-the-mountain type role that I’m mostly calling druidry (see also this). that latter one’s complicated by the existence of actual ordained druids, but honestly? someone whose job it is to look into the future, perform magic, and mediate the spirit world is not having a typical human experience in western society. I’ve seen plenty of people talk about feeling alienated from humanity and the world at large because of being god- or spirit-touched. they’re welcome to call themselves alterhuman too - the original definition pretty much outright says so.

and, sure, you could still argue that anyone can experience oneness with nature, or concern about the state of copyright law, or the otherness of being queer, or a pull to leadership positions. these things on their own are normal human experiences. and yet. people do not move through the world calling themselves pirates and kings and magical girls and paladins and supervillains, at least not all the time, and not sincerely. not the way i do. i don’t see the way i live reflected in society, nor do i feel there is space made for me to do so. and i don't think that any current alterhuman communities fully encompass what i'm experiencing either.

reader, do you have an experience with an archetype you adhere strongly to? that affects your sense of self? how does it affect you? do you feel like you stand out from other people because of it? come tell me about it. we can make the space ourselves.

[historyhermann]

The bun-wearing librarian shusher and romance in the library

Scenes with the librarian in the middle and end of an episode of "Boyfriends."

As I've noted on this blog before, shushing librarians is one of the most prevalent stereotypes of librarians in animated series, and in other popular culture media more broadly. As I moved this blog slowly away from a focus on animated series and more into a focus on webcomics, I came across, back in June, an issue of one of my favorite webcomics, Boyfriends, centered around a polyamorous quad of four male students, which focuses on love in the library. Now, astute readers may remember that I have covered this subject over, over, and over again. Unlike those examples, the episode of Boyfriends seems to say the librarian either dislikes romance or perhaps is homophobic herself, but less so than the character at a bloodbank in Hey, I'm Gay, who wouldn't accept the blood of the protagonist because he was gay, claiming it was because gay people have HIV/AIDs, even though dominant mode of spread is through spread among heterosexual people. So, that made this a little more interesting, for that reason.

In this comic, Nerd bumps into Prep in the library, flirting with him, asking why he is there, with Prep saying he is studying his books, and then... he is shushed by the librarian! He apologizes to her, saying he will try to be quieter, and they go up to the third floor since that part of the library is usually empty, where it won't bother anyone else. Nerd is impressed at his studiousness, and he says he is doing it because his parents like him to keep a high GPA. Nerd later talks about the pressure he is under having a double-major. They later study together for his upcoming test, and ended up flirting instead. That's about it.

While some in the comments came outright and said the librarian was homophobic, one commenter, SexiLexi89, who called themselves a "queer library tech," commented "I think you'd have a harder time finding a librarian that acts like this than a librarian that would encourage the gay flirting" while another said the librarian is jealous, saying she needs a girlfriend, or called the librarian's shushing "regular librarian behaviour." Others described the librarian as "pretty," "cute," guessed the librarian ships Nerd and Prep, or even sympathized with the librarian! Another wished the librarian existed "outside the stereotypes," which is something I was thinking too.

A quote from her January 2020 article, "The History and Debunking of Librarian Stereotypes," which I have cited on this blog before.

Other than knowing they may have been loud, we can't see the incident from the librarian's perspective, so we can't exactly know what is going on in her mind. So, it is probably a stretch too far to say she is homophobic, although she shouldn't have shushed them. What none of the commenters pointed out is how the librarian completely fits the spinster librarian stereotype. Librarians which fit this stereotype are portrayed as sexually undesirable, uptight (and possibly skinny) women, usually who are old, like to enforce rules, dress conservatively, have a bun hairstyle, are portrayed as unattractive. She isn't a background character like the spinster librarians in Futurama, as harsh as the unnamed librarian in DC Super Hero Girls, as un-helpful as Madame Nu in Star Wars (really an archivist), or as elderly as the librarian snatched in the first episode of Zevo-3. She is just like the spinster librarians, in terms of some of qualities, as those in Teenage Mother, Ironweed (although not as helpful as her), The Philadelphia Story, Boston Blackie, Ghostbusters, and It's A Wonderful Life which Jennifer Snoek-Brown analyzed on her blog, Reel Librarians, to give some examples.

That's all for this week. Until next week!

© 2021 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Reprinted from Pop Culture Library Review and Wayback Machine

[queerfables]

This is all totally fair. Like I said, I'm not trying to change your mind. It seems to me that if the emotions of the ending don't land for you, there's not much anyone could say to change your mind and that's fine. I do really hope that despite your concerns, season three (if we get it) ends up being something you enjoy though.

Regarding point 2, you're actually right, I shouldn't really imply that this path is better, it's just different. I worry about them not getting enough time being in sync as partners too, since that's the beating heart of the story, but I think there are lots of ways to do it while exploring the conflict of this fight.

One last reason that I loved the ending is that for me, season two was an exercise in very tentative trust that payed off beyond my wildest expectations.

Neil Gaiman talked a lot about how season one was written as a love story, and played somewhat coy about exactly what kind of love it was. That's fine, and I don't have a problem with stories centred on friendship being described as love stories, they can hit all the same beats and be just as emotionally significant. What gave me pause was the way he responded to questions about the queer subtext between Crowley and Aziraphale. It was this careful, consistent line of like "I've always said it was a love story. It doesn't really make sense to categorise these non-human characters by human sexualities. Season two will explore their relationship in more depth." There was just - there was nothing there to really grab hold of. He was skirting all around it, heavily implying that romance was on the table but refusing to commit to anything. He got accused of queerbaiting A LOT, and broadly his response to this was a slightly irritable "watch season two and get back to me". And it still didn't really mean anything. But the longer I watched him stand firm on this, and the more I learned about his history with writing queer characters, the more I started to believe that if he really meant to portray them as friends only, he would come out and say it.

I felt like I was setting myself up for disappointment. I bargained with myself to accept it if there were prominent secondary characters who were queer, and Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship was kept more ambiguous. I talked myself through all the totally legitimate reasons he might not want to take that direction with the characters - I mean, they were to some degree based on him and his late co-writer. Who am I to say how he should tell a story that personal? But the really specific gaps in what he would say about Crowley and Aziraphale were still there, and I knew I was going to be hurt if he didn't follow through. And I knew I was going to feel unjustified about it too, because it's not like he owes me anything! I kept my expectations as low as I reasonably could and I knew I still had a huge chance of getting my heart broken.

And then season two came out, and Neil delivered on every single unspoken promise and then some. It was a season filled with queer validation and joy. Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship was central and vital. Their relationship was solidified as unambiguously romantic. And, look, this was never his job or responsibility but it was extraordinarily healing for me to see that, and I know a lot of other people felt the same way. Not just the queer storylines in themselves, but to watch a question asked in subtext answered loud and clear in the text.

So the real heart of why I love, love, loved the ending, the reason underneath everything else, is that I trust Neil Gaiman with this story. I know that Crowley and Aziraphale are going to be alright.

Can someone who actually liked the ending of s2 please explain to me why?

[jeannereames]

Hi, Dr. Reames! I just read your take on Song of Achilles and it got me thinking. Do you think there might be a general issue with the way women are written in mlm stories in general? Because I don't think it's the first time I've seen something like this happen.

And my next question is, could you delve further into this thing you mention about modern female authors writing women? How could we, beginner female writers, avoid falling into this awful representations of women in our writing?

Thank you for your time!

[It took a while to finish this because I wrote, re-wrote, and re-wrote it. Still not sure I like it, but I need to let it go. It could be 3xs as long.]

I’ll begin with the second half of the question, because it’s simpler. How do we, as women authors, avoid writing women in misogynistic ways?

Let me reframe that as how can we, as female authors, write negative (even quite nasty) female characters without falling into misogynistic tropes? Also, how can we write unsympathetic, but not necessarily “bad” female characters, without it turning misogynistic?

Because people are people, not genders, not all women are good, nor all men bad. Most of us are a mix. If we should avoid assuming powerful women are all bitches, by the same token, some women are bitches (powerful or not).

ALL good characterization comes down to MOTIVE. And careful characterization of minority characters involves fair REPRESENTATION. (Yes, women are a minority even if we’re 51% of the population.)

The question ANY author must ask: why am I making this female character a bitch? How does this characterization serve the larger plot and/or characterization? WHY is she acting this way?

Keep characters complex, even the “bad guys.” Should we choose to make a minority character a “bad guy,” we need to have a counter example—a real counter, not just a token who pops in briefly, then disappears. Yeah, maybe in an ideal world we could just let our characters “be,” but this isn’t an ideal world. Authors do have an audience. I’m a lot less inclined to assume stereotyping when we have various minority characters with different characterizations.

By the same token, however, don’t throw a novel against the wall if the first minority character is negative. Read further to decide if it’s a pattern. I’ve encountered reviews that slammed an author for stereotyping without the reader having finished the book. I’m thinking, “Uh…if you’d read fifty more pages….” Novels have a developmental arc. And if you’ve got a series, that, too, has a developmental arc. One can’t reach a conclusion about an author’s ultimate presentation/themes until having finished the book, or series.*

Returning to the first question, the appearance of misogyny depends not only on the author, but also on when she wrote, even why she’s writing. Authors who are concerned with matters such as theme and message are far more likely to think about such things than those who write for their own entertainment and that of others, which is more typical of Romance.

On average, Romance writers are a professionalized bunch. They have national and regional chapters of the Romance Writers of America (RWA), newsletters and workshops that discuss such matters as building plot tension, character dilemmas, show don’t tell, research tactics, etc. Yet until somewhat recently (early/mid 2010s), and a series of crises across several genres (not just Romance), treatment of minority groups hadn’t been in their cross-hairs. Now it is, with Romance publishers (and publishing houses more generally) picking up “sensitivity readers” in addition to the other editors who look at a book before its publication.

Yet sensitivity readers are hired to be sure lines like “chocolate love monkey” do not show up in a published novel. Yes, that really was used as an endearment for a black man in an M/M Romance, which (deservedly) got not just the author but the publishing house in all sorts of hot water. Yet misogyny, especially more subtle misogyny in the way of tropes, is rarely on the radar.

I should add that I wouldn’t categorize The Song of Achilles as an M/M historical Romance. In fact, I’m not sure what to call novels about myths, as myths don’t exist in actual historical periods. When should we set a novel about the Iliad? The Bronze Age, when Homer said it happened, or the Greek Dark Age, which is the culture Homer actually described? They’re pretty damn different. I’d probably call The Song of Achilles an historical fantasy, especially as mythical creatures are presented as real, like centaurs and god/desses.

Back to M/M Romance: I don’t have specific publishing stats, but it should surprise no one that (like most of the Romance genre), the vast bulk of authors of M/M Romance are women, often straight and/or bi- women. The running joke seems to be, If one hot man is good, two hot men together are better. 😉 Yes, there are also trans, non-binary and lesbian authors of M/M Romance, and of course, bi- and gay men who may write under their own name or a female pseudonym, but my understanding is that straight and bi- cis-women authors outnumber all of them.

Just being a woman, or even a person in a female body, does not protect that author from misogyny. And if she’s writing for fun, she may not be thinking a lot about what her story has to “say” in its subtext and motifs, even if she may be thinking quite hard about other aspects of story construction. This can be true of other genres as well (like historical fantasy).

What I have observed for at least some women authors is the unconscious adoption of popular tropes about women. Just as racism is systemic, so is sexism. We swim in it daily, and if one isn’t consciously considering how it affects us, we can buy into it by repeating negative ideas and acting in prescribed ways because that’s what we learned growing up. If writing in a symbol-heavy genre such as mythic-driven fantasy, it can be easy to let things slip by—even if they didn’t appear in the original myth, such as making Thetis hostile to Patroklos, the classic Bitchy Mother-in-Law archetype.

I see this sort of thing as “accidental” misogyny. Women authors repeat unkind tropes without really thinking them through because it fits their romantic vision. They may resent it and get defensive if the trope is pointed out. “Don’t harsh my squee!” We can dissect why these tropes persist, and to what degree they change across generations—but that would end up as a (probably controversial) book, not a blog entry. 😊

Yet there’s also subconscious defensive misogyny, and even conscious/semi-conscious misogyny.

Much debate/discussion has ensued regarding “Queen Bee Syndrome” in the workplace and whether it’s even a thing. I think it is, but not just for bosses. I also would argue that it’s more prevalent among certain age-groups, social demographics, and professions, which complicates recognizing it.

What is Queen Bee Syndrome? Broadly, when women get ahead at the expense of their female colleagues who they perceive as rivals, particularly in male-dominated fields, hinging on the notion that There Can Be Only One (woman). It arises from systemic sexism.

Yes, someone can be a Queen Bee even with one (or two) women buddies, or while claiming to be a feminist, supporting feminist causes, or writing feminist literature. I’ve met a few. What comes out of our mouths doesn’t necessarily jive with how we behave. And ticking all the boxes isn’t necessary if you’re ticking most of them. That said, being ambitious, or just an unpleasant boss/colleague—if its equal opportunity—does not a Queen Bee make. There must be gender unequal behavior involved.

What does any of that have to do with M/M fiction?

The author sees the women characters in her novel as rivals for the male protagonists. It gets worse if the women characters have some “ownership” of the men: mothers, sisters, former girlfriends/wives/lovers. I know that may sound a bit batty. You’re thinking, Um, aren’t these characters gay or at least bi- and involved with another man, plus—they’re fictional? Doesn’t matter. Call it fantasizing, authorial displacement, or gender-flipped authorial insert. We authors (and I include myself in this) can get rather territorial about our characters. We live in their heads and they live in ours for months on end, or in many cases, years. They’re real to us. Those who aren't authors often don’t quite get that aspect of being an author. So yes, sometimes a woman author acts like a Queen Bee to her women characters. This is hardly all, or even most, but it is one cause of creeping misogyny in M/M Romance.

Let’s turn to a related problem: women who want to be honorary men. While I view this as much more pronounced in prior generations, it’s by no means disappeared. Again, it’s a function of systemic sexism, but further along the misogyny line than Queen Bees. Most Queen Bees I’ve known act/react defensively, and many are (imo) emotionally insecure. It’s largely subconscious. More, they want to be THE woman, not an honorary man.

By contrast, women who want to be honorary men seem to be at least semi-conscious of their misogyny, even if they resist calling it that. These are women who, for the most part, dislike other women, regard most of “womankind” as either a problem or worthless, and think of themselves as having risen above their gender.

And NO, this is not necessarily religious—sometimes its specifically a-religious.

“I want to be an honorary man” women absolutely should NOT be conflated with butch lesbians, gender non-conformists, or frustrated FTMs. That plays right into myths the queer community has combated for decades. There’s a big difference between expressing one’s yang or being a trans man, and a desire to escape one’s womanhood or the company of other women. “Honorary men” women aren’t necessarily queer. I want to underscore that because the concrete example I’m about to give does happen to be queer.

I’ve talked before about Mary Renault’s problematic portrayal of women in her Greek novels (albeit her earlier hospital romances don’t show it as much). Her own recorded comments make it clear that she and her partner Julie Mullard didn’t want to be associated with other lesbians, or with women much at all. She was also born in 1905, living at a time when non-conforming women struggled. If extremely active in anti-apartheid movements in South Africa, Renault and Mullard were far less enthused by the Gay Rights Movement. Renault even criticized it, although she wrote back kindly to her gay fans.

The women in Renault’s Greek novels tend to be either bitches or helpless, reflecting popular male perceptions of women: both in ancient Greece and Renault’s own day. If we might argue she’s just being realistic, that ignores the fact one can write powerful women in historical novels and still keep it attitudinally accurate. June Rachuy Brindel, born in 1919, author of Ariadne and Phaedra, didn’t have the same problem, nor did Martha Rofheart, born in 1917, with My Name is Sappho. Brindel’s Ariadne is much more sympathetic than Renault’s (in The King Must Die).

Renault typically elevates (and identifies with) the “rational” male versus the “irrational” female. This isn’t just presenting how the Greeks viewed women; it reflects who she makes the heroes and villains in her books. Overall, “good” women are the compliant ones, and the compliant women are tertiary characters.

Women in earlier eras who were exceptional had to fight multiple layers of systemic misogyny. Some did feel they had to become honorary men in order to be taken seriously. I’d submit Renault bought into that, and it (unfortunately) shows in her fiction, as much as I admire other aspects of her novels.

So I think those are the three chief reasons we see women negatively portrayed in M/M Romance (or fiction more generally), despite being written by women authors.

------------------------------------

*Yeah, yeah, sometimes it’s such 2D, shallow, stereotypical presentation that I, as a reader, can conclude this author isn’t going to get any better. Also, the publication date might give me a clue. If I’m reading something published 50 years ago, casual misogyny or racism is probably not a surprise. If I don’t feel like dealing with that, I close the book and put it away.

But I do try to give the author a chance. I may skim ahead to see if things change, or at least suggest some sort of character development. This is even more the case with a series. Some series take a loooong view, and characters alter across several novels. Our instant-gratification world has made us impatient. Although by the same token, if one has to deal with racism or sexism constantly in the real world, one may not want to have to watch it unfold in a novel—even if it’s “fixed” later. If that’s you, put the book down and walk away. But I’d just suggest not writing a scathing review of a novel (or series) you haven’t finished. 😉

[yusuke-of-valla]

Biphobia and performative allyship also play a role in how heavily obsessed some people are with a specific ship that shall not be named lest we summon said violently obsessed people (nothing against the ship it's just become an "Enough-TP" for me)

I know what you mean. For me I just think fandom is such a niche space that like what goes on in fandom circles isn’t going to broadly affect the wider world, so like while writing same sex relationships in fic as a casual part of the characters is good in the sense that it CAN help further normalize same sex relationships, it’s broadly speaking only really gonna reach people who are on with that stuff?

Or basically: something like The Owl House Having a non-binary character who explicitly uses they/them pronouns helps normalize the idea of that for a broader audience. Financially supporting authors who write queer stories by buying and recommending their books helps show publishers that there is a market for these kinds of stories and helps marginalized authors get paid.

Shipping two characters though? Yeah sure it does have the potential to normalize things and I don’t doubt that fanfiction has helped people see themselves or understand different points of view or exposed them to things and people they would have never had the chance to meet, but it’s nowhere near the end-all-be-all of representation, and holding up something that reaches a comparatively niche audience as the pinnacle of activism is just not it chief.

TL;DR: shipping a m/f pairing where neither of the characters are canonically gay (and can also potentially end up in a relationship in the source material) or not shipping a same-sex pairing isn’t inherently homophobic, and also shipping should not be your only form of activism if you’re gonna be all high and mighty about it

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 8 – Dream a Little Dream of Me: parallels with Doctor Who

What’s queer film and TV without a bit of Doris Day in your chapter title?

This was never intended to be a chapter by itself, but having seen @tjlcisthenewsexy’s fantastic video on Wholock parallels here X I had to start writing. Full credit for inspiration here to @tjlcisthenewsexy, who has definitely had many of these ideas independently, and I would fully recommend watching the video before you read this. I personally only really buy Moffat era Who as a direct parallel to Sherlock, largely because Moffat wrote both, but also because 2010-17 matches up exactly with our boys. Lots of people have drawn parallels between 2005’s Bad Wolf Bay scene (by Russell T Davies) and the tarmac scene – those parallels are definitely there, but I think they’re more due to common tropes in love-declaration scenes than from intent.

The Doctor Who episodes I’m largely going to be drawing on here are Amy’s Choice, Last Christmas, The Name of the Doctor and A Good Man Goes to War. Others will feature, but if you want a really strong grip on what I’m talking about, I’d recommend taking a look at all of these, or at the very least Amy’s Choice! But now – on with the show.

Time travel has always been possible in dreams. This line comes from The Name of the Doctor, which came out in 2013. The dream in question is a psychic telepathy connecting five of our main characters whilst they sleep, controlled by Madame Vastra. Much has been made of Madame Vastra being an explicit Sherlock mirror (X) with Jenny as her wife and explicit John mirror, so using a dream state to connect people across time should already ring TAB bells. But crucially, we’re not just focusing on telepathy here – we’re focusing on the ability of 19th century characters to use a dream state to connect with the 21st century. Given that we never see where River Song is connecting from, it’s safe to say that it is the 19th – 21st connection between the other characters that is important, like in TAB. The use of the word ‘always’ is really important here – it’s not saying that time travel is possible in dreams in the Whoniverse, but that it has always been possible. There’s an implication here that before time travel was invented, in a non science fiction world, dreams can still do this – and that’s what helps us to jump across to TAB.

In the dream sequence in TNotD, Jenny is supposed to lock up before they go into their trance, but she forgets. Intruders break in, but because Jenny and Vastra are unconscious they can’t defend themselves and so Jenny is murdered. This is the spur for everybody to wake up, to save themselves. Pretty much all of our dream states in Doctor Who are focused on the possibility of dying in the outside world, but TNotD is the one which articulates the problem of EMP theory most specifically. Jenny, our John mirror, dies because her protector’s unconsciousness means that she can’t protect her wife. (Vastra’s Silurian abilities very much put her into the role of protector here – she could save Jenny where Jenny couldn’t save herself, and frequently does.)

Between the time travel and Jenny, then, TNoTD is probably the best framework we get set up for TAB. This came out only a few months before s3, in which EMP began, so it’s safe to say that these ideas are well-formed in Mofftiss’s heads at this stage. However, if we jump all the way back to 2010 and Amy’s Choice, we can see that this has been in the works for a lot longer.

The first point of note here is the casting of Toby Jones as the Dream Lord.

Casting the same actor to play dream merchants, knocking characters unconscious and altering their memories and psyches? The universe is rarely so lazy. Other mirrors in this episode are easy to pull out. The Doctor and Sherlock have long been read as mirrors for each other – characters who have existed for a long time and are constantly evolving through adaptation, super-intelligent loners, but in case that wasn’t obvious, Moffat went to a reasonable effort to style them very similarly when both tenures began.

Both of these are very conscious remodellings of old characters. Much was made of Matt Smith being the youngest Doctor ever (26!), and Cumberbatch’s youth set him apart from the Rathbone/Brett image in everybody’s heads. There’s something young and modern here – but both still dress like they’re slightly ‘out of their time’, which of course they are. Coming to terms with modernity is the central challenge that Sherlock is going to have to face. And then, of course, there’s the hair – instantly recognisable to the character in both cases, yet remarkably similar.

If the Doctor and Sherlock are mirrors, Amy as the Doctor’s companion should be linked to John. Amy ran away on the night before her wedding, and whilst she is reasonably happy with Rory in the long term of the series, this episode is about her making the decision between domesticity and adventure – a pretty clear link to John in s3 and 4. This episode is particularly important for TST however, because Amy is heavily pregnant in the domestic dream – but she is far from enthused, torn between domestic life with Rory and wanting to run off with the Doctor. However, I grant the similarity with Martin Freeman isn’t striking.

Do note, however, the similarly uncomfortable dynamic in both of these photos – hilarious.

The parallel dream!verses created broadly represent John’s dilemma from TST, and if we followed Amy’s Choice as it seems on the surface, we would end up with a pretty straight reading of TST – John spends too much time with Sherlock, they’re all in danger, Mary dies and John is suicidal because of it. Broadly speaking, this works – Rory is killed in the dream (with a really nice visual parallel to TST) and Amy crashes a bus and kills herself because she doesn’t want to live without Rory. Amy picks the domestic sphere and although it takes several more series to play out in full, this is broadly the direction the series takes us in.

In both scenes, Sherlock and the Doctor are left standing off to the right, unsure of what to do – if you watch both scenes in parallel, it’s striking. There’s a great article here talking about how the angle demonstrates the Doctor to be powerless for the first time, amongst other things. X Amy asks the Doctor what is the point of him, and John’s declaration that Sherlock has broken his vow carries similar weight – they were supposed to save them.

The title of the episode is Amy’s Choice, and this, we’re led to believe, is the moment when Amy chooses Rory. I don’t believe this. The Doctor/Rory conflict goes on for a lot longer than this, and it’s far too early in their first series to resolve it. It would leave a lot of later episodes without nearly so much tension. It’s true that Amy does have some agency in choosing – the science is questionable, as the Doctor says they’ve all tapped into some space LSD equivalent from an unmentioned offscreen adventure which has induced a mutual psychic trance, which means that we’re not sure how much agency each of the characters has in this dream. It’s not seeded, and so it sounds like a fudge – deliberately. Because a pseudoscientific explanation like this can’t explain the Dream Lord himself, Amy and Rory point out, and the Doctor admits that the Dream Lord, the architect of the dreams themselves, was actually the Doctor’s psyche. The space LSD sounded like a fudge – and Amy and Rory expose that it wasn’t just a fudge on Moffat’s part, it was a fudge on the Doctor’s part.

And, crucially, what was the first thing the Doctor said about domestic!dream, long before he realised he created it?

“Oh, you’re okay. Oh, thank God. I had a terrible nightmare about you two. That was scary. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. You’re safe now.” X

Later, when asked how he knew that the Dream Lord was him, the Doctor merely says that no one else hates him so much. Domestic!verse, then, is a manifestation of everything that the Doctor dreads – it’s his worst nightmare, being conjured by his subconscious. That nightmare involves Amy’s suicide, Rory’s death because the Doctor can’t protect them – this maps pretty neatly onto EMP theory and TST. Although John doesn’t kill himself, he is rendered suicidal in the domestic nightmare that is left behind. As the previous chapter discusses, Sherlock not being able to protect John is definitely a nightmare, but the nightmare also maps onto reality – John is suicidal, but he’s struggling to work out why, so he has to construct it through a heterosexual lens. John’s potential death and love for Mary are the two things that form the worst nightmare in both dreams, and the nightmarish sense is highlighted in TST by the deep waters metaphor.

At the very end of the episode, the Doctor’s reflection is still the Dream Lord, suggesting that this isn’t some psychic drug phenomenon, an explanation which was frankly crap. The Doctor’s dark side is still inside him. This feels like an allegory for mental illness, and mental illness crops up aplenty in Moffat’s depictions of the Doctor, particularly the later we get – the seeds of it are here. Again, although Sherlock is being killed rather than killing himself, we have seen the suicidal side of him before and it is made clear in TAB that his opinion of himself is low. EMP s4 is about him coming to terms with how he views himself, and the cognitive dissonance that we see in Amy’s Choice is a nice separation of the psyche in two that foreshadows the immense splintering that’s going to come in EMP, but particularly between John, Mycroft and Eurus.

Another nice parallel between s4 and Amy’s Choice is the idea of predictability. Way before we know that this is the Doctor’s dream, the Doctor displays a remarkable ability to finish what the Eknodines say before they do, an ability which becomes an obvious hint in hindsight. Moving over to TLD, Sherlock has similarly ridiculous powers to predict what other people will do; because this underpins TLD, it jumps out as being something that rings very false to me, almost like a parody of who Sherlock Holmes is meant to be, and so we should pay attention to it. An uncanny ability to predict what others will do – yup, that’s a dream world.

One key similarity that Amy’s Choice has with EMP theory is that a false dream premise is set up in both. Amy’s Choice suggests that there are two worlds, and only one is a dream; their survival depends on recognising which is the real one. This is, of course, a lie – both worlds are dreamed, and that false premise is created to trap them in the Doctor’s psyche, presumably until the Doctor dies (although the threat is never clearly explained). TAB sets up a real world in the form of the modern day and a false Victorian age, but the supernatural graveyard scene is the first hint that the reality/dream binary is not real, just like Amy’s Choice. This one scene is not an anomaly – the chronology of the ‘man out of my time’ scene coming after Sherlock gets off the tarmac suggests that such mixing is still going on, and we shouldn’t trust our senses. In case that point needed hammering any more, however, Steven Moffat gave us A Good Man Goes To War.

This episode is the culmination of a series in which Amy is actually an almost-person, and Amy has been dreaming all of their adventures with a flesh avatar actually having them with Rory and the Doctor. Here it is Amy, rather than the Doctor, who is dreaming, which is a little ambiguous, but there are two key aspects that parallel Amy’s Choice. The first is that, like Amy’s Choice, the flesh avatar/dream person threat doesn’t just go away. These words of Madame Kovarian are extremely important:

Fooling you once was a joy, but fooling you twice, the same way? It’s a privilege. X

Exactly what the Dream Lord does in Amy’s Choice. Furthermore, although there’s a later meta in blindness across Doctor Who and Sherlock which at some stage really needs writing, many people have made the point that Sherlock is associated with blindness throughout series 4, and so we should note that the architect of the dream people/flesh avatars is Madame Kovarian, better known (and usually credited) as the Eyepatch Lady. However, there’s one other key message they’re giving us, which comes at the end of the clip linked above – the baby’s not real. Both Amy’s Choice and A Good Man Goes To War feature Amy’s child, and in both cases the plot revolves around the emotional recognition that that world isn’t real. Given that we know that Amy is a John mirror, and that her choice between the domestic and the adventurous is consistently paralleled to John’s choice in Sherlock, this is a pretty huge indicator that something is up with Rosie even if we didn’t know it already. Indeed, the cot and mobile that the child has in Amy’s Choice are similar to Rosie’s. That baby never stood a chance.

The last episode I want to briefly invoke is Last Christmas. If we’re looking for dreams, this episode really goes above and beyond. The premise is that there is an alien species called the dream crab which latches onto your face and dissolves your brain whilst putting you in a dream so that you don’t notice. To make this more confusing, it often places dreams within dreams to confuse you – whilst you’re dying. This episode came out on Christmas Day 2014, so a year after series 3 aired but before TAB, so in Sherlock-time we’ve just entered the mind palace. The title, Last Christmas, is pretty helpful here I think – of course it has relevance within the episode, but this episode should also get us thinking about what was going on this time last year, when Sherlock was airing.

We’re no stranger to dreams within dreams at this stage, but it’s interesting how the saving-the-companion vibe is still going strong here. Ostensibly, that’s not what the episode is about at all – it’s a classic everyone-trapped-on-a-base-working-together episode, but the last five minutes tacked on the end suggests that it’s far more about the Doctor’s relationship with Clara, the episode’s companion, than one might think. In this clip (X) the Doctor thinks he’s broken out of the final dream but goes back to visit Clara and realises that she is now old, and that he’s missed her life. It culminates in him apologising for getting it wrong, for not coming for her in time, for failing her; we get more of this with Clara’s actual death later in the show, but given that it’s a kid’s show and Christmas, this scene is a touch lighter than that. It’s then that Father Christmas comes in to tell the Doctor that he’s still dreaming, he can still save her – and his first word when he wakes up is “Clara”. None of the others trapped in the dream have needed his help to wake from the vision and survive; Clara, who as the companion is our John mirror, specifically needs saving, and the Doctor needs to wake up from his dream within a dream to do that.

Nick Frost’s appearance as Father Christmas gave us all a good laugh, but he was also used as the indicator that the world we were perceiving was a dream world. This was made a bit of a joke of early in the episode – in a sci-fi world like this, are we seriously looking for what’s not realistic as the code to crack the dream? The exact same joke is made in Amy’s Choice, and here we’re hitting a pretty silly version of the show where they joke that just about the only character who can’t be real is Father Christmas. These hints about looking for what’s not real, though, should be taken as just that – hints. From the emergence of ‘something’s fucky’ theories early on in s4, this has been the abiding reasoning for the various forms of EMP theory that have sprung up, and they’re not wrong. However, if I had to put my money on a figure like Santa Claus, something iconic which functions as a kind of dream thermometer, I’d be guessing:

You were there before me. The fucky skull that glows, almost like a warning that this is too mad. Crucially, in Last Christmas they explain that Santa is a warning that your brain is sending you, picking the most unbelievable thing possible so that you know you’re trapped, dying in your brain. Santa Claus? Well, it’s a kid’s show, and it’s Christmas. But if I were picking a dream siren to tell me I was dying, I like to think that my subconscious would pick the glowing skull on the wall; without explanation, it’s an awful lot more direct.  

There is more reference than necessary made to dream crabs making one blind, and between Madame Kovarian and the blind Doctor in the later dream episode Extremis, there’s a lot more to unpack there, but I’m going to leave that for sometime down the line, or for someone else to jump into if they would like. I also want to throw out a thought I haven’t quite come to terms with yet – the elephant in the room in Amy’s Choice. Arwel Wyn Jones would be proud of the script for Amy’s Choice – twice, it mentions the elephant in the room, and so I feel I have to do the same. The first time, you could blink and miss it – the Doctor calls pregnant Amy ‘elephanty’. But the second time, we get this exchange:

DOCTOR: Now, we all know there’s an elephant in the room.

AMY: I have to be this size, I’m having a baby.

DOCTOR: No, no. The hormones seem real, but no. Is nobody going to mention Rory’s ponytail? You hold him down, I’ll cut it off? X

The elephant in the room – that the baby’s not real? Possibly, but not what we normally take it to mean. Rory’s ponytail also has not shaving for Sherlock Holmes vibes, but again it’s not quite concrete in my mind. These little bits at the end aren’t quite tied up, and I would love to hear what people have to say about them. That, however, is for another day! The next chapter in this series will be jumping back into episode-by-episode analysis with TLD – see you there.

[songbookff]

For the festival of love reqest: Personally I think Amilyn/Leia in this would be really cute (especially if they had a public kiss or something which is usual for them, but idk) and in general I just like queering star wars up, but honestly whatever pairings you feel like fit the story are good. :)

queering up star wars...see below. ;)

Also...timeline, what timeline? And um...ship all the ships, I guess. 

“We need to do something fun!” Paige Tico came hurling into the mess hall, her little sister in tow. Rose had a smile that rivalled her sister. Obviously the Tico girls had been planning something. “Anyone know about the Ewok Festival of Love?” 

“Sorry, Ewok festivals aren’t standard Stormtrooper training,” joked Finn as he shoveled a spoon of stew into his mouth. 

Poe gave him a nudge with his elbow and said, “Is it romantic? Or does love mean something else on Endor?” 

“So romantic,” winked Paige as she sat down next to Rey. Rose took a seat next on the other side of Finn. “I think we need a little love on this dreary base. What do you say?” 

“You want to throw a Love Festival? So you can get laid?” asked Kaydel Ko from the next table over. A couple of the rebels she was sitting with giggled. 

“Festival of Love!” emphasized Rose at the same time that Paige protested, “I don’t need a festival to get laid!” 

After rolling her eyes at her sister, Rose continued, “We could use a night off and a little mood lift. The Festival of Love isn’t just about romantic love. It’s about the bonds of family and the trust and acceptance between people! Think of it like a team building experience!” 

“It’s also a good way to get laid,” winked Paige. A couple of people cat called from the tables around them. 

Poe shrugged and slug his arm around Finn’s shoulders. “Just gotta get it approved by the General.” 

“I’ve got an idea about that...” The group turned to see Larma D’Acy grinning at them. “Leave the General to me.” 

~~~

Two days later, Rose stood in the middle of the hanger, hands on hips, proud of her work. Rey stood a few feet away amused at her friend's excitement. The hanger was draped with colorful banners, vines of leaves, and bundles of wildflowers. Someone had even found lanterns to hang around for when the sun set.

"It looks great," assured Rey. "I'm sure everyone will love it."

"Thanks." Rose gave her a brilliant smile and then added, "Thanks for being my date tonight! The Festival of Love is about friendship, too."

"You can always count on me to show up for you. But maybe tonight you could tell her how you feel...maybe the timing will finally be right." Rose's eyes darted over to a group of people before focusing back on her friend.

"Maybe," she conceded. Then she clapped her hands together, altogether changing the mood. "Let's get the music going!"

The cooking team had outdone themselves with a spread of food from all over the galaxy. It seemed everyone was willing to go on rations for a week or two just to have one night of celebration.

Poe and Finn entered the hanger, hand in hand, about ten minutes later. Poe carried a crate of some alcohol that was probably illegal, but the pilots were quick to divide it up to eager hands.

Finn stared at the pageantry in amazement. No one was in uniform. It seemed enough civilian clothing had been dug out to dress everyone in an assortment of colors. Even Poe had found Finn a colorful robe to through over his normal clothes.

"It's like everyone has forgotten we're in a war," he murmured, just for Poe to hear as they filled their plates with food.

"No one has forgotten..." replied Poe. "But war is all the more reason to celebrate. We could all die tomorrow...but we're here tonight."

Poe pressed his lips to Finn's cheek. The two men smiled at each other and then found a spot by Poe's x-wing to enjoy their dinner and illegal beverages.

Some giggling and friendly shouting drew their attention to the middle of the room where Paige had drug her girlfriend, Jessika Pava into the makeshift dancefloor. She shouted something neither man could make out, but loud music suddenly filled the hanger. Paige let out a hoot and pulled Jessika in for a dramatic kiss.

Everyone began cheering and soon other couples joined them to start dancing on the floor. Finn nudged Poe on the shoulder. They had made a deal that Finn would owe Poe one dance together, but Poe had promised not to make him dance until everyone was too drunk to remember it.

"I can sit here with you," assured Poe, trying not to enviously watch the other dancers. 

“Go,” encouraged Finn. Just then, Rey approached them with a smile and a wave. “See, Rey and I can sit here and celebrate friends who don’t dance while you go celebrate loving dancing!” 

Poe kissed Finn, took a swig of his drink, and then dashed off to join his friends dancing to an upbeat song on the dancefloor. Rey picked up his almost empty plate, picking out the leftovers she wanted. 

“You look happy,” she told Finn between bites.

“I am happy.” The response was so simple, but it had been so long since he had been able to say that truthfully. Poe made him happy; being a part of the rebellion made him happy; having friends made him happy. 

Rey raised a glass, “To the festival of happiness!” 

Finn clinked his bottle to her glass and they watched Poe, Rose, and the rest of their new family dance their hearts out. After an hour, there was a break in the music when the General made an appearance. Leia was dressed in white, something that she reserved for special occasions these days. It was her branded look, back in the day. 

Someone had handed her a microphone, the crowd insisting on a speech for the Festival. And of course, Leia was nothing if not a politician. 

“Alright, settle down, settle down.” There was a graceful smile on her face. “Firstly, I would like to thank the Tico sisters for coming up with such an uplifting and wonderful celebration. I do believe that we have to remember what we are all working towards; love is the reason we fight against tyranny.” 

“Down with the First Order!” shouted someone in the crowd. 

“Long live the Republic!” called another, leading to more cheering and clapping. 

“I want you to have your time tonight to celebrate each other. I want you to remember who you fight side by side with. And then tomorrow, I expect everyone to be back to work.” Laughter met her words and it soon turned to cheering, with a chant of her name. “Now, I owe a very important woman a dance before I leave you all to celebrate without the watchful eye of the General.” 

She turned to extend her hand to the colorful Amilyn Holdo. The women stepped onto the dancefloor to a roomful of cheers. Amilyn stood out in a deep red dress and orange hair against the starkness of Leia’s white dress. But no one could doubt their connection as they began to dance. It was a sweet moment, truly a celebration of lovers. 

As the song ended, Leia twirled Amilyn and then gracefully dipped her towards the ground before pulling her back up into a soft kiss. The hanger had never been louder. Both women were smiling when they waved their goodnights. 

The party continued long into the night; the drinks flowed, the dancing was magical, and the kisses were given freely. As soon as people started to pair off and leave, Rose found herself cleaning off some tables with Kaydel Ko. 

“Tonight was wonderful,” said Kaydel Ko, with a nervous voice. “Thanks for setting all of this up.” 

“You helped!” insisted Rose, the alcohol giving her a bit of courage. Tonight had been wonderful, but there was one thing that would make it better. If only she could ask...

“They look like they’re having fun.” Kaydel Ko pointed to where Poe was showing Finn some new dance steps, having finally drug his boyfriend out on the floor. Both women went back to cleaning, avoiding each other’s gaze. 

As the music changed to something slower, Kaydel Ko cleared her throat. “Rose?” 

“Yes?” 

“Wouldyouliketodancewithme?” 

Rose stared at her, her alcohol addled mind trying to desipher what was asked. Kaydel Ko blushed and stared down at her feet. Rose finally put two and two together. “You want to dance with me?” 

“Yes...I mean, if you want...”

Rose smiled broadly and reached for Kaydel Ko’s hand. She let her out to the floor where the numbers were slowly dwindling down. They started swaying together, a blush on both of their cheeks. 

After a few moments, Kaydel Ko murmured, “I’ve wanted to do this all night.” 

“Dance with me?” asked Rose, amazed. “Kaydel Ko, I set this whole thing up so I could dance with you.” 

Kaydel Ko’s eyes widened in realization. Both women smiled, realizing that they had nothing to fear about their feelings for each other. Rose pulled her closer, so their cheeks were touching as they danced. Across the room, she caught Rey’s gaze, and her friend gave her two thumbs up. 

Yes, the Festival of Love had worked it’s magic on the scruffy rebels tonight. 

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

@gatheringbones It’s very much just what you said, but you said it better.

Being in a social environment where people are very invested in non-queer media as a kind of queer media. Both passively, as in, it just what they like and spend a lot of time on; or politically, as in, trying to argue that it is queer and radical, actually, for this and that reason.

Like you, I spent a lot of time in those spaces and kinda bought into it; and now having discovered what it is to be outside that, I now feel quite uncomfortable with how uncritically and enthusiastically other people do it.

So yeah: consume actual content by queer creators, about queer people, even or especially if it’s a bit half-baked and under-practiced and outside of what you’re really looking for. It’s not the 1990s any more, and it’s certainly not the 50s: there has never been an easier time to actually access this kind of content.

I feel this about people doing “transmasc asexual Cedric Diggory” fic, and I feel this about women doing “I’m wlw but can only explore my sexuality through imagined mlm”, and I certainly feel this about people doing “well the creators said the characters could potentially be queer because of death of the author in a twitter post, that’s allyship!”.

Developing consciously separatist(?) media tastes has always been an essential form of radical practice! Both ideologically, trying to free yourself from the thought-structures of your oppressor, and practically - keeping money in your community and demonstrating there is a market for this media.

Film being my main thing, I do semi regular “only women’s media”/”only POC media” challenges, even though neither of those are ~categories I am in~ because it always, always exposes me to stuff I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, as well as an awareness of like...how hard it is to find media fitting the “women’s” criteria which is designed for adult women. Women are actually pretty well represented in the child/teen market, but above a certain age that vanishes. Or, how hard it is to find POC media in genres I actually enjoy - there’s a lot of crime and sad biopics about racism, and that’s pretty much it. Or how hard it is to do a challenge that’s more specific than “POC”, even though that’s a category so large as to be meaningless, but good luck going into charity shops or DVD shops and accomplishing, say, African Americans working in Hollywood, or Chinese creators who are working in China - unless you have the budget, expertise and internet access, you’re kinda resigned to “non-white media”.

(and my criteria for those challenges is already pretty broad: it needs to be about women/POC in a major way, say as protagonists; OR have a significant representation in the crew, say a director or the writer of the original source material)

So you’re not only discovering something about yourself (potentially), but more broadly, about the context in which media is produced. As in, what kinds of stories about queer people are produced - and by whom.

Like, the fact that movies by women & POC working independently, outside of the studio system, producing stuff that isn’t just feelgood rom coms and gangster movies, is all on labels like Criterion and BFI or import discs and is £15-£25 a go - is itself interesting, you know? There are movies like Watermelon Woman and Born in Flames that I have literally wanted to see since university a decade ago, and the fact that they are scarce and expensive is...important to know, important to have observed. I can’t afford to watch interesting movies by marginalised creators. Systems of power make it trivial for me to watch 23 James Bond movies, and impossible to watch one post-apocalyptic black dyke biker gang revolutionary movie. But what am I going to learn from James Bond 24 that I didn’t already know, about myself and others?

(and that creates new questions, such as: how can we increase support and distribution for marginalised artists? The history of 20th C queer literature is built on, queer folks creating their own publishing houses and bookshops to spread these books!)

(and questions like, what is the difference between women’s media produced inside and outside of the Hollywood system? what can I learn by observing that?)

It’s also about the need to self-create what you need to see. I write very shitty trans man porn now, and I hate every minute of it; it isn’t very good, and nobody reads it, and thank goodness frankly; but it’s thinking about alternative reasons why art creation exists in a marginalised context. Like, uh, the American Expressionism art movement which was like “our art is not about what the finished picture looks like, but our experience of creating it”. What if making art as marginalised people wasn’t about good art, or even good politics/didactics/persuasion, but what we learn about ourselves in the process of creating it (including or especially, our discomfort and unwillingness)

Like there’s SO MUCH to talk about, and it then feels v difficult to get people on the same page for what needs to be collective efforts, when they feel themselves to be satisfied with a kind of self-created shadowplay, and especially when they start attributing the queerness and meaning they have themselves found and created to the original source.

(something which, as a fan of both Blue Jam and League of Gentlemen, I know myself to be as guilty as anyone of)

[princepestilence]

Hey Samson, I'm very much a homebody and I wanted to know if you had and tips on where to meet cool queer people?

Hello there! I’m honestly very flattered that you thought to ask me, because that makes me feel like I must look like I’ve got my stuff sorted out and am living that #queer community dream–but that’s not actually entirely true and I sort of want to preface anything else I say with the fact that I am still very much in the process of trying to find more cool people to bring into my life myself, because I’m not where I want to be on that front yet. I’ve been super lucky so far, but I don’t want to give the impression that I’m done meeting cool queer people. There’s a lot of friends I’m still out looking for and a lot of connections I haven’t made yet that I’d really like to, so yeah! Happy to share my thoughts but I am not an expert.

For me, there’s kind of been three major sources of finding My People so far, and those have been: work/university (which count as the same for me, since I was once a student and now I teach students and have cool queer colleagues and they know cool queer people, so it has a run-on effect), the internet, and creative art spaces. 

I think being a homebody can be a bit of a disadvantage if you want to meet cool queer people, mostly because I’ve found online queer spaces and offline queer spaces to have… very different vibes and values. Not always! I’ve definitely experienced first-hand some weird vibes that I didn’t want to tangle with in offline queer spaces (thinking specifically of the queer collective at my university). But broadly, I’ve enjoyed offline queer spaces a lot more, and found more connection with other people, and experienced more genuinely restorative and healing and positive vibes in those spaces than here on tumblr or elsewhere online. 

So that’s kind of my first piece of advice: see what’s happening in your local area regarding queer and/or artistic events! I don’t use Facebook, but there are a lot of local groups that use Facebook to organise and announce events, so if you have that, that can be a great way to keep in touch with that’s going on and see if anything strikes your fancy. For me, I go to the poetry slam every month I can make it, which is something I adore and always an experience of big queer solidarity, because it’s a bunch of creative (often queer or non-norm) people in a space that has a strongly upheld belief in the respectful spaces policy–i.e., be excellent to each other, no bigotry allowed. 

I’ve definitely lucked out with my local slam (maybe I’m biased, but it is the best one around) but a lot of events like that are places where you can walk in, sit down, and not have to really talk to anyone if you don’t want to, and get a sense of the place and the people and I’ve definitely found these spaces to be more welcoming and respectful than more… mainstream (?) events, so that can be a cool place to go. Similar things like pop-up art exhibitions (especially if they have talks or workshops) count, especially if you see anywhere that they’re LGBTQ+ friendly and/or make a clear statement of intent re: supporting grassroots or marginalised creators, etc. 

Alternatively, I can recommend queer book clubs! Sometimes these groups are specifically about reading queer lit., and sometimes the reading is just a way of bringing queer people together, and either way, that’s a good place to at least go along and suss out. If there’s none around, a great option is to actually start something like that yourself–as intimidating as that might feel. Submitting a call for interest on a queer Facebook group, for example, can help put you in contact with people who might be in your exact same boat of wanting to build community but not knowing where to start, or not yet finding the right kind of space for them. 

I personally feel book clubs (or a similar hobby exercise) are a good way to do this, since it 1. brings everyone together in one place on a regular schedule, which is good for getting to know people, 2. isn’t necessarily a huge time or energy or financial investment, which means it’s more inclusive than many other events (although obviously requires some planning and also consideration re: which books and book costs, travel costs, access to libraries etc.), 3. is overall a relaxed space that can be hosted in the daytime, away from alcohol, in a public venue such as a cafe, which for many people is more approachable, and 4. gives everyone something to talk about when they get there and for the duration, so it’s way less awkward than sitting in a circle being like, “hi, I’m gay, are you my new best friend??” or feeling obliged to generate personal conversation the whole time. If it doesn’t work out or it’s too much effort to continue, you can discontinue it at any time, so it’s a pretty low stakes approach, I feel.

Edit: totally forgot, but sometimes [hobby or passion of yours] + “queer” into search bars can show up good results! For example, sometimes there are particular gatherings or small conventions, regular gaming events, forums or talk-sites, so on. I definitely know of Ace & Aro Teatimes that are held, specifically as a way of catching up, and you might luck out and discover something like that, which is particularly great because it means you will already have an interest or hobby in common with the people you meet there. 

Off the top of my head, that’s kind of it for offline spaces. You can probably check out if your local university has a queer collective, because even if you’re not part of the university body, sometimes they will have events open to the general public etc. Like I said before, that’s not my scene, because I’ve personally found the local university queer collective to be… more similar in personality to the online spaces and also just a little more intense than I’m looking for. But! That’s not to say they’re all like that. 

As for online spaces, I met a lot of my queer friends by the sheer bizarre wheel of fate that brings people together in the disgusting blue sea of tumblr. I know that’s not helpful at all, but the piece of advice I have to offer there is that I met all these people by doing what I loved, first and foremost. I was doing my own thing, however weird, and they were doing the same, and we saw each other and went “oh cool,” and we were both queer. To a certain extent, I think this is true in all things: have fun, be yourself, and trust in queer pack magic to bring cool queer friends into your life. 

I am someone who’s very forward, I guess, and very proactive socially (and in general), so I am usually the first person in a new friendship to walk over and say, “hey! you’re cool, I love your you, tell me about yourself,” [paraphrased] and honestly that’s worked pretty much every single time. I admit my charisma rolls tend to be high (I sacrificed constitution and wisdom for them, so they better be) but I do believe that you miss all the shots you don’t take, so it’s worth reaching out. So if you come across someone that seems cool, remember that you’re also a cool person worth knowing and a good friend and give that person a chance to find that out for themselves by saying hello, because a lot of the time, the other person isn’t going to have that courage and if you wait for them, it might never happen. Easier said than done for many, I know, but it’s that whole thing with lesbian sheep (wool-oo-wools, if you will): you can’t stand there and expect someone else to know that you standing there still is a sign of how much you like them. 

I have no idea if any of this is going to be helpful to you, but I wish you so much luck in finding your people! If there’s anything I’ve said that’s not clear or needs more detail or anything, please let me know and I’ll be happy to do what I can to help. I think finding community is one of the most important things in life for queer people to do, in whatever form that takes, so I am absolutely always down to help with that in whatever ways I can. 

[deehollowaywrites]

Title: Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge, and Post-Metal

Author: J.J. Anselmi

Release: February 11, 2020

Genre: music, nonfiction, memoir

Order here!

When I first heard Metallica’s “Battery,” I knew I’d found the real shit, J.J. Anselmi’s newest states in an early chapter. The social alienation, the depression, the anger, and the preoccupation with death: it was the music I needed, right when I needed it. Similar stories abound in volumes like Jon Wiederhorn’s Raising Hell and a recent academic anthology of gender, sexuality, and heavy metal analyses; the typical pathway to extreme music, it seems, is youthful aggression, disaffection, or malaise. It’s not very cool to recall that your teen rage was tempered rather than catalyzed by religion. Even less cool to admit that if you are currently swimming in doom’s murk, you only took the chilly plunge because of boys and men. 

A few antecedents, then: The Minutemen. Captain Beefheart. Def Leppard. The Mars Volta. 

Edgy enough, weird enough, almost metallic enough, nearly harsh enough. It’s easy to see the slippery slope, to hear my mother’s voice in my head. If that’s what you want to spend your money on, she said of The Mars Volta’s full-length debut, I guess it’s your money. A year or so later, she would be interrogating me about certain media downloads to the family desktop--not because I was infringing copyright via poorly-labeled LimeWire files, but because the music was the sort that drove away the Holy Spirit (to be fair, Master of Puppets didn’t inspire any epiphanies). Mormons are very concerned with the Spirit’s presence. Movies and music are the fastest and most seductive shortcuts to becoming lost in a mire of worldliness, spiritual miasma, and sin. Interestingly, my mother was less perturbed by my weekly emails to a much-older dude I’d “met” on a geek forum, he of the curly beard and Captain Beefheart appreciation. For a suburban teenage girl reading SPIN in 2003, music in particular seemed a clear Point A to ineffable cool’s Point B, as evidenced by--although at the time I wouldn’t have phrased it thus--fuckability. Whiteboy music journalists, from Klosterman with his contrarian hair metal love to Azerrad deifying The Minutemen, had Ideas about what made rock music good. It was a trail of breadcrumbs that could be followed by anyone, so maybe I’d start off as me and end up as Brody Dalle. Of course, wanting to be punk is proof that you're destined to remain square, so the guy in the homemade Leftöver Crack t-shirt likewise stayed a mystery. Meanwhile, I made a fansite about The Mars Volta for my web design class, wrote an AP essay about why filesharing is good, actually, and counted the days ‘til graduation.

Euro-style power metal is romantic. Good make-out tunes. The fine art of getting into something that someone you fancy is into, well, that’s bog-standard for a huge swath of humanity and I’ve never been above it because I do like exploring new things. However, there’s a certain flavor of man who encourages women to listen to music he likes not out of genuine enthusiasm and desire to share, but because filling up a vessel with water from your spring means that you, yourself, will never be thirsty. There’s no rearranging of boundaries necessary for the recommender, no exchange of gifts, no call to reassess your favorites in light of new information. Where things get hairy is when women take what is conferred and make it their own. The vaguely fringe music that had already primed my eardrums led away from flourish-laden prog and high-camp power metal, into weirder and uglier places my boyfriend at the time had no interest in traversing. It stings a bit to realize that your heart is big enough to hold all the loves that comprise the person you love, that your desire is malleable and open, and that they have always been enough by themselves, fully-formed, unswerving as a highway through the desert. It hurts to hear that you’re not doing the thing (metal or comics or horse racing) in the way that was shown you, properly. This might be when the rage starts to seep back in, poisoning the spring. But solo concert-going is only lonely until you make it past the venue’s threshold. After that, the Spirit is always with you.

Myself, I’ve seldom found the divine in places it was supposed to inhabit.

The thing about The Mars Volta that embedded itself in my ribcage seventeen years ago wasn’t their tight jeans: it was how they seemed to have misplaced all their fucks. Prior to Sacha Jenkins’ 2003 SPIN review, the ugliest thing I’d sought out of my own volition was an Anti-Flag album, a suitably edgy move in George W. Bush’s America. Deloused in the Comatorium did not care if you understood what it was going for; an impetus existed behind the unexpected time signatures, dog-bothering vocals, and salsa moves that was alluring in its opacity and bloody-mindedness. A bunch of weirdos recorded a fuck-you in album format because they wanted to. Atmosphere, emotion, tension could all be far more important to a song than melody or lyrics. Listenable was up for debate. Art formed its own excuse. In this way, although the two groups couldn’t be further apart sonically, my heart was made ready for Katatonia. Then Oceans of Slumber. Torche. Black Castle, Thou, Bell Witch, Cult of Luna, on and on, an endless sinkhole opening up. 

A great and appealing contrast of doom metal lies in the apparent dumbassery of its sound. This is broadly true of all metal, of course; Coal Chamber or Megadeth, Black Sabbath or Pantera, metal was music for drop-outs, stoners, school shooters… the purview not only of miscreants, but of boys and stupid boys at that. Punk seemed the smarter option, if you had anger issues, had heard of feminism, or tended toward hobbies like trying to form a Young Democratic Socialists chapter at your school. For older me, trying to rewrite a religious mind into a liberal and cosmopolitan one, prog metal was defensibly slick and impressive, while power metal seemed less openly hateful toward women. All the while, doom lurked beneath layers of nay-saying. Adult men I’ve known, talented guitarists with good ears and smart hands, have sneered at all the seeming lack populating the slower subgenres--lack of beauty, skill, or even aggression in its most recognizable and masculine forms. Yet, for a listener whose favorite pastime is intellectualizing everything in sight, doom is the other side of the sun. 

I don’t… really… understand what a tritone is. I know it’s important, and I could do a bad approximation of the opening of “Black Sabbath,” but definitionally I’m at a loss. Often I have no idea which instrument is making the sound that I like. I don’t know anything about music theory or how to talk with authority about what makes music good, important, or even what differentiates music from other sounds. Maybe a drone metal track is a collection of sounds, rather than a song? My Dream Theater-enthusiast ex figured since I was a nebbishy bespectacled geek, prog would be all I needed. The thinking man’s metal! No one has ever felt threatened by Steven Wilson. You can remain Smart™ while listening to assorted finger-wanky Europeans. In contrast, kicking it with a Texas weed-cult at the skatepark is stupid. Obviously, every genre of metal contains its geniuses, and one of doom’s most lovable qualities is how often unquestionable finesse arrives wrapped in brutal, bizarre, counterintuitive paper. But beyond the plausible deniability of technique and philosophy found in groups like Neurosis is something even more compelling. Sometimes, it just fucking sounds cool.

It sounds like that because someone did it intentionally, gleefully. I wrote a novel like that because I liked how it looked, sounded, felt.

One of the birthrights of normative (white, cis, straight, abled) masculinity is feeling. If you turn out queer, or are socialized as female, or live with the massed connotations of a racist culture written over your skin, overt and violent emotion may be anathema. The power of accessing a fully human emotional spectrum for the first time should not be underrated. The doom bands I grew into loving, independent of the people closest to me who putatively liked similar music, are into feelings. Even, or maybe especially, the ones authority figures wish you didn’t have (and those aren’t always the bad ones. Authority hates it even more if you feel good). If there’s a thing Mormons don’t countenance, it’s feeling bad things and informing people of them, or feeling the wrong good things. Doubt is a big no-no. It’s always better to feel shame when possible. If the Spirit isn’t telling you what you know it should, it’s on you for not listening enough, praying enough, being enough. If the Spirit’s voice isn’t soft and gentle, if it instead materializes in the best growl this side of Obituary, well, Satan quotes scripture too. Meanwhile, doubt--lack of clarity, spiritual and emotional murkiness, bone-deep ambivalence--is doom’s molten heart. Meanwhile, shame--at the self’s fondled hatreds, as C.S. Lewis has it, for things desired and things questioned--is shunned by doomsayers.

The body experiences advance warning. Fury, fear, arousal. Sure, I attribute my openness toward weird music to frustrated teen lust. Sure, I owe Roy Khan and Tony Kakko for first love and redrawn horizons. When fire dies, what’s left is not absence but ash, fertile and generative. Doomed to Fail recognizes that continual plumbing and revolving in uncertainty for its beauty and possibility. Whatever formed my rage and love, those two sides of the same forbidden coin, they belong to me now. 

[lostinphases]

Book Review: Witch

Title: Witch: Unleashed. Untamed. Unapologetic.

Author: Lisa Lister

Review:

So, where do I begin? I read Witch quite a while ago, over a year I think, and I’ve been meaning to write a review of it ever since because, believe me, I have some thoughts. But this book is a complicated one to review, so I’ve been putting it off. However, since this book, despite being two years old, is now suddenly a hot button topic, I think it’s about time I weigh in.

I guess, I should first start by saying I don’t see this book as a reference book for witchcraft. In my opinion, Witch is much more of a memoir of Lister’s relationship with her craft that includes background information, crafts, and recipes. I think that’s an important distinction, especially with the controversy surrounding the book right now. Why? Well, she spends the first 150 or so pages self-promoting and telling her personal story as a hereditary witch of Romani heritage (some people take issue with her using the G-word throughout, but that’s her heritage not mine). The rest continues her story with definitions, recipes, and kind of journey through the Wheel of the Year scattered throughout. She is telling her story as a woman claiming her self-confidence and personal power in the context of being a witch. A lot of people are reading this as directly exclusive, but I personally didn’t read the book that way.

Don’t get me wrong. The introduction was a flag. I think what Lisa Lister wanted to do was a write a book to a specific audience that would feel a physical and emotional connection to her specific experience, but she messed up along the way by approaching it with an attitude that is inflammatory more often than it is explanatory. There’s a difference between writing a book featuring the female body (very, very heavily featuring sheesh) and acknowledging that the topic can also more broadly approach and include other bodies versus saying my book is about the FEMALE body, sorry not sorry!!! which is kind of what she does just not in those words. She discusses her experience with witchcraft as a woman (specifically a cis woman) and that includes a lot about her relationship with her female biology. She doesn’t actively exclude anyone from witchcraft as a practice, (despite the rude introduction) and she doesn’t define witchcraft as for women only as far as I can tell.

That being said, I will say she is likely feminist to a fault, and again, the first 150 pages or so of the book are self-indulgent and very heavily promote her other books, so they could likely be skipped. When I bought the book and read it, I was initially wary based on the introduction, but it needs to be taken in context with the goal of the book. She’s trying to share the empowerment she has gained through witchcraft and how that connects to the biology of her body. She acknowledges that’s she writing her book for a specific audience, and if you don’t like body-centric uses of witchcraft, then this might not be a book to read (there are lots of books, posts, etc. about body-centric witchcraft by witches of all genders, not to mention books about queer magic). I just don’t think she does it well.

Would I recommend reading this book? Yes! I would.

Now, if you’re thinking “Oh my gosh, Veronica, why?” Well, I think you should read it for several reasons. First of all, a book this divisive can only be discussed well by people that have read it, so if you want to contribute to the debate about this book, read it to be an informed commenter. Second, it’s a valuable lesson in learning to read critically. I’m an asexual person, and the near excessive, often vulgar, feminist to a fault, usage of the female body as a power symbol in this book is overwhelming. (And I’m sure that’s the intention.) But I read this book because I know how to read critically, I can read past the devices where Lister overdoes it to try to actually get at the heart of the thing. Third? If nothing else, this book oozes confidence. I think most people would be hard-pressed to read this without wanting to scream, dance, or just do something bold to empower themselves. I could probably compare this to the Yerbamala Collective’s and Becoming Dangerous, but I don’t want to turn this book review into its own novel. (You can read that review here, though.)

So, yes, read it. Do I recommend it because I whole-heartedly love and adore this book? No. Not at all. I’d probably give it 2.5/5 stars if I had to because the “reference” information is pretty basic. Every time I’ve ever told someone to read this book, it came with the disclaimer that it needs to be read critically. I do the same thing with Scott Cunningham and many other authors that can offer us valuable insight into this amorphous world of witchcraft without us having to be their number one fans.

This is getting really long, and I’m not sure I’ve covered it all because there is so much that could be dissected here. But hopefully this provides some more insight into this book. If anyone wants to discuss further, I’m happy to share more of my thoughts.

[thedyingmoon]

💜 This I Promise 💜

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XXXVIII. Nobleman

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That particularly hot morning of July, Levi woke up to the strange noises coming from one of the rooms downstairs.

He opened his eyes, massaged his temple, and stretched. He got up from his chair and went to the bathroom to wash his face, removing all the dirt that accumulated during his stressful two hours of sleep.

Ever since arriving in Shunerman’s mansion, he was feeling uneasy about the things around him. He was not particularly fond of Hange’s plan to disguise themselves as Elvis and Jacqueline just to get near (F/N), and he was not very pleased with all the things that started to happen since last month. Moblit, Hange’s assistant, who was left in the Legion to observe all the things that might be suspicious, recently reported of the latest happenings in Trost while they are away, in codes, of course. And what he reported doesn’t sound good, at all.

Oh, yeah, have I told you that I’ve been reading a fascinating story about the queen who was jealous of her step daughter because of her beauty? He wrote. The queen ordered the best hunter in the land to kill her. When that was not successful, she searched for her, herself, disguised as an old hag who was offering apples. The queen gave her step daughter the apple, which was poisoned, by the way. The girl died instantly, with no hope of salvation. The queen gave her step daughter the apple, which was poisoned, by the way. The girl died instantly, with no hope of salvation.

Of course, Moblit had to write the last two sentences twice. It was his way of saying something urgent, and from the looks of it, someone had already died in the Legion. Not that they are not used to people dying a lot in their division.

It simply meant that someone died, not because of Titans.

But, because of something more sinister.

The enemy has already started killing off the witnesses in the Legion, one by one,…

Levi groaned upon hearing the strange music once more. He checked himself in the mirror, double checking if his appearance ( and disguise ) is okay, and finally went down to see what was wrecking Elvis Shunerman’s mansion in half.

What he found there absolutely annoyed him, for there was Hange, in disguise, naturally, conversing with three unknown people wearing formal attire, like they were doing business or something.

Hange, who was free to wear her thick – lensed glasses inside the mansion, didn’t fail to notice Levi, who was standing at the doorway, giving her dagger stares. The woman smiled broadly and went to him like everything was okay.

“What the shit is this, four eyes?” he whispered savagely to her.

“They’re from the dance company, Levi.” She answered.

“Then, what the fuck are the stars of leotard town doing here?!” he almost shouted in her face.

Hange had to bite her lip to prevent herself from laughing. “Well, we are going to attend the Winter Season ball, aren’t we?”

“And what about it?” Levi asked, already knowing the answer deep inside.

“They’re here to teach us how to dance.” Hange simply announced, making Levi widen his eyes at her.

Levi looked at the direction of the three professional tutors, who nervously waved at him like he was their grumpy relative who they haven’t seen in a long time. He grimaced, grabbed Hange’s right arm roughly and led her forcefully out of the room. He almost threw the woman out of the room and shut the door angrily.

“Aren’t you alarmed by what’s happening right now?” he grumbled. “A Scout dead by suspicious poisoned fruit? And you inviting tutors here like nothing happened?”

“It’s nothing like that, Levi.” Hange retorted. “We’re going to infiltrate the ball, am I correct?” after Levi’s nod, she said, “Well then, we’ll have to be the noblemen that the guests expect us to be, so that they wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“Isn’t there any other way without us having to learn some shitty pirouettes and twists? I’m sure you can think of something else!”

“Nobody said anything about pirouettes and twists, Levi! How do you even get close to our nobleman without him getting suspicious? We can’t just put a gag on him and kidnap him straight on! Have you forgotten that the guard dog is still on the loose? What if he, or she, attends the ball, too? I’m pretty sure that he’ll pay close attention to the surroundings, especially if there’s some suspicious people wearing black and tailing his master around the room!”

“I didn’t say anything about wearing black.” Levi shot back at her.

“Well, do you have any ideas?”

Hange waited for Levi’s answer, and when he said none, she continued.

“Don’t you forget that our other target would possibly be there, as well.”

Levi felt fumes of anger forming inside him. “Erwin Smith,…”

“Yes, him.” Hange replied, then crossed her arms. “If Moblit is correct, then, Erwin would also pursue the mastermind behind all this. Don’t you think it would cause a big commotion if people found out that we barged in there as us, uninvited? Erwin didn’t invite you, this time. You would want to keep it that way to avoid further damage.”

Levi absorbed all the information and just nodded hesitantly, slightly thinking of that one time when the nobles of Wall Sina invited Erwin for the Winter Season ball two years ago as an honorary guest because he was the Commander of the Scouting Legion, which entitled him to invite three more people. He remembered he invited Hange, him, and,…

“And don’t forget that (F/N) would also attend the ball. You don’t want her to see the real you after what happened in Stohess a month ago.”

Levi looked down on the floor, suddenly remembering the girl denying that she knew them.

What would happen to them if they meet each other again, undisguised?

“And, what if Erwin succeeds on his plan and everything turned into chaos?”

Hange pushed her glasses up her nose bridge. “We immediately take (F/N) away and bring her to safety. Let Erwin do his thing.”

Levi sighed and gave up.

“Okay, four eyes.” He breathed. “Do we even have an invitation to that shitty ball?”

“I’m glad you asked.” She answered and took out an envelope from her coat pocket. She gave it to Levi and watched him as he opened the powder blue material and perused the contents of the invitation. It was from a noble named Rod Reiss, who was, apparently, the host of this year’s Winter Season ball, and it was addressed to Elvis and Jacqueline.

“It came with this.” Hange said, then showed him a single – stemmed, lavender – colored rose. “Quite a flashy invitation, isn’t it?”

Levi took the rose from her and examined the thing. It really looked queer. It even smelled differently from the other roses he have seen and touched before.

To his sensitive nose, it almost smelled like expensive liquor.

“Is this thing real?” he asked, twirling the thing with his fingers.

“I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s the first time I’ve see one. Even outside the Walls, we haven’t travelled far enough to discover that floral specie. I guess the host has a thing with lavender, maybe?” Hange told him.

“I don’t know.” He said, setting the rose down on a nearby table. “All I know is that we must keep (F/N) away from Erwin and that nobleman with his guard dog, whoever they are. We must keep her away, as far from them as possible.”

Hange nodded, determination evident in her hazel eyes.

“So, the tutors?” she asked him.

Levi’s eyes widened a bit, and seeing that he had no escape from them, he nodded, defeated.

She opened the door and both of them entered the room, where they saw the three chatting eagerly and exchanging musical pieces. The three turned towards them and smiled.

“Where were we?” Hange asked them.

“The waltz, Milady.” Wheezed the oldest of the three. He was wearing a gold – rimmed monocle, and his moustache curled in a way that reminded Levi of the white – sauced pasta he ate the other day. The man motioned for the other tutor, who was a bit younger than him and more energetic, to go near Hange. The young man bowed at her, making her grin in pride.

Levi clicked his tongue. Was this how nobles act in front of ladies?

The man with monocles glided excitedly towards the piano, sitting on the stool, and gesturing for the violinist, who had dark, greasy shoulder – length hair, to start at his command.

“We begin the basic steps, Milady.” The dance tutor said and offered his hands to Hange.

For a full hour, Levi watched them as they pranced about the room in circles, or in boxes, as the tutor put it. He was quietly observing them from his place on the corner of the room, and he honestly thought that Hange Zoe had both left feet. She kept on stepping on the foot of the tutor and making wrong turns. The tutor was finally noticeably losing his patience as he explained for the fifth time that the feet must be slightly apart by a few inches after the full box step, not wide like a split.

And when Hange made the wrong step all over again, Levi clutched his temples in embarrassment of his supposed partner. She noticed this and dropped her hold on the tutor.

“You think it’s easy?” she shot at him, irritated.

It’s your freaking idea! “Well, you think it’s easy for him to teach you?”

Hange inhaled and exhaled, controlling her anger. She looked at him with a very sinister looking smile.

“Why don’t you try it, honey? I’m sure you’ll do pretty well. I need to rest my feet for a while, see?”

She was clearly challenging him. And it annoyed the hell out of him.

He raised and eyebrow, dropped it immediately, and uncrossed his arms, walking towards the dance tutor while Hange walked away to the nearest chair to rest her tired legs.

The pianist and the violinist readied as Levi faced the tutor.

“Whenever you’re ready.” Announced monocles.

Levi glared at the tutor, who was,…

Slightly blushing?

The music began and the tutor quickly positioned himself as the partner, which would make Levi the lead.

“Elvis, dear, you have to hold his hand and put your other hand on her back.” Hange told him, looking like she was torturing him with her huge, annoying smile.

“What the fuck?!” Levi savagely whispered as he looked back at the tutor, who had his neck almost craned painfully to the side as he waited for Levi to hold him. He had no choice but to do what Hange said and held the tutor just like what she said.

Slowly, they made their way through the basic steps of the waltz.

And it was extremely uncomfortable.

Very, very, very uncomfortable.

The tutor kept looking at him in a weird way, occasionally fluttering his eyelids at him whenever he thought he was concentrating on the steps. The young man also tried to, occasionally, get closer to him by pushing his lower torso towards his, which Levi avoided every single time.

Levi thought he was imagining things, but when his eyes lingered accidentally towards the pianist and the violinist, he found out, in complete terror, that they were definitely thinking the same as him. They were looking worriedly at him, even the grumpy violinist had his eyes wide open as he observed how the dance tutor positions himself closer to him.

And Hange? How was Hange taking in all of this?

Well, apparently, the crazed woman was holding in her laughter by clutching her mouth with one hand and holding her stomach with the other. She had her eyes closed with tears of sheer bliss almost coming out of them.

Levi looked back at the dance tutor, who was, now, attempting to put his knee in between his legs,…

“FUCK!” Levi screamed as he immediately broke his hold on the dance tutor, who almost fell to the ground and was disappointed and scared at the same time. “Get out of this house, RIGHT NOW!”

The tutor scrambled to his feet and ran towards his comrades, who also got off their instruments and took all of their stuff with complete terror in their eyes. They stumbled into each other, trying to make their way outside the house, and with that, they’re finally gone.

Hange finally let out her laughter, filling the whole room with her obnoxious voice and irritating Levi to the edge of his already snapped patience.

“Do you think it’s funny?! FUCK! I should’ve known that you’re up to something stupid!” Levi screamed as he searched for something to break, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“I’m not! I’m not! I s-swear!” Hange stuttered through her uncontrolled fits of laughter.

“Then, could you kindly explain what that was about?!”

“I did! I told you! I just didn’t expect the tutor to be like that! No wonder I couldn’t learn anything from him!” Hange was trying her very best to control her laughter.

“Shit!” Levi took a seat on the piano stool, trying to calm himself down. “Those three should be as good as fired. No. They should be as good as murdered!”

All of a sudden, he heard someone knocking on the front door. Levi ignored it, thinking that it was those three again. And when he heard the knock again, he impatiently stood, cursing under his breath, and went all the way to the living room to open the door.

“What the fuck is it?!” Levi screamed as he opened the door.

It was a huge mistake.

For outside the doorway stood none other than the confused – looking (F/N),…

***

Levi watched as Petra twirled around in his office. She was so excited to be invited to the Winter Season ball inside Wall Sina where only the elite could participate. Apparently, it was her dream to wear the most beautiful gown and to dance in the halls of a castle where a Prince might sweep her off her feet and marry her.

“Come on, aren’t you excited about this, Levi?” she sweet – talked him, going towards him and hugging him from behind.

“No, not exactly,…” he told her, his hands still busy roaming the many documents that invaded his table.

“Why?” Petra began massaging his temple, sending his senses into the furthest regions of his own desire.

Strange, she really held power over him like that.

“Because,” he answered, concentrating hard enough on the documents and not on Petra’s seductive touch. “I have no time for dancing and socializing. Look at this. I still have to pass this tomorrow, so I definitely need to finish this right now.”

She smiled sweetly at him. She took his pen playfully away and sat on the desk in front of him.

“Come on, I’ll help you with those later.” She said, then began spreading her legs in front of him. Levi’s eyes instantly went towards her sweet spot and he felt his pants getting tighter. She leaned closer to him, her sweet breath wafting down his face. “You, my sweet, are tired. How about I make you feel better?”

Levi smiled at her and swiftly took her in his arms, letting her feel the hardness she caused him down there.

“Good offer, Cadette.” He said to her and carried her towards the bedroom,…

***

~ @levi4mikasa , @yepps , @super-peace-fangirl , @unhappysap , @nerdyphantomlady , @shewolfofficial , @fangurl-ontgeside , and @emilyackerman78 . 💜

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💜💜💜

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